Why did Australia's spy agencies listen in on the Indonesian first lady?

ON October 17, 2007, three days into Australia's federal election campaign, a cable marked "secret" was sent from the US embassy in Jakarta to American diplomats in Canberra and to the CIA. Its contents would set the scene, six years later, for the most contentious aspect of Australia's spy scandal relating to Indonesia: the targeting of Indonesia's first lady.

The cable spoke of a "new dynamic" in the power balance at the top of Indonesian politics with the emergence of a player who had become the most influential adviser to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

But this new powerbroker, the cable said, was not the vice-president, nor was it a member of SBY's inner cabinet. It was the President's wife, Kristiani Herawati, known in her country as Ibu Ani.

"According to contacts Indonesia's first lady has expanded her influence with the palace and emerged as the President's undisputed top adviser," the cable stated. "Kristiani Herawati's ascendance has apparently come at the expense of other key advisers. The first lady has allegedly leveraged her access to the President to help her friends and disparage her foes, including vice-president (Jusuf) Kalla."

The cable said Ibu Ani was restricting the access of other advisers to the President and that "by strengthening her gatekeeper role, the first lady was able to expose the President to views and policy perspectives of her own choosing".

The views contained in this American cable were shared by Australian intelligence agencies, which had also noted the rise and rise of Indonesia's first lady. In Western intelligence circles, it was becoming clear that Ibu Ani was no presidential handbag but a fast-rising powerbroker within the government of Australia's largest and most important neighbour.

Inside the super-secret Defence Signals Directorate and other spy agencies in Canberra, intelligence officials naturally were curious to know more about this new dynamic in Jakarta.

They pondered whether Ibu Ani's power play was part of a suspected plan to create a family dynasty culminating in her eldest son eventually becoming president. And what was the dynamic between the first lady and the Islamic groups she was wooing to shore up her husband's political support?

When the decision was taken inside DSD to monitor the phones of President Yudhoyono and his most senior colleagues in the leadership, it was believed there were compelling reasons to also target the E-90 3G mobile handset of Indonesia's first lady.

"To monitor the thoughts and connections of the President's closest political adviser is extremely useful," said one well-connected insider who asked not to be named.

"Who is she dealing with financially, who is who in the party, what is its structure and what is Indonesia's shifting power base? Any intelligence agency would love to have that information."

Yet last month, when documents stolen by rogue US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden showed that in 2009 the DSD had targeted the phones of SBY, Ibu Ani and eight other Indonesian leadership figures, the initial response of many in Indonesia and in Australia was, "Why the first lady?" Even in the distinctly ungentlemanly game of spying, surely this was not cricket? First ladies lived in the shadows of their husbands, smiling demurely in public, supporting charities and rearing children. Tapping their phones would surely produce only shopping lists and cheap cocktail party gossip. It must have been a step too far, an arrogant overreach from a country whose spy agencies seemed out of control.

SBY seemed to agree that monitoring his wife's phone was a step too far, given the white-hot anger that radiated from his initial tweets after the news broke.

"He does take things personally, and nothing is more personal than a man's wife," explained The Jakarta Post's editor-in-chief Meidyatama Suryodiningrat.

But Inquirer understands that intelligence agencies believed there were clear national security reasons to justify the targeting of Indonesia's first lady. The decision to monitor her phone was deliberate and calculated, and was not based on a flippant notion that the DSD should try to listen in simply because it could.

The decision to try to eavesdrop also was not based simply on the fact SBY at times used his wife's phone instead of his own.

The nature of the power-sharing relationship between SBY and Ibu Ani made it inevitable that once the DSD had decided it was in Australia's national interests to target the President's phone, it followed that Ibu Ani's phone would also be targeted.

The Prime Minister's office refused to comment on this story, saying it does not comment on intelligence matters.

Several factors appear to have led the DSD, now known as the Australian Signals Directorate, to take a keen interest in Ibu Ani in 2009. When SBY began his first five-year presidential term in 2004, US diplomats assessed that his wife's voice was "only one of the many" he listened to during his "lengthy deliberations on matters of state."

But this began to change during the course of that first term.

Ibu Ani was born not into politics but into military royalty: she is the daughter of Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, a lieutenant general who was head of Indonesia's special forces during the bloody anti-communist krackdown in the mid-1960s.

