Mideast Roundup

November 18, 2002

Espionage

Trail of the Stormont Ring Leads to Middle East Terrorists

The disclosure of the "Stormont Spy Ring", that is still rocking Northern Ireland, has quietly touched off a multi-pronged manhunt in Britain, Northern Ireland, Eire, Cyprus, Lebanon and northern Iraq.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources report that the targets of the search are Irish, Palestinian, Cypriot, Greek, Lebanese and Iraqi agents or go-betweens, who may have bought or mediated the transfer of security secrets that members of the IRA spy ring stole before it was smashed on October 5, in a police-security raid of the IRA's political wing's office in Stormont Castle, home of Ulster democracy.

The raid led to the breakdown of the province's fragile interim power-sharing agreement between Unionists and the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein.

It also brought a vast haul of thousands of secret documents purloined by the IRA spy network, largely for sale or barter with foreign terrorist groups with whom Irish republican extremists have been long associated. The spies got hold of transcripts of confidential telephone conversations on secure lines between Tony Blair and President Bush, sending them to Belfast by means of ring members that included British civil servants and Irish Catholic politicians.

Their activities were not confined to top-secret briefing materials laid before Blair on the political and military situation in Northern Ireland. They also went after intelligence memos and encrypted messages passing between the British and American leaders in their exchanges on military and intelligence preparations for the Afghan War, the campaign against Iraq, the post-Taliban situation in Kabul and highly sensitive data pertaining to the global war on terror, including anti-al Qaeda tactics.

The recovered documents cover a period running from April 1, 2000, five months before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, up until October 4, 2002. The Irish spy ring therefore operated undisturbed for 30 months at least, up until the security-police raid in Stormont.

Immediately after the police raid, the British prime minister made a grim report to President Bush who, thereupon, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, sent a special CIA team to London for an initial independent assessment of the damage to American security interests. Our sources add that last week's London trip by the American Homeland Minister, Tom Ridge, was also connected with the affair. It came on the heels of several discreet rounds of inquiries by the CIA director George Tenet in London, Belfast and Dublin.

The most urgent purpose of the parallel probes is to track down the recipients of the secret documents. It has been established, say DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources, that some reached interested parties in the Middle East. Thus far, two such parties have been identified as Palestinian agents based in Cyprus and Lebanon and Greek Cypriot agents who work the region. Both groups have longstanding ties both with the IRA and with Lebanese and Palestinians associated with Iraq and al Qaeda operatives in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf.

Our intelligence experts note that, if indeed these sensitive papers are shown to have reached Iraqi or al Qaeda hands, it will mean that elements of America's most secret war plans have been compromised. US security authorities fear the IRA ring has blown to Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda agents and supporters data on US war plans against Saddam Hussein and on undercover operations still afloat against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.

Denis Donaldson, Sinn Fein's chief administrator has been charged with five counts of possessing documents useful to terrorists in carrying out acts of violence. Fiona Ferrelly, a republican community worker, faces two similar charges. William Mackessy faces two charges of aiding terrorists while working at the Northern Ireland Office in Belfast.

Those three arrests are just the beginning. The IRA is suspected of running a network of spies in many areas of government, some in unobtrusive jobs as clerks, clerks and chauffeurs. British and American agents need to lay hands on many more informants in and outside Ireland and the UK to be able to evaluate the amount of damage wrought by the Stormont Ring.

Iraq War

Sooner rather than Later

Washington has a check list of Iraq's weapons of mass production ready for pulling out on December 8, for comparison with the full accounting Security Resolution 1441 obliges the Iraqi government to submit on its unconventional weapons arsenal on that date. Any discrepancies will mean that Saddam Hussein is cheating.

No one will be surprised. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Washington describe Baghdad's six-page letter accepting the UN Security Council resolution that the Iraqi ambassador handed UN Secretary General Koffi Anan Wednesday, November 13, as studded with recipes for procrastination ("The timetable does not take Ramadan and our festivals into account".) and pretexts for obstructing the movements of the UN arms inspectors, due to arrive in Baghdad next Monday, November 18. ("We have no weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, chemical or biological as claimed by evil people".). The letter is full of ifs and buts. It does not explicitly cite Resolution 1441 as its reference. The inspectors have moreover not been granted unfettered access to suspect sites.

However, Anan chose to ignore the holes in Iraq's letter of acceptance when he presented it triumphantly to President George W. Bush in the White House on Wednesday, November 13. Bush played along with the charade, perfectly aware that the game would be up within days of the inspectors' arrival in Baghdad.

