Double Agent behind Silent Operation toCapture Xananas Gusmao

Jakarta - Behind the silent operation to capture Xanana Gusmao, a double agent named Mariano played a crucial role in uncovering the hiding location of the former Falintil guerrilla leader in Dili on 20 November 1992. Long before the arrest, a development exhibition was underway in Baucau. Security was provided by the 315th Battalion. During the event, an armed resistance group attacked, killing one soldier. For the commander of Nanggala X/East Timor Intelligence Taskforce at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Mahidin Simbolon, the attack could not be dismissed as a routine security incident. Mahidin subsequently assigned a junior officer, First Lieutenant Doni Monardo (former head of Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency), to investigate the network behind the attack. The inquiry led them to a student from the University of East Timor, part of the clandestine network – an underground organisation that served as a logistics, information, and communication hub for Timor’s independence movement. During interrogation, the student did not immediately talk. He only mentioned, ‘Perhaps A knows’. From one name, another emerged. From one node, another followed. ‘We didn’t dismantle the clandestine network; we expanded it,’ said Major General (Retired) Mahidin Simbolon in an interview with Kompas Brigade Podcast, cited on Thursday (28 May 2026). Mahidin explained that the clandestine network was trained to resist capture. Thus, he said, arrests were carried out differently. Targets were pursued in the early hours, around three or four in the morning. According to Mahidin, people awoken suddenly from sleep panic more easily and lose composure compared to being arrested in public. Small operations were conducted quietly, house to house, from one informant to another, all interconnected. ‘Convince him he definitely knows,’ Mahidin said regarding the interrogation method used at the time. From this process, another name emerged: Paul Alvez.