Mideast Roundup

July 19, 2002

Iran

1. Next in Line After Iraq?

On July 13, US President George W. Bush aimed a sharp sideswipe at the ayatollahs' regime in Tehran. He called for government reforms, an end to repression in the Islamic Republic, democracy and a better future for the Iranian people. His vision for Iran, a country the United States has accused of sponsoring terrorism, runs along similar lines to the outline he charted on June 23 for the Palestinian Authority.

But his words fell on Tehran with the force of a ballistic missile. Iran's rulers immediately took them for little short of a cassus belli, propelling them into a massive shifting around of national strategic resources.

In the last year, Iran has invested heavily in building up the Lebanese Hizballah, bolstering the group with its Revolutionary Guards units and a large array of missiles, so as to anchor its national defenses on a forward line far from its borders. The US president's words were taken by Iran's rulers to mean that their Islamic regime, Tehran itself, was to be the next target of America's military thrust after Saddam Hussein. They therefore rushed into full-scale, secret preparations for a war of terror against the United States.

Within hours, Ali Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader and the supreme commander of its armed forces, called two of the most potent state forums into secret session. President Mohammed Khatami was ordered to entrust the supreme state security council, called into immediate session on Sunday, July 14, with a detailed analysis of Bush's speech and recommendations for an appropriate operational response.

Khamenei himself led an urgent meeting of the supreme council for the export of the Shi'ite revolution, the secret Iranian panel that synchronizes international Iranian and Hizballah terrorist activities. Present, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Tehran, were past masters of ventures into the 'export of revolution' such as former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - now the senior global coordinator of Iran's terrorist and subversive operations and liaison director between terrorist elements and senior political leaders, and Ali Akbar Velayati, the former Iranian foreign minister and currently Khamenei's most senior adviser on terrorism - a position that effectively puts him in command of Iran's terror campaigns. Velayati is primarily responsible for Iranian terrorist cells in the Gulf and North and South America, including the United States. Also present were the former interior minister, Ali-Akbar Mohtashami-Pour, who oversees Iranian ties with Syria and Hizballah, and Mohammed Taktiri, a senior officer of the Islamic council for propaganda and export of the revolution, one of Iran's multiple terrorist arms. Mohtashami-Pour's main job is to tend operational links between Khamenei and Imad Mughniyeh, the Iranian leader's commander of terror operations.

As DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported in its previous issue, Mughniyeh has also been appointed supreme military commander of Hizballah forces in southern Lebanon.

Bush's comments dropped on the Iranian leadership with incendiary effect at a particularly sensitive time. The ayatollahs were smarting from the anti-regime demonstrations staged in Tehran and other main cities four days earlier, on Tuesday, July 9, to mark the third anniversary of the violent suppression of a previous student rally. There was also the painful resignation of a regime stalwart, Ayatollah Sayah Jalal Adin Tahari, Khamenei's personal representative in Esfahan, the second most important city in Iran.

The ayatollah from Esfahan quit after publishing a biting indictment of the Iranian leadership, holding it responsible for the corruption rampant in the country, the widespread government graft, soaring drug use in all walks of society and an ailing economy with unemployment rocketing at 14 percent.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources say the real figure is closer to 30 percent.

Bush's speech fueled the flames of Tahari's fierce attack and exacerbated the mounting insecurity of a regime that feels itself more and more under siege.

It also added to the anxieties entertained in Tehran about American intentions ever since a disturbing report came in from Iranian agents. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Tehran can disclose that word has come from the approximately 2,600 to 3,000 Iranian undercover agents posted in eastern and northern Afghanistan of an intense US military buildup along the Afghan-Iranian frontier, most markedly in and around the eastern city of Herat. As we shall report in detail in the next article, the Americans are building what promises to be the biggest air base in the region only 100 km (60 miles) from the Iranian border, a facility with the potential of a direct strategic threat to Iran.


2. Iran Loses Sleep over New US Air Base in East Afghanistan

In deep hush, the Americans are nearing completion of a spanking new underground air base in eastern Afghanistan, to be the largest facility of its kind in that part of the world. This is reported exclusively by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources.

The project coincides with US efforts to stabilize the administration of Hamid Karzai in Kabul amid reported debates over whether or not to boost the 1,000-strong US military presence in Afghanistan. It means that the Pentagon has abandoned its earlier plan to locate this important facility in the Baluchistan region of Pakistan.

