Mideast Roundup
June 20, 2003
The New Era
Two Huge US Intelligence Centers Go up in Iraq
The Americans are secretly building two giant intelligence facilities in Iraq at a cost of some half a billion dollars, according to an exclusive report received from DEBKA-Net-Weekly s intelligence sources. US engineering and construction units are setting up what amounts to an “intelligence city” on a site north of the oil city of Mosul in Kurdistan and a second facility in Baghdad s Saadun district on the east bank of the Tigris. Our military experts infer from the vast dimensions of the two projects and their colossal expense that it is Washington s intention to retain a large US military presence in Iraq in the long term, for a decade at least.
The new installations will greatly enhance America s military, intelligence and electronic command and control over Iraq and its neighbors, notably Iran and Syria. The Mosul facility will guard northern Iraq s oilfields and the pipelines carrying Iraqi gas and oil to Mediterranean terminals. Its instruments will reach into every corner of Iran and Syria, replacing America s electronic eyes and ears in southern Turkey. This facility will be activated a section at a time according to need. Upon completion at the end of 2005, it will employ an operating staff of around 4,000 American intelligence personnel and electronic engineers.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly s Middle East sources report that the intelligence center going up near Mosul is causing much nervousness in Damascus and Tehran. Both governments understand that when the first sections are activated in three months time, not a single military or intelligence move of theirs will go unseen by America s electronic spies - and that goes for terrorist activity as well.
That Baghdad station has been assigned completely different functions. While the Mosul center will provide early warning against external threats to the US military presence in Iraq, the Baghdad station will stand guard over America s political and military control of the capital and its satellite towns, including the Sunni enclave cities of Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit.
To clear a site for the giant facility, DEBKA-Net-Weekly s military sources report the Americans have expropriated the luxury Baghdad Hotel complex that straddles Saadun Street to the east and Abu Nuw as Street, which is a section of the Corniche along the Tigris, as well as the surrounding blocks between Firodos Square and the city s main bus terminal to the north at Naser Square.
Since the beginning of this week, an American airlift has been running large containers crammed with electronic parts from American army bases to Baghdad international airport.
Once the Baghdad electronic station is up and running it will aid US forces in their fight against guerrilla and terrorist assailants picking off GIs almost every day. These assaults are harmful but they do not detract from the overall American control over security in the broad expanses of a large country. There is every indication that the US civil administrator Paul Bremer is gradually pulling ahead of the difficulties. His recipe is simple. No Iraqi associated in any way with the overthrown Saddam regime or the outlawed Baath party is to be allowed to take part in government. Bremer equally bars from public service all Iraqis with foreign political connections, even American. This means that all political hopefuls from whatever party, ethnic group or religious sect will fight level for a place in government when the time comes - all standing at the same starting line.
This formula, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly s sources, pacified the rival Shiite factions who make up more than half the populace and who were on the verge of rising up against the American presence in the country. Now they are more ready to collaborate with the US civil administration, as are the Kurds under their rival leaders, Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Since Bremer took over in Baghdad, the two tribal leaders have decided to go for a merger to unite their movements into a single political entity. Without this union, neither holds much chance of office in the future central government.
Bush Middle East Policy
Built on Sand
Don t let George W. Bush s utopian perceptions of a Middle East peace fool you. The vision of a Palestinian state and a Jewish state living side by side in peace and prosperity does not cloud his bedrock perception that the Palestinians need a short leash. He fully intends to retain tight U.S. financial and political control over any Palestinian government, closely supervise its security and intelligence services and make sure their terrorist elements are expunged.
While genuinely aspiring to lift the terror threat darkening life in Israel, DEBKA-Net-Weekly s sources in Washington report that the Bush administration has come to realize that a measure of Israeli-Palestinian calm is the most that can be achieved for now in the framework of its overall regional strategic policy - especially in the light of events in Iraq (treated in a separate <#3>article in this issue). Most intelligence officials and counter-terrorism experts in Washington and Jerusalem have come to believe that it is impossible to eradicate suicide terrorism altogether at this time.
But even the Bush administration s modest goal of quenching the highest flames is fast slipping out of reach. Those flames are already licking around the edges of Washington s overall objectives in the Middle East, to the detriment of its strategic moves elsewhere in the world, notwithstanding the two regional summits in which Bush staked his personal prestige.
In some high-placed Washington circles quoted by DEBKA-Net-Weekly s sources, the talk is that the two summits were a mistake and will almost certainly backfire. The president s first get-together with supportive Arab rulers since the Iraq war at Sharm el-Sheikh on June 3 was far from cordial. His deliberations with the rulers of Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, attended also by Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, soon resolved themselves into what one source close to the event described as “tough behind-the-scenes arguments” with Saudi crown prince Abdullah and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Saudis Upset by Possible U-turn on Troop Withdrawal
At one point, tempers flared to the point that Abdullah was about to stalk out before the closing ceremony. He was only persuaded to sit down when Bush took him aside for a heart-to-heart that stressed the importance of not showcasing a fresh US-Saudi crisis in front of a regional and world audience.
