Mideast Roundup

Sept. 29, 2003

Iran's Nuclear Clock Is Ticking Fast

Monday, October 6, is a date picked up this week by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's informed military and intelligence sources as a possible date for Tehran to spring a surprise nuclear test of some sort on the United States and Israel. That date would correspond to the 30th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War against Israel which the Arab and Muslim world has always maintained it won.

It so happens that this year, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) falls once again on October 6, as it did in 1973.

The United States and Israel would be taken by surprise because they are working on the assumption that Iran cannot go nuclear before late 2005.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's experts have consistently challenged that hypothesis. In October 2002, DNW No. 82 revealed that Iran already possessed a nuclear device built with the help of North Korean, Chinese and Pakistani scientists.

Our sources continue to maintain that the Iranian program is far more advanced than believed. So much so that some of DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources have heard that Iran and North Korea are contemplating simultaneous nuclear tests as early as the coming Monday. There's no hard evidence of this happening but it is definitely under discussion.

The two might be thinking that a double test would head off American and Israeli reprisals.

The Israeli prime minister's office and intelligence leaders sat up and took notice Monday, September 22, when they read an interview with Iran's air force chief Reza Pardis in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Hayat, in which he threatened Israel with powerful retribution if it dared attack an Iranian nuclear reactor or any of its nuclear facilities.

"Israel knows the Iranian air force has a plan of attack and therefore I believe that Israel will not dare to strike," he said.

The strong wording of the threat to Israel is unusual and has not been heard from Tehran since Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. Our intelligence sources report that Sharon's office alerted the White House to the Iranian air force commander's remarks.

A still more ominous happening occurred Thursday, September 24 just before DEBKA-Net-Weekly went to press. At a closed meeting attended only by the top commanders of the Iranian armed forces and Revolutionary Guards, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Muslims everywhere will soon wake up to a discovery.

"With God's help and great power, we will carry out our mission to defend the homeland and the entire Muslim world," he said. "I repeat my promise that very soon your eyes and those of the world will be opened."

The Farsi phrase: "Your eyes will be opened" - repeated twice - is generally interpreted in Tehran as meaning only one thing: an Iranian nuclear test is in the offing.


Putin at Camp David

No Plan, No Expectations, No Decisions

President George W. Bush had high hopes of his weekend visitor Russian president Vladimir Putin, whom he has invited to spend September 26 and 27 at his Camp David retreat. Bush had looked to his guest for help in finding some partial answers to the difficulties facing the United States in Iraq and a contribution that might provide uplift to his own falling approval ratings at home.

But DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Moscow report that Putin will disappoint his host.

Just before setting out for the UN General Assembly session and his Camp David summit, the Russian president came to a decision to indefinitely postpone any bilateral diplomatic, military or economic understandings with the US president.

Even such strategically crucial accords as the partnership to develop an oil terminal and pipeline from Murmansk to the U.S. East Coast (as reported in DEBKA-Net-Weekly's No. 125 issue on September 12, 2003) have been put on ice in the Kremlin.

The Russian president confided to his advisers that he did not mind being flexible and lending Bush a helping hand, but no commitments for the moment. His decision to stay away from the UN General Assembly session opening addressed by Bush signaled a new wind blowing from Moscow and caught the White House by surprise.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly will outline the outcome of the Bush-Putin summit in its coming issue next week as well as providing some insights into the most recent Kremlin decision-making processes.


The Clintons Go on and on...

Bill Launches His Senatorial Race in Tel Aviv

The F.O.B.s (Friends of Bill) were astounded.

Red-eyed and hoarse after joining an 80th birthday bash in Tel Aviv for his buddy Shimon Peres, former President William Jefferson Clinton laid out some startling personal political plans before a group of veteran supporters that included the Labor Party chief - who can only dream of winning a national election for the first time - and several influential American Jewish leaders and potential campaign contributors.

"Hillary will return to the White House as president and I'll be elected US senator from Arkansas," Clinton said on Tuesday, September 23, as the room fell silent and jaws dropped.

"Once in the Senate, I'll be elected house majority leader - and it could all happen much sooner than you think," he said, hinting at a run in 2004 rather than in 2008.

Only one US president, John Quincy Adams, chose to run for Congress after leaving the White House. Adams - like George W. Bush the only president whose father also held the post - won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1830, a year after completing a single term in the Oval Office.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report that Clinton described as "not serious" remarks he was quoted as making in support of the presidential candidacy of retired general Wesley Clark at an intimate dinner party with a small group of advisers at the family residence in Chappaqua, New York last week. "Hillary and I support him because he is a good man - and we would support any good candidate. But if we were really thinking along those lines, I wouldn't have planned the important political trip I'm on now, from Bosnia to the Gulf to Tel Aviv," Clinton said.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources, Clinton described his junket as "a preliminary probe on the road back to the White House". Asked by one of the F.O.B.s if he meant that he was blazing a path for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to become president, Bill just stared at his questioner for a couple of seconds and said nothing.

