Vol.1, Issue 61, May 24, 2002
India-Pakistan
Al Qaeda’s Hand Stirs up War Fever
President George W. Bush is reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in Washington, New Delhi and Islamabad, as having resigned himself to Indian-Pakistani frictions erupting into a frontal war. Every diplomatic attempt by Washington to avert the conflagration has run aground; its efforts now focus on keeping the conflict short and contained and preventing it from sliding into full-scale or nuclear belligerence
Here is how matters stand as we go to press.
1. The US administration has extracted little from the Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee beyond a tacit undertaking to keep the military conflict within bounds. However the prime minister held back the commitment Washington demanded to refrain from launching military operations outside Kashmir’s borders. He thus dashed American hopes that India would be satisfied with a series of aerial bombardments and ground actions against Muslim rebel and paramilitary bases inside Kashmir.
India’s military plans are more extensive. Its military leaders will try and seize control of the mountain border passes from Indian Kashmir to Pakistan, as well as attacking bases inside Pakistan near the Kashmir frontier. They are also thinking in terms of brief, aerial strikes against a small cluster of bases deep inside Pakistan, including Baluchistan. The Indian navy, moreover, plans to strike a number of bases along Pakistan’s southern Arabian Sea coast.
Messages flying from Washington to Delhi continue to emphasize that the US government is opposed to any Indian military action outside Kashmir.
2. India forwarded to Islamabad via the United States an ultimatum demanding the immediate dismantling of the Kashmir Desk of Pakistan’s Inter-Services-Intelligence agency and a military crackdown against the Pakistani groups pouring fighters and weapons into Kashmir. India also requires an immediate repetition of the tough campaign Pakistan instituted under US pressure against Pakistani Muslim groups supporting al Qaeda.
Pakistan was called upon furthermore to detain and remove from the disputed territory all the Pakistani military intelligence officers present in Kashmir, whether or not they are still army personnel. Details of their presence in the disputed region were disclosed on April 26 in DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue No. 58.
3. The Pakistanis categorically rejected the Indian ultimatum.
President Pervez Musharraf informed Washington that he would hold his army down to a limited military response to an Indian offensive, on condition that India does not step out of the borders of Kashmir. But if India strikes inside Pakistan proper, Mesharraf will resort to nuclear weapons against military and strategic targets inside India.
Upon forwarding his reply to India via Washington, Musharraf ordered Pakistan’s nuclear-tipped missiles to be deployed in their launch locations.
Washington passed the Pakistani warning to India, urging Delhi to take it seriously.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources have learned that the Americans pointed out that, while India has a clear military preponderance over Pakistan, Pakistani nuclear missiles are ore powerful and accurate than comparable weapons in India’s arsenal.
4. Some Indian feathers were ruffled by US official remarks, which may be why New Delhi sent a sharply worded reply early this week.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in New Delhi, Vajpayee informed Washington that his army chiefs do not believe Pakistan will resort to atomic weapons and that intelligence information indicates Pakistan’s reported nuclear missile deployment is mere bluff and a scare tactic. At the same time, the Indian leader took the precaution of tagging on a warning that India would unleash the full might of its nuclear arsenal against Pakistani territory – destroying large parts of the country -- if Islamabad fires nuclear weapons against Indian targets in Kashmir or anywhere else.
5. Despite every effort by the United States, India and Pakistan to keep the information under tight wraps, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources have discovered who carried out the attacks against Indian units in Kashmir, including the May 14 assault on the Indian army base at Kaluchak, six miles south of the winter capital of Jammu, that killed more than 30 people, many of them the wives and children of soldiers on the front line. India has proof that the assailants were hundreds of al Qaeda Arab fighters who have been moving from place to place in the valleys of Kashmir since the first thaw of the winter snows in the mountain passes in early April. New Delhi has been plying Washington with this intelligence data. Indian troops have picked up many of these fighters, who are hiding up in caves and atop mountains. They were astonished to find that none were Pakistani. They included a large number of Egyptians and Saudis, who confessed under interrogation that they had received their orders, destinations, money, weapons and ammunition at the hands of former “Afghanistan desk” officers of the Pakistani SIS.
Pakistan totally rejects India’s accusation as made out of whole cloth.
Bush-Putin Summit
Personal Affinity Vs Discord on Iraq, Iran and China
US President George W. Bush will not be going to Beijing after or before his St. Petersburg summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin at the end of this week, as he made a point of doing last year. His stopovers in Europe are also a lot too cursory for the liking of most Europeans.
Indeed, this trip signals above all the US president’s decision to put most if not all his military and foreign eggs into the joint US-Russian basket.
