Mideast Roundup

May 16, 2003

Riyadh Bombings

Al Qaeda Remains a Daunting Threat

Just a few hours after Al Qaeda struck terror in the Saudi capital of Riyadh with its most lethal multiple suicide attack since 9/11, US vice president Dick Cheney issued a tough statement:

"The only way to deal with this threat ultimately is to destroy it," he said. "There's no treaty that can solve this problem. There's no peace agreement, no policy of containment, of deterrence, that works to deal with this threat. We have to go find the terrorists," he thundered.

There was nothing new in this speech. It was a restatement of existing Bush administration guidelines in regard to the global war on terror. But it leaves an unanswered question. If that policy stands, why then was it not implemented to prevent the devastating assaults of Monday, May 12, on the elite gated compounds inhabited mostly by foreign nationals and their families?

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terrorism experts are informed that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, orchestrated the attacks. Their objective was to erase America's psychological and strategic gains from its lightning war in Iraq in order to refocus international attention on al Qaeda and its enduring threat to wield the weapon of terror. According to our sources, the two terror chiefs are currently in the Arabian Peninsula. Accompanied by their senior operational lieutenants, they are constantly on the move, cutting paths from the Assir province of southern Saudi Arabia through to Yemen and the vast Rub al-Khali (Empty Quarter) desert which thrusts fingers into the Saudi oil-rich Eastern Provinces and into most Gulf states.

The scholarly treatises hailing al Qaeda's demise - and its broken chain of command - on the grounds that the network omitted to bring off a single strike to impede the Iraq War - were abruptly proven premature by the shocks rocking Riyadh this week. By that assault, the two strategists of terror sent Washington the same message they conveyed in Tora Bora at the tail end of the Afghan War. They fought ferociously in November and December 2001 in the daunting cave complex to prove a military and psychological point, that the US-led alliance may have subdued Taleban-ruled Afghanistan but the war was not over. It was merely the opening stage that had ended - and on the fundamentalists' terms. After all, Bin Laden and Zawahri remained in command of sufficient intelligence and logistic resources to elude an American siege.

(At the time, DEBKAfile revealed bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora between December 8 and 10 under cover of heavy battles, leaving a very small group of fighters as a diversionary force)

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources, bin Laden borrowed his own Tora Bora tactic this week in Riyadh. From a forward headquarters near the Saudi city of Juka in the Assir mountains, he and Zawahiri plotted the chain of events leading up to the Riyadh bombings. On May 4 or 5, the pair left this command post. Their departure came two days before the large-scale battle that erupted in the Saudi capital between Al Qaeda fighters and Saudi security forces.

According to exclusive information gathered by DEBKA-Net-Weekly sources, the two Al Qaeda leaders and a party of senior operations officers moved east, circling the town of Haruf and heading into the Najarn region, from which they crossed the desert into Yemen. They had nothing to fear along this route. Several hundred Al Qaeda fighters, mostly Saudis or Yemenis, control the Assir mountain region that stretches from the Juka suburbs to the outskirts of Ad-Darh. The Ghamid tribe which dominates the region provides the al Qaeda with protection, and keeps it well supplied with logistics, ammunitions and a messenger service.

About seven months ago, US special forces based in Djibouti carried out discreet counter-terror operations in the area, flying in directly or transiting the Yemeni frontier into Assir. Supported by the spy ship and helicopter carrier USS Mount Whitney and Predator drones, they ransacked the rugged, snow-covered terrain for al Qaeda hideouts and command quarters. Their success was limited, although they set up a base in the mountains and engaged the terrorist-fighters in several skirmishes.

Washington blamed Riyadh for chaining the operation down by undue secrecy. The US task force, under the counter-terror arm of US General Tommy Franks's Central Command, was not allowed to fly in heavy bombers or launch large-scale assaults. The operation ended in stalemate. The withdrawal of American forces allowed Al Qaeda and its fighters, some of them local Saudi nationals, to operate unrestrained.

By mid-January 2003, as preparations for the Iraq War accelerated, US special forces were pulled out of Eritrea and Djibouti as well as Assir, leaving al Qaeda in full control. Neither the Saudi army nor its National Guard has since made the slightest effort to rein them in or keep the fundamentalists out of Saudi cities. They did nothing to stop the network's commanders from moving back into the Assir mountains and assuming direct and active command of the teams of suicides and operatives assigned to the Riyadh bombings.


Anatomy of Terror

1. Al Qaeda's Archives Found in Iraq - How Much Did Saddam Know?

After fruitless searches in Afghanistan and Pakistan for many months, using every known state of the art implement, US special forces and intelligence units in Iraq finally came upon Al Qaeda's secret archives by means of human intelligence in Iraq. Revealing this, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-intelligence sources report the files were discovered three weeks ago in a cave complex linked by natural underground passages in the mountainous Targat region of northern Iraq, north of the Kurdish city of Suleimaniyeh. They were led to their find by local Kurds who sold enough correct information to cross-reference neatly with data obtained from interrogations of Al Qaeda prisoners, some badly wounded, who were captured in the fundamentalist al Qaeda-linked Kurdish Ansar al Islam enclave in northern Iraq. That enclave was subjected to heavy American missile and aerial bombardment in the second week of the Iraq war.

Al Qaeda turns out to have cached its secret archives in these caves in two batches: one before and one after the watershed September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. US experts have just begun examining them prior to an appraisal. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources, who obtained limited access to some of their contents find that even a cursory glance sheds light on the bin Laden system of operation.