The base, abutting on the southern suburbs of the Afghan Shi'ite city of Herat, is due to go operational in September as the new home of US aerial forces now scattered around the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and other locations in Afghanistan. It will also house elements of the advanced control and command center dismantled at the Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia and temporarily stored in new US bases in Qatar and Oman.

From its big new base, the operational scope of the US air force will stretch across Afghanistan and the Caspian Sea region, which is vitally important for the United States because of its oil reserves and other natural resources; Central Asia, all of Iran, the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the northern Arabian Sea up to Yemen's Socotra Islands. The US air force will also have a commanding position in relation to Pakistan, India and the western fringes of China. The base will include a facility for US special forces units

Iranian strategists have noted that the Herat base is but a link in a formidable chain of new facilities the United States is in the process of drawing around them. Other links, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported in Issue 67, are the new air and naval facilities at Assab and Dahlak in the Eritrean archipelago and in Tiblisi, Georgia, as well as those located on Yemen's Socotra Islands and in the Red Sea port town of Hodeidah.

American military planners are now looking at locations in Turkmenistan near the Caspian Sea. The Iranians and their intelligence services have also been keeping a close eye on the newfound German and Israeli naval and air presence in the Horn of Africa, at the meeting points of the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

One of DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Iranian sources said: 'It should be understood that when Iranian leaders see the map of American bases tightening around us like a noose, they are absolutely sure that Washington's primary goal is first to strangle us, then kills us off.'

The new base at Herat has reinforced this conviction.

The men in Tehran also have a grievance. As one source put it: 'First, the United States pressured us to cut down on our agents' activities in Afghanistan so as not to threaten the stability of the Karzai government in Kabul. Now,' he complained, 'It looks as though this was only an excuse to remove the thousands of Iranian agents we sent to Afghanistan to keep track of US military activities in areas Tehran views as vital to its strategic interests. With them out of the way, the Americans could go forward in the dark.'

Iran's leaders have a bad sense of failure over their handling of the Herat base issue - in more ways than one. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Afghanistan and Iran, they counted on the local Shiite leader, Ismail Khan, standing up and drawing a line against the US military advances and spreading influence in the regions under his control. But in recent weeks, the Americans were able to mute his resistance and now have high hopes of winning him over completely.

The way Khan changed his spots may also be a side effect of the situation in Tehran. As our source in the Iranian capital put it: 'Khan might not have shifted round to the American side had the Iranian government been in a stronger position, instead of hemmed in by domestic, political, military and religious troubles." Battered as it is by domestic woes, it is the general feeling that the Iranian regime has lost the battle for Herat, a stinging defeat its first big fight with Washington.

(More on Iran's internal weakness in fourth article in this series.)

3. Tehran Gears up for Asymmetrical Offensive Vs America

US President George W. Bush and his speechwriters may not have bargained on his call for reforms in Tehran on July 13 precipitating full-scale preparations for a war of terror against the United States. But for the Islamic Republic of Iran, the tinderbox of the past is never far below the surface.

Its founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, knew that Iran's military had no chance in a face-to-face battlefield showdown with 'Big Satan' - or even to pose a real threat to US naval and air forces in the Persian Gulf. Yet Islamic Iran has gained the upper hand in every confrontation with America since the rise of the Shi'ite revolution in 1979, ever since the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and the seizure of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s.

The ayatollahs' answer to American might was and is terror. In an asymmetrical campaign, Khomeini's disciples believe they can cut down Washington's military and technological preponderance as well as overcoming the innate weakness of the Iranian regime, while yet leaving Iran's armed forces intact.

The two high-level state councils summoned hurriedly into session the day after the Bush speech (See first article in this issue: Next in Line after Iraq?) formulated a detailed plan of campaign in the face of a potential American attack.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Tehran report the main steps they approved:

A. To block the Strait of Hormuz. This mission was entrusted to the Iranian Navy, which is under the command of the Revolutionary Guards.

B. To set fire to all or a large number of Persian Gulf oil fields, including those of Saudi Arabia. This task will be assigned to special Marine units of the Revolutionary Guards stationed on the Iranian islands of Bandar Abbas and offshore Kish. They are trained as naval commandos and equipped with fast missile craft. 

