The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  The venture would provide exactly the test of Siglos the marines wanted. If he could take the reporter to meet with Tilao and bring her back safely, it would demonstrate that he had the access he claimed to have. Debriefing him later would give them a better fix on where, how numerous, and how well armed the guerrillas were. It might even allow the marines to set up an ambush immediately afterward. Further, a videotaped interview might provide “proof of life,” showing that the Burnhams were indeed alive and giving some indication of their condition.

  The trip into the jungle took two days. The reporter and the informer sailed through the military checkpoints, as the colonel had promised, and set off on foot into the jungle. They walked for about two hours, guided by a villager. Dela Cruz wore a blue sweatshirt and khaki pants, and carried a small digital video camera. She and Siglos were eventually met by about a dozen guerrilla fighters in a little clearing. Leading them was Tilao, looking thinner than usual after his months on the run, but still wearing his trademark sunglasses and black head wrap, dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and army fatigue pants, with a rifle over one shoulder and a pistol strapped to his hip.

  Tilao and Siglos embraced, laughing and crying, delighted to see each other again. “Auntie and Uncle will meet you tomorrow,” Tilao told dela Cruz, referring to the American captives. Then he and Siglos walked off together to talk. Sitting that evening with Tilao’s men, dela Cruz could hear the two friends talking animatedly well into the night, sometimes laughing boisterously, sometimes talking quietly for long periods. They spoke to each other in a local dialect that she didn’t understand. When dela Cruz awakened the next morning, the two were still talking, and she lay on the ground listening to them telling stories and laughing.

  Later that day, Tilao produced the Burnhams. Both of them looked emaciated. Martin’s beard had come in thick and red, redder than the thin, sandy hair on the sides of his head. His cheeks and eye sockets were hollow, and his neck appeared long and very thin. His worn clothing hung on him. Gracia was similarly wan; her face was lined and her eyes were puffy. She smiled warmly and then quietly wept when she was introduced to dela Cruz and Siglos. Gracia was amazed that a reporter had found them in the jungle—but why a reporter and not a rescue force?

  They spoke for more than an hour; the meeting was recorded on videotape. Martin seemed matter-of-fact about their predicament, even resigned to it. He was poised, in firm control of his emotions. He talked about his determination to return home to his children. Gracia’s pain was closer to the surface, as was her anger. She spoke of her fear of being executed, her expectation of death. Most of Gracia’s anger was directed at the Philippine government.

  They parted later that day. Dela Cruz hugged Gracia and Martin, promising to carry their message to their children, to their friends, and to the world. Tilao and Siglos choked up on parting. Dela Cruz and Siglos were then led away, and after a surprisingly short walk down the mountain, they arrived at a military outpost. Soon after dela Cruz’s return to Manila, her interview aired all over the Philippines and around the world.

  Sabban and Aragones were heartened: Siglos had delivered exactly what he had promised. After debriefing him and dela Cruz, and watching the videos, the two marines determined approximately where Tilao and his men must be living on the island. But the Philippine army refused to allow the marines to conduct a rapid raid in pursuit. Sabban’s efficiency had embarrassed the army, and it wasn’t about to let the marines close out the mission. Instead, the army decided to pluck Tilao all by itself. Philippine army troops descended in force on Tilao’s hideout, and found no one.

  Tilao and the captives had vanished.

  5. The Special Agent

  Outside the small world of military intelligence, Colonel Sabban’s success was perceived as failure: a mere journalist had walked into the Basilan jungle and scored an interview with a man the Philippine armed forces somehow couldn’t find. But within intelligence circles it was a different matter. Sabban’s small unit had accomplished more than all the rest of the Philippine military: it had not only found Tilao but also secured, in Alvin Siglos, a direct line to the guerrilla leader.

