Mideast Roundup

September 6, 2002

Arab Nuclear Drive

Egypt Arranged Iraqi Scientists' Employment in Libyan Program

In the traditional televised Jewish New Year's message on Wednesday, September 4, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon dropped a far from traditional bombshell that will reverberate long and loud. He revealed recently confirmed intelligence information from early 2002 that Libya was close to becoming the first Arab and African country to join the nuclear club, beating Iraq and Iran to the punch.

Considering that Iran is expected to reach operational nuclear capability by 2005, what Sharon was signaling was that Libya would have its atomic bomb by 2004. The Israeli leader added that the Libyan program was being carried out by Iraqi and North Korean nuclear scientists with Saudi funding. He suggested the advisability of checking to see if Saddam was not exploiting Libya to build a nuclear weapon for himself outside Iraq.

Sharon's remarks came scant hours after US president George W. Bush told congressional leaders that the United States had no option but to deal with the problem called Saddam Hussein. In the run-up to the congressional briefing at the White House, US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said America had secret information that Iraq was nearing its nuclear goal.

He did not give that information away. Sharon did, revealing that the first Arab nuclear bomb was on the way - albeit in an unexpected place.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington report that the Bush team was far from pleased with him for letting the cat out of bag, having hoped to keep this fresh source of Middle East tension on a back burner before the assault on Iraq.

However, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources note that Sharon gave only half the show away. He kept the other half to himself. In late July, Israeli intelligence was startled to discover that the Libyan nuclear program was essentially a combined effort to provide Egypt as well as Libya with a nuclear bomb, with a finger in the nuclear pie for Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The North Koreans had contracted to carry the project forward for the two Arab countries. And, while some of the financing came from Cairo, some could also be traced to Riyadh, in the drive for the first Arab nuclear bomb.

Some of the background for this development is revealed here by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources:

A.
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who claims the privilege of being Washington's strongest ally in the Arab world, hid behind this standing and his prestige as peacemaker in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s, to deal secretly with North Korea on the development of an arsenal of atomic weapons and nuclear-tipped missiles.

B.
Mubarak opted for this course after Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, putting paid to his hopes of Rabin being talked round to declaring the Middle East a nuclear-free zone in return for comprehensive peace with the Arab world. After the Israeli prime minister's death, the Egyptian president pressured Washington to force Israel's nuclear disarmament. When this did not work, he performed an about-face.

C.
This turnabout entailed an approach to Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi for help. At the time, Libya was ostracized and subject to UN sanctions over its role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Mubarak proposed embarking on a joint Egyptian-Libyan program to develop the Arab nuclear weapon.

The Egyptian leader, while above suspicion of harboring nuclear ambitions, proposed entering into secret negotiations with North Korea for assistance in building two nuclear facilities.

The first was to be an underground reactor in the southern Libyan Desert oasis of al Khufrah opposite the Aswan Dam of the Upper Nile. When Libya and Egypt fell out in the 1970s during the presidency of Anwar Sadat, Ghaddafi posted Scud missile batteries at al Khufrah as a threat to the huge dam, a threat that was partly instrumental in persuading President Sadat to sign peace with Israel in 1979.

The other project for which Mubarak sought North Korean help was a factory for the manufacture of surface-to-surface missiles on the model of the North Korean No Dong missile, capable of delivering nuclear warheads.

Work on the two projects began in the fall of 1996, with some 1,800 nuclear engineers and technicians working on the construction of the reactor. Only 800 came from Pyongyang, the rest were recruited in Belarus, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Poland and Central Asia - mostly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - with a handful of Chinese.

The missile factory, near Alexandria, was completed in 2000. Its assembly line is working without pause, employing some 600 North Korean technicians and engineers.

Ghaddafi put up most of the cash for the two $4.2 billion nuclear projects. But Saudi Arabia agreed to contribute $800 million after Mubarak and Ghaddafi secretly showed Saudi Arabia's crown prince Abdullah round their respective facilities - the Alexandria factory and al Khufrah reactor sites - in September 1999.

D.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources report that parts of the al Khufrah reactor, now in its last stage of construction, starts test runs in a matter of weeks, a testimony to the expertise of the North Korean, East European and Asian engineers and technicians who built it. They have proved far more efficient than their Russian counterparts who are erecting Iran's Bushehr reactor.

