Mideast Roundup

August 23, 2002

Two Nuclear Chases

Iraq Agents on Hunt for Uranium

Operatives of the American and the Russian SVR secret service's first directorate are jointly engaged in an epic hunt for a band of undercover Iraqi operatives racing up and down Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan this past week. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's exclusive sources, the Iraqis have been sent by Saddam Hussein on an illicit hunt for nuclear material, particularly weapons-grade enriched Uranium-235. They are also trying to buy black market missile parts.

American and Russian task forces have set up a joint command center in Moscow to coordinate the high-stakes chase.

The alarm was first sounded in Washington and Moscow in early August by reports of Iraq agents splashing out with multi-million dollar offers for nuclear material. They did not take the information too seriously at first. But then came further reports that 15 Iraqi agents had split up into three groups, two covering Kazakhstan and the Ukraine and the third, Belarus.

The American and Russian presidents put their heads together and decided their intelligence operational divisions would mount a hot pursuit of the Iraqi agents, hoping to get to them before they reached their objective.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources say the chase is still on.

Iran Accuses Russians of Sabotaging Bushehr Reactor

Iran's dreaded Revolutionary Guards are hunting for Russian engineers suspected of sabotaging the 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor which Russia is constructing under its $800 m. contract with Tehran near the Persian Gulf city of Bushehr, 750 miles south of the Iranian capital.

Supreme spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered the country's intelligence chiefs, Revolutionary Guards commanders and the chairman of the Iranian Atomic Energy Commission to lose no time in getting to the bottom of and exposing what he described furiously to his close intimates as the "Russian-American conspiracy to cripple our nuclear reactor at Bushehr".

The nuclear cooperation between Moscow and Tehran has been a heated subject between the United States and Russia, with the Russians claiming the nuclear project was a purely civilian enterprise.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Teheran quote Khamenei's charges, as conveyed to an emergency secret meeting after Friday prayers on August 16. The ayatollah claimed to have received credible information from a source in Moscow he declined to name, alleging that the Russians had finally succumbed to US-Israeli pressure to limit its nuclear cooperation with Iran.

The angry leader spoke with Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian president, who is one of his top national security and intelligence advisers, by his side. President Vladimir Putin, said Khamenei, could not risk openly violating the terms of his 1995 nuclear cooperation contract with Iran without damaging Moscow's credibility as an international trading partner - especially since Iran paid up on schedule. The Russians therefore had to go through the motions of building a fully operable reactor. However, to still American protests, Putin hit on a ruse. He instructed Russian intelligence to hint to the Russian engineers now finishing work on the reactor to insert a few mistakes in their calculations before passing them on to the Russian and Iranian technicians installing the various parts of the nuclear facility.

Khamenei insisted the source of this information was "unimpeachable".

Both Khamenei and Rafsanjani are quoted as saying they were not surprised at Russian attempts to sabotage the reactor or some of its more sensitive components, given the fragile state of Iranian-Russian relations over the Bushehr project.

Then and there, they ordered the Revolutionary Guards to seek out the Russian engineers with access to these sensitive facilities. Rafsanjani said they must be arrested and held until the Iranian government decides what to do with these enemies of Iran's national security.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Teheran interpret Rafsanjani's remarks as suggesting that the Iranian government already knows the names of the Russian engineers suspected of sabotaging the Bushehr project. Iran may even be pondering whether to prevent the hundreds of Russian engineers and technicians at Bushehr from returning home, until Moscow and Teheran settle the sabotage controversy.

A senior Iranian diplomat, Amir Hussein Zamani-Nia, head of the Iranian foreign ministry's international policy section, was sent post haste to Moscow on Monday, August 19. He was received immediately by high-ranking Russian officials, who endeavored to cool the nuclear crisis. The Iranian official arrived at the same time as a US congressional delegation, come to deter Russia from entering into a new nuclear deal for the construction of another five nuclear reactors in the Islamic Republic. The Americans said it would be regrettable if nuclear cooperation with Tehran were allowed to sour Washington-Moscow relations.

The day the Iranian envoy departed Moscow, Wednesday, August 21, the Russian atomic energy minister Alexander Rumyuantsev announced that Moscow had signed all the documentation for ensuring the return to Moscow of the Iranian reactor's spent nuclear fuel. "We will make sure all the used nuclear fuel is back in our possession and cannot fall into the wrong hands," the Russian minister said.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Moscow and Tehran described the talks between the Iranian emissary and his Russian hosts as heated. Zamani-Nia bluntly accused the Russians of sabotaging the Bushehr reactor to curry favor with Washington. He also ruled out any negotiations on the future of spent nuclear fuel until the current crisis was resolved.

