The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  Hamja had painted his boat with an image of a crouching Spider-Man and called it the Kingfisher, emblazoning the name on the side in the sweeping script of graffiti artists everywhere. For months he had been piloting the Kingfisher without knowing that he was being watched, or that both the boat and the supplies it carried had come from the Philippine marines and the CIA. But he would soon learn.

  Hamja was snatched by Aragones and his men off a street in Zamboanga City, and immediately and wisely agreed to cooperate—the marines had a deservedly fierce reputation. Now it was just a matter of waiting for Tilao to summon the boat. The call came sooner than Colonel Sabban had anticipated, on the afternoon of June 20. The guerrilla leader wanted to be picked up between three and four in the morning, at a spot that was a four- to five-hour boat ride north. That meant the marines had to be ready to leave before midnight. Colonel Sabban was on a flight to Manila, so Aragones had to wait for more than an hour until he landed. The captain knew that the other branches of the military would be angry if the marines did this themselves, so he was reluctant to go ahead without the colonel’s direct authorization. When Sabban called right after landing, he told Aragones he would fly back to Zamboanga immediately.

  “But you go ahead,” the colonel instructed him. “And just keep on calling me if you need any advice.”

  Aragones was daunted by the responsibility, but he had so much to do that he didn’t have time to dwell on it. He had to coordinate the mission on the water with the Americans, so they could get their surveillance plane and backup boats ready. The Kingfisher was still tied up under the safe house in the fishing village, and sending Hamja back to retrieve it was out of the question. The marines didn’t trust him enough to let him go to the house, and sending anyone else to retrieve the boat might sound an alarm. So Aragones and his men waited until dark, then slipped into the water, swam in under the house, cut the ropes tethering the boat to the stilts, and gently and silently eased it out and away. When they were far enough from the shore they climbed aboard, started the engines, and steered it to the navy pier, where the SEALs affixed infrared beacons called “fireflies” to the bow and stern.

  Hamja would be piloting his boat, but to keep an eye on him, Aragones recruited a trusted Basilan man, Gardo, who had worked as an agent for him in the past. Hamja phoned Tilao to tell him that all was ready, and that his “cousin” would be coming along because he was more accustomed to navigating between the peninsula and the island. Aragones told Hamja that this was to be just a reconnaissance mission, that he and Gardo were going to be watched from above as they ferried the guerrillas back to the island. But Gardo knew that once they had steered the Kingfisher about a mile offshore, the marines would confront them. The approach would be made far enough from land that none of the guerrillas could swim back. Gardo was instructed that if gunfire erupted, he was to dive off the Kingfisher and break a Chemlight he was wearing as a necklace so that he could be easily seen in the water. Hamja, who had earned neither the trust nor the affection of the marines, was not so fortunate. He was not told that his boat would be attacked; and once it was, he would be on his own in the water.

  The Kingfisher was outfitted with several large plastic jugs of what appeared to be gasoline. They were about four-fifths full of water, and the rest was gasoline—the fuel is lighter than water and doesn’t mix, so anyone uncapping a jug would smell pure gasoline. The ruse ensured that if somehow Tilao was able to evade the ambush, he would quickly run out of fuel.

  Late on the evening of June 20, just thirteen days after the botched rescue, four boats slipped away from berths at the navy pier in Zamboanga City and steered north along the coast. Two were U.S. Navy vessels, each carrying a SEAL team. Another was the same flat, open, gray wooden speedboat used by Abu Sayyaf in the kidnapping at Dos Palmas, now carrying Captain Aragones and fifteen men armed with assault rifles, and bearing two M-60 guns mounted at the bow. Moving well in front of these three was the long, sleek boat that Hamja, its young owner, had for months been using to supply Tilao.

  On the monitor inside the CIA’s container back at the base in Zamboanga City, the four vessels showed as gray shadows on a field of black, tracked from above by two CIA pilots in a high-flying RG-8 Schweitzer aircraft. The agents on the ground monitored the vessels’ slow progress for hours.