One of the foremost irritants, DEBKA-Net-Weekly s intelligence sources exclusively reveal, was the possibility of Washington reneging on its promise to withdraw American troops from the oil kingdom no later than the start of winter 2003. This option is now on the president s desk, placed there in mid-May by US vice president Dick Cheney.
Only very rarely has the vice president been known to take strong issue with defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. However, he is flatly opposed to the pledge made to Riyadh by Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, commander of US forces in the Gulf, to yank the 10,000 US troops still in Saudi Arabia, mainly at the big Prince Sultan air base. In an urgent private interview with the president, Cheney said the decision was surprising and misjudged and fraught with three signal geo-political disasters.
A. It would expose the western flank of the US army in Iraq, leaving a military vacuum that would invite anti-American elements - Sunnis, Saddam Hussein loyalists, al-Qaeda terrorists and Syrian fighters - to take advantage and move into Saudi Arabia as their rear base for anti-American forays into Iraq. Saudi armed forces were not capable of stemming this incursion. Even if they could, Cheney said he was not sure Saudi leaders would want to actively run into conflict with these elements. They might prefer to support the Iraqi Muslim Sunnis spearheading the resistance to US forces, as their only channel of influence in postwar Iraq.
B. Saudi Arabia would be laid open to Al-Qaeda s drive to turn the kingdom into its primary territorial base in place of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden s command posts are now confined to the Empty Quarter and remote areas bordering on most of the Gulf emirates and Yemen. Once the American military presence was removed, they would surge forward into the Saudi heartland and cities.
Cheney likened Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan on the eve of the US invasion in October 2001. Then the Taliban, like the Saudi royals, nominally ruled the country and its urban centers but bin Laden held sway over extensive outlying areas. In the oil kingdom today, al Qaeda has reached fingers into entire suburbs of major Saudi cities as well as spreading through villages and Bedouin tribal regions. The Islamic radicals are also building up a presence at Saudi international airports and seaports. The deployment of their cells in Red Sea ports will allow terrorists to establish their first naval bases. They will be able to start threatening Suez Canal shipping to and from the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.
The US vice president added for emphasis that his staff had never received any confirmation of Riyadh s claim to have stopped the transfer of funds to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
C. The loss of a military foothold in Saudi Arabia will weaken Washington s leverage against Iran and ability to convincingly threaten military action against Tehran s clerical regime. The elimination of the US strategic flank to the west of Iraq will create a continuous chain of anti-American forces running from Syria, through the Sunni enclave of central Iraq and down south to fundamentalist Wahhabi country, exacerbating the peril of an al Qaeda takeover of Riyadh.
The president told Cheney, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly s sources in Washington, that he needed time to weigh the situation, but gave no indication of whether he would consider delaying the US troop pullout from Saudi Arabia.
At Sharm el-Sheikh, Bush was surprised to be jumped on by Saudi Arabia s Abdullah, who knew all about the Cheney briefing and demanded a clear answer on whether the promise to evacuate US troops from the kingdom was about to be reversed. Sources familiar with the behind-the-scenes exchanges at the summit revealed that the crown prince was equally biting about Washington s handling of postwar Iraq. He had nothing good to say about Paul Bremer, the top US political administrator in Baghdad. Finally, Abdullah sternly warned Bush against a military action against Iran.
Scared stiff of Western democracy, free trade
Egypt s president Hosni Mubarak, regarded as one of America s staunchest allies in the region, had a bone of his own to pick with President Bush - and not for the first time.
Mubarak has tried often to wean US leaders away from their overall design, formed before the Iraq war, to lead the Middle East toward a democratic future. This is an alien and radical concept for the Egyptian president, who believes its application would compel Arab nations to abandon their nationalist-religious ethos in favor of economic and civic progress. He sees it moreover as a recipe for toppling Cairo as number one power in the region, a prospect Mubarak believes would not deflect the Bush administration from its regional master-plan.
Hence his anger at Sharm el-Sheikh.
Mubarak believes Egypt has attained its pride of place in the region both as center of Arab nationalism and fountainhead of Islamic learning. The post of Arab League secretary is traditionally held by an Egyptian official - former foreign minister Amr Mussa is incumbent, while Cairo s Al-Azhar University has been esteemed for centuries as the pre-eminent seat of Islamic studies and home to great sages. Bush s campaign to push the Arab world out of its traditionalist base into the world of market economies, free trade agreements, economic cooperation and democratically elected institutions, strikes at the core of everything the Egyptian president has worked for over thirty years and confronts the country as he knows it with the danger of extinction.
