March 22, 2004
Bush's Spanish Reverse
1. Moroccan Cell links 9/11 to Casablanca, Madrid and Baghdad
The terrorists who carried out the Madrid train bombings that murdered 2001 commuters, injured 1,400, and sent shock waves through Europe, did not emerge from an obscure terror group in the desert wastes of Arabia or the remote mountains of Afghanistan. They lived as well-integrated European citizens in the middle of urban Spain, one of Washington’s closest allies in the global war against terror and the conflict in Iraq. One is a prominent member of the Spanish soccer team Real Madrid’s fan club. He is known for his regular attendance at league matches.
On September 11, 2001, it was an al Qaeda cell linked logistically to Spain that sowed untold death and destruction in New York and Washington. Three years later, the same group’s Madrid cell took indirect yet telling aim at George W. Bush.
For al Qaeda the operation was important enough for it to be orchestrated in detail and timed precisely for three days before the Spanish general election by Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman Zuwahiri, in person. They did not rely on an offshoot or local affiliate. This time they meant to strike at the Achilles heel of the West and achieve the broad strategic goals of splintering the US-led coalition front fighting in Iraq and the global war on terror and undercutting Bush’s chances of re-election.
But Bin Laden’s “success” owes less to his superior craft than to the laxness of US and European counter-terror authorities and failure of their intelligence.
One senior specialist in combat against al Qaeda put it this way to DEBKA-Net-Weekly:
“Looked at from the perspective of the damage wrought to the organization’s leadership, structure and fighting force, American gains in the war against al Qaeda are formidable. The only trouble is that all these undoubted gains apply to Osama bin Laden’s group as it was up until fall of 2002. But al Qaeda has moved on. Its 2004 makeup, capabilities and tactics are changed. The global war on terror has not yet caught up with this new generation. By focusing on the “old” al Qaeda and its roots, counter-terror agencies have failed to capture the “new” al Qaeda on their screens.
This lapse has had the following consequences:
A.
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington DC, counter-terror agencies forces have not been able to lay hands on the Moroccan Spanish-based cell that provided the logistic link for those attacks and went on to mount further large-scale terrorist strikes. Their names and descriptions are known and their photos and fingerprints on record. Known too are the addresses of their families, with whom the wanted men stay in touch via telephone, email and couriers and even short visits. Nonetheless, their whereabouts in Spain have not been established for long enough to nab them.
B.
The Madrid operation was a cakewalk for al Qaeda. For the September 11 attacks, the fundamentalists had to round up airliners, train suicide air hijackers and acquire the secret codes that shut down US government communications systems, radar and the alarm link between the White House and American airports. For more than 30 minutes, no one knew the locations of the flying aircraft-turned-missiles or where they were headed. However, in March 2004, to execute their biggest terrorist attack since 9/11, bin Laden’s group needed nothing more than a supply of easily-purchased Spanish Gados explosives, a bunch of cell phones and ordinary trekkers’ backpacks.
C.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources, for their Madrid attack, bin Laden and Zuwahiri activated a Moroccan psychiatrist called Dr Abu Hafiza as their main point man. The advice he gave was for an operation to profoundly scar the Spanish psyche as preferable to sheer numbers of dead and injured, one that would generate the right climate for the Spanish electorate to turn away from the conservative Aznar government and opt for the Socialists who were committed to pulling Spanish forces out of Iraq.
He predicted the downfall of Jose Maria Aznar would set off a domino effect that would knock over Britain’s Tony Blair and unseat Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. The next US ally to face an election is Australia’s John Howard, whom Bush calls his Sheriff in Asia. The al Qaeda psychiatrist calculated that the Madrid shock might cause even this staunch supporter of the Bush administration in Iraq to crack and remove the 850 Aussie troops deployed there.
The first objective was easily accomplished. The government in Madrid played into al Qaeda’s hands by its clumsy attempts to cover up the true perpetrators of the attacks and unconvincingly finger the Basque ETA. But it is Bush himself that bin Laden is gunning for. Wrecking his chances of re-election would bring down the last domino of the al Qaeda offensive.
Shrink and strategist
Since the mid-1990s, Hafiza has been part of the tight bin Laden-Zuwahiri circle. He was the brains and commander of the Moroccan cell that provided logistics for al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. Their lead hijacker Mohammed Atta, under orders from Hafiza confirmed by Zuwahiri, paid a brief visit to the Spanish city of Tarragona to pull the operation’s last ends together with the Moroccan cell. Intelligence agencies are still very much in the dark about how Atta’s Hamburg cell worked with the al Qaeda network in Madrid, Tarragona, Tangier and Casablanca. It is rarely mentioned that a good deal of the preparatory work for the September 11 attacks was done in Morocco or locations on the Mediterranean coast across from Spain.
Hafiza pulled strings similarly for the April 2002 attack on the 2,000-year-old El Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian resort island of Jerba that killed 21 people, and the May 2003 bombings in Casablanca in which 45 people died.
