Time, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2002; 2:31 p.m. EST
Confessions of an al-Qaeda Terrorist
American interrogators finally got to Omar al-Faruq, who detailed plans to
launch a new terror spree in Southeast Asia.
A TIME exclusive
By Romesh Ratnesar
Posted Sunday, Sept. 15, 2002; 2:31 p.m. EST
For someone interested in quietly leading a terrorist's life, the rainy Indonesian hamlet
of Cijeruk is a nice place to settle down. Nestled among lush, green paddies and
swaying banana trees, an hour's drive outside the chaotic capital city of Jakarta,
Cijeruk consists of a single two-lane road lined by a row of well-kept cottages. It's a
good spot to hide from the authorities, if you have reason to be on the run -- which
may be how Omar al-Faruq, a 31-year-old drifter from Kuwait, ended up living there, in
a concrete house that belonged to the family of his Indonesian wife Mira Agustina, 24.
After moving to Cijeruk last year, al-Faruq tried to fit in with locals, getting by with
functional Indonesian-language skills and an ID card that said he was from the eastern
Indonesian city of Ambon. His wife says he read and taught the Koran and stayed
close to home -- until one day in June, when he vanished. "He called at noon that
Wednesday to say he was going to the mosque," says Mira. "I never heard from him
again."
If she is to be believed, Mira, like the rest of the world, is only beginning to discover
the truth about her husband. On June 5 government agents arrested al-Faruq at a
mosque in nearby Bogor. Three days later, Indonesian authorities deported al-Faruq to
the U.S.-held air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, where CIA investigators have been
interrogating suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist
organization. But al-Faruq was no ordinary operative.
According to a secret CIA document and regional intelligence reports obtained by
TIME, U.S. officials already had reason to believe al-Faruq was one of bin Laden's top
representatives in Southeast Asia, responsible for coordinating the activities of the
region's disparate Islamic militant groups and employing their forces to conduct terror
attacks against the U.S. and its allies. According to one regional intelligence memo,
the CIA had been told of al-Faruq's role by Abu Zubaydah, the highest ranking
al-Qaeda official in U.S. custody and a valuable, if at times manipulative, source of
intelligence on the terror network and its plans. Initially, al-Faruq was not as
cooperative. Though al-Faruq was subjected to three months of psychological
interrogation tactics -- a U.S. counterterrorism official says they included isolation and
sleep deprivation -- he stayed virtually silent.
But early last week al-Faruq finally broke down. On Sept. 9, according to a secret CIA
summary of the interview, al-Faruq confessed that he was, in fact, al-Qaeda's senior
representative in Southeast Asia. Then came an even more shocking confession:
according to the CIA document, al-Faruq said two senior al-Qaeda officials, Abu
Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had ordered him to "plan large-scale attacks
against U.S. interests in Indonesia, Malaysia, (the) Philippines, Singapore, Thailand,
Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia. In particular," the document continues, "(al-)Faruq
prepared a plan to conduct simultaneous car/truck bomb attacks against U.S.
embassies in the region to take place on or near" the first anniversary of the Sept. 11
attacks. Al-Faruq said that, despite his arrest, backup operatives were in place to
"assume responsibilities to carry out operations as planned." If successfully
executed, such a coordinated assault could produce thousands of casualties. Fearing
an attack could come at any moment, al-Faruq's interrogators relayed his revelations
to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Va. Al-Faruq's story tracked with
several recent intelligence reports from Southeast Asia about an increase in
suspicious activities near American embassies. A day later the U.S. issued its
code-orange terror alert. Al-Faruq's threatened attacks never occurred.
Omar al-Faruq's confessions, as detailed in the intelligence reports obtained by TIME,
are much more than a single operative's warnings about possible plots against U.S.
interests; they also provide a wealth of new and unpublished detail about the broad
reach of al-Qaeda, its efforts to establish a base of operations outside Afghanistan
and its success in pulling disparate militant groups and criminals into its lethal
struggle against the West. At the same time, the documents illustrate the speed and
determination with which U.S. intelligence agents and their foreign counterparts are
working to untangle al-Qaeda's web of terror before the group strikes again.
Investigators are still verifying the credibility of the numerous leads into alleged
al-Qaeda conspirators identified by al-Faruq. The intelligence documents, combined
with TIME's investigation of al-Faruq's past, reveal that:
-- With al-Faruq acting as the point man, al-Qaeda received financial and operational
assistance from Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a militant group that seeks to establish a pure
Islamic state in Southeast Asia and is active in at least five countries -- Indonesia, the
Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. The CIA report states that Abubakar
Ba'asyir, 64, the cleric who is the alleged spiritual leader of JI, "authorized Faruq to
use JI operatives and resources to conduct" the embassy bombings planned for last
week; al-Faruq told the CIA that Ba'asyir dispatched a JI member named Abu
al-Furkan to oversee a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Malaysia. Al-Faruq
said Ba'asyir was also behind a 1999 bombing of Jakarta's largest mosque and then
blamed Christians for the act. Ba'asyir is wanted by Singapore for his alleged role as
the mastermind of last December's foiled al-Qaeda plot to bomb U.S. targets there.
