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Category: Politics/Government
Description: For anyone wishing to understand the next, post-9/11 generation of al-Qaeda planning, leadership, and tactics, there is only one place to begin: Southeast Asia. In fact, such countries as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia have been crucial nodes in the al-Qaeda network since long before the strikes on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, but when the allies overran Afghanistan, the new camps in Southeast Asia became the key training grounds for the future. It is in the Muslim strongholds in the Philippines and Indonesia that the next generation of al-Qaeda can be found. In this powerful, eye-opening work, Maria Ressa casts the most illuminating light ever on this fascinating but little-known "terrorist HQ." Every major al-Qaeda attack since 1993 has had a connection to the Philippines, and Maria Ressa, CNN's lead investigative reporter for Asia and a Filipino-American who has lived in the region since 1986, has broken story after story about them. From the early, failed attempts to assassinate Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton to the planning of the 9/11 strikes and the "48 Hours of Terror," in which eleven American jetliners were to be blown up over the Pacific, she has interviewed the terrorists, their neighbors and families, and the investigators from six different countries who have tracked them down. After the Bali bombing, al-Qaeda's worst strike since 9/11, which killed more than two hundred, Ressa broke major revelations about how it was planned, why it was a Plan B substitute for an even more ambitious scheme aimed at Singapore, and why the suicide bomber recruited to deliver the explosives almost caused the whole plan to fall apart when he admitted he could barely drive a car. Above all, Ressa has seen how al-Qaeda's tactics are shifting under the pressures of the war on terror. Rather than depending upon its own core membership (estimated at three to four thousand at its peak), the network is now enmeshing itself in local conflicts, co-opting Muslim independence movements wherever they can be found, and helping local "revolutionaries" to fund, plan, and execute sinister attacks against their neighbors and the West. If history is any guide, al-Qaeda revisits its plans over and over until they can succeed--and many of those plans have already been discovered and are here revealed, thanks to classified investigative documents uncovered by Ressa.
eBook Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc./The Free Press, 2004
Books By Dames Release Date: March 2004

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Prelude
Face to Face With Osama Bin Laden

It is nearly two o'clock in the morning, and I am sitting in a cubicle on the sixth floor of the North Tower of CNN's headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Stacked around me are 251 videotapes from Osama bin Laden's personal collection. As I take another one from the pile, I can't help thinking, "When was the last time he touched this tape? What was he looking for?" Some sand spills out, part of the saga of this collection. Some savvy Afghans found them in one of the four houses allegedly owned by bin Laden in Kandahar. Thinking they might be mistaken for al-Qaeda members if the tapes were found in their possession, the Afghans panicked and buried them after U.S. troops arrived. Later, through middlemen, they contacted CNN's Nic Robertson and Mark Phillips, who recovered the tapes and brought them to Atlanta less than a month ago.

It is now the end of September 2002, and the war on terror is in full swing. Nic had already aired a series of exclusive reports based on these "terror tapes," showing how al-Qaeda used videos to teach the basics of chemical weaponry, urban guerrilla warfare, assassinations, hostage taking, and other terrorist tactics. The tapes span nearly a decade and chronicle the interests and growth of al-Qaeda. All of them were recorded before the 9/11 attacks, except for one, a recording of news reports from different media organizations, including CNN, that show the disaster caused by simultaneous plane attacks and the collapse of the World Trade Center.

The tapes are graphic, at times horrifying and extremely alarming, always providing new insights into al-Qaeda's organizational structure, its strategies for training, its tactics and its recruitment methods. The fact that no intelligence agency around the world had seen these tapes, nor anticipated their contents and the extent and professionalism of the terrorists, showed how badly the West had underestimated al-Qaeda's fortitude, scope, and depth.

Because of the work I had done in tracking al-Qaeda's networks, CNN's investigative producer, Henry Schuster, asked me to come to Atlanta to look for any familiar faces -- in my case, that meant any connections or links to al-Qaeda's network in Southeast Asia. Though the world's attention was focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, I knew that the next major battleground would be to their south and east, in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries where al-Qaeda was busily setting up its training camps and financial networks and where it had already been active for years.

