“DID you guys realise that when you were about to land on the runaway after your morning sortie, you were at eye-level with me? I could actually see you in the cockpit.”
“Where were you? No I didn’t.”
The tone of the sahur session I was having with a group of fighter pilots based at one of the country’s most strategic installations quickly turned intense.
Earlier in the day, I had secured a spot at a housing project adjacent to the base. From my elevated vantage point, I watched a squadron of jet-fighters take off and land.
I noted their types, their take-off times, how many there were in each formation or element, their weapon loadouts to see if they were tasked with air-to-air, air-to-ground or maritime recon/strike missions, and if they carried external tanks — details that would be valuable to a foreign power or terror organisation intent on doing us harm.
A day earlier, I found another spot at the opposite side of the runway that gave me a clear, unobstructed view of the control tower, the aircraft shelters, with three Hornets and four Hawks inside them, an aircraft dispersal area with two Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) P-3C Orion maritime surveillance aircraft, a fuel storage farm and an ammunition dump.
I was armed with a small compact camera with 20-times magnification. If I had been part of a terrorist cell armed with man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS), the amount of damage my team and I could inflict in one afternoon would be incalculable.
Rapid development around the Royal Malaysian Air Force base in Teluk Air Tawar, Butterworth, Penang, had not escaped the attention of these men, who are at the tip of the spear.
“This has been our concern for a while. The threats against this base are real, but we are mere soldiers,” said “Gump”, a call sign this reporter shall use to refer to one of the pilots, who wore an increasingly worried look as this reporter unveiled more.
Out came the camera, that for two days before, had been recording sensitive images and footage of the high-security area that should never be in the hands of a civilian.
They watched silently and concurred that even those with little knowledge of security and defence would be able to pinpoint exactly where strategic assets and high-value targets were located.
These included the very fleet of aircraft that had been deployed to chase away unwelcomed aircraft straying into our airspace and those used in the fight against foreign intruders in Sabah in 2013.
The New Straits Times Probes team made a thorough assessment of the airbase’s periphery. Structures from two massive housing projects near the airbase tower over its perimeter wall, offering a tantalising glimpse of the juicy targets that lay beyond.
At the first construction site, which is about 70 per cent complete, the team scaled the top of the four-storey-high superlink house. The view from the bathroom was arresting.
If the buyer was a defence enthusiast, or God forbid, a foreign agent sent to monitor these assets and their movements, he would have had unbridled access to intelligence that our enemies would pay millions for and not blink an eye.
At the next project, the fence was practically inches away from the base perimeter walls. You don’t have to be a high jumper to cross over and make your way to Alert 5 hangar, or the “Last Chance” pit, where the safeties for the ordnance are removed before the jets take-off.
Just beyond that lay the ammunition bunker (the team shall withhold its location). On a moonless night, a saboteur with satchel charges and C-4 plastic explosives could make a quick, surreptitious dash to the facility, blow the armoured doors off the hinges, lob the charges inside, and wait for mayhem to ensue.
From the balcony of the master bedroom of the house that stands no less than 6.1m-high, the team observed the goings-on in the base. Regular, roving security patrols were non-existent. Not once were we challenged, hailed or queried from the time we got there at 9am, to the time we left at 1.30pm.
On one or two occasions, we saw one or two Provos making their way beside the perimeter wall, but our presence went unnoticed.
With the global threat of terrorism, one that the country is not excluded from, security at this critical, strategic base and others like it must be fortified.
The Butterworth base has traditionally been the staging area of large-scale exercises and missions, and hosts some of the world’s major air forces, including the United States Air Force (USAF), the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force (RAF) and the RAAF, with their sophisticated, top-secret assets.
Just last year, the USAF deployed its much-vaunted and super-secret stealth fighter, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, to this region — a first.
Accompanying the Raptors were the Boeing F-15C Eagles, which, despite being in service for almost 40 years, have never been defeated in combat and is still a closely-guarded secret.
It was only in April that the Home Ministry had warned that army camps were believed to be among the targets of Islamic State militants rounded up by the authorities.
The NST would also like to bring up an incident which, to date, has not received media attention, just to illustrate the fact that this threat is real. Soon after the Sabah incursion, an attack was carried out at the RMAF Labuan base. The suspects were Suluks who had wanted to send a message to the military that if they “had wanted to, they could have”.
The incident resulted in a lockdown at the base that primarily housed their engineers.
It happened once. It could happen again...
The writer is a multi-award-winning investigative journalist and a Kajai Award recipient