The strategist-psychiatrist is currently in charge of operational interchanges between all Qaeda’s Moroccan rings in Spain and Morocco and the cells in Saudi Arabia. Hafiza is credited with the brainwave of attaching undercover operatives to the staffs of Saudi royal palace and overseas luxury apartments and using their masters’ frequent travels aboard private aircraft to ferry messages, fighters and even weapons and explosives from place to place.
Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah maintains a summer palace in Morocco; other princes and King Fahd himself keep palatial residences in Marbella, Geneva and London. Large retinues, including the planted servants and aides, accompany them on all their jaunts.
Hafiz’s right hand man is Karim al-Majati, also known as “Abu Elias”. He was the foremost recruiter of al Qaeda operatives for planting as royal servants in Saudi Arabia
DEBKA-Net-Weekly 137 of December 12, 2003, profiled Abu Elias, who is married to a woman with US citizenship and uses the Saudi cosmetics concern run by his French mother as a front for “business trips” between the oil kingdom and Morocco.
Somehow, Hafiza’s movements and actions have slipped under the radar of US, Saudi and Spanish intelligence. Our exclusive sources reveal that in April or May 2003, he used a genuine Moroccan passport and a false identity to travel undetected between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where he collected a contingent of Saudi al Qaeda combatants and brought them to Fallujah in Iraq.
Shrink and spy
In Iraq, Bin Laden and Zuwahiri assigned the Moroccan psychiatrist with a strategic mission of the highest importance to their future plans. He was to compile a comprehensive report with recommendations on the following:
1.
The US political and military situation in Iraq.
2.
The standing of coalition forces in Iraq.
3.
The condition of the Iraqi Ba’ath party and Iraqi guerrilla fighters.
4.
Where the Shiites stand in relation to the fast-moving events in Iraq.
5.
The quickest way to push US forces out of Iraq.
6.
The most expedient method of toppling Bush and Blair.
Hafiza spent nearly four months posing as a teacher at a religious school or madressa, on the outskirts of Fallujah. He traveled the length and breadth of Iraq, returning occasionally to Fallujah to draft reports for the two al Qaeda leaders.
In mid- or late August, Hafiza returned to Pakistan the same way he came, meeting bin Laden and Zuwahiri at a rendezvous in the mountains of Waziristan on the Pakistani-Afghani frontier.
The date he delivered his report to the two chiefs is not known. However, judging from their decision-making procedures, his debriefing probably took place in all-night sessions spread over several weeks. Bin Laden and Zuwahiri then opted for a tentative course of action that was apparently scheduled for late September, upon which Hafiza must have sat down to write his final conclusions and recommendations.
Why Bin Laden trumpets his plans in advance
DEBKAfile’s analysts wrote of the Madrid bombings: “Osama bin Laden’s terrorist movement makes no secret of its plans, priorities or motives. They are all laid out - in English too — in a plethora of print and Internet publications. While difficult reading for Westerners, who find it hard to take the florid phrasing and outrageous aspirations seriously, such publications are the daily fare of tens of millions of Muslims around the world, almost in the same way as a daily newspaper may be part of an ordinary Westerner’s routine.”
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s experts on Islamic fundamentalism find some method in bin Laden’s apparent madness. He broadcasts his plans over an open network for a reason. Simply put, no al Qaeda terrorist would consider going into terrorist action without knowing its rationale. Scattered around the world with no overt means of communication with their top leaders, the group’s operatives rely on the Internet for Muslim ideology to justify the atrocities they are called on to commit.
For this reason, the decisions reached by bin Laden and Zuwahiri were incorporated in Hafiza's own recommendations and put up on an al Qaeda-linked websites in December 2003. Most Westerners who chanced to read this item dismissed it as the usual fundamentalist claptrap and apropos of nothing.
Even the young Norwegian intelligence analyst who perused all 42 pages found it of interest but not of sufficient practical import to bring its content to the attention of his superiors. However, after the Madrid attacks, when the document was seen as the blueprint for the operation complete with preset targets, the international intelligence community not only sat down to read it through, but made every effort to remove the content from the Internet to keep it from the public in the West.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s analysts find three salient features manifest in the document:
1.
The mark of an author well versed in mass psychology and the behavioral patterns of al Qaeda’s target communities and their ruling bodies.
2.
Clarity of mind and powers of analysis which are not inferior to those found in any intelligence or research facility in the West.
3.
Clear contradiction of the so-called “Zarqawi letter” published by the Americans in January, which DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence experts never believed was penned by the fugitive al Qaeda mastermind. Whereas that letter recommended terrorist attacks against the Shiites to stir up civil war and put the Americans to flight from Iraq, the Hafiza document proposed establishing a new Iraqi Shiite party that will function under al Qaeda’s guidance.
