Mideast Roundup
July 12, 2002
Iraq
Saddam Close to Decision on Preemptive Strike
As America piles up a military armada in the Gulf, Red Sea and Mediterranean regions for a general assault on the Iraqi regime, Saddam Hussein is closing in fast on a critical decision on whether - and where - to strike in order to pre-empt the US offensive.
The talk on all hands this week was ominously about the use of 'every means at our disposal'.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's disclosures since March regarding US and Iraqi war plans and Washington's American Middle East re-partition program (DNW Nos. 54, March 22; 66, June 28; 67, July 5) have also provoked an explosion of media coverage.
This week, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources find strong evidence in four tactically telling military preparations Saddam has set in train that he is inching closer to his crucial decision. They all signal his active contemplation of biological, chemical - and even a variety of nuclear - weapons against long-range targets:
A. Mirage F-1 with 'Spray Tanks'
The Iraqi air force is now taking wing freely in the no-fly zones of southern and northern Iraq, backed by its new radar system and air defenses. Their Chinese fiber optics-enhanced equipment (reported in DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue 67) instantly spots and identifies any foreign plane entering Iraqi air space. Iraq therefore has a running picture at all times of when US, British, Turkish or Israeli planes enter its air space and when the horizon is clear of hostile aircraft.
Given this reconnaissance capability, the Iraqi air force can now fully exploit the French-made advanced Mirage F-1 planes for all-day flights and intensive mid-air refueling exercises.
The F-1's outstanding feature is its exceptionally long flight range supported by a large fuel tank with a 2,200-liter (1,000 gallons) fuel capacity. These exercises indicate that the Iraqi general staff and the air force command are planning to use the Mirage F-1 planes for long-range missions against three probable targets: Israel, Jordan and US forces deployed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
US and Israeli spy satellite surveillance have made an even more troubling discovery: The F-1 carries an extra fuel tank with a 1,000-liter (455 gallon) capacity. Both of its fuel tanks can be jettisoned electronically, but the extra tank is apparently a 'spray tank' equipped with computer-controlled aerosol spray generators that intelligence experts believe can 'crop dust' a seven to 10 square kilometer (three to four square mile) area with anthrax, nerve gas or biological agents. This relatively low-tech device overcomes one of the Iraqis' basic difficulties in delivering chemical or biological agents by missile: intense friction at launch burns out the toxic substances in its warhead.
Our military sources report the F-1s are stationed in at least four Iraqi military airfields.
Al Jaara Airbase, about 150 km (90 miles) southeast of Baghdad, not far from the southern bank of the Tigris. Covering a 33 square kilometer (13 square mile) area, it is protected by a missile air defense system, an electronic security fence, guard towers and gun emplacements.
Balad Airbase, some 70 kilometers (40 miles) north of Baghdad, is served by two runways -- the first, 11,300 feet (3.5 kilometer) long, and the second, 11,200 feet (3.4 kilometer) long.
Talil Airbase, lies some 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of Nasariyeh and more than 330 kilometers (205 miles) southeast of Baghdad. This base, which covers 30 square kilometers (11.5 square miles), also has two runways.
Al Baghdadi, about 300 km (180 miles) west of Baghdad and some 270 km (170 miles) east of the Jordanian border. Its paramount task is to defend central Iraq from air attack from the west ®¢ the Mediterranean and the Israeli air force. Here, Saddam's son Uday maintains his command center.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, these installations are also home to light planes equipped with spraying gear for chemical and biological toxins. The L-29 Delfin can carry two 300 liter (80 gallon) tanks, as can the Polish-made BZM-18 crop duster aircraft Iraq has purchased. Both have a range of between 700 and 800 kilometers (420 and 320 miles) and are equipped with global positioning navigation system .
B. Dummy Missile Convoys
US and Israeli reconnaissance planes report recent sightings of long convoys of Iraqi military trucks - converted in the past into mobile missile launchers - heading north towards the northern oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul and the armored divisions deployed on the eastern banks of the Big Zab and Little Zab rivers (as reported in DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue No. 67 last week). Similar convoys are moving south toward the borders with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
These convoys appear to be decoys, their missile freights dummies, since no attempt is being made to hide them as they travel openly by day along main highways. They look as through they are transporting such surface-to-surface missiles as medium-range Scud Bs, the al-Hussein whose range is up to 650 to 750 km (400 to 470 miles) and the al-Abbas whose reach is 950 km (590 miles). But this may be a trick by Saddam to convince hostile watchers that his missile arsenal is much larger ®¢ as many as 500 units - than the 150-200 missiles most intelligence agencies credit him with having.