Clinton, 57, has made no secret of his frustration over the 22nd Amendment, passed after Franklin Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term. Two terms, Clinton has said publicly, is simply not enough time to carry out presidential policy to the full.

"I think since people are living much longer... the 22nd Amendment should probably be modified to, say, two consecutive terms instead of two terms in a lifetime," he said in a speech in May in Boston. He also said at the time he did not think such a change would apply to him, but benefit future generations instead.

Only one man, Grover Cleveland, has been elected to non-consecutive terms as president. He served as the 22nd president from 1885 to 1889 and as the 23rd occupant of the Oval Office from 1893 to 1897.

Clinton sounded particularly presidential in describing to his friends in Tel Aviv his visit earlier this week to Srebrenica, where he participated in a memorial for the 7,000 men, women and children massacred by Bosnian Serbs in 1995. He spoke at length about his special relationship with the Muslim community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and especially his friendship with former prime minister Alia Izetbegovic, whose health has deteriorated recently.

Izetbegovic, Clinton said, "was a man we could work with".

"Instead of confrontation, ways must be found to cooperate," Clinton said, adding: "In many ways, the Balkans are no less important than the Middle East."

It was Clinton's way of hinting that the war in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein should not be the main arena for the US battle against Muslim terrorism.

In a speech some 16 hours earlier at the American University in Dubai, Clinton said about Iraq: "What we need is for the UN to nominally supervise the security situation and NATO to be used as an instrument."

His comments were a clear reference to the way his administration handled the crisis in Kosovo. It was invaded by NATO in 1999 and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was deposed. Now he is on trial at The Hague for war crimes.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Clinton said, should also be solved through the use of international forces. "International forces should be invited to enforce agreements and see through a transitional period," he said.

His listeners in the room had no doubt Clinton was setting forth what he regarded as policy lines he expected to be able to enforce in the future. Summing up, Clinton said he knew the fight he and Hillary planned to wage against President George W. Bush would not be an easy one, but he was certain they could count on the help of all their loyal friends, and "with strong international backing" return "to the position we once held" in Washington.

As dawn broke after the late-night meeting with Bill, one of the participants shook his hand warmly and said: "Next year in Washington."

"You bet," Clinton replied.


Guantanamo Spy Affair

A Suddenly Helpful Damascus

While Syrian information minister Ahmed al Hassan made a show of innocence - "How could Syria have a spy in Guantanamo?" he asked on September 25 - his bosses in Damascus had a more down-to-earth reaction to the uncovering of a suspected nest of Syrian spies inside Camp X-Ray, the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which holds some 680 al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist suspects. Suddenly, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources reveal, high sources at the Radwa presidential palace were on the telephone to the White House and falling over themselves with offers of help for American efforts in the Middle East - and Iraq in particular.

What are we talking about? - was the wary response from White House officials at the other end of the line.

Two main items, replied the Syrians.

A.
We can now tell you that $700 million of Saddam Hussein's money is on deposit in banks in Damascus and Aleppo - mostly Aleppo. (Until now, Damascus flatly denied Aleppo banks were being used by the deposed Iraq president and his supporters as their main conduit for bankrolling the Iraqi guerrilla campaign against US forces.) Radwa palace was willing to go so far as to transfer Saddam's hidden funds to Baghdad for the use of the Iraqi Governing Council - a policy about-turn of 180 degrees. It meant that Damascus was offering to be the first Arab government to recognize the American occupation of Iraq, as well as the US-appointed provisional government and the termination of the Saddam regime in Baghdad.

B.
We can let you have special security teams of Syrian special forces and military intelligence agents to operate alongside US forces in northern and central Iraq for two objectives: 1. Some of the teams would be deployed to seal the border between the two countries against the passage of Islamic guerrilla fighters into Iraq. (Until now, the Syrians pretended to use three brigades of special forces for this purpose but in reality ordered them to facilitate the transit in collaboration with the Arab tribes of the border regions - as DEBKA-Net-Weekly 126 revealed last week.). 2. The remaining special security teams would be positioned in the central Sunni Triangle and assist the American forces in their hunt for Saddam Hussein.