Those Marine units will also be called upon to strike at US aircraft carriers and warships sailing the Persian Gulf or docked in its ports. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources add the same units will use their fast boats and helicopters to sow the waterway with large quantities of mines.

The Iranian defense minister, Revolutionary Guards Admiral Aly Shakhmanei, has been given supreme command of terrorist-sabotage operations at sea. The navy is the only arm of the Iranian military controlled by a body outside the formal military hierarchy - the Revolutionary Guards.

C. To attack strategic targets, airports, financial and business centers and military installations in the United States.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources, some 800,000 Iranians now live in the United States. Ninety-five percent oppose the Islamic revolutionary regime in Iran, but five percent - a little more than 30,000 people, including some 5,000 agents in clandestine cells -- are loyal partisans of the revolution. Some of these sleeper agents are trained for terrorist operations.

D. Radiological, or so-called dirty, bombs will be used for attacks in the United States. From the early 1990s, Tehran has stepped up their manufacture, with the help of nuclear devices purchased from stockpiles left by the defunct Soviet Union in Central Asia and the Ukraine.

Our intelligence sources estimate Iran's stock of radiological bombs - between eight and 12 - as the largest of any entity in the fundamentalist Moslem world. They believe that three or four of these devices were smuggled into the United States even before the September 11 attacks and are now in the hands of Iranian sleeper cells.

Former Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati will coordinate terrorist operations in the United States.

E. A general, global call-up of all Hizballah cells in the Far East, Africa, the Middle East, South America and Europe to join the worldwide Iranian terror campaign.

Former interior minister Ali-Akbar Mohtashami-Pour, will oversee Hizballah's activities.

F.  To launch a worldwide recruitment drive for Muslim volunteers similar to the American campaign in the 1980s, which bolstered Mujahideen fighting strength against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan. By the end of the year, 500 training camps will be waiting to absorb Muslim student recruits from around the world, especially from Arab countries.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly reports that the two biggest camp complexes are to be located near Zahedan, the capital of Iranian Baluchistan, and at Mazanderm on the Caspian shore. Recruits will be instructed in Islamic doctrine and receive rudimentary weapons and explosives training. Top achievers will be singled out for the Revolutionary Guards' special units or terrorist networks.

G.  Palestinians will be co-opted to Iran's battle plans. At the secret session, former president Rafsanjani declared that the Palestinians must not be allowed to confine their Intifada to Israel and the West Bank. Large numbers of Palestinians the world over should make their logistical capabilities and fighting zeal available to the Islamic cause.

After the conference, Mohtashami-Pour called the Iranian judiciary chairman, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi who was visiting Damascus, instructing him to call at once on Syrian president Bashar Assad and talk to Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

According to our sources, Shahroudi was told to test Syria's willingness to join forces with Iran's campaign of terror outside the Middle East and order Nasrallah to place Hizballah's international agents, especially in the United States, at Iran's disposal in an emergency.

Assad received the Iranian emissary promptly, but was cool to his request. The Syrian president affirmed his government's ideological solidarity with Tehran but declined any direct involvement in its war of terror. At the same time, he would not object to Iranian contacts, or cooperation, with Palestinian terrorist groups based in Damascus or Lebanon. Neither would Damascus interfere in the operational links between Tehran and the Hizballah.

Monday night, July 15, Shahroudi had a long talk with Nasrallah, urging him to draw up a detailed plan for the recruitment of Muslim fighting strength in Lebanon and elsewhere. Citing the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey, north and south Iraq and Chechnya, Shahroudi demanded that the sleeper cells Hizballah had planted so carefully around the world be woken up.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources, Shahroudi then had a secret conversation with Imad Mughniyeh, meeting him in southern Lebanon because the arch-terrorist does not feel safe in Beirut. That encounter held the key to the terror campaign Tehran means to unleash in America, because Mughniyeh is one of only three people at the top of the Iranian terrorist chain of command with an exact map of the locations of every Iranian terrorist cell in the United States. US and other intelligence services, including Israel's, conversant with the Iranian terrorist structure in the United States, believe those cells are currently concentrated in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Seattle and Houston.