Pre-September 11 Batch

This collection of documents dates back to 1994 when Osama bin Laden and his headquarters were based in Sudan; they cover the period up until late June 2001. One revelation lays bare the meticulous preparations the network made for the 9/11 suicidal massacres and confirms that America's responsive invasion of Afghanistan was fully anticipated. There is no indication as to whether Saddam knew the archives were in Iraq or had a hand in hiding them.

However, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terrorism experts find it hard to believe that with his security forces, spies and informers in every corner of the country - certainly in the heart of all the military and terror groups he hosted - could have been completely ignorant of al Qaeda's doings and the contents of its files. Even without specific foreknowledge of 9/11, he must have guessed that Al Qaeda chiefs had good reason to spirit their archives out of Afghanistan to a safer location. In fact, senior intelligence sources who have viewed the al Qaeda papers told DEBKA-Net-Weekly that Saddam had a pretty good idea that a major terrorist attack in the United States was afoot.

Even before the American invasion, the Iraqi ruler was not in complete control of every movement in northern Iraqi Kurdistan. Yet it would have been sufficient to enable him or one of his sons to remove the al Qaeda archives and carry them out when they fled the country last month. They did manage to abscond with other sensitive intelligence materials. But Saddam did not bother to take the al Qaeda files, or even order them destroyed.


January 2002 - April 2002 Batch

It is clear that Al Qaeda was unable to spirit this batch out of Afghanistan and Pakistan with the first. The files show signs of being hurriedly packed and smuggled out in haste after US forces were deep inside Afghanistan.

The special interest of these documents lies in their inclusion, reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, of a complete blueprint for rebuilding al Qaeda's terrorist network just in case it was forced to pull up its stakes in Afghanistan. There is no way of telling if the plan was drawn up prior to 9/11 or afterward. However, after quitting Afghanistan, al Qaeda almost certainly reconstructed its operational units along the lines laid down by this blueprint.

The negative evidence contained in the al Qaeda documents is particularly telling. There is no record of active terror collaboration with Saddam's regime, only written instructions to operatives to make use of the access they enjoyed to Iraqi territory to set up training bases, terrorist command centers, camps. They were to use Iraq also as a short and easy transit route between Iran and Turkey and Syria and Lebanon. But how they procured this access is not revealed. There is no record in the documents that al Qaeda requested or obtained permission to locate its activities in the country from Baghdad or any local authority.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism experts explain the absence of any evidence linking Saddam to the still shadowy al Qaeda on three grounds which may alternate or overlap:

1.
Top Iraqi leaders gave Al Qaeda a tacit green light to operate out of Iraq after they were bribed to turn a blind eye to its activities.

2.
Al Qaeda operated in northern Iraq under the protection of Iranian - not Iraqi - agents. Towards the end of the Afghan war in the winter of 2001-2002, Tehran opened its doors to Al Qaeda fighters on the run from Afghanistan and Pakistan. In return for large cash payments, Iran let them live in camps in the north of the country, allowing some of the men to move to Teheran, Qom and Mashhad. But then Iran changed its face and decided to clean house as quickly as possible. The ayatollahs turned the al Qaeda fighters out and pushed them over to northern Iraq and from there to Syria and Lebanon. They also had an ulterior motive; the belief that the al Qaeda presence in Lebanon would strengthen the pro-Iranian elements in the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah at the expense of mounting Syrian influence.

3.
The al Qaeda presence in northern Iraq fell under the protection of Syrian military intelligence which is still a pervasive influence around the Iraqi oil city of Mosul. The palms of senior Syrian officers were almost certainly well greased for their patronage.

The archived records cataloguing Al Qaeda's reorganization after the Afghan War lend credence to the third explanation. According to its prepared blueprint, the reorganized network was to establish three terrorist operational centers.

A.
The United States and Canada: This center was to evolve in three stages; the nucleus would be fashioned in the Kurdish Ansar al-Islam enclave around the northern Iraqi town of Biara. This nucleus was to be managed, according to the documents and supporting intelligence data, by Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader captured in Pakistan in March. His job was to use this nucleus to seed branches in Europe that would eventually plant cells in the United States and Canada. Those cells were to come together as an active base of operations. There is no information on whether this happened.

On paper, Al Qaeda's organizational and intelligence methodology appeared smooth and uncomplicated. But when Sheikh Mohammed came to be interrogated, he conveyed the impression to US intelligence officers that either he had not been fully briefed on the organization he was assigned to set up, or he was dissembling.

The captive was shown to be out of the loop or playing games - or both - when the Americans acted on his information.

On March 20, just after the Iraq War was launched, US forces also embarked on Operation Valiant Storm in search of top al Qaeda leaders, possibly even Bin Laden in person, along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Then, in the last week of March, another US operation codenamed Desert Lion was initiated with the same objective. Both operations were based on information gleaned from Sheikh Mohammed's interrogation. Both, despite widespread rumors of the capture of Bin Laden's son, came up empty but for al Qaeda minnows.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and counter-terrorism sources, Sheikh Mohammed had deliberately sent the Americans off on a wild goose chase, exhausting large contingents of special forces that could have been put to better use on other fronts.

At the same time, the location of two key al Qaeda men, both outranking Sheikh Mohammed on the fundamentalists' totem pole, was found in the second batch of the secret al Qaeda archive. Both men are inaccessible. According to our exclusive sources, the two operatives are hiding under the protection of Bashar Assad's military intelligence in northern Syria. The Syrian ruler denies their presence in his country. US officials have named them and demanded their handover on at least three occasions, the last being when secretary of state Colin Powell visited the city on May 3.