Ghaddafi, in addition to being the project's leading sponsor, is also providing the enriched Uranium-235 for the reactor. No stranger to the illicit trade in nuclear material, back in the 1970s, the Libyan leader and his intelligence services were involved in the mining and production of uranium-rich lead in Niger, in partnership with the Soviet Union and East Germany. Over the years, Ghaddafi was the source of much of the uranium that went into the Pakistani nuclear bomb, as well substantial funds. He hoped to be presented with a bomb of his own. But the Pakistanis were only prepared to give their benefactor enriched uranium for manufacturing a device, drawing the line at providing him with the blueprints for constructing one.

E.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources, until Bush entered the White House, Washington took no take action against Mubarak's nuclear project, accepting his denial of Israel's allegations that the Alexandria factory, operated by North Koreans, was turning out missiles capable of delivering nuclear, biological and chemical payloads. In mid-1988, Bill Clinton, then president, the CIA and the Mossad found out about the Arab nuclear bomb project. But, his hands full preparing the war in Kosovo, he was too wary of disrupting US political and intelligence cooperation with Egypt to worry about the discovery. He declined to step in even when two successive Israeli prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, presented him with evidence that Egypt was planning to manufacture missiles capable of delivering non-conventional warheads.

F.
Shortly after September 11, 2001, the Mossad discovered that Iraqi nuclear scientists from Saddam's atomic arms development program had been co-opted to the North Korean teams at the al Khufrah underground facility. In early and mid-2002, Sharon raised the issue in several of his visits to Washington. Admitting he had no specific facts, he conveyed his fears to Bush that in early 2004, when a nuclear bomb was in the hands of Egypt and Libya, Iraq would be handed both a ready-made atomic device and the missiles to deliver it anywhere in the Middle East, including Israel.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington and Jerusalem report that, while Bush did not challenge Sharon's assessment, he asked for more proof.

G.
After each such conversation in Washington, Sharon would call on Israel's intelligence chiefs for a supreme effort to dig out definitive evidence of Iraq's participation in the Egyptian-Libyan-North Korean nuclear project. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, their chance came on July 15, when a senior North Korean envoy, Kim-Jung Nan, arrived for visits to Tripoli, Damascus and Teheran.

Both the CIA and Mossad noted that Kim-Jung, who oversees his country's nuclear ties with foreign countries and entities, steered clear of Cairo and Baghdad. But Jerusalem and Washington were tipped off that, while in Tripoli, Kim-Jung slipped away for a secret tour of the al Khufrah underground complex. There, he rendezvoused with a delegation from Egypt's atomic energy commission and senior Egyptian officers dealing with nuclear projects.

The key piece of information came from Damascus, where Kim-Jung was found to have met secretly with the heads of Iraq's nuclear military industry. The North Korean envoy demanded a guarantee that, with a US offensive against Iraq in the offing, documents on the Libyan-Egyptian-North Korean nuclear project be removed from Baghdad and kept safe from American hands, including evidence of the Iraqi scientists employed at al Khufrah.

From Iraqi and Egyptian officials, he demanded to know what would become of the Iraqi scientists once the US attack began and who would assume responsibility for them.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources reveal that in early August, Israeli intelligence got hold of the transcripts of the North Korean official's conversations with Iraqi representatives. Sharon sent them to Washington post haste by the outgoing Mossad director Efraim Halevy. So highly classified was this material, that Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and defense minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer were not let into the secret before they visited Mubarak in Alexandria later last month.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and military sources, the Bush administration began preparations to sever its ties with Cairo earlier this year, when it first heard that Egypt had admitted Iraqi nuclear scientists to its joint nuclear project with Libya. The proofs Sharon sent over to the White House finalized its decision. The US defense secretary's proposal to pull US peacekeeping forces out of Egypt's Sinai desert was part of Washington's move to withdraw from involvement in the 1979 Israel-Egyptian peace treaty. The Bush team reasons that if the strategic balance between Israel and Egypt turns nuclear, America had better not be caught in the middle.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington predict the Bush administration will soon begin tailing off its monetary and military support for Egypt, ending in a complete cutoff. The White House has no intention of providing aid that ends up bankrolling the Libyan-Egyptian-North Korean (and perhaps Saudi) nuclear program. In the meantime, the US will do its utmost to ensure that the Arab nuclear option is never realized.

9/11 - One Year On

Macedonia Encapsulates Abiding Threat

One year after the September 11 hijacking suicide calamities in New York and Washington may be too soon for a clear verdict on the Bush administration's war on global terror.

