Mideast RoundupDecember 6, 2002
Hunting Iraq's WMD
The False Front and the Real Inspectors
The hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction ends its first week on a surreal note. The real job is not in the hands of the chief UN inspector Hans Blix, or even the International Atomic Agency inspector Mohammed el-Baradei. It is certainly not being handled by the teams rushing around ahead of the TV cameras from one suspect site to another.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources have discovered that a special multinational task force, made up of special elite units and armed with combat helicopters and aircraft, spy-planes and satellites, is in fact on top of the mission. Unlike the UN team which is based in Baghdad, the concealed team of investigators has fanned out across the country. One well-placed source disclosed: "Our men in the field know where 90 percent of Saddam's missiles and unconventional weapons systems are located, even the mobile ones that are moved from place to place every hour. We are keeping them under tight observation because when the war begins and Saddam orders his men to activate them, we want to be there before they hit the triggers."
According to our sources, this highly sensitive, elaborate and secret inspection project has been going for more than three months. Its success could pre-determine the course of the war before it begins. Its members are drawn from five nations: the United States, Britain, Israel, Jordan and Turkey. They operate under the Special Forces command at Al Udeid in Qatar and its sub-command in the Jordanian base of Mafraq. For the purpose of the search, Iraq has been divided into 16 squares, each the province of an elite unit for a set period. The Talil air base complex in north Iraq, for instance, with its air fields, missile bases and air defense batteries, was assigned for the first three weeks of December to US special forces, while the H-2 air base complex is under the purview of an Israeli unit for the same period of time.
When these units end their tour of duty, they return to base and are replaced.
All the units on this mission are briefed down to the last detail on the unconventional weapons in their zone, their precise locations and the names of the Iraqi officers and men assigned to the site. They keep watch around the clock over the comings and goings inside those sites and are on the ready at all times to move in and seize the facility if ordered to do so.
Conscious of the eyes constantly watching them, the Iraqis have made almost all their weapons systems mobile and are perpetually shifting them. Often the observers jump to false alert as a result of Iraq tricks, such as starting up the engines of giant trucks, usually Mercedes, and making as though to move out. Twenty minutes later, the engines are switched off. A convoy may set out without warning after midnight for an unknown destination. The watchers follow - only to discover them turning round at 4 am in the middle of the desert and driving back to base.
Each of these elite units is afforded broad autonomy of action. They may call up reinforcements as needed, or air assistance from their home base. The Turkish northern Iraqi observation unit, for example, is in the care of the south Turkish military command. Any urgent medical aid requirement will therefore be supplied by the Turkish air force. The same applies to the Israeli units who are at liberty to call up Israeli air force planes and helicopters as needed.
However, when aerial bombardment is called for to prevent the movement of weapons from one square to another, or air cover is required in the frequent cases of the special units coming under artillery or tank gun fire, the request for aerial assistance is routed through the US headquarters in Qatar or Jordan and US and UK warplanes scramble to raid Iraqi military targets.
Most of the dozens of "Western" or "allied" air sorties against Iraqi ground targets that are reported every few days are connected, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources can reveal, with Iraq's maneuvers around the hiding places of its weapons of mass destruction.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources say this invisible arms inspection project has a dual purpose: it pins down the suspected weapons of mass destruction under close observation and siege; it supplies the Bush administration any data inaccessible to the UN inspection teams that may be needed.
Therefore on December 7, when Iraq submits to the UN Security Council its promised list of arms, to prove it has no long-range missiles of unconventional weapons - 1,000 pages have been promised - President George W. Bush can order General Tommy Franks to produce proof that the Iraqi list is false. All the general needs do is to order the elite unit guarding any one of the 16 squares to seize a weapons system, possibly with its Iraqi crew.
Since no one has any notion of how Saddam Hussein will react to this denouement, all American and allied forces in the Middle East and the Gulf were put on a high state of preparedness as of Wednesday, December 4.
These revelations provide backing for the statement by White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, on Thursday, December 5, that "the United States will provide intelligence to the United Nations inspectors on Saddam's weapons". He insisted that the US possesses solid evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, despite Baghdad's denials.
