From Habibie to Prabowo: the wiretap that keeps finding Indonesia’s presidents

What happened when the palace found its own phones tapped

On Tuesday 3 November, Indonesia’s National Police announced the arrest of three of its most senior generals, including the man who had run the force until a month earlier, and the charge was extraordinary because the alleged victim was the president himself, since investigators say the three men ran an unauthorised wiretapping operation that reached President Prabowo Subianto’s own telephone between 2025 and 2026, alongside the phones of ministers, politicians, journalists, civil society leaders and businesspeople, in arrests we reported as they broke on Tuesday. CNA (5 Nov 2026)

The shock deepened the next day, when Prabowo dismissed the former police chief, General Listyo Sigit Prabowo, from his new post as presidential chief of staff, a job he had held for barely a month, while presidential spokesman Prasetyo Hadi told reporters the conduct may have amounted to treason, and on Thursday the government sent more than 20,000 troops into Jakarta, although the palace has not linked that deployment to the wiretap case, while 6,770 police and soldiers were assigned to guard a court hearing involving former president Joko Widodo, a trial the authorities say is unrelated to the scandal. Reuters (4 Nov 2026)

What does the record show across five presidencies?

The current case, as laid out by Bareskrim chief Asep Safrudin, is methodical, because the suspects allegedly fed telephone numbers into the police Lawful Interception Management System without the verification or legal basis required under a 2010 National Police regulation, and the interceptions had no connection to any law-enforcement process, while the logs were deleted in October 2026 to cover the traces, and the affair came to light only when an officer who knew of the operation reported it on 30 October, after which investigators questioned ten witnesses and three expert witnesses and seized eleven mobile phones, an iPad and four flash drives. Associated Press (3 Nov 2026)

The pattern, however, is older than the case, because Indonesia’s presidents have been learning for 28 years that their conversations are not their own, starting in December 1998, when a telephone call between President B. J. Habibie and attorney-general Andi M. Ghalib about the legal handling of former president Suharto was leaked and its transcript circulated in the press in February 1999, with a small microphone suspected to have been hidden in the president’s office and those responsible never identified.

In August 2009, Australian intelligence monitored President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s mobile phone for fifteen days, an operation revealed only in November 2013, when documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed the Defence Signals Directorate had also targeted his wife Ani, vice-president Boediono and former vice-president Jusuf Kalla, and Jakarta recalled its ambassador from Canberra before relations were mended by May 2014, while in late 2013 suspected listening devices were found in the Jakarta residence of then-governor Joko Widodo, in his living room, dining room, bedroom and official car, and in October 2024 former president Megawati Soekarnoputri said she avoided her own mobile phone because she believed her calls were routinely monitored. The Straits Times (4 Nov 2026)

The motive, the audience and the missing recordings

The most basic question has no answer, because neither the police nor the palace has said why the wiretaps were ordered, for whom the material was gathered, or what was done with it, and the legal-affairs minister, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, has said only that the motive remains unknown, while the spokesman’s treason warning and the minister’s assurance that investigators have found no sign of treason so far describe different stages of an early inquiry rather than a settled conclusion. TRT World (4 Nov 2026)

We do not know what was actually captured, whether the recordings were copied, shared, sold or destroyed beyond the October deletion, or whether the deleted logs can be recovered, and we do not know the full target list, because the authorities have named only the president while describing dozens of other prominent figures without identifying them, which is why Amnesty International in Indonesia has urged the government to say publicly who was tapped, and we do not know whether the three generals acted alone, since the police have warned that more arrests could follow and a fourth person is already under investigation.

Why does a tapped presidential phone keep changing Indonesian politics?

Indonesia is the world’s third-largest democracy, its largest Muslim-majority nation, Southeast Asia’s biggest economy and a member of the G20, so a scandal that reaches the president’s own telephone is never a private embarrassment, and when the allegation is that the national police chief turned the state’s own interception machinery against the head of state, the damage runs in three directions at once, through the institutions that are supposed to guard the law, through a presidency already governing with record-low approval amid economic pressure and weeks of student protest, and through a region that needs Jakarta steady.

The history is what makes the present case heavier than a single arrest, because each earlier episode left the same lesson unlearned, as Habibie’s leaked call showed a young democracy could not protect the palace’s own conversations, the Australian operation showed a foreign service could listen to a sitting president for a fortnight, and the devices in Widodo’s residence showed the threat could come from inside the country, so the question the current scandal poses is not whether Indonesia’s leaders are watched, since the record says they always have been, but whether any president has ever been able to stop it. The Hindu (5 Nov 2026)

Five dimensions, one unguarded instrument

Geopolitically, the case sits at the junction of Indonesia’s two power centres, because Listyo was appointed police chief by Joko Widodo in 2021, kept by Prabowo after the 2024 election, and lifted into the palace on 1 October, only to be arrested a month later, which is why the affair reads in Jakarta as a factional reckoning as much as a criminal case, while economically it lands as Prabowo fights a cost-of-living squeeze and investor nerves, and demographically the street belongs to the young, whose protests against perceived authoritarian drift gave the scandal its audience before it existed.

Historically, the echo is deliberate and uncomfortable, since the police were separated from the military in 1999 as a democratic reform, yet the allegation is that the separation produced a force powerful enough to surveil the presidency itself, and technologically the case turns on a single system, the lawful interception platform, which was allegedly run without law, its logs now partly deleted, so the reform question is who watches the watchers. The Hindu (4 Nov 2026)

What the scandal unlocks beyond the three generals

Every crisis redistributes leverage, and this one hands the parliamentary opposition a live case for the police-reform bills that have languished for years, including civilian oversight of interception powers and a statutory leash on the 2010 regulation the suspects allegedly bypassed, while inside the palace the purge creates vacancies, since a new police chief must be confirmed and every general is now calculating his distance from Listyo.

The courts become the next arena, because Vice-President Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the son of Joko Widodo, is already under pressure over his annulled high-school certificate, and a treason-tinged police scandal hands his critics fresh ammunition, as our report on the parliamentary inquiry into that diploma set out, while regional partners will read the instability plainly, since a Jakarta consumed by an internal security war is a Jakarta distracted from the region’s hardest files, and the markets have already shown how fast confidence reprices on political risk.

What to watch as the investigation widens

Watch three markers in the coming weeks, because the announced charges will come first, with illegal interception, unauthorised access and deletion of electronic data carrying up to ten years per count and a combined maximum of twenty-four, while the treason question will be decided by evidence rather than briefings, since either investigators find the link the minister says is absent, or the spokesman’s warning fades into political theatre. Jawawa (4 Nov 2026)

The second marker is the deleted October data, because its recovery would say who was heard and for how long, and the third is whether the probe climbs beyond the three generals, since the police have warned that more arrests could be made and a fourth person is already under investigation, and the same force that named thirteen suspects in a trafficking ring this week now faces the harder test of holding its own most powerful servants to account.