*
I walked into the foyer of this office building, carrying my milkshake container of coffee. I like a decent jolt of caffeine in the morning and a milkshake container allows me to have three cups in one hand. The foyer was empty, and I examined the tenant board: beside the name of Australasian Education Services Pty Ltd was a suite number on the second floor, so I walked up and had to wait at the door and look into the camera. I waited fifteen seconds and then there was a buzz and a sliding of serious bolts. I walked into a reception area where a thirty-something woman sat behind a desk and a computer screen.
‘I have you in room three,’ she said, not using my name.
I followed her pointed finger and walked down a hallway that could have been a lawyers’ or accountants’ office. Except there was no one there. I pushed through a frosted-glass door with ‘3’ on it, and now I was in a meeting room with an oval ten-seater table placed in front of a big screen. I realised the woman had walked in behind me and now she pulled out a chair and gestured for me to sit in it. She picked up a remote control, hit a button, and after a few seconds I was being televised to a small sub-screen down in the bottom right-hand corner of the main screen.
‘Are we live?’ she said to the screen, and a voice crackled over it, and the previously blue background flickered and came to life. On the screen now was Brandon, a white man in his mid-forties whose pasty skin and wire-rimmed glasses were a perfect foil for what he really was: an intelligence lifer, for a foreign government.
‘Reading me?’ asked Brandon, and the woman in the room said, ‘All set,’ and then she left.
Brandon said a few pleasantries and ran through the attendees at the teleconference: the names were Mike, James, Calvin, Anwar and John. As Brandon introduced us by first names, he cycled a picture of each of us through the pane in the bottom right of the screen. So we got a five-second flash of each bloke, which looked like a kaleidoscope of different complexions and facial expressions. For me it was 9 am on a Friday, but for some of these bleary-eyed blokes it was late at night. Anwar looked Indonesian or Malaysian and might have been on deck for his Bahasa and local knowledge; John was African-American and, judging by his gaze, he would be the sniper or assassin or the one who’d do whatever wet work was required. Calvin had the look of the IT–electronics guy – he looked thoughtful and educated. And James, going by his grooming and his wristwatch, was a former special forces captain who assumed he’d be leading the group.
Brandon told us about the gig and cycled five or six pictures onto the screen of an Indonesian troublemaker called Samson Ramdi. Samson had an intelligent, thoughtful face and was in his sixties. His image seemed to run at two speeds: clean-cut and shaven, in a shirt and blazer – perhaps taken ten years ago; and then raggedy, with a white beard and decked in mosque robes. You can probably guess that the backstory here was ‘radicalisation’, and Brandon came in on cue: like Osama bin Laden, our man Samson was from a successful Javanese finance and construction family, with good ties to the military. He was educated in Australia and the US and was supposed to take the reins at the company, which he did for a while, owning homes in Singapore and Dubai as well as Jakarta. But he’d rediscovered his ‘faith’ and turned into one of the world’s foremost funders and makers of bombs, suicide vests and all sorts of clever IEDs. I could tell by Brandon’s voice that there was a fair bit of respect for how this bloke operated. There was something else in his voice: fear, dread?
Brandon showed a few images of bomb blasts in India and Pakistan and said the pressure was growing to catch Samson and take him out of the bombmaking game. His output and quality was very good, and he had a distribution network that was moving his bombs around Asia without detection.
Brandon said they had credible human intelligence from West Java, where Ramdi was apparently living in disguise. The job for this team was to go into the boondocks of Java – never the safest place for a bunch of Western intel operators – and confirm that the sightings of Ramdi were credible. Besides the white beard and mystic’s robes, Brandon said Ramdi was missing the index and middle fingers from his right hand, the result of a bomb going off at the wrong time. Having verified Samson Ramdi’s whereabouts, we’d stand by for new orders.
Not much detail, but there you go: when you’re pulled into these jobs, the information is drip-fed on a need-to-know basis. I was a direct hire so I was sure a few extra pennies would be allowed to drop for me over the coming days.
Brandon finished the meeting by telling us that the details of our next moves were in our briefing packs, and then he clicked off. The door opened and the woman walked in again. She looked corporate, like one of those ‘business centre’ hostesses that manage all the computers and meeting rooms in the big American hotels. She dropped a plain, orange-hued manila envelope on the table in front of me and she left.
I emptied the contents. There was a security statement and non-disclosure document that reminded me of the security clearance I enjoyed and the twenty years I’d spend in that nation’s prison system if I blabbed. There was a basic term sheet that spelled out my payment and the direction I’d have to take from the responsible entity, in this case, Brandon, although he wasn’t named.
There was a brochure for a Development and Construction Symposium in Jakarta, and the government I was working for had signed me up – under my real name – and there was a lanyard with my name on it among the paperwork. Symposia could be good cover but they were even better as meeting places and drops, because every bugger was wandering around talking to random people. It’s very hard for the watchers to make anything of that.
There was also an open return ticket in my name. I’d be hard-pressed explaining this to Liz: the flight for Jakarta left Melbourne the following morning.
