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Saturday, Aug. 16, 2003

"He's obviously a major capture. He was canny, intelligent and resourceful, and we wanted him very badly," said former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro.

But administration officials counseled caution. The Aug. 5 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jarkarta shows that Southeast Asis remains a major hub of al-Qaeda terror and that its networks in the region remain relatively intact, they said.

"We have plenty of indications that Hambali and his associates were planning mass casualty attacks against soft U.S. targets in Indonesia such as hotels and restaurants," a State Department official said.

Hambali, 37, whose real name is Riduan Isamuddin, was arrested in central Thailand two days ago in a joint CIA-Thai operation that also netted several minor al-Qaeda operatives, U.S. officials announced.

Hambali, who is from Malaysia, has allegedly always been associated with the Indonesian branch of al-Qaeda called Jemaah Islamiyah, a group that wants to establish an Islamic nation in Southeast Asia that would include southern Thailand, Cambodia, Brunei, Singapore and the southern Philippines.

Hambali is a past associate of Ramzi Yousef, serving a life sentence for his involvement in the 1993 plot to blow up the World Trade Center, U.S. officials said. He also gave aid to Sept. 11 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, with whom he reportedly met in Malaysia in January 2000, a former CIA official said.

During the 1990s, his rise as head of JI was "spectacular and rapid," a former senior CIA official said.

According a report by the International Crisis Group, Jemaah Islamiyah had its origins in the late 1970s as Indonesian intelligence embarked on operations to expose Islamic extremists as potential political enemies of then Indonesian President Suharto.

According to the Crisis Group, the founders of Jemaah Islamiyah were Abdullah Sangar, now deceased, and Abu Bakar Baasyir, who were radicalized by their treatment at the hands of the Indonesian authorities and fled to Malaysia in 1985.

But U.S. intelligence officials told United Press International that Sangar had met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the late 1980s at least two or three times, and Rohan Gunaratna, a renowned specialist on bin Laden, told UPI that Sangar and the terrorist mastermind "were very close."

Plot to Kill Clinton and Pope

By the 1990s, bin Laden had begun infiltrating the Jemaah Islamiyah using an aggressive cell in the Philippines headed by Ramzi Yousef, the acknowledged mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center who was also allegedly involved in plots to kill then-President Bill Clinton and the pope.

As early as 1988, bin Laden had sent his brother-in-law, Mohamad Jamal Khalifa, to the Philippines to recruit local Islamic groups, according to a former very senior CIA analyst.

Based in central Java, Ngruki and Sangar and the current Jemaah leader, Abu Bakar Baasyir, were "totally taken over by al-Qaeda," the analyst said.

Although Baasyir has consistently denied any connections to al-Qaeda or any terrorist group, Gunaratna said that the Islamic leader had been trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan 1987 and 1991, a statement confirmed by U.S. intelligence officials.

Although one former senior State Department official said he believed that al-Qaeda did not have "operational control" of the Bali bombings, Gunaratna said that the acting operational chief of Jemaah Islamiyah, Riduan Isamuddin, is not only a member of the consultative council of Jemaah Islamiyah but also a member of al-Qaeda's shura majlis or consultative council, which stands just under bin Laden in the organizational hierarchy.

A former very senior CIA official said, "We believe that is probably the case. There is evidence that Isamuddin has membership in both organizations."

The bombings on Oct. 12 of last year, which killed almost 200 foreigners, were the work of the JI and Hambali, according to Milt Bearden, former chief of CIA operations in Afghanistan.

He described Indonesia as "ready to explode," and added, "The word 'amuck' is an Indonesian word."

U.S. government sources said Isamuddin is very close to Khalifa, a Saudi Arabian from Medina and a veteran of the 1980s Afghan war. U.S. intelligence officials told UPI Khalifa was the financier of Yousef's cell in the Philippines.

As a chief al-Qaeda money man, they said he quickly set up a chain of Islamic relief agencies and businesses in the Philippines that channeled funds to two radical Islamic groups - Abu Sayyef and Moro Islamic Liberation Front - in the early 1990s.

Khalifa also acted as a "supervisor" to Jemaah Islamiyah and other groups, helping them select targets and evade surveillance by law enforcement groups, according to Josef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.

"Hambali has access to the al-Qaeda money pipeline that was funding projects all over the world," Cannistraro said. "The loss of that access will hurt the organization."

One former senor State Department official, involved in counterterrorism, said it was by using the MILF as a front that bin Laden first began to spread his group's cells into Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Bin Laden grew close to the Indonesian militants in the 1990s and engineered an agreement under which al-Qaeda operatives were trained in MILF camps, according to Gunaratna and U.S. intelligence officials.

"It was a temporary arrangement of expedience," a former senior CIA official said.

With the fall of Indonesian President Suharto and the emergence of a fragile, fledging representative republic in 1998, Jemaah Islamiyah found a new freedom to operate. It has now developed from a local network to a Pan-Asian group spread from Malaysia and Japan in the north to Australia in the south, Gunaratna said.

Cannistraro said from the beginning Jemaah Islamiyah provided "a vast manpower pool" for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups to recruit from.

'Every Muslim With a Grievance'

Bearden cautioned that the Indonesian group "encompasses not just al-Qaeda but every Muslim with a grievance" against his government or against the United States.

"I wouldn't attribute all of this to al-Qaeda," he said. "I don't think that's accurate. It's extremist Islam that's the problem here." But Gunaratna disagreed, pointing to Isamuddin's "dual membership" in Jemaah Islamiyan and al-Qaeda.

Cannistraro said that the real significance of Hambali's capture consisted of his willingness to talk, "a big if," he said, but that the arrest of key al-Qaida operational figures such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, arrested in Pakistan in March, and Hambali is the loss to the group of men with operational experience.

"Gaining experience in operations takes time, and its loss isn't easily replaced. You can be zealous and willing to die, but the loss of people who know how to do things means real erosion of your capabilities," Cannistraro said.

Copyright 2003 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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