4. Ayatollahs on the Brink of a Volcano

A spate of Intelligence reports reaching Washington from Tehran, the Gulf, Israel and other key places contribute to the growing certainty that Iran is on the brink of an internal explosion that could blow away its revolutionary Islamic regime, suddenly and violently.

The ayatollahs are well aware of their fragile situation. Some have arranged escape routes in case of an uprising and, according to one intelligence report accessed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Iranian sources, nest eggs have been deposited in overseas banks by certain leading clerics against the moment they they are forced to make a run for it.

Most scenarios agree that the main danger to the regime in Tehran emanates from the possibility of a crushing US offensive against Iranian bases, though not civilian targets, spurring hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers to deserting their posts, shedding their uniforms and taking to the streets in anti-government riots.

Only a handful of troops will remain to confront the Americans.

As long as US forces do not harm Iran's national interests and confine their assault to the regime's military support base, according to this scenario, they will be cheered on by the Iranian people, who will take advantage of the opportunity to bring the government down in the early stages of the campaign.

Promising though this scenario sounds to ears in Washington, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and Iranian sources say it represents but a cautious appraisal of the most recent intelligence data, which pose a much bigger question mark over the Iranian government's durability. Compilers of these reports have visited Washington to find out from members of the national security council and CIA officers why the United States is agonizing so hard over which regime to attack first - Tehran or Baghdad, when the obvious no-brainer is Tehran.

They argue that the campaign against Iran would be a pushover compared with the long and complicated war ahead in Iraq.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence experts have prepared a rundown on the state of Iran's armed forces, leadership, economy and society.

The Armed Forces

At the command of the Iranian government is a military composed of a 450,000-man standing army; Revolutionary Guards consisting of between 300,000 and 350,000 troops, expandable to 500,000 soldiers in an emergency call-up; and the bassij  Islamic militia, whose hardcore nucleus of 70,000 members maintains its paramilitary framework and gives its up to 1.2 million reservists from the poorest social strata proper military training. Iranian military publications claim up to 20 million volunteers would answer the militia's call to arms in all-out war, but this is a deliberate exaggeration. Even when the Khomeini regime was at peak popularity in the mid-1980s, the bassij could not muster more than 2.5 to three million men.

Like Khomeini his mentor, Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, does not trust the standing army. This sentiment is fully reciprocated by the top army brass who are deeply suspicious of the clerical politicians who rule the country - especially Khamenei. For this reason, the regular army is charged with defending Iran's borders far from the capital. It is thus sidelined, kept to the country's fringes and denied a foothold in Iran's main cities and industrial, economic and social power centers. The Revolutionary Guards and bassij defend the interior, effectively keeping the army out.

The army's field of action was further limited in recent years. As Iran pressed forward with its ballistic missile and nuclear program, the military chiefs discovered that the army was debarred from operating not only in the interior but also outside Iran's frontiers and denied access to its most advanced weaponry. The Revolutionary Guards alone were mandated to operate outside Iran and also awarded the control of its sophisticated weapons programs.

The Iranian armed forces, almost to a man, are therefore deemed by most intelligence experts to be opposed to the Iranian government to the point that they can no longer be counted on to fight off a foreign invasion.

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution - and through the seven-year Iran-Iraq in the 1980s, the Iranian army steered a course between allegiance to the revolutionary government and staying out of politics, lest the regime find a pretext for weakening the military. The generals now admit their error. While they kept to the sidelines, the ruling clique cut into the army's spheres of operation and undermined its authority. They could only grit their teeth when huge budgetary allocations were transferred from the army to the Revolutionary Guards, building this force up into a rival.

In the past four years, while the army was forced by lack of funds to exempt masses of conscripts from military service, without even basic training, the Revolutionary Guards reveled in lavish funding and absorbed recruits.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, the Revolutionary Guards-controlled ballistic missile program launched production of the Shihab-3 medium-range missile series in early June this year. Manufacturing facilities for their components have been set up in Shiraz, Esfahan and Teheran. Production is still slow - no more than two missiles a month. Some are already deployed on the lines facing Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, Khozistan, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq.

Despite Iran's promises to stop the series after the Shihab-3, planning for the 5,000-kilometer (3,000-mile) range Shihab-4 is advancing.