C. Special Missile Unit 223 Has Chemo-Bio Warheads
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, the Al Hussein Missile Brigade and its Special Unit 223 were put on an alert concurrently with the missile convoys' movements. The six-battalion-strong Unit 223 is the only Iraqi missile unit armed with chemical and biological warheads. Detachments of this brigade are stationed in the Hamrin Mts. north of Baghdad, where many experts believe Iraq has set up secret stores for its nuclear devices, such as radiological bombs.
D. Saddam Calls up 'Men of Sacrifice'
What set the alarm bells for a pre-emptive strike jangling in earnest was Iraq's call-up ten days ago of the 35,000-strong combat force known as Saddam's Martyrs, or Men of Sacrifice, which is now on high alert. Made up entirely of members of Saddam's own Tikrit tribe, this force is tougher, more loyal and more arcane than even the most secret elite divisions of the Republican Guard. Commanded by Saddam's son Uday, the little known about this closed tribal force is that it receives its training in bases to which only members of the Saddam clan have access, that it is structured on modular lines and that it numbers both a chemical combat unit and an intelligence unit for chemical and biological warfare. Persistent reports suggest also a nuclear weapons unit equipped with cruise missiles developed in Iraq from the naval missiles bought from China and Belarus.
Other units of Saddam's Martyrs are naval commandos, communications and transports ®¢ all of which function independently of the Iraqi army ®¢ as well as several hundred undercover agents planted clandestinely in other key Iraqi army units as Saddam's spies and as assassins of those senior officers marked out by the Iraqi dictator for liquidation. These agents are also trained to take swift command of military's command centers, communications hubs and main weapons depots should they come under threat of takeover by the ruler's adversaries.
The almost unprecedented full mobilization of Saddam's Martyrs signaled to the rest of the Iraqi army and the major national tribes that the boss is on the verge of a crucial political or military decision
As we reported two weeks ago, on June 28, special command units of the Republican Guards were dispatched to northern Iraq to engage the Kurds recruited and trained by US special forces and CIA combat units. This week, preliminary reports filtered through of battles raging between Iraqi forces, on the one hand, and US contingents and Kurdish rebels, on the other. The fighting is still ongoing. According to the news reaching DEBKA-Net-Weekly, both sides are taking heavy casualties, the Kurds suffering the highest losses. Both sides are pouring reinforcements into the combat zone.
US special forces troops have been detached from bases in Jordan, raising to between 800 and 1,000 US special forces troops believed deployed at present in North Iraq's Kurdish regions.
Iraq, for its part, has sent in two supplementary forces ®¢ another contingent of Republican Guards commandos and one of the six fighting battalions of the Islamic extremist Kurdish group known as Ansar al-Islam, or 'The Soldiers of God'. This organization, based in the city of Bayara on the border between the Kurdish-Iranian region and the Kurdish-Iraqi area, is commanded by Abu Abdullah al-Shafi, who is known to have personal links with Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahri.
The semi-official Baghdad daily 'Babel' owned by Saddam's son Uday this week came up with its own tailored version of DEBKA-Net-Weekly's disclosures relating to the Bush administration's blueprint for redrafting Middle East frontiers. In an editorial signed 'Abu Hatem' one of Uday's recognized pseudonyms, he writes, 'The Saudis were first to realize that the Americans seek to divide their kingdom'. Iraq, he adds, will be willing to come to Saudi rescue if it is asked. Bahrain, according to 'Abu Hatem', is fated to be restored to Iran, while Jordan is designated 'a homeland alternative for the Palestinians'.
'The implementation of the partition plan', according to the Iraqi writer, ' is linked to eliminating the Palestinian intifada, and in order to achieve that goal they have to attack Iraq.'
US-Syria
Confrontation Inescapable
The chairman of the U.S. senate's intelligence committee, Florida Democrat Bob Graham, did not mince words on the subject of Syria's support for terrorists.
The United States 'should have a serious discussion with Syria,' he said without much conviction this week to a CNN interviewer after he visited the Syrian capital. But what if Damascus refuses to close down the camps in its country and Lebanon, where groups like the Hizballah and Islamic Jihad train? Should the US use air power to destroy those camps?
The senator's reply was firm: 'Then I think the international community led by the United States has a priority to do so.'
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington and the Middle East say that Graham's words may be described as Washington's last warning to Syrian president Bashar Assad before it goes into action against him.
Graham was part of a three-member senate intelligence committee delegation who went on a fact-finding Middle East tour last week in connection with the joint Senate-House Committees investigation into the events of September 11.
The delegation visited Egypt, Syria and Lebanon before winding up its tour in Israel.