Most of the processes set in motion in the first heat of shock are still inchoate.

Even the view from Kabul is far from clear. The provisional regime established by the West's great hope, Afghan fashion plate Hamid Karzai, is looking a bit disheveled in the face of challenges by warlords who may or may not be loyal to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda - which, in turn, may or may not have been defeated. This week saw an upsurge of anti-Western violence in Afghanistan, including a car bomb in downtown Kabul which killed upward of a dozen people and an attempt on Karzai's life in Kandahar. The bullets aimed at him struck his armored car and his American bodyguards opened fire on the assailant.

In neighboring Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf's control does not extend to the lawless, semi-autonomous tribal regions on its northwestern border, where the Taliban and al-Qaeda are bunched together in quasi-colonies, their new bases of operation.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's analysts have therefore homed in on a relatively low-profile trouble spot as a vantage point for a fair perspective on America's interim anti-terror balance sheet.

Surprisingly, the breath-taking vistas of a tiny picture corner of Europe, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, may be the best place to sit back and gauge the state of a world changed forever by 9/11; in particular, its border areas with Kosovo and Albania.

Behind its serene visage, a majority of Macedonia's just over 2 million inhabitants - 67 percent Greek Orthodox and 23 percent ethnic Albanian Muslim - live with a creeping peril. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terrorism sources describe a hostile enclave running from Crna Gora and Sar Plan near Tetovo in the north to the divided lake districts of Ohrid and Prispankso Ezero in the south, spanning 2,700 square kilometers (1,400 square miles), where any Western intruder risks disappearing without trace or turning up dead.

American peacekeepers and their allies in the war against terrorism -- the British, French, Dutch, Australians and Russians - have learned that venturing into these badlands is as dangerous as a visit to Kandahar or east of Kabul and Bagram.

New Islamist army on the march?

The enclave is ruled over by five allied groups, each with its own turf:

The Albanian Liberation Army, a substantial number of whom are Albanian-Americans, under the control of the Albanian mafia - the major partner, and Sigurimi, the Albanian State Security Service - that was once trained by the CIA. For the moment, the two are partners.

A group of 600 to 900 young Saudis, aged between 16 and 25, made up of Islamic radicals, GIS general intelligence operatives and al-Qaeda fighters, who were dispatched to Macedonia from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Lebanon, Chechnya and Central Asia.

Some 1,200 to 1,600 Iranians. Save for a handful of religious volunteers, most are Pazdaran, ie Iranian Revolutionary Guards, assigned to Macedonia by the force's special security and intelligence agencies.

Between 200 and 300 Lebanese Hizballah extremists, mostly from the Shiite group's special security division. They are under the command of secretary-general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and the Iranian Shiite terrorist mastermind Imad Mughniyeh.

At least 70 to 120 Iraqi agents. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, Saddam Hussein's undercover men began trickling into Macedonia from August 10 via Athens and Sofia, Bulgaria - all members of the crack, super-secret al Amn al-Khas, or 14th Directorate, the special presidential security agency serving directly under his orders. All are fluent in Balkan languages, as well as English and German.
Saddam reserves his 14th Directorate for highly classified, sensitive operations outside Iraqi borders. One of its past missions was the failed attempt on the life of the first President George Bush during his visit to Kuwait in April 1993.
The Iraqi agents are scattered around the enclave, while the other four groups have each commandeered its own slice of the territory, their unofficial boundaries well known to the local ethnic Albanian populace.

Non-Albanians were "ethnically cleansed" from the area, their property confiscated and homes expropriated or destroyed. The remaining ethnic Albanians couldn't be more pleased. The interlopers maintain security and public order without levying taxes. Instead, they hand out to the locals monthly stipends ranging from $150 to $350, requiring in return only that they come every day to pray at the new mosques built with Iranian, Saudi and Iraqi money.

Bin Laden T-Shirts for free

The top floor of these two-storey mosques serves for prayer meetings; educational and medical services are provided downstairs. Most of the small children and youngsters in villages and towns in the area wear tee shirts with a picture of bin Laden which are handed out free of charge.

Young ethnic Albanians are easily recruited to the imported flag. DEBKA-Net-WeeklyÎs intelligence and counter-intelligence sources hear that the lower floors of the new mosques are recruitment centers for local youngsters, who are drafted into the Albanian Liberation Army or local militias run by outside agents, depending on their medical fitness. Both are given on-site training in terrorist tactics, the use of weapons and explosives and urban and mountain warfare.