Forced to adjust to open forums and Western economic mores, poverty-stricken Egypt, the second largest recipient of US foreign aid, would make a poor showing at the new Middle East and Persian Gulf forums. Egypt and Arab nationalism, which dominate Middle East politics today, would furthermore be eased to the fringes of the multiethnic platforms envisaged by Bush. Non-Arab regional participants like Turks, Kurds and Israelis would be raised level with the Arab components and Egypt downgraded as Arab nationalist exemplar.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly s sources note Mubarak has repeatedly warned Bush that he may rue the day if the Egyptian presidency is ploughed under by American economic reforms; his successor would be unlikely to fit into Washington s plans.
This warning he translated into a vivid scenario for the benefit of the US national security council. Should Al-Azhar University and its relatively moderate Sunni administration fall into the hands of radical Shiites, they would have gained a point of vantage for whipping the Muslim world into an anti-Western frenzy that would make the Khomeinist Islamic Revolution in Iran look tame.
According to our sources in Cairo, Mubarak lives in fear of setting off a Shiite chain reaction. He therefore cut short an initiative put forward by his senior political adviser, Osama el-Baz, sympathetically supported by the White House, to make Al Azhar the standard-bearer of moderate Sunnism against the radical Shiism of Tehran and the fundamentalist Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia. At all costs, the Egyptian ruler seeks to avoid confrontation with Muslim extremists. He believes Egypt should act as mediator and moderator between the two great schools of Islam rather than challenging the Shiites and extremists.
This philosophy also governs Cairo s Palestinian policies. Resisting the US president s call for a universal fight against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their suicide killers - voiced also at Sharm el-Sheikh - Egypt is sponsoring reconciliatory dialogues with the two Palestinian terrorist groups. The Egyptian leader rejects Bush s attempts to neutralize Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat. He needs Arafat as his back door to Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Gulf emirates.
At Sharm el-Sheikh, therefore, Mubarak sharply rebuffed the Bush demands for Arab governments to establish normal relations with Israel and open up the Middle East to free trade. He told the US president he wanted no part of these policies.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly s sources report that the two strong-willed presidents were left with no option but to agree not to agree.
Bush & Palestinians
Two Fresh Horses - But No Winners
Margaret Thatcher summed up her first impression of Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet leader in the dying moments of the Cold War, with the succinct comment: “I can do business with this man.”
Similarly, President George W. Bush gave the nod to Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian internal security chief on whom Washington is pinning its hopes of crushing the Islamic militants striving to derail the U.S.-backed Middle East peace offensive.
“I like this man,” said the president when he attended two Middle East summits earlier this month - at Sharm el Sheikh and Aqaba. “He s somebody we can work with.”
DEBKA-Net-Weekly s Middle East sources describe the no-nonsense Texan as being impressed by Dahlan s lucid and detailed presentation of his plan for winning the war against terrorism. They met at the June 4 summit hosted at Jordan s Red Sea resort by King Abdullah and attended also by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas.
“I shall move my forces from point A to point B,” said the Palestinian official. “Afterwards, I ll pour additional units into new areas as they are transferred to my control.”
His confidence in describing the way he meant to deploy tens of thousands of troops and security officers made it sound as easy as raking in the cash from the Gaza extortion rackets he is notorious for running.
With a straight face, Dahlan told the president he had so far marshaled a 4,000-strong force ready to leap into action against Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
“And what about Hamas?” Bush asked.
“Hamas will not be a problem. They will have no choice but to sit back and give up terrorism,” Dahlan replied.
Bush may be forgiven for viewing the Palestinian official through rose-colored glasses. He had received a glowing commendation of the security chief s ability from CIA director George Tenet, a personal friend since the Agency undertook to train members of Dahlan s Preventive Security Service in the Gaza Strip in the early 1990 s as a corollary of the Oslo interim peace accords. Officials close to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, particularly his bureau chief Dov Weisglass - who got to know Dahlan during the Oslo period - also sang his praises.
Dahlan - A Bottomless Pit
But DEBKA-Net-Weekly s Palestinian sources point to two flies in the ointment.
1. The Palestinians do not share the US president s enthusiasm for their new leaders, Abbas and Dahlan.
2. Shortly after his gung-ho presentation, the security chief s assessment of his forces turned out to be highly embellished. According to one credible estimate, he can muster at most 1,500 men; according to a second, none at all.
In a short, sharp encounter this week in Jericho, Dahlan rocked European Union member diplomats back on their heels when he rapped out that he needs at least $400 million from the EU to create a security force for combating terror, on top of the funds secretly pledged by Washington.
Reporting on the meeting, a European diplomat confided to our sources:
“Here was a man who had the cheek to demand millions of dollars on the table without even presenting us with a program.”
One of the Europeans present, who knew exactly how much Washington had pledged, did some fast arithmetic. He then passed a note round which said, “According to my reckoning, Dahlan s demands add up to each pair of shoes provided a Palestinian counter-terror officer costing $400,000!”