Iran is also projecting Shihab-5, a missile with a 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) range, capable of reaching targets on the eastern seaboard of the United States. This version is in the initial planning stages. Its continued development and manufacture depend on the fate of the North Korean government and Russia's consent to continue sharing its missile technology.

The Revolutionary Guards

Intelligence experts estimate that in an uprising against the regime or a US military assault, about two-thirds of the Revolutionary Guards will desert or simply fade, leaving no more than 70,000 to 100,000 opting to defend the government.

The Iranian government's strength is anchored at present in the Revolutionary Guards units stationed in cities and villages and guarding essential utilities like power stations, water resources and transport hubs. The Revolutionary Guards, the Pazdaran, also maintain a flock of internal agents known as the Komiteh, spies who report to their superiors on suspicious or subversive acts or words by individuals in the populace or staff employed at organizations under their eye. Seeing eyes and ears are also provided by more than 500,000 mosque preachers up and down the country, who offer intelligence to their paymaster, Iran's spiritual ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his henchmen. This dependency has generated for the regime a highly effective network of agents and spies in almost every corner of Iran.

The Bassij

Comprised mainly of poor villagers and impoverished city dwellers who came from the country looking for work, the bassij comes closest to being Iran's popular army. With the Revolutionary Guards, the bassij is supposed to defend the homeland against all invaders. But conventional wisdom claims that more than half of its number will turn tail as soon as the first shot is fired. Most experts on the Iranian military agree that the strength at the disposal of the Teheran regime will vanish a lot faster than did the Taliban fighting force in Afghanistan.

Corruption at the Top

Khamenei's standing among secular Iranians, as well as his religious countrymen, has slipped steeply in recent years. Political resilience is not in his nature. Unlike his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who supported radicals one day and reformists the next, Khamenei is an inflexible hardliner, who stands immovably against reform and freedoms.

His support base in the general population is non-existent and his opposition is constantly expanding.

Iran's spiritual leader has never gained the respect of accredited religious figures. They tend to sneer at his lack of erudition and question his fitness for handing down religious rulings.

He has never made the grade as Grand Ayatollah and is therefore not qualified to act as a senior Islamic judge. Khamenei's hard work over the years to bring Iran's clergy under control has not paid off. Most of the senior priests cherish their independence and reject him as a religious power. To much of the public, he is a clerical lightweight and therefore a figure bereft of support either from the clergy or the general population.

The publication last week of Sheikh Jamil Adim Tahari's letter of resignation was yet another slap in the face. Tahari is one of the most nationally esteemed clergymen and immensely popular in Esfahan. Tahari wrote that even in Iran's darkest periods, never were so many clergymen persecuted and put on trial as they are today. Even Khomeini's heir-apparent, Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, has been in detention for the past four years after criticizing Khamenei. Many middle-rank clergy have been tried and stripped of their religious authority for daring to criticize the regime or call for more moderation and humanity in state policy, including an end to executions in the name of Islam.

President Mohammad Khatami's popularity is also in decline. The Iranian people, who voted him in as a reformer, are bitterly disappointed in his failure in five year to achieve any real social progress or ease repression. In the bazaars of Iran, Khatami is nicknamed derisively 'the Smiling Don' - charismatic and smooth spoken but ineffective as a healer for the country's multiple ills.

Indeed, repression in Iran is more ruthless now than before Khatami's election in 1997.

His most signal failure is seen in the worsening economic crisis, galloping corruption and the glaring social gap. A host of rich parvenus, most if not all relations or cronies of Iran's clerical rulers, are the focus of popular disaffection. Two clans top the pyramid of corruption - those of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Vaez Tabasi. The latter controls the Islamic society of Khorasan province in northeastern Iran. He is popularly known as the King of Khorasan thanks to his influence and wealth.

Every market peddler knows about the billions of development dollars that continually disappear into the bank accounts of Iranian leaders and their families.

Spreading unemployment, drug addiction


Unemployment in Iran now stands unofficially but realistically at 30 percent, or six million to seven million people, out of a potential workforce of some 20 million. Between three million and six million Iranians are drug addicts. Special cleanup squads prowl the streets of Iran's major cities, including the capital, Tehran, to pick up the bodies of junkies who died overnight.

The drug scourge has spread to previously untouched segments of the Iranian population. Girls aged 11 or 12 have learned how to sell their bodies for a fix.