The combined strength of the five alien contingents occupying this region of Macedonia is estimated by intelligence agencies as ranging between 12,000 and 20,000 highly trained and well equipped fighting men and officers, who are thought to be drafting around a total of 700 to 900 young locals each month. The ranks of the militant Islamic movement in the heart of Europe are thus swelling month by month.

The Albanian Liberation Army and Albanian mafia cells set up in every community have spread a security umbrella over the entire enterprise. These "minders" make sure Macedonia's border to Kosovo in the northwest remains open and that international peacekeepers, American, Russian, NATO and UN, are kept out. They also keep the Macedonian army confined to the eastern region, at arm's length from the Islamist enclave.

In this way, an anti-West Muslim coalition force formed of Saudis, al Qaeda, Hizballah and Iranians has got away with conquering a territory of several thousands of square miles in the middle of Europe - and building an Islamic legion - under the noses of an international force assigned to keeping the peace in the stormy Balkans.

And the buildup continues under one guise or another.

For instance, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 's intelligence sources have learned of an application from the Iranian embassy in the Macedonia's capital of Skopje to the Macedonian Science Ministry for entry permits for 1,200 Iranian "students", claiming Serbia admitted 1,600 Iranian students-visitors last spring. In answer to the query from Skopje, Serbian officials confirmed the information but added that every last Iranian "student" had disappeared weeks after their arrival.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly can disclose that the Iranian tourists were in fact elite Revolutionary Guardsmen, who lost no time in heading out of Belgrade for Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Albania. The Macedonians therefore rejected the Iranian application, prompting a row with Teheran, which soon found alternative routes for slipping hundreds of its operatives into the protected Islamic enclave of Macedonia.

Xmas gift for Europe - narcotics

Intelligence sources consulted by DEBKA-Net-Weekly are not clear what the five groups intend doing with this mushrooming Islamist army. All five are clearly acting under orders from their respective intelligence masters at home. They also wonder about the smooth, untroubled functioning of this religious-military-intelligence body, although it is run by elements sent out by different national agencies.

The overriding impression gained by our sources - from dozens of interviews with escapees from the badlands who came out one piece - is of a single controlling hand, a higher authority which activates all five groups, whether foreign or indigenous. They believe a command center, somewhere outside the mountains of Macedonia, hands down orders, funnels money and weapons and synchronizes the different groups' activities, binding them into a harmonious shared enterprise.

Our sources on the ground report that the local commanders and operations officers report in at this command center at least once a week, to commune and synchronize their activities. In between those visits, the Saudis, Iranians, Iraqis, al Qaeda men and Albanian mafia hoods operate in utter secrecy, maintaining total telephone, radio and communication silence. When essential messages are to be sent, couriers are employed, usually women or youngsters. However, the four foreign groups are in constant touch with their headquarters, whether in Tehran, Baghdad, South Lebanon, the Gulf, Central Asia or Pakistan, by way of local or regional links of some kind..

A certain amount of communication appears to go through the Internet, encrypted in a manner that has so far defeated intelligence agencies' efforts at interception.

Extremely tight electronic surveillance of the five groups operating in Macedonia points to their commanders and operations officers taking delivery of orders every few days. However, from the second half of August, the surveillance monitors picked up unusual bustle. They believe it was set up by instructions to al Qaeda personnel to take out of storage some 200 tons of heroin and opium hidden in a local Macedonian village or hiding place in the mountains. The narcotics were smuggled into Macedonia in the winter via Central Asia, Bulgaria and Croatia. Al Qaeda chose Macedonia as its central transit point for drug smuggling into Europe because it is already the main conduit for South American cocaine and heroin destined for Western Europe.

The enormous Macedonia drug cache, destined to be Osama bin Laden's Christmas-New Year gift for Western Europe, may account for the UN and other reports published this week that his organization is again flush with funds and free to strike. US intelligence learned of the order to begin moving out the drugs from local informers who reported a general call-up of al Qaeda, Hizballah, Iranian and Saudi operatives and hirelings to load up the narcotics for transfer from their hiding places to the Albanian mafia for shipment to West European markets.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Western Europe report that the Albanian mafia this year completed its takeover of 75 percent of London's brothels and prostitute smuggling traffic. The brothels serve also as distribution centers for the al Qaeda drugs brought out of Macedonia.