While European diplomats were taken aback by his brazenness, Palestinian and Israeli security officials know that the gimlet for bursting the Dahlan bubble sits in a drawer in the Palestinian prime minister s desk. It is an unpublished 275-page report from an inquiry Abbas commissioned five years ago into his future interior minister s complicity in the arms smuggling trade in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Also probed were his protection rackets. A silent partner in most Palestinian-owned companies, Dahlan also made sure of his cut from the special levies his preventive security service imposed on every Palestinian entering or leaving the Gaza Strip from or to Egypt, Jordan or the West Bank.
Dahlan and his underlings were described as taking over legitimate businesses by expropriating “in the interests of national security” the lots on which factories or office premises stood. To recover their property, those businesses were forced to take the head of preventive security, namely Dahlan, as their partner.
He soon became one of the richest men in the Palestinian Authority.
Dahlan embodies Arafat-al Qaeda link
More ominously, information gathered but never released by Pentagon intelligence, reveals how deeply Dahlan has always been immersed in Palestinian anti-Israel terror and international terrorism against US targets. In the 1990s Bosnian civil war, Dahlan is recorded by US intelligence as operating from the Palestinian embassy in Sarajevo to set up training camps for Muslim terrorists and provide them with false Middle Eastern and European passports. Upon graduating from his training camps, those recruits were equipped for overseas travel, whether to join al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the separatists in Chechnya or the extremist groups of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Some even headed for the Middle East.
Only last year, Dahlan on orders from Arafat took a personal hand in setting up the failed Karine-A arms smuggling venture, an attempt to ship to the Gaza Strip a cargo of Iranian-supplied weapons for the illicit uses of the Palestinian Authority and the Lebanese Hizballah.
Dahlan s men purchased the freighter from a pair of shady ship-owners, a Greek named Dimitri Kokus and Rifaat Mahmoud, a Pakistani-American. Registered as partners in the Delaware-incorporated Nova Spirit Inc., they clandestinely maintain and operate a fleet of some 20 ships for al-Qaeda. Dahlan s direct complicity in the Karine-A venture and his association with Kokus and Mohammed in Arafat s behalf are concrete evidence of an operational relationship between Yasser Arafat and al-Qaeda.
That murky association continues.
On June 17, DEBKAfile reported exclusively that Yousef Qaradawi, an influential preacher on al-Jazeera satellite television, had been recruited by Egypt and Dahlan to issue a fatwa, or Islamic religious edict, permitting the Hamas and Islamic Jihad to enter into a ceasefire, or hudna, with Israel.
(More about this episode in HOT POINTS below).
Sheikh Qaradawi is a key player in the so-called “axis of good”, an esoteric term known to Western circles dealing with global terrorism. Qaradawi also openly advocates suicide terror.
Abu Mazen - an honest cipher
As for Abu Mazen, he differs from Dahlan in that he is an honest man, untainted by the terrorism and corruption rampant in Arafat s Palestinian Authority.
That said, Abbas lacks a political power base and the savvy for butting heads with the wily Arafat and making his mark in a Palestinian leadership role. Palestinians and other informed Middle East sources long acquainted with Abu Mazen told DEBKA-Net-Weekly sources that he is a good man who stands little chance of performing effectively as prime minister.
On June 17, Abbas called a meeting of his own Fatah faction heads in the Gaza Strip to try and negotiate a deal to end terrorist attacks on Israel. “We have nothing to say to you,” a Fatah functionary told him. “You are not one of us. We do not like you and cannot accept anything you do.”
Abu Mazen s lack of credibility on the Palestinian street will offset any bid by the Bush administration to fit Abbas and Dahlan into the mold of its Middle East policy and lead it to a dead end.
Signs of disillusion with the new Palestinian leaders, Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan, were detected in Washington by DEBKA-Net-Weekly s sources late Thursday, June 19, despite the secretary of state Colin Powell s imminent arrival in the region the following day. Powell had hoped to usher in a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians, as a solid building block in the edifice American is building in the Middle East. However, as one dispirited source remarked: “With those two horses we won t get far.”
On closer acquaintance, prime minister Abu Mazen strikes American officials as a strange bird with little drive for getting things done and less political sophistication. It is now evident that Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and ambassador Eliot Abrams wasted the hours they put in explaining why he must set up an autonomous political channel completely detached from Yasser Arafat. He nodded to show he understood, but in his everyday pursuits he never takes a step (if at all) without checking first with Arafat.
Dahlan is turning out even more disappointingly. One Washington sources notes: “He talks big but carefully dodges any practical action obliging him to shoulder responsibility for sending Palestinian security forces against terrorists in any part of Palestinian territory, whether the Gaza Strip or the West Bank.” Furthermore, whenever Abbas requires his support, Dahlan is nowhere to be seen.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly s Washington sources, the Bush administration is beginning to realize that even if a ceasefire - or partial halt in violence - is proclaimed as planned in Cairo next week by all the terrorist groups, including the Hamas and Jihad Islami, it will be evanescent. Within hours, Palestinian terrorists will be rampant again and Israel will not be able to avoid military action to rein them in. There will be no escaping the long-deferred large-scale assault on the terrorist strongholds of the Gaza Strip to break up the Hamas and Jihad Islami structures and root out their al Qaeda and Hizballah operational cells.