The senator's comments underscored the fact that no one in the political, military or intelligence branches of the American government sees any way of avoiding a confrontation with Syria. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources, after six weeks, Washington has finally read the writing on the wall: Assad has not the slightest intention of withdrawing his support from the Hizballah or closing down the Damascus bases of such hardline Palestinian terrorist groups as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Moreover, the Syrian leader, following an intricate game plan of his own, is aiding Iraq's war preparations against America, while fostering Iran's aspirations to rope Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority into its sphere of influence.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources learned that Middle East strategic planners of the national security council, Pentagon and CIA have warned the White House that Assad's maneuvers may end up undoing any American victory over Saddam Hussein. The US expeditionary force and the units staying on in post-Saddam Iraq to buttress the Kurdish, Turkomen and Shiite autonomous regions will find themselves hemmed in and threatened by the Iranian takeover of east Mediterranean countries. Quite simply, the Syrian president is helping Tehran in a scheme to turn the tables on the US-led alliance by drawing a threatening economic and military line from Iranian territory in the east and south and, through his strategic grip on Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, from the north and west too. The advice from US war planners is for America and its senior regional allies, Turkey and Israel, to take urgent action to thwart the Syrian president's plans, even before getting started on the Iraq campaign.
Assad, they say, is wasting no time. He has taken the following steps to promote the plans of both his allies:
1.
He has given the Iraqi army sole use of the renovated rail link running from the Syrian Mediterranean ports of Tartous and Latakia via the northern Syrian town of Qamishli to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The trains return to Syria laden with Iraqi oil. The Syrian-Iraqi rail route is now in effect Baghdad's prime conduit for the delivery of the weapons and military supplies it needs to bolster its preparations for the coming US offensive. New spare parts for Iraq's French-built Mirage F-1 warplanes and Sukhoi and Tupolev fighter-bombers, recently transported along this route, have enabled the Iraqi air force to fly with increasing freedom in the no-fly zones (as reported in the first article of this issue).
2.
He has let Iran set up a mobile radar station atop the Djebel Baroukh peak in the Chouf Mountains of central Lebanon. The station will give early warning of an Israeli missile attack against Hizballah forces in Lebanon, as well as gathering intelligence on Israeli and Mediterranean targets for the terrorist group's missile and rockets strikes. The station and all Lebanon-based Iranian Revolutionary Guards operations have been put under the command of the newly established Guards' forward headquarters in Damascus. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources believe the radar station will give Iran almost total command of Israeli, Jordanian and eastern Mediterranean airspace.
3.
He has ordered Syrian military chiefs in Lebanon to help the Iranians build the Hizballah's third line of fortifications in south Lebanon. Our military sources report exclusively that Iranian and Syrian engineering units are working with Lebanese contractors on the line that will run between 18 and 25 kilometers (11 to 15 miles) north of the Israeli border, curving northeast from a point south of Sarafand on the Mediterranean across central Lebanon through Jezzine, Rahiyeh near the northern foothills of Mount Hermon and on to Djebell al-Mazar on the Lebanese-Syrian border.
This line of defenses, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, will be fortified with anti-tank obstacles, anti-tank and anti-aircraft gun emplacements, troop bunkers, surface-to-air missile and heavy rocket positions.
The builders are working round the clock to complete the project by early August. Its completion will provide the Hizballah with a triple line of protection against an Israeli drive into south Lebanon or any hostile landing on Lebanon's Mediterranean coast: the southernmost line running along the Lebanese-Israeli border from the Mediterranean east to Mt. Hermon; the next one running 10 kilometers (six miles) north of the first, from the coastal city of Tyre to the southeastern slopes of Hermon.
Since the Hizballah can muster no more than 10,000 to 12,000 trained fighting men, the big question is who will man this triple line of defense. Iran and Syria, certainly aware of the Shiite terror group's manpower shortcoming for stopping an Israeli armored and infantry advance, may envisage the defenses as fallback positions for Hizballah contingents, allowing them to regroup for counter-attack. Syrian troops with Iranian and Iraqi 'volunteers' (soldiers disguised as civilians) may also be planned for the project, which has claimed a heavy investment of money and skilled manpower from Tehran and Damascus.
Intelligence
America's Old Foe Moves into S. Lebanon
Imad Mughniyeh has never looked back since staging the bombing attacks that killed hundreds of Americans at the US embassy and Marines headquarters in Beirut of the early 1980s. It was then that he also developed his unique skills as a hostage-taker, mostly by kidnapping Americans. From his promising start as a young member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17, Mughniyeh has steadily climbed to the top. As operational chief of the Iranian hardline spiritual leader Aly Khamenei's intelligence-cum-terror organization, while also serving as operations executive in Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, he directed, planned and executed the most savage terrorist strikes of the 1990s against American targets in Africa, the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. A co-planner of the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, he made the FBI's September 11 most wanted list, along with 21 other terrorists.
Now, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's exclusive sources reveal, Syrian president Hafez Assad has added another feather to Mughniyeh's super-terrorist cap by appointing him supreme commander of the Hizballah terrorist group in southern Lebanon.