Crawford, Texas

Call Him Commander-in-Chief

His golf clubs back in the bag, US President George W. Bush is no longer taking his swings at Saddam Hussein from reporter-infested fairways, where his sound bites carried little sting. The leader of the strongest nation on earth acted decidedly presidential when he convened a meeting of his top security advisers at his Crawford, Texas ranch on Wednesday, August 21.

Facing the press later in a button-down shirt with his business-suited defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, peering over his shoulder, Bush looked like he was ready to roll up his sleeves and get to work on confronting Iraq. His Crawford conclave - also attended by vice president Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, the head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency - had all the trappings of a war council. But it was an optical illusion. The group did not need to debate whether to go to war against Iraq, because - as DEBKA-Net-Weekly has been reporting for the past two months -- a decision has been made and Bush is pressing ahead with plans for the offensive to topple Saddam despite a flurry of White House denials and domestic criticism.

The true significance of the ranch hoedown-before-the-showdown was that it was held in the public spotlight. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington report that Bush plans to hold similar war councils weekly as D-Day approaches. Some meetings will be made public, others classified. Bush will be talking to top US political leaders and military chiefs directly involved with preparations for the offensive and its implementation. Among those who can expect a presidential invitation are secretary of state Colin Powell, deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, General Tommy Franks - commander of the war against terror and the Iraq campaign - and other top army, air force, marines and navy officers.

It's all part of Bush's efforts to demonstrate that he is indeed the supreme commander of the armed forces of the United States and that he means to see the Iraqi campaign through to final victory.

Senior military sources in Washington told DEBKA-Net-Weekly that the president is eager to face the Congressional elections in November as a pro-active commander-in-chief who dominates the strategic preparations for an offensive bearing his personal mark. He fully expects the Iraq venture to strongly influence America's strategic standing in such flashpoint world regions as the Middle East, Arabia, the Gulf, Iran and Central Asia - from a military, political and economic standpoint. He will therefore lead the campaign from the front, along with his top team of advisers.

According to our sources, the conference at the presidential ranch in Crawford dealt with the following subjects:

1. Timeline

It endorsed Bush's decision to go ahead with the offensive against Iraq before the November elections. As DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported in Issue 67 on July 5, the president strongly favors the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks as launch date. But then, as in Crawford on Wednesday, he stressed that the timetable must be determined by the military consideration. If Franks and his team needed another two or three weeks of preparation time, they would get them.

Our military sources quote General Myers as announcing to the gathering that the US assault force would be revving at the starting gate in the last week of September or the first week of October. Our military experts cite any time between September 10 and October 10 - barring unforeseen circumstances, which could include a pre-emptive attack by Saddam, or a mega-terror strike by Iraqi agents.

Meanwhile, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources report the bulk of the US assault force for Iraq as being in position.

The USS Lincoln is on its way from Okinawa to the Arabian Sea, where late next week it will join four other US aircraft carriers already on-station. With the Lincoln, the United States will have mustered more than 450 aircraft ready to pummel Iraq. Britain's input of fighter-bombers will top up General Franks's air armada to more than 500 craft.

Troop mobilization is complete and the US 10th, 101st, 82nd, 28th, 35th, 40th divisions and 49th armored divisions have been relocated from bases in Europe to the Gulf and Middle East - some, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly has reported, deployed inside Iraq, mainly in the northern Kurdish regions; others around Iraqi borders - whether in Jordan in the east, or in Kuwait and Qatar in the south.

The poor showing of the Iraqi opposition front invited to the US capital earlier this month has not put the Bush administration off its plan to establish a provisional Iraqi government in northern Iraq prior to the main war offensive. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington, this plan was aired in detail at the Crawford session. The provisional administration's first task will be to invite the United States to send troops into Iraq, while calling on the Iraqi military not to resist the American force but turn their guns against the units loyal to Saddam Hussein.

The Bush team has still not come up with any dissident leader with sufficient command and authority to fill the post of provisional prime minister capable of swaying popular opinion and drawing the Iraq army into switching sides.

2. US Blitzkrieg

Contrary to the assumptions dominating United States, Middle East and Gulf media in recent days, George W. Bush and his war planners have not selected Baghdad for a major strike early on in their offensive. The reason is simple: Saddam Hussein and his immediate circle have not set foot in the Iraqi capital since last April; neither have his military and political chiefs been located there since May.

Reporting this, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources add that Iraq is not seriously contemplating defending Baghdad either. The absent regime has left behind just a few units of the Mukhabarat - the Iraqi domestic secret service, some lesser government bureaucrats and ruling Baath party functionaries, some low- and middle-ranking military officers, volunteer militiamen and police. Iraq's leaders are not wasting important units on defending the capital because they know their military strength is inadequate for putting down a military or popular uprising, or standing up to an American onslaught. Two US troop divisions, parachuted into the Tigris area or landed there in gliders, could take Baghdad in hours.