  Other military and police intel units began vying for the services of this new action agent, and Sabban had to use all his clout to fend them off. In secret reports about the operation in Manila, the marine intelligence group was identified only as “MC-2.” When American embassy officials began inquiring about MC-2, they were told at first that no such group existed. This was apparently an honest mistake, because no one at the highest levels of the Philippine government had ever heard of it. But contact was finally made, and Colonel Sabban was suddenly awash in offers of help, from both the CIA and U.S. military intelligence.

  In short order he was dealing with the complexities of America’s military intelligence bureaucracy, and being amazed by how strictly the Americans followed their rules. He discovered, for instance, that there were things that one agency could deliver but another could not. For military equipment and ammunition, it was best to ask the military intelligence folks, who were also permitted by the U.S. government to share “lethal information”—intelligence that might lead to a target’s death. For technology and money, he learned, it was best to approach the CIA. Unlike military intel, the CIA had deep pockets. The agency was barred, however, from directly sharing lethal information.

  Sabban’s primary American contact was a bald, trig dynamo: Kent Clizbee, a CIA officer who showed up in Zamboanga City raring to go. The term gung-ho was inadequate to describe this big, pale, muscular American. He was nothing like the conventional image of the retiring, blend-into-the-background spy. Looming over his new Filipino collaborators, dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and hiking boots, he looked like an American tourist who had taken a wrong turn. But Clizbee was an expert in Southeast Asian languages and cultures. When Sabban invited him along on a strenuous uphill hike for some exercise one afternoon, Clizbee, a U.S. Special Forces vet, earned any marine’s deepest measure of respect by easily keeping pace. He was the perfect ally. He wanted no credit. He didn’t want to plan or run the operation. He was a good listener.

  “What do you need?” he asked Sabban. One of the first things the CIA provided was money to buy a new satellite phone—for Tilao. The guerrilla had asked Siglos to get one for him; his own had either broken down or been lost, and he’d been using his cell phone to make calls out of the jungle. There were several cell phone towers on Basilan, but service was poor. The colonel wanted Tilao to have a satellite phone, because it facilitated the kidnapper’s vital link to Siglos; and with the help of the CIA, it potentially meant being able to pinpoint his location. Siglos bought the phone at a store in Zamboanga; the marines recorded its serial number, and then Siglos passed it along to the couriers who would take it into the jungle with the groceries Tilao had requested—also purchased with money from the CIA. Tilao later called Siglos on the satellite phone and confirmed that he had received the goods, and he even put his captives on the phone—“Uncle and Auntie want to talk to you,” he said. Siglos recorded the call, as instructed, and collected $500 for his work.

  Other units and agencies, Philippine and American, with an interest in pursuing Tilao were suspicious of Siglos. The FBI, which regarded all Philippine efforts as untrustworthy, wanted to pick him up as a suspected member of Abu Sayyaf. But the truth was that Siglos was fully committed to taking Tilao down. The knowledge that he was betraying his friend pained him from time to time, but once he started along that road he never seriously considered turning back. The way he saw it, Tilao would be arrested and sent to jail, the hostages would be set free, and he would collect the reward money. He would avenge the murder of his uncle and get rich, which seemed a fair outcome to him.

  With the Tilao-Siglos connection authenticated, the marines set about making it exclusive. They had been intercepting the terrorist’s letters and phone calls for months, and knew that he had other connections in Zamboanga who served the same purpose as
Siglos, sending groceries and supplies. These other contacts began meeting with unfortunate accidents. They were eliminated one by one, until, by early 2002, Tilao had only one avenue for his requests.

  And Siglos was a bountiful provider. The CIA arranged things to look as if he was getting money secretly from local political figures sympathetic to the guerrillas, and virtually everything Tilao asked for was promptly delivered. His steady stream of requests included many from Martin and Gracia Burnham, who saw the sudden bounty as an answer to Gracia’s prayers. At times in the previous months, Martin had hoarded cookie and candy wrappers so that he could simply smell them to ease his hunger pangs. Gracia had prayed for such items as sanitary napkins, a Scrabble game, Nestea, Bisquick, peanut butter, and even hamburgers; and the CIA began seeing to it that these very specific prayers were answered. When Tilao asked for a backpack, the CIA had one prepared with a tracking device sewn into the fabric. Its signals were of no use at first, however, because the agency had to wait for the war in Afghanistan to end before it could get aircraft—manned and unmanned—to track them.