This partnership hinges heavily on the two leaders’ common plans to develop Central Asian and Caspian oil reserves and its means of transportation, as the free world’s alternative to dependence on Middle East-Gulf energy. It is strongly cemented by the exceptional personal affinity binding the two world leaders since they embarked on their strategic collaboration in the US-led global war on terror.
Their policy goals call for vast US financial aid to Russia and massive US investments in Central Asia and the Caspian. Moscow’s quid pro quo will be a one-way commitment by President Putin to subject his external policies to the dictates of the Moscow-Washington military, political and intelligence collaboration pact. For example, Russia will have to adjust its arms-to-India sales program to the interests of its burgeoning ties with the US.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Washington and Moscow sources, the four most ticklish items on the Bush-Putin summit’s Moscow agenda this week are:
As the series of exclusive DEBKA-Net-Weekly articles below will show, Putin faces tough dilemmas on the path forward in his close collaboration with Bush.
He will have to discard the Moscow-Baghdad intelligence relationship that goes back decades, as well as the long Russian tradition of investing in this outlet to warm water ports.
As for Iran, Putin will be put on the carpet for failing to pull out of lucrative Russian transactions with the ayatollahs, despite his promises to Washington. Bush will force him to choose between those transactions and a stake in their future Central Asian and Caspian oil plans.
Both these dilemmas will be examined by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s analysts in an article below.
The Russian president may find it even harder to put a distance between Moscow and Beijing after decades of strategic, ideological and neighborly ties.
As DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s China and Far East expert will show in additional articles, Moscow and Beijing, though far from trusting each other, have attained a form of strategic equilibrium based on their mutually advantageous defense trade and Russian accommodations in the face of Chinese territorial claims and aggressive economic expansion. Of late, Russia has pulled in its Far Eastern horns to allow a form of controlled Chinese ascendancy in the region.
In talking to Bush, Putin will need to practice some pretty tricky footwork to fine-tune his strategic, military intelligence and arms supply policies to American-Russian interests – or perhaps use them to maneuver for a better deal with the US.
Iran & Iraq
Putin’s Moment of Truth
En route to his weekend meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, President George W. Bush told a Berlin news conference Thursday, May 23, that the Iraqi regime presents a danger to civilization.
”The Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein,” said the US president, “should be disposed of before he begins sharing weapons of mass destruction with groups like al Qaeda.”
But then, Bush went on to insist he had no current plan to attack Baghdad.
He also suggested Iraq possessed ballistic missiles capable of hitting targets in Europe. Saddam was therefore able to retaliate for a US military offensive by striking European cities like London, Berlin and Paris, in addition to targeting Israel and US military targets in the Middle East, Gulf and Europe. It will all depend on which European countries decide to line up with the American military campaign against Saddam Hussein.
Bush’s comments on Iraq’s missile capabilities confirm DEBKA-Net-Weekly reports that Iraq has assembled an arsenal of surface-to-surface missiles of various types, of which between 50 and 70 can reach Europe. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s information, intelligence estimates of a small Iraqi missile force are outdated.
Bush carefully sidestepped questions on a timetable for the US assault on Iraq. But DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources report exclusively from Washington that, just before he left for Europe, the president ordered General Tommy Franks, supreme commander of the US war against terrorism, to transfer the day-to-day command of the Afghanistan campaign to staff officers and focus entirely on preparing the assault on Iraq.
One of the things Bush expects from his summit with Putin in St. Petersburg is an update on exactly where Putin and Russia stand on the strategic-personal alliance the two presidents forged immediately after the September 11 attacks, an understanding that translated into joint action in the Afghan War.
Beyond the agreements on nuclear arms limitation and Russia’s expanded role in NATO decision-making, Bush also needs an assurance of Russian intelligence cooperation in any military actions against Iraq - and, if necessary, against Iran, Syria and the Hizballah in Lebanon too. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources, US objectives in Iraq go beyond toppling the Saddam; they go as far as ensuring that never again will a strong central government rise in Baghdad and assert control over all of Iraq. The US President is more determined than ever to stick to his original program – as first reported in DEBKA-Net-Weekly 54 on March 22 – of going on to chart new borders and spheres of influence in the Middle East after removing the Saddam regime.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources, US military and political planners are going back to their first blueprint, the one calling for the partition of Iraq into three provinces with the Baghdad government administering loose federal control. This scenario calls for Shi’ite self-rule in the south that will lean on pro-American Gulf countries such as Kuwait; a Sunni province backed by Jordan’s military might and intelligence services in central Iraq; and a Kurdish province in the north retaining its present autonomous powers.
Iran looms large and threateningly over this plan. American strategists understand that their projected three-part Iraqi state will be fair game for an Iran bristling with nuclear weapons and sophisticated intercontinental missiles – unless Tehran can be prevented from procuring this arsenal.
