(This story is in the July 4, 2005 issue of Newsbreak magazine, which will come out on Saturday)
The prime suspect in the wiretap scandal involving the administration is the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP), ironically the President's favorite military agency. Since assuming power in 2001, she has handpicked all ISAFP commanders (Victor Corpus,Tirso Danga, Marlu Quevedo, and Leonardo Calderon). She relied even on their wildest reports and allowed them and their deputies to directly report to her, bypassing the chain of command.
AFP chief of staff Efren Abu, in an April 26 interview with NEWSBREAK, admitted as much. At the time, he had decided to defang ISAFP (then under Quevedo)—giving area commanders more power over agents and making the ISAFP headquarters just a housekeeper because it had become a "political" unit.
Danga, who is now AFP deputy chief of staff for intelligence (J2), has denied that the ISAFP engages in wiretapping. But the fact is that surveillance is the heart of its work. Five former and current ISAFP officers, including an ex- ISAFP chief, told NEWSBREAK that ISAFP has the capability to monitor cell phone conversations. One of them was very specific: its latest equipment, acquired sometime in 2002, could monitor 500 cell phones at any given time.
Under investigation is ISAFP's technical unit or Military Intelligence Group (MIG) 21, led by its commander, Army Lt. Col. Pedro Sumayo, Jr., who was MIG 21 chief during the elections. Air Force T/Sgt. Vidal Doble, the alleged source of the wiretapped tapes who is now in police custody, was with MIG 21 and was getting orders directly from Sumayo.
During the elections, Sumayo worked under two superiors: Lt. Col. Allen Capuyan, who was ISAFP's operations and intelligence (OID) chief, and Danga, who was then ISAFP chief. A ranking government official privy to the probe told NEWSBREAK that Capuyan is "the No.1 suspect" in this scandal. It was Corpus who had brought Capuyan to ISAFP, though Corpus was already out of ISAFP long before the polls. (Corpus declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Also being probed are the enlisted men at MIG 21—led by Doble—who had worked for Sen. Panfilo Lacson. Doble and 11 other ISAFP enlisted men were previously detailed with the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF) under the Estrada government. PAOCTF was headed by Lacson, then a police general. When PAOCTF was dissolved after Estrada's ouster in 2001, the one dozen ISAFP technical guys were returned to their mother unit, says a former PAOCTF officer.
But he explained that Doble and his team could not have acted on their own—if the aim is to pin them down due to their links with the opposition senator. "Lacson had no direct supervision over them [during the elections]…Doble could not have done this without orders from his ISAFP superiors." Still, Lacson was one of the first to obtain a copy of the CD containing the wiretapped conversations between Elections Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano and the President, among others.
Why would the ISAFP put Garcillano, an ally of the President, under surveillance? And why would they release the taped conversations, knowing that they would be damaging their commander in chief? One theory is that the military was ordered to check if Garcillano was helping the opposition. And one reason the tapes were leaked was that key people in the ISAFP were disgruntled. They had lost their invincibility.
The ISAFP had become a powerful unit during the Marcos years. In Joseph Estrada's time, ISAFP chief Jose Calimlim was a power center. It was the same with Corpus, the first ISAFP chief under the Arroyo administration.
But under Abu, ISAFP's powers were clipped. His sour relationship with the spy agency began when he was named chief of staff in October last year. He had received reports that the agency was being run like a fiefdom by a clique of officers. He wanted another officer to head ISAFP, but Danga, who enjoyed the President's confidence, continued to hold the position even if he was abroad for medical treatment. His deputy and protégé, Quevedo, was the caretaker.
The Abu-ISAFP tiff came to a head on the eve of the December 23 burial of Fernando Poe Jr. last year. ISAFP went straight to the President and told her that a destabilization plot was in the works, presenting as evidence wiretapped conversations between dismissed Army Lt. Col. Oscarlito Mapalo and some retired generals. The AFP leadership, however, insisted that the information was groundless.
The President listened to ISAFP, anyway, instructing Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez to issue a statement, warning of a destabilization plot. Gonzalez's basis was ISAFP's wiretapped telephone conversations among anti-Arroyo people. The government got burned, and thus began ISAFP's decline.
When Danga had to extend his medical leave, the President eventually agreed to replace him. Abu recommended Army Col. Fernando Mesa, with the approval of Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz Jr. But the President overruled them and named Quevedo instead (Danga's personal choice) as the new ISAFP chief.
Partly because he didn't trust ISAFP, Abu early this year resurrected the AFP Counter Intelligence Group, which caused more insecurity among Quevedo's men. It didn't help that shortly after, a draft intelligence brief on the communist movement, "Knowing the Enemy," was leaked. It named some organizations, such as the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, as fronts of the Communist Party. The author of that draft is Capuyan. The draft, which was not approved by the AFP hierarchy, was criticized by former ISAFP chiefs to whom it was presented due to its loopholes, according to one of the former ISAFP chiefs who attended Capuyan's briefing.
(We tried to interview Capuyan, but he did not respond to our requests.)
Until he left ISAFP last March, Capuyan was the most powerful man at the agency, the "little ISAFP," as one defense official describes him. He quit to take a mandatory senior officer course at the AFP Command and General Staff College in Camp Aguinaldo.
A 1983 graduate of the Philippine Military Academy who was implicated in the December 1989 coup, Capuyan was ISAFP OID chief during the elections and is said to be personally known by the President and her husband. As OID, he oversaw all operations of ISAFP's sections, including MIG 21. Sumayo, who also joined the December 1989 coup, was his underclassman at the PMA (1984).
Indeed, many officers hope this isn't true, that this is all a concoction of the opposition. Otherwise, a monster could be lurking in the AFP.
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