  For most of early 2002, thanks to the CIA, the marines had at least a periodic fix on the meandering guerrilla band. When Tilao boasted in radio interviews—saying, for instance, “It’s really an embarrassment [to the authorities], because the superpower can’t do anything to us”—he was doing so on a CIA-funded satellite phone, which gave away his position as he spoke.

  The only hitch was that the CIA was not allowed to relay the precise coordinates—in part to cloak the capabilities of its own equipment, in part because it had not been given a “lethal finding”—permission to pass along potentially lethal information. When its agents on the ground pressed, their request triggered an argument in Washington. The Pentagon wanted the precise coordinates turned over to Philippine forces, but the CIA refused, instructing its agents to give Sabban and his men only a five-mile radius.

  The marines had other troubles. Every time Colonel Sabban requested permission to send a small force of his men under Captain Aragones into the jungle to find the Burnhams and deal with Tilao, the lumbering Philippine army insisted on doing the work itself, sometimes sending whole battalions after the nimble guerrillas. Although it had only general coordinates, the army did come close several times. Abu Sayyaf lost men in these skirmishes. Tilao and his group were feeling enough heat that in early April they slipped off Basilan in a small boat. By now, all of the hostages had been ransomed or abandoned but three: the Burnhams and a Filipino nurse. They made their way across the short passage to the Zamboanga peninsula, stopped briefly at a small island, and then moved to a fishing village just north of Zamboanga City.

  In the days afterward, the guerrillas seemed to have vanished, but then, just as suddenly, they reappeared. Tilao began calling Siglos from his cell phone—service was reliable in Zamboanga City, so he did not need to use the satellite phone. The U.S. and Philippine intelligence agents could not get the same precise fix on his position that they had gotten from the satellite phone, but by now they had something even better: aircraft.

  6. The Rescue

  In moments of despair, Gracia Burnham told her husband she would rather be dead than continue running with their kidnappers. Martin reminded her of their children: “What do you think the kids would say if you could pick up the phone and call them?” Gracia was haunted by their vow to grow old together—it was happening; they were both so haggard that they seemed to have aged forty years. Martin’s weight loss was aggravated by such intense diarrhea that when he was chained to a tree each night, he tied rags between his legs to catch the flow. His ribs were showing through his T-shirts.

  After a short stay in the fishing village, the band moved off into the jungle north of the city. Here the guerrillas, no longer on familiar or friendly ground, had to be concerned about being seen, even by villagers. They could not let the Burnhams be seen, so the couple were no longer allowed to bathe in rivers. Tilao seemed increasingly beleaguered, and it was apparent that he was tired of living on the run. In May, during an interview with Radio Mindanao Network, he warned, “If we see our situation becoming difficult, maybe we will just bid good-bye to these two.” It was clear which “two” he was talking about.

  From a base in Zamboanga City, the marines had reestablished their Siglos supply line. The action agent delivered supplies to a courier named Hamja, who took them to the guerrillas. From a house on stilts in the fishing village, he would steer his boat up the coast and leave the goods at a drop point on the beach; Tilao’s men would pick them up and carry them into the jungle. At about that time, in early spring, the CIA agents finally got their aircraft: a Predator, an unarmed, unmanned surveillance drone, which flew so high in the sky that it could not be seen or heard from the ground. It was equipped with high-resolution video cameras, one of them infrared.

  As long as the guerrillas stayed close to the city, food—even fast food—was plentiful. When Gracia told Tilao she had prayed for a hamburger and pizza, he told Siglos, “I would like my goats to eat hamburger and pizza.” Pizza was purchased, along with burgers from Jolli-bee’s, a local fast-food chain. The food was still hot when it was delivered, its glow registering brightly on the Predator’s infrared. Reprovisioned, the guerrillas pushed farther north into the hills of Zamboanga del Norte.