Electronic Enigma

Al Qaeda Messages Still Invisible

US intelligence knows that al Qaeda uses the Internet for its in-house communications, but is stumped by its inability to trace the Islamic network's electronic messages in general - and its exchanges with the groups operating in Macedonia, in particular. This failure is reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources in other countries too, such as Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, where similar contingents are based.

One year after 9/11, save for rare occasions when agents or terrorists linked to these groups have risked using satellite or cellular telephones, neither the US nor any allied intelligence agencies has been able to intercept a single transmission or broadcast relating to the operational or financial activities of al Qaeda decision-makers or the organization's affiliates.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence experts say the last time electronic messages or satellite telephone calls were picked up from bin Laden himself was late November and early December, 2001 when US special forces, backed by local Afghan fighters, waged battle against al Qaeda in the Tora Bora cave complex in eastern Afghanistan. At the end of the fierce engagement, al Qaeda men dropped out of sight. American intelligence and scientific experts, combing through the detritus left in the empty caves, found a large number of computers, telephones and communications gear with hard disks, floppy disks and data cassettes in tape recorders containing pre-recorded messages worded so as to mislead US commanders and intelligence experts.

However, since then, all electronic surveillance of al Qaeda has drawn a blank.

The issue of al Qaeda and its use of e-mail came up last week, more than 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) from Macedonia, at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the 9/11 attacks. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered the FBI to provide an affidavit explaining why no comprehensive examination was made of the defendant's electronic mail - whose address - <xdesertman@hotmail.com> -- was similar to millions of others used in the United States and elsewhere. The angry judge in Alexandria, Virginia, demanded to know whether the FBI had even bothered to ask for help on the matter from the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA). Sources described in media reports as "familiar with the workings of the court" told reporters that when FBI agents arrested Moussaoui on immigration charges in Minnesota on August 16, 2001, the Justice Department turned down the bureau's request to examine his computer. It issued a new request several weeks later after receiving intelligence information from France about the suspect, but was again turned down. In documents submitted to the court, the government said the agents tried unsuccessfully to access Moussaoui's email accounts. An affidavit filed by Hotmail said the company had no records of the xdesertman account.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terrorism experts note that in the Moussaoui case, the US government and its intelligence agencies have run into the same type of problem that has baffled them in Macedonia: a failure to discover just how al Qaeda agents and allies move their electronic traffic and what it contains. The experts are asking themselves if the Islamic fundamentalists have hit on a revolutionary technology for transmitting and receiving e-mail undetectably.

To this day, not a single line has been found recorded on paper or on the Internet referring to the preparations made by the 19 hijackers of four US airliners to crash their planes on September 11 into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Investigators have managed to put together no more than fragments of testimony and oral information.

Over the past year, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence experts report no significant breakthrough in uncovering al Qaeda's methods for transmitting messages. The Islamic fundamentalist organization therefore remains virtually untouched by the intensive global drive to expose its command structure, logistical set-up and the ways it moves fighters, weapons and money. Its leaders can hope to stay out of reach as long as they observe electronic invisibility and avoid the trap into which senior al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah fell last winter. He was located and captured after one of his men was persuaded to accept a cell phone from Pakistani agents so that he could talk with his family.

In solitary confinement at the US naval base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, this member of bin Laden's inner circle has betrayed nothing significant to his American captors, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources. Though responsible for recruitment and the administration of the group's training camps, Abu Zubaydah is ignorant about the operational side of the organization or its secret communications systems. Compartmentalization - in which operatives are told no more than they need to know to carry out their own tasks -- is religiously upheld in al Qaeda.

This confronts counter-terrorism authorities in the United States with the biggest question of all: Is there a secret higher command structure behind the known faces of the ultra-extremist Islamic terrorists? Who, for example, is really running the show in the autonomous Islamic enclave of Macedonia and keeping five disparate groups working in harness to build a fresh, presumably jihadist, fighting force?

A year after 9/11, much of the Western intelligence community has come to believe the terror war against the West is run by a political alliance, rather than a coalition of intelligence forces.

They cite four arguments to support this thesis:

1.
It has now been concluded that the two extremist Islamic organizations, al Qaeda and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, possessed neither the intelligence capability nor the logistics for staging an attack on the scale of 9/11 unaided.

2.
No mega-attacks have been pulled off in America since that date - evidence of al Qaeda's operational limitations.

3.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources are increasingly convinced that the hands behind the September 11 atrocities belonged to the same professional and national operational and intelligence services now at work raising an Islamic legion in Macedonia, namely a combination of Saudi, Iranian, Pakistani, Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese Hizballah intelligence factions, together with the intelligence and terrorist agencies of fundamentalist Islamic movements active in different countries. This is the ad hoc entity which attacked the United States then and may be gathering for a fresh assault.