In villages and suburbs, poverty has forced women into prostitution, sometimes with their husbands' knowledge, to avoid harassment by the Revolutionary Guards. Brothels have become a thriving industry. Authorities in Tehran have spoken of thousands of whorehouses and 350,000 women working as prostitutes in a city where the chador is ordained by law. Popular frustration has generated thousands of underground cells, which distribute leaflets and organize secret protests, but lack a guiding hand to mold them into a cohesive and powerful political force.

The regime's repressive activities have stunted the growth of an alternative political leadership, although intelligence experts believe one will emerge when the time comes. Several intelligence reports mention Said Hajjarian, a former deputy minister in the office of Iranian intelligence, as a possible alternative leader. The target of an assassination attempt in Teheran after he criticized the government, he is now a paraplegic. Hajjarian opened an opposition website called Emrouz, or Today, containing a wealth of information on happenings in Iran. Most of the information comes from Iranian intelligence personnel willing to cooperate clandestinely with him against the government.

Heshmatollah Tabar-Zadi, who took part in the seizure of the US embassy in Teheran in 1979, is another example of a potential leader. By exposing financial corruption among Iranian leaders he sent a shockwave through the ruling echelons. He now leads a political organization called the Iranian Democratic Party and is working openly to bring down the present government.

There are also pro-democracy forces at work outside Iran. Reza Pahlavi, the 35-year-old son of the last shah of Iran, is based in Maryland. He occasionally issues appeals to the Iranian people to rise up against the regime. He has also urged Iranian opposition groups in exile to unite in the common cause of toppling the Teheran regime. But his activities are mostly low-key.

However all these afflictions pale when seen against the biggest failure of the Islamic Shi'ite revolution and government in Iran. A quarter-century after the revolution, and despite the Iranian government's deep involvement in international terrorism, the Islamic Republic has failed to export its revolution to a single corner of the Muslim world, with the exception of a small segment in Lebanon stretching from the southern suburbs of Beirut to the Israeli border. No group, community or Muslim nation has heeded the clarion call.
For all these reasons, Iran's Islamic revolution is sentenced to perish with the present Iranian regime.

Palestinians

The CIA's Security Force Begins Recruiting

The 'Madrid Quartet' - the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - slid into diplomatic deadlock in New York this week over a joint Middle East policy and what to do about Yasser Arafat. At the same time, secretary of state Colin Powell demanded attention for what he called 'a very good' CIA security plan for protecting Israel against Palestinian terrorism, while refusing to reveal its substance.

Powell adheres faithfully to the White House policy calling for the removal of Yasser Arafat as having reached the end of his political usefulness. This does not mean he likes it. His real feelings are closer to those of the Europeans and UN secretary-general Kofi Annan that Arafat is the elected Palestinian leader and cannot be dismissed from peacemaking.

Security, as the only issue all four members of the Quartet agree upon, has therefore become the catchword. After Powell announced the new CIA plan, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer reported positive developments. While setbacks were always possible (in the Middle East), President George W. Bush was generally satisfied. EU chief Javier Solana then came forward with the news that a US task force of security officials would be traveling to the Middle East in two weeks to pursue the plan with the Palestinians, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

This optimism was quickly shot through by dissenting voices from the Middle East. On Thursday, July 18, Egypt announced it would not be sending military or police forces to Palestinian Authority territory, after all. Jordan followed suit, after King Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak conferred urgently. But DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Cairo and Amman advise ignoring these public utterances. On the quiet, Egypt and Jordan will go ahead and cooperate with the United States in establishing the security force.

As for the content of the security plan on which Powell was so cagey, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terrorism sources reveal that the CIA has begun setting up and training new security forces for the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These contingents are not tied to Israel, Arafat or to any existing Palestinian security agency - certainly not those headed by Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan, although both had past associations with the CIA.

As one senior US security source in the field told DEBKA-Net-Weekly: 'The new agencies are completely autonomous and run - at least in the preliminary stages - by US security personnel.'

Another US security source in the field said: 'It's (CIA director) George Tenet's new baby in the region and he's convinced that President Bush will go for it.'

