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.