Asked if the United States was headed towards war, President Bush said: "That's a question you should ask Saddam Hussein."
United States at War
Bush Is Down One to Saddam, Two to al Qaeda
Since March, US and Turkish special forces, with local Kurdish support have been building up their control of northern Iraq. During these months, Saddam Hussein appeared inert. However, he used the time to quietly stiffen the anti-American Bayara-Tawilla region in northeast Iraq near the Iranian border which is dominated by the radical Kurdish Ansar al-Islam . He fostered an expanded al Qaeda presence there and injected into the enclave Iraqi intelligence units, followed by Republican Guards units.
This week, he was ready for his first counter-move.
On Wednesday, December 4, a force made up of this radical brew pounced on two isolated hilltop positions on the land of the pro-US Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Jalal Talabani's PUK, which has been working closely with US special units. Letting the UN arms inspectors chase the shadows of his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam's men attacked the two positions. Their capture brought the invaders to a point southeast of Sulaimaniyeh and Kirkuk and dangerously close to strategic Halabjah on the Iranian border.
Six days earlier, on another continent, Al Qaeda demonstrated an unsuspected air combat capability in well-synchronized assaults on Israel targets at the Kenyan resort town of Mombasa.
Two cells of the fundamentalist network sent SA-7 Strela surface-to-air missiles speeding towards an Israeli Arkia Boeing 757 during takeoff from Mombasa international airport with 261 Israeli passengers and crew aboard. They missed.
Down the road, the party checking into the Mombasa Paradise Hotel and the local staff were less fortunate. Additional terror teams hit the hotel twice, killing thirteen people, 10 Kenyans and three Israelis. First, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the lobby, after hurling himself out of a jeep packed with some 300 kg (660 lb) of explosives, which crashed the walls. A local troupe was dancing a welcome for the new arrivals from Israel. Three dancers were killed. The other buildings burst into flame when hit by more bombs dropped out of a light plane hovering overhead. This completed the hotel's destruction (See also <>HOT POINTS below).
None of the attackers was taken alive; the ones who got away left no trace. The Israeli and Kenyan investigating teams quickly decided they had escaped in light planes or fast boats waiting to pick them up on a nearby Indian Ocean beach.
Claims and counter claims of prior knowledge came next. American and Australian intelligence said they had expected an al Qaeda terror strike in Kenya. Brig.-Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, Israeli military intelligence head of research, admitted Israel had been informed of a general threat in East Africa, but nothing specific.
As for the attack in northern Iraq, it was staged in the eastern part of autonomous Kurdistan, the domain of Jalal Talabani which centers on the big oil city of Kirkuk and the Turkish towns of Irbil and Halabjah. His 20,000-strong army has been training for six months with US instructors in the use of American equipment and weapons. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources disclose that small US special forces teams have been attached to PUK army units for join action.
The PUK's former rival - and current partner in the pro-US Kurdish front - Massoud Barzani's Democratic Front of Kurdistan, or KDP - fields its own army which is almost as big as Talabani's and controls the western part of Kurdistan.
On December 3, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources report the Kurdish Ansar-al Qaeda-Iraqi force headed south from its Bayara enclave in northern Kurdistan. The next day, they attacked the two PUK hilltop positions outside Halabjah, home to 44,000 Kurds, laying down a heavy artillery barrage. Within hours, they had closed in and captured the positions in hand-to-hand combat. Both sides took casualties estimated at 30.
After this contretemps, it is essential for Talabani's men and the American special forces units to fight off the Iraqi al Qaeda-supported Kurdish push towards Halabjah, whose fall, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources say, would be a grave setback for US forces in northern Iraq and a blow to America's war preparations against Iraq. Such a defeat would shake the morale of America's Kurdish supporters and their confidence that US military force can protect them from Saddam's long reach, a bitter taste of which Halabjah's Kurds had 16 years ago when his chemical weapons poisoned 5,000 to death.
When the chief's away·
This combined snatch for territory friendly to the American assault was made possible by two unforeseen circumstances, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources disclose:
A.