On the face of it, this offer is astonishingly forthcoming. No other Middle East or Muslim party has ever come forward with any such offer since the Americans launched their invasion of Iraq.

Yet, according to our sources in Washington, the White House responded to the offers tumbling out of Damascus with a curt promise of consideration and a reply in due course.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terror sources have this to add: The Syrian approach to Washington was prompted by utter panic. A Syrian spy ring has been caught red-handed in the heart of a facility holding the most dangerous al Qaeda terrorists in American hands.

Last March and April, Damascus developed a similarly helpful attitude when Syria was caught granting asylum to hundreds of top Iraqis with their families while letting pro-Saddam fighters enter Iraq. Then, the Syrians were scared enough to turn in a few, though not all, of the fugitives to American forces and stage the captures of some of the trucks escaping with Saddam's money to Syrian highways. The Assad regime was willing then to make a show of changed spots to ward off US military retaliation and only just made it. On April 13 and 14, US 101st Airborne Division and Delta forces were on their way to hit military targets in Syria when President George W. Bush held up a last-minute stop sign.

This time, the Syrians will have to run hard and fast to hold Washington off. In any case, a steep price will be demanded to persuade the US just to take a look at Damascus's peace offerings.

Five key American demands will be laid on the table at once:

1.
The names of the high Syrian officials running the spy ring in the United States.

2.
A promise to arrest them and put them freely at the disposal of US investigators.

3.
It being unlikely that the Damascus sent spies to American on its own behalf, the identities of the recipients of the stolen US intelligence - Saudis, al Qaeda or other foreign intelligence bodies. Holding back any of this information will be deemed tantamount to non-cooperation.

4.
A binding Syrian commitment to put a stop to the presence of al Qaeda and other Islamic terror organizations in Damascus.

5.
Complete openness on the locations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Syrian military engineering units trucked from Iraq into Syria between January 10 and March 10 2003.

The Bush administration will require Bashar Assad's cooperation on additional issues. For instance, US intelligence does not trust the $700 million figure cited by Damascus as the amount Saddam and his insiders are holding in Syrian banks. It is thought to be around double that sum.

Even complete answers from Damascus on every query will not compensate the United States for the colossal damage to its national security generated by the Guantanamo espionage affair.

To appreciate the true dimensions of the damage, it is necessary to hark back to some of the pertinent background:

Yee and al-Halabi: Outgrowths of early al Qaeda penetrations

It doesn't take a counter-terrorism genius to grasp that the discovery of a Muslim spy ring inside the Guantanamo Bay detention center puts Washington back to square one in its shadow war against Osama bin Laden's global terrorist network.

Senior Airman Ahmed I. al-Halaba, 24, of Detroit, Michigan, an Arabic translator at the base, has been charged with 32 criminal counts, including espionage and aiding the enemy. He is a Syrian native who moved to the United States as a teenager. Arrested on July 23, al-Halabi was later transferred to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

In addition, the military is holding army Islamic Chaplain Yousef James Yee, 35, a Chinese-American brought up as a Lutheran who converted to Islam. He was employed as a chaplain at the facility in Cuba. Arrested on September 10 on suspicion of espionage, Yee is being held at the consolidated Naval Brig in Charleston, SC

Their activities may well originate in the malignant seeds planted in US intelligence by the notorious triple spy, the late Larry Wu-Tai Chin. From 1976 to 1982, this Chinese-born American intelligence officer in the CIA's foreign information service provided Beijing and Moscow with a treasure trove of the CIA's top secret reports on the Far East. Larry Wu-Tai also planted an intricate clandestine Chinese intelligence infrastructure in the United States. In keeping with the smoke-and-mirrors nature of counterintelligence, it was also possible for him to put together spy networks for China's rival, Taiwan.

Caught in 1985 - four years after he retired - he was convicted a year later on 17 espionage-related charges. He committed suicide in his cell a month before he was due to be sentenced.

Since Wu-Tai died before many of his networks were uncovered, it is possible that Yousef Yee, the Imam of Guantanamo, is a second or third generation operative of the nest of moles he planted.

As if Wu-Tai's perfidy was not enough, US intelligence was dealt another bitter blow by the infamous Aldrich Ames, a CIA turncoat who spied for the KGB for nine years before his arrest in 1994. During that time, Ames, who is now serving life imprisonment without parole, sold - for $2 million in cash and another $2 million waiting for him in a Moscow bank -- the names of every US spy planted in the Soviet Union. In charge of clandestine operations around the world, he became the most dangerous mole ever to burrow into the CIA.

