The key to finally resolving the alleged cheating in the 2004 presidential election may not lie with former Election Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, the pivotal figure in the “Hello Garci” wiretapping/election-rigging scandal.
The “original, unadulterated tape recording” of the wiretapped conversations allegedly between Garcillano and then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had been handed over to a military colonel for safekeeping, according to a former Army sergeant who was part of the military intelligence team that carried out the “Hello Garci” wiretaps.
Vidal Doble Jr. is the latest potential witness to have emerged this week to bolster the “body of whistle-blowers” that Malacañang is forming in a bid to pin down President Benigno Aquino III’s predecessor in election manipulation charges.
Doble on Friday said he had personally given this crucial piece of evidence—referred to as “the original tape” in military intelligence circles—to Army Colonel Dioscoro Reyes shortly before the House of Representatives began canvassing the national election results of the 2004 elections.
Reyes, a former chief technical officer of the defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, left the military service on May 25, 2009, according to the Armed Forces public affairs office.
There was no information on whether he had retired or was discharged.
Reyes is a graduate of the Philippine Military Academy Class 1981, whose members now occupy the top positions in the AFP.
The source tape
“People who want to put closure to the ‘Hello Garci’ scandal should listen to the original tape—they’ll find everything there,” said Doble, who had testified in the congressional inquiries into the “Hello Garci” scandal in 2005, in an interview.
According to Doble, the cassette tape contains uninterrupted phone conversations among key personalities—Arroyo and Garcillano allegedly included a variety of topics, including election manipulation.
He said the original tape was the source of the so-called “mother of all tapes,” which he had given to the late Samuel Ong, former deputy director of the National Bureau of Investigation.
Ong, who died in 2009, set off the so-called “Hello Garci” scandal in June 2005 when he announced that he had in his possession the original set of four audio tapes containing conversations about the alleged rigging of the 2004 presidential elections.
The tapes were supposed to be recordings of phone conversations between Arroyo and Garcillano on how the election results were to be manipulated.
Covert team of wiretappers
In Friday’s interview, Doble said that unlike the Ong tapes, which contained annotations to provide context to the captured conversations, the original tape was free-flowing and recorded voices as they streamed into the wiretapping machine.
It was the original tape that was in the machine, he said.
Doble said he decided to hand over the original tape to Reyes because his commander, Col. Paul Sumayo, did nothing about revelations that the Arroyo administration had been allegedly manipulating the election results.
MIG-21
Sumayo at the time headed a covert team of intelligence officers, which included Doble, that went by the code name “Project Lighthouse.”
Composed of agents from the Military Intelligence Group-21 of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces (Isafp), the team had set out to wiretap key personalities from both the Arroyo administration and the political opposition.
“Everyone at MIG-21 knew there was cheating going on and we were angry,” Doble said.
“Every significant development was fed to Col. Sumayo, but nothing happened,” he said.
Doble said he had kept Sumayo posted on every new recording in the original tape, partly by submitting “gist reports” on every conversation.
“The cheating was really serious,” he recalled.
Doble said authorities planning to reinvestigate the “Hello Garci” scandal should convince members of the covert team—many of whose members are now retired—to surface and finally speak up.
The emergence of the “Hello Garci” tapes and the resulting scandal almost brought down the Arroyo government in 2005.
However, the issue was never resolved in the subsequent congressional inquiries, reportedly because of Arroyo’s issuance of an executive order bannning officials from testifying in congressional hearings without her permission.
In 2005, Doble denied the Ong tapes had come from him but admitted to having appeared in a video for a “scripted authentication” of the tapes for which he was paid P2 million. He said the money had come from Laarni Enriquez, the mistress of deposed President Joseph Estrada. This was denied by Enriquez.
The justice department slapped Ong with illegal detention charges in connection with the videotaping of Doble, but the charges were later dismissed.
Ong, who died in May 2009, failed to show up at a Senate inquiry into the “Hello Garci” tapes in 2007. His lawyer said he was hiding “somewhere in the north” after getting death threats.
The Isafp simply denied it had engaged in wiretapping. With a report from Dona Pazzibugan