Nonetheless, to keep up the pretence, the Iraqi authorities organized photos for release of Republican Guard units taking up positions around presidential compounds and the villas of top functionaries, as well as several anti-aircraft missile batteries lined up on the eastern bank of the Tigris. No sooner were the Republican Guard units out of Baghdad, than the soldiers and missiles were replaced with cardboard dummies.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources reveal that since they left Baghdad, Saddam Hussein and his top political and military advisers have buried themselves with their families in inter-connected bunker-cities on the fringes of the northwest Iraqi city of Tikrit, guarded by special units of the Republican Guards, made up of officers and soldiers from Saddam's own Tikrit tribe. One intelligence report puts their number at no more than 25,000 men; another at 45,000. The real figure appears to fall somewhere between 15,000 and 22,000 troops. They are equipped with about 300 tanks and mobile artillery.

However the bunker site and Tikrit are marked out for America's primary air-missile blitz against Iraq, together with the 45 grand palaces and underground bunker complexes Saddam has built for himself across Iraq - just in case the Iraqi leaders are no longer hunkering down in the Tikrit underground city but have escaped past the electronic surveillance screen and gone to ground elsewhere. US military planners are determined to leave no stone unturned in the hunt for Saddam until he is finally and inescapably cornered.

The Crawford meeting was given an estimate of a week to 10 days for the total obliteration of the Saddam government. A massive aerial-missile bombardment combined with ground action is planned to pulverize the entire complex of bunker cities and wipe out the Iraqi defender forces. The plan calls for US airborne troops to parachute into Iraqi airfields, or land from giant gliders, to clear the way for larger reinforcements.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources report that US intelligence has mounted the most thorough data-gathering operation ever to make sure the plan succeeds. Any person or group associated with the construction of Saddam's underground cities, such as the Italian, German, French and Tunisian engineers who built or upgraded sophisticated ventilation and purification systems, were flown to the United States and pumped on every detail of their projects. American agents tried to reach Western or Arab politicians who had been received in Saddam's underground citadel. They all claimed they had been driven blindfolded to the site three of four hours through the desert. No foreign visitors were received after early May, when Saddam stopped them.

Garnered thus far are descriptions of what the visitors saw when the blindfolds were removed. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources quote them as saying they found themselves in a windowless 40 square meter (430 square foot) hall with red marble walls and floor, facing a bank of three large high-speed elevators with stainless steel doors. The elevators whisked the visitors underground to their meetings with Saddam in the space of 40 to 45 seconds.

But over-zealous security can backfire. Some of the visitors, blindfolded as they left Baghdad and bored to tears, timed and measured every stage of their journey. Most revealing was the time taken be the elevators, by which US intelligence calculated that Saddam's underground quarters are no more than 10 to 11 floors beneath the ground. The area of his main reception hall for visitors was put at 300 to 400 square meters (3,230 to 4,305 square feet), giving American tacticians a good idea of the size of the entire buried palace.

The hall has only one exit, apparently leading to the Saddam family's living quarters. One of his last visitors reported Saddam was showing the strain of his months underground and tended to to be snappish. When he complained bitterly to his Iraqi underlings that the dryness of the air impaired his faculties, they installed a big wave-making pool with a small fountain in the center, in the middle of the hall.

Whereas the Iraqi ruler's hideouts are generally believed to be impenetrable - or that is the impression conveyed by Iraqi intelligence's psychological warfare department - US intelligence agencies and military planners believe that the more complicated the complex's support systems, the more vulnerable they are. The ventilation ducts, for instance, for electronic systems, air conditioning and communication equipment, or the entry and exit points of the subterranean access roads, or even the external access and ventilation systems for underground fuel stores. All these systems make bunker cities vulnerable to attack by special smart weapons or ground assault.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and military sources, US intelligence will monitor but not disrupt the subterranean communications, telephone and computer systems - until the assault on the Tikrit region starts. From that moment, the United States will cast an electronic net to jam all communication between Saddam and his military commanders and forces on the outside and among the various sections of the palace-bunker. The expectation is that once he is cut off from the world outside his most intimate circle, Saddam's political and military authority will soon cave in.

3. Saddam's Mysterious Apathy

A select group of Iraqi district governors was ushered into Saddam's palace-bunker about 10 days ago expecting a last briefing from their president on contingencies for a US offensive. But DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in the Gulf report they were treated instead to a long harangue from Saddam on public sanitation in their respective districts.

Saddam got down to the nitty-gritty on sanitation in city markets and public services. "Sanitation is one of the most important foundations underpinning the stability of the Iraqi republic," he told his guests. After the meeting, several governors told close confidantes that their president and supreme commander seemed to have lost touch with reality.