Ames and Chin were well acquainted and their networks cooperated in strategic and operational matters - and not just in the United States; their tentacles stretched to the Far East and Middle East, notably to Iraq and Syria. It is no coincidence that President George W. Bush has frequently spoken of the need to dismantle Baghdad's intelligence machine in order to win the worldwide war against terrorism. Those links remain buried to this day.

Ames ran a multiple operation in the Middle East. He set up and controlled spy networks for the CIA, blew them to his KGB masters in Moscow and twice enlisted, in 1981 and 1986, an Egyptian intelligence officer, a fundamentalist Muslim called Ali A. Mohammed.

From Ali Mohammed to Yousef Yee

With Ames behind him, Mohammed was accepted by special US units tasked with fighting Muslim terrorist groups. In this capacity, the Egyptian made occasional trips during the 1980s to Afghanistan for contacts with Osama bin Laden on behalf of US intelligence. Bin Laden cooperated at the time with the American effort to fight the Soviet occupation of the country. The Russians were routed and evicted from Afghanistan in 1987. But Mohammed continued traveling to the country for his meetings with bin Laden. The Egyptian was "run" by Ames as a double agent against US interests; while the Saudi-born fundamentalist was about to begin charting his terror offensive against the United States.

In the 1990s, Bin Laden was forced by US and Saudi pressure to relocate his operations from Afghanistan to Khartoum. Mohammed helped organize this flight and establish al Qaeda's central base in the Sudanese capital.

There, bin Laden embarked on his disastrous war of terror on the United States. To this day, no one in the US intelligence community can say for sure what precise role Ames played in this development before his arrest in 1994. In retrospect, it is clear that Bin Laden's transfer to Sudan was the pivot for the expansion of his terrorist networks across the Middle East, Horn of Africa and East Africa.

Those networks were directly responsible for American setbacks like the 1993 "Blackhawk Down" battle in Mogadishu in which US Rangers and Delta Force commandos fell into a lethal trap set by Al Qaeda operatives fighting alongside the militia of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed.

By 1995, Bin Laden was striking out right and left. In that year, he mounted a failed attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak near Addis Ababa international airport; in 1998, al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Horrific climaxes were reached with the September 11, 2001 suicide air attacks in New York and Washington and the May 12, 2003 bombing of foreigners' compounds in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

One of DEBKA-Net-Weekly's top experts on Al Qaeda says he is constantly surprised to see operatives allied with the Egyptian fundamentalist double agent in the 1980s and 1990s still fully functioning in terrorist operations of the last two years.

Yee, al-Halabi and the Syrian link to al Qaeda

Examination of the chronology brings another link to light: James Yousef Yee traveled to Damascus in 1995 to study with Syria's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, at a school called Abu Nur. Mohammed, then at the peak of his powers as a senior Bin Laden lieutenant, undoubtedly met Yee who spent four years in Syria. Bin Laden habitually recruits from the school's student body and the Chinese-American would have been easy prey. After all, Mohammed must have known of his pending arrival, perhaps on a tip-off from the Ames' network - which continued to operate from 1995 under the direction of FBI turncoat Philip Robert Hanssen or Wu-Tai's successor-moles.

What all this adds up to is the likelihood that James Yousef Yee has been spying for nine years for the double agent networks created by Ames and Wu-Tai, who put him in touch with Al Qaeda with whom they had nurtured crossed links. Syria became one of the key hubs of these interconnections from the mid-1990s and is more important now than ever before. It was not by chance that Yee took a Syrian wife or that Senior Airman al-Halabi is of Syrian extraction and upbringing.

On Wednesday, September 24, Syrian cabinet ministers scrambled to deny any direct or indirect Syrian involvement in the Guantanamo Bay spy ring. They said it was ludicrous to suggest the CIA did not know what was going on at Camp X-Ray.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism experts believe the spy network may not actually be controlled from Damascus but is rather a covert branch of Al Qaeda's terror infrastructure. As a matter of policy, the Assad regime both assists and exploits bin Laden's agents as intelligence sources. Syrian military intelligence provides them with logistical aid, grants them a presence in Damascus and help for recruiting and training students at Muslim religious seminaries in the city for terrorist activities to be carried out - not only by Bin Laden's own group but also by the Palestinian Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades organizations.

Typical of Syrian military intelligence modus operandi is the case of the two British Muslim terrorists, Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Sharif, who were sent to Tel Aviv to blow themselves up at the US embassy on April 30, 2003.

The pair rented a room in a youth hostel near their target. When they saw they stood no chance of getting explosive belts past the security cordon at the embassy, one of the suicide bombers blew himself up at an adjacent jazz club. The second attacker failed to detonate his belt and took to his heels; his body washed up on a beach several weeks later.