Indonesian officials have so far declined to arrest him, saying they have no evidence
linking him to terrorist activity.
-- In a separate regional intelligence report obtained by TIME, a high-ranking JI
member now in custody told investigators that he hosted Zacarias Moussaoui --
currently on trial in the U.S. for conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks -- during
Moussaoui's swing through Malaysia in 2000. According to the source, Moussaoui
went by the alias "John" and told the operative to buy four tons of fertilizer,
presumably to build a bomb. Moussaoui left the country before giving any further
instructions on what to do with the fertilizer.
-- Acting as an al-Qaeda operative, al-Faruq, the CIA report says, was "the
mastermind behind all the Christmas 2000 bombings in Indonesia" -- a wave of
attacks on Christian churches -- which killed 18 and injured more than 100. Earlier
that year, al-Faruq "cased the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta to develop a plan to destroy
the embassy with a large car bomb." He abandoned the plan when the U.S. hardened
the building's security after a separate, credible threat in October 2000.
-- Increasing numbers of al-Qaeda operatives are moving into Southeast Asia. In May,
according to a regional report, six "Middle Eastern terrorists" slipped into Indonesia.
Counterterrorism officials say that, based on information provided by al-Faruq, the
U.S. believes Southeast Asia now has the world's highest concentration of al-Qaeda
operatives outside Afghanistan and Pakistan.
-- Al-Faruq told the CIA that some of al-Qaeda's operations in the region were funded
through a branch of al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, an international charity based in
Saudi Arabia, with offices in several Islamic countries. According to one regional intel
memo, Faruq told his interrogators "money was laundered through the foundation by
donors from the Middle East." Government sources tell TIME that U.S. investigators
believe the charity is a "significant" source of funding for terrorist groups associated
with al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia. Counterterrorism officials are also investigating
possible links between al-Qaeda and top al-Haramain officials in Saudi Arabia.
What does it all mean? al-faruq's confession serves as a reminder that even after
losing its base in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is actively forging and reconstituting ties with
violent extremists around the world who are receptive to bin Laden's cause. "They are
bulking up," says a U.S. Administration official. "We don't have our arms around them
yet."
To a sprawling organization like al-Qaeda, Omar al-Faruq was the ideal operative, a
man whose networking skills were at least as impressive as his appetite for
destruction. Born in Kuwait on May 24, 1971, he got his first taste of jihad in the early
1990s when he trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Khaldan, Afghanistan. He spent three
years at the camp, becoming close to both al-Mughira al Gaza'iri, the camp's leader,
and senior bin Laden associate Abu Zubaydah. In 1995, at Abu Zubaydah's
suggestion, al-Faruq procured a fake passport and traveled with al-Mughira to the
Philippines. There he joined Camp Abubakar, a terrorist-training facility run by the
Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a Philippine-based rebel group fighting for
independence from Manila. According to a regional intelligence report, al-Faruq, while
in the Philippines, unsuccessfully tried to enter flight school, in the hopes of
commandeering a commercial plane and blowing it up.
Al-Faruq maintained close ties with Abu Zubaydah and al-Qaeda. In the late 1990s
al-Faruq slipped into Indonesia to take control of al-Qaeda's operations in Southeast
Asia. Across a belt of territory stretching from Myanmar (formerly Burma) to eastern
Indonesia, radical Islam was on the rise, with militants occupying swaths of the
region's steamy jungle terrain. In Indonesia the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998 left
the world's most populous Islamic country in a state of turmoil and turned it into a
fertile breeding ground for potential al-Qaeda terrorists. Al-Faruq married Mira, the
daughter of a former Islamic activist, and linked up with an Indonesian businessman
named Agus Dwikarna, who was active in the Indonesian Mujahedin Council (MMI). A
purportedly nonviolent political organization, the MMI was founded by Abubakar
Ba'asyir -- the Indonesian cleric also believed to be the spiritual leader of JI, which is
run by Ba'asyir's former student Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali. In addition to
his alleged links to scores of bank robberies and murders in Malaysia, Indonesia and
the Philippines, Hambali is believed to have colluded with al-Qaeda since 1995.
Western intelligence officials say he played host to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers
during their trip to Malaysia in 2000. Hambali is thought to have gone into hiding, but
his organization remains active. In an interview with TIME, JI members said al-Qaeda
operatives continue to meet with radical groups in the region, and, according to one of
them, JI boasts a cadre of 20 suicide bombers "waiting and ready to carry out attacks
if instructed."
While intelligence officials have long believed that Hambali ran the day-to-day
operations of JI, al-Faruq told the CIA that Ba'asyir was just as eager to work with
al-Qaeda, even dispatching his aides to procure weapons and explosives for al-Faruq
and his cronies. Last week Ba'asyir repeated his longstanding denial of connection
with terrorist groups. "I don't have any link whatsoever with al-Qaeda," he told TIME,
"but if al-Qaeda's struggle is for the best interest of Islam, I support it."