2. “Jihadist Iraq — Hopes and Dangers”
That is the title the Moroccan psychiatrist and strategic specialist Dr. Abu Hafiza gave the 42-page plan of action he formulated for al Qaeda and presented to its chiefs, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zuwahiri last year. Incorporated in the document, which DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s experts have studied, are the plans and rationale for the Madrid train bombings and their predetermined outcome as being the downfall of the Aznar government, its replacement with a party pledged to remove Spanish troops from Iraq and the next stages of the al Qaeda campaign, whose ultimate target is George W. Bush.
The document was published by a body which no one has ever heard of called “The Information Institution for the Salvation of the Iraqi People, Center for Services to Combatants.”
It is packed full of an astonishing amount of intelligence data, especially on the Americans, which the author draws on freely for making his penetrating evaluations of situations in the field, determining the weak points of the US military and civil administration in Iraq, sketching psychological profiles of policy-makers running institutions al Qaeda has targeted and for simple and clear operational recommendations.
Two examples are instructive:
One, Hafiza has produced a detailed analysis of the cost of maintaining US forces in Iraq and the dollar losses al Qaeda is capable of inflicting on the Americans through terror attacks. Two, before recommending the attack in Madrid, he analyzed the results of all Spain’s elections since 1982, one by one, and drew lessons. He noted that the 9/11 attacks in America gave Spain its first chance ever to distance itself from the dominant European axis of France and Germany and align with the United States.
Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s defeated prime minister, received searching attention as a factor in the outcome of the Madrid bombings. He was found to be a complicated character with unusual religious tendencies whose powerful aspiration for a place in history he believed would come about through his close association with Washington. This aspiration was diagnosed as the Achilles heel that al Qaeda could exploit for his undoing by subjecting Spain to terror.
The Moroccan psychiatrist predicted two gains for al Qaeda from the downfall of Bush’s close ally, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi: a severe blow against a world center of heresy, the Vatican, and the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq in the wake of Spain.
He did not recommend action against the Polish force, which attracts little international notice and whose presence in Iraq plays no role in domestic politics in Warsaw. However, once the Spanish and Italian forces are gone, Tony Blair will be under heavy pressure at home to remove the British contingent from Iraq too. Aside from the British stake in the oil resources of southern Iraq, the writers found that the UK derives little benefit from its military presence in the country. Blair, confronted with a choice between oil and staying in office, will undoubtedly opt for the latter, removing the last prop holding up the US presence and strategy in Iraq.
“After knocking over one domino after another,” Hafiza writes, “We will stand face to face with the key domino, the United States.”
Iraq is Al Qaeda’s main confrontation arena with US
For the present, he says, Iraq is al Qaeda’s main battle arena and its direct confrontation with the United States is ordained to take place on Iraqi soil.
The Moroccan psychiatrist concedes that America is very strong and al Qaeda’s resources puny. He therefore recommends following the strategic doctrine laid down by the Saudi Sheikh Yusuf Avivi, one of al Qaeda’s most outstanding commanders in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Avivi refutes the “conventional al Qaeda strategy” of striking large-scale enemy concentrations to prevent them from settling in one place, like the Americans in Iraq or the Russians in Chechnya, and force them to cut back on their strength. Avivi developed a reverse strategy. He proposes guerrilla forays to harass large enemy forces and drive them to shelter in their bases where they are easy prey for terrorist attack. In Iraq, he recommends propelling American troops into the cities, where terrorist strikes can inflict the largest number of enemy casualties.
The tactic Hafiza accordingly advised al Qaeda to adopt in Iraq was made up of the following steps:
1.
Pinning the US army down in the main Iraqi cities after it hands security over to Iraqi forces. This increases its vulnerability to terror. The car bomb attack that destroyed Mount Lebanon Hotel in downtown Baghdad on Wednesday, March 17, was one of the most savage Iraq has known. A whole block of apartments was gutted by flames that burned for several hours.
Al Qaeda agents in the Iraqi capital were aware that US forces are in the middle of redeploying in eight bases outside the city having delegated security in the town to Iraqi forces. They know that as long as terror attacks are rampant, US forces are in no position to hand security over to the Iraqis. This prevents them from pulling back to perimeter bases and keeps them confined en masse inside Baghdad, so falling into the positions prescribed by Sheikh Avivi.
2.
Refraining from interfering with essential utilities such as water, electricity, bridges and food supply centers so as not to upset the tenor of everyday life in the country and make enemies of the people. The smooth running of services also facilitates the movements of al Qaeda’s terrorist cells from place to place and helps them mingle with the population and keep them supportive.
3.
Iraqi recruits to the new army and security services are not expected to turn themselves into dedicated and efficient operational barriers to al Qaeda’s campaign despite the massive investment in money and logistics the Americans have laid out to create Iraqi military and police forces.
4.
Establishing a dense concentration of terror cells in the main Shiite cities of Karbala, Najef, Basra and parts of Baghdad as well as the medium sized towns, al Amara, Naseriyah, Hilla, Baquba and Dawaniya. Abu Hafiza proposed bypassing the existing Shiite parties and militias which follow Muqtada Sadr and the Ayatollahs Hakim and Sistani, and creating a new Shiite Islamic party under al Qaeda’s guidance.