Some of the tapes are motivational propaganda, for the purpose of recruiting new mujahideen. One that I had already watched with our producers and Arabic translator, Hayat Mongodin, earlier that day, incites Muslims to join the jihad in Indonesia.

"This is what they're saying," Hayat told me as we saw pictures of horribly burned, often charred bodies. She translated, "Look at what your brothers are going through. Look at what you're closing your eyes to. They're burning mosques in order to put up synagogues and churches. This is a country of pride. Now it is a country of shame."

The pictures dissolved into a map of Indonesia. She continued to translate: "Since the thirteenth century, Islam came to Indonesia spreading the word of Allah, replacing Hinduism. Now there are people working against you, behind your back, and they are killing your brothers. The government of Suharto [Indonesia's president until 1998] is treating the Muslims in such a harsh way, harsher than the colonizers." Then a more graphic image appeared -- a man whose arm was being amputated as the camera panned to the tattered flesh on his back. "Look at this man," translated Hayat, "look at his back. You can't hide his torture. Even if your pens lie, his back won't lie. Be patient and strong in facing this."

The images were from the island of Sulawesi, where Muslims and Christians had been fighting, and the province of West Kalimantan, where brutal beheadings triggered by ethnic conflict between Dayaks (the old head-hunters of Borneo) and Madurese were portrayed as Christians killing Muslims. Because the Dayaks were mostly Christian converts and the Madurese were Muslims, you could say the tape was technically correct -- although religion wasn't the source of that conflict. This, I thought, was the key to al-Qaeda's success: in the anger it incites, its claims always lie on a foundation of unavenged truth.

At the time, the government of Indonesia was officially denying that al-Qaeda had come to the country, though some of its military investigators knew otherwise. Indonesia was fast becoming a stronghold. As the tape continued, the evidence leaped out: men training in a Kashmiri-style training camp, their faces covered with masks that had holes for their eyes and mouths. They were in the forests, running on a military-style obstacle course carrying homemade rifles. It was the first videotaped confirmation that Indonesia was becoming a key node in al-Qaeda's network. I was elated -- and terrified.

By now, in the middle of the night, I am the only person on the entire floor. I am working through some of the other subjects in bin Laden's video library -- tapes of news broadcasts that showed al-Qaeda's focus, including reports of Muslim conflicts in the Middle East, Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Like he did with 9/11, bin Laden watched media coverage of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and afterward even recorded news reports as the ship was moved from Yemen to the United States. It seemed that bin Laden monitored the news to see how al-Qaeda operatives and plots were doing and to get an idea of how much the authorities knew.

Finally, I reach the tape numbered 106 on the al-Qaeda registry. I press the PLAY button and watch news coverage of Pope John Paul II's 1995 visit to the Philippines. He had a record number of followers in what was then Asia's only Catholic nation; more than one million people came to see him at Luneta Park. Just weeks before he arrived, a freak chemical fire had led to the discovery of a plot to assassinate him by al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing.

The coverage that bin Laden or his associates had taped was CNN's. I was the correspondent on the story. I turn up the sound and hear my own voice, like listening to a ghost from the past. I try to picture bin Laden watching me. It is chilling. Did he laugh at my naiveté? Was he relieved at the simplistic picture my reports created? At the time, I had made the same mistake the CIA and FBI had about his terror plots in the Philippines, completely underestimating his organization's imagination and perseverance.

* * *

Even then, al-Qaeda members in the Philippines were planning what would become the 9/11 attacks, carried out because their discovery in 1995 had been ignored by authorities around the world. Now the Philippines, Indonesia, and neighboring countries had blossomed into one of al-Qaeda's most important centers.

What I didn't know was that in 1995 I had stumbled onto al-Qaeda's first-known cell in Southeast Asia. Although its plots would be foiled and most of its cell members arrested, al-Qaeda learned from its mistakes. Instead of sending Arabs to set up the next cells, al-Qaeda began to recruit from the regions it wanted to control. Over the years, al-Qaeda successfully infiltrated and co-opted homegrown Muslim movements around the world: in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Chechnya, Kashmir, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Groups from these regions have their own domestic agendas, but they are also pushing forward al-Qaeda's anti-Western goals. Through al-Qaeda, terrorist organizations around the world have exchanged tactics and information for more than a decade, fueling conflicts that, had they remained domestic issues contained within borders, may long ago have ended or been controlled. As I'll show in this book, this has been going on silently in Southeast Asia, slipping beneath the sensors of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies since 1988.