Other military and intelligence sources paint a similar picture of Saddam's apparent mood. But professional Saddam-watchers, who keep an eye on the Iraqi president through various surveillance systems - notably American, Israeli and British - wonder whether his quirky behavior might not just be an elaborate act.

"The symptoms are too obvious," one intelligence official told DEBKA-Net-Weekly. "If you take them at face value, you have to conclude that Saddam's personal and mental condition is so low that it is hard to predict what will happen first - the US offensive to topple him or a mental breakdown with the same result of bringing his regime tumbling down."

"If that is the case," says the source. "America could win the war without firing a shot."

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources point to various signs of the Iraq ruler having given up, possibly too depressed to put up a fight:

1.
Iraq has made no unusual preparations for military action or for withstanding a full-scale war. Nothing has changed in the country's military disposition except for the massing of special forces at the Tikrit bunker complex where Saddam and his top leaders are holed up.

2.
Iraqi military movements begun in June have come to a halt. They included the deployment of divisions on the border with Turkey, the southern banks of the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers, the stationing of forces in central Iraq across from the Jordanian border, and the dispatch of special forces to northern Iraq to confront the US and Turkish commandos occupying bases there. The bulk of those Iraqi forces remain static, although some have returned to base. Iraq has suddenly cut back on its heightened air force activity, also ending a series of training exercises focusing on air combat and the mid-air fueling of Mirage F-1 fighter-bombers.

The only military movement detected lately in Iraq is the accelerated call-up of popular militias, most prominently the Jerusalem Brigades. But these militias are made up of elderly volunteers, most over 50, who lack basic military training and are armed only with antiquated rifles. Intelligence officials believe the militias are not frontline forces, but have been raised to preserve public order on city streets after the army has gone to the front.

As one military source told us: "Anyone who may have feared a long and bloody urban guerrilla can stop worrying."

3.
All of the surface-to-surface missiles deployed in early August north and south of Baghdad have disappeared. Intelligence agencies have been unable to establish their present locations, but are certain that they were not sent back to base. This certainty explains the presence of the head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, at the Crawford gathering last Wednesday.

American leaders wanted to hear at first-hand an expert estimate of the Iraqi missile threat to US forces in the Middle East and Gulf, to Israel - especially Tel Aviv - and to Saudi oil fields and facilities, mainly around the world's largest petroleum port of Ras Tanura. They were anxious for a closer scrutiny of recent CIA intelligence assessments, so far unconfirmed by other sources, that Iraq has procured long-range surface-to-surface missiles, capable of hitting US bases in Europe or European cities as far away as London.

Here now are some updated intelligence estimates of Iraq's missile arsenal:

Iraq has between 50 and 60 medium-range surface-to-surface missiles (DEBKA-Net-Weekly's experts put the number at 75 to 125) capable of hitting targets up to 1,000 to 1,200 kilometers (600 to 720 miles) away. Some can carry chemical and biological warheads. Scraps of information gleaned by US intelligence suggest that Saddam has a handful of missiles, perhaps no more than five or six, able to deliver a nuclear payload. If these numbers is correct, Saddam will have to pick and choose his targets carefully if he wants to produce a bang big enough to resonate in Muslim history books, before he leaves the world stage.

In the face of the US Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC 3) anti-missile missile deployed by US forces in the Gulf and Israel's Arrow-2 missile killer, Saddam will need to launch volleys of 15 to 20 missiles each for a minimum of two to five to survive long enough to reach their targets. Three or four such volleys will leave Iraq's missile arsenal depleted.

Communication between Saddam and his missile units presents him with an equally serious tactical problem. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources, Iraqi missile units, before disappearing from the Baghdad area, were stationed at locations far from chemical and biological weapons depots. It is almost certain that the US military will lay heavy electronic interference on the bunkers where Saddam and his top military officers are hiding out, as well as jamming Iraqi missile batteries' communications and operational systems. Even now, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report, Saddam, his sons and Iraqi military chiefs have no communications or telephone links with missile unit commanders. Secret messengers, usually officers from Saddam's Tikrit tribe, are used when necessary.

Back in early June, missile battery commanders received their last instructions on how to meet the contingency of an American attack. They were told that if they did not hear from Saddam or his sons for more than three hours into an attack, to open wax-sealed envelopes, extract the target lists inside and starting shooting without delay. But the built-in weakness of such orders is that the missile commanders might start wondering why on earth they should let loose against alien targets with missiles tipped with chemical and biological warheads when their own leaders may be dead and gone.

US and Israeli intelligence services differ over the scenario. US experts, led by Kadish, expect full obedience to Saddam's commands from the Iraqi missile commanders, while Israeli experts are much more skeptical.