The two al Qaeda fugitives under Syrian protection are full operational. In the last week of March, when coalition forces were advancing in Iraq, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources report they assembled a force of well-trained terrorists with orders to quietly infiltrate Saudi Arabia. Some crossed overland from Iraq and Jordan; others flew into Jeddah on commercial flights from Damascus. Our sources label some of the team as Algerians with Canadian passports. Seven took part in the al Qaeda street battle on May 7 with Saudi security forces in Riyadh. The same North American Muslim fighters were also on the team that carried out the suicide bombings on residential compounds housing foreign nationals in the Saudi capital five days later.

It is not entirely clear how active are the additional two terror centers or cells planted by al Qaeda - or even their scope.

B.
Northern Iraq and Jordan: Its operations were meant to range across Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

C.
Israel: Long thought to be dormant, this al Qaeda presence is now threatening to burst into action like the one in Saudi Arabia, under its commander, Abu Musab Zarqawi, the notorious Jordanian-born bio-chemical warfare expert who was trained in northern Iraq.


2. Structure of al Qaeda's Saudi Networks

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terrorism experts, Al Qaeda's Saudi network is a key operation. Structured differently from the other world centers and cells, this group operates under the direct command of bin Laden and Zawahri. It is made up of five sectors:


A. The "Afghans"

Saudi nationals who fought in al Qaeda's ranks in Afghanistan in 2001, and became known as "the Afghans".

In October 2001, two weeks into the Afghan War, the House of Saud made a strategic decision to fund and stage a rescue operation for the 2,500 to 3,000 Saudi fighters on the Afghan battlefield and their clandestine repatriation by plane, train and ship. Several hundred non-Saudis, mostly Yemenis, Egyptians and Syrians, were lifted to safety at the same time.

To many Western observers, this operation looked like a Saudi maneuver to remove Saudi al Qaeda followers from the danger of falling into American hands lest they betray the scope of Riyadh's profound ties with the terrorist network so soon after the shock of the 9/11 attacks by Saudi suicide-hijackers in New York and Washington.

On another, deeper level, it was recognized that the Saudi royal family and the kingdom's intelligence services - like other Arab governments in the Middle East - perceived Bin Laden's organization and the Taliban regime as the Sunni religious and military counterweight to the militancy of the Shiite paramilitary terrorist groups, such as Hizballah, arching over the Arab world. This rationale still motivates Saudi support for the Palestinian Hamas terrorists.

Furthermore, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Middle East experts note, the Saudi royal family holds itself traditionally responsible for the welfare of all Saudi citizens. This paternalism stems from strong tribal, clan and family loyalties that are the bedrock of Saudi society. It is inconceivable for a Saudi father to abandon his son the battlefield, even if he is fighting for Osama bin Laden. So when Saudi fighters returned home from Afghanistan, most were welcomed with open arms by their families. They were quickly absorbed into the clandestine cells that Al Qaeda had established in their tribes and clans while they were away in Afghanistan. Once back with their families, they were of no more interest to Saudi intelligence.


B. Saudis who fought outside Afghanistan

Those who served al Qaeda in the Balkans, in places such as Chechnya, Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania.


C. Private mosques

Thousands of private mosques have sprung up across the kingdom and function without formal religious or security supervision. Most are just a room in a private apartment or a tent in the desert. They provide safe and convenient meeting places for Al Qaeda adherents to get together and take training in the use of weapons and explosives.


D. Private preachers

Many thousands of private often self-appointed firebrand preachers, roam the desert kingdom, avid zealots of the puritanical Wahhabi doctrine that is even more radical than the Al Qaeda brand of fundamentalism. The preachers serve Osama bin Laden's organization as fund-raisers and couriers and also as spotters for new members from the ranks of the faithful. A wandering preacher visiting tribal desert encampments and outlying villages is the perfect courier which the most sophisticated electronic instrument is incapable of keeping track of.


E. Fugitive Saudi Expatriates

This group opted not to return home but to establish themselves in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Its members became the dynamic lifeblood that kept the organization afloat after its bases were lost in Afghanistan. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources reveal that this group set up medrases, or religious schools, in the suburbs of Damascus to replace the schools of Pakistani Peshawar where Al Qaeda once reared and recruited terrorists. Pakistani intelligence now keeps those medressas closely supervised; they are frequently raided by US special forces patrolling the region against terrorists.

The new medressa system in Damascus has become a hit. Thousands of Muslims from all over the world, especially from Western Europe and North America, are stepping up to enroll in the student body, a fresh reservoir of zealots from which Al Qaeda can pick and choose its next generation of terrorists


When bin Laden, Zawahiri and their operational staff returned to the Arabian Peninsula in September 2002 (as DEBKA-Net-Weekly 81, reported on October 18, 2002 under the caption Bin Laden is Alive - And Back Home in Saudi Arabia") all they needed to do was to connect the dots between Al Qaeda's five power bases and equip the fighters with weapons, explosives and operational plans.

The May 7 street shootout between al Qaeda fighters and Saudi security forces in the streets of Riyadh, followed by the suicide attacks on Westerners residential compounds five days later, were the initial outcome of the new plan of operation in Saudi Arabia.