In other words, while US strategists are adjusting their tactics to the Zarqawi memorandum, Al Qaeda agents in the Shiite regions are obeying the Abu Hafiza guidelines, which they received last August before it was published over the Internet.
5.
Reporting on his findings in Iraq, the Moroccan psychiatrist judged that US forces after quitting the cities planned to focus on protecting the oil fields, installations and pipelines, and securing the highway network linking the cities. He therefore proposed making these facilities al Qaeda’s foremost targets.
After the Madrid bombings attested to the fact that bin Laden and Zuwahiri embraced the Hafiza document as their plan of action, al Qaeda may now be expected to step up its attacks on Iraqi oil facilities.
3. New al Qaeda Commander for Saudi Arabia
The close doctrinal weave of al Qaeda’s operational fabric was apparent this week when its top echelon decided to appoint Saudi-born Abdel Aziz Al-Mokran chief of operations in the Arabian Peninsula in place of the Yemeni Abu Hazim al-Shair, also known as Khaled Ali Haj, who was killed in the al Nasseem neighborhood of eastern Riyadh in an exchange of fire with Saudi security forces Monday, March 15.
Al Shair and Ibrahim bin Abdulaziz bin Mohammed al-Mezeini were shot dead in their vehicle when they refused to stop for a spot identification check. Weapons and $137,000 in cash were found with their bodies.
Senior appointments in al Qaeda are subject to reciprocal oaths of loyalty by all members of the leadership. Al Akram is one of the organization’s veterans, recruited at the age of 17. In the early eighties he fought in Afghanistan; in 1993 he took part in the infamous Mogadishu battle between US elite units and local rebels backed by al Qaeda forces. Then came his undercover period from 1996 to 2000, when al Akram lived in Spain and ran al Qaeda’s weapons and explosives smuggling route from Spain to Morocco and Algeria. In this capacity, he must have know the leading lights of the Moroccan network such as Dr. Abu Hafiza and most of the Hamburg cell, including Mohammed Atta and the 15 Saudis who crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center’s towers.
In a sense, al-Mokran’s appointment to lead al Qaeda’s operation in the Arabian Peninsula closes a circle between the 9/11 and the Madrid atrocities. The ends of this circle should have been prevented from coming together long before 2004 by the Western global war on terror. Because they were not, President George W. Bush has lost his Spanish ally and Western nations, Italy, Britain and possibly Israel too, are menaced with further terrorist assaults and the al Qaeda spring offensive yet to come.
Syrian Kurds Prepare Intifada
Kurdish Anger Shakes Assad’s Rule
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has little faith in Bashar Assad’s ability to extricate himself from the very sticky situation created by a Kurdish uprising which his father Hafez Assad would have put down with an iron fist and rivers of blood before it got started.
Which is why, much as he hates late nights, the 76-year old Egyptian ruler climbed wearily aboard his private red-eye jet Sunday night, March 14 and forced himself to fly to Damascus. He hoped that a dose of seasoned statesmanship would pull Syria back from a civil war that could blow up in a trice from last week’s bloody riots in the northeastern al-Jazeera province near the border with Iraq.
On March 12, Arab tribesmen from the Deir al-Zuar descended on the Qamishli stadium in northern Syria to support their soccer team in the final round of the league games against a local Kurdish eleven. No one knows who would have won because the event degenerated into political violence from the word go. The Arab fans marched into the stadium waving photos of Saddam Hussein and shouting: “Halabje will return!” (In neighboring Iraq, the Kurds were just then commemorating the 5,000 Halabje Kurds Saddam poisoned to death in 1988).
The Kurdish fans, for their part, hoisted large photos of George Bush and yelled: “Amur, amur, Kurdistan!” (Independence for Kurdistan) and: “Saddam’s end is yours!”
Both sides were firing automatic weapons in short order.
It was the first time that Syrian ethnic Kurds, some 3 million in the general population of 20 million, had ever fired shots in anger, although they have long complained of official repression. Kurds are not recognized as Syrian citizens, for example.
The “Amur, amur Kurdistan” watchword quickly caught fire among Kurdish communities around the country. Kurdish gun squads turned on security forces and torched government buildings. They toppled statues of Bashar Assad and his late father Hafez and burnt Syrian flags. Kurdish students at Damascus University marched around the campus and halls with clenched fists and shouted slogans. Wednesday, they began handing out new maps of Syria marked as South Kurdistan.
Although figures are hard to establish, by Thursday, at least 70 Kurds appear to have been killed in clashes with Syrian security forces in several cities and as many as 2,000 had disappeared including some as young as 14. By then, the Syrian army had encircled two Kurdish districts of Aleppo — Deir Maqsud and Ashrafiya — and asserted control of the trouble spots in Afrin, Ras el-Ain and Amuda.
