Rendi A. Witular – Aside from a string of failures to detect terrorism threats and sectarian conflicts, recent cases of intelligence breakdown may provide a revealing glimpse at the quality of the country's intelligence.
On Jan. 28, 2010, the National Police intelligence division overestimated the scale of a street rally protest marking President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's first 100 days of his second term.
The police's estimation of 20,000 protesters, a number confirmed by the State Intelligence Agency (BIN), prompted the police and the Indonesian military to deploy more than 5,000 personnel and a dozen tanks and armed vehicles to ensure the rally did not turn violent. On the day of the rally, less than 1,000 protesters showed up.
"They [intelligence] can no longer estimate the number of protesters accurately," said a legislator with the House of Representatives' Commission I for defense, intelligence and information. "This is actually an easy task for intelligence. How can we expect them to do a harder task if they failed at this one," he said.
Another humiliating incident revolved around an assassination threat against the President by terrorist groups in May 2010.
In a press conference, National Police intelligence chief Ins. Gen. Saleh Saaf exposed several recent photos of terrorists aiming firearms at a photo of the President at a militant training camp in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam. The photos turned out to have been taken two years earlier, not in Aceh but at a terrorist training camp in Poso, Central Sulawesi.
Another controversial story of an intelligence operation centered on a report from the US-based Center for Public Integrity, which disclosed in 2005 that BIN had used a foundation belonging to former president Abdurrahman Wahid to hire Washington lobbying firm Richard L. Collins & Co. to persuade the US Congress to lift its military embargo.
According to the contract documents, the foundation paid the company US$30,000 monthly from May to July 2005. BIN picked up the contract directly in September 2005 and continued it until November 2005, when the US lifted restrictions on defense exports to Indonesia. The revelation sparked protests from Indonesian human rights groups.
Previous to the incident, public attention had already been drawn to BIN when then BIN chief Syamsir Siregar reported several of his agents at the agency's anti-counterfeiting division for printing billions of rupiah worth of counterfeited banknotes in Malang, East Java.
The head of the division, Brig. Gen. Zyaeri, and several of his officials were sentenced to between one and four years in prison in 2006. Speculation was rife at the time that the case had been ignited by business disputes between a company with the backing of Syamsir and those under the protection of Zyaeri. Both have denied the speculations.