The Three Battles of Wanat Read online

  2. The Colonel

  Over the next year and a half, Aldam Tilao would in fact be hunted down and cornered, in a Philippine military operation that involved the CIA and the American military. Eliminating him was a small, early success in what the Bush administration calls the “global war on terror”; but in the shadow of efforts like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it went largely unnoticed. As a model for the long-term fight against militant Islam, however, the hunt for Tilao is better than either of those larger engagements. Because the enemy consists of small cells operating independently all over the globe, success depends on local intelligence and American assistance subtle enough to avoid charges of imperialism or meddling, charges that often provoke a backlash and feed the movement.

  The United States would play a crucial but almost invisible role in finding and killing Tilao, enlisting the remarkable skills of the Philippine marine corps for the most important groundwork, and supplying money, equipment, and just enough quiet technological help to close in for the last act. Such an approach does present problems; the Philippine operation exposed some of the legal, logistic, and moral challenges of this kind of work. For one thing, the Americans worked hand in hand with Philippine forces who almost certainly murdered people standing in the way of their intelligence operation.

  At the time of the Dos Palmas raid, Colonel Juancho Sabban, the deputy commander of southern operations for the Philippine marine corps, was in Hawaii beginning an advanced officer training course offered by the U.S. Department of Defense. On the first day of classes, the attendees from military forces around the Pacific took turns introducing themselves. Sabban—a thickset brown-skinned man in his forties with short-cropped black hair, full lips, big teeth, and a bull neck—spoke at some length. He dwelled particularly on Palawan, where he had been based for part of his career, and which he considered to be heaven on earth. So when he received a first report of the kidnapping, he expressed disbelief: Palawan was much too far away from Abu Sayyaf’s territory; the movement lacked the means to strike at the far side of the Sulu Sea. When the details were confirmed, he was embarrassed, but he was also impressed by what the guerrillas had pulled off.

  Meanwhile, Abu Sayyaf was tying the Philippine armed forces in knots. The army conducted raids all over Basilan but was always one step behind. The island’s five hundred square miles are mostly jungle, and its people have a long tradition of supporting rebels. Abu Sayyaf found moving and evading relatively easy. Tilao paused now and then to give cocky, even cheerful, radio interviews. From the midst of one firefight, with gunfire popping in the background, he fielded questions from the Radio Mindanao Network.

  Where are the hostages? he was asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not with the captives. I’m a hundred meters away from them…. We have thirty hostages now. We abducted ten fishermen when we left Palawan…. So we can’t be blamed now if we make good what we said earlier, that we will execute the hostages one by one. It’s up to you.”

  There was a burst of gunfire.

  “Perhaps Gloria [President Macapagal-Arroyo] thinks we can be frightened,” he said. “We’ll keep adding hostages, even if they reach a thousand.”

  Tilao went on to say that trigger-happy government forces were killing off the hostages faster than he and his men were. “The military thought that the hostages were our comrades, so two of them were killed. But I can’t tell you their nationalities nor identities. What we will do now, perhaps today, we will [have] executions, but we cannot tell how many and at what time.”

  The Philippine army did seem more intent on killing guerrillas than on rescuing hostages. The captives were dragged from hidden camp to hidden camp all over the island that summer, as the rebels engaged in frequent shoot-outs with their pursuers. Martin Burnham and Guillermo Sobero had both been wounded in one such clash; Burnham had taken a stinging spray of shrapnel in his back; and Sobero was hit in the foot, so that it became increasingly difficult for him to keep up. To distract and throw off government forces, Abu Sayyaf operatives conducted numerous raids, including one at a coconut plantation called Golden Harvest; they took about fifteen people captive there and later used bolos to hack the heads off two men. The number of hostages waxed and waned as some were ransomed and released, new ones were taken, and others were killed.

  One victim, in early June, was Sobero. He had irritated his captors from the beginning, partly because of his disregard for their show of Islamic piety. He would, for instance, remove his shirt in the oppressive heat, exposing his arms and torso in a way they considered “un-Islamic.” They also coveted his young girlfriend. One day several of the guerrillas marched him off into the jungle after telling him, “Someone wants to see you.” Sobero had tossed his shirt to Gracia Burnham and asked her to keep an eye on his backpack until he returned. He never did.

