From the Eyes of a Tiger: The OSINT as a catalyst for terrorists – Part II

During the summer of 1992, after completing the mandatory three battles with the Imran-Pandiyan Regiment, I was hand-picked by Thinesh Master to join the LTTE’s military intelligence unit. Thinesh was the military advisor to the LTTE leader Prabhakaran and oversaw the LTTE’s military office. He ordered that I be sent to the Military Intelligence Unit of the LTTE to study and that I would specialize as an operative in the intelligence collection department of the Sri Lankan Navy and Air Force. I was to learn everything about the Sri Lankan Navy and Air Force, including the locations of all Sri Lankan naval and air force bases, structure, firepower, history, the names and duties of all its officers, and exact details on all ships and aircraft at its disposal. Thinesh explained that I would be part of the organization’s newly established Military Intelligence Unit. I would mainly focus on gathering Open-Source Intelligence or “OSINT,” an information processing discipline that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence. My duties would eventually expand from gathering OSINT to acting as a prominent operative and trainer in aerial and naval intelligence gathering for the LTTE.

Thinesh explained to me that from then on, I would answer Sasikumar Master as my immediate superior and that he would brief me on my impending duties. This gave me my first clue as to the weight of the position I was being offered, as Sasikumar was one of the higher-ups in the organization; the fact that I would be answering directly to him meant I could look forward to doing something important.

Upon my arrival at the Gadhafi military intelligence base, located around Maanippai, a suburb of Jaffna, Sasikumar told me that one of my jobs would be to translate English language OSINT documents into Tamil and to read the Colombo-based English newspapers and translate them into the Tamil language; this was exciting to me since it meant that I would get to improve my English and open up doors that I thought had shut the day the LTTE forcibly recruited me. Seeing that my new position gave me some leeway to expand my knowledge, I was pleased to have landed a job where I could further my knowledge and skills.

Sasikumar explained how I would gather intelligence and said I would be in contact with the “Sea Tigers” reconnaissance team, the LTTE’s rudimentary naval wing, informing me that one of my primary duties would be to coordinate with them for real-time intelligence. The Sea Tigers’ reconnaissance team would spy on the Sri Lankan Navy from their boats and gather maritime intelligence by infiltrating the Sri Lankan naval bases. My role was to provide the Sea Tigers with all the information they needed to conduct their covert operations. This was when I realized that my duties went further than simply gathering and disseminating information. I was to be instrumental in operational and tactical planning and would be required to think and act accurately and timely to ensure operations were carried out effectively.

I was told to study and translate a British-published military defense catalog called “Jane’s Naval Fighting Ships.” This detailed and informative magazine is published annually and outlines all the details of the military capacity of each of the world’s naval forces. Indeed, I was to pay attention mainly to Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. The catalogs illustrate precisely which classes of vessels and how many of them the Sri Lankan, Indian, and Pakistani naval forces possessed and their operational capacity. I was surprised that such a magazine existed and that countries would need more time to make inventories of their entire naval arsenals available to the public. “Is it this simple?” I mused inwardly, shrugging my shoulders at the apparent myopia of conventional navies.

For example, I knew that the Sri Lankan Navy had a certain number of Super Dvora, Israeli-built Fast Attack Crafts, and Shanghai Class, Chinese-built Fast Gun Boats. I had a complete strategic layout of those boats and could ascertain how to sink or capture them. Using these British catalogs, I had a comprehensive guide to the total naval capacity of Sri Lanka. The LTTE’s military office had every copy of Jane’s Military catalogs, which were not limited to maritime forces. They had every copy of Jane’s Fighter Aircraft, Jane’s Combat Tanks, and Military Balance Books for every national defense force globally.