If not then, December 8 will be the pivotal date to watch.

In any case, no one in Washington ever expected Saddam Hussein to go through with disarming. Therefore, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources confirm, the US President and his war cabinet are forging ahead with their plans for a military offensive against Iraq. Still under review is only the launch date. The inclination is to go sooner rather than later.

One timeline under the White House microscope, those sources report, is a day in December before Christmas. A second option is the standing date of January 15.

General Tommy Franks, OC US Central Command, who will lead the assault on Iraq, has submitted a paper titled "Changes and amendments to the war plan", that draws a red circle around the first ten days of the offensive, whenever it is, as the period of highest risk to the United States and its invasion force.

The Central Command have come to the conclusion from close surveillance that Saddam is getting ready to use his weapons of mass destruction (WMD), an arsenal that certainly contains nuclear weapons (although whether powerful radiological devices, shells or bombs, no one knows), as well as germs and chemicals, including a variety of poison gases.

The relevant equipment was sighted as it came out of storage and was handed to field commanders.

US military planners figure that Saddam will have to persuade his generals to let loose with the WMD in the initial days of the US assault - or not at all. Should they balk, the war will be quickly over and lost.

The cheering news is that Iraq has very few planes and missiles capable of delivering unconventional arms - no more than five Mirage F-1 planes fitted to carry nuclear or biological weapons, and 18-20 Al Hussein missiles. The downside is that the paucity of delivery vehicles places the ultimate decision for using the WMD in very few hands, only 10 pilots and two missile crew commanders to be persuaded to carry out Saddam's orders.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources say the Franks war plan reports to the President that the US special forces units assigned to demolishing Iraq's WMD sites are all set at their staging locations ready to go forward on notice of one or two hours at most, depending on their targets.

But the report stresses two key imponderables.

Neither the CIA nor military intelligence is sure it has a complete rundown of Saddam's banned weapons arsenal. He could be hiding items outside Iraq for use after the first 10 days of the campaign have elapsed.

Furthermore, too little is known about the threat of Iraqi terror plans in conjunction with al Qaeda, the Palestinians or the Hizballah, the accent being on the specialist terrorist core Imad Mughniyeh's has planted inside the Lebanese Shiite group.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's note the Bush administration has stopped ducking the possibility of Iraq resorting to nuclear weapons. He is also quite open about the three terror movements' potential for synchronizing operations, particularly Iraq and al-Qaeda. DEBKA-Net-Weekly was one of the few world media to demonstrate the operational collaboration for terror existing between Iraq and al Qaeda and dating back to mid-1998.

Counter-terrorism experts in the Bush administration recently concluded that Iraq and al Qaeda are planning to orchestrate simultaneous mega-terror attacks in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. A slightly different scenario envisions mega-attacks in Europe and the Middle East - mainly in Israel - followed within hours by a similar terrorist strike in the United States.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources say that, aside from generalized intelligence evaluations based on situational analysis rather than hard data, American and other Western undercover agencies suffer from a dearth of hard data on the terrorist cells now poised to act. They have no way of telling if these cells are outside cells on their way their targets or sleeper agents already in place. Worse, they have nothing solid on the identity of those targets.


Iranian N-Bomb - Part II

North Korean Nukes - Made in Iran

On October 25, 2002, DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported in its No. 82 issue the suspicion in Washington that one of the two bombs allegedly hidden in Kim Jong II's war chest was not North Korean at all, but Iranian. Our sources revealed that the Iranian bomb was delivered to North Korea in the third week of September under a secret agreement Kim-Jung Nan, the North Korean president's overseer of his country's military and nuclear relations, concluded in Tehran on July 24.

Last week, DEBKA-Net-Weekly received fresh and surprising information on how this deal is being implemented. The information came from intelligence sources who checked out a detailed report on Iran's clandestine nuclear program brought to Washington in early August by an Iranian exile in flight from the hard-line regime. That report found no willing listeners in the US government, which was busy at the time with its bid to rope Iran into the war against Iraq.

On August 14, the exile called a select news conference and presented his report again. He still failed to attract serious official attention - until the North Koreans admitted to a secret nuclear program. Then, the powers that be in Washington began connecting nuclear dots. Intelligence agencies went to work and established that the Iranian exile's report, gathering dust for three months, was spot on target, accurate in every detail.