3
The hours before I deploy can be nervy and quite emotional. As with soldiers and firefighters, the hardest part of going to work is dealing with your spouse and other loved ones. They get worried about what might happen and that becomes a management exercise in itself. How do you convince someone that you’re trained for this, that you know what you’re doing? You can’t trivialise the situation you’re putting yourself into but neither can you sit there talking about how bad it is. It’s a juggle.
When I returned from the meeting I told Liz immediately. She had to work that evening and so we had a bit of a cuddle, and took it to bed. Nothing about this was ideal but with Liz the main element in getting her support is honesty. She is an intelligent, strong-willed person who deals with people whose lives are hanging in the balance. She’s got more mental stamina and calmness than most men. What she doesn’t like is bullshit, so early in our relationship I tried to get the balance right: I negotiated that I’d give her a broadbrush description of where I was going but I couldn’t tell her what I was doing. I’d say ‘work’, or ‘a job’, and I’d try to be accurate with how long I’d be gone and how dangerous it was. The quid pro quo on my honesty was her agreeing to not make me lie by asking too many questions. A lot of women would find it impossible to quit with the interrogation, but Liz has stuck to her side of the bargain, and we’re a better couple for it.
This kind of ‘honesty with vagueness’ is the opposite of what most people in intelligence do with their spouses, and that is to give them a detailed account of where they’re going and what they’re doing, but it’s all fabricated. The typical thing to do is say you’re going to Perth when you’re actually in Auckland. At some point in the marriage the spouse gets the idea that the intel officer is a liar, and the rot starts there. So Rule Number One of getting along in this business: building an illusion on at least the basis of a true story is the only way to go. Pure bullshit eventually gives off a smell of . . .
I moved casually around the departures lounge of Melbourne International, keeping a keen eye out for any eyes that might be on me. I wore my tourist uniform: polo shirt, jeans, a cabin wheelie bag and a Rip Curl backpack. In my
backpack I had a large D series Canon camera with a 70–300 millimetre zoom lens on it. There was a time when this would have sparked interest from the border authorities, but with large, professional cameras now so widely used by tourists, it doesn’t warrant a second look.
When I travel internationally I move straight from check-in to the customs and immigration gate, beyond which no one but travellers can move. This allows me to better detect the watchers. It’s not that I’m paranoid or anything, but when you’ve tailed as many people as I have, and watched which flights they’ve got on – and confirmed that they handed over their boarding pass and walked through – then you’re always on the lookout for those who would watch you.
On the other side of the security screening at Melbourne International there’s a seating and café area that follows the contour of the curved wall of windows. I grabbed a coffee and sat at one of the tables up against the glass, giving me a view of the people, their eyes and their movements. This is my prep for a gig: getting all that intensity up to full revs while at the same time relaxing into looking like a tourist, right down to smiling a lot and saying ‘hi’ to people I don’t know. It’s a bit of a balancing act but it’s the way I’ve always done it. I travel as a tourist and do my research so I have a good idea of where I’m going and why. I stick to the facts: I’m a builder and photographer so I’m taking pictures of structures and their interesting architecture. And unless someone springs a surprise on me, I fly under my own name. It removes complexity and unnecessary untruths.
The Qantas flight went without a hitch. I was in business class which can house all sorts of nosy parkers, but on this trip the seat beside me was empty and there was no surveillance that I could detect. The flight touched down in Jakarta mid-afternoon, thanks to the morning departure in Melbourne. I bought a prepaid phone from an airport kiosk and jumped on a relatively fast shuttle ride from Soekarno-Hatta International into the Mandarin Oriental. On the gigs for this particular organisation, the hotel of choice in Asia had often been the Marriott, but a spate of bombings at those hotels meant the bookings were now made elsewhere, usually the Mandarin and the Shangri-La. I walked across the security screening area, booked in and took my room key from the reception people. I didn’t stop to say hello to anyone, although I thought I saw the captain named ‘James’ from the teleconference standing in the newsagency gift store in the foyer. I didn’t stop to say hello or ask him if his name was James. You don’t do that.
I headed up to the eighth floor and took a quick tour of the room to check for cameras and bugs. There’d be no way to check if my phone was being tapped – that’s why I buy a burner when I’m in-country. But listening devices and cameras are easier to find. There were none, so I took a shower and looked out over this big, slightly crazy city. The Mandarin is located on a large roundabout in central Jakarta, in a precinct housing major hotels such as the Grand Hyatt. I usually make my rounds of a hotel, because I like to see where the exits and hidden entrances are. But I already knew the Mandarin and its layout.
I watched TV for half an hour and at a little after 5 pm I caught the elevator down to the lobby, walked around to the Azure bar beside the pool and ordered a club sandwich, fries and a beer. I sat at one of the poolside tables and flicked through my phone, pretending to be interested. But across the pool from me – in a recliner – was the rather muscular form of John, another of the team members from the teleconference. And sitting two tables away from me, also eating a club sandwich, was the operator named Calvin. We all knew who we were, and no one said a word. I found it easy to avoid Calvin’s gaze, but John was lying back on his recliner, dressed in nothing but board shorts and observing us through mirror sunglasses, his mouth slowly working on chewing gum.