These magazines were open-source information, meaning they are available to anyone; all you need to do is collect and process the data. This is entirely legal, and no espionage is required to gather OSINT. Other sources of open-source information include telephone directories, newspapers, books, magazines, movies, and later, the internet – the trick is to learn what small details to look for and what they mean when you see them and then exploit them once you extract them. My job was to collect, assess, analyze, and exploit this information in Tamil, to build a model of each fighting ship owned by the Sri Lankan Navy, and to provide real-time, technical, and final intelligence products to the decision-makers so that all the Sri Lankan naval vessels could be identified and attacked on sight by the Sea Tigers.

In November 1992, I officially began my duties at the Gadhafi Military Intelligence Base. Sasikumar gave me a list of tasks and a document of future projects. Included were the establishment of detailed plans on hijacking ships in international waters and taking over supply routes, as well as specifics of the LTTE’s long-term agenda to take control of Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern territorial waters and maritime supply routes by establishing sea denial. These supply routes were of the highest importance to Sri Lanka, India, and the entire international shipping community that relied on these passageways for trade and commerce.

After studying Jane’s catalogs and magazines, my first job was to map out all of Sri Lanka’s major sea supply routes. To my knowledge, the LTTE wanted to take control of the territorial waters of Sri Lanka to enable the Sea Tigers to load cargo from LTTE’s floating warehouses without being detected by coastguards or foreign navies because it was dangerous and apprehensive to be hiding and waiting in international waters. While LTTE’s procurement wing had its warehouses in and around Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Indonesia, LTTE’s floating warehouses were registered in Malta, Honduras, Cyprus, Liberia, Panama, and New Zealand, to name a few. They sail on different routes and carry a variety of legitimate and illegitimate cargo to avoid detection. These land-based and seagoing warehouses were registered under the LTTE’s front, cover, and sympathetic organizations and businesses.

I interviewed retired Sri Lankan Navy personnel among the local Tamils and captured navy officers detained by the LTTE, learning from them about their training in foreign countries. I studied British and American admiralships, including their operations, exercises, maneuvers, naval history, structure, administration, communications, vessels, and weapons capacity.

I provided the LTTE with intelligence on all the naval bases controlled by Sri Lanka. Since their only international port is in Colombo, I mainly focused on that location and Trincomalee and Karainagar, the eastern and northern naval headquarters of the Sri Lankan Navy, which had built and developed internal seaports in those areas. I made living models of these harbors based on information gathered from various sources. I focused primarily on acquiring periodic updates to key inputs from which I collected detailed intelligence on Sri Lankan military personnel and their administrative structure that provided vital intelligence to the LTTE. It facilitated various operations that demolished or captured enemy vessels, personnel, and cargo.

It shocked me when in November 1992, an LTTE suicide bomber assassinated the Sri Lankan Navy Chief, Admiral Clancy Fernando, based on the OSINT gathered by the newly formed military intelligence unit. He was assassinated because he was on the verge of making a deal with India to cooperate on naval reconnaissance and patrol missions. Such an agreement would have threatened the Sea Tigers’ logistics, supply routes, continued ability to operate in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka, and the sailing of LTTE’s floating warehouses in the Indian Ocean Region.

It is essential to point out that the National Intelligence Wing of the LTTE assassinated Admiral Fernando based on the intelligence collection and fusion that the newly formed Military Intelligence Unit facilitated. This remained a controversy within the LTTE organization because of the dubious motivations of the National Intelligence Wing leader, Pottu Amman. The National Intelligence was established some ten years before the LTTE established the Military Intelligence Unit, and thus, it remained the primary intelligence service of the LTTE. Some within the organization, particularly Thinesh Master, speculated that the tactics of the National Intelligence Wing tended to push the limits of acceptable conduct, even in the context of asymmetric warfare.

