Indonesia's president dismisses chief of staff over alleged wiretapping of his phone

President Prabowo Subianto dismissed his chief of staff on Wednesday, a day after national police named the retired four-star general and two fellow senior officers as suspects in a criminal investigation into an unauthorised wiretapping operation that investigators say reached the president's own telephone line. The move abruptly ended the five-week tenure of Gen. Listyo Sigit Prabowo, Indonesia's longest-serving national police chief in recent years, atop the presidential staff office, and triggered one of the most serious institutional crises of Prabowo's second year in office.

Listyo and two other generals, Inspector General Ahrie Sonta Nasution, head of the National Police's legal division, and Inspector General Eko Hadi Santoso, a senior instructor at the national police education institute, were detained on Tuesday at national police headquarters in South Jakarta, according to ABC News Australia and other outlets that confirmed the arrests with the government. All three remain in custody while the inquiry continues, and none has entered a public response to the allegations.

What the numbers show

According to the national police's Criminal Investigation Agency, the alleged surveillance ran from early 2025 into 2026 and reached well beyond the presidential palace, with targets said to include cabinet officials, politicians, journalists, civil society figures and business executives. Investigators say phone numbers were entered into the police's Lawful Interception Management System without verification or any underlying criminal case, in violation of a 2010 internal police regulation that governs when and how wiretaps may be conducted. A tip from a fellow officer, filed on October 30, triggered the inquiry; detectives have since questioned ten witnesses and three expert witnesses and seized eleven mobile phones, a tablet and four flash drives, according to Jakarta Globe. Investigators also allege that one suspect ordered intercepted files deleted from a department computer in September, which they describe as an attempt to destroy evidence of the operation.

The three suspects face charges under three separate Indonesian statutes: illegal interception of non-public electronic communications under the 2023 Criminal Code, which carries up to ten years in prison; unauthorised access to another person's electronic system, punishable by up to six years; and tampering with or deleting electronic evidence under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, which carries up to eight years. None of the three has, as of Wednesday, been charged with treason, a separate and far graver offence under Indonesian law that in its most serious form carries the death penalty.

• Gen. Listyo Sigit Prabowo, 56, national police chief from 2021 to October 2026, then presidential chief of staff; dismissed and detained.
• Insp. Gen. Ahrie Sonta Nasution, head of the National Police's legal division; detained.
• Insp. Gen. Eko Hadi Santoso, senior instructor at the National Police Education and Training Institute; detained.

A career cut short

Listyo led the national police for nearly five years, a tenure that survived repeated controversies, including criticism over the force's handling of street demonstrations and long-running questions about police brutality and abuse of authority within its ranks, before Prabowo nominated a successor, Commissioner General Suyudi Ario Seto, at the start of October. Rather than retiring, Listyo was sworn in on October 1 as head of the Presidential Staff Office, one of the most senior positions in Prabowo's inner circle, replacing retired army general Dudung Abdurachman, who moved on to become coordinating minister for political and security affairs. Barely five weeks later, Minister of State Secretary Prasetyo Hadi confirmed that Prabowo had signed a decree removing him from that post, and Lieutenant General Ariyo Windutomo, head of the presidential secretariat, was named acting chief of staff in his place. Listyo had been widely seen as a holdover loyalist of former president Joko Widodo, who installed him as police chief in 2021, and his swift rise and equally swift fall have become entangled in broader speculation about a rift between Prabowo and his predecessor's remaining allies inside the security establishment.

Disputed allegations

Prasetyo Hadi told reporters the wiretapping appeared to be the work of "rogue individuals" whose conduct, given the sensitivity of information accessible through a head of state's communications, could tend toward a betrayal of the state. Yusril Ihza Mahendra, the coordinating minister for law, human rights, immigration and corrections, pushed back on that framing, saying investigators had not yet found evidence to support a treason charge and that the case for now falls under ordinary criminal and electronic-information statutes. The disagreement between the two ministers has left the ultimate legal characterisation of the case unresolved, and police have not disclosed a motive, said who ordered the operation, or said whether anyone benefited from it.

Civil society groups seized on the case to press for transparency. The Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation said that, if proven, the conduct would amount to a clear abuse of power:

"If proven, the use of wire-tapping equipment without a lawful basis or legitimate purpose would constitute a human rights violation and an abuse of authority."

Amnesty International's Indonesia chapter went further, calling on authorities to disclose who was targeted and warning that an unchecked surveillance apparatus could eventually be turned against political opponents, a claim prosecutors have not addressed. Even Prabowo's own Gerindra party distanced itself from the officers: secretary-general Sugiono described the episode as "insubordination" within the security apparatus, while former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose own phone was reportedly targeted by Australian intelligence in a separate 2013 affair, urged Prabowo on social media to "restore civility" to Indonesian politics.

What happens next

The case lands amid broader strain on Prabowo, whose approval ratings have slipped in his second year over food prices and the cost of his signature free-meals and village-cooperative programmes. It follows weeks of unease among investors over the government's economic management: Indonesian equities have suffered sharp swings in recent months, ratings agencies have flagged policy unpredictability around the $1.5 trillion economy, and MSCI has warned it could reconsider the country's index weighting. Against that backdrop, the military's decision this week to put roughly 20,900 troops on standby for security duties in and around Jakarta has fuelled speculation about friction between the armed forces and a police force unsettled by the scandal, though a navy spokesperson described the deployment as routine and tied to scheduled exercises rather than the investigation, and Yusril said the capital remained calm. Researchers who study Indonesian security politics, including Sana Jaffrey of the Australian National University, said the more immediate risk was of miscalculation between institutions already on edge, rather than any coordinated move against the government.

The affair also revives memories of Indonesia's last major wiretapping furore, in 2013, when documents leaked by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden indicated Australian intelligence agencies had tried to intercept the phone of then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife. That episode triggered a diplomatic rupture between Jakarta and Canberra and a temporary suspension of military and intelligence cooperation. This time, the alleged eavesdropping is said to have been carried out not by a foreign power but by Indonesia's own police leadership, a distinction that has sharpened domestic anger and raised harder questions about oversight of the country's lawful-interception systems.

Prabowo has not commented publicly, and neither Listyo nor his co-accused have addressed the allegations; Reuters reported it could not immediately reach the suspects or their lawyers for comment. The government has pledged to pursue whoever ordered the wiretapping, and pressure is building, including from within parliament, for a review of the rules governing lawful interception once lawmakers reconvene. For now, three senior officers remain in detention, the presidency has only a caretaker chief of staff, and the full extent of who was listened to, and why, remains unknown.