Bill Clinton had hoped to wind up his two terms of office on the eve of the US presidential election in 2000 with the flourish of a historic peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Arafat sabotaged this effort by launching an armed confrontation, his Intifada, against Israel.
Bush may still hope to launch his 2004 bid for a second term by succeeding where Clinton failed - judging correctly that the Iraq War turned Middle East geo-strategically on its head. However, this epic transformation left Arafat in place, a fixture as Palestinian leader, capable at 75 of outfoxing any political foe - in Jerusalem or Washington.
Saudi Prince in Danger
Al-Qaida Plots Assassination of Interior Minister in Mecca
The clashes widely reported to have erupted on June 15-16 in the holy Muslim city of Mecca focused, DEBKA-Net-Weekly s exclusive sources reveal, on a well-laid al Qaeda plot to assassinate Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdelaziz. Nobody in Riyadh is admitting the peril that lurked behind the running gunfights in Mecca s Khalidiya quarter between Saudi security forces and terrorists, all of whom Prince Nayef declared in an angry statement Wednesday, June 18, were members of al Qaeda.
The Khalidiya quarter, an extensive neighborhood in central Mecca, is home to Saudi middle-class citizens as well as senior security officials, civil servants and senior religious clerics. It is located just 5 kilometers from Mecca s Great Mosque and the sacred Kaaba .
Mecca was the scene of a major insurrection in 1979 when fundamentalists from the Wahhabi Oteiba tribe took over the Great Mosque to declare a revolt against the House of Saud. The rebellion was only put down after two weeks when a French anti-terror force made a sacrilegious incursion of the compound.
The Saudis never publish reliable information about the attempted insurrections breaking out every few days and the clashes stirred up between security forces and al-Qaida operatives in remote townships. It is therefore hard to tell at this stage if al Qaida cells were planning to murder the prince during his visit to Mecca, or use the town as springboard for attacks in other locales toured by Nayef last week, like Medina, Jeddah or Mena, to inspect the state of readiness of security forces.
The 70-year-old Naif, a scion of the power-wielding Sudeiri branch of the Saudi dynasty, headed by the ailing King Fahd, defense minister Sultan and Riyadh s Prince Salman, supervises the war against al Qaida. He has been accused of chaotic management of the campaign - especially after Osama bin Laden s men succeeded on May 12 in striking three elite housing compounds in Riyadh populated by American intelligence advisers and other Western VIPs. He was hauled over the coals by Crown Prince Abdullah, who found the command of the security forces too clumsy and slow-moving to catch up with the al Qaida operatives who were making free of the kingdom.
DEBKAfile s intelligence and anti-terror sources report that in their latest attack in Mecca, al Qaida units repeated the modus operandi used in Riyadh:
The assailants split up into two groups of 15 to 20 terrorists, each assigned a separate safe house as operations center and store for weapons and ammunition. One group was charged with carrying out the attack - in this case shooting up the Interior Minister s motorcade; the second stood by for one of two eventualities - either to spring into action and finish the job should the first group fail in its mission, or cover its getaway after a successful strike.
This technique worked well in Riyadh. Four days prior to the May 12 attack, Saudi security personnel discovered the al-Qaida strike cell s hideout and liquidated most of its members in a shootout. Unbeknownst to the Saudis, a second cell was in hiding in a separate location ready instead to carry out the triple attack on the gated compounds. Three days later, Al Qaeda s dual track tactic went into operation in the attacks in Riyadh.
This week in Mecca, Saudi security forces, having drawn the painful lesson of Riyadh, activated their own dual track. One unit confronted the first al Qaeda group, while a second went hunting for its hidden mate. Although the Saudi searchers came up empty-handed - the safe houses were deserted and empty - their diligence in keeping up the pursuit thwarted the assassination of Nayef.
DEBKAfile s counter-terror sources assign high military marks to al Qaeda s planning even though the murder did not come off.
The assassins were positioned at three ambush positions several hundreds yards apart along the route of the interior minister s motorcade. “Alpha group” was tasked with firing rocket-propelled grenades at the minister s armored limousine; “Bravo group” with hurling powerful poison-spiked bombs at any vehicles surviving the first anti-tank salvo. “Charlie group,” was to rake the scene with machine gun fire throughout the attack to cut down any bodyguards trying to exit the vehicles and interdict any approaching Saudi security personnel.
All the above-mentioned weaponry - anti-tank rockets, bombs, machine guns and chemical toxins - was exposed at the safe house raided in the Khalidiya quarter of Mecca.