4.
The foregoing three arguments point US intelligence and counter-terror agencies inexorably toward a dead end in their 9/11 investigation. However forthcoming the intelligence bodies involved in the attack may be about individual terrorists or double agents, they will always refrain from coming clean on the most vital elements required by the American investigation for building up a true picture.
Syrian intelligence is a case in point. President Bashar Assad ordered Syrian intelligence informers to hand over to Washington a bulky dossier on the al Qaeda Hamburg cell in Germany. It contained some of the hijackers' names including that of their commander, Mohammed Atta. But the Syrians, while disclosing much, omitted to mention Atta's three visits to Damascus in the months leading up to September 11. They also concealed the fact that bin Laden's Syrian-born wife and son were in Syria as late as late as two weeks before that date.

Diplomatic sensitivities further obscure the picture. Washington, like any government, faces hard dilemmas before it can come forward and publicly point a finger at any foreign national intelligence service as a player in the most devastating man-made disaster ever perpetrated on US soil. This is most problematic when it comes to governments with whom the United States maintains friendly relations.

US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld alluded to the insuperable difficulties posed by the new kind of warfare in an interview he gave to the New York Times on September 5, marking the first anniversary of September 11. He said:

"It is impossible to guard against terrorist attack in every place and at every time. So self-defense requires preemption, which means taking the battle to the terrorists and to those states that harbor them or support them or might arm them."

Rumsfeld's solution for the diplomatic difficulties posed by putatively friendly nations known to be involved in terror was forthright. There must be a more flexible way of establishing alliances, he said: "The mission must determine the coalition. Coalitions must not determine missions."

Iran

Dissidents Holier than the Ayatollahs

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Iranian sources report that three groups of junior officers in Iran's standing army were executed secretly in Teheran this week. The discovery and execution of subversives in the military are fairly routine occurrences in the Islamic Republic. In the past year, cells of officers hoping to spark a military coup against the regime have proliferated at the same rate as corruption takes root at all levels of the government. While the Ayatollahs' regime is shaken, its security services uncover the cells almost as fast as they are formed and the "conspirators" are swiftly put to death. This year, 21 to 25 rebellious officers are thought to have been executed.

What really put the fear of Allah into Iran's rulers was the discovery in the Revolutionary Guards, the Pazdaran, the government's faithful bulwark and basis of its popular support, of underground dissidents who are fundamentalist Muslims and dissatisfied with the degree of piety in the regime. They aspire to overturn the present government in favor of a more rigorously religious one.

While corrupt practices have spread through many parts of the Pazdaran's mid-level officers' echelon too - platoon and squad commanders take part in protection rackets and collect kickbacks from smuggling scams - large sections of the force share the government's religious ideals, except that they accuse the ruling caste of betraying those ideals and therefore seek its ouster.

To curtail the spreading revolt, numbers of Pazdaran men have been rounded up at the Guards' special units' bases in Tehran and Bandar Abbas in the last two weeks, some on suspicion of belonging to opposition cells, others for speaking out against the spread of corruption through their ranks.

While putting down dissidence with one hand, with the other, the Teheran government is preparing to intensify its undercover presence in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to stem the spread of American influence.

Several hundred Iraqi Shiites and a similar number of Afghan Shiites, long-time residents in Iran and fluent in Farsi, have been recruited for special urban and mountain warfare training. The Farsi-speaking Afghans are to be infiltrated into Iraq and the Iraqis into Afghanistan, posing as Islamic messengers from abroad, sent to guide the local populace in spreading the word of the Prophet. Their true mission will be to establish underground Iranian movements in Afghanistan and Iraq for subversive operations against the Americans.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly, US intelligence got wind of Tehran's plan and delayed for three days the entry into Afghanistan of a high-level Iranian delegation invited by the strongman-governor of Herat, Ismail Khan. The delegation was made up of central government figures from Khorasan province in northeast Iran on the Afghan border. Khan invited the Iranians to discuss paving an Iranian-funded road that would link the Iranian border city of Taybad with his own city of Herat. The Americans, who are building a large military airbase on Herat's outskirts, are leery of any project bringing Iranian engineers, technicians - and intelligence agents - to the vicinity of this sensitive facility.