Al Qaeda made a heavy investment in the assault.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources are certain that the Americans and Saudis seriously underestimate the expenditure of terrorist manpower when they put its number at 10 and 15 fighting men. At least 55 to 65 terrorists were most certainly involved in the battle and the attacks.

Our sources believe that all of them spent periods of from two to three years on the battlefields of Afghanistan or Chechnya. At least five were members of the Saudi military, attesting to Al Qaeda's deep penetration of the kingdom's armed forces. Almost all of the terrorists were graduates of Saudi universities, and some were foreigners from Algeria and Canada who had fought in Afghanistan and used their passports to move freely around the world.

Other foreign passport holders included men who came from or once studied at the Damascus medressas. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources report that at least two of the men who took part in the Riyadh bombings had family connections with some of the 19 suicide-hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks. Relatives of suicide bombers believe they have a family and religious obligation to carry on their legacy and become martyrs. Others are carried away by fiery rhetoric and religious fanaticism.

The average age of the Riyadh assailants was 28; at least 20 of team members were aged between 25 and 30. Five others were about 36 years old. Their 28-year-old commander, Khaleb al-Jenani, fought for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia. In mid-2002, he was seen in the company of fellow senior Al Qaeda operatives on the move between Beirut, Damascus and Jeddah. All of the members of the network carried Saudi identity papers issued under their assumed names, bespeaking again Al Qaeda's ability to infiltrate Saudi internal security departments and win the cooperation of a large number of minor Saudi officials.

US and Saudi intelligence services knew all this at the end of last year. But DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terrorism experts estimate that the Saudi government refrained from taking preventive action for fear of upsetting their delicate balance of relations with the kingdom's tribes at a critical stage of the power struggle in the royal house.

Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef, whose security services failed to prevent the Riyadh attacks, is wooing tribal support for himself and his brothers of the Sudeiri faction in their bid for the succession to the throne against Crown Prince Abdullah.

He too is unlikely to take action that will antagonize the tribes - even after the massacre perpetrated in the capital of the kingdom.

As for the Americans, they claim they expected the Saudis to act first. But their hands were tied for another reason. To dismantle the Saudi terrorist underground they would first have had to take action against the entire Al Qaeda infrastructure in Lebanon and Syria. Such action was on hold as long as the US ultimatum to Syrian president Bashar Assad was in force to compel him to take on the terrorists under his wing, or face the music.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources, the Riyadh terror assault is but a foretaste of the terror offensive in store for Saudi Arabia. No one knows for sure the scale of the terrorist army at large in the kingdom, but intelligence assessments estimate that between eight and 12 cells are operating in parallel. Each of those groups is geared up for more terrorist assaults, some even deadlier than the Riyadh bombings.


Iran

To Please Washington, Ayatollahs Decentralize Regime

In an exclusive report from Tehran, DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveals that the rulers of Iran are going to extreme lengths to appease Washington and persuade the United States to enter into a friendly dialogue to settle their differences over Iraq, Lebanon and terrorist groups like the Shiite Hizballah and the Palestinian rejectionists which they support. To demonstrate good will, they have embarked on radical regime reform, the first since Ayatollah Khomeini established the Islamic Republic in 1979.

It is also the Iranian hard line leadership's first tangible response to American pressure for regime change by political means and to Washington's discreet postwar diplomatic moves in the region.

The key element of the Iranian reform program, as set out by the real power in the land, spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is the decentralization of government in Tehran and its breakdown into two systems. Government in the capital, headed by himself, will control national security, foreign affairs, the treasury, the military, the oil, military and nuclear industries and nuclear weapons development.

The second system will be based on regional semi-autonomy in the conduct of local affairs, industry and economic development. A coordinating authority will operate on the national level to oversee overlapping essential utilities and services such as electricity, transport and water.

Our Iranian experts point out there is nothing haphazard about this distribution of power in relation to the burdens of government. It is heavily weighted on one side, leaving the power and national revenues in the hands of the hard line spiritual ruler and the militant Revolutionary Guards who obey him, and casting the country's galloping social and economic ills out for the provincial authorities to cope with as best they can.

The only province unaffected by the reform will be Khozistan. Since this region contains most of Iran's oil riches and is populated largely by Arabs, Tehran will not abolish the military government that has ruled the province for many years.

Baluchistan is a different matter. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Tehran sources reveal that earlier this month, Khamenei took a trip to this province which abuts Pakistan. Local conditions here were a factor in the Iranian ruler's decision to go for reform. He found that across the border, the Islamabad government and the Pakistani army were fast losing control of their Baluchi citizens, whose province is sinking into lawlessness. Fearing a spillover to the Iranian side, Khamenei decided to grant Iran's 4 million Baluchis a measure of administrative autonomy in their capital of Zaheadan - both to check the breakdown of order from seeping through into Iranian Baluchistan and perhaps to tempt Pakistani Baluchis to seek annexation to their better-off brethren in Iran.

Our sources report that the Ayatollah spent ten days in Baluchistan and when he returned to the capital, ordered the devolution of the central government's powers to begin forthwith.

Iran's 11-18 million Kurds are the second population group who will be at the receiving end of the changes in Tehran. A group of Kurdish leaders has already approached Khamenei to state that their people are not seeking full independence in the wake of the Iraq War, only equal rights, administrative autonomy and official recognition of the Kurdish language alongside Farsee. Khamenei's office displayed willingness to discuss Kurdish demands for the first time.