DEBKAfile s military sources note that the Mecca gunfights showed up the rundown state of the kingdom s military forces. Al Qaeda, in contrast, is thriving. The arms and ammo dumps turned up in recent weeks in Riyadh, Jeddah, Medina, Hilal and Mecca, are clearly only the tip of the terror iceberg whose true dimensions Saudi security has yet to uncover.
The royal forces have decided that their only safe working hypothesis must be that no city, town, village or tribal area is without its heavily armed local al Qaeda unit. Security in the kingdom has accordingly been tightened drastically. Foreign visitors find large police and military units manning roadblocks along city thoroughfares and the entrances to neighborhoods; intercity travelers are frequently stopped at military checkpoints along the highways.
DEBKAfile s intelligence sources report additionally that Saudi security forces are undergoing rigorous vetting in obedience to a directive from Crown Prince Abdullah. The princes and senior administrators sent to the outlying provinces after the May attack in Riyadh are busy screening local security units for their loyalty to the crown. Suspected al Qaeda sympathizers and religious zealots have been listed for weeding out. Our sources disclose the lists as containing thousands of names. Rather than carry out mass purges that might rock the throne, the government has put large numbers of suspects out to pasture. Some are given early retirement, others dumped in detention camps and charged with drug running or other felonies. Around a thousand such detentions are believed to have been made in the last week.
Yet al Qaida s influence appears to be gaining in top Saudi circles while the grip of central government weakens.
Last week, Crown Prince Abdullah invited several hundred members of Riyadh's social and financial elite to join him at the central royal library. He brought up the matter of the changes sweeping the capital - not to mention the monarchy - in the wake of the al-Qaida terror assault. Abdullah, who finds these close get-togethers useful for keeping tabs on the country s power circles, also uses them to weigh which politician or businessman gets a cash allowance. None of the people invited would normally dare not show up for fear of incurring Abdullah s displeasure.
However, last week, for the first time in the history of these informal gatherings,
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report that about a half of the invitees took a pass, although they took care to excuse themselves on the grounds of sudden illness or overseas travel. This conduct, scandalous by Saudi standards, bears witness to the trends current in the oil kingdom. Many high-powered members of the court and government, heeding al Qaeda's threat against the royal house and its supporters, are becoming increasingly wary of publicly showing the royal flag.
In any event, the House of Saud seems to have good reason for worry.
Iran
Cheers for Protesters Back Home from Los Angeles-based Farsee TV
Iran s clerical regime fears that the most sustained anti-government student protest in 24 years of Khomeinist Islamic rule - now in its second week and spreading out of Tehran - could well explode into a popular insurrection. The protesters are avidly egged on by opposition groups overseas, who are demonstrating that the television screen is a potent vehicle of disruption - even when the content is beamed by satellite from half a world away into the homes of ordinary Iranians.
Around the clock, nine Farsi language television stations are celebrating the anti-clerical unrest in Iran from studios in Los Angeles, where more than 400,000 Iranians who fled their country with the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, now live.
The most popular is Television-e Mellie-e Iranian (National Iranian Television, or NITV) established by the popular former singer Zia Atbay. It broadcasts political programs as well as vintage Iranian movies and entertainment and satirical shows that poke fun at the ayatollahs regime.
Television-e Azadi (The Freedom TV), a strong supporter of the late shah s son, bluntly calls on Iranians to rise up and overthrow the regime. Its most popular presenter, former movie star Reza Fazeli, went into exile in London after the Islamic revolution and produced satirical plays that portrayed Iran s clergymen-leaders as liars and crooks using religion as a cover for financial felonies. Video tapes of the productions were sold in their thousands around the world - to the Iranian government s great consternation. Five years ago Fazeli moved to Los Angeles.
Iran has joined the battle of the air waves, setting up several television stations of its own with a strong radical Islamic slant. Some broadcast entertainment shows in a bid to draw viewers away from the politically-heavy content of the exile stations. Iran has also been trying to jam the Iranian-American satellite broadcasts. But many Teheran residents manage to record the programs and sell the video cassettes at inflated prices to eager viewers.
HOT POINTS
(that you may have missed in DEBKAfile Round-the-Clock)
A Digest of the Week s Exclusives
8 June: Leading Palestinian factions are marking the Aqaba summit period as open season for terror. Sunday morning, June 8, the three dominant groups, Fatah - with suicide arm al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hamas and Jihad Islami, for the first time publicly admitted acting in unison to murder four Israelis and injure four at the Erez checkpoint between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Each named the gunman it had sent for the strike.
The spot chosen for the attack - the Gaza-Israeli checkpoint through which ten thousand Gazans were allowed to go back to jobs in Israel as a pre-Aqaba summit gesture by Israel - signaled their rejection of any but violent Palestinian interchanges with the Jewish state and their defiance of efforts by Abu Mazen and Dahlan to carry out understandings reached under the aegis of the US president, George W. Bush.