The breakdown of US-Iranian military and intelligence cooperation (as reported in DEBKA-Net-Weekly's November 29 issue). No one but Iranian intelligence has managed to penetrate these arcane radical regions of northern Kurdistan. Iranian agents' output on al Qaeda movements was priceless and is irreplaceable.
B.
PUK leader Talabani was away. Invited to join a conference of Iraqi opposition leaders taking place in London on December 10, the Kurdish chieftain decided to leave a few days earlier and spend them in Paris. Al-Qaeda's surprise attack literally caught him napping in a Paris hotel. Its precision timing exposed the depth of Iraqi intelligence's infiltration of the highest ranks of the PUK army. These spies handed the al Qaeda-led force Talabani's itinerary.
This episode is an uncomfortable reminder to those concerned of the surprise Iraqi assault on CIA bases in northern Kurdistan in September 1996 and the brutal way it cut short the most ambitious military operation the agency ever mounted to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Then, as now, the CIA, relying mainly on Barzani's Democratic Front of Kurdistan, or KDP, set up a chain of communications and intelligence bases, as well as landing strips, inside northern Iraq. However, Iraqi military intelligence was able to subvert sections of the rival PUK, sending them to hit the CIA bases where Kurdish militiamen were training.
Caught badly off-balance, the CIA agents had time only to grab any transport available and hightail it across the border to Turkey, abandoning some of the agency's most secret and sensitive military and communications systems. As in the dying days of Saigon, the United States focused on getting its own people out of town, turning a deaf ear to desperate pleas for rescue from the Kurdish fighters who had thrown in their lot with the Americans. Faced with the cruel choice of saving either CIA personnel or Kurdish militiamen, they opted for the former, advising their allies to try and make their own way to Turkey.
The Kurds didn't make it. They were captured by Iraqi military intelligence and executed, some after being tortured. The 1996 CIA debacle in northern Kurdish is still regarded as one of the most painful and humiliating of any in its experience.
Today, the fall of Halabjah would open the way for Iraqi military intelligence to pour combat units dressed as tribesmen - some reports reaching DEBKA-Net-Weekly suggest they are already on the move - into the area. They would help al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam solidify their gains and reach out for additional conquests in northern Kurdistan. Such combined Iraqi-al Qaeda thrusts my not be confined to the Halabjah region; similar units may try the same tactic to capture the oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk.
This development, even if it is partial, could confront the United States with some hard choices quite soon. Over the weekend or early next week, General Tommy Franks' US military command may decide to rush large quantities of weapons to the Talabani and Barzani forces to enable them to stand up to an Iraqi offensive. US forces may have to join the fighting to prove to both Kurdish armies that they have not been left in the lurch in the battlefield.
A security source in the field told DEBKA-Net-Weekly: "Kurdish memories of the 1996 horrors are enduring. They live in fear of history repeating itself and that they will again be left to Saddam's mercies. The US command will therefore have no option but to move decisively and swiftly to restore the balance in the Kurdish regions so that the setback outside Halabjah does not become the first domino of a row that could flatten US military gains thus far."
It would be enough for the Iraqis and their allies to grab a second small piece of territory from American or Turkish special troops to place a big question mark over the launching of a general US offensive against Iraq in early winter. It would set back the offensive by the several weeks, the time needed for US forces to make up their losses in the north in order to accomplish an easy victory in the south.
The Iraqis took full advantage of the attention given to the UN arms inspectors' fruitless searches. Saddam threw down the gauntlet for President Bush four days before he was required by the UN Security Council to fully declare any weapons of mass destruction in his possession. He cockily laid before the American President proof of his cooperation with bin Laden's terrorists by ordering a joint, belligerent maneuver against America's Kurdish ally. The White House must decide whether to use this evidence or not while, in the meantime, Iraq, like al Qaeda, makes good use of Washington's indecision.
Europe
First Western contacts with al Qaeda
It is now universally evident that President George W. Bush's consent to the UN Security Council having a go at disarming Iraq made Saddam Hussein the priceless gift of a breathing space before an American assault. He needed that breather to hold onto - and even further advance - his hidden missiles and weapons of mass destruction, as well as developing a counter-offensive.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism and intelligence sources believe that al Qaeda has a similar purpose - to hold off the next all-out round of America's global war on terror by aiming its bombs and suicide killers against Israeli and Jewish targets, giving the terror network time to set up large-scale strikes against America.