  Sabban was still at the Manila airport when the boats set off. High overhead, the CIA plane executed wide, silent sweeps, moving over the jungle and then back out over the water, keeping its cameras trained on the boats. In the speedboat, Aragones slept. His long hair and wispy beard made him the scruffiest military officer in the Philippines. He could not imagine Tilao slipping out of this trap, and didn’t expect him to go down without a fight. The guerrilla had often boasted of his eagerness to be martyred for his cause. With luck, he would get his wish.

  The CIA officers watching the monitors in their office in the container could see everything. The deserted beach registered bright white against the dark gray of the sea, and just in from the water’s edge were the splayed gray silhouettes of palm trees as seen from high above. As the other boats waited just over the horizon, the Kingfisher touched sand. The two men appeared on the CIA monitor as black shadows. Hamja stepped out on the beach, slowly approached the tree line, and then stood and waited.

  The aircraft cameras slowly panned up and down the beach, and back into the jungle. After long minutes of waiting, one black figure emerged from the foliage. He and Hamja stood together. They looked as if they were talking; the second man could be seen gesturing with his hands. Then, from a point farther up the beach, a group of figures emerged—it was hard to tell how many. They were moving close together, and on the screen they blended into a black blob. A bird flew above them. As they moved down the beach, they spread out into separate shadows, so distinct that the CIA monitor in Zamboanga City showed their legs moving as they walked toward the boat.

  While Hamja was on the beach with the others, Gardo had activated the fireflies as instructed, by pushing a button on the bottom of each. The signals, silent and invisible to the naked eye, appeared as bright, blinking beacons to the aircraft’s infrared camera. Once the Kingfisher had moved offshore, the beacons would allow the pursuers to spot it with night-vision binoculars.

  The boat shoved off. When it had steered somewhat more than half a mile offshore, it turned south. The marines followed the vessel’s progress for a time, waiting for it to come farther out to sea, but it seemed to have set its course, and was staying at about its original distance from shore. This was a problem. What if the guerrillas decided to make a run for it? The Kingfisher was fast and maneuverable, and Tilao might be able to get close enough to the shore for him and his men to swim to land. So the marines changed plans: they would ram it. Their boat was much larger than the Kingfisher, so ramming would most likely break and sink the smaller craft. The men aboard would be dumped into the water.

  On the CIA’s screen, the white speck of the Kingfisher could be seen plowing steadily on, leaving its long black wake. When the Schweitzer passed directly overhead, the officers could see the forms of nine men on board, most of them toward the stern.

  Then the marine speedboat, moving much faster, jumped onto the screen from the bottom, cut rapidly across the smaller vessel’s wake, and then turned hard right, aiming straight for the Kingfisher’s port side.

  Aboard the speedboat, Aragones and his men leaned forward expectantly. Their three motors were quieter than the Kingfisher’s, so Aragones’s strike force would be seen before being heard.

  “Five hundred yards,” announced one of the men in the bow, peering ahead through his night-vision goggles.

  “Two hundred yards.”

  “Get ready!” Aragones shouted, and the men braced themselves and raised their weapons; someone switched on the speedboat’s searchlights.

  Seconds before the collision, puffs of white appeared on the CIA screen, just off the Kingfisher’s starboard side. Tilao and the other men aboar
d, including Hamja and Gardo, had seen what was coming and hurled themselves overboard; the puffs were heat from the guns of two guerrilla fighters who opened fire on the speedboat as soon as they hit the water. Onscreen, the speedboat came to a sudden stop, halted by the force of the collision. It then appeared to plow straight through the smaller boat; actually, it was pushing under it and tearing it in two.

  Just before impact, the faces of the men in the waves were clearly visible in the speedboat’s searchlights, and their weapons flashed when they fired. As the speedboat swung around after the collision, the marines unleashed a torrent of fire from their starboard side. Aragones felt the burn of the guns beside him and inhaled the smell of gunpowder. He knew the shooting from the men bobbing in the waves would be inaccurate—they were treading water as they fired—so he chose his own shots with care. Mixed with the smoke came the distinct coppery smell of blood.

