Surveillance Awareness – Terrorism Avoidance

Unfortunately, they found another part of another one of the four sailors kidnapped in the Philippines:

A decapitated head was found in Jolo, Sulu, on Monday night, more than five hours after the Abu Sayyaf claimed it beheaded one of its captives—Canadian Robert Hall.

The story began as follows:

Just before midnight last night the 11 men, wearing civilian clothes, backpacks, and brandishing guns and bandoliers, arrived at the Holiday Oceanview Resort in Samal Island.

With the island only accessible by boat, the kidnappers’ docked under cover of darkness and began breaking into tourists’ yachts in a bid to find valuable Western captives they can hold for ransom…

Authorities said the kidnappers’ first attempted to first storm the yacht of [American] tourists Steven and Kazuka Tripp.

However, when the couple fought back and leaped off the boat, the attackers turned their attentions to other foreigners staying on yachts on the island.

The militants went straight for foreigners’ boats where many of the 30 guests dived into the water in a desperate bid to avoid being taken.

Canadians John Ridsdel, 68, and Robert Hall, 50, were taken at gunpoint, alongside 56-year-old Norwegian resort manager Kjartan Sekkinstad and his Filipino girlfriend.

The first thought of any K-strategist goes to thinking about how to fend off the attackers. How would you have seen them land and gotten an early warning? Where would your guns have been? Would you have hit the water, Navy SEAL-like, and taken shots from the darkness under the docks? Would you have made your way to land and engaged from there? What guns? What rounds? Body Armor? Night Vision?

Obviously situational awareness helps in situations like this, and it is good to play what-if so if something does happen, you have a rough idea of what you are going to do and you move fast. But it will only give you one last opportunity to possibly execute an already formulated escape plan, to elude the attack at the last minute.

Such an attack can be thwarted earlier however. One article said the kidnappers apparently knew exactly where they were going, and who they wanted off what boats. They only assaulted the boats of rich westerners. They hit the Americans first, and then went for the Canadians, and then hit the Norwegian – in a marina which from photos would have had about forty to fifty boats. By now you should immediately be thinking of two things.

One, you should be realizing that they deployed some sort of surveillance prior to the attack, and two, you should be picturing the intelligence the attackers would have wanted to plan the raid – and how they would have sought it out. Picture yourself as an attacker, and imagine what you want to know. Where are my targets? Who will shoot back at me, or potentially stop me? Where are the threats? What are the objectives, and what are the obstacles? You can’t act without that.

By all means, run what-ifs, and know what you would do if the shit erupted all of a sudden. But just as often, ask yourself intelligence/surveillance based questions, because there is a whole lot of that prior to any attack, and if you are playing that game when it is going down, you open up a huge vulnerability in your attacker’s operation.

In this case, think as if you were an attacker. What intelligence they wanted about the marina, the yachters, and the defenses they would encounter. Ask yourself, what intelligence you yourself would have provided to the marina or allowed to escape to outsiders, how it was picked up, by who, and how it could have flowed from the terrorist’s asset/surveillance and on to the attackers. Perceiving that potential path of information flow, where it starts, who has access to it from there, and who needs to be involved, before the bullets start flying, should be a paramount objective whenever overseas in dangerous areas. It tells you where to look for anomalies. It tells you where to apply stress to potential assets, to see if they register the stress and show it.

Maybe it was a guard at the marina checking out the boats during the day, spending too much time focusing on flags, names, and registered ports written on the aft ends of the ships. Maybe it was a janitor who grabbed a listing of the slip assignments out of the main office at night. Maybe it was a landscaper with a leaf blower who was trained to look around and commit to memory as he landscaped the already cut grass for a little too long by the American boat, compared to everyone else. Or maybe they had one of their own float in undercover on a cheap sailboat and tie up for a week to talk to people and get intel on everyone up close. Maybe he was the guy who didn’t actually know how to tie up when he got to his slip.

But one thing you know – the terrorists did not just tell their ten shooters, up in the jungle, the name of the marina and then stick them in boats, telling them to find it themselves and bring back any Westerners that might be there. They did not go in blind.

A good way to force such surveillance to expose itself, if you will be a target, is to keep your distance from everyone. Surveillance wants to come in for a closer look, to acquire the information which it requires. If you are a mayor-type, who presses the flesh everywhere you go and strikes up conversations with everyone, you are creating the opportunities surveillance needs to make contact and subtly try to extract the intelligence it needs to fill out your file.

If you avoid contact, you create a problem for surveillance. Most people will leave you be. As a result you will have few external contacts with people you don’t know, if you avoid them purposely.

But surveillance is different. The operators have often been pulled in and told, “Make contact, and get his information firsthand.” It is usually a procedure – a checkbox for your file. In this case, I’m sure they didn’t want to hit a boat, and find Bas Ruten on board, and suddenly three kicks later all of them have broken shin bones in the blink of an eye. When you have surveillance, they will usually try to contact you, and the more you stand off, the more forced the encounter will appear. The more forced the encounter appears, the more stressful it is for the operator engaged in it, and the more you will tend to notice it.