Tenet, the source said, has already sold the president on the view that the CIA's 1990s program to set up a CIA-supervised mechanism for security and military cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians was correct. It would have worked had not Arafat torpedoed the plan by opting for the path of terrorism. That threat has evaporated now that Arafat is hanging on to power by a thread. It is time therefore to build a security model on the same lines as the failed one.

Tenet plans to create a Palestinian security force controlled totally by the CIA on the model of the local militias now operating in Afghanistan and the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. He has slotted Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan into the venture as the CIA's partners, and will ask Israel to jump in later in a limited capacity.

He is reported to have convinced Bush that his plan is the best way to get an effective Palestinian security force into Palestinian towns with responsibility for security and the prevention of terror, and allow Israeli troops to pull out. Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence and security elements attached to the force will lend it operational ballast and pan-Arab legitimacy.

Our source described Tenet as passionate about the project and devoting much of his time to its details. The CIA director hopes its success will validate what many believe was his failed Palestinian program in the Clinton presidency.

Asked about the scope of the new security forces, our source said: 'They will be much smaller than the existing Palestinian security and police forces of 50,000 men - no more than 12,000 to 15,000,'

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources, CIA officers have begun offering jobs to Palestinian intelligence officers, working off lists pre-approved by CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Candidates are being invited to serve in a new security apparatus run by 'US civilian security personnel'. Their conditions of employment include severance of every tie with any existing Palestinian security or intelligence services and willingness to serve in any capacity anywhere in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Originally, the CIA planned a first-stage complement of 300 officers for the West Bank and 200 for the Gaza Strip. But the Palestinians rallied to the recruitment campaign much more enthusiastically than expected; economic conditions in Palestinian Authority-controlled area are harsh and no one knows how long the existing services will survive or meet their payrolls. The US agency accordingly upped its figures, so far signing up some 1,000 applicants.

Most have been trained in anti-terror tactics, close combat, policing and security duties in densely populated urban areas. The costs of retraining will therefore not be high. The lesson American instructors will hammer home is that terrorism against Israeli targets is a thing of the past. Their primary mission is to fight radical groups like the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of Arafat's Fatah, the radical Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly has further discovered from its sources that, by way of an important though discreet step to support Tenet's security plan, the Bush administration has begun to pressure banks in Europe and the Far East to stop releasing the funds in Arafat's accounts --- an unofficial move that is gradually freezing his cash flow. By law, the banks cannot close Arafat's accounts or stop all activity, but they are piling up technical obstructions to the transfer of funds.

Because of these difficulties, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report that Arafat this week quietly ordered his personal money wizard, Mohammed Rashid, to leave his safe refuge in London and come back to Ramallah without delay, even though his life is under threat from elements in the Palestinian Authority and its security services. Arafat needs Rashid at his side to cut through the technical barriers blocking access to his accounts in European and Far Eastern banks, especially Singapore.

Tenet's security plan is still in the fledgling stage and vulnerable. While Egypt and Jordan have agreed to play ball, Arafat could decide to counter the monetary and personal pressures heaped on him by targeting recruits to the new force and their families for terrorist attack and assassination. If enough recruits are frightened into deserting, the CIA security force could fold.

Endorsement by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon is likewise essential to the new force's survivability - and it is not a foregone conclusion. If he sees any sign of Powell using the time lag before the new force is fully formed to partially rehabilitate Yasser Arafat as a stopgap or token figure of authority, Sharon will back away from the Tenet plan. In the air over Washington last weekend was talk of making Arafat a figurehead president of the Palestinian Authority while a prime minister would assume real powers with the backing of the new security force.

The Israeli prime minister is also watching out for signs that the new CIA-led Palestinian force, if it is devoid of Israeli influence, will be a tool in the hands of Powell, the State Department, the Europeans and Egypt, for 'internationalizing' the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a goal long cherished by Arafat and anathema to Israel.

In a move that may reassure Israel, the vice president's daughter, deputy assistant secretary of state Elizabeth Cheney, has been put in charge of the security task force due in the Middle East in two weeks. As a diplomatic figure, she will counter-balance the security officer, George Tenet, and also perhaps his not too happy record in Jerusalem.


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

13 July:  An assessment of the current Turkish political turmoil's potential for holding up the US campaign against Iraq, is the errand bringing US deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz to Ankara next week. Incirlik and Adana, where the US air force bases its F-15, F-16 and AWACS aircraft, are important launch pads for striking at northern Iraq and providing air cover for the pro-US Kurdish and Turkoman contingents recruited for the US offensive to topple the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad.