This appointment elevates the former Lebanese terrorist to the strongest position in al-Qaeda's military and terrorist hierarchy. He controls a patch of territory stretching across all of southern Lebanon and parts of the center of the country, an area of more than 150 square kilometers (58 square miles). Under his command are 12,000 trained men and an arsenal of heavy weapons, including thousands of missiles of various types. Also his to command is a well-oiled intelligence apparatus covering the Middle East, the Gulf, Africa, parts of Europe and several countries in South America, mainly Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. He can also call upon a combat reserve comprising some 10,000 Palestinians in south Lebanon's refugee camps and the cities Sidon and Tyre. In addition, Mughniyeh is backed to the hilt by the logistical, intelligence and monetary resources of Iran and Syria.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and counter-terrorism sources add to all these assets 100 to 130 al-Qaeda Afghan veterans who reached Lebanon via Pakistan and Iran. Some were based in the Tora Bora cave complex up until the US-led large-scale operation to flush them out. Others were personal bodyguards to Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, and now guard Mughniyeh.
The new Hizballah commander's final strategic resource is his close personal relationship with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who gave him his start in the mid-1970s together with a thorough grounding in special terrorist and intelligence tactics that served him for the next quarter of a century. Their abiding friendship surfaced at the outset of the Palestinian armed confrontation against Israel in September 2000. Mughniyeh's role as the Palestinians' arms supplier and source of instruction in the manufacture and use of heavy weaponry, such as missiles and extra-powerful explosive devices, was crucial.
Those ties came into even sharper focus when the Lebanese master terrorist supervised the arms smuggling project for the Palestinians and the Hizballah aboard the Karine-A, which Israeli commandos aborted by stopping the ship on the Red Sea.
Mughniyeh's appointment as Hizballah commander confronts Washington with hard quandaries:
How to define relations with the Lebanese government whose leading figures maintain close and friendly ties with the United States, yet permit a top al Qaeda operative to officiate as military-intelligence chief of an important sector of their country? No one questions Mughniyeh's extreme hostility to the United States or his dedication to sabotaging US policies on the Palestinians and Iran by means of terror and violent action.
As for Syrian president Bashar Assad who approved the appointment, he consistently gets away with saying one thing and doing another, toying with US demands, while maintaining active political and military exchanges with the United States. Given the Syrian example, why would Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and Yasser Arafat in Ramallah worry about coming to harm from US military or political action?
In their latest contacts with Washington, Syrian officials, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terrorism sources, denied the presence of Mughniyeh or al-Qaeda forces in Lebanon. They even made the gesture of inviting a large CIA delegation to visit Damascus for the first time in many years, promising its members could interrogate 'radical Muslim terrorists possessing inside information on the contemporary global terrorist labyrinth'.
The Americans arrived in early June to a warm welcome, only to find they were questioning veteran Muslim Brotherhood members who had spent many years behind bars. The CIA officers never saw a single prisoner or detainee with information on al Qaeda.
The Syrian denial of Mughniyeh's presence was deceptive. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources disclose that the present Mughniyeh, since undergoing radical plastic surgery, bears little physical resemblance to the terrorist scourge of the 1980s. The athletic figure with a head of bushy hair has been transformed into a bald, flaccid-faced character, more like a Gulf businessman than a terrorist.
Some weeks ago, however, American officers with the help of Israeli military intelligence located and photographed the Hizballah's new commander. The sources say he has set up headquarters in an underground bunker complex under a hill in an eastern neighborhood of Sidon overlooking the Mediterranean.
Iranian and Syrian leaders are not waiting idly for the Americans to decide what action to take against them. They are building up their respective armies and at the same time strengthening their bilateral ties. Recently, the Syrian president gave Lebanese Hizballah preachers permission to travel round Syrian mosques across the country; he also approved the construction of new mosques funded entirely from Tehran or the Hizballah.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources report talks between Assad and Iranian emissaries on the introduction of Farsi language teaching in Syrian elementary schools. When the next school year opens in the fall, several big schools in Damascus and regions with large communities of Assad's own Alawite sect can expect to start Farsi lessons. The language will gradually go into use for instruction in various subjects.
US and Israeli intelligence have concluded that the Syrian president is taking deliberate steps in line with a broad strategy aimed at gaining Tehran's safety net for his minority Alawite sect and regime. The process could lead to the eventual integration - or even unification - of Syria and Iran, a goal that would fit Bashar Assad's general rationale.
Like his late father, Hafez Assad, Bashar lives in fear of the Sunni Muslim majority and its extreme fringes. The Alawite sect is closer to Shi'ite than Sunni Islam. Assad feels safer leaning on Iran than on any other Muslim power, including al Qaeda. But he knows he must co-exist with Osama bin Laden's network because it has become the dominant force today in the radical Muslim world, which Shiite Iran prefers to befriend rather than oppose. Assad ventures to do business with al Qaeda only from the safety of Tehran's umbrella. By approving Mughniyeh's command in south Lebanon, he preserves his inside track with both the ayatollahs and al Qaeda. For Washington, the Iranian-Syrian alliance ®¢ arguably one of the most interesting developments in the Middle East and Muslim world ®¢ is too dangerous to be allowed to solidify.