Like Yee, the pair had spent time at a religious seminary in Damascus. The American was recruited as a spy, the British Muslims as terrorists - both by al Qaeda and both in Syria and with Syrian connivance.

Why does Washington refuse to crack down on Damascus?

Last April, President Bush prevented a US military offensive from going forward against Syria - notwithstanding the sanctuary the Assad regime granted Saddam's henchmen and the hiding places for his unconventional weapons in Syria and the Lebanese Beqaa Valley. Syria's connections with the former Saddam regime and al Qaeda have surfaced again and again.

So what is holding the US president's hand?

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources and experts report that US intelligence, especially CIA circles, has convinced him that Washington's undercover links with Damascus are vitally important for the ongoing war against terrorism and US attempts to infiltrate Al Qaeda and procure intelligence on the group. So far, those links have yielded no rewards. Except for one case which is classified to protect field operatives, the Americans have derived no real time information on Al Qaeda or its affiliates. Even the single instance did not prove effective for saving many American lives.

US intelligence still lacks concrete information on the logistical infrastructure buried in America which placed 19 suicide-hijackers at Boston's Logan airport on September 11, 2001 with detailed instructions on how and where to fly the planes they commandeered. US authorities remain clueless about the number of Al Qaeda sleeper and active cells on US territory.

The network uncovered at Guantanamo Bay is proof that al Qaeda's spies are deployed in America. Bin Laden's hard operational core has not been cracked anywhere. It can no longer be denied that while counter-terrorism agencies are in the dark about the inner workings of Al Qaeda and its plans, Bin Laden's group has the tools for finding out what is going on inside US civilian and military intelligence and anti-terror services around the world.

How do al Qaeda's agents operate?

The "Syrian spy ring", DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence experts note, used couriers like all Al Qaeda networks. Its operational command centers also use Internet chat rooms and email to send encrypted messages to field operatives - but only in emergencies when a short cut is needed.

Last August, the organization passed an encrypted message over the Internet for a fast warning to Mohamed Fazul, al Qaeda's chief operations officer in East Africa, that a US-Kenyan special forces manhunt was closing in on his hideout in the Kenyan resort of Mombasa. But even in Saudi Arabia, where Al Qaeda fighters are on the run, couriers are still the preferred means of clandestine communication.

The US intelligence inquiry into the "Syrian network" is still at the outset. Still sought are the identities and locations of the network's agents around the United States and Canada. Yee and al-Halabi are known to have been acquainted and met regularly. Investigators suspect Yee passed secret materials to al-Halabi which he handed on. The Chinese-American appears to have acted as Al Qaeda's chief liaison with the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay - relaying messages to them when he recited prayers over the camp's loudspeakers. He also collected messages from the prisoners in private interviews designed to reduce frictions between the inmates and their guards.

Through these two-way channels, Al Qaeda was able to regulate the prisoners' disclosures under interrogation. In the same way, Muslim chaplains and clerics directed the admissions made by two senior al Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaydah - who was captured and seriously wounded on March 29, 2002 in Rawalpindi - and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - who was apprehended in the same Pakistani city on March 1, 2003. Both were visited by Muslim clerics at their places of detention.

This form of covert communication explains the manifestation encountered by interrogators: All the fundamentalist prisoners trot out the same story as the first World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and his men, who were nabbed in the Philippines in 1996 after their failed attempt to bring the towers down in 1993.

From then until now, all of bin Laden's captured operatives sing the same tune. They deny Al Qaeda has any network in the United States, claiming that each cell functions autonomously. Furthermore, most of the captives did not appear surprised to fall into American hands. They even seemed fatalistically prepared for detention, which suggests they may be willing sacrifices or decoys to preserve the cover of a new generation of field commanders.

This tactic was one of the most successful basic methods employed by the KGB's counterintelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate, which ran the Ames and Hansen networks and liaised, along with the SVR, with Bin Laden's people during the 1990s.

Two years after 9/11, the United States is still very short of hard intelligence on Al Qaeda, Much of the data in hand could well be misinformation planted by the terrorists.

A senior Middle East intelligence official working for years against Al Qaeda told DEBKA-Net-Weekly, "First you must ask one fundamental question: How could an officer of Chinese descent and Syrian background come to be stationed at Guantanamo Bay and be granted direct access to the prisoners? Had I been told this was possible in America, I would have refused to believe it."


Regime Change in Beirut

Hizballah's Spiritual Fathers Gravitate to Iraq

Call it a small victory for pragmatism or a piece of historic irony.