September 11 exposed something that had long been ignored -- how al-Qaeda capitalized on the growth of radical Islam and anti-U.S. sentiment around the world. For me, it created a new framework for analyzing recent events. My discovery of al-Qaeda's network in Southeast Asia was like building links in a chain: each link led to the next, and forging the chain meant revisiting many of the stories I had reported on over the past fifteen years -- particularly those that had struck me as instances of irrationality and senseless violence. For the first time, I began to understand why events had happened the way they did -- mainly, what was behind the numerous, unexplained bombings and ethnic and religious riots I had reported on from the region. I began to realize much of the violence I had lived through had been fueled and exacerbated by al-Qaeda.

After 9/11, I looked up longtime contacts -- investigators who had risen in the ranks in the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. I realized they all were scampering to harness their resources and gather intelligence. My contacts were more than willing to share past intelligence reports. And for a short period of time, they desperately needed help. That was my window of opportunity. Often, because some nations lacked resources or the case officers didn't have time to go through unwieldy bureaucracies, investigators picked up the phone and called me -- to find out whether a name was familiar or to brainstorm about the meaning of some new information.

Talking to investigators in different countries, often on deep background, I discovered what information they shared -- or didn't share -- with their neighbors. I was horrified at how crucial information would get lost when someone didn't see how it fit into the bigger picture. I saw firsthand how the United States underestimated the threat in the region.

The Philippines -- because of the information it discovered in 1995 -- had much more information about al-Qaeda than its own intelligence or that of the United States realized. I began to collect intelligence documents. The joke in Manila now is that CNN's library is more extensive and better organized than the main Philippine intelligence database. Why? Because most Filipino case officers keep their own files and don't necessarily share them with others outside their units. There isn't a single, central data bank. The same situation exists in Indonesia and other countries in the region. This, on a simple scale, shows one of the main problems of this war on terror: the inability of law-enforcement officials and investigators on the ground to share their information with one another, let alone with other nations.

It didn't help that at the time al-Qaeda was gathering momentum, senior U.S. officials had little knowledge of the way things really worked in the region beyond the briefing papers they received in Washington. They had an inherent distrust of "third-world intelligence," and regional intelligence officers often told me they wished they had more information from the United States. Intelligence agents are not only fighting to uncover information about terrorist networks, but after getting the information, they often have to fight, at great personal risk, to get their information passed up the chain of command, and struggle even harder to get the politicians to act on it.

Sometimes countries and institutions are so factionalized they can't even decide on a common agenda within their borders. In Indonesia, everything was in disarray. Imagine the office of the president -- and the chief of intelligence -- changing four times in four years. After the fall of Suharto, the most experienced information source, the military intelligence, had been discredited. The police, separated from the military in 1999 and now tasked with domestic intelligence-gathering, had no experience.

Ajaj Sahni, the head of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, summed up the intelligence dilemma for me: "Nation-states have still not gotten beyond the conventional position of interests of state. Each country thinks that it is, in some measure, on its own in this ball game. We talk about globalization, but I would like to emphasize that the only truly globalized enterprise today is terrorism."

Much of what you will read in this book has never been published before. It is information I gathered from intelligence documents I collected over two years from Southeast Asia, the United States, Canada, and two European nations. I have used only information I have been able to cross-check with three different sources from at least two different countries.

I wrote this book because I was frustrated with the denial of public officials about the scope of the threat even as their countries' intelligence services gathered this information. This is the reality that lies beneath the surface. I've lived through many of the terrorists' attacks in the region. I've met victims and operatives. I've seen the violence the terrorists can unleash. And I believe the only way to stop the network from growing is to understand what they've accomplished, what they believe in, what they tell their new recruits, and, above all, to shift the paradigm of how we respond to this global threat.

Copyright © 2003 by Maria A. Ressa