Bush therefore hopes to persuade Putin to halt construction of the Iranian atomic reactor at Bushehr, now it its final stages, and bring home the hundreds of Russian scientists and engineers helping Iran develop the 1,800 km-2,000 km (1,100 mile –1,200 mile) range Shihab-4 missile.
He will present the Iranian peril as a cause of deep concern for stability in Central Asia, arguing that if Moscow helps Tehran acquire a nuclear arsenal and long-range missiles, Iran will be in a position to wipe out the US-Russian investment in Central Asia and the Caspian region. Their joint interests will be squeezed in a pincer movement from Iran in the east and China from the north.
All the US efforts since 1994 to dissuade the Kremlin from providing Iran with nuclear aid and high technology have been unavailing. Bush will now confront Putin with his moment of truth. His response will not be made known before the US president’s return to Washington next week.
Meanwhile, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources say the Iranians are girding for trouble. Ten days ago, they fortified the Bushehr complex’s defenses. US and Israeli satellite photographs show the deployment of additional batteries of surface-to-air missiles and five more missile boats, raising to 11 the number of missile boats moored there.
China-Russia
I. Russia is China’s Biggest Foreign Arms Supplier
Russia sells China today an estimated US$2 billion of new weapons a year, with increasing technology transfer requirements. Thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians from the financially devastated defense industries of ex-Soviet states, particularly Russia, may now be integrated in the Chinese defense industry and R&D infrastructure.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s China expert, Chinese funding also supports the continuation of Russian military R&D projects (e.g. the advanced Su-37 thrust-vectored variant of the Su-27 fighter aircraft), more than 100 programs for adapting Russian weapon prototypes to Chinese military, and other joint ventures.
China pays Moscow mainly by writing down the massive Russian debt to Beijing.
In progress are massive transfers to China of even more advanced Russian defense systems and technologies. It is believed that by 1994-95, China successfully transplanted to a location near Shanghai an entire Russian cruise missile plant (probably based on either the Kh-15/AS-16 ‘Kickback’ or more likely the Kh-55/AS-15 ‘Kent’), complete with research and development team. As Russian cruise missile technology now supports land-attack ranges of about 4,000 km, China's capabilities in this field could increase rapidly, and it is believed that China has now developed the advanced ‘Hong Niao’ (Red Bird) series of land attack cruise missiles with advanced GPS, terrain-following and terminal guidance systems.
People's Liberation Army owned enterprises are believed to be buying as many as 165 former state defense firms in Russia, and essentially dismantling them and shipping them back to China.
A significant portion of the former Soviet Union’s heavy investment in the directed energy weapon (DEW) field may have been diffused to China through technical personnel and business transactions, as the Russian state science and technology infrastructure continues to implode through a lack of resources.
Relevant Russian design bureaus include Antey, NPO Astrofizika, NPO Almaz, and OKB Vympel, which have conducted R&D on CO2, free-electron, and gas lasers, as well as high-powered microwave weapons (HPM) and are familiar with current US developments in the field. The Institute of Applied Physics and the Lebedev Physics Institute may also have been at the cutting-edge of HPM and radio frequency (RF) weapon research. Some reports indicate that Russia may have transferred the knowledge to develop a nuclear reactor-powered, ground-based laser with anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities. The AGAT research establishment in Belarus may also be providing assistance in laser optics to China.
China has also allegedly formed secure E-mail links with Russian military, scientific and nuclear organizations and thus acquired such benefits as computer technologies for simulating nuclear tests. Coordinated through a Chinese “Military-Technical Cooperation Coordinating Center”, these activities with Russia have, according to unconfirmed Chinese sources, saved hundreds of millions of dollars and up to two decades of R&D effort by China for some areas.
Reports during early 2000 indicated that some 2,000 Russian technical personnel are engaged in Chinese R&D efforts in DEWs, nuclear weapon miniaturization, cruise missiles, space-based weapons, and nuclear submarines. This migration of top human talent from the old Soviet military-industrial-complex is the powerful engine driving the rapid modernization of China’s aerospace-defense sector.
China has a long-standing tradition of employing Russian/Soviet weapons, which are considered cheap to mass-produce and easy to use and maintain compared to Western systems. By 1998, Russian arms sales to China had topped US$6 billion.
Chinese Manchuria, adjacent to the Russian border, has a high concentration of traditional defense manufacturing industry for such products as tanks and other AFVs, aircraft, and artillery, in addition to defense-related educational and R&D institutes with strong pre-1960s historical ties to Russia.
Hence, the ‘new’ defense relationship with Russia is hardly surprising or even new. Yet these defense trading relations, however advantageous, fall short of a true strategic partnership or even a high level of mutual trust.