  Tilao turned the American’s execution into a joke. In another of his frequent radio interviews, he announced, “As a gift to the country on its Independence Day, we have released unconditionally Guillermo Sobero.” Then he paused, and added: “But we have released him without his head. It’s up to you to find Sobero’s head … but the dogs may beat you to it.”

  Trudging behind their captors, the missionary couple endured. They focused on staying alive, attending to basic bodily needs—eating, sleeping, staying clean. No strangers to religious conviction, the Burnhams gently engaged their captors in theological discussion and found these jihadists to be shallow, even adolescent, in their faith. Unfamiliar with the Koran, the outlaws had only a sketchy notion of Islam, which they saw as a set of behavioral rules, to be violated when it suited them. Kidnapping, murder, and theft were justified by their special status as “holy warriors.” One by one they sexually appropriated several of the women captives, claiming them as “wives.”

  Despite Sobero’s murder and the Burnhams’ continuing ordeal, the American government and the American public were largely indifferent. In this pre-9/11 era, the matter was regarded as a typical third-world outrage, the kind of nightmare often faced by missionaries in dangerous places. The official U.S. response was limited to occasional comments from the embassy in Manila, condemning the crime and demanding the hostages’ release. Despite a policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists, the FBI would eventually be involved in a futile attempt to ransom the Burnhams, losing $300,000 in the process. The money is believed to have been stolen by elements within the Philippine police.

  After 9/11, everything changed. No longer was Abu Sayyaf just an obscure group of kidnappers; it was now a regional arm of the international Islamist menace. The fate of Sobero and the Burnhams was suddenly on the lips of powerful people in Washington. During a White House meeting with President Macapagal-Arroyo, President Bush said the United States was prepared to help “in any way she suggests.” Given the ham-handed efforts of the Philippine army to that point, she was clearly in the market for new tactics. Tilao continued to taunt Philippine authorities in frequent radio interviews from his satellite phone.

  In the fall of 2001, Colonel Sabban returned from his training course and was put in charge of the Philippine marine intelligence operation targeting Abu Sayyaf. Sabban is a charismatic man, popular, tough, and highly regarded within the marine corps, an elite group so cohesive that at times its members have seemed more faithful to one another than to the government. As a young officer in 1989, Sabban himself had been arrested and imprisoned for following his leaders in a failed coup against Corazon Aquino, who was then the president. Many of the officers caught up in that plot were absolved and reinstated years later; their involvement was seen as motivated less by politics than by unit loyalty. The colonel’s career hadn’t suffered. If anything, his rebel past added to his luster as a man to be reckoned with. He knew the southern islands well, and he had what he called “assets in place.”

  The marines ran an old-fashioned intelligence operation. They did not have a budget to rival the army’s, and they had none of the technol
ogical wizardry of the Americans, who were deploying to the Philippines that summer for joint military exercises; but they had smart, trustworthy corpsmen who spoke the local languages without an accent and were plugged into the islands’ families and clans.

  Early on, the colonel made Tilao the primary target, and noted two obvious weaknesses. The first was Tilao’s love of attention, his need to boast of his exploits on the airwaves; there had to be a way to take advantage of that. The second was his local roots. He had been born in Malamawi, a little island just off Basilan, where he still had friends and extended family. It was a small, small world, and Tilao had become a very big fish. He had been outgoing, and an attention seeker, all his life, so he had left a larger circle of connections than most others in his shadowy organization, a circle stretching from Malamawi to Basilan and beyond. Sabban’s undercover agents began mapping Tilao’s connections, identifying family members, old friends, teachers, schoolmates. Then they fanned out, acting as undercover “spotters” to make informal contact. They would strike up conversations with targets, pretending to vaguely remember Tilao from school, or perhaps just to have read about him in the newspaper or heard his voice on the radio. They began to learn things; Tilao had been less guarded than he should have been. People had received letters, some with requests for supplies. The spotters were able to discover who had delivered them. The couriers were then followed, and fresh letters were intercepted and copied. Sabban’s men were careful not to disturb this web; they were content to patiently gather information.