Intelligence

An MI6 Operation Succeeds - and Misfires

On Thursday, May 15, heavily armed US Army forces stormed an unnamed village near Saddam Hussein's former power base of Tikrit. They captured more than 200 prisoners. But they targeted only two of Saddam's top guns, who too were not named. One was described as appearing " on the top 55 list" of wanted regime officials; the other in the top 20. They were sought in a house to house search. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources believe it probable that one of the wanted men is Tahr Habush, former chief of Iraqi intelligence who is known to have been negotiating terms for his surrender for some time.

His capture would close the circle of a dark and intricate spy tale of betrayals, assassinations, terror and covert rivalries, whose final denouement came about in Baghdad, May 2003.


By the time the British joined the American-led invasion of Iraq, their arch enemy, the master terrorist Sabri al-Bana, aka Abu Nidal, self-styled "Father of the Struggle", had been dead for some months. He was murdered in his Baghdad apartment on August 19, 2002 along with several of his top operations officers. Thus ended the brutal career of a decades-long thorn in the sides of British intelligence, a figure who had worked long and hard with Saddam Hussein's security services to bring Britain's undercover services into decline in a strategic region.

From 1970, Abu Nidal headed the Palestinian Fatah office in Baghdad. For the intervening 32 years until his death, he and Iraqi intelligence mustered every terrorist resource at their disposal for an all-out battle to frustrate the British secret service's goal of establishing clandestine networks deep inside the Arab and Muslim world. This secret war occasionally came to the surface in the form of high-profile assassinations, such as the 1984 killing in Athens of Ken Whitty, the top British intelligence operative in Greece, and the murder the same year in Bombay of Percy Norris, the deputy high commissioner in India. But mostly Abu Nidal's war was fought in the shadows, ranging across Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf - often solo but sometimes in ad hoc collaboration with Syrian, Libyan, Yemeni or Sudanese security agencies as well as Iraq.

In 1997 and 1998, Abu Nidal made Cairo his center of operations, hired by Egyptian intelligence for its offensive to destroy the terrorist cells run by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the main operations arm of Al Qaeda in Egypt, Albania, Kosovo, Chechnya and Yemen. Even then, Abu Nidal missed no opportunity of stamping on the MI5 and MI6 cells planted in the Islamic Jihad or their fundamentalist allies.

One of the iron cords binding Abu Nidal to Iraq's security services and Saddam himself was their shared hatred for British intelligence and its machinations in the Middle East. Abu Nidal and Saddam, who met frequently, agreed for instance that British efforts to bind Yasser Arafat and fellow Palestinian figures to their chariot stymied their own drive to dominate the Palestinian national movement and must be curtailed.

The pair worked hand in glove with a third, far from silent, partner who was equally dedicated to keeping the British out of behind-the-scenes positions of influence in the Middle East: Soviet - later, Russian counterintelligence. The prime mover in this campaign was the former KGB's First Chief Directorate which was inherited by the SVR and is still located in its old headquarters at Yasenevo on Moscow's ring road.

For long years, Iraqi intelligence acted as Russian counterintelligence's proxy in its undercover war against British intelligence, using Abu Nidal as its own surrogate.
In the 1970s and 1980s, at Baghdad's behest, Abu Nidal was placed at the head of Soviet Bloc shell companies headquartered in Warsaw. Under their cover, the terrorist proved to be an acute businessman, conducting a lively trade in the illegal sale of arms and ammunition to various terrorist undergrounds including the IRA, another sideswipe at the British who were locked in bitter conflict with the Irish terrorists at the time.

The historic clandestine ties between Russia and Iraq served Saddam Hussein and his to intelligence officials in good stead when the Americans invaded Iraq and they needed an escape route in a hurry·

When the plan to go to war against Iraq was mapped out last year, Abu Nidal was still alive and living in Baghdad. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources can disclose exclusively that the heads of MI5 and MI6 believed the run-up to the offensive offered the perfect opportunity for settling the score with Abu Nidal - permanently, that is if they could catch their slippery prey.

British undercover forces were already present inside Iraq as part of the preparations for war. To get Abu Nidal, they needed to achieve deep penetration of the Jazair residential compound in southeastern Baghdad, home to senior Iraqi intelligence officials, retirees and Saddam's tame terrorists, including the Palestinian maverick.

The British clandestine pre-war mission provided an excellent opportunity for this side venture. British covert agents and special forces were in any case directed to go into Baghdad and evaluate the feasibility of killing or capturing Saddam or members of his inner circle, meanwhile gathering data on potential targets and Iraqi troop movements.

However, British prime minister Tony Blair saw the potential of this expedition for more ambitious rewards. He had thrown himself into the Iraq war enterprise, trusting that collaboration with the Americans in Iraq would boost their military ties, as well as restoring British intelligence to the pride of place it enjoyed in the Middle East before and during the Cold War. At some point in 2002, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources reveal, he directed British secret service chiefs to prepare an elaborate "sting".

Its purpose was to prove to Washington that British agents were second to none in their ability to get close to top Iraqi leaders, penetrate Baghdad's intelligence centers and even plant eyes and ears inside Saddam's closest ally, Russian counterintelligence. Moreover, if the British could set up Abu Nidal for a fall, the Americans might be convinced Saddam could likewise be disposed of covertly and so obviate the need for war.