  Clizbee and a fellow agent tracked the fugitives, working in their “office,” a blue shipping container installed under the reviewing stand at the marine base in Zamboanga City. They studied monitors displaying data from a variety of tracking and surveillance systems. To make up for the CIA’s refusal to provide exact coordinates, Colonel Sabban sent Aragones and an eleven-man team into the jungle to keep visual tabs on their targets. Aragones, whose hair now hung to his shoulders and whose wispy mustache and beard blew in the wind, found them easily, guided by the tracking devices. The marine captain and his men blended silently into the jungle, and waited and watched. Tilao had nineteen men with him, and the three hostages. Aragones felt that if he and his men could choose the moment, they could easily rescue the hostages and either kill or arrest the kidnappers.

  But once again competition arose over who would attempt the rescue. The American command, with forces again in the Philippines for the annual joint exercises, wanted to conduct the raid, using one of its SEAL teams. The Filipinos balked at this, and squabbled among themselves. Colonel Sabban argued that since his unit had found Tilao, and since his men were already in position, and since they counted only twenty armed men guarding the Burnhams, the marines not only deserved to conduct the mission but were best positioned and best suited for it. He did not prevail. Army commanders were determined to prove themselves.

  The raid took place on the afternoon of June 7, 2002, in the rain. The guerrillas had stopped to camp atop a small mountain, the ground descending steeply before them to a stream. As the Philippine army troops encircled the camp and prepared to assault it, the Burnhams were quietly stringing up the small shelter they used on rainy days and hanging their hammock. They had just closed their eyes for a nap when the army struck and gunfire erupted. Martin Burnham was killed in one of the first volleys, shot through the chest. The Filipino nurse was also killed, as were some of Tilao’s men. Eight of the attacking soldiers were injured. Lying beside her mortally wounded husband, herself shot in the leg, Gracia played dead, resisting the urge to cry out in pain and terror. When the shooting stopped, she raised a hand slowly, trying to draw attention without drawing fire. The raiding party at first tried to reassure her that her husband was still alive, but more than a year on the run in the jungle had turned Gracia into a hard-eyed realist.

  “Martin is dead,” she told them curtly.

  The attempt to rescue the three hostages ended up killing two of them. It was a failure in yet another way: Tilao himself had escaped. The army found his backpack—the one with the hidden beacon—but the rebel leader and a small group of men had once again slipped the noose.

  Gracia Burnham arrived back
in civilization to a storm of media attention. Doctors in Zamboanga City attended to her wounded leg, and by phone she both celebrated and grieved with her family. Just before leaving the Philippines for the United States, three days after her rescue, she was wheeled out to microphones at the airport in Manila, her leg propped up in front of her. She was still gaunt, but she looked clean, rested, and enormously relieved. She seemed suddenly ten years younger. The raid had been characterized by many in the press as a debacle, but Gracia lived up to her name. She thanked the Philippine people for their prayers, and she thanked the government for her rescue. She talked about how much her husband had loved the country. She expressed no sympathy for the riddled, fleeing band of kidnappers, or for their “holy war.”

  7. The Endgame

  Colonel Sabban was furious about the raid. He believed there would have been a better chance of keeping the three hostages alive and of capturing all the guerrillas if Aragones and his reconnaissance team had been allowed to go in. Sabban was determined that the next move would be by his own men. He expected that Tilao’s plan would be to flee the peninsula for his home islands, and for that he would need a boat. This presented an opportunity: If the guerrillas could be confronted on the water, the marines had clear jurisdiction. Sabban also knew that the peninsula was unfamiliar ground for the kidnappers, so they would probably seek to leave it from the place where they had entered. And since they had few friends or allies on the peninsula, they would be likely to summon the same courier and the same vessel that had been serving them so well. Sabban ordered his men to quietly pick up Hamja. If they were going to lure Tilao out onto the water, they would need the courier’s help.