Mubarak fears jeopardy to Arab summit
The Egyptian president owns a vested interest in stopping the Syrian ethnic cauldron from boiling over. He intends to lead an offensive at an Arab summit convening in Tunis on March 29 against President George W. Bush’s Greater Middle East Initiative, which has alarmed Arab leaders by promoting democratic and economic reforms. Mubarak fears a civil war in Syria would prevent Assad from lining up in the united Arab front against the plan. It could even topple him.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Cairo sources, the Egyptian president gave his young Syrian counterpart some fatherly advice: “Put out the fires quickly. If the Kurds get the chance to dictate terms, they will get the same support from America as their brethren in Iraq.”
Syria’s Kurds have never before flexed their muscles and the ripple effect from Iraq was manifest in the huge American flags hoisted in their street protests and the pro-democracy slogans they chanted with demands for reforms in the Arab world.
Our sources report that the government in Damascus rushed a Republican Guard armored brigade over to the cities of Qamishli and Amura and the surrounding Kurdish villages to clamp them under curfew and seal the highways between Arab and Kurdish areas. Mass arrests were carried out to break the back of the movement.
Assad next dispatched a three-man delegation to talk to the Kurds. It was led by his younger brother Maher on his first important political mission, supported by two heavy hitters, interior minister Ali Haj Hammoud and General Mohammed Mansura, deputy chief of political intelligence.
The officials summoned the heads of all 13 Kurdish factions to a meeting. The Kurds refused to talk until all the detainees were released and arrests halted. The interior minister refused, retorting that the Kurds were anyway not fit to talk to because they were the only group in Syria never to have publicly denounced the American occupation of Iraq.
This brought the Damascus mission to impasse.
New Kurdish militancy
The Syrian authorities face the daunting tasks of calming Kurdish fury while letting them know that the Syrian army will move into crush them if they do not simmer down and hand in their weapons. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Damascus sources see little chance of accommodation. The Kurds are up in arms and refuse to listen before all their compatriots are freed and the regime is wary of showing any sign of weakness.
The Syrian Kurds’ unprecedented resort to arms against Syrian Arabs and government forces brought to light the existence of a new Kurdish militia in Syria. It also attested to the strong influence the Iraqi situation has already had on its neighbors.
Syrian Kurds have close ties with the two foremost leaders of Iraq’s six million Kurds, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barazani, both of whom support the new Iraqi constitution and are members of the US-appointed Provisional Government of Iraq. Third-class citizens in their own country, they enviously follow the evolution of the quasi-state Iraq’s Kurds are building, with their own army and government administration, in regions contiguous to theirs.
Our sources report that Syrian Kurds, fired up by the turbulence they generated, are now contemplating launching a Kurdish uprising, “Sirhalden”, against the regime.
It therefore looks as though Mubarak was too late. Syrian forces and Kurdish leaders are glaring at each other eyeball to eyeball. He may still go ahead with his bid to scuttle the Bush initiative at the Arab summit, but the Kurdish uprising is moving ahead too fast to stop, fueled by manpower, money and weapons from Iraqi Kurdistan.
Two-way influx of guerrillas
Bashar Assad, who runs the Syrian corridor down which he pumps al Qaeda and Arab fighters into Iraq, looks like being punished in kind. His own Kurds will be running a route in the opposite direction carrying Kurdish fighters from Iraq into Syria. This subversive movement will further reduce the stability of his regime at a time when Washington proposes to clamp strong sanctions against Syria over its support for terror. Syrian expatriates who oppose his regime have begun staging protest demonstrations outside Syrian embassies in the United States and Europe, while a new radio station funded by Washington takes to the air from Cyprus on March 31.
The Americans are tightening a steel ring around the Syrian ruler’s throat. This Mubarak understands as well as Assad. However, fixated as he is on the menace from Washington, Assad does not seem to know how to cope with the peril he faces at home. It is easier for him and his advisers to whisper that Kurdish unrest is being whipped up by US and Turkish agents provocateurs. The Turks are suspected of hatching a conspiracy to give them a pretext for invading Syria to quell the Kurdish uprising.
However, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in Ankara, Turkey is chiefly worried that the Kurdish turmoil may spill over and infect to its own 10 million Kurdish citizens. Tuesday, March 16, prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the Turkish-Syrian border for a close look at events on the other side. He ordered the border sealed as a safety precaution. Tehran does not feel its own large Kurdish minority of some eight and a half million souls is in immediate danger of rising up, but its response to long-running ethnic volatility is hard to gauge.
Thursday night, March 18, DEBKA-Net-Weekly learned that a delegation of US officials from Iraq had just landed in the Kurdish regions of northern Syria with the knowledge of the government in Damascus. There is no immediate information about the object of this visit.
Intelligence
US Exposes Saddam’s Deep Penetration of Egyptian Regime
The United States has gift-wrapped a special package for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ahead of his trip to Washington next month. It comes in the form of a large stack of Iraqi intelligence documents that US forces seized in Baghdad. After opening his gift, Mubarak called an emergency session in the presidential palace of his key advisers, intelligence chiefs led by General Omar Suleiman and top military and police commanders.