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

2 September: DEBKAfile reports that even the limited anti-smallpox vaccination project for 15,000 "first responders" ordered by the Israeli security cabinet on August 21 has not been accomplished, any more than the security fence to protect Israel against terrorist incursions - the subject of another formal government decision. Clearly the health authorities had no bottom-drawer plans prepared for this contingency. The Health Ministry spokesman Idan Hadari promised large-scale vaccinations for hospital and first aid personnel "between Yom Kippur and Succoth" (high Jewish festivals falling between September 16-20). "We are working on this around the clock", he insisted.

The impression however is of a sluggish operation. So, with a US offensive against Iraq round the corner and speculation about Israel's vulnerability to unconventional weapons assault from Baghdad, what is holding up a massive protective program?

One answer turned up in DEBKAfile's special investigation is the apparent conclusion by Israel's high command and military intelligence that Saddam's missile capabilities are so under-developed that he will be reluctant to squander this sparse resource on hitting Tel Aviv, Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona or any of its cities in retaliation for an American offensive. They expect him to save his missiles for far more vital strategic objectives such as US bases in Qatar and Bahrain or the big Saudi oil port of Ras Tanura.

But, according to DEBKAfile analysts, no one can be sure that Iraqi military intelligence units known to have penetrated the West Bank have not armed Palestinian terrorist units with chemical, biological, or even "dirty" nuclear devices, for detonation upon a signal from the presidential palace in Baghdad or Yasser Arafat's government compound in Ramallah. It is for this threat that Israel must prepare without further delays.

2 September: DEBKAfile's military and Palestinian sources have turned up a pivotal through unannounced development: Last week, 300 troops of the Jordanian Army's Palestinian Al Bader Brigade quietly crossed into the West Bank and took up terror-prevention duties in the Bethlehem-Beit Jala-Beit Sahur area abutting south Jerusalem. Without fuss, these harbingers of the US program for displacing the Palestinian Authority's terror-tainted security force run by Yasser Arafat swung into action.

The Jordanian crown troops, members of the Bader Brigade of the Jordanian armed forces, known also as the Palestinian Liberation Army, defer directly to the new Palestinian interior minister Gen. Abdel Razzek Yahya and operate in collaboration with US CIA and Israeli liaison officers. They are to take over from the Israeli military units which have for the last three months been holding back local cells of Arafat's Force 17, Tanzim and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from executing terrorist attacks against Israelis.

Their arrival brings to fruition Washington's master plan - first revealed by DEBKAfile on July 22, 2002 - to transfer security-intelligence control over West Bank Palestinians from Arafat's Palestinian Authority to the Kingdom of Jordan, a transition to be coordinated closely with Israel.

Shortly after its arrival, the Jordanian-Palestinian contingent was challenged by Arafat's ultra-violent Al Aqsa Brigade and prepared to defend itself. The next contingent of 500 al Bader troops is due shortly for service in the Hebron region. By the end of this month, the Jordanian Palestinian security force in the West Bank at Gen. Yahya's disposal should expand to between 2000 and 3000 members, growing by the end of the year to some 5,000. The American reform plan calls for a total of 10,000 to 12,000 Al Bader Brigade troops to take up security positions in the territory by early 2003.

Washington and the 15-nation European Union, the Palestinian Authority's biggest donor, have had a major falling-out. Whereas a European donors' meeting in Paris - and later in Elsinore north of Copenhagen - called for a Palestinian state by 2005 and a reformed Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat, the Bush administration demands a new leadership and the breakup of its security force as the prerequisite for Palestinian statehood.

2 September: Informed Arab circles, including high Saudi and Egyptian officials, are wondering what lies behind an order the Syrian president Bashar Assad has just issued to the radical Damascus-based Palestinian "Fronts" to break off all operational ties with Yasser Arafat. DEBKAfile's Middle East sources say the directive applies to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front from the Liberation of Palestine; the Hamas and Jihad Islami, both of whom maintain headquarters in the Syrian capital, turned their backs on Arafat some time ago. The Palestinian leader finds himself ostracized, therefore, not only by the Americans and Israelis, but also by Syria and its Palestinian proteges.

Furthermore, a fifth Palestinian group operating out of Damascus, Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front fro the Liberation of Palestinian -General Command, has fallen totally under Iran's thumb.

Assad's rationale is not entirely clear. DEBKAfile's sources put forward some alternative explanations:

A.
He may judge that the Saddam regime's overthrow will lead to Arafat's downfall and is moving in to wrest control of the Palestinian camp.

