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Terror Central
Haledon Street, Lakemba, 30 minutes south-west of Sydney’s central business district, looks like many other streets in outer-suburban Australia - charcoal chicken and kebab stores competing against each other, grocery shops, a travel centre, a discount furniture store, a bakery, some desultory looking shops remarkable only because they bear signs in the undulating script of Arabic. But talk to almost anyone in Australia’s spy community, and something else quickly emerges - it’s widely regarded as a stamping ground for some of the most dangerous people in the country. There are more ASIO officers, ASIO paid informants and undercover agents along this street than any other in Australia. These intelligence operatives regularly visit and monitor the strip to identify any new figures on the scene and to make an ongoing assessment about who are the movers and shakers in the area.
However another former senior ASIO officer, Neil Fergus, disputes Roach’s security-risk figure of 60. Fergus, now running a company in Sydney called Intelligent Risks and preparing a terrorist risk-assessment report for the federal government, says the real number is probably less than half that. He also presents a picture of an Islamic community in Australia that is overwhelmingly peaceful and in danger of being stereotyped so unfairly that it could push some young hotheads into the arms of terrorists. Fergus, who as director of intelligence for the 2000 Sydney Olympic and Paralympics Games was intimately involved in investigating threats from some sections of the Islamic community, says that of the 300,000 Muslims in Australia, 298,000 would be repulsed by al Qaeda and its terrorism like any other Australian. Another 1900 would have some sympathy for the political views of Osama bin Laden because of issues like Israel’s actions in Palestine. Only about 100 could be classified as “travellers” who identify closely with bin Laden’s aims and, according to Fergus, perhaps 30 of them are a clear risk and capable of getting involved in terrorism. Those 30 would have some training or access or connection to people who have training in explosives and handling arms. If ASIO is wrong and the Lakemba strip is perfectly innocent, our national security organisation has made a colossal blunder. If they’re right, and this is Anxiety Central, then any act of terrorism in this country may well have its origins around here. There’s one particular hall along the street, above some shops, where a favourite Friday night activity involves young Muslim men sitting around watching videos. Sounds innocent enough - except these are videos of Muslim Chechen rebels, killing Russian soldiers. The videos have all the graphic detail and gore. And the bloody death of a Russian is often accompanied by a round of applause. It’s an open secret around here that the place is wired for sound. ASIO uses as many devices as are available; they can even listen in to a house from a helicopter hovering a kilometre away. A couple of years ago they used these bugs to make a chilling tape- recording of young men from the Islamic Youth Movement talking about how they were going to “get” a particular individual whom they still believed had worked for ASIO (he has since left the organisation). The ASIO officers played the man the tape in which the young men discussed killing or harming him. The man was warned by ASIO that his car may be firebombed. Whether or not they live in Lakemba, many of those regarded by the security agencies as serious security risks gather along Haledon Street to seek support from like-minded Islamic fundamentalists, many of whom are followers of the hardline Wahabi strand of Islam. The spiritual home of the Wahabis is Saudi Arabia, and it is from this stream of fundamentalists that Osama Bin Laden and many of his supporters come. However, a former Australian police agent trained by the FBI in investigative analysis - commonly known as “profiling” - says that if a suicide bomber is to emerge from the Australian community it is unlikely to be one of those already identified as a suspect, or one of those imams who have made loud declarations of support for Osama bin Laden. The former policeman, who is one of only a handful of Australians trained in criminal profiling and who does not wish to be named, says no one should have been surprised that the young men who carried out the recent terrorist bombings on the London tube were previously considered law abiding. “Terrorism and suicide bombing are subversive acts,” he says. “People who do it aren’t likely to make themselves suspects.” However, law enforcement agencies had to rely on surveillance and tip-offs (human intelligence or “humint”, as the spies call it) because the task of identifying a likely suicide bomber through other policing techniques, such as profiling, was immensely difficult. Such people are quite unlike other violent criminals, according to the profiler: they are motivated by ideology and their intention is to disrupt and create fear across whole societies. Thus they have no specific intended victim, and once they have reached their target they don’t care about minimising the risk of being tracked down afterwards because they assume they will be dead. Normal profiling, which involves identifying the fantasies of a criminal from a modus operandi and identifying the type of person a criminal is likely to be from “clusters” of behaviour, does not apply. The profiler draws an analogy between the sort of people likely to be attracted to a terrorist cell and those who join bikie gangs: losers looking for redemption. “The message to those who join these sorts of organisations is ‘everyone else might let you down, but we will not let you down, ever’,” he says. “It is a powerful thing, and with a terrorist cell, you have both ideology and religion - religious motivation is about faith, not hard evidence, and is all the more powerful for it.” This, of course, hardly helps to narrow the search for a would-be suicide bomber: it simply means that such a person is likely to be a young man with low self-esteem and a (possibly secret) religious bent. The “human intelligence” able to be gleaned from the Islamic community around places like Lakemba is high but potentially very inaccurate because the community is riven with divisions. A prominent Islamic leader visited by The Bulletin openly admitted that he informs on other members of the community to ASIO. This leader declared that if there were an act of terrorism in Sydney, it would be one of seven people - he then named the seven. It was astounding he would so openly make such a dangerous statement to a reporter he had never previously met. One of The Bulletin’s most intriguing moments researching Lakemba came three years ago when we went in search of one of the leaders of the Islamic Youth Movement. After much persuasion he agreed to meet, and nominated a particular hall along Haledon Street. When The Bulletin arrived there was nobody around and the door was shut. Finally, a man walked past and