Prabhakaran, Pottu Amman, and Thinesh Master assessed potential targets. The first rule of my job was to avoid asking why but to get whatever information they wanted. When the file I had created on Admiral Fernando disappeared from the data bank, I assumed it must have been vital to some operation. Curiosity eventually got the better of me – when I finally dared to ask Sasikumar about it, he told me that he had no idea where the file had gone, but it would be returned within the next few days. This led me to conclude that Sasikumar or Thinesh had taken the file and shared it with the National Intelligence Wing. I realized that Sasikumar acted as a liaison between the National and Military Intelligence services of the LTTE and that he oversaw most of the information that flowed or was shared between the two branches. My suspicions were confirmed when I read about Admiral Fernando’s death in the LTTE-controlled local newspapers.

The Military Intelligence Unit, under Thinesh and Sasikumar, had the advantage of cross-checking all the information they acquired through OSINT and fusing it with its SIGINT teams that intercept radio communications within Sri Lanka, neighboring India, and beyond. This Military Intelligence Unit had only been created in 1993 by the order of Prabhakaran. The older National Intelligence Wing under Pottu Amman had existed since 1987 and carried out most operations up to this point. The birth of the Military Intelligence Unit in 1993 created resentment between Pottu Amman and Thinesh Master because Pottu Amman didn’t like dealing with another intelligence unit under someone else’s command. This bred a certain amount of what one might call “constructive competition” between the two intelligence branches within the LTTE.

The Military Intelligence Unit had been placed under the command of Thinesh and Sasikumar by Prabhakaran as a reward for their planning and executing the assassination of the Sri Lankan Army General Denzil Kobbekaduwa by the Special Reconnaissance Team of the LTTE by conducting intelligence fusion. Again, using OSINT from the military journals smuggled in, Pratheep Master, an expert in explosives who oversaw all the LTTE’s ammunition factories, had indigenously designed and developed the land mine that killed General Kobbekaduwa and several important figures in the Sri Lankan military, including Vice-Admiral Mohan Jayamaha.

At one point, it was rumored that Pottu Amman had boasted that he had proved that if Thinesh and Sasikumar could kill a General, he could kill an Admiral. I believe Prabhakaran did not place the Military Intelligence Wing under Pottu Amman’s command because he was unhappy with certain methodologically and ideologically failed National Intelligence Wing’s cross-border operations, such as the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in a public way. Because of this assassination, the LTTE was officially proscribed as a terrorist organization by India, the major superpower of the region, whose influence in Sri Lanka could only be rivaled by the United States and, to a lesser degree, by China at the time.

This had put the LTTE in a sticky situation internationally and was the catalyst that set off a chain reaction of LTTE eventually being labeled as a terrorist organization by most of the world, the notable exception being Australia. It is worth noting that countries like Canada did not declare the LTTE was a terrorist organization until the 9/11 terrorist attacks turned the tide of international opinion against any organization that used similar tactics to those employed by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

This tense competition between the two intelligence bodies could have proved fatal to the LTTE’s operations had it not been for LTTE’s central committee and its watchful eye since many more deadly assassinations and significant attacks were not carried out because of the intervention and advice of the central committee of the LTTE. That said, the collection, selection, and exploitation of OSINT are impossible to counter in the face of a well-structured and determined organization such as the LTTE since much of the vital intelligence is widely available in the vast sea of open sources.

In Sailing the Sea of OSINT in the Information Age, Stephen Mercado (2012), an analyst in the Directorate of Science and Technology, explains: “Open sources may often be more useful in penetrating closed borders than open societies […] Since the Cold War’s end, the revolution in information technology, commerce, and politics is only making open sources more accessible, ubiquitous, and valuable. Simply put, one can gather more open intelligence with greater ease and at less cost than ever before. The explosion in OSINT is transforming the intelligence world with the emergence of open versions of the covert arts of human intelligence (HUMINT), overhead imagery (IMINT), and signals intelligence (SIGINT)”. This is also relevant to a non-state actor or a terrorist group. “The OSINT as a catalyst for terrorists” is a good case in the Sri Lankan civil war, where the LTTE invented the deadliest tradecraft of OSINT gathering and the renewed threats it had on the Sri Lankan civil war for more than 30 years.

Featured Image: KnowBe4