Palestinians
Curtains for Arafat
That Washington's plans for Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian regime are quite different from those presented in most of the media was vividly illustrated in an interview US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice gave to Israeli TV Channel 2 on July 11. She made it very clear that the entire Palestinian leadership had to go ®¢ and not just Arafat ®¢ for the United States to proceed with the presidential vision of a Palestinian state. 'One man cannot determine the fate of an entire people,' she said with great emphasis.
This statement directly contradicted published suggestions that Arafat was moving in the right direction in hiring and firing Palestinian Authority officials and calling elections.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington, Jerusalem and other Middle Eastern capitals, Arafat cannot last as chairman or even stay in Palestinian-controlled territory for much longer. Even he may be coming to realize that his usual trump card ®¢ the resumption of suicide killings in Israeli towns ®¢ may not work any longer. Washington and Jerusalem are waiting for one last suicide attack - and then, with a silent nod from the United States, he will be put on a non-Israeli plane waiting outside Israel and carried off, his first stop being Sudan.
He won't be flying alone. One-way tickets will also be issued to other Palestinian officials directly involved in terrorism as well as to the security chiefs who planned and ordered the attacks to be carried out - especially the suicide murders. In all, between 30 and 40 top Palestinians will join their boss on his way out.
This final step was approved late last month by Washington and Jerusalem, in response to a shower of intelligence information attesting to Arafat's active ties with the wanted super terrorist Imad Mughniyeh and the Hizballah.
Those ties dated from last year, before a joint project fell flat: the Karin-A arms smuggling ship that was seized by Israeli commandos on the Red Sea with its entire freight of contraband Iranian arms. That was not the first or the last vessel smuggling arms by sea to the Palestinians. The trade-off proposed by Mughniyeh and accepted by Arafat last year was for shipments of Iranian arms to be paid for by the Palestinian leader's permission to let the Hizballah operate freely in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Operating freely meant the go-ahead for a Hizballah liaison officer to be posted in every Palestinian community, both to set up military cells and to help set up an educational, religious, medical and social welfare infrastructure.
Dozens of Hizballah operatives, members of Mughniyeh's security and intelligence networks, accordingly poured into the West Bank and Gaza Strip late last year. They were soon organizing and training Palestinian terrorist networks, contributing to the colossal wave of suicide massacres that hit Israel in the second half of February, and introducing extra-powerful explosives into the Palestinian arsenal.
From April, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon imposed a news blackout on the Hizballah presence in Palestinian-controlled areas and ordered the Mossad to iron its cloak, sharpen its daggers and liquidate the intruders. The intelligence agency re-activated its liquidation squads, after a pause of several months, at about the same time as the IDF carried out Operational Defensive Shield in the wake of the Seder massacre in Netanya's Park Hotel. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, from April until today, around 30 targeted killings have been carried out ®¢ most in the West Bank and a few in Israeli Arab communities. The largest number were senior officers in Mughniyeh's security and intelligence networks.
This was the most painful operational setback the super terrorist had suffered in his quarter of a century career in terrorism.
One of the prime objectives of the long siege of the Hebron government compound in mid-June was the capture of a senior Hizballah operative who had been setting up terrorist networks in this West Bank city. The building was blown up, but not before the Lebanese terrorist was apprehended. He was not the only one. Others were taken in or killed in the Palestinian towns of Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya and Bethlehem in Israel's current open-ended counter-terror offensive. It will soon be the turn of the Gaza Strip (as reported in our last issue) for similar terror networks created by Hizballah agents in the territory's cities and refugee camps to be smashed.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources add that at least three or as many as five of the most senior captured Hizballah operatives, including the Hebron-based terrorist leader, were secretly handed over to the Americans and flown to a US-run interrogation center outside the United States. In other cases, US investigators and intelligence officers sat in on Israel interrogations of the Hizballah men. This was the Americans' first opportunity since the 1980s to access operational personnel directly linked to Mughniyeh.
This sharp downturn in Palestinian-Hizballah fortunes explains the sudden consent of Hizballah officials to enter into negotiations for the release of the Israeli reserve colonel and businessman, Elhanan Tannenbaum, who was kidnapped in October 2000 shortly after the outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian war. Mughniyeh ordered Hizbalah secretary-general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to make every effort to gain the release of his men from Israeli custody.
Proof was adduced from interrogating the Hizballah captives that Arafat had in return for weapons granted the Hizballah the freedom of Palestinian-controlled areas and integrated its operatives in Palestinian security agencies ruling the Palestinian street. For Israel and the United States, it was the last straw ®¢ and they decided the time had come to end Arafat's bloody reign and send him into exile.
