Seen on radar screens, mysterious 'black flights' confound Indonesians

Seen on radar screens, mysterious 'black flights' confound Indonesians

Slobodan Lekic, Associated Press, Yogyakarta

They appear as faint specks on radar screens, lurking at the far reaches of Indonesian airspace. Yet by the time fighter jets scramble to intercept them, the phantom intruders vanish without a trace.

No one is sure what these "black flights" might be. Some speculate they are the shadowy movements of smugglers and people traffickers who have long operated in this poorly policed stretch of Southeast Asia. Others suspect they are the work of terrorists or foreign forces tracking them secretly.

For many years, nationalist politicians and military officers have talked about espionage flights or clandestine airdrops across Indonesia's 13,000 islands, which sit strategically between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Reports were common during the Cold War, when Indonesia initially flirted with -- and then violently rejected -- communism in the mid-1960s.

A more recent spate of sightings have coincided with political turmoil and an upsurge in extremism in the world's most populous Islamic nation.

Rear Marshall M.B. Sidehabi, who heads the Indonesian Air Force Academy, said many black flights were tracked in 1999, when mayhem erupted in East Timor after it broke free of Indonesian rule and triggered the deployment of international peacekeepers.

"But they were very difficult to catch or identify," said Sidehabi, a former air defense commander.

Since then, the threat of international terrorism has placed a spotlight on waters between Indonesia and the southern Philippines, where U.S. forces have assisted Filipino troops in hunting Islamic militants linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

Indonesia is also home to Jamaah Islamiyah -- an al-Qaeda- related group that's blamed for bombings that killed nearly 200 people on Bali island on Oct. 12.

Bolstering Jakarta's assertions that its airspace is frequently violated, the wreckage of two reconnaissance drones was fished out of the sea last year near Sangihe -- a tiny Indonesian island near Mindanao, site of the main Muslim insurgency in the Philippines.

One of the robot planes was identified as an Australian-made Aerosonde model, but carried no national insignia. Only tiny fragments of the other were recovered.

Security analysts downplay the possibility that black flights are being conducted by terrorist groups themselves.

"Clandestine flights around Indonesia probably have more to do with illegal movements of immigrants (and) smuggling ... than with terrorism," said Bob Broadfoot of the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy.

"They have been going on long before anybody ever heard of al- Qaeda," he said.

Nighttime sightings of unidentified aircraft also have been reported at remote airstrips in Aceh and Papua, provinces at opposite ends of Indonesia where rebels have been fighting for independence.

Tales of such covert flights have circulated since the birth of the republic in 1949. At the time, President Sukarno accused Dutch colonialists of flying subversive missions on behalf of separatists in the Maluku archipelago.

The overflights became a national obsession in 1958, when the anti-communist administration of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower mounted a covert effort to overthrow the left-leaning Sukarno by inciting a mutiny on Sulawesi and Sumatra islands.

Mercenaries from the United States, Taiwan and the Philippines flew logistic supply missions and combat sorties against government forces during the six-month conflict. They used a fleet of unmarked cargo planes and B-26 bombers supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The secret war ended abruptly when Allen Pope, a pilot under contract to the CIA, was downed in a dogfight with an Indonesian P-51 Mustang fighter.

Pope was carrying a trove of documents that revealed the extent of U.S. involvement. Rather than risk a major international incident, Washington pulled the plug on the rebellion, in which 30,000 people had died.

"The rather shrill Indonesian accusations at the time proved to be accurate in almost 100 percent of the cases," said Ken Conboy, author of "Feet to the Fire," a history of CIA operations in Indonesia. "It suddenly turned out that all the talk about black flights was absolutely true."

The aerial drama quickly became the theme for literature and legend -- and not just in Indonesia.

Western comic strips with aircraft and pilots as their protagonists -- such as Terry and the Pirates -- featured tales of mysterious missions over Southeast Asia.

Adventure heroes such as the square-jawed Steve Canyon, naval aviator Buck Danny, and Belgian reporter Tintin all foiled sinister plots in tropical island nations suspiciously like Indonesia.

In the 1970s, after a right-wing coup, long-range reconnaissance missions by Soviet Tu-16 Badger bombers were reported along Indonesia's northern maritime periphery.

And in the late 1990s, when Australian peacekeepers were dispatched to East Timor, unmarked patrol aircraft were said to be snooping along the southern fringes of Indonesian airspace.

"We assumed they were Australian, but they may have been planes from U.S. or even French carriers," an air force officer said.

The Canberra government denied at the time it was engaged in any spying. French and U.S. officials said this week they had no knowledge of the sightings.

Indonesian fighters have nabbed mysterious intruders only once since 1958 - only to find it was a case of mistaken identity.

Embarrassingly, in April 2000, they intercepted Australian air force Hornet jets en route to Bali. The flight had been scheduled and cleared by Jakarta air traffic control, which neglected to inform the air defense command.