The documents spelled out in detail how Farhan Hassan, Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the Arab League in Cairo, used his office as a center of espionage and recruitment post for Iraqi agents in Egypt, the United States and the Gulf.
At the end of the meeting, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources, Mubarak ordered security forces to start rounding up all the Egyptians listed in the documents as having been employed by Hassan’s Iraqi network. Some 120 people have been picked up so far.
The package also contained personal reports filed by Hassan — whose codename “Number 3” attested to his ranking in the Iraqi hierarchy — directly to Saddam Hussein.
Number 3 described in detail how he bought the loyalty of “several prominent Egyptian journalists”, among them popular columnist Sayid Nasser, who were willing to publish articles that followed Saddam’s propaganda line. One report outlined Hassan’s steps for the recruitment of Shuwaike Abu Zayad, the wife of one of Egypt’s top diplomats. She passed to Number 3 all the Egyptian foreign ministry’s top-secret cables and documents.
As expectations of a US invasion of Iraq mounted in 2002, Mrs. Abu Zayad handed the Iraqis the ministry’s secret computer codes. Iraqi intelligence then tapped in from Baghdad and downloaded document after document, including the secrets of US-Egyptian military cooperation and transcripts of conversations between Mubarak and the past and present US defense secretaries, William Cohen and Donald Rumsfeld. The Iraqis also read all the secret reports and documents pertaining to the annual US-Egyptian “Bright Star” military maneuvers.
Number 3 was particular fond of boasting to Saddam that he had recruited about 20 Egyptian generals who had been transferred to the reserves and farmed out to administrative jobs in Egypt’s military industries. They positively gushed with information on their former units and new jobs.
Hassan also enlisted engineers, industrialists and doctors, some of them personal physicians to Egypt’s senior military officers and political leaders. Saddam placed extremely high value on information on the health of top Egyptians.
Number 3 performed many services for his master in Baghdad. They included:
1.
Thwarting special operations mounted by the Iraqi opposition in Washington and London. In the US capital, according to one of the documents, Hassan recruited Najib Salhi, an Iraqi general and former commander of Iraq’s 4th Division who defected to the United States. The general’s people collected information in Washington on the activities of Iraqi opposition figures, including Mohammed Chalabi, now a senior member of the Iraqi Governing Council.
2.
Using Iraq’s Arab League office in Cairo to recruit agents from Eastern Europe. The documents are chock full of the names of Russian and Czech diplomats who served Iraqi intelligence. Number 3 was able to pass along to Baghdad volumes of secret cables and military reports that Moscow sent to or received from its embassies in the Middle East and Gulf.
3.
Running a large number of import-export companies registered in Cairo. They were used as fronts for information, goods and money sought by Iraq.
4.
Overseeing operations at the Qatar-based al-Jazeera, the biggest and most influential Arab satellite television in the world. Hassan got first look at intelligence gathered by the station and paid its staffers to tout the Iraqi line. Hassan’s operation was highly successful. His people managed to enlist the services of Faisal al-Qassam, one of the station’s best-known broadcasters. Qassam, a Syrian, edits and moderates al Jazeera’s daily phone-in show, the most popular in the Arab world, called “Counterpoint”. Only a few of the dozens of callers who telephone from across the Arab world to discuss current events manage to get on the air. But before every show, Number 3 or one of his minions would agree with Qassam on the issue to be discussed and hand him a list of viewers who would call in and the questions they had been told to ask. Those viewers, of course, were Iraqi intelligence agents across the Arab world reading questions dictated from Baghdad.
The Egyptian regime meanwhile has its hands full rolling up Hassan’s pro-Saddam network and waiting for a second stack of secret Iraqi files to be handed over by Washington.
HOT POINTS
(that you may have missed in DEBKAfile Round-the-Clock)
A Digest of the Week’s Exclusives
13 March: Officially, Spain’s political parties curtailed their election campaign three days before polling in deference to the agony and shock of the most brutal terrorist attack since the 9/11 assaults on New York and Washington. In reality the campaign never stopped. The Aznar government harped on ETA as the culprit defying all the evidence to the contrary, fearing the backlash to the ruling party if Muslims were proved to have retaliated for unpopular Spanish troop involvement in Iraq.
This electioneering tactic left the investigators at sea in a probe of vital importance to the global war on terror in the essential first hours of the crime, when vigorous inquiry holds the key to a successful solution. Early findings were tensely awaited by European and US governments who needed every scrap of authentic information to enable them to prepare for the worst. By throwing the probe off-course, valuable pointers were missed to the next targets as being Italy, Britain and the United States.
According to data gathered by our experts, from December 2002, three months before the US invasion of Iraq, al Qaeda began issuing a stream of fatwas designating its main operating theatres in Europe. Spain was on the list, but not the first.
1. Turkey was first, to recover the honor and glory of the Ottoman caliphates which were trampled by Christian forces in 1917 in the last days of World War I.