II. China’s Territorial Claims Remain Active
While currently cozy economic and defense trading partners, Russia and China are traditional military and intelligence opponents. Up until at least the mid-1980s, the KGB considered China to be a “major adversary” just behind the US “main adversary”. Undoubtedly, the “Chinese conspiracy” theory is still popular in Russian intelligence circles, matched by the opposite view among their Chinese counterparts. Indeed, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s China expert reports the sense in Moscow of widespread Chinese intelligence operations within Russia, reciprocated on the Chinese side. Powerful military and political groups in Beijing have never lost hope of eventually recovering to the Chinese sphere of influence territories Russia took from the old Chinese Empire.
These territories are vast and abut on all China’s frontiers. The most relevant in contemporary terms are the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Tadjikistan, seized by Imperial Russia under an 1858 treaty, and the Siberian frontier region of the Heilong Jiang (Black Dragon) River, or Amur River as the Russians call it, where the rustic and decaying, under-populated Russian town of Blagoveshchensk faces the modern Chinese city of Heihe just some 1,000 metres across the river with modern skyscrapers and a booming economy. In the 19th century this region was seized by a resurgent Russian Empire from a weak Chinese Empire. Chinese bitterness over its past territorial losses, surfacing in the 1964-1974 Sino-Russian border clashes, has never abated and claims to some half a million square miles of land never recalled.
No longer full “comrades”, China is concerned over Russian political instability and the possibility that the Kremlin may return to its major power expansionist ideology. Russia, for its part, views China primarily as a source of investment and hard currency, secured in large part through the sale of Russian arms. Historically, densely populated China has been regarded as a threat to Russia’s energy and resource rich, but under-populated, territories east of the Urals.
In its April 1996 strategic accord with Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, China undertook to ease military tensions along all these borders, which are also sources of Islamic extremist separatist activity aimed at Beijing. Following an understanding to resolve their long-standing border disputes at their July 2001 bilateral summit, the two powers agreed to hold consultations on strategic stability, allow military-technical cooperation not directed at third parties, but opposed “any kind of independence for Taiwan”.
Privately, some PLA intelligence estimates hold that China could recapture Siberia in a matter of weeks, given the heavy cutbacks and state of neglect in the Russian Far Eastern Command and Far Eastern Fleet, the slow self-destruction of Russia’s nuclear deterrent for lack of maintenance, and the lack of funds for developing a new generation “nuclear triad”.
However, an economically vibrant China is discovering the short cut to regaining lost territory by simply buying it back.
In May 2002, China regained 90,000 hectares of claimed territory from the ex-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.
Earlier, in September 2001, Premier Zhu Rongji concluded a deal in Moscow to build by 2005 a 2,500 kilometer oil pipeline connecting the eastern Siberian city of Angarsk, the easternmost terminal of Russia’s current oil pipeline network, with the Chinese city of Daqing in Heilongjiang Province, which is the northernmost terminal of China’s oil pipeline network. This new pipeline will carry tens of millions of tons of Western Siberian oil into China.
A high-capacity natural gas pipeline will be built in tandem with the oil pipeline.
Also during September 2001, China won permission to explore and develop oil and gas deposits throughout Eastern Siberia and the massive Yakut Republic of the Russian Far East. Russia abandoned the last of its far-flung Asian military bases when it handed back Cam Ranh Bay naval base to Vietnam on May 4, 2002. Essentially, Russia has by these steps reverted to the role of a central Eurasian land power, denuded of facilities for monitoring Chinese, American and Japanese activities in the South China Sea. However, by keeping its hand on the cross-border energy source of rapidly industrializing China, Moscow holds a lever to keep Beijing's expansionist aspirations in check.
This is particularly pertinent when Chinese expansion is not just territorial.
Special Chinese border free trading zones in proximity to former Soviet states, the largest of which is Dadong City in Liaoning Province on the Yalu River, are porous not only to trade but also in the case of Siberia to broad unofficial Chinese societal immigration of Han farming settlers and traders. Chinese intelligence may have a hand in facilitating a natural demographic process. So too do big-time crime organizations, like the Chinese triad, the Japanese “Yakuza” and Russia mafia elements, who run heavy illegal goods smuggling, money laundering, counterfeit goods production, and narcotics trafficking across the border, centering on Far Eastern Russian towns with large ethnic Chinese communities, such as Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, and Pogranichnyi.
III. Creeping Chill over Beijing-Moscow Friendship
Moscow-Beijing relations show a definite tidemark separating the period prior to the 2001 Afghanistan War, and the resultant Bush-Putin strategic alliance, from the subsequent six months. Before those events, Russia let China have its most advanced defense technologies, both owning a shared interest in countering a perceived US global hegemony. They were alarmed by Western tactics in the Kosovo crisis - and particularly the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The downing of a PLAAF J-8 fighter that crashed into a US reconnaissance aircraft last year near Hainan Island also cast a shadow.