That report reveals that the two bombs smuggled to North Korea from Iran last September were the property of North Korea. However, they were manufactured and assembled in Iran under the secret Tehran-Pyongyang contract of last July.

This means that North Korea secretly transferred its nuclear manufacturing facilities to the Islamic Republic.

Specifically, North Korean plant for the production of all the essential components of the North Korean bombs, including equipment for uranium enrichment, was shifted lock, stock and barrel to Iran, where production has been taking place at two secret sites, both supervised by the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization. This state body is controlled by the National Security Council that defers only to Iran's radical spiritual leader Ali Khamenei:

The most important site, where nuclear fuel (enriched uranium) is produced, is located at Natanz, 100 miles north of Isfahan on the old Natanz-Kashan highway. A huge facility, big enough to employed hundreds of workers, it is buried many feet underground and set in layers of concrete. The director of this site is an IAEO official called Dawood Agha-Jani.

The second site, producing heavy water, is at Arak in a place called Qatran Workshop close to the Qara-Chai River, three miles from Khondab in northern Azerbaijan. A second IAEO official, Daryoush Sheibani, heads this project.

Unfinished structures were left at both locations to support official claims that building is uncompleted and the sites still inactive

The Iranian exile's report, as relayed to DEBKA-Net-Weekly, stressed that Iranian nuclear scientists and technicians were actively employed in every stage of production, their participation in the project in its entirety the essence of the secret Iranian-North Korean nuclear cooperation pact.

American intelligence is still pondering the following missing information:

--- After the two bombs were completed, did North Korea leave its nuclear equipment and manufacturing facilities behind in Iran?

Our sources suggest it did - which means Iran is now equipped to manufacture bombs unaided, whether by Russia or anyone else - depending, of course, on the Iranian scientists having acquired the necessary proficiency to work independently.

--- How much uranium was enriched? And what proportion, if any, stayed in Iran?

The presumption is that Iran was left with enough to make between 8-12 bombs.

Laugh's on Moscow

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Washington sources add that the Bush administration is considering placing this information before Russian president Vladimir Putin as leverage to persuade him to come aboard, should the US decide on military action against Iran, during or after the Iraq campaign.

After all, it would now appear that the Iranians used the Russian-assisted Bushehr project as a cover-up for their secret deal with North Korea, camouflage to obscure their progress towards a nuke of their own. They must also have been laughing up their sleeves at the expenditure of intense effort by America and Israel over eight years to block the Bushehr project.


Al Jazeera

The Popular TV Channel Serves Arab Moderates and Extremists Alike

The popular Arab satellite television channel, Al Jazeera, has earned a reputation for making - as well as breaking - news by airing events many an Arab ruler would rather never saw the light of day.

Now, the Qatar-based station finds it is a player in Saudi Arabia's unending tug-of-war for the succession. It has also become the coveted object of a Saudi prince's desire.

While pondering its changing fortunes, Al Jazeera scored another Bin Laden scoop this week. On Tuesday, November 12, it ran an audio tape, later confirmed as the authentic voice of the elusive al Qaeda leader, praising the recent terror attacks in Bali, Kuwait, Yemen and Moscow. He bluntly warned American's allies and the United States against pressing ahead with the war on Iraq. "You will be killed just as we are killed, bombed as we are bombed. Expect more suffering."

The threat was addressed specifically to the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia. Germany was named as the target of the attack on the ancient synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, in which 14 of the 21 victims were German, while the Australians were warned to remember Bali.

The content fixes the date of the recording as recent, subsequent to the events referred to. It confirms that the Saudi-born terrorist is alive and active, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported on October 18, and raises a challenge to the official Washington claim that it has no notion of whether the two top terrorists are alive or dead. Moreover, the frequency of the tapes' appearances in recent weeks suggests that Bin Laden and Zuwahri are hiding out not far from the station's location in Doha, Qatar.

This also appears to be the conclusions reached by Washington. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources report several hundred US special forces troops launched a hunt in the Rub al-Khali desert, the Empty Quarter straddling Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, at around the same time that DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported their arrival there, along with families and operational staff. US surveillance aircraft made several passes over this vast desert area, spy satellites were positioned to pick up any movements by the terrorists and their parties, but the fugitives' sophisticated camouflage and electronic counter-measures defeated the American watchers.

Washington, keen on diverting attention from Bin Laden's presence in the oil kingdom, so as not to further upset relations with the royal family in Riyadh, did not take into account the terrorist chief's intimate ties with Al Jazeera and his use of the station as a powerful weapon to extend his reach throughout the Arab world.