2. Spain followed, to recover their lost kingdom in Andalusia.
3. Italy and its capital were third, as a world center of heresy because of the Vatican.
4. Vienna came next because there the conquering Muslim armies were defeated in 1683 before they could engulf the heart of Europe.
The logic behind this philosophy however strange to Western ears engenders a perfect match between its injunctions and the actions of its faithful in practice. Witness Istanbul November 3003 and Madrid 2004.
Since last year, Al Qaeda has been able to spread its operational wings through many countries by linking up with local affiliates or sympathizers - either as accomplices or surrogates. In Turkey, they rely on the Muslim radical IBDA/C.
This expanded infrastructure, straddling many target countries, also enables al Qaeda to multiply the number of deaths it is capable of inflicting in each individual attack. In the last four months, bin Laden’s organization has managed to take 533 lives and maimed more than 3,000. The organization has pushed out the limits of the scale and diversity of its operations substantially since the 9/11 catastrophe in America.
Where do the United States and Britain stand on al Qaeda’s time table?
Turkey and Spain were placed ahead of London, Paris and Berlin. Israel is doubly anathemized as a Jewish state ruling a country once governed by Muslims. Rome ought to come next, although the fatwas allow some flexibility to meet changing circumstances and enable al Qaeda to strike where least expected. Bin Laden and the leadership group of his organization have been arguing over whether to build up Islamic fundamentalist gains in Europe before turning to America, or using Europe as a springboard to strike the United States. Bin Laden has come down on simultaneous action on both continents.
15 March: This Palestinian terror attack was different. For the first time in the 42 months of their terrorist offensive against Israel, Palestinian bombers overcame the fence enclosing Gaza Strip and emerged for an assault that was meant to be more than a bloodbath; they were to cripple a strategic Israeli target 55 kilometers away, the important, busy Ashdod seaport on the Mediterranean through which most of its container traffic passes. The two teenagers were also assigned jointly by Arafat’s Fatah-al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to hit the port’s dangerous toxic materials stores, which they missed. Ashdod was consequently only just spared Israel’s first mega-terror chemical attack. But the Palestinian terrorists did demonstrate that no fence, including the one Israel is building on the West Bank will bar the rampages of their suicide killers’ inside Israel.
While able to retrace the bombers’ course from the Gaza City Jebaliya camp to Ashkelon, Israeli security authorities are stumped by their ability to penetrate the well-secured port area. At least one got in in broad daylight wearing a bomb belt, hardly the gear for clambering over fences.
The episode laid bare a glaring hole recently opened up in Israeli intelligence in the Gaza Strip. This hole was also evinced Saturday, March 6, when the first mixed Fatah al Aqsa-Hamas-Jihad Islami gang, using jeeps painted in Israeli military colors and sporting Hebrew signs, surprised the Israeli military guard post at Gaza’s Erez crossing. Their technical preparations and the jeeps driving towards Erez were not picked up by Israeli surveillance drones and aircraft patrolling Gaza’s skies. The same blind spot was apparent in the Israeli retaliatory raid the following day against al Bureij and Nuseirat camps. Although nine armed Hamas men died in the fighting, the operation was based on an outdated premise current in December that Hamas leaders and senior operatives had been beaten down and were close to accepting a ceasefire. But since early January, their fortunes have taken a secret turn for the better and the Islamic group is redoubling its terrorist assaults on Israeli targets.
The Islamic fundamentalist group’s astonishing recovery is laid by DEBKAfile’s Palestinian and counter-terror sources at the door of Yasser Arafat, who in recent weeks has made Fatah-al Aqsa manpower, logistical means, war materials and funds available for bringing Hamas out of its crisis. One of his motives in reconstituting the fundamentalist group is to set up a barrier against the Gaza Strip’s takeover by his rival Mohammed Dahlan.
The new Fatah-Hamas collaboration was displayed in the joint announcement made very shortly after the Ashdod bombing. The two Gazan bombers were identified as Nabil Massoud and Muhammed Salem, “temporary dwellers” of a Gaza Strip refugee camp, bent on “liberating their former home villages of Abariya and Deir Sneid,” which until 1948 were situated on the sand dunes built over by the city of Ashdod. Arafat and his Fatah have thus doctored their battle cry, which until now called for an end to Israel’s “1967 occupation of Arab lands,” and taken it to the further extreme of encompassing the borders laid down in the 1947 UN partition resolution. In this way, Fatah has gone far towards an ideological compromise with the radical Hamas, whose declared objective is to expel all Israelis from every part of former Palestine.
15 March: In just a few weeks, X will step into the open and expose the extraordinary cover under which he lived and operated in secret for half a century as a spy for two agencies, the Israeli Mossad and the American CIA.
DEBKAfile was given an exclusive advance peek at some of his about-to-be-revealed secrets.