This was first signaled hours after the Aqaba summit broke up on Wednesday, June 4, when terrorists used axes and knives to hack an Israeli couple to death in a Jerusalem wood. From that moment on, as terror threats spiraled, Israel began to reverse the goodwill gestures made for the Aqaba summit.
At Aqaba, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon shocked many Israeli with three epic concessions:
1. Recognition of the legitimacy of an independent Palestinian state.
2. Recognition of the need for territorial contiguity between the two parts of the Palestinian state, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
3. His assertion: “No unilateral actions by any party may prejudge the outcome of our negotiations.” The reference was to the past and to Jewish settlements - not just the unauthorized outposts. These settlements were established “unilaterally” by democratically elected Israeli governments led by both major parties on land which Sharon recently indicated may be judged retrospectively as “occupied”. Their presence thus becomes an obstacle to a final peace accord and their removal justified.
In return for these concessions, did the Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas say he recognized Israel as Jewish state? Did he renounce the demand for the return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees? He did neither.
But the concession of greatest relevance was the nod he gave to a comprehensive plan formulated by Dahlan for converting terrorists into cops, after the proposal was endorsed by President George W. Bush - even though it was pronounced unworkable or worse by Israeli security and anti-terror chiefs
That plan was first revealed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly 112 on June 6:
9 June: Syrian President Bashar Assad s attempts to hitch a ride on the Middle East road map is aimed at getting something for nothing - an Israeli pledge to restore the Golan before negotiations - to take minds off his troubles. One is the active American attempt to hijack the Hizballah, one of his most powerful levers. For two weeks a senior US official has been in Beirut secretly negotiating the voluntary disarmament of the Hizballah, its withdrawal from the Israeli frontier and parts of southern Lebanon and a pledge to stay out of Iraqi Shiite affairs.
In the longer term, the Americans want guarantees from the group that it will break off operational ties with Yasser Arafat and his Fatah-Tanzim and al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as well as the Hamas and the Jihad Islami, and stand aside in a potential outbreak of hostilities with Iran.
The middleman for US-Hizballah negotiations is the Lebanese Shiite religious leader, Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.
Seen from the presidential palace in Damascus, the United States by conquering Iraq knocked away his eastern prop and is now chipping away at his mainstay in the west, Lebanon.
He is also having a hard time executing a government shakeup.
1. Syrian prime minister Mustafa Miro has to go because he is a Kurd and therefore unacceptable in the Arab world since Iraq s Kurds helped American conquer the country.
2. The hard-line Farouk Shara is fighting for to retain his hold on the foreign affairs portfolio against Assad s new favorite Dr. Busayana al Shaban, head of information at the foreign ministry.
3. The Syrian president has decided to sack veteran defense minister Gen. Mustafa Tlas to curry favor wit the Americans because his son, Firas Tlas conducted on behalf of the Syrian regime all the transactions for the smuggling of weapons and oil to and from Iraq in Saddam Hussein s day. He also arranged for the transfer of Iraq s weapons of mass destruction from Baghdad and Tikrit into Syria on its way to Lebanon. Parts of this arsenal were destroyed; the rest buried under an army base in northern Syria and huge pits dug by Syrian engineering units in the Beqaa valley. Assad will sacrifice the father but discreetly keep the son in his employ.
12 June: As the 20-year old human bomb from Hebron, Abdel Muttu Shabana, tore into the packed Jerusalem 14A bus in rush hour traffic opposite the city s open air market - killing 16 Israelis and injuring more than one 100 - an Egyptian delegation representing the US, Israeli and Palestinian governments sat down opposite a Hamas delegation in Gaza City. The Egyptians were there to solicit the hard-line Islamic terror group s consent to a ceasefire - and they were having a hard time.
The delegation s leader, Mubarak s special emissary, Egyptian intelligence chief, General Omar Suleiman, had spent the afternoon in Ramallah trying to cajole Yasser Arafat into endorsing a truce, only to be turned down by an Arafat reveling in his newfound relevance.
Israelis, stunned by the horror of the attack, listened to President George W. Bush s words of condemnation “in the strongest possible terms” and his call on the free world to cut off support to the enemies of peace such as the Hamas. They also heard their prime minister Ariel Sharon promise to hunt the Palestinian terror groups and their leaders down relentlessly, while not abandoning the search for peace.
This two-track approach to Palestinian organizations that live by the bomb has found further expression in the presence in Israel and the Palestinian Authority for some days of a CIA mission seeking to arrange a ceasefire, undeterred by advice from Israeli and other counter-terror experts that, the more the negotiations advance, the harder the bargain Hamas will drive and the more intense its terrorist activity. The only way to bring a violent group of this kind to accede to a truce is to break up its structure.
Thus far, however, the Americans have preferred holding off extreme action.
DEBKAfile s Washington sources report that President Bush is determined to keep the ceasefire negotiations with the Hamas on track even after the slaughter on the Jerusalem bus on Wednesday, June 11. The Israeli prime minister concurs - so too do Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Abu Mazen.