She studied medicine at university but in 1976 dropped out to marry SBY, who was a young military officer and whose rise would benefit greatly from her family's blue-blood military contacts.

From early on in SBY's political career, Ibu Ani played an active role in campaigning on his behalf. She graduated in political science in 1998 and in 2004 was appointed vice-chairman of SBY's Democratic Party.

The problem for intelligence agencies seeking to learn more about SBY's innermost thoughts was that he was a solitary figure who rarely confided even in close colleagues. This trend became apparent during his first term, increasing his reliance on his wife as a trusted political confidante.

As one expert put it: "In public they have a very regal style of presidency. (In private) they read the papers together in the morning, they are happy and sad together, they are face-to-face people who confide in each other."

By October 2007, the Americans noted in their secret cable, later disclosed by WikiLeaks: "Ibu Ani was the only person the President could truly trust on every issue and as the President moved into the second half of his term, he was increasingly moving in lockstep with his wife.

"According to Yahya Asagaf, a political appointee at the State Intelligence Agency (BIN), it was also becoming more obvious that the first lady's opinion was 'the only one that matters'."

During 2009, Australian intelligence agencies were trying to unravel Ibu Ani's role in what they believed was a complex presidential succession plan to ensure that her family retained the presidency beyond the constitutional limit of two five-year terms, which would expire for SBY in 2014.



]\][
Ibu Ani has always held high ambitions for her eldest son, Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, now a 35-year-old Harvard-educated military officer. Insiders say that in 2009 the President and his wife were toying with a plan to try to install her as president in 2014 to hold the position until their son was old enough to have a serious run at the presidency in 2019.

The plan never got off the ground, not least because private polling showed she had barely 4 per cent of voter support for a tilt at the top job.

But back in 2009, the succession plan was taken seriously. A journalist was hired specifically to write articles about Ibu Ani for party newsletters, apparently to raise her profile.

Had the plan gone ahead, it would have had significant ramifications for Indonesian politics, and for Australia.

Ibu Ani's growing influence at this time was not limited to her husband. She was also exerting power over the make-up of SBY's cabinet and inner circle. The US embassy identified her as the primary influence behind Yudhoyono's decision to drop vice-president Kalla as his running mate in the 2009 election.

If intelligence agencies could somehow monitor Ibu Ani's links with Indonesia's political elite, it could help Canberra better understand the internal power dynamics shaping Indonesian politics.

Another factor in the targeting of Ibu Ani is believed to have been the active role she was playing by 2009 in building up political constituencies in Indonesia. Her work behind the scenes is partly credited with securing SBY's crushing election win in July that year with 60 per cent of the vote.

Experts say SBY prefers, where possible, to leave it to his wife and her helpers to reach out to his key political constituencies.

"Ibu Ani controls a lot of this stuff, in part because she is a mover and a shaker and SBY, as the President, doesn't want to get his hands dirty," says one insider.

By monitoring the first lady, Australian agencies also were hoping to gain a broader understanding of the financial position of Indonesia's first family and the network of patronage that flowed from that.

As early as June 2006, US diplomats in Jakarta noted in cables the efforts by the President's family, "particularly first lady Kristiani Herawati ... to profit financially from its political position".

"First lady Kristiani Herawati is increasingly seeking to profit personally by acting as a broker or facilitator for business ventures ... Numerous contacts also tell us that Kristiani's family members have begun establishing companies in order to commercialise their family's influence."

On security matters, it is believed that Australian intelligence agencies also took a keen interest in the first lady's links with Islamic groups as she sought to secure the religious vote for her husband.

At that time, popular support for Islamic parties in Indonesia was on the wane, with the parliamentary elections in April 2009 revealing a drop in support for religion-based parties from 38 per cent in 2004 to 28 per cent.

But Islamic groups were still an important constituency for the ruling family, especially because one of SBY's political rivals in the 2009 election, vice-president Kalla, was trying to portray the ruling family as un-Islamic. When Kalla spread rumours that Ibu Ani might be Christian because she rarely wore headscarfs, the accusation prompted the first lady to start wearing them.