Sayed Moh'd Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual progenitor of the fanatical Shiite suicide bombers who murdered 241 US Marines in their Beirut base in 1983, is determined thirty years later to jump aboard the historical process instigated in Iraq by his old enemy, the United States.

On Monday, September 15, the Lebanese cleric presented himself at Bashar Assad's Radwa palace in Damascus to request permission to relocate to the Iraqi Shiite holy town of Najaf, together with a party of his supporters from Beirut's "hawza" religious seminaries.

The Lebanese cleric, once branded "The Terrorists' Ayatollah" and partner of the Lebanese arch-terrorist and abductor Imad Mughniyeh, is now willing to play by the new Middle East rules laid down by Washington. Fadlallah still enjoys more power and influence in the region than Assad could ever hope for. But he has mellowed and - unlike Yasser Arafat - knows when to bend.

While blasting the US conquest of Iraq, he knows perfectly well that the US presence is an accomplished fact and that dialogue and cooperation with the Americans are necessary evils for shoring up Iraq's internal security and reconstruction.

The heads of the important Shiite seminaries in Lebanon, especially those under Fadlallah's direction, want to follow him to Najaf or Karbala, Iraq's second Shiite holy city. They comprehend that Iraqi Shiites must interact with Washington as an integral feature in the war against terrorism and the overarching relationship between the United States and Islam. They have no wish to be left behind, marooned in the Lebanese backwater with the Hizballah chief sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. So Lebanon's Shiite clerics are striking out boldly and heading for a new future, thereby leaving Nasrallah and Assad's Syria bereft of their traditional religious patronage and about to lose their special standing in the Shiite world.

Nasrallah was worried enough to seek his own channel of dialog with Washington.

The same week that Fadlallah called on Assad, Hizballah did something it had never done in its 25-year history. The group invited US delegates with known intelligence links to a symposium on the Middle East situation.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Beirut, the American invitees conditioned their acceptance on being allowed to speak freely and openly. Nasrallah gave the nod. The result was that senior Hizballah officers, including the group's security and terrorist chiefs, were exposed for the first time to American positions on regional developments.

Nasrallah later buttonholed the Americans, including a senior US official, for lengthy private conversations.

This rare event was all the more surprising in that it brought US officials into contact with the chief of a group designated by Washington as part of al Qaeda's a global terrorist network. In southern Lebanon, Hizballah harbors 150 of bin Laden's fighting men as well as Mughniyeh, the Shiite-Iranian terrorist held by Washington to have been complicit in plotting the 9/11 attacks.

Fadlallah meanwhile received Assad's permission to move to Najaf.

But US civilian administrators in Baghdad accused the Syrian ruler of taking liberties.

"Who is Assad to think he can determine who moves to Najaf," huffed a senior US source in Baghdad who deals with Shiite affairs. "Doesn't he see what's going on militarily on the Iraqi-Syrian border and what happened in Washington this week?"

The source was referring to operations by the US 101st airborne division, which we reported in our last issue, and the unfavorable comments on Syria made by John Bolton, US undersecretary for arms control and international security, in his testimony to Congress. In addition, White House spokesman Scott McClellan publicly warned Syria it would bear responsibility for the actions of terrorists crossing its border into Iraq to kill US soldiers.

US officials fashion new Beirut leadership

In Beirut, meanwhile, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources report that the United States has instituted a process to refashion the Lebanese government. The bright star on Washington's Lebanon's horizon is hardly a newcomer. Yet Michel Aoun's name rings few bells in or outside the region. This former general is barely remembered as president and interim prime minister of Lebanon on the eve of the first Gulf War in 1991.

At the time, the late Syrian president, Hafez Assad, suspecting the Maronite Christian Aoun of pro-American proclivities, put him on a Syrian military plane that flew him to exile in France. He has been living quietly in a grand country house south of Paris for the past 12 years.

Aoun never lost touch with friends in Washington and visited them often. But it was only last week that he was finally invited for his first meetings in years with officials of the state department, the national security council and the Pentagon.

Summoned to address a congressional subcommittee on Middle East Affairs, Aoun said Syria had turned Lebanon into "a slave toiling in the service of a dictatorship".

Aoun won his ticket to Washington by proving he still has political clout in Lebanon. Hikmat Deeb, Aoun's candidate in a by-election held on September 14 in Baabda-Aley in central Lebanon, put up a strong showing against Henri Helou, who was backed by Syrian military intelligence in Beirut, the Druze and Hizballah.

The pro-Syrian Helou received 28,000 votes to 25,000 for Deeb, with a turnout of only 20 percent.