However, since Bush and Putin forged their understanding, the Russians, according to the latest reports, appear to be scaling back the transfer of their most sensitive military technologies to China, although China remains the Russian armaments sector’s leading customer.
The same tidemark is stamped on the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization”, which Beijing conceived in 1996 as a security barrier against American influence. Military cooperation and defense technology transfers between China and former Soviet states were encouraged to offset America’s preponderant superpower role within the new unipolar geo-strategic environment, halt NATO’s eastward expansion, and encourage regional cooperation and coordination in the fight against “terrorism, separatism and political extremism”.
In mid-May 2002, the defense ministers of the “Shanghai Six”, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, met in Moscow to reaffirm these basic goals. However the group found itself unable to launch any concrete unified actions, such as major joint military exercises, while some of its smaller members had turned away to engage in active military cooperation with US-led anti-terrorist coalition forces, in direct contradiction of those goals. Uzbekistan did not even send its minister to this year’s meeting, having meanwhile allowed US forces to be stationed on its territory adjacent to Afghanistan.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s members are thus distancing themselves from Beijing’s agenda, which consists of two main items: To provide many levels of support for the re-building of Afghanistan in such a way as to counterbalance the US military presence, which so far shows no intent of leaving the region; and to shore up China’s long friendship with Pakistan, which has also gravitated into the US sphere.
Russia has instead joined a NATO joint council to combat common security threats, a step interpreted as turning its back on its eastern neighbor.
As the chasm between the two former ideological partners widens, there is unease in Moscow over China’s growing military power and its preferred purchases of Russian defense technology and components that will lead to eventual indigenous production (For example, recent relatively small purchases of Russian S-300 anti-ballistic missiles, advanced mines, mortars, anti-tank guided missiles, thermobaric flame-throwers, and advanced man-portable anti-aircraft missiles are thought to be intended primarily for reverse engineering by China’s large defense industry sector). Moscow fears China will steal its traditional arms exporting markets and therefore prefers to sell complete systems rather than technology transfer packages. Beijing has already concluded agreements with alternative suppliers of Russian defense technologies, such as the Ukraine and Belarus.
China has no illusions concerning the long-term utility of Russia's declining armaments infrastructure; it is simply taking advantage of Russia's misfortunes to lay hands on the end results of decades of R&D effort. Indeed, Beijing hopes also to benefit from Russia’s new program introduced in 1999, to modernize its defense electronics and other advanced weapons systems, which lag far behind the West.
This, the US will make every effort to thwart.
Bush and Putin are signing an agreement to reduce each side’s nuclear stockpiles by two-thirds or more, scrapping thousands of US and Russian nuclear warheads over the next decade (down to between 1,700 and 2,200 respectively for each country). The US will also try to eliminate any lingering Russian dislike for the development of an American ballistic missile defense (BMD) system after the US unilaterally abrogated the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001.
But in Beijing, the BMD is perceived as a threat. Taken with regional cooperation in this area from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the development of supposedly limited strategic, theatre, naval and tactical BMD systems might eventually be integrated into a full-fledged strategic BMD program that could render Beijing’s nuclear retaliatory force impotent against the US and its allies.
At the same time, the Russo-American nuclear reduction pact is seen as giving China an edge over the two signatories: Its current modernization program of both long-range multiple warhead land and sea-launched ballistic missiles (DF-31, DF-41, and JL-2) could make China a first-rate nuclear power within a decade.
In addition, China’s dynamic space program, with considerable technical assistance from the nearly bankrupt but innovative Russia program, is a potential component for a future Chinese BMD system, although China officially opposes the militarization of space.
A Terrorist’s Funeral
Jibril Murder Signals Civil War Revival in Lebanon
An ingathering of at least one of the most wanted terrorists in the world took place in Damascus Wednesday, May 22, at the funeral of one of their number: Jihad Jibril, operations officer of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, the hard-line terror group founded by his father, Ahmad Jibril. Among the merchants of violence present was the arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, who is believed to be the mastermind of the next wave of nuclear, biological and chemical terror, that US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld described as inevitable when he briefed a Senate committee this week. He warned that the next assault would be deadlier than the first on September 11.
Thus did the United States miss a rare opportunity of eliminating or capturing the man behind the approaching peril, together with a collection of men whose mug shots adorn the FBI’s most wanted list of terrorists. They all turned out in force to pay respects to Ahmed Jibril’s elder son, who was blown up by a 2 kg explosive charge planted in his car, setting it off himself when he switched on the ignition.