His physical proximity to the TV station enables him to respond more speedily and with more punch than ever before to international events. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism experts, rumors in the Gulf suggest that bin Laden and Zuwahri are planning to stage an emotional appearance over Al Jazeera immediately after the US attack on Iraq commences. In tapes made a few days prior to the event, they will exhort the Arab and Muslim masses to take to the streets against the Arab governments quietly backing the US offensive.

The role Al Jazeera is increasingly filling in Middle East dramas is not to Washington's liking, while more than one Arab leader, led by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi princes, have their own scores to settle with the satellite station. Those leaders believe their turn will come after Saddam Hussein's ouster and that al Jazeera will become an American instrument for stirring up the masses against them.

Ambassador Bandar Buys into al Jazeera

In the current climate of suspicion and conflict pervading the Middle East, a rumor spread fast last month alleging that Saudi and Yemeni officers serving in the Qatari army had led a coup against the liberal emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani. Gulf sources also reported that US special forces troops, some in civilian clothes, helped the emir subdue the revolt. There were no further details.

This rumor touched a sensitive nerve - not only in Qatar but also in the United States, which has been allowed to establish its biggest and most important air base in the Gulf at Al Udeid, near the capital of Doha. The facility is also the closest to Baghdad, 700 miles (1,100 km) to the north. The US war command center, led by General Tommy Franks, is being transferred from its main headquarters in Tampa, Florida to al Udeid. Some observers interpreted the reference to Saudi and Yemeni officers in the alleged coup plot as proof of al Qaeda sympathies among Gulf military circles

However, an investigation by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources found no evidence of any plot to overthrow the Qatari ruler, but something quite different and unexpected: the secret purchase of a 20-25 percent stake in al Jazeera by none other than the veteran Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. This coup is the hottest item in the ruling circles of Riyadh and Cairo. His uncle, Saudi crown prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, is reported as having gone ballistic. His loathing for Al Jazeera is so extreme that he recalled the Saudi ambassador from Doha and severed ties with Emir Hamad, only to discover that his nephew had bought shares in the satellite channel. Abdullah decided Bandar's move was not merely provocative but a blow on behalf of his father defense minister Sultan bin Abdulaziz in their contest over the succession. Their purpose, he suspects, is to use the station as a platform against him.

Bandar's objective in buying a share in the station was quite different. Despite its multi-million Arab audience across the world, al Jazeera was in trouble financially because of an advertising boycott enforced by Saudi and Egyptian state-supported institutions and firms. Bandar sought to help the channel out of a fix induced largely by Mubarak's disapproval of its broadcasting policies.

The Egyptian president resents Al Jazeera on more than one count. Bringing the Palestinian Intifada live into Arab living rooms triggers stormy demonstrations from Morocco to the Gulf, causing unrest in Cairo and Saudi cities. Egyptian officials have been leaning hard on the station to stop these televised reports, but the management has turned the pressure aside.

Another bone of contention is the starring role assigned by the Qatari channel to the Egyptian fundamentalist sheikh Yousef Qaradawi on one of its most popular programs - "The Sharia (Muslim ritual law) and Life" - a two-hour show broadcast every Sunday. Qaradawi's message is regarded as the most blatant Bin Laden's fundamentalist Wahhabi brand of Islam enjoys on any Arab platform. Qaradawi openly calls for a global jihad against the morally bankrupt, degenerate and corrupt West, which is moreover accused of waging a crusade against Islam.

Egypt's security services have been keeping a close eye on the radical sheikh for more than three decades. The Egyptian Jamaa, to which he belongs, was behind the Anwar Sadat assassination in 1981. Therefore, Qaradawi's television performance is seen in Cairo as motivated by Qatar's aspiration to destabilize the Egyptian regime by disseminating the Jamaa philosophy and justifying the murder of an Egyptian president.

After failing to influence al Jazeera's producers, Egypt enlisted help from Riyadh in a campaign to pressure Arab advertising agencies to boycott the station. Al Jazeera's advertising revenues dropped sharply leaving it unable to cover its overheads. While the Qatari emir provides a generous working fund, both he and the station's management want it to stand on its own feet. This has been made possible by Bandar's investment.

The Sheikh and the Spy Chief

Qatar has made itself unpopular with its neighbors by another of its policies. Last month, the emir secretly received Ephraim Halevy, who was then still director of the Israeli Mossad spy agency.