This decided Washington to throw its support behind Aoun for a comeback in Beirut as the leading Christian ally of the pro-American Muslim prime minister Rafik Hariri. This support will also extend to helping Aoun restore the political power of Lebanon's Christian Maronite minority.

US government strategists are counting on a Hariri-Aoun alliance to help Lebanon finally slough off Syrian domination and empower the Lebanese Army to start disarming the Hizballah in the south.

Possibly emboldened by the approaching Aoun comeback, Lebanese troops on September 21 fired at armed Hizballah men in the village of Jbaa in southern Lebanon, killing one and wounding three others. The incident began when the Hizballah tried to stop members of the rival Shiite Amal from hanging political posters in the local mosque.

Lebanon's central bank may also be feeling the wind of change. It issued a directive to commercial banks to cough up details of the accounts and dealings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

The fresh currents in Beirut may explain why Assad stepped back from a government reshuffle that would have presaged reforms. Thursday, September 18, the Syrian president was still expected to instruct the new prime minister, Mohammed Naji Otri, to appoint young, liberal pro-American ministers to his cabinet lineup. But when the roster was announced, it was found to have retained anti-American old guard ministers in the two key posts: defense minister Mustafa Tlas and foreign minister Farouk a-Shara.


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

20 September: This week two top Israeli officials flew to Washington to assure White House officials that the 370-mile security fence and its three deviations into the West Bank from the old pre-1967 Green Line border meet a prime security need.

All three controversial fence sections lead into the country's most densely populated heartland and are designed to impede the path of terrorists from their West Bank bases.

For the Ariel cluster, options have been developed. It will be left outside the barrier and given boosted defenses - mobile barriers, sensors and other obstructions, and a detachment of special forces from the already stretched and under-budgeted IDF. Alternatively, the main fence will have a gap opposite the town. Neither option promises the 18,000-member community proper protection. This device has become known as "the breach". A glance at any map shows its strategic location 12 miles inside the West Bank and opposite Israel's narrowest and most heavily populated waist line. That line measures 10 miles across, from Green Line to the Mediterranean Sea. It hits Herzliyah, a town roughly between Netanya and Tel Aviv.

Ariel commands access to the Trans-Israeli Highway that links Israel lengthwise from north to south, Kfar Saba, Petah Tikva and Rosh Ha'Ayin 15 miles away. All these places suffered mass-casualty attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers coming in from the West Bank.

Beit Arieh to the south is less that 3 miles east of the Green Line. It is the gateway to the heavily industrialized Lod region 11 miles away, Ben Gurion international airport 10 miles away and the same distance from the big US Marine base secretly under construction at Nachshonim.

Beit Arieh is just over 5 miles from the Trans-Israeli Highway, roughly the same distance as Manhattan to Long Island.

In geographic terms the two deviations from the barrier's Green Line's course are tiny. However they are the keys to defending from West Bank Palestinian terrorists Israel's most strategically vital and heavily populated and industrialized center of gravity as well as its national and international transport lifelines.

Al Quds University on the southern fringe of municipal Jerusalem has the bad fortune to straddle the roundabout routes used by terrorists from Bethlehem and Hebron heading Jerusalem.

The fence's route as a whole is therefore designed not merely to protect the 18,000 residents of Ariel and its satellites, but the roughly one million Israelis living in the vulnerable population centers to the west of the barrier.

The fence epitomizes another bone of contention between Washington and Jerusalem.

The Bush administration can on no account be accused of insensitivity to Israel's security needs. However it perceives the future Palestinian state as dependent on the Israeli economy. The Palestinian confrontation and Yasser Arafat's avowed perception of statehood have made most Israelis yearn more than anything to shut themselves away from the Palestinians behind a high, hopefully impenetrable barrier.

21 September: Syrian Vice President Khalim Haddam Saturday, September 20, dismissed any suggestion of Damascus bowing to pressure from Washington - or being scared by economic sanctions. Haddam spoke before receiving a delegation of angry Arab-Sunni tribal leaders from the Syrian-Iraq borderlands demanding that the Syrian president obtain the release of their paramount chief, Sheikh Ibrahim Hanjari, captured by US forces.

Two main issues prey on the minds of Syrian government, whatever the vice president says: The quiet US military action to shut down the tribal umbrella protecting smuggled anti-US fighting elements streaming across the porous Syrian-Iraqi border; and Washington's refusal to re-activate the Kirkuk-Syrian oil pipeline.