  One thing the colonel learned was that a prominent tennis pro on Basilan sometimes played with a man who claimed to have been Tilao’s closest childhood friend. The friend’s name was Alvin Siglos, and there was something very important about him beyond his lifelong connection with Tilao, something that the guerrilla himself did not know.

  Being a terrorist often means killing strangers to make a political point, and in terrorists’ eyes, such deaths have no meaning beyond the political one. But in Abu Sayyaf’s brutal attack on the Golden Harvest plantation, four of the plantation workers the terrorists had marched off into the jungle were cousins of Alvin Siglos. And one of the two men killed was his uncle.

  Sabban had his ticket to Tilao.

  3. The Informer

  Squat, dark, and powerful, Alvin Siglos had been the leader of a rambunctious gang at Basilan High School three decades earlier. The boys hung out together constantly, playing sports during the day and gathering to raise hell at night. Siglos was the soccer team’s captain and best player, and Tilao was a pugnacious defenseman. Reckless and fun-loving, Tilao seemed as far from serious thought about politics or religion as a young man could be. He skipped classes and got into trouble for fighting. His father was an honorable, pious Muslim, but Tilao was not. He and the other boys liked girls, and they liked to drink, gamble, and fight.

  Siglos had not strayed far from home or from his youthful pursuits. Sabban found him living in the city of Zamboanga, a sprawling metropolis just a short boat ride from Basilan at the southwestern end of the large island of Mindanao. He was a cheerful, garrulous man with pockmarked skin, thick black hair, and a wide face with narrow dark eyes set wide apart. He didn’t look like an athlete, but he was a star in the local softball leagues and was considered one of the city’s best tennis players. He had little education and no interest in religion or politics. He worked only when the need was strong and a suitable opportunity presented itself; he was the kind of man who lived off hustle and charm. He was also an enthusiastic gambler, wagering heavily on the hugely popular Zamboanga cockfights. He knew that his old high school friend had moved to Saudi Arabia years earlier, and he’d learned only by accident that Tilao was back in the Philippines: one day in 2000 he heard someone who sounded like Tilao boasting on the radio, though the voice had been identified as belonging to someone named “Abu Sabaya.” He was curious enough to ask one of Tilao’s cousins, and was told that his old soccer buddy was now the most notorious jihadist in the Philippines. Siglos began boasting that he was the outlaw’s “best friend.”

  Months later, word apparently reached Tilao that his old friend had been talking up their relationship, and out of the blue the terrorist leader surprised Siglos with a phone call.

  “Are there lots of millionaires there in Zamboanga City to kidnap?” he asked.

  “No,” Siglos told him. “We are all poor.”

  After the kidnapping at Dos Palmas, another surprise call came, and this time Tilao wanted help. He asked if Siglos had a bank account. He was looking for someone he could trust, someone outside known Abu Sayyaf circles, to collect and hold ransom money. Siglos said he had never had enough money to need a bank.

  “I will call you again,” Tilao promised.

  These furtive contacts with his friend on the run were thrilling for Siglos, and at first he didn’t waste much time thinking about the nature of Abu Sayyaf’s crimes, or about its victims. Their childhood friendship transcended such abstract considerations, and he was inclined to help Tilao if he could. Then came the kidnapping at Golden Harvest. What Tilao was doing no longer seemed so abstract.

  It was at this moment that Siglos was first contacted by an operative of Colonel Sabban’s. The marine asked if Siglos wanted to work as an “action agent.” Apart from the pay he would receive, the Philippine government was offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to Tilao’s capture or death. (The Americans would later put up a reward of $5 million. Tilao scoffed at the local reward, which he considered too small, but was proud of the Americans’ offer.) At some level Siglos still loved his old friend; and he would later see that Tilao still trusted him. But as Siglos figured it, not even their friends could fault him for informing on the outlaw. Nor could they accuse him of selling Tilao out for money: blood was thicker than friendship. Revenge weighed heavily on the scale. Siglos was so eager to cooperate that the marine intelligence unit was at first taken aback.