The exit of Arafat and his minions will leave the Palestinian Authority headless. Word of sweeping reforms and January elections is deceptive. The so-called 'Madrid Quartet' of foreign ministers, American, European, Russian and moderate Arab, Egyptian and Saudi, will at their next meeting in New York seek agreement on a supervisory body to monitor and assist the efforts of non-terrorist Palestinian officials and local authorities to administer the different regions and towns ad hoc until a central administration is formed. Its precise nature and areas of jurisdiction may have to wait upon the US campaign against Iraq. America's geopolitical re-definition of the region will not omit the Palestinians.
Greece
November 17 Assassins Remain in Shadows
Bursting with pride, the Greek police, on Tuesday, July 2, claimed to have captured its first suspected member of the shadowy urban guerrilla November 17 group since it launched its 27 years of murder and mayhem. Not too much detective work was involved. The suspect, 40-year-old Savas Xyros, was seriously hurt ®¢ according to some reports, critically ®¢ when a bomb he apparently was planting exploded prematurely in Piraeus, the port of Athens.
The gun police found beside him was identified as the weapon used in the murder of a Greek policeman in 1984.
Immediately after bringing Xyros, an artist, to hospital, police raided his apartment in an upscale Athens neighborhood and found a large quantity of weapons, including bombs and anti-tank missiles. Several days later, police raided another Athens apartment and discovered another weapons cache, although no one was arrested.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources, who spoke with sources in Athens, it is highly unlikely the local police have actually uncovered a thread that could lead them to the heads of November 17, a group named after the date of a bloody 1973 student uprising against the military junta then ruling Greece.
For now, police are focusing on the gun found next to Xyros.
The reason is elementary: Since December 1975, the November 17 group has committed 21 murders, mostly US, British and Turkish intelligence personnel and several key political and business figures in Greece. The same 45-caliber pistol was used in all the killings. Richard Welch, the CIA chief in Athens, was the group's first victim in 1975; British defense attachÎ Stephen Saunders, gunned down on his way to work in June 2000, was the most recent.
The group's other victims include:
November 15, 1983 - U.S. military attachÎ George Tsantes shot six times in his car. His driver was killed too.
June 28, 1988 - U.S. naval attache in Athens Captain William Nordeen is killed by a remote-controlled bomb outside his home in the northern suburb of Kifissia.
March 12, 1991 - U.S. air force sergeant Ronald Stewart is killed by a remote-controlled bomb in protest against U.S. involvement in the Gulf War.
January 24, 1994 - Former Bank of Greece Governor Michalis Vranopoulos is gunned down and his driver-bodyguard injured in a central Athens street. The weapon is the group's signature gun.
May 28, 1997 - Ship owner Costis Peratikos is killed as he leaves his office in the port of Piraeus.
After each attack, the self-declared radical Marxist group announced it wanted to rid Greek of foreign ®¢ and especially US and British ®¢ capitalist interests.
But DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report that intelligence circles fighting terrorism for many years in Europe take a different tack on November 17's real motives and why none of its members has ever been caught.
They note that all the group's victims, including Greek business executives and financial figures, were directly linked to intelligence agencies, suggesting that the killings were 'wet operations', or liquidations, rather than murders motivated by political ideology. A statement issued by the group after the murder of the British defense attachÎ two years ago underscores the point. It said Brigadier Saunders was killed because of his involvement in the war in Kosovo in 1998. The statement alleged that he helped direct NATO's bombing of the Serbs in Yugoslavia. By revealing Saunders's secret role in the Kosovo war, November 17 signaled that as in other murders, it was privy to precise data on the key roles of its victims in various intelligence agencies ®¢ information obtainable only by large, sophisticated and state-sponsored intelligence bodies.
The failure to arrest even one member of the group in a quarter-century of murder was explained away by the unlikely contention that it enjoyed the protection of high-powered Greek politicians. Anyone familiar with Greece's politics and the internal disputes among its myriad intelligence services - private agencies controlled by Greek shipping tycoons and intelligence bodies run by the Greek Orthodox church - knows it would be impossible to persuade these feuding groups to act in concert in the interests of keeping the identities of November 17 members secret.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, the solution is far simpler.
The assassins never knew who sent them. Neither did the Greek authorities or the CIA and MI6, which lost men to November 17 attacks.
Conventional wisdom among intelligence and counter-terrorism experts is that November 17 enjoys the support of intelligence bodies that helped the Soviet KGB infiltrate the US intelligence community, especially the CIA and FBI, at the height of the Cold War. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources say both the FBI and CIA are still conducting vigorous investigations to try to discover if the CIA's Aldrich Ames and the FBI's Robert Philip Hanssen, the two American double agents who worked for years for the KGB, availed themselves of the operational services and capabilities of November 17 in their covert operations for the Russians.