At the early age of 16, Mossad headhunters spotted X’s potential as a high-flying media star and began grooming him. On June 2, 1954, X arrived in Alexandria on his first mission. In the guise of an Australian reporter working on a picture series for international newspapers, he gained access to the Egyptian Navy’s flagship Domiat and carried out his assignment of discovering if new Soviet-made naval radar had already been fitted on Egyptian battleships. Two years later, on October 27, 1956 - two days before the launching of the joint Israeli-British-French operation against Egypt that became known as the Suez or Sinai Campaign, a French transport painted in Israeli Air Force colors dropped three secret agents - an Israeli, a Briton and a Frenchman - over northern Sinai for the task of penetrating Egyptian military staff headquarters. X was the Mossad agent. Once inside, the trio discovered that the entire Egyptian general staff had flown to Damascus to coordinate their campaign against Israel. They also found out when they were flying home. On the night of October 29, Israeli fighter planes intercepted the returning Egyptian Ilyushin over the Mediterranean and shot the plane down over the water.
Egypt thus faced a three-nation war offensive in the 1956 war without a military command and never found out what happened to its generals until 1962 through Russian intelligence.
After several more episodes, the Mossad opened the doors of world influence before X and he began moving up. At his peak, X could pick up a telephone to 100 world statesmen and walk through the open doors of 1,000 newspaper editors.
That was when a “friendly” secret service, the US Central Intelligence Agency, whose double agent had been planted secretly in the Mossad, uncovered the existence of X. He forced the Israeli agency to share its stake in their super spy. That was how X acquired two masters, the Mossad and the CIA.
16 March: According to DEBKAfile’s exclusive counter-terror sources, the Madrid train bombings in which 201 Spanish commuters were murdered and 1,400 injured, were not the work of an al Qaeda offshoot or affiliate. Like the attacks in the United States, they were conceived, planned, orchestrated and directed by Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman Zuwahiri, in person. The terrorist chiefs were convinced that a change of government in Madrid would engender the pullout of the Spanish 1,300-man troop contingent from Iraq, thereby weakening the solidarity of the US-led coalition and hurting President George W. Bush’s campaign for re-election.
Bin Laden’s “success” was not predetermined. The names and descriptions of all the members of the Moroccan network which perpetrated the worst terrorist outrage since 9/11 were in the possession of US intelligence, handed over by Ramzi bin al Shaiba after he reached US custody in September 2002. All that time, none of the Moroccan terrorists named were detained, although their network is directly controlled by bin Laden himself and despite the fact that they lived mostly in Madrid or Tangiers. This intelligence failure is further magnified by the ease with which the terrorists were able to carry out their attack. They had no need of aircraft, suicide bombers, wads of cash or even box-cutters — only very simply to buy Spanish-manufactured explosives, stuff them into ten ordinary bags and leave them on the targeted trains.
17 March: The Ashdod Port double suicide attack Sunday, March 14, in which 10 port workers lost their lives, could only have been carried out in one of three ways. Either the Palestinians copycatted an al Qaeda method of operation, or the Palestinians entered into a direct operational partnership with al Qaeda in the US and the Middle East, or Al Qaeda operatives are ensconced in the Gaza Strip to orchestrate and upgrade Palestinian terrorist operations against Israel.
The ruse was discovered when a port worker pulled a ring fixed to the wall of an incoming container and a secret compartment opened out. It contained blankets, scraps of food, hand grenades and weapons and had been standing in the port since early Sunday.
The container had already passed inspection at the Karni crossing for transiting bulk merchandizes to and from the Gaza Strip. The inquiry is now focused on the scanner and why it failed to work.
Israeli security experts’ initial conclusion is that al Qaeda devised the Palestinians’ clever Trojan horse.
Al Qaeda has used lavishly appointed secret containers in the past to smuggle terrorists into and out of ports around the world. The Ashdod container had transited another port before arriving in Israel, raising the possibility that al Qaeda experts had carried out the conversion before it reached the Gaza Strip. Israel would have reason to be even more alarmed should it transpire that the work was done in the Gaza Strip. It would mean an al Qaeda cell or headquarters has set up a base in the territory and is orchestrating a terrorist offensive through a Palestinian proxy.
Back on November 30, 2001, DEBKA-Net-Weekly, followed later by DEBKAfile, were the first media outlets to draw attention to the danger of ship containers being used by terrorist groups, and especially by al Qaeda. In its follow-up story, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 39 reported on October 18, 2001 that a 43-year-old Egyptian stowaway named Rigk Amid Farid had been caught at Italy’s Gioia Touro port aboard the German vessel Ipex Emperor. He was comfortably installed in a container converted into a luxurious suite complete with soft bed, small kitchen, cellular telephones and enough food, water and batteries to last him three weeks.
In DEBKA-Net-Weekly 64, on June 14, 2002, we disclosed that between 75 and 125 al Qaeda operatives were known to have illegally penetrated the United States over a period of two months, mostly through American ports as stowaways in commercial sea containers. But the paper trail connected to the terrorist smuggling machine mysteriously disappeared along with the reports of insurance companies that issued policies for the containers.
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