4.
Although the previous three points suggest a fundamental weakness in the Iraqi leadership, Iraq's intelligence services, especially military intelligence, are still going strong. They have been waging a ruthless campaign in Iraq to uncover potentially rebellious military officers and others liable to cooperate with the United States or its allies. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources report dozens, if not hundreds, of Iraqi military intelligence officers acting as agents provocateurs. They are going through armed forces units posing as secret representatives of US-sponsored opposition groups or even US intelligence. They offer large sums of money to "recruit" brother officers to turn coat and join the American side after the war campaign gets underway. Any officer inclining to accept the offer is summarily put to death. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources say at least 35 such officers have been executed over the past two weeks.
The assassination of Palestinian arch terrorist Abu Nidal and four of his operatives in his Baghdad apartment on Friday, August 16 (See also <#Hot>Hot Points Item below), by Iraqi agents also indicated strongly that Iraqi intelligence services was operating efficiently at the behest of Saddam Hussein and his minions.

The latter two events strengthen the suspicion in the American, Israeli and Turkish intelligence communities that Saddam's seeming apathy and apparent signs of a mental breakdown are a piece of theater designed to misdirect attention from his war plans, which continue to be a hotly debated mystery in Washington, Jerusalem, Ankara and Amman. He may also be putting on the act to disarm vigilance for the mega-terror attacks he plans to launch in the United States and Israel - as DEBKA-Net-Weekly determined last week.

Israel Politics

Ben Eliezer in Sharp Crisis of Confidence with Army Chiefs

Israel's war with the Palestinians has ironically been sidelined by an acute domestic row setting Israeli military and security chiefs against defense minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer in a bitter crisis of confidence. This situation is reported exclusively by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, which point to Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and Shin Bet director Avi Dichter as spearheading the break with the defense minister. Political veterans say this is the sharpest crisis of confidence between a defense minister and the military-security echelons since the 1960s, when foreign minister Shimon Peres, then deputy defense minister, joined with chief of staff, the late General Moshe Dayan, to oust defense minister Pinhas Lavon.

Informed sources in Jerusalem say General Yaalon is no longer talking or conferring with Ben-Eliezer. "Yaalon defers directly to Ariel Sharon. He takes operational orders and gets any backing he needs straight from the prime minister," one source said. "The chief of staff refuses to carry out the defense minister's orders unless endorsed by the prime minister."

Dichter, director of Israel's secret service, the Shin Bet, whose role in combating terror is vital, likewise boycotts Ben Eliezer and is dead set against the minister's plan to conciliate the Palestinians by experimentally handing over the anti-terror campaign to Palestinian Authority security agencies - first in the Gaza Strip and Bethlehem, next in Hebron. The Shin Bet chief regards the plan as both hopeless and dangerous. He contends it fails to address the complicated Israeli-Palestinian security and political issues, while pandering to Yasser Arafat and playing along with his attempts to buy time until he is ready to launch his next onslaught of terrorism, including mega-attacks that will cost hundreds of Israeli lives.

If Dichter is critical of the defense minister's tactics, Yaalon queries his motives. The general confided to a small group of friends that Fuad is going where no Israeli defense minister dared to go before. Yaalon believes the Labor Party leader is exploiting the defense ministry and his decision-making powers as stepping-stones on the way to a position of vantage over his rivals for the Labor party leadership. The chief of staff privately suspects Ben-Eliezer of weighing military operations in the light of their usefulness to his drive for retaining the leadership of his fractured party against a new contender, former general Amram Mitzna, who is breathing down the back of his neck.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources point to some of the absurdities inherent in this standoff.

This week Ben-Eliezer negotiated an Israeli army pullout from Bethlehem with Palestinian security chiefs who represented no accepted authority. Along came the international media and hailed the promised pullout as indicating that Israel and the Palestinians were back on track for a ceasefire. They omitted to report that not a single Israeli soldier or tank actually withdrew from Bethlehem - an impossibility, in any case, since none were deployed inside the city in the first place.

Ben-Eliezer came out next with a promise to ease the military clampdown on Palestinian towns, whereupon the army sent a special forces unit into the center of Ramallah to nab Mohammed Saadat, the brother of Ahmed Saadat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who is jailed in Jericho under US-British supervision for masterminding the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister. Mohammed Saadat was killed while resisting arrest on Tuesday, August 20, drawing vows of vengeance from the PFLP.

The following day, the defense minister urged in a radio interview that any Palestinian sign of goodwill and willingness for dialog must be encouraged and addressed. That evening, the Shin Bet announced the capture of a Palestinian terror cell of six Jerusalemites, responsible for the deaths of 35 civilians. The men were caught in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Geulah in north Jerusalem on their way to a massive terrorist attack. Most of the cell carried Israeli identity cards. They are credited with carrying out eight major attacks, including the July 31 bombing of a cafeteria in Jerusalem's Hebrew University, in which nine people, among them five Americans, were killed.

