Inside The Bali Plot

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The city-state of Singapore is an impeccably well-ordered place. Bubble gum, for instance, has been banned for 10 years because it is too messy. One year ago, Islamic terrorists hatched a plot to wreck the island's placidity. They planned to bomb the U.S., Australian and Israeli embassies, Singapore government buildings, and locales where sailors from the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet congregated. Singapore is well policed, however, and the plot was discovered; 13 people were arrested. But although the bombers were foiled, law-enforcement agencies around the world, still digesting the attacks of Sept. 11, recognized that a new front in the terrorists' war had just opened in Southeast Asia.

The most brutal act of the war in Southeast Asia happened on Oct. 12, when two coordinated bombs killed, at the last count, 191 people--mainly vacationers out for a night's dancing--in two of the bars in the village of Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali. Since the bombings, Indonesian police have arrested 20 people said to have taken part in the plot. One of them is a man called Amrozi, who has confessed to transporting explosives to the site and was arrested a month after the bombings in his home village hundreds of miles from Bali on the island of Java. Another is Imam Samudra, allegedly one of the key planners of the attack, who was picked up on Nov. 21 after Indonesian police tracked his cell phone. TIME has discovered, however, that investigators believe the incident's real godfathers--those described by one Western intelligence source in the region as the "top tier of the operation, not the foot soldiers or even the sergeants and captains like Samudra"--remain at large. Law-enforcement officials think that these men will prove to be the link, long suspected, between Southeast Asian terrorist groups and the international network of Meanwhile, both the nature of the terrorists' targets and the methods they use to garner recruits have become clear.

A NEW KIND OF TARGET

Six weeks after the Singapore plot was foiled, according to an FBI report, a meeting of terrorists took place in a village in southern Thailand. The gathering was held at the behest of Riduan Isamuddin, a leader of an organization based in Indonesia called Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) that has long been suspected of acting as a cover for terrorist acts. Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, fought in Afghanistan with the anti-Soviet mujahedin in the 1980s and is wanted by authorities in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. He was last seen in January 2001, when Indonesian authorities sought his arrest for involvement in a series of bombings the previous month that left 19 dead and scores wounded.