According to a foreign intelligence report, al-Faruq told the CIA he helped Dwikarna
establish Laskar Jundullah, a militant Islamic group dedicated to forming an Islamic
state and involved in attacks on Christian villages in central Sulawesi province.
Beginning in mid-1999, al-Faruq claims, he launched a succession of audacious but
generally unsuccessful terrorist plots. In May of that year, al-Faruq met with several
potential accomplices at a villa in west Java and hatched a plan to kill current
Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who was then a candidate for the
presidency. The plot involved buying weapons in Malaysia and the Philippines, but the
group failed to get the guns into Indonesia. Last year a second assassination scheme
-- it involved detonating a bomb at a meetiing of Megawati and other ruling party
leaders -- fizzled when the designated bomber lost his leg and was arrested after the
bomb he was carrying blew up prematurely near the Atrium Mall in Jakarta in August
2001.
Around that time, al-Faruq began running into trouble. He had been living near
Dwikarna in Makassar, in South Sulawesi province, but because of his poor language
ability, he never managed to acquire an Indonesian passport. In mid-2001, immigration
authorities detained al-Faruq temporarily and prepared to deport him. Al-Faruq
skipped town, heading to Cijeruk with Mira and their baby daughter. After Sept. 11 he
stayed in contact with Abu Zubaydah during the U.S. military campaign against
al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Abu Zubaydah told al-Faruq that he should plan to return
soon to Kuwait, but in the meantime, al-Faruq was to set in motion new terrorist
missions. Knowing the U.S. Navy was scheduled to conduct joint exercises in the
Surabaya harbor in late May, al-Faruq plotted a suicide attack against a U.S. ship,
similar to the deadly al-Qaeda operation against the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000.
He drafted a Somali operative named Gharib to help find Arabs willing to participate in
the suicide mission. But when he failed to recruit enough operatives to carry out the
plan, al-Faruq had to scrap it.
What al-Faruq may not have known was that in early 2002, U.S. and regional
intelligence officials had picked up his signal. On Feb. 25, according to intelligence
reports, the CIA informed regional counterparts that three Indonesian-based Islamic
militants had established a training school for terrorists on the island of Borneo.
Indonesian investigators discovered that four MMI operatives, including al-Faruq, had
held training exercises at the same location. While al-Faruq initially managed to stay
beyond the reach of authorities, some of his closest associates ran out of luck. In
March Dwikarna was arrested in Manila after airport security guards discovered plastic
explosives and detonation cables in his suitcase; the next month U.S. and Pakistani
forces seized Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad, Pakistan. A regional intelligence brief
says on April 27 the CIA reported that the same cell-phone number, 081-2957-6852,
had been programmed into the handsets of both Dwikarna and Abu Zubaydah. The
number was al-Faruq's.
Investigators soon realized al-Faruq was a man with connections. An al-Qaeda
prisoner at America's Camp X Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also had al-Faruq's
number. The same intelligence report says the CIA traced a number dialed by Fathur
Rohman al-Ghozi, an Indonesian JI militant arrested for suspected involvement in last
December's Singapore bomb plot, back to al-Faruq. In May, the report continues, the
CIA found that Ibin al-Khattab, the late Chechen commander with ties to al-Qaeda,
had once placed a call to al-Faruq on his cell phone. On May 2, shortly after
discovering that al-Faruq had acquired a fake Indonesian passport, the Indonesian
government authorized agents to arrest him. Intelligence reports say that on May 23,
U.S. interrogators questioning Abu Zubaydah showed him a picture of al-Faruq. Abu
Zubaydah quickly identified his old friend as "al-Faruq al Kuwait." He then told his
inquisitors the tangled tale of al-Faruq's quest to turn Southeast Asia into an al-Qaeda
stronghold. Two weeks later, authorities swooped in on al-Faruq at a mosque in
Bogor. Says Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the country's chief security minister: "It
was quite rapid work."
Though al-Faruq's odyssey has ended, his story finally divulged, the reasons he
knowingly risked so much to pursue a life of terrorism remain a mystery perhaps even
to those who knew him best. Back in Cijeruk, now left to raise their children alone,
al-Faruq's wife Mira insists that she knows nothing about her husband's past -- even
though, in his testimony to the CIA, intelligence officials say, al-Faruq alludes to
Mira's participation in his terrorist plots. She claims al-Faruq never even told her he
was Kuwaiti. But she does recall a piece of advice he once gave her. "When we got
married, he made me promise that if he disappeared one day, I would not go looking
for him," she says. "So I kept my commitment and didn't search."
REPORTED BY JASON TEDJASUKMANA/JAKARTA, SIMON ELEGANT AND
ZAMIRA LOEBIS/CIJERUK, NELLY SINDAYEN/MANILA AND ELAINE SHANNON
AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON
FROM THE SEPT. 23, 2002 ISSUE OF TIME MAGAZINE; POSTED SUNDAY,
SEPT. 15, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
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