As DEBKA-Net-Weekly has reported before, Mughniyeh, a member of Arafat’s Force 17 before he became a notorious Beirut hostage-taker, was detailed by his master, Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to join Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda command in April 2001 – five months before the suicide hijackings hit New York and Washington. It was his job to make sure that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards intelligence service and the Lebanese Hizballah movement tendered bin Laden all the intelligence and logistical aid he might need.
The United States has been after Mughniyeh for the past 20 years, never forgetting his murky record of setting up and executing the kidnappings of American and other Western hostages in Lebanon of the 1980s. He is also held responsible for the 1983 suicide bombings of the US embassy and US Marine compounds in Beirut, which killed more than 300 Americans. Many US intelligence and counter-terror experts have come to believe that the Lebanese-Iranian terrorist was far more important in planning the 9/11 suicide attacks in America than originally thought.
Since that operation, Mughniyeh has been busy.
Operating out of Iran and the Persian Gulf, he helped organize the air- and sea-lifts for retrieving al-Qaeda fighters on the run from Afghanistan last December and January, bringing several thousand safely to countries in the Gulf and the Middle East.
His latest jobs are al-Qaeda’s chief operations officer in the Middle East and the network’s main liaison man between Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian security services and Tehran.
Mughniyeh does not make a habit of public appearances. However, after a lengthy disappearance, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence and counter-terrorism sources report he turned up without bodyguards at Jihad Jibril’s Damascus funeral on Wednesday. After undergoing extensive plastic surgery that has completely altered his appearance, he mingled with the crowds to test his new face. His plastic surgeons should be proud; no one recognized him, excepting a top Hizballah operative and the US and Israeli high-flying drones which flashed real-time pictures of the event to their monitors. The American pilotless aircraft took off early Wednesday from US warships cruising for the last four months in Mediterranean waters opposite the coasts of Lebanon and Syria.
Instead of the 39-year old black-haired terrorist ace of athletic build, the photos showed a Gulf businessman type in his late 50s. His face was round and his once full head of hair was now bald. Instead of his old semi-military safari outfits, he was attired in a conventional navy blue business suit.
The films showed the Hizballah secretary general, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, as the only mourner who knew Mughniyeh’s real identity. After embracing the grieving father, Nasrallah scanned the faces of his fellow mourners until he spotted the bald businessmen standing at the edge of the crowd. He made a beeline for the arch terrorist and the two kissed and hugged in a lengthy embrace.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terrorism and intelligence sources say the Jibril slaying and Mughniyeh’s appearance at the Damascus funeral signal an ominous development: the rumblings of a fresh eruption of Lebanon’s endemic factional warfare.
Several hours before the Jibril murder, the decomposing bullet-riddled body of a Christian military operative was found in the trunk of his car in another section of Beirut. He was laid to rest in a Christian neighborhood of the Lebanese capital Wednesday, May 22, at the same time as Jibril was buried in Damascus.
Such tit-for-tat assassinations were daily occurrences in the Lebanese civil war that raged in the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, when the Muslim community was joined by the Palestinians to constitute a majority of 60 percent of the population of four million, and fought the dominant Christians for control of the country. The Hizballah, as representatives of the Shiite community, have been added to the equation since then. The Shi’ites now make up almost half of the Muslim population and a quarter of all of Lebanon’s inhabitants.
Hizballah aggressiveness is mounting as Washington’s June deadline for its renunciation of terror approaches, with no sign the extremists intend climbing down. The Christian communities, sensing the turmoil ahead, are stirring into action in the hope of recovering their lost standing in Beirut. For the first time since the Saudi-mediated Taif agreement ended the Lebanese civil war in 1989, the outlawed Christian Phalangist and other Christian flags flew at a Beirut funeral. The warring camps appeared to be rallying once again – the Christians at Irani’s funeral in Beirut and the Muslims at Jibril’s in Damascus.
Mughniyeh played a very active role in the first Lebanese civil war. His return to the scene augurs fresh trouble. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in Beirut discern further signs of approaching strife in the Lebanese resort city and port of Jouniyeh, a playground of bars, nightclubs, hotels and casino until Syrian troops stationed in the town pulled out earlier this year. Since then, Christian militias have made Jouniyeh their center of operations and port of entry for large quantities of arms imported from eastern and western Europe.
This new threat has been exacerbated by the failure of two sets of secret talks CIA and National Security Agency representatives held in the past two weeks – both with Iranian military intelligence officials in Cyprus, and with Syrian officials and academics in Damascus and the United States.
In the conversations with the Iranian officers, Washington hoped to establish, in advance of the Bush-Putin weekend summit in the Russian town of St. Petersburg, whether Tehran had changed its mind about seeking nuclear armament, developing intercontinental ballistic missiles and running the Hizballah as a terrorist organization.