Answering that question could expose several still-hidden channels of penetration of the CIA and FBI, like November 17, that are still active and serving a new generations of spies, as well as certain terrorist groups.
HOT POINTS
A Digest of the Week's Exclusives
5 July: Hashem Mohamed Hadayat, 41, who gunned down Yakov Aminov, 46, and Vicky Hen, 25 on the 4th of July at the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles airport and wounded 7 others, is revealed by DEBKAfile's intelligence and counter-terror sources as a secret operative of the Egyptian Jihad Islami. He maintained undercover links to the same Jihad cell in Brooklyn, New York, as the 'blind sheikh' Abdul Rahim Rahman and Ramzi Yousef. Both are doing time for perpetrating the first attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993.
Hadayat is also believed to have abetted a previous, contrived airline disaster: On October 31, 1991, an Egyptair Boeing 767 Flight 990, which also took off from Los Angeles airport, never reached its destination of Kennedy, New York. The plane plunged into the Atlantic off the Nantucket Island, Mass. coast, killing all 217 passengers and crew. In a special probe, the US National Transportation Safety Board found that the copilot Gameel el-Batouty was at the controls when the plane went into its dive. His voice was recorded shouting, 'I put my faith in Allah!'
The report held back from referring more directly to the Egyptian copilot's responsibility for the crash.
Our sources affirm that Hadayat, who lived in Irvine, California, 70 km south of Los Angeles, knew Batouty well, also a group of high Egyptian air force officers and helicopter pilots posted up to 1991 at Edwards Base north of Los Angeles to learn how to install command and control centers in Egypt's air defense systems, operate anti-air missile batteries and fly Apache gunships. Most of those officers were on the doomed Egyptian airliner after completing their courses.
Two years ago, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak exerted all his influence on President Clinton to keep the federal inquiry board's findings out of its published report and, above all, the fact that a group of Egyptian air force officers was on the plane.
Hadayat's murderous attack on El Al flight 106 passengers points back to the Egyptair 990 disaster of 1991, reviving the many questions left open by that earlier, half stifled inquiry. It also raises the question of how many sleeper cells the Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda's primary operational arm, maintains in American cities.
6 July: Accelerated diplomatic momentum is in the air, along with the apparent slowdown of Palestinian suicidal terrorist action against Israel. Sharon has ordered relaxations of restrictions for the Palestinian population and sent foreign minister Shimon Peres to start a dialogue with the newly appointed Palestinian ministers of economy Salam Fayeed and interior Abdel Razak al-Yahya. However, the leaked litany from the prime minister's office in Jerusalem alleges that Yasser Arafat's government overhaul is not a genuine reform program but steps for tightening his grip on Palestinian government. He has issued no orders at all to hold back Palestinian terror against Israel. Sharon has therefore urged European Union leaders to withhold subsidies from the Palestinian Authority, as the funds go straight into the hands of groups preparing fresh terrorist campaigns.
DEBKAfile's political sources can confirm that the common thread running through Arafat's new appointments is the removal of officials who pose a threat to his rule.
Jibril Rajoub's dismissal as chief of the West Bank preventive security apparatus has been forced down his throat, but he still retains control of his 4,000-man militia and refuses to take up the Jenin Governorship vacated by his designated successor Zuhair Manasra.
Two other would-be challengers to Arafat's authority, Muhamed Dahlan, Jibril's opposite number in the Gaza Strip, and Mohamed Rashid, his personal financial adviser, have removed themselves and their families to London under the protection of British security. Abu Mazen, Arafat's veteran deputy and official successor, has gone to ground in one of the Persian Gulf emirates. Hundreds of affluent Palestinians have taken advantage of the summer vacation to shut their villas and make tracks for European and American resorts after liquidating their assets in Israeli and Jordanian banks.
According to DEBKAfile's military and political sources in Washington and Jerusalem, the Israeli prime minister's next move will be a large-scale military counter-terror offensive in the Gaza Strip. This territory was omitted from the broad military operations Israel has been conducting in the West Bank since April. Like the current military operation on the West Bank, so too will the Gaza campaign be open-ended, requiring additional call-ups of reserves. Israel's prime objective now, with Washington's tacit blessing, is to acquire strategic control of all Palestinian areas, so as to prevent a second Palestinian front from opening up to the rear of Israeli forces fighting in the coming military operations against Syria and the Hizballah in the north and, potentially, against Iraq in the east. Israel's military presence will keep open the strategic routes linking the Mediterranean with the Jordan River and eventually the Tigris and Euphrates, as well clearing the way to the Hatzbani and Litani Rivers of Lebanon.
Yasser Arafat is trying to steady himself in anticipation of salvation from three directions:
1. A solidarity offensive by the Hizballah, in the form of a missile and rocket barrage the length of the Lebanese-Israel frontier targeting all of northern Israel and reaching into its central heartland.
