BANGKOK, Thailand — It was only two months before the 2003 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Bangkok — President Bush would be attending — and Thai soldiers and police had the building surrounded. Their mission: to nab one of the world's most wanted terror suspects, the man thought to be one of the masterminds behind the spectacular nightclub bombings in Bali that had killed more than 200 people a year earlier.

The operation, in Ayutthaya, a sleepy city north of Bangkok, went off without a hitch. A soldier kicked down the door and others stormed in. The suspect, Riduan Isamuddin, an Indonesian national better known as Hambali, had been on the run since the Bali bombings. He was captured without any serious resistance and whisked away without a trace, save for an old passport photograph authorities provided to the press depicting a bespectacled man with a slightly pudgy face. It was August 11, 2003, and the next time Hambali's whereabouts would be known would be more than three years later, when President Bush listed him as one of 14 key prisoners moved from secret CIA prisons to the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Then-Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra asserted that Hambali had been planning an attack that could upstage even the Bali carnage: a bomb attack on the upcoming APEC meeting. Three days after the arrest, President Bush declared that Hambali was "no longer a problem to those who love freedom" and when he was in Bangkok for the APEC meeting Bush warmly referred to Police Maj.-Gen. Tritos Ranaridhvichai, the Thai police officer who was officially responsible for the arrest, as "my hero."