The Israeli spy chief's mission was complicated.

He had just come back from accompanying the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, on a visit to Moscow to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw his opposition to US military action against Iraq. Putin responded with a complaint: How did America's global war against terrorism fit in with a Russian intelligence finding that Qatar, where the United States maintains a heavy military presence, has become the primary source of Arab funding for Chechen rebels fighting Russia. Putin ordered Russian intelligence chiefs to show Sharon the list of Qataris transferring money to the Chechens.

Since Qatar maintains excellent relations with Israel, Sharon sent Halevy to Doha with the roster and questions for the emir on the Russian allegations. The answers were to be collected and posted back to the Kremlin.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources say Halevy's secret visit to the emirate was immediately misinterpreted in Riyadh and Cairo, who jumped to the conclusion that Qatar and Israel had struck a deal on ways to use Al Jazeera for destabilizing Arab governments during the US war on Iraq. This suspicion evoked the leak from Saudi sources close to Abdullah alleging that Qatar would follow Libya in quitting the Arab League. The rumor was denied by Qatar who took it as emanating from the same cabal as the false coup report that was being propagated by its foes to put the emirate on the spot.


Iran

On Brink of Radical Coup

Tehran sources report that Iran's hardline supreme religious leader, Ali Khamenei, is plotting a military coup in Tehran to coincide with the onset of the American attack on Iraq. This is reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Tehran.

With reform legislation beginning to go through the Majlis and mounting student protest against the condemnation of a liberal academic, Khamenei has decided to draw the line on the Khatami presidency and purge the regime of liberals and reformists.

An operational coup command team is secretly in place under the leadership of Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) commander Lt. Gen. Yahya Rahim-Safavi and his deputy Mohamad Baqer Zolghadr, and a group of extremist fundamentalist clergyman headed by Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi.

Since late last week, this panel has been meeting daily in the role of an operational command.

Our sources report some of the team's decisions:

To gradually detain all of President Khatami's close aides (already begun).

Roughly 8-10 days before the US assault, Khatami will be liquidated (as DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported last week) in a manner that shifts the blame away from the Revolutionary Guards and their controllers - possibly a staged road accident or assassination by a dissident, like a Mojaheddin Khalk member.

The coup leaders will then impose military rule over Iranian cities.

Opponents of the Islamic radicalists figuring on lists under preparation at the moment will be put to death on charges of spying for America or Israel. This will be a bloodbath of many thousands. It will send a brutal message to the Muslim world that, while the Arabs support the American attack on Islamic Iraq, Iranian revolutionaries are striking a blow in defense of Islam.

The Majlis, where reformist deputies are in the majority, will be dissolved and un-Islamic media shut down.

The preparations made by Khameini faction's for their radical putsch explain the massive withdrawals in recent months of Iranian precious metals, mainly gold and silver, deposited in banks in the Far East, (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia ) , Europe - Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain and Denmark - and the Gulf emirates including UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Even secret accounts in Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Jersey have been cleaned out.


UK-Hizballa

Britain Risks Rupture with Bush

Tony Blair has put a crimp in Britain's special relations with President George W. Bush by overstepping the mandate he received as Washington's point man for unacknowledged diplomatic exchanges with Tehran on cooperation - first for the war in Afghanistan and now in the run-up to a military offensive against Iraq. The British prime minister, according to sources in the Bush administration, has misused the Tehran channel to reach the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah for some clandestine palaver.

Those sources allege that Blair went behind the president's back in contacting a group branded by Washington a terrorist organization. Some administration sources allow his intentions may have been good, possibly to "dilute" the global war on terror in order to bridge European-American differences over the war on Iraq. However, sources close to vice president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld expect the British leader's actions to eventually lead to an open rupture with Bush, although not before the Iraq war is over.

Nevertheless, there are sources in the Bush administration who judged that all the elements of a Bush-Blair blowout are in place. They wonder if the British leader realizes that some factions of his intelligence services and Foreign Office are leading him by the nose down a slippery slope that will end disastrously for US-UK relations.

Britain as Washington-Tehran Middleman

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources recall that the Bush-Blair partnership began in late 2001. The British were miffed by the President's choice of the Russian president as his key intelligence and military ally in the Afghan War against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Bush then promised the UK a lead role in the war on Iraq, inviting Britain's vaunted secret services and astute diplomats to serve as Washington's point men in establishing a dialog with Iran. By playing the middleman, Britain would gain a preferential strategic position over other European countries - mainly France - with interests in the Gulf and Middle East -- regardless of what transpired.