asked what the reporter wanted. We told him who we were seeking, and he asked who wanted to talk to him. We went upstairs into a sparse hall. It wasn’t until we had sat down that he admitted that he was the person The Bulletin was after. We sat in the hall drinking coffee and talking about the intricacies of the Islamic Youth Movement. When we finally asked him to agree to an interview recorded on camera, he said he would not. “It’s not ASIO I’m worried about. My real fear is that if I speak, any of the five or six intelligence services who work around here may harm me.” Five or six? “Yes, they’re all over this place - the Egyptian secret service, the Syrians, Israelis, Jordanians, Lebanese and Americans. They’ve all got agents in different communities here. The Egyptians are the most determined - once a nation has lost a leader to assassination [Anwar Sad at in 1981] their intelligence service becomes much more ruthless.” But what was his evidence for foreign intelligence services operating around Lakemba? “Whenever I or other people travel to these countries, they know all about us. I went to Syria last year, arrived at Damascus airport. They keyed my name into the system then a customs officer asked: ‘So you don’t attend Sheik Hilaly’s mosque in Whangee Road but you pray with the Islamic Youth Movement. What have you got against Hilaly [the Islamic leader recently involved in the Douglas Wood hostage drama]?’ Many others have had similar experiences - somebody is informing on us.” How much of these kinds of claims is bravado or paranoia and how much is solid information? Who is reliable and who’s not? This is clearly the most complicated, mysterious and - possibly - dangerous street in Australia. The questions about the secrets of Haledon Street and some of the fanatical people who frequent it or places like it or linked to it in other cities have so spooked Australia’s political leaders that next month Prime Minister John Howard, state premiers and territory chief ministers will meet to discuss changing Australian laws to the point of extinguishing what have long been considered civil rights. On the table will be a national identification card, detain-and-search laws for train and bus stations, and a new anti-terrorism legal framework that could include criminal charges against those who indirectly incite terrorist acts - a sort of “thought and speech” crime. Howard used the fear of terrorism to turn the argument over civil liberties on its head. The most important civil liberty, he told journalists last week, “is to stay alive and to be free from violence and death, and I think when people talk about civil liberties, they sometimes forget that action taken to protect the citizen against physical violence and physical attack is a blow in favour, and not a blow against, civil liberties”. It was a similar argument to that used by British Prime Minister Tony Blair as he began tightening his country’s legal system. Meanwhile, Howard declared his government would ban an extreme Islamic group called Hizb ut-Tahrir if ASIO found it was a terrorist threat. The group, already outlawed in Britain, has described suicide bombers as martyrs and has said Muslims had a duty to resist the occupation of Iraq. Hanging over preparations for next month’s summit will be the recent bombings on the London tube and a bus and the resulting shock that the acts had been perpetrated not by foreign terrorists, but by young men born in Britain. Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, who’ll be charged with drafting any new national laws, declared last week that Australians should feel nervous about a possible terrorist attack. Paul White, an academic from the University of Western Sydney, begs to differ. White, co-ordinator of Muslims for Peace (formed after the invasion of Iraq), is the co-author of a coming book on Lebanese youth in Sydney, which is based on extensive interviews with 80 young Muslims. He believes the chances of a London-style terrorist attack in Australia are negligible. “Muslims here do not face the same level of provocation as they do in a country like England,” he says, although he is concerned that some media outlets are doing their best to ratchet up the level of Islam phobia to western European levels. There is, he says, “absolutely no evidence that there are terrorists primed and ready to go” as Roach claimed. “There is a microscopic tiny minority who have the feeling that there is no hope, they are not part of Australian society and feel marginalised.” How, then, have Haledon Street and places like it become such a big draw for secret service agents? Any understanding requires a journey back to the early 1990s. Few westerners knew much about extremist Islam in February 1993 when a group of Muslim terrorists bombed New York’s World Trade Centre, killing six people and injuring hundreds. The investigation and trials of those involved in the bombing took five years and revealed the terrorists had a web of contacts that criss-crossed the world. Central to the investigation were the phone records of the nine men convicted of the bombing and many of their associates. FBI agents noted that three convicted terrorists (and a number of their colleagues who could not be convicted) were consistently in telephone contact with Australia in the months before and after the bombing. The FBI supplied ASIO and the AFP with the phone numbers and addresses of a number of people in Australia who were in contact with some of the most dangerous people in the world. ASIO began an urgent program of surveillance, which over the years has led ASIO agents from home to home in cities from Sydney, to Melbourne, to Perth. Phones were bugged, computers seized and their contents examined, houses raided, documents bundled up. Evidence was found of a terrorist training camp near Canberra and suspects were trailed as they inspected possible targets in Melbourne and around Sydney Harbour. Names were cross-checked with international intelligence agencies and with passport control, and 20 people had their passports revoked. Of particular interest were the travel records of some of those under surveillance. Many thousands of Australian Muslims had travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Ruddock said last week it was “safe to assume there are a number of people in Australia who have trained with terrorist organisations”. Senior law enforcement officials claim the surveillance operation has played a big part in preventing a terrorist attack on Australian soil. “The main targets can’t move without us knowing, and they know it,” one source said. The problem, identified by the FBI-trained profiler who spoke to The Bulletin, is that the main targets are unlikely to be the real problem. If there is a suicide bomber - or a cell of them - waiting to be activated (or provoked), it is unlikely anyone suspects who they are - until it’s too late. |
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A
terrorist attack in Australia seems inevitable. How our security forces are
tracking the bombers. John Lyons and Tony Wright report.