B.
His action may emanate from his secret exchanges with the United States in the run-up to the US offensive against Iraq.

DEBKAfile's military sources reveal he has consented to the positioning of American electronic warfare and intelligence units along the northern sector of the Syrian-Iraqi frontier opposite Iraq's Western Desert, where the Americans suspect Saddam maintains some of his missile and special forces units. The Syrian ruler hopes that by this gesture of collaboration he can fend off a US or Israel strike against his own strategic assets.

C.
He has found out following a secret visit to Baghdad by Arafat's personal envoy Azam al Ahmad that the two are preparing to whip up Palestinian turbulence, including suicide attacks, in Jordan and Israel, to coincide with the US attack on Iraq. Assad has told the Damascus-based Palestinian groups stay clear of Arafat and avoid any mayhem he generates lest Syria is drawn into an untimely military clash with the United States or Israel.

4 September: Iran has enlisted Syria, Lebanon, the Hizballah and the Palestinians for its own elaborate war plan to counter the approaching US campaign against Iraq. They are to provoke a massive confrontation with Israel, opening up a second front to hamstring the US offensive. This is revealed exclusively by DEBKAfile's Iranian and Middle East sources, in the wake of a secret visit that Iran's deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, Mohammad Sadr, paid to Syria and Lebanon this week.

The Iranian visitor found the door wide open.

Syria's Bashar Assad shares Tehran's conviction that the installment of a pro-American regime in Baghdad is extremely dangerous, a direct threat to the Ayatollahs in Tehran, the Baath regime in Damascus, the freedom of operation of the Syria-based Palestinian terror groups and the very existence of the Lebanese Hizballah, Tehran's primary arm for overseas operations and intelligence.

The Iranian game plan as revealed to DEBKAfile was charted step by step:

A.
Iran's hardline spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei set up a supreme security council to formulate a plan to prevent or foil the American assault on Baghdad. This plan hinged on the fundamental conception was that were the United States and Israel to decide that war on Iraq bears too high a price, Washington would drop its anti-Saddam offensive.

B.
The Iranian planners proposed ordering the Hizballah to launch massive pre-emptive assaults against Israel. Once the Israelis were drawn into military retaliation against Syria, as well as Lebanon, the Americans would suspend their war preparations or, if the campaign had been launched, they would slow down, fearing to risk a large part of the Arab world rushing to the aid of Syria and Lebanon and sending the entire region up in flames.

C.
In the middle of last week, Khamenei approved the plan for immediate execution.

D.
Deputy foreign minister Sadr was sent to Syria and Lebanon to confer on the plan first with President Assad, the Syrian defense minister and army corps commanders including military intelligence and air force. He also met the heads of the Palestinian terrorist groups operating out of Damascus. Tuesday, September 3, Sadr arrived in Lebanon for a marathon round of talks with Hizballah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah and two senior lieutenants, Hashem Saffi-e-din and Naim Kassem.

All these talks were termed by our sources operational-tactical, requiring also finely-detailed coordination among the various Syrian and Lebanese military and terrorist forces. Sadr gained Assad's permission to secretly co-opt a delegation of Palestinian leaders and operations officers from Damascus discuss Palestinian integration in the war plan. They huddled with Qadr Nureddin, the Hizballah's south Lebanon commander and decided to rope in the inmates of the large Palestinian refugee camp of Ein Hilwa - both for military operations against Israel and for a cycle of terrorist strikes against American targets around the Middle East.

According to our sources, the Hizballah are preparing very shortly to launch a fresh wave of anti-Israel military operations to begin in the region of Ajar, a border village straddling the Lebanese-Israeli border, the location of the Jordanian source river, the Wazzani-Hatzbani. The Lebanese will begin diverting the river, Israeli will step in to interfere and the Hizballah will have its pretext for launching a massive assault.

E.
DEBKAfile's intelligence and counter-terror sources reveal too that Iran opened a three-day "Palestinian workshop" on Wednesday, September 4, in Tehran to impart innovative suicidal terror techniques, hinging on Islamic tenets, to invited terrorist operatives. Iranian intelligence experts will lecture on novel methods of target selection and the vulnerabilities of the United States and Israel to terrorism. The chief lecturer at the "Palestinian workshop" will be Abdallah Safi-Id-a-Din, one of the top operations aides of the Iranian-Lebanese master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, who this year switched his center of operations to south Lebanon.