The "sting" worked like this: British agents planted clues and scraps of information with secret service contacts in the Gulf who could be counted on to pass them on to Iraqi intelligence. The mass of innuendo suggested that Abu Nidal and his cronies had sold Saddam Hussein out to US intelligence for a multi-million dollar reward. He was said to have passed on to Washington insider intelligence on Saddam's hideouts and family intrigues, as well as Iraqi troop movements and war preparations. The British, knowing that gossipy insinuations would not suffice to convince the Iraqis of Abu Nidal's treachery, went on to fabricate an accumulation of "intelligence evidence", feeding it out so that each portion confirmed the previous fragment and built up a solid picture of the terrorist's deepening ties with the Americans and mounting menace to Saddam in person. The data had to be convincing. Even a tyrant like Saddam would not lightly order the liquidation of a useful tool like Abu Nidal in the heart of the Iraqi capital.

On August 19, 2002, the first reports filtered out of Baghdad that unknown assassins had shot dead Abu Nidal and two of his operational chiefs after breaking into their apartment.

That was not the end of the episode for the British, but only the first chapter - and a highly embarrassing one at that. Abu Nidal was dead but their "sting" had backfired. This they realized two days later, when Iraqi intelligence chief Tahr Habush (see photo) invited foreign correspondents to a rare news conference.

As cameras flashed, he held up pictures of Abu Nidal's body to prove his claim that the terrorist had died by his own hand. Habush insisted that Abu Nidal had lived in Baghdad without the knowledge of Iraqi intelligence. When his presence was discovered in mid August, a team of Iraqi security men was sent to check out the apartment where he was said to reside. The Palestinian terrorist, realizing the game was up, stuck a pistol in his mouth and fired. The photograph Habush displayed as proof of this tall story was said to have been taken in the apartment directly after the "suicide". In fact, it proved nothing as the bodies were impossible to identify.

So what was the point of the demonstration?

Saddam's motive was to let Washington know what is in store for any would-be assassins sent to kill him.

But the inference for Washington was quite different. The Americans were shocked. They had not realized the British had taken their "sting" operation so far or so fast. Some senior intelligence sources told DEBKA-Net-Weekly that Washington had not been fully informed that the faked evidence against Abu Nidal passed to Saddam had implicated the United States in the terrorist chief's drummed up conspiracy. This was not the impression of American intelligence US President George W. Bush sought to present on the eve of going to war - not even to Saddam. While acclaiming the British spy service's professional virtuosity in bringing off Abu Nidal's demise, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington report that not all Bush's war planners were delighted with its outcome and many still fault the British initiative.

The shock waves hitting the top Iraqi leadership and its security establishment were intense enough to force American and British undercover and special forces to hold up operations for several weeks and led to the unscheduled retardation of war preparations.

But the convolutions of the tale were still not over. After US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq and American troops entered Baghdad, American intelligence began to sweep Iraqi intelligence headquarters. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, one of the files they found in Habush's now vacant office held yet another surprise. The frame British intelligence built to incriminate Abu Nidal had not after all persuaded Saddam to liquidate the semi-retired Palestinian terrorist. Another, stronger determinant was now revealed.

In early August 2002, two weeks before Abu Nidal's death, president Vladimir Putin dispatched to Baghdad a Russian general, one of Saddam's closest confidants, bearing strong evidence that Abu Nidal was in secret collusion with the Americans to stab him in the back. The evidence presented made no mention of the British case against him. But the Russians - not British intelligence - were the more convincing and ultimately swung Saddam round to believing that Abu Nidal was double-crossing him.

It is not entirely clear why Moscow was so keen to be rid of Abu Nidal as to hitch a ride on the British sting and give it a final push. Perhaps the Palestinian terrorist having performed many covert services for Moscow held too many secrets about the clandestine terrorist links of Russian intelligence to be allowed to fall alive into the hands of the Americans, as did Saddam's Palestinian stooge, Abu Abbas. For by August, when it launched its own sting, Moscow knew that the US invasion of Iraq was not far off.

Or perhaps, the Russian leader wanted to exacerbate Saddam's paranoia, focusing it on an enemy within allegedly planted by the Americans.

The answer to this mystery was not found in Habush's filing cabinets. The man himself - if he was indeed captured Thursday - may yield the missing information under interrogation. However, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and military sources, a confidential investigation was quickly launched in Washington to determine how Russian intelligence got wind of British intelligence's top secret plans and what use was eventually made of them.


HOT POINTS
(that you may have missed in DEBKAfile Round-the-Clock)
A Digest of the Week's Exclusives

10 May: After undergoing several metamorphoses since its formulation by the Quartet, the Middle East road map is shunted aside by Washington because of more pressing issues: US relations with Iran, Syria and Lebanon - a higher priority in the post-Iraq war period than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The spotlight began edging away from the Middle East road map when secretary of state Powell handed Syria a list of 10 demands with ten days to come up with responses. The deadline runs out on Tuesday, May 13. DEBKAfile has listed those demands before. But Powell added an eleventh: Assad must close the books on the longstanding issues of Israelis missing in action, prisoners of war and abducted men. He named the three men missing from the 1982 Sultan Yacoub battle, Yaacov Katz, Zachariah Baumel and Zvi Feldman, the navigator Ron Arad, the men kidnapped by the Hizballah in 2000, Benny Avraham, Adi Avitan and Omar Sawwad, and the civilian Elhanan Tanenboim, as well as Guy Hever, who disappeared with trace and whose family believes he was abducted to Syria. Powell warned Assad the Middle East had entered a new era and this agonizing business must be put to rest.