2. US-Iraq hostilities that may well open up ®¢ not with an American strike ®¢ but with Iraqi pre-emptive action against the US forces poised inside Iraq and in neighboring Jordan for the American offensive against Baghdad.
3. A mega-terror strike against the United States or Israel ®¢ with conventional, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons - that would attain such calamitous proportions as to undo America's military and political position for the Middle East.
Whatever the surface appearances, therefore, the immediate horizon seems to hold greater promise of conflict than of diplomacy.
7 July: Hesham Mohamed Hadayat was no stranger to El Al's Los Angeles airport office.
According to DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources, the man who murdered two Israelis on the El Al ticket line at Los Angeles airport on July 4th worked for a local ground service company from 1993 (one year after he arrived in the US) until 1998, when he left to set up his own limousine service for air passengers. Our sources reveal that during his employment, he aroused the suspicions of El Al security personnel who warned airport security. When no action was taken, they put him under surveillance. El Al asked the ground services firm to rearrange Hadayat's shifts for periods when none of its planes were scheduled.
Sunday, July 7, the influential Arabic London-based Al Hayat followed the original DEBKAfile disclosure of July 5 - that Hadayat was a member of the Egyptian Jihad Islami - and took it a step further. According to the Arabic paper, the Egyptian gunman met Dr. Ayman Zuwahri, the Jihad Islami chief who is Osama bin Laden's deputy, twice in California ®¢ once in 1995 and again in 1998. According to DEBKAfile's sources, it was at that second encounter that Hadayat was told to leave his job and given capital to set up his small limousine firm, so as to take advantage of his access to airport facilities and airline personnel contacts, while at the same time shaking off any watchers.
The Al Hayat report places Dr. Zuwahri in California unobserved less than three years before the 9/11 hijacking attacks in America and a year and a half before the Egyptair disaster (see first DEBKAfile story). From all the foregoing, our counter-terror experts cite Hesham Hadayat as a classical a Qaeda plant. He was positioned at Los Angeles airport in the early 1990s to bide his time for the right moment to carry out a terrorist attack against an El Al flight. When Hayat's handlers saw he was under observation, they made him lower profile. His assignment was revised to fit his role as a limousine driver familiar to the Tom Bradley terminal staff and free to move around - namely to shoot down a line of passengers waiting to board an El Al flight.
Although from 1994 or 1995 at the latest, Hadayat was brought to the notice of American security, was under the eye of El Al security, and the Egyptian authorities must have known about him, he was never investigated - even after 9/11. The FBI has admitted he figured on no watch list for terrorists. This left him perfectly free to carry out his mission on behalf of the extremist Islamic organization ®¢ all of which raises some hard questions about the way in which the war against terror is carried out in the United States.
9 July: Three former Israeli army medical officers and public health experts added their voices Monday, July 8, to the rising chorus calling for mass anti-smallpox vaccinations without delay.
In the United States, the federal government is preparing to vaccinate 500,000 health care and emergency workers, as well as laying plans to immunize the whole population. Last year, the US government ordered millions of doses of smallpox vaccine - enough for 'every man, woman and child.'
Public vaccination against smallpox stopped all over the world in the 1970s when the World Health Organization declared the fatal disease eradicated. According to the British magazine New Scientist, no one today can be sure of immunity. The smallpox scar on your arm from before that date can no longer be counted on to protect you from infection.
Yet in Jerusalem, the health ministry sees 'no need' to immunize the public 'at this time', refuses to publish concrete plans to vaccinate against smallpox or even reveal how many doses it has in stock.
For some months, DEBKAfile has been following the potential for mega-terror attacks and nuclear, chemical or biological strikes in Israel posed by Palestinians terrorists and other hostile parties. Intelligence WMD experts see three possible sources of this menace:
1. Palestinians controlled by Yasser Arafat's machine of terror, specifically his Fatah group's al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, as well as the Islamist Hamas. Both are capable of unconventional terrorism at a primitive level, such as stuffing explosive devices and bomb belts with toxic or bacterial substances or carrying the infection in their own bodies. The blast would instantaneously flood a crowded area or large building with the poison
2. Palestinian terrorists serving the Iraqi military intelligence cells planted in the West Bank. Intelligence estimates speak of suicide killers secreting smallpox, anthrax, botulism, as well as nerve gases in public places. All it would take is a lone terrorist smashing a test tube in a public convenience, elevator or busy foyer.
3. Hizballah and al Qaeda infiltrators from Lebanon, Syria, by air or by sea.
Israeli officials explain their inaction by the fear of sowing general panic. However, Israelis have been living at an abnormally high state of perturbation since September 2000. The last thing they need to boost national morale is uncertainty about the ability of their health authorities to speedily and effectively protect them against WMD.
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