Getting Britain on board, Bush felt, also gave him a loyal ally he could trust to pursue day-to-day dealings with Iran and smooth over the historically fraught Washington-Tehran relations, especially with regard to neighboring Afghanistan.

The United States and Iran soon fell out. Washington resented Iran's attempts to undermine Afghan president Hamid Karzai as soon as the war was over. This despite the fact that Tehran had helped fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda, mainly by keeping the restive Shi'ites of western Afghanistan quiet.

Iran, for its part, accused Washington of overlooking its contribution to the war effort and persecuting Iran's representatives and agents in Afghanistan.

Britain was the mediator, holding secret and often heated talks with Iran in late 2001 and during all of 2002. British foreign secretary Jack Straw paid two visits to Tehran, the first in September 2001 and the second a year later. On his second trip, on October 9, he made much of his achievement in bringing about military and intelligence cooperation among the United States, Britain and Iran for the military action against Iraq.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly and DEBKAfile have alone of all the media reported extensively on this trilateral partnership. Its outcome is there on the ground: special units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are now in northern Iraq, fighting alongside pro-American Kurdish forces against al Qaeda fighters and their Kurdish supporters.

Iranian special units are also deployed with US and British commandos in southeastern Iraq near the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.

In the latest mark of US-Iranian cooperation, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources report that Tehran has allowed most of the American ammunition war reserves to be stored in an Iranian base converted into a massive US facility near the Iranian oil city of Abadan. General Tommy Franks chose this site for good reason. He is convinced that Saddam will never strike targets in neighboring Iran in the coming campaign - even if his back is against the wall. He will aim to prove his conflict is with America, not fellow Muslims. He would have no such scruples about striking a storage base built in Kuwait or Qatar, both of whom are working with the Americans, but will turn a blind eye to Iranian collaboration.

While appreciating British diplomacy in Tehran, the United States is getting worried by confidential information, according to which Britain sought Iranian assistance for opening a line of communication with Hizballah secretary general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and other leaders of the group. British officials reportedly threw out hints that in exchange for Teheran's assistance, London would use its special relations with Washington to avert or even scrap a potential American or Israel strike against the Hizballah

The trouble for the Bush administration is that the intelligence information flowing to Washington proves Hizballah's security and intelligence branches were deep into the planning of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. One of its brightest stars, Imad Mughniyeh, had a personal hand in the operational planning as a key figure behind the network.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources reveal that the Iranians acceded to the British request and brought their representatives and the Hizballah together for regular meetings. They began talks, without Washington's knowledge, in Lebanon, Cyprus and Tehran, discussing a British proposal that went against US aims in its war on terror. The proposal was for the Hizballah to isolate Mughniyeh and expel him from their territory in Lebanon. This would enable the British to make the case before Washington that the Hizballah had changed its spots and would play ball with the United States.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources say Hezballah has still not responded to the British offer.

Washington tumbled to the British maneuver in the last week of October. When the Americans asked French president Jacques Chirac how come he invited Nasrallah to the opening session of the conference of Francophone states in Beirut, the French president floored them with his answer. French intelligence in Beirut, he said, had informed him of secret British contacts with Hizballah leaders going back some months. The French were sure these meetings could not have taken place without sanction from Washington. Chirac took this to mean that the Americans had lifted their taboo from the Shiite terrorists and France could pursue its own dialog on the cultural-religious plane.

Top US officials are now considering how to treat the British departure from their agreed path. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report they never saw it coming and maintain Britain has acted in contradiction of America's anti-terror policy.


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

9 November: A bureaucratic mix-up in London Friday, November 8, forced British officialdom into the unwilling admission that international terrorists may now wield a nuclear threat and it could be aimed at Britain.

According to DEBKAfile's counter- terror sources, potential alerts registered in the second week of November include:

Possible nuclear or chemical attacks in North American, West European and Middle East cities. The alert for London pinpoints The City, government offices, the Underground and the Thames River.

In pursuit of massive casualties, terrorists may resort to bomb cars or kamikaze pilots. Ships loaded with many tons of explosives of all types - some containing nuclear substances - may crash into Western harbors such as London, New York, Tel Aviv or Haifa.

Possible hijackings of trains and subway systems, to be packed with explosives and blown up in city centers.

Possible sea landings by suicide teams bent on reaching pre-arranged targets.