  Captain Gieram Aragones was unimpressed after the initial interview. He didn’t trust Siglos. A wiry man with pale skin, Asian eyes, and the nickname “Bong,” Aragones was obsessed with getting Tilao. It was the most important job he had been given, and apart from his ambition and professional pride, he personally found Abu Sayyaf offensive, and Tilao particularly so. Aragones—who was the son of a marine chaplain and had graduated from the Philippine naval academy—was a convert to Islam. He had taken well to undercover intelligence work, immersing himself in the culture and languages of Sulu Province. To him, Abu Sayyaf was an illegitimate political movement and a bogus religious one. Tilao and the other jihadists gave his adopted religion a bad name. As a symbol of his determination, Aragones announced to his men that he would neither cut his hair nor shave until Tilao was either in custody or dead.

  Siglos was a potentially important avenue to Tilao, but Aragones judged that anyone who talked so much and displayed such transparent lust for reward money was dangerous. The would-be informer boasted that he had worked many times as an undercover agent for the Philippine organized-crime task force, but his claims didn’t check out. Aragones saw him as a blowhard and an opportunist. Before putting Siglos on the payroll as an action agent, Aragones recommended to Colonel Sabban that the recruit be put to a test.

  4. The Reporter

  Colonel Sabban, as it happened, had exactly the same thing in mind. He’d been looking for a way to exploit Tilao’s vanity and obsession with publicity, and he had a friend who would be perfect for the job: a remarkable and daring young journalist, Arlyn dela Cruz.

  Arlyn dela Cruz was a well-known TV personality, short and slender with long dark hair, big eyes, and full lips; very articulate and very ambitious. Her success as a journalist had been so sensational that it had brought personal and professional problems. In 1993, as a rookie reporter, she had been assigned, much to her surprise, to try to interview members of Abu Sayyaf, after they kidnapped Father Bernardo Blanco, a Spanish missionary. Not only did dela Cruz get an exclusive in
terview with the group’s leaders; at least one of them, Khadaffy Janjalani, took a shine to her. Over the next few years she repeatedly visited jungle hideouts, bringing back scoop after scoop—videotapes and notes of exclusive interviews with Abu Sayyaf’s notorious leaders. Tilao was among those leaders, and he had greeted her in the jungle camp like an old acquaintance, a fellow celebrity. This struck her as so odd that she had asked Janjalani about him. He explained that Tilao had essentially appointed himself the group’s spokesman: “He likes to talk.”

  Intelligence agents disappointed by her unwillingness to share information spread false rumors about dela Cruz— that she was having an affair with Janjalani; that her husband was somehow related to the rebel leader. On one occasion, while working as an independent journalist, she sold the videotape of an interview to a TV station for broadcast, and her rivals denounced her as mercenary. The backbiting took such a toll on her personally and professionally that she resolved to stop covering Abu Sayyaf altogether. So when Tilao began calling, offering an interview after the kidnappings at Dos Palmas, she turned him down.

  She continued to refuse interview opportunities until Bob Meisel, the head of the New Tribes Mission office in Manila, personally implored her to get involved. He explained that official efforts had not borne fruit, and that after all these months the Burnhams’ family and friends were eager for any contact at all. Moved by Meisel’s pleas, dela Cruz began looking for a way to arrange a visit with Tilao and the captive missionaries. In November she flew to Zamboanga City.

  Colonel Sabban’s men had been watching dela Cruz for weeks. When she arrived in Zamboanga, they tailed her. Much to their surprise, within days she led them to Alvin Siglos. The colonel called her. “We know what you’re up to,” he said. Dela Cruz was not surprised; she was used to playing games with the various government intelligence units. Sometimes they used her, and sometimes she used them. Often her goals and theirs coincided. Sabban did not inform her at this point that his own team had been talking to Siglos. “Go ahead and keep on doing what you’re doing,” he told her. He said that if she and the informer went into the Basilan jungle, he would make sure they would not be delayed at any of the military checkpoints along the way.