Iran was high on the agenda of the US and Russian leaders. (See separate article in this issue on the St. Petersburg summit.)
The United States was also anxious to gauge Iranian willingness to scale back its involvement with various Middle East terrorist groups, such as the Egyptian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad organizations, and to revise its approach to the US military presence in Afghanistan and the Hamid Karzai interim government in Kabul. Another issue on which the Americans sought to test the water was Tehran’s attitude on the US presence in the Central Asia republics and the Caspian region, as a prelude to possible cooperation between Iran’s oil industries and the oil projects planned in those regions.
Mughniyeh figured high on the agenda of the secret discussion. The American side wanted to know if Iran would be willing to suspend his activities and withdraw its support from the terrorist and intelligence networks he established in the Gulf, Middle East and Balkans – specifically in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources report that the Iranian response was positive on oil industrial collaboration and Afghanistan, but flatly opposed to cooperating with Washington on any other issue. They were most prickly about their weapons arsenal and sponsorship of terror.
On the first, they declared they would not let the United States relegate the Islamic republic of Iran to the status of second- or third-rate power, while India, Israel, Iraq and Saudi Arabia were free to stock up on the most advanced weapons and missile systems, and three even boasted a nuclear option. As for sponsoring terror, the Iranian side warned the Americans and Israelis that they would not be allowed to attack the Lebanese Hizballah with impunity. Iran, as the biggest Shi’ite country in the world, regarded itself as the defender of Shi’ite minorities everywhere, just as Israel was the protector of Jews in the Diaspora.
The American-Syrian conversations were even more fruitless, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Middle East sources. Washington had hoped o strike a deal on Lebanon and disarming the Hizballah with President Bashar Assad and Syrian political and military leaders. The US team felt that if things did not work out with Tehran, they might come away from the Syrians with something on the Lebanese issue; they derived encouragement from Syria’s brief shutdown of the Iranian arms and equipment air route from Iran to the Hizballah, via Syrian military airfields and Damascus international airport.
If this was a goodwill gesture by Assad, it was not aimed at the US, but at Saudi Arabia. As the talks progressed, Damascus-Tehran coordination was seen to be very tight indeed. Right after the collapse of the talks last week, Iranian flights to the Hizballah via Syria resumed.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources note that Mughniyeh’s unabashed appearance at the Damascus funeral of a terrorist and his affectionate meeting with the Hizballah leader must have been approved at the highest levels between Damascus and Tehran. Middle East intelligence sources read it as a blatant demonstration to Washington by the Iranian and Syrian leaders that they stand foursquare behind the Hizballah.
HOT POINTS
(that you may have missed in DEBKAfile Round-the-Clock)
A Digest of the Week’s Exclusives
16 May: However insistent Palestinian calls on their leaders to overhaul their ruling system may be, no single group dares suggest that Yasser Arafat be “reformed” out of his job as Palestinian Number One. He is therefore secure in the knowledge that the only reforms in his governing regime will be orchestrated by himself – or not at all. In the meantime, as a sop to his following in Europe and the Israeli left wing, he issued vague promises to overhaul his institutions.
He issued the opposite signals to his followers. To avoid laying himself open to charges of incitement, the Palestinian leader wrapped this signal round with euphemisms and subliminally inflammatory symbols, confident that references to the Prophet and religious-belligerent motifs would serve to rally his terrorists to fresh efforts. For instance, his stress on the Truce of Hudaybiyeh, first referred to at his Johannesburg mosque speech in 1994, one year after signing the Oslo Peace accords with Israel, when he called on Muslims the world over to join the Palestinian jihad and liberate “our capital”, Jerusalem. That truce, signed by the Prophet Muhammed with the infidels of Quraish, whom he later exterminated, became the precedent for the injunction to Muslims to violate accords they sign with unbelievers as soon as opportune. According to this precept, Arabs view an enemy’s readiness for peace as a weakness to be exploited.
Arafat’s rallying cry for a jihad to liberate Jerusalem was more subtly conveyed at the Legislative Council meeting. He singled out the high priest of the ancient Samaritan community of Nablus for four demonstrative kisses.
The Samaritans, or Shomronim, of whom there are only a few hundred, are divided between the West Bank town of Nablus - at the foot of Mount Gerizim - and the Israeli town of Holon. They recognize no Jewish writings after the Pentateuch, claim to have inhabited the Shomron (Samaria) continuously for 4,000 years, and make the burning of the sacrificial lamb on Mount Gerizim the central rite of their religious calendar. The Nablus community supports the Palestinian cause. Arafat for his part demonstratively joined one historic Samaritan claim by declaring more than once that the Jewish holy mount never was Zion in Jerusalem but in Nablus.