The warnings against biological warfare for spreading smallpox, anthrax and the like are still current.

DEBKAfile's intelligence and counter- terror sources stress that these alerts proliferate the nearer the date approaches for the (official) launching of the US military offensive against Iraq.

Four groups or organizations are mentioned in this regard: Al Qaeda, Iraqi military intelligence - or the secret cells in maintains in North America, Europe and the Middle East; the Hizballah and Palestinian groups. Warnings based on intelligence data also allow for massive terrorist attacks carried out jointly by the four groups in different combinations.

It is important to note that the terror alerts sounded in the past week apply to Israel as much as to any other country. Until last week, Israel ranked second after America as an international terror target; now Britain has come alongside.

Israelis are deeply immersed in their surprise election campaign, their eyes fixed on the high-wire contests between incumbent and former Likud prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu, the wrangling between Labor leader Binyamin Ben Eliezer and his rivals Haim Ramon and Amram Mitzna. All the candidates are still arguing about dates for leadership primaries and voting day. However a massive terrorist attack on a scale described in London by the American homeland minister - and not yet achieved by Yasser Arafat - or a severe Iraqi strike causing heavy casualties or damage, would put an end to Israel's political contention. The general election due in late January would almost certainly be postponed.

9 November: Friday, November 8, while international attention was fixed on the UN Security Council vote by 15 to nothing in favor of the US-UK-Ireland ultimatum to Iraq to disarm, US aircraft dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets over Iraqi troop concentrations that are building up in southwest Iraq, calling on them not to fire on US and British forces. The leaflets fluttered down over a 250-mile strip running close to the Iranian border from the big Iraqi land and air base at Al Kut, 135 miles southeast of Baghdad in the north, to the Shatt al Arb port city of Basra, Iraq's only outlet to the Persian Gulf, in the south.

DEBKAfile's military sources report the American leaflets targeted two major Iraqi military concentrations in particular - one divided between at Al Halafyah, 22 miles east of Al Amarah - roughly 25 miles west of the Iranian frontier, and Musallan, 12 miles north of Al Amarah; the other Iraqi deployment guards the strategic town of Al Qurnah, 50 miles north of Basra, and Al Muzayriah, 10 miles south of Al Qurnah, at the point where the Euphrates flows into the Tigris.

According to our sources, US-UK and Iraqi forces have been locked for two weeks in the most extensive engagement of the campaign thus far for the capture of the entire region from Ali Gharbi in the north up to Al Qurnah in the south. Fighting alongside American and British special forces are elements of Iranian Revolutionary Guards special and intelligence units. They face on the Iraqi side elite units of the Babel and Republican Guard divisions, as well as contingents of the Saddam Martyrs Brigades, made up of fighting men from Saddam's own Tikrit tribe. They include paratroop and naval commandos and units armed with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

9 November: Both the US-UK-Iranian alliance and Iraq have in the last two weeks beefed up their elite units in southeastern Iraq. The US-led assault force has two primary missions:

A.
Within the 60 days assigned to the UN inspectors for completing their report, the troops aim to assert military control over all southeastern Iraq. They will encircle the great oilfields of Khozistan, but stay outside. This mirrors the situation established earlier in northern Iraq, where US, British, Jordanian, Turkish and Iranian special forces stand outside the gates of Kirkuk and Mosul.

B.
When completed, US and allied forces will have caged Saddam Hussein, his family, the ruling Baath and the armed forces in the central region, cornering them in the cities of Baghdad and Tirkit, cutting them off from access to the oilfields and denying him revenues for keeping the Iraqi army fighting.

At present, the fighting in the southeastern region is focused at Halafiyah, northeast of Al Amarah, and Musallan further to the north. Control of these two towns will trap the Iraqi Al Amarah force in a pocket. But even more important, the Tigris River widens out at Musallan for its journey north through the capital. From this riverside town, American units can travel upriver into the heart of Baghdad without having to fight their way past Iraqi land units.

American and allied forces are also battling for the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris at Al DEBKAfile's military sources report American deliveries in the combat arena of advanced river-crossing equipment, speedboats, hydrofoils, portable bridges - transportable in retractable sections on truck beds - and amphibian craft, for transporting large-scale forces and heavy equipment across marshland and water. Some of the equipment is going through Iran.

One Iraqi response to heightened US-UK-Iranian military activity in the southeast has been to set fire to the marshes.