The only political winner of this behind-the-scenes tug of war between the defense minister and the highest-ranking officers of Israel's armed forces and security branch is Sharon. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources say the prime minister feigns non-involvement in the feud. But, on the quiet, he is backing Yaalon and Dichter against his defense minister and government coalition partner.

Political circles in Jerusalem dissect Sharon's objective as being to hasten the visible decline of the Labor Party to the point of its collapse and eclipse as a political force. Sharon is counting on the Labor fallout voting for him in the next election - due in October 2003, if not earlier. He needs the former Labor ballots to offset the large-scale defections from his own Likud party - as many as half its members - who are expected to support the bid certain to be mounted by the former Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Fuad may find himself trampled in the stampede to the next general election.

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

Two-Part Special Series on US-Israel Relations

Part I

18 August: The Bush administration, which only last month sought $200m in special counter-terror aid for Israel, has just suspended its allocation reflecting its displeasure, according to DEBKAfile's Washington sources, with the latest trends at the top of Israeli politics - chiefly the resurgence of the pro-Oslo camp with fresh demands for concessions and dialogue with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and a new left-wing challenger for the Labor party leadership against defense minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer, Haifa mayor Amram Mitzna. Mitzna, who frankly bucks the policies articulated by the Bush team, is picking up left-wing fringe support as well as backing from an important wealthy elite, many of whose members made hay in the post-Oslo "New Middle East" economy. This faction is leaning heavily on Labor to quit Ariel Sharon's national unity government. To deflect that pressure, Sharon is giving ground on some key security issues, particularly in the Palestinian arena, bringing down on his head a measure of American ire.

The revival of the Clinton-era Oslo faction in Israeli politics, which does not sit well with the Bush administration, is also resented by the majority of Israelis, who bitterly blame the Oslo regime for the miseries of suicidal terrorism, economic depression and galloping employment attendant on Arafat's war of terror. The economic crisis contrasts dramatically with the boom in neighboring Jordan as a result of a US $500 million injection in expanding Aqaba port and its airfield, new south-to-north highways and new ground bases where US troops are stationed near the kingdom's Syrian and Iraqi borders. Israel is not the only country suffering economic punishment at the hands of Washington. Three days ago, the Bush administration informed Egypt that supplementary aid would not be forthcoming in view of the imprisonment of the pro-democracy, American-Egyptian academic, Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

Last week, with inspiration from Washington, the new Palestinian finance minister Salam Fayyed created a central instrument of financial reform, the Palestinian Investment Fund, to operate under his direct control under a soon-to-be-appointed board of trustees. The new holding company's powers will extend to the Palestinian Authority's foreign assets, disbursements of international aid and management of cement and petroleum monopolies in Palestinian-ruled areas.

DEBKAfile recalls that under the Oslo accord arrangements, those monopolies were created as Israel government-approved partnerships between Palestinian circles close to Arafat and Israeli business associates close to leading Oslo architects. The revenues were to be split between Arafat and the Israeli interests involved. Behind this business association, Arafat's financial advisers and the heads of Israel's pro-Oslo camp forged a strong political alliance. The association came in the form of monopolies, which kept any outsiders from engaging in major transactions in Palestinian-controlled territory in basic commodities, such as petroleum flour, cement, paint, iron, foodstuffs, minerals and the now shuttered Jericho Casino.

The new Palestinian Investment Fund and finance minister Fayad were thus empowered by Washington to become an instrument of transparency - not only in respect of Palestinian Authority finances, but also those of its Israeli partners in the key monopolies - a direct hit at the resurgent camp of doves.

Part II

18 August: Two weeks ago, the Israeli prime minister's chef to de bureau, Dov Weissglass, visited Washington with a surprising message. He urged the importance of including two Palestinian Authority officials, Mohamed Rashid and Mohamed Dahlan, both close to Yasser Arafat and high up in his terror machine, in the process of reforming the Palestinian administration. This request went down badly with leading US officials. When the Bush administration adopted Sharon's demand for a thorough overhaul of the Palestinian administration to purge it of terrorists and corruption, it meant exactly that. No half-measures. Arafat's men must be pushed out, and reformers brought in.

Then too, Ariel Sharon gave the nod to a list-ditch attempt by Israeli Labor ministers, Binyamin Bin Eliezer and Shimon Peres to rescue and re-empower Yasser Arafat's regime. Behind them is a faction of wealthy businessmen, bankers and politicians with vested interests in preserving that regime who are now also backing Haifa Mayor Gen (ret.) Amram Mitzna in his race against Ben Eliezer for the Labor leadership. This attempt came in the form of the defense minister's "Gaza First" initiative for handing sole responsibility for security in Gaza to the Palestinian authority as a test. He did not demur when Ben Eliezer took his initiative further, adding the West Bank towns of Bethlehem and Hebron to the experiment. Brandishing another red flag in Washington's face the Israeli defense minister agreed to negotiate with Yasser Arafat's national security adviser, Mohamed Dahlan, as well as the reformist interior minister Abdel Razzek Yahya.