  Then the firing stopped. For a few moments there were just the sounds of men shouting and the lapping of the water. The marines unleashed another furious cascade from the starboard side. Then Aragones heard again the pop-pop-pop of an automatic weapon from the waves. One of the guerrillas was shooting up at the vessel from the port side. Aragones raced to join his men on that side and, as the other men cut loose with their weapons, he squeezed off the last ten rounds in his magazine. The body of the man in the water was cut in half, and vanished under the waves.

  Cries came from terrified men in the water. Gardo had activated his Chemlight. Hamja had swum under the marine speedboat and was clinging to it. Hauled aboard with the others—four of Tilao’s men survived—Hamja told Aragones that he had ducked underwater and swum to the port side after the shooting started. Tilao, he said, had done the same. Hamja had grabbed onto the boat, but Tilao had swum out farther, shouted, and opened fire. The man whose body was cut in half had been Tilao.

  Captain Aragones phoned Clizbee and announced, “We just killed the motherfucker.”

  8. The Aftermath

  Tilao’s body was never found; this fed rumors that he had somehow escaped yet again. But interrogation of the four captured Abu Sayyaf men—one of whom died during questioning—confirmed Hamja’s story. Tilao was the final victim of his bloody kidnapping spree.

  He had failed to ignite jihad. In the four and a half years since his death, Abu Sayyaf has faltered. Although it survives as a stubborn regional insurrection, it has mounted no spectacular attacks or kidnappings. This past December, police discovered what was believed to be the body of Khadaffy Janjalani. Abu Sayyaf continues to battle marines and to set off bombs on contested islands like Jolo, but shows no sign of resurrecting itself into the charismatic movement it became in the time of “Abu Sabaya.” His removal by Philippine forces did not inspire the larger Islamist struggle he had hoped for; the invisibility of the United States’ role reduced the effort to a local police action. In a world where any visible U.S. military intervention prompts a dangerous backlash, Aldam Tilao slipped quietly and permanently under the waves.

  “His death significantly downgraded the leadership and strength of the group,” said Sabban in an interview last year. “He was spokesperson and operations officer. Janjalani is just a figurehead. It was Sabaya who made all the real decisions. Even after the kidnappings in 2001, the others all drifted away. It was Sabaya who kept the most valuable hostages. That right there shows you who the most important figure was.”

  Alvin Siglos has yet to receive any reward from the U.S. government. Why? The reasons are unclear.

  Sabban is now a brigadier general, based in two small rooms off a corrugated shed at the Philippine marine base on Jolo. Captain Aragones is now a major, and clean-shaven, but since he still does undercover work, he wears his hair longer than most marines. Arlyn dela Cruz was kidnapped herself not long after her successful interview with Tilao and the Burnhams, and underwent her own ordeal in the jungle before being released through the intercession of her “friend” Khadaffy Janjalani. She writes a column for the Philippines Daily Inquirer, and reports for Net-25 TV, a UHF TV network in the Philippines.

  Gracia Burnham visited President Bush at the White House a month after her return to the United States. Her leg had healed, and she moved confidently in a long, flowery skirt and a lacy white blouse. She spoke about her husband’s unfailing kindness toward their kidnappers, even as they handcuffed him to a tree every night. And she added: “Even though Martin was kind to them, we never forgot who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. The men who abducted us and held us—who murdered some and mistreated others, who kept us running and starving in the jungle—are criminals, and they deserve to be punished.”

  Alvin Siglos collected the $100,000 in Philippine reward money and reportedly blew it quickly, gambling on cockfights and throwing big parties. Sabban and Aragones urged him to keep a low profile, pointing out that the terrorist group might target him for revenge, but he seemed unafraid. He has never collected a penny of the $5 million American reward. When speaking of his role in the mission during an interview last year, he broke down crying several times as he recalled his stark betrayal of his child hood friend, and he even defended Tilao. He said the jihadist had been planning to release the Burnhams unharmed. The marines had never told him, Siglos complained, that they intended to kill his friend. “Still, he killed my uncle,” he said through his tears. “He was the blood of my mother.”