Does this look like a team-building event? One of the guys is loitering in the lobby gift shop, thinking I can’t immediately make him. And three others are sitting around the same pool. No one is talking. Even better, none of us even acknowledges any of the others. It must seem bizarre to outsiders, who are used to movies where the ‘leader’ has to band together the oddball gang and go win a war. In reality, the people who assign us to these gigs like to use people who are not used to working together, tell them little, keep each person working and thinking as an individual and then send everyone home with a pocketful of cash. The alternative, which is people forming bonds and loyalties beyond the immediate mission, is not useful to intelligence chiefs. Friendship means people talking and swapping notes; it means cross-checking of facts and operators delving into matters that are best left alone. I have a good friend who used to run the selection panels for Australian special forces soldiers, and he used to say that the number one requirement for elite operators was what he called ‘zero interest in politics’. That is, you want people who have intensely mission-driven, goal-oriented personalities. They want the objective defined and they want to win. It’s the same with the world I contract into: the spymasters don’t want people sitting around having a few beers and discussing the broader dimension. They want focus, execution, clarity.
I sipped on my beer while I waited for my food. I was together and alone, in a team but solo. Liz may have thought I’d reluctantly opened up to her about my world, but there was nothing reluctant about it. Opening up to her about my life was a sanity check and a lifeline to reality.
4
The gig really kicked off at 9 am the next morning. There were only four of us in the restaurant for breakfast – Anwar had not showed up at the hotel. Not unusual, by the way.
At a quarter to nine we stood up – not acknowledging one another – and walked out of the Mandarin and onto the street. Across from the big roundabout that the Mandarin abutted was the Grand Hyatt, and the Development and Construction Symposium was being held in their conference halls. We drifted across on the four-minute walk, and presented our lanyards. There was a speech from a woman about funding the gap – or something that was supposed to prompt more aid from the West – and when that was over shortly before 10 am, we filed out, mingled with the throng of attendees, and walked out onto the apron of the hotel where a small, unmarked shuttle bus was waiting. We got on without talking to the driver. No one spoke, and about thirteen minutes later we were ushered through the security bollards and extensive identity checks to give us access to the embassy of the government we were working for. We were issued with more security lanyards and were then driven further into the compound. There was a detachment from the main embassy that housed soldiers, and we were led into this building by the driver, at which point a white man – who I pegged as a major but who was dressed in civvies – walked us through to a meeting room. Thus far, no one in the team had conversed with anyone else.
As I took my seat, the operator called John gave me a quick smile and a nod and I nodded back. I noticed that the person who I knew as James was planted at the head of the table, and that he’d put a small pad and a pen on the table in front of him. He must have been new to this, I chuckled to myself, because contractors don’t take notes, and even if they did, nothing we wrote would ever be allowed out of that room. Ever.
As if reading my thoughts, the major turned on his laptop and, seeing the notebook, waved at it and said, ‘You won’t be needing that, buddy.’
Captain James didn’t seem to fully understand and so the major hardened his tone and said, ‘No pens, no paper, no notes, okay, ladies?’
Now I saw things more clearly: Captain James was an army lifer who’d taken his pension and tried to leave, but hadn’t succeeded in the civvie world. So now he was sticking his toe in the private contractor waters, thinking it must be like doing a briefing at Bagram. Which it’s not. When intelligence agencies want gigs done by contractors, they don’t want us to know all the history and all the deeper meanings. They define a specific job, they pay well, and everyone goes home. But you start writing down what one of these people is saying – or try to record anything that goes on in one of their buildings
– and you look like a nuisance and a threat and a possible leak. And intelligence agencies don’t like that. The whole point in them hiring contractors is that they don’t have to indoctrinate us.
I shared a quick look with John and thought I saw him wince.
And then the show started. It was a fifteen-frame PowerPoint and the major talked over it in a well-practised presentation. He started at the top by designating the team: Captain James would lead, I would be the recon guy – the verifier of Ramdi’s identity – and John and Calvin were the support.
We nodded and the major hit his remote, bringing up the first PowerPoint: there were two ‘recents’ of Samson Ramdi – in the white beard and robes – and some dot points of where his bombs had been used. India and Pakistan topped the list, but hotel bombings in Indonesia were in there too.
The PowerPoint named a village in rural Java – on the north coast, on the Java Sea – which was about three hours’ drive from Jakarta. The major had a laser pointer and he splashed a bit of red light on an area of Java that is considered dangerous for Westerners who have no good reason to be there. The PowerPoint continued and the major mentioned a person he called CI 1 – or confidential informant number one – who had told someone in Indonesian intel that Ramdi was living in a small compound outside the village. There’d apparently been a lot of comings and goings in trucks from the compound.
At Hell's Gate Page 2