At the same time there is no progress in another of Ben Eliezer's projects to which Sharon has given the nod: a security fence supposed to protect Israel from West Bank Palestinian terrorist intrusions. This is not surprising. Cash is scarce because Washington is holding back.

Bush will not permit the Oslo faction to defeat his strategic plans for the Middle East or reverse his project for obliterating "evil" regimes, whether Saddam Hussein's in Baghdad or Yasser Arafat's in Ramallah. To this end, the US government is slowly switching off the flow of supplementary dollars to Israel and will continue to do so until it is convinced that Ariel Sharon has stopped flirting with the Oslo faction and that candidates for prime minister of Mitzna's ilk disappear.

20 August: Abu Nidal - once Yasser Arafat's best friend; later turned fierce foe - was shot dead with four of his henchmen early Friday, August 16 by Iraqi military intelligence gunmen who burst into his home in Baghdad.

His murder raises some intriguing questions:

1.
Why would Iraq want to dispose of a sick, clapped out terrorist who once performed services for Saddam Hussein?

2.
Does his liquidation have any bearing on the approaching American military attack on Iraq?

3.
Is it related to the intricate trade-off relations between Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat? Iraqi military intelligence and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades? Or the networks currently engaged in preparing a mega attack in Israel?

Abu Nidal's modus operandi as defined here by DEBKAfile's terror experts was singular:

A.
First and foremost a mercenary, his clientele spanned Yasser Arafat in the early seventies - before they fell out over conflicting orientations; Libya's Muammar Gaddafii in the late seventies, early eighties, for whom he carried out strikes in West Europe; Iranian intelligence, which used him as its surrogate overseas liquidator and, most of all, Saddam Hussein. Abu Nidal's fee per operation ranged from $1 million to $3 million.

B.
A sharp businessman, Abu Nidal diversified into selling arms and trafficking in his fellow terrorists' secrets from a business base he set up in Soviet East Europe in the mid-70s, in cooperation with his hosts' intelligence services. The Fatah Council's Warsaw firm sold and leased weapons and ammunition to terrorist networks and paramilitary militias, such as the Irish Republican Army, the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Unbeknown to these purchasers, Abu Nidal retained clerks to note down the serial numbers of their purchases in order to track their disposition and sell the information to the highest bidder.

C.
The dreaded Abu Nidal did not execute all the attacks credited to him. Some he claimed to build up his reputation and raise his fee; sometimes, rival terror groups borrowed his name. But most of all, he turned a pretty penny by renting out the name of his organization, to cover up the real perpetrators.

Our terror experts reveal for instance that, contrary to general belief, not Abu Nidal but a seven-man Iraqi military intelligence team carried out the attempted murder of the Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London in June 1982, which prompted Israel's invasion of Lebanon and led to the destruction of Arafat's military infrastructure in south Lebanon and his own expulsion. Saddam paid Abu Nidal a quarter of a million dollars to attach his name to the crime.

Nine years later, Iraq paid him handsomely to say his men had murdered two of Arafat's top aides, Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and Hayel Abdel-Hamid, two days before the Gulf War began in 1991. Both men opposed Arafat's alliance with Saddam against the US.

After 12 years of obscurity in Libya, Abu Nidal surfaced in late 1997 in Cairo with a small band of trusted partisans. Thereby hangs an extraordinary tale, which DEBKAfile reveals here for the first time. Faced with virulent threats from extremist Islamic terror groups, Egyptian political and security leaders persuaded their opposite numbers in Washington that Osama Bin Laden's al Qaeda and Dr. Ayman al Zuwahri's Egyptian Jihad Islami could only be penetrated and fought by terrorists of the same ilk. Therefore, they proposed hiring arch terrorist Abu Nidal to extinguish the two rising fundamentalist menaces. DEBKAfile's Washington sources recall that the Clinton administration agreed to go along with the project - albeit passively - after some agonizing in the National Security Council.

They scrapped the Abu Nidal project after two years in mid-2000 when they caught him peddling information to a Qaeda about American and Egyptian secret combat tactics. The terrorist lost no time in slipping out of Cairo - heading first for Tehran, then Baghdad. Clinton called off the investigation against him before the CIA had a chance to establish exactly what secrets Abu Nidal had sold to Osama Bin Laden. Many counter-terror experts view this omission in retrospect as an error that left the Bin Laden-Zuwahri duo free to pus ahead with planning for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

In Baghdad, he found a Saddam Hussein eager to exploit his knowledge to find out how much the Americans and Egyptians knew - or didn't know - about al Qaeda, before deciding how safe it was to play ball with Bin Laden's network without incurring American retaliation. Not long after Abu Nidal's arrival, in July or August 2001, al Qaeda fighters began filtering into the pro-Iraqi fundamentalist Kurdish towns of Biyara and Tawil in the Shoman district of northern Iraq. Iraqi military instructors trained them there in the use of bombs and devices containing chemical and biological agents and possibly also in the handling of nuclear devices. Those camps have been taking in fresh intakes ever since.