  He still thinks he is owed the American reward, and it would seem he is right.

  PROFILES

  Just Joe

  Published as “The Salesman,” Atlantic, October 2010

  “Shermanesquely, No”

  In January 1973, not long after he was sworn in to the Senate seat he would hold for more than three decades, Joe Biden attended a dinner party in the upscale Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia. The event, thrown by Biden’s fellow freshman, Senator Bennett Johnson Jr. of Louisiana, offered the newcomers a chance to mingle with some of the Senate’s old guard.

  Political analyst Charlie Cook, then a freshman at Georgetown University working as a congressional intern, remembers well both the evening and the presence of Biden, then a thirty-year-old unknown from Delaware. “A bunch of us kids had been wangled into wearing white jackets and serving drinks and helping out in the kitchen,” he said. “All of us were floored by how young Biden was! He was more one of us than one of the senators. And, sure enough, when the grown-ups retreated to the dining room, Biden drifted back to the kitchen to hang out with us twentysomethings…. It was hard for us to believe that someone our age, give or take a few years, was already a United States senator.”

  Elected when he was just twenty-nine, Biden was the youngest member of the upper chamber in modern times, and the sixth-youngest in American history. Inexperienced and unheralded, he’d nonetheless ousted a veteran incumbent, J. Caleb Boggs, who had enjoyed the full backing of President Richard Nixon and the national Republican Party. Biden arrived in Washington with the luster of unlimited promise. Back home they called him the “Delaware Kennedy,” a parallel he would consciously exploit. He was a man for whom the White House seemed not merely a possibility but a likelihood. In a notoriously revealing 1974 profile Kitty Kelley wrote for the Washingtonian, Biden talked about becoming “a good senator” and “a good president.” Biden’s sister Valerie, who had managed his surprise victory, told Kelley, “Joey is going to be president someday. He was made to be in the White House…. Just you wait and see.”

  Fast-forward to 2007, and the presidential campaign fields of Iowa. Biden’s once slender facial features had thickened somewhat, giving him the look of an elder statesman from central casting. What little remained of his modishly long hair had long since gone white; at the front of his otherwise bald dome, a patient hair plug regimen had replanted a thin copse of strands, which he combed back, so that when the lighting and angle were just right it afforded the semblance of a silver mane. And not only did he look the part. He was one of the most recognized and influential m
embers of Congress. Scarred by intense personal tragedy, a close brush with his own mortality, and his share of embarrassing missteps, Biden at age sixty-four was a survivor, in life and in politics. Though the luster of the wunderkind was long gone, the talents he had displayed at the outset of his career had matured. Yet here he was, six months away from the first contest of the 2008 presidential campaign, badly trailing a pack of less seasoned Democratic hopefuls, mired in the low single digits in every poll, and struggling to raise enough money just to keep going.

  It was a mystery. Back home in Delaware, Biden had a bond with voters that transcended issues and party politics, a stature that bordered on reverence. “I remember being in a cheesesteak shop in Claymont, just outside Wilmington, just eating dinner by myself one night years ago, when Joe came in to order something,” said Cris Barrish, now a senior reporter for the Wilmington News Journal. “It was like royalty or Jesus Christ himself had walked in. He didn’t know a reporter was watching, so none of this was for my benefit, but he charmed everybody in that place for a full five minutes. He knew the names of all the women behind the counter. Everyone seemed to want a piece of him, to touch him. That was the first time I fully appreciated the appeal he enjoys in this state.”

  But that unfailing local electricity, which had propelled him back to the Senate with ease in five consecutive elections, stubbornly refused to travel. His first run for the presidency, in 1987, had sputtered out of the gate, when Biden was discovered passing off as his own passages from a speech by a British Labour politician. Now, twenty years later, he was on his way to another early fizzle. In those months before the Iowa caucuses—where Biden would ultimately finish with less than 1 percent of the vote—it was fair to wonder why he even bothered. Might he be seeking something else? Might he be angling to become secretary of state in the next Democratic administration, or even vice president?