the-table to groups with whom he sympathized. I’m sure he
laughed about that episode until the day he died.
Regardless, a price had been set. Sabaya did the math
and figured Schilling was worth $10 million. Problem was,
Jeff Schilling came from a working-class family. His mother
could come up with $10,000, perhaps. The United States
wasn’t about to pay one dollar. But we would allow a
payment to be made if it could be run as a “sting” operation.
If we could draw Sabaya into an offer-counteroffer
bargaining situation, we had a bargaining system that
worked every time. We could beat him down to where we
wanted him, get the hostage out, and set up the “sting.”
For months Sabaya refused to budge. He argued that
Muslims in the Philippines had suffered five hundred years
of oppression, since Spanish missionaries had brought
Catholicism to the Philippines in the sixteenth century. He
recited instances where atrocities had been committed
against his Islamic forebears. He explained why the Abu
Sayyaf wanted to establish an Islamic state in the southern
Philippines. Fishing rights had been violated. You name it,
he thought it up and used it.
Sabaya wanted $10 million in war damages—not
ransom, but war damages. He held firm in his demand and
kept us out of the offer-counteroffer system we wanted to
use against him.
And he occasionally dropped in threats that he was
torturing Jeff Schilling.
Sabaya negotiated directly with Benjie, a Filipino