If Syria turns a deaf ear, DEBKAfile's Washington sources report the four options facing the administration:

A.
To leave the ultimatum sword hanging over Assad's head.

B.
To carry out covert or overt military operations against Iraqi and terrorist targets in Syria and Lebanon.

C.
To strangle the Assad regime with an economic noose.

D.
To instigate regime change in Damascus.

Earlier, to stave off threatened action from Washington, Syria sent out a peace feeler to Jerusalem, offering to separate it from the Palestinian issue, but demanding an international umbrella like the Quintet's sponsorship of the Middle East road map, the last thing the Israelis and Americans want to see. Hizballah terror would not be on the agenda. US officials warned Israeli prime minister Sharon that a positive response would give Assad a way round American demands for the surrender Saddam's unconventional weapons and regime leaders and the dismantling of the Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist structures in Syria and Lebanon. Syria would tag Washington's ultimatum onto the Syrian-Israeli peace agenda and declare it must take its turn on the table. The Israeli prime minister therefore played for time and promised an answer one month hence.

Assad and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizballah leader, hope the Iranian president Muhammed Khatami, visiting Beirut and Damascus from Monday, May 12 to Thursday, May 15, will offer them a lifeline to survive the menaces coming from Washington.

Yasser Arafat in Ramallah too is waiting to see what message President Khatami is bearing. But he is not worried. If Iran lets Assad and Nasrallah down and they bow to Washington's dictates, he will be left in his most coveted role, the last Arab and Muslim leader still openly fighting the United States and the Zionists. He will then redouble his orders for Palestinian terrorists to kill Israelis. As for Abu Mazen, the new Palestinian prime minister, he was forced to receive Powell in Jericho because Ramallah was not safe for the visitor since Arafat has pulled his terrorist centers close to his headquarters. Neither Abu Mazen nor his internal security minister Mohamed Dahlan are willing to put their hands in fire to stop the terror - meaning that the Palestinian reform horse will not run. Without a reformed Palestinian administration, the Middle East road map is a non-starter and Washington had little choice but to suspend it.

12 May: Mahmoud Abbas - Abu Mazen - is endeavoring to earn the job of first Palestinian prime minister by keeping three balls up in the air at once: He wants to prove his "reformist" credentials to Washington and Jerusalem, uphold his Palestinian credibility at home and in the Arab world and beat off Yasser Arafat's incessant overt and sneak assaults on his standing. It is hard to see how he can succeed.

One of his maneuvers is to show Powell he is willing to meet with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, while at the same time angling behind Arafat's back for an invitation to Damascus for talks with Syrian president Bashar Assad. He has also sent emissaries to Cairo to open communications with senior Hamas officers. Assad, for his part, might seize on a visit by the US-backed Palestinian prime minister to deflect accusations of fostering terror.

Showing that Washington will not be gulled by these ruses, Powell warned Syria in an interview that it would find itself "on the wrong side of history" if it tried to destabilize postwar Iraq or continued harboring radical Palestinian groups.

According to American sources, the US secretary left his meeting with the Palestinian prime minister in Jericho Sunday afternoon with a sense of failure. Abu Mazen made it clear that he would not confront the Palestinian terrorists head-on but only seek dialogue.

Intelligence sources confirm Palestinian suicide killers were - and remain - poised ready to strike as soon as Israel responded to the American request to lift the blockade on Palestinian areas. Monday morning therefore Israel put back the checkpoints and recalled the 25,000 work permits it had issued a few hours earlier.

Arafat meanwhile chips away at his prime minister's authority, making "presidential appointments" in the prime minister's own departments and demanding his 10 percent cut for the "President's Office" of all amounts conveyed to the Palestinian government, including Israeli transfers to Palestinian finance minister Salim Fayyad and Washington's pledge of $50 m for creating jobs and alleviating popular hardship. A portion of all the funds reaching him is automatically earmarked for funding the terrorist groups he sponsors, the Fatah-Tanzim and the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. But no matter how many Israelis and others die in his campaign of terror, nothing dents the plate-armored personal immunity extended to Arafat by the United States, Europe, Asia and sections of Israeli society, as well as the Sharon government. Counting on this, he deliberately let it be known that the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades squad he sent to murder an Israeli motorist on the day Powell began talks with Sharon set out from his own presidential quarters. He is known to harbor 200 terrorist masterminds, controllers and operatives in those quarters.

13 May: For some years now the Israeli Islamic Movement has been known to serve the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group as financial conduit and money launderer. Its fund-raising efforts for the families of Palestinian suicide killers have not gone unnoticed either. Some members have even been caught aiding and abetting these killers, transporting them to and from target areas, providing hideouts and intelligence - in more than one case to the Lebanese Hizballah as well.

So what happened on Tuesday, May 13, to bring out hundreds of Israeli police and Shit Beit agents to in a swoop on the Islamic Movement's northern offices in Umm al Fahm, not far from the West Bank border, to round up 15 of its leaders, including Sheikh Ra'ed Salah?

DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources have two answers:

1.
Israeli counter-terror and intelligence authorities believe that one of the Islamic movement's clandestine cells is hiding Omar Khan Sharif, the failed British suicide bomber whose explosive belt did not work at Mike's Place in Tel Aviv on April 30. His partner's did, killing 3 Israelis and injuring 60.

According to information reaching Israeli investigators, Hamas planners surmounted the difficulty of getting the British bombers through checkpoints to Palestinian areas by setting up a safe house inside Israel, courtesy of the Islamic Movement or one of its factions, for terrorists unable to go through with their missions.