That is the most painful measure in motion even without the enactment by the US Congress of the Syria Accountability Act and Lebanon Sovereignty Restoration Act that could impose a virtual trade embargo on Syria. Before the war, the Kirkuk-Banias oil pipeline carried 300,000 barrels a day of Saddam Hussein's smuggled oil exports to Syria's Mediterranean terminal, earning Syria a cool $1bn per annum. In April, at a high point in the war, the Americans cut the pipeline when they caught Assad opening the door wide for Arab fighters, including Palestinian and Hizballah terrorists, to cross over and fight alongside Saddam Hussein's army.

Desperate to revive the flow, Assad complained bitterly to Tehran about the embarrassments caused him by the way Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers in Damascus and based in Lebanon flaunt their relations with Palestinian and other Arab terrorist elements from his turf.

He cited the case of the Palestinian suicide attack at Neve Afek north of Tel Aviv on August 12 that led Israeli intelligence to uncover an Iranian Revolutionary Guards money pipeline to Palestinian al Aqsa Suicide Brigades cells in the West Bank town of Nablus.

DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources reveal that, in the wake of that suicide attack, Israel caught an al Aqsa operative called Osman Younes, who takes his orders from Col. Tawfiq Tirawi. The captive revealed under interrogation that Tirawi's men were drawing wages from two sources, Yasser Arafat and Iranian Revolutionary Guards bank accounts in Beirut and Damascus.

Had Tehran responded positively to his complaint, the Syrian president would have turned to Washington and demanded the resumption of the flow of oil through his pipeline in return for cutting off Iranian ties and feed-lines to Palestinian terrorists. But Tehran shows no sign of lowering the profile of its collaboration with Palestinian terrorists in Syria and Lebanon.

23 September: The Hizballah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is an old hand at twitching Israeli nerves by dangling offers of information on prisoners, MIAs and fallen troops on terms that Israel cannot accept. The Israeli machinery dealing with prisoner recovery then swings into action expecting little more than a sign of life. Even that has not been forthcoming in most cases.

Two weeks ago, Nasrallah offered a real exchange - and not just scrappy information - of the bodies of three Israeli soldiers kidnapped in October 2000 and an Israeli civilian, Elhanan Tanenboim, who was snatched at the same time, in return for Lebanese, Palestinian and other Arab prisoners.

The Palestinians seized on his words and began pumping out ever-spiraling figures.

Tuesday, September 23, Israeli negotiator Ilan Biran left for Berlin for another round of negotiations with the Hizballah through a German mediator. However, Israeli official sources refused to confirm Palestinian reports that he would negotiate the release of 400 Palestinian terrorists including the West Bank Tanzim commander Marwan Barghouti, who is on trial before an Israeli court for multiple terrorist murders. Any such releases must first be approved by the cabinet.

Nasrallah's starting price is disproportionately high. It reportedly includes Mustafa Dirani and Sheikh Obeid, two former officers of Hizballah's rival, the Lebanese Amal Shiite militia. Israeli forces abducted the pair around 10 years ago as bargaining chips for Ron Arad. However, the challenge was never taken up. The missing navigator was no longer in Lebanon. Dirani had mistreated him in prison and then sold him for cash to the Iranians.

The Hizballah list reportedly includes 19 Lebanese prisoners, 40 Palestinian and a group of other Arab captives for the three bodies, Tanenboim and a personal undertaking by Nasrallah to dig for information about the fate of Ron Arad.

This fresh chance of a real trade has come about - not because the Hizballah leader has changed his spots overnight, but because he is being squeezed by circumstances beyond his control.

1.
The United States is in mid-ploy for dislodging Syria, Hizballah's sponsor, from its positions of influence in Lebanon. The two Lebanese figures to watch are prime minister Rafiq Hariri and the former president Michel Aoun.

2.
Heads of important Shiite hawzas in Lebanon, including Hizballah's spiritual leader Sayed Moh'd Hussein Fadlallah, have applied to depart Lebanon and relocate in the Iraqi Shiite holy towns of towns of Najef and Karbala.

The fulfillment of these two processes - by-products of the Iraqi war - threatens to leave the Hizballah marooned in the Lebanese backwater without Syrian protection and minus the spiritual backbone that elevated the organization to its unique standing in the Shiite world.

Nasrallah senses his comedown is near and knows he is left with two hard choices: Either launch a ferocious military-cum-terror assault on Israel - in defiance of the prohibition from the Syrian and Iranian rulers ("Help the Palestinians, but only from a distance," he has been told by Tehran.); or jump aboard the US-backed bandwagon rushing to take over in Beirut. To do this, he must first disencumber himself of the Israeli prisoner issue which has become an impediment

The trump card has therefore landed at last in Israel's hands - if only its leaders are canny enough to play it to advantage.

http://www.deka.com