11 November: The terrorists Yasser Arafat's Fatah admitted sending to Kibbutz Metzer on the Israel-West Bank border carried out their killing rampage on Sunday, November 10, concurrently with the Fatah-Hamas conference taking place in Cairo under the European Union's aegis.

Far from being mutually contradictory, the two events fit neatly together.

In Cairo, "External Hamas", and Arafat's Fatah representatives were charged by their European sponsors with discussing ways and means of ending terrorist and suicide attacks in Israel.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell is the wirepuller behind the EU initiative.

For the White House, Yasser Arafat - like Saddam Hussein - is a political goner.

But not for the secretary of state or the European Union.

In London, Charles Tanner, Conservative foreign affairs spokesman in the European Parliament, was curtly brushed off for demanding an investigation into charges that European taxpayers' donation of 10 million euros a month to the Palestinian Authority is being diverted to fund terrorist activity. European Foreign Affairs Commissioner, Britain's Chris Patten, retorted that he wants this investigation "like a hole in the head."

The Palestinian leader maneuvers adroitly between these conceptual divergences.

The fine European distinctions between pre-1967 and territory across the Green Line, right-wing communities and pacifist villages, are immaterial for any part of the Palestinian terrorist movement. Therefore, EU-State Department efforts to persuade the terrorists to stop striking in Israel alone (killing Israelis across the Green Line is permissible in their judgment) is not only denounced in Israel as two-faced, but also misses the mark.

The attack on the left-wing, pro-negotiation Kibbutz Metzer inside the Green Line illustrates this point to the Palestinians and the Arab nation as they celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. It is Arafat's renewed battle cry for unity. It also underlines two further political objectives:

1.
After taking credit for bringing down the national unity government, Arafat's next goal is to drag Israel's right-of-center government into radical reprisals that will provoke international condemnation for " war crimes".

2.
To prove the Bush "road map" a non-starter.

12 November: For Yasser Arafat, suicide attacks in Kibbutz Metzer, at the Karkur Junction or on Jerusalem's Jaffa Street are not enough. In the last few hours, reports have reached DEBKAfile's military and intelligence sources that the three thousands Jordanian special forces and police, after sealing off the southern towns of Ma'an and Kerak for three days and battling local Islamic zealots, are closing in on their quarry: the assassins who shot dead the senior American diplomat, Lawrence Foley, on his doorstep in Amman on October 28, and their dispatchers. The wanted men include Iraqi military intelligence agents and Palestinian members of the Arab Liberation Front, whose leader, Abul Abbas, has his headquarters in Baghdad.

The diplomat, a senior USAID administrator, was shot dead by a professional marksman who fired 8 bullets from a silenced weapon.

Jordanian intelligence and CIA officers in Amman have homed in on two likely paths of inquiry: One is al Qaeda, which maintains secret cells and operational rings among the Muslim fundamentalist Bedouin tribes of southern Jordan. The most wanted man in Jordan today is Muhammad Shalabi, also known as Abu Sayyaf, with his three top aides.

The second path, as DEBKAfile reported immediately after the murder, has led to Palestinian terror cells in Jordan controlled by Iraqi military intelligence agents. For Saddam, the Palestinian terrorists were convenient surrogates for a mission Iraqi intelligence could not afford to execute directly lest the American be presented with the very pretext they need to overcome international objections to military action. To keep their hands clear, the Iraqi agents swarming in Jordan operate through Palestinian cells set up in the large Palestinian population and controlled by the Baghdad-based Arab Liberation Front. This group performs a dual role; it is the Palestinian operational arm of Iraqi intelligence in Jordan and also the connecting link between Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein, that is Baghdad and the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

Monday, November 11, the Jordanian authorities announced a number of foreigners had been taken in.

DEBKAfile's military and intelligence sources report the detained foreigners fall into three main groups:

Egyptians: Members of the extremist al Takfir Al Hijra, the roof organization of the Egyptian Jihad Islami whose leader, Ayman Zuwahri, is Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant and operations officer of al Qaeda;

Saudi Wahhabists from two tribes, the Rashid and the Uteibi, who are zealous followers of bin Laden;

Iraqi military intelligence agents, including Palestinian operatives, members of Abul Abbas's group who were smuggled into Jordan from Baghdad.

Most of all, the picture unfolding from data garnered from the men rounded up in Ma'an is one of deep mutual commitment and a steady flow of operational exchanges between Saddam's palatial bunker in Tikrit and Arafat's ravaged headquarters in Ramallah.