If I pulled into this marina and tied up, I would have made it difficult to find out who I was. I would not have had anything on the boat indicating I was American. Even the name I used would have been nondescript and difficult to characterize, like Bazak Kaliaf (my friends call me Bazi). I would have tried to have the marina manager list my slip assignment under that alias, if possible, and if they didn’t need a passport, even the manager would have known me by it, so on paper in the office I appeared as likely a local. I might even fake an accent in an area where Abu Sayef operates.

I would have tried to avoid being photographed, and I would have worn a hat and sunglasses whenever I was out, so getting any good imagery of me would take work and possibly force exposure. I would have avoided talking to people, and when approached I would have answered their opener politely in a one word sentence before leaving quickly on an errand which couldn’t wait.

It would be anti-social, but if somebody wanted to know if I was American, he’d have had to ask right up front, and given how difficult it would be to pull that off naturally, I would immediately know something was up. If you are in an area where Muslim terrorists operate, and somebody who knows nothing of you walks up and says, “Excuse me, are you American?” being suspicious would be a wise play.

I would also have been on alert for anybody paying too much attention to details in the marina. Anyone who looked suspicious, and even some people who were just in a position to be running surveillance, would have “caught” me looking at them quizzically and intently, as if I had figured out what they were doing. The goal of that would be to elicit a response, which I would be looking closely for. This would be a long shot, but you never know if you’ll catch somebody looking, and see them visibly panic at being caught.

Surveillance is stressful, and as a terrorist in the Philippines, where Duarte is rolling high, it is really stressful. You have it drilled into your head to not get caught, to not burn the operation, to not end up strapped to a workbench being tortured with power tools, and to always be unnoticed. It is only natural that if you see an indicator that you just got caught, the sudden increase in stress will show. That is how you will catch them experiencing what surveillance operators term the “burn syndrome.”

An honest landscaper, who is just blowing grass clippings away, and who catches you looking at him intently, will think nothing of it and continue on his way. A terrorist pretending to be a landscaper, trying to get intel he should not be seeking, and told to not be noticed at any price or the entire operation will be a failure and Duarte will have him tortured, will act very differently when he notices you noticing him. It will be subtle, but his body language, facial expression, and behavior will all be trying to betray him by growing stiff and uncomfortable, even as he consciously tries to bring that all under control and maintain his cover as his training has taught him to.

Even the most highly trained professionals cannot fully control that response. It is a strange catch-22. The more you are invested in not getting caught, the more you will show the stress when you think you have been burned.

Finally if you see anything, report it fast, and use the word “terrorist” when you do. Then get the hell out of there, rather than rely on the competence of the average idiots you reported it to. As we have seen, the authorities, given everything on a silver platter, will still find a way to blow it all and let the terrorists strike freely. Don’t hang around.

I’d bet at some point, the terrorists sent somebody in close to take a look around before they traveled all that way, and I will bet the person they sent was poorly trained. If you had caught even a hint of it, that could have blown this entire assault and saved not only your life, but everyone else’s as well. I will also bet this assault would have been a hundred-fold easier to thwart at the surveillance phase, compared to eluding at the direct action phase.

Of course not all surveillance is the same, nor are your goals similar when confronted with it. In the Philippines, as an amateur avoiding Abu Sayef, forcing surveillance into overt exposure by being obviously surveillance-aware is a good strategy.

If I were visiting North Korea however, I would definitely not play “gotcha” with my local surveillance team, just for shits and giggles. Surveillance no-likey the surveillance-aware, and there they will let you know it. Likewise, if I were visiting Russia, I would be much less aggressive in trying to expose any surveillance placed on me, and I would place more emphasis on not letting surveillance know I was looking for them, or even concerned with such things. Being surveillance-aware, all by itself, can make people wonder, what is he hiding? Suddenly you have an entourage, and not the cool, P. Diddy kind, but rather the “Where the fuck did all this surveillance come from, and why is it fucking with me, of all people?” kind. You won’t be having any fun with that.

So under some circumstances, you want to avoid surveillance entirely, and not look for it too aggressively. But when confronting terrorism as an amateur in areas like the rural Philippines, exposing it should be your first priority.

Sadly, this doesn’t just apply to foreign areas these days. Note that in Orlando, there was a period of time prior to the shooting where you might have seen an angry looking Muslim sitting in a car with a scared-looking woman, outside a gay bar, glaring at the entrance. If you had put together the incongruity of a heterosexual couple, loitering in a car, outside a gay bar, and added in the angry Muslim angle, you might have put together what was going to happen in the future. That is a huge power.

At that point, I would have been tempted to scrutinize him in a way he would have noticed, and made an open examination of his license plate, maybe writing the number down, just to see if he would have acted quizzically, like a normal citizen, or immediately become defensive, like somebody doing something he shouldn’t. I would not have done that unarmed, or without an escape plan ready in my head, lest he come out shooting though.

These are K-selected times, but that doesn’t mean all of your instincts are dead on. In matters of conflict, being ready for the head-banging is great, but there will be considerable periods of quiet prior to the head-banging when the outcome of the conflict will be determined. You need to learn to play just as hard in that phase of the game as in every other.