This week, American ABC and CNN TV stations reported the discovery of a chemical weapons program run by al Qaeda members in northern Iraq, plus the fact that Washington had been planning a covert operation against it, which the President called off late last week.

This joint Iraq-al Qaeda WMD training project was first exposed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue No. 54 on March 22, 2002.

The US government was chary of any action that might lead to the exposure of Washington's indirect employment of the notorious terrorist and therefore held off at first from acting on the information. This constraint may have been superseded by Bush's need to supply proof of a direct link between Saddam and global terror in order to silence the critics of his war plan for Iraq. Two options were open to him: One was to send a covert American force to snatch al Qaeda trainees with their Iraqi WMD instructors, catching them red-handed in their north Iraqi bases. The other was to have US special forces abduct Abu Nidal and bring him to America to tell his damning story against Saddam.

Neither option is available any longer to Washington.

Tipped off to their potential as President Bush's cassus belli against Baghdad, the al Qaeda and Iraqi birds have flown Biyara and Tawil. Whereas Bush needed Abu Nidal alive, Saddam had a pressing need to shut the old terrorist's mouth finally and without delay.

Four Iraqi bullets settled that problem permanently.

Moreover, by disposing of one veteran terrorist, Saddam Hussein issued a graphic warning to another - Yasser Arafat, showing him the fate awaiting him if he turned coat and threw in his lot with Washington. Arafat's former lieutenant, the late Abu Iyad, paid the price in 1991; Abu Nidal in 2002.

21 August: The announcement Wednesday, August 21, of the Israel's security and police authorities' coup in capturing a six-man terrorist cell of Jerusalemite Arabs, all bearing Israeli identity cards, poses some questions. The communiquÎ reports that all six admitted to complicity in executing 8 of the most devastating terrorist attacks in the last three months, in which 35 Israelis died and dozens were gravely wounded in different parts of the country.

Without detracting from Israel's success in rounding up the ring, DEBKAfile's counter-terror experts note the word "admitted" used instead of "committed" in the official communiquÎ - denoting reservations about whether the six suspects could have carried out this many operations over such a large area in so short a time - roughly five months.

One possibility is that they were mere pawns of the high command in Ramallah, part of its plan to try out Jerusalemite Palestinians as instruments of terror, to fill the shoes of West Bank terrorists locked in by the presence of Israeli troops in most Palestinian centers. Until now, Jerusalem Arabs, roughly one-third of the population, stayed clear of Arafat's Intifada and prospered in comparison with their brethren in Palestinian-controlled areas. However, their usefulness clearly tempts, especially when combined with Jerusalem's proximity to Ramallah. The Arabs of Jerusalem move around Israel freely with Israeli identity cards and Israeli number plates on the cars; they do no need permits to work in Israel - and many do. The cell's commanders were therefore able to activate the six over an area of operation covering all of central Israel - Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Holon, Rishon Lezion, Rehovot and Lod - in surveillance and as planners, liaison, field operatives and handlers of suicide killers, while avoiding the practice themselves.

Israeli defense minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer's plan to induce a truce by the Israeli army's experimental handover to Palestinian security of responsibility for terror prevention in the Gaza Strip, Bethlehem and possibly Hebron, is probably doomed to a (not very) quiet death - even after the capture of the dangerous terror ring in Jerusalem. Removing Israeli troops from West Bank towns would put the terrorists back in Israeli cities. Five suicide killers are known to be on their way to mass-casualty targets in Israel. The Palestinians are also trying to plant a truck loaded with chemical fertilizers converted into explosives in a large Israeli city center. Three more major strikes are planned for Jerusalem. Following their effective attack at the Mount Scopus campus, Palestinian terror masters are preparing further assaults on Israeli universities, now eyeing Haifa. There are also reports of potential terrorist landings by sea.

Perhaps the most curious feature of the official Israeli communiquÎ is the way it fails to attach the captured cell to any Palestinian group or organization, beyond the vague mention of Ramallah.

Some sources have tried attributing the ring to Hamas, maybe because its leaders declared they wanted no part of Ben Eliezer's understanding with the Palestinian Authority. But the Hamas has no real standing in Ramallah, the source of the cell's orders and explosives. This West Bank hub town just north of Jerusalem is the fief of one man - Yasser Arafat. The Ramallah reference is therefore nothing but a veiled hint at the man who rules the roost there.
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