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Prologue

Djakarta

31st March 1981

0325 hours

Grimfaced, General Benny Moerdani listened intently for the words he had waited so anxiously to hear.

‘It’s done,’ the Indonesian Special Forces’ commander reported.

‘Casualties?’

‘The pilot and one of our anti-terrorist team,’ the officer’s voice carried down the secure line from the Indonesian Military Attaché’s office in Bangkok.

‘And Si Anu?’ General Moerdani remained tense; he had personally briefed the Special Forces’ officer. “Si Anu” referred to their undercover agent in the terrorist squad.

‘He was killed fleeing the aircraft,’ came the sombre reply, the commander’s words signaling the success of Moerdani’s covert operation, planned and executed to discredit the Komando Jihad, (Holy War Command) Islamic radical group.

‘You’ve done well,’ Moerdani offered, satisfied that the government agent would not come back to haunt him. ‘Quarantine the team, then get them back to Jakarta immediately.’

* * * *

Moerdani sat alone in his office smoking a Cuban Rey Del Mundo Choix Supreme relishing in the success of the covert operation. The Garuda Indonesian Airlines DC-9 aircraft “Woyla”, designated Flight 206, had been ‘hijacked’ by five members of the Komando Jihad when en route from Jakarta to Palembang and flown to Bangkok. Moerdani had spoken directly to the Thai armed forces chief and was granted authority to mount the rescue mission on Thai soil. Had this support not been forthcoming, the intelligence czar would have diverted the aircraft to a more receptive destination. Moerdani, Indonesia’s Army Intelligence Chief and President Suharto’s right-hand-man’s ostensible purpose with this exercise was to demonstrate his troops’ level of anti-terrorist skill and save passenger lives – his real goal, to destroy militant Islamic factions that threatened to destabilize the New Order.

The General blew a perfect coil of smoke through the stale office air, smiling at the irony of the situation. A decade before, with Indonesia experiencing an increase in radicalized Islam the Komando Jihad had been set up as a front organization by his predecessor, General Ali Moertopo with the aim of discrediting Islamic political groups perceived as a threat to the Suharto regime. Through the intelligence agency, BAKIN, Moertopo had recruited radicals from jails to work with the army, these extremists then forging the very network of militant Muslims that challenged the government of the day. The unintentional consequences of Ali Moertopo’s Komando Jihad operation resulted in renewed and forged bonds amongst Islamic radicals across the archipelago.

Alarmed that the armed forces had lost control with the Komando Jihad metamorphosing into a number of even more dangerous organizations, General Moerdani was charged with the responsibility of destroying this product of the Indonesian armed forces’ own creation. Government agents penetrated the pesantren, boarding school, Pondok Ngruki in Central Java. The founder, Abu Bakar Bashir was arrested – his incarceration a precursor to a much wider operation to curtail the rise of anti-government sentiment.

The seeds had been sown – the dangerous stratagem of establishing unauthorized armed covert organizations to protect the Indonesian military’s vested interests from the very people they were charged to protect, the genesis of the terror group, the Jemaah Islamiyah and what would become, the Laskar Jihad.

Satisfied that public outcry over the Garuda hijacking would provide a groundswell of local middle-class and international support for the government’s imminent crackdown against outspoken clerics, General Benny Moerdani retired for the night – unaware that the American president, Ronald Reagan had just been shot, the assassination attempt displacing the Garuda ‘hijack’ from front pages, worldwide.

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