Arafat is not content with invoking Islamic history. Late last month, opposite the Lebanese-Israeli frontier, Israel sank a Hizballah arms ship bound for the Gaza Strip. This vessel was larger than the Karin-A Palestinian arms-running freighter, which was intercepted on the Red Sea in January with 50 tons of smuggled Iranian arms in its holds.
22 May: The word is out in the United States: Al-Qaeda, Hizballah and the Egyptian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad groups are about to strike.
US intelligence has been leaking information, based on fragmentary intercepts of terrorist transmissions, of impending mass-casualty attacks in the United States, Europe and the Arabian Peninsula, including the Persian Gulf. DEBKAfile’s anti-terrorist sources add the Middle East, including US military and civilian targets and Israel, to the list of targets. Underlining US bioterrorism fears, the UN’s World Health Organization earlier this week reversed a long-standing order to destroy the world’s smallpox virus stocks by the end of the year, to allow the manufacture of vaccines and develop treatment for the deadly disease.
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources cite spy agencies in the United States, Britain, Russia and Israel as being convinced that sleeper terrorist cells, directly run or supported by the Iranians, Libyans, North Koreans, Syrians and Iraqis, have laid hands on biological weapons, including smallpox. This comes on top of the FBI general warning of threats to the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge.
According to our intelligence and counter-terrorism sources, the terror talk emanates from three main sources:
The US administration and its anti-terrorist agencies take into account that terrorists may set off a radiological bomb to contaminate large urban districts, or other nuclear devices. In several countries, authorities are getting set for nuclear terrorist attacks with casualties in the region of 10,000 or 50,000. Such preparations are underway in the main American cities, especially in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. In Britain, London and large cities in the north, such as Leeds and Manchester, are being prepared for nuclear assault, as are Moscow, Tel Aviv and other Israeli coastal cities. European cities, such as Milan, Paris and Berlin, know they could be targeted.
According to the latest intelligence information in US and Israeli hands, several dozen terrorists - if not more - have managed over the past few weeks to infiltrate the United States. Other international terrorist cells have reached Israel. Some were engaged by Israeli troops in close quarters combat in April, in the course of its large-scale counter-terrorist Defensive Shield operation in the West Bank. None survived battle, denying the intelligence authorities crucial information about the composition of those terrorist cells, the nationalities of their members, their weapons and tactics.
DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counter-terrorism conclude from the field investigations that Imad Mughniyeh, the Iranian-Palestinian-Shi’ite Lebanese terror master, is the moving force behind the terror wave in the making. There have been signs that in the last six months, operating out of either Dubai or Iran, he established new terror networks in the Gulf, Lebanon, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, and several central Asian countries, especially Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
These cell members, some carrying European passports, are believed to be on their way from their rear bases towards their assigned targets.
23 May: Wednesday night, Rishon Lezion, the small town south of Tel Aviv was struck by a Palestinian suicide bomber for the second time in ten days. Strollers taking the air in the high street pedestrian mall and groups of chess-players sitting in a corner opposite a park were targeted by the Palestinian terrorist. Two were killed and more than 30 injured.
Less than 12 hours later, the main Israeli fuel depot at Pi Glilot in north Tel Aviv came close to being blown up by a tanker truck, underneath which an attached explosive device was detonated by a cell-phone. The fire was quickly doused by automatic extinguishers, but the scale of the calamity so closely prevented aroused horror and questions.
How did the truck which had parked during the night in Holon just south of Tel Aviv enter the strategic fuel depot without inspection? Why was the official decision to move the tinderbox facility away from the most densely populated part of Israel being held up, although it was taken many months ago?
Miraculously, the bomb that set the tanker truck ablaze at Pi Glilot – an incident that could have killed more people than a radiological bomb blast in central Tel Aviv – did not lead to catastrophe. But Israel’s security authorities are redoubling their demands to move the fuel depot to a safer area. Their top priority now is to find out how Palestinian terrorists were able to target, sabotage and track the fuel tanker undetected along its 15-mile route cutting through Tel Aviv from Holon to Pi Glilot.
This highly-organized operation must have been prepared in fine detail, tracked by terrorist intelligence agents and executed by trained operatives. It was carried out proficiently enough to escape detection by Israeli security forces, including intelligence.
The terrorists must have maintained advance surveillance of the tanker driver, observing where and how he parked his truck and how often he checked his vehicle. Watchers must have logged the driver’s work schedule and habits. They knew what time he usually left for Pi Glilot to take on a load of diesel fuel and how many times a week.
The surveillance team or teams then tailed him all the way from Holon to Pi Glilot, timing the journey and noting delaying factors. They also familiarized themselves with the Pi Glilot security routines for entering and exiting tanker trucks.
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