14 June: Operation Peninsula Strike exposed a large quotient of foreign combatants from Arab countries Saudis, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians and Palestinians from Syria or Lebanon mixed in with the Fedayeen Saddam, Baathists and former Republican Guards officers mounting lethal ambushes against US troops in and around Baghdad. But no one says where they are coming from.
The answer, according to DEBKAfile s intelligence and military sources, is quite simply Syria, its president Bashar Assad along with chiefs of his military intelligence, which run Syria s terrorist connections, and Firas Tlas, son of defense minister Mustafa Tlas.
The makeup of the “foreign Islamic legion” Syria is pumping into Iraq to fight against the American presence strongly resembles the al Qaeda combat force deployed on northern Iraq s Afghan border, in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Dubai and Chechnya - as well as Syria and Lebanon.
Syrian military intelligence is raising this combat force in three places:
1. South Lebanon where several Qaeda operatives have foregathered as guests of Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist groups.
2. The hundreds medresas springing up in the poor districts of Damascus.
3. The Muslim tourists crowding into Damascus to take advantage of the only Arab city with no entry controls Islamic traffic and traffic hub with no controls on movement.
The Syrians have put their foot through the Iraqi door partly with an eye on the oil-rich Mosul, but mostly to find replace sources of revenue for his contraband trade of weapons and oil with he Saddam Hussein. In May, the Americans intercepted two trucks laden with gold bullion on its way to the Syrian border. Many more trucks must have got through.
Syrian intelligence is also running a steady trickle of fighters, funds, weapons and explosives into the West Bank, aid for the terrorist groups under Yasser Arafat s command, the primary source of weapons and explosives nourishing the hard-line Palestinian terror organizations.
DEBKAfile s intelligence reveal that, shortly before the Aqaba summit of June 4, the Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas secretly sent a high-ranking aide to Damascus to ask Syrian officials to put a stop to this flow of fighters and weapons to Palestinian areas controlled by Arafat. He was rebuffed.
While Syria s involvement in Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can no longer be denied, it is hard to understand why the Bush administration obdurately refuse to point the finger at the Assad regime, when it continues to send across hostile combatants to join the Iraqi resistance that harms US servicemen and actively sabotages Washington s plans for a new Middle East.
17 June: Very shortly, Israelis will wake up to find their military forces pulling out of the northern Gaza Strip and Bethlehem and handing over the war on terror originating in those regions to Palestinian prime minister Abu Mazen and his internal security minister Mohamed Dahlan.
The key to the truce was provided by the man in the picture. His name is Yousef Qaradawi.
On December 2, DEBKAfile introduced Qaradawi as the author of the Islamic concept of “the good axis” as the antithesis of President George We. Bush s axis of evil and a popular disseminator of al Qaeda s doctrines in a regular weekly broadcast over the Arab television station al Jazeera. No links between Qaradawi and Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda have ever been proven, but for 90 minutes every Sunday, he fills his “Sharaya and Life” program with bin Laden s teachings.
The main burden of his sermons is the justification of suicidal terror.
The document the Egyptian ceasefire brokers presented Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on Sunday, June 15, was not an American or an Israel guarantee to end targeted assassinations of terror chiefs or incursions, but the far more potent Qaradawi fatwa with permission for the terrorist groups to join the Palestinian Authority in a ceasefire. The document does not state with whom, never mentioning Israel, but it set in motion the following course of events:
1. The Hamas, Jihad Islami and Fatah secretly accepted a truce.
2. It will be announced only after another round of Egyptian-Palestinian Authority talks in Cairo. Until then, all the parties, including Israel, will act as through the Egyptian ceasefire bid is in stalemate.
3. Some of the understandings agreed by the United States, the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas as part of the truce deal will not be published.
4. To avoid the ceasefire being seen to be a Palestinian accord with Israel, the original order of truce first and Israeli withdrawal second was reversed.
Israeli leaders reiterated this week that a truce is in the country s worst interests. The Sharon government has nonetheless been swept up by the diplomatic dynamic generated in Gaza City this week and is heading for a partial troop withdrawal and a ceasefire without the Palestinians interrupting their terrorist offensive for one moment.
Many Israelis are asking to what Palestinian hands they are entrusting their security from terror assault. The question has been answered on frequent occasions by DEBKAfile - Yasser Arafat, the eminence behind the Abbas throne. Even if by some miracle, Abu Mazen and Dahlan are able to ring down the curtain on terror from the regions under their control, the next source of trouble has already made itself known. This week, for the first time, Palestinian missiles were fired from Rafah and Khan Younes - the southern end of the Gaza Strip at a kibbutz and moshav in the southern Negev. As in the past, the Israeli army will be pressed into the effort to recover lost strategic points for fighting terror and contend with terrorist forces fresh from the respite of a truce and armed with replenished stocks of weapons and energy.
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