However, DEBKAfile's military sources point out that, while their strategic value next door to Iraq is high, the two bases are no longer unique. Since being booted out of its Saudi air base, the United States has set up substitute operational facilities in Jordan and Israel and other parts of the region, boosted by air carrier fleets cruising the eastern Mediterranean and southern Aegean opposite Turkish and Greek shores.

Most of all, Wolfowitz must ascertain that the Turkish special forces stationed in the Turkoman regions of Iraq are up to par and their integration in the US-led ground assault will not be hampered by political upsets in Ankara.

Last month too, Turkey, the only Muslim-majority member of NATO and a secular democracy, took control of the allied peacekeeping force in Kabul.

After two months of debilitating ill health, Turkey's veteran political warrior, 77-year old Bulent Ecevit is left with a government and party deeply eroded by defections, economic crisis and a rising clamor for an early poll. Faced with the exit of seven ministers from his government and 43 deputies from his Democratic Left Party - DSP, the prime minister yet refuses to stand down and call an early election in September. In a live TV interview Friday, July 13, Ecevit declared elections would be considered only if his party is further splintered and his government's parliamentary majority of 15 disappears. That is exactly what happened this week when the rate of defections further accelerated. The government was forced to call an early election for November 3.

16 July: The expert ambush laid for the Bnei Brak-Immanuel bus 189 Tuesday, July 16, left seven Israelis dead. Eight of the 16 injured are fighting for their lives. The hospital had to deliver a badly hurt pregnant woman of a premature baby by Caesarian incision, in an attempt to save both lives. The baby died in the night. Immanuel is a small town. Therefore the second Palestinian attack in less than a year has decimated families that first suffered losses in last December's strike that killed eleven residents.

Four Palestinian groups, led by Yasser Arafat's Fatah, made haste to claim 'credit' for the attack. Their boast was hollow. Since Israeli forces took control of West Bank Palestinian towns, none of the regular terrorist groups has been able to break out of the Israeli military grip clamped down on their strongholds for almost a month - though not for want of trying.

DEBKAfile's military sources note that the Immanuel massacre broke with the routine Palestinian terrorist atrocity in that it was engineered by Iran through its military-terrorist surrogate, the Hizballah, under the direct command of the super terrorist Imad Mughniyeh.

Tuesday's Immanuel attack displayed quasi-military advance planning, efficient intelligence and expert tactics carried out by well-trained operatives. Their planning and attention to detail was faultless, including their escape route. The killer squad of three or four men appears to have spent two days or more lying up near the scene of the attack. They studied the 189 bus's route and timetable and marked the vulnerable gaps in its armor. First, they set explosives in its path, calculating in advance that the blast would tip the bus over on its right, leaving its unarmored windows and roof exposed. The terrorists then leapt out of their hiding place and sprayed the unprotected windows and roof with automatic fire, tossing hand grenades through the smashed windows. They also turned their guns on a pick-up van behind the crippled the bus.

Most of the victims, taken off guard by the Israeli army uniforms worn by the killers, suffered gunshot wounds, unlike the more common blast and flying shrapnel injuries from terrorist attacks.

The terrorists' disguise fooled Israeli troops who rushed to the scene demanding that their 'comrades' pitch in to help the injured, instead of which they opened fire on the rescuers too. 

This method of operation was first seen in the attack four months ago on March 12, when seven Israelis were slaughtered on the Kabri-Matsuba highway of North Israel's Galilee. That strike was the work of a mixed team of Ahmed Jibril's Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, and Hizballah, who spent several days at the scene of attack beforehand. Then too, the killers lay in wait until a line of Israeli cars was disabled, then advanced on their victims spraying bullets and hurling grenades directly into the vehicles, until they were sure that the injured were dead.

The multiple murder method exhibited in Immanuel resembled the Galilee attack closely enough to convince DEBKAfile's senior military sources that the professional, highly-trained killers came from the same outfit, the Hizballah.

The claim of responsibility by the four Palestinian groups is therefore meaningless. What has happened is that Arafat has found a way to field a fresh, well-trained organ of violence to make sure the bloodletting goes on.  

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