In July 2009, the US embassy wrote: "Yudhoyono knows the importance of Islam in Indonesia; he makes it clear he is a practising Muslim and he has done the Haj. He has also forged links to Islamic-based parties which have joined his coalition, such as PKS (Prosperous Justice Party). In addition, he has bent backwards at times to support issues of concern to the Muslim community, including regarding the Middle East or by supporting a controversial anti-pornography bill."

There is no suggestion that SBY or Abu Ani knowingly gave financial or political support to any radical Islamic elements in the groups they were wooing; both are staunch opponents of extremism and terrorism, and have been powerful advocates for a secular Indonesia. But during a decade when terrorist bombings were rife in Indonesia, intelligence agencies were curious to learn all they could about the power structures and the relationship between the presidential palace and large Islamic groups such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, which have more than 80 million members between them.

The DSD and other agencies also would have been especially curious in 2009 to learn more of the political alliance between the President's Democratic Party and the Islamic party PKS, which was described at that time by Washington-based writer Sadanand Dhume as Indonesia's version of the Muslim Brotherhood.



"Since it first burst into prominence five years ago, PKS has done little to dispel fears that it is the dark bloom at the heart of Indonesia's democratic flowering," Dhume wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2009. "Party leaders are outspoken supporters of Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiah, the terrorist group responsible for suicide bombings in Bali that killed hundreds."

In August 2009, when the Snowden documents show the DSD was trying to monitor the thinking of Indonesia's leaders, including SBY and his wife, Australian spy agencies were busy trying to solve the mystery of the bombings the previous month at Jakarta's Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels that killed seven people, including three Australians.

At that time, bombing mastermind Noordin Mohammad Top was still on the run. At a press conference outside the presidential palace after the attack, an emotional Yudhoyono showed photos of his picture being used as a target by unidentified masked men holding rifles. "This terrorist action is believed to have been carried out by a terrorist group but not necessarily a terrorist network that we have known thus far in Indonesia," he said. It was only a month later that Top was killed in a raid conducted by an Indonesian anti-terrorist team.

The hotel bombings lifted the death toll for Australians targeted by terrorist bombings in Indonesia to 95 between 2002 and 2009. Australian agencies had an intense interest in the innermost thoughts of the President and his wife at this volatile time, when the lives of Australians were still being lost.

Even so, there were differences on how to interpret these events in Indonesia, both within the Australian intelligence community and between Canberra and Washington. The Americans, especially the CIA, were inclined to take a more pessimistic view of the state of Islam in Indonesia at this time than did Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation and the prime minister's Office of National Assessments.

The CIA was more nervous than the DIO or ONA about the prospect that Indonesia might move towards a more hardline form of Islam. The CIA had some support in this view from Australia's domestic spy agency, ASIO, which was warier about the Islamist threatin Indonesia at that time than other Australian agencies.

The decision to target the phones of the President, his wife and other senior leaders in Indonesia would have been made by the DSD but also could have been requested by its Five Eyes intelligence partner, the NSA.

At that time, the decision would have been taken with little regard to the fallout if it were exposed. Back in 2009, maverick digital-age mass leakers such as Snowden and US soldier Bradley Manning were unheard of, so the risk-benefit analysis of any such targeting was far more complacent then than it is in today's post-Snowden world.

The debate over the rights and wrongs of targeting the personal phone of the Indonesian President and his wife have been played out in Australia across the past month.

Critics here have generally fallen into two camps: those who assume that all forms of spying are illegal and immoral, and those who accept that all countries spy but question whether the Australian agencies overreached in also targeting Indonesia's first lady.

But the Snowden leak has also revealed a simple truth: that Australia's intelligence agencies are doing what their government asks them to do, and that is to effectively uncover secrets that another country wants to keep, just as Indonesia's spy agencies seek to do with Australia.

Indonesia is a friend of Australia but it is also a giant, historically unstable Islamic neighbour whose democracy in still in its relative infancy and where terrorists have claimed numerous Australian lives in the past decade.

In this context, the decision to target the intelligent, powerful and politically savvy first lady of Indonesia, described by American diplomats as a "cabinet of one" for her husband, President Yudhoyono, is not so surprising.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bukan sulap bukan sihir, Australia menyadap Ibu Presiden hanya karena kedekatan Pemerintah SBY dgn islamist.