2.
The terrorist financing issue is far from plain sailing. The Hamas group's primary source of funding is not the Israeli Islamic movement but Saudi Arabia, which is thought to transfer about $50m a year to the Palestinian terror group, 70 percent of which flows directly into its terror chest. The Saudis also send money to the Israeli Islamists. The Tel Aviv bombing oiled by Saudi funds set up for the first time a terror chain leading to the British terrorists who hailed from Derbyshire and Finsbury Park, moved to Damascus at whose medressas they were recruited and trained for their mission, called in at the Gaza Strip's Hamas branches and wound up in the Israeli Muslims' safe house.

Israeli security authorities decided to snap this chain of terror before Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem once again suffer the horrendous fate inflicted on the Saudi capital this week.

13 May: After midnight Monday, May 12, Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network struck the United States and Saudi Arabia, displaying high skills in planning, intelligence, mobility and execution with devastating effect.

The terrorists overcame security by having several small teams strike at different points in each estate with ferocious fire and explosive power. While one group killed the guards and smashed the gates, one or more Mercedes packed with explosives and suicide terrorists drove round the other side and rammed the estates' perimeter walls. The next team drove into the estates through the hole. Once in, vehicles loaded with cans of gasoline as well as explosives blasted high-rise buildings, killing many of their residents and leveling entire streets. Another group of terrorists rode into the damaged compounds and massacred survivors by spraying the interiors of still standing buildings with automatic fire, hand grenades and fuel bombs. Some witnesses heard the firing going on 10 minutes after the explosions. When their ammunition ran out, the killers detonated bomb belts.

After the first-wave assaults, few could have survived the fierce heat and vacuum generated in their apartments by the second-wave gasoline blasts which tore the facades off their buildings and sucked them out - a replay of the al Qaeda tactic first seen seven years ago when a truck bomb crashed into the Khobar Towers housing the US military personnel (with families) securing the oil fields of Saudi Arabia's Eastern Provinces. The unofficial toll then was put at 19 American servicemen killed and 500 injured - some very gravely. To this day, no American or Saudi official has openly attributed that atrocity to al Qaeda.

The suicide assaults came five days after a large-scale al Qaeda-Saudi military shootout in the streets of Riyadh, from which 19 terrorists escaped. Leaks from Saudi sources showed the incident to have been more dangerous and audacious than first reported: an attempt by Al Qaeda to assassinate the pro-American Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan, third in the line of succession to the throne, and his brother, Interior Minister Prince Naif, who is also in command of internal security in the kingdom. According to DEBKAfile's terror experts, this fresh offensive has not been orchestrated by a new al Qaeda leadership as has been claimed; Bin Laden and his veteran lieutenant, the Egyptian Dr. Ayman Zuwahri are still firmly in the saddle.

15 May: When European Union's foreign affairs executive, Javier Solana, turned up in Riyadh Wednesday, May 13, his purpose was not to condemn the al Qaeda suicide killers' horrendous triple attacks two days earlier on Riyadh compounds housing many European expatriates - or even to comfort the many European victims in hospital. Brushing all other business aside, Solana, according to DEBKAfile's exclusive Middle East sources, presented Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal with his latest brainchild, a plan to force the Middle East road map down unwilling throats by ramming it through the UN Security Council as a mandatory resolution. This would be the panacea for all the region's ills, a view that would have met with Saudi approval.

Thursday, May 15, after the European bureaucrat had flown out to Damascus, the count was still incomplete of American, European, Australian, Asian and local dead and Riyadh's hospitals were choked with the injured. The FBI team sent to examine the scenes of the attacks was held up in Germany almost a day waiting for Saudi landing permission. The agents fretted over the loss of valuable data on the ground and leads to the perpetrators that needed to be collected when they were fresh to be of any use.

But Solana avidly promoted his latest scheme to limit "American hegemony" after the Iraq war.

The Security Council must first be called into urgent session to discuss the deteriorating situation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank as a result of Israeli military counter-terror operations. At the end of the debate, the road map will be put to the vote. The US as a signatory can hardly demur or exercise its veto. Neither will Britain oppose the draft for fear of jeopardizing its fence-mending efforts with Europe. Anyway, Tony Blair would rather see the UN assuming a role in the Palestinian conflict than in Iraq.

After adopting the road map resolution, the Security Council create an inspection or monitoring team to supervise its execution. This will meet Yasser Arafat's long-held ambition for an international body to move into the borderlands between Israel and Palestinian areas. Israel will be compelled to pull out of Palestinian locations and to give up its fight against terrorists.

Solana assured the Saudi foreign minister that he had already obtained French, Russian and German assent to his plan. In Damascus, he saw no difficulty in persuading the Syrian president to jump in as a way of pushing back the heat applied to him from Washington to get rid of his terrorist bases and connections.

The European official's road map initiative was one of the causes of Powell's failure on Wednesday May 14 to win Russian president Putin round to Washington's proposal to lift UN sanctions on Iraq. The US badly needs revenues from Iraqi oil sales to fund reconstruction and the imposition of law and order. Russia and the other governments who opposed the American war on Iraq now see their way to punishing the Bush administration for going ahead anyway as well as holding a lever for sinking US postwar plans by withholding funding and forcing Washington to report back to the Europeans and Security Council for approval of further progress. The powers vested in the security council format of endorsement coupled with an international inspections mechanism will thus be reinstated to bend Washington as well as Jerusalem to their will.

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