This change of target from "the Crusaders" to "the Jews" did not come out of the blue.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's exclusive sources have discovered that certain European and Arab governments, led by Saudi Arabia, initiated informal diplomatic overtures to Osama bin Laden's organization in an effort to pry open a chink for first contacts. At the back of their minds was the hope that putting Israel in the frying pan might take some of the heat off themselves.
Those first contacts took place under cover of an innocent sounding international trade fair held in Baghdad last month. Ignoring protests from Washington, the Saudis opened their Arar crossing point into Iraq on November 1 for the passage of people and goods - for the first time since the 1991 Gulf War. Mingling with the visitors to the fair, representatives of Iraqi, French and Saudi firms got together on the sidelines with al Qaeda agents.
The French and Saudi participants were introduced as "private individuals with business interests and very good contacts with the security services of their respective countries."
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report that the al Qaeda operatives who came to Baghdad from Yemen, via Abu Dhabi, introduced themselves as "traders from the Gulf with business and intelligence links in Iran and Pakistan". No one gave his full name.
But DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources have learned that certain US intelligence agencies procured a partial list of the participants in this parley, with names and summaries of some of their conversations.
There were four such meetings. Its participants pretended they wanted to ascertain in general if any September 11-type al Qaeda strikes were planned for other parts of the world. But according to intelligence data, their concern was much more specific, namely, was bin Laden targeting any European nation or the Saudi kingdom for similar carnage.
Three ominous replies were quickly forthcoming from Al-Qaeda representatives:
1.
Washington has left al-Qaeda no option but to continue its attacks against America.
2.
If the US continues to pursue its global war on terrorism and launches military action against Iraq, al-Qaeda will strike back in Europe and Saudi Arabia.
3.
Al Qaeda invited the talks' initiators, the Europeans and the Saudis, to present any ideas or new information that might persuade the terrorist group to rethink its strategy or objectives.
The second time they met, the two sides bandied harsh words. At one point, an al-Qaeda representative warned his organization would not find it difficult "to repeat the August 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania".
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism and intelligence sources, the other participants interpreted this as a threat of a fresh round of terrorist attacks on Western targets in Kenya. This suspicion prompted the terror alerts issued for East Africa in mid-November, two weeks before the Mombasa attacks. These alerts, still in effect, came from the United States, Australia, France, Germany and Britain and, latterly, Israel.
At a later stage in the talks, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources report that the European and Saudi representatives presented an implied suggestion that al Qaeda might consider alternative targets - at least at this juncture - to their own countries. Although no names were mentioned by either side, the al Qaeda delegation grasped exactly who were the subjects of those hints: Russia and Israel. However, the Islamic terrorists cannily put a price tag on their willingness to play ball. Yes, they said, alternative targets do exist, but we shall consider them only if you stop cooperating with the United States. The more you disassociate yourselves from US policies, the smaller the danger to your countries and interests. Conversely, the more profound your military and strategic relations are with Washington, the greater al Qaeda's wrath against you.
American and Israeli counter-terrorism and intelligence experts, who analyzed the transcripts of all four exchanges at the Baghdad Fair, mark them as a strategic milestone for al-Qaeda and the cue for its decision to start preparing a wave of 9/11-type attacks inside Israel and a campaign against Israeli targets overseas. Participants at the meetings in the Iraqi capital concurred with the assessment.
Israeli targets instead of European? Or both?
According to our counter-terrorism sources, Israel was not apprised of those contacts. Aside from the general terror alerts picked up in Tel Aviv, Israel's policy-makers and security officials were not forewarned of any directional changes by al Qaeda and therefore made no adjustments to meet them. As far as Israel was concerned, the terrorist violence it faced was primarily Palestinian in nature, aided by the Lebanese Hizballah and Iraqi military intelligence.
Back in May, Israel had indeed picked up signs that al-Qaeda operatives had slipped into the country and set up secret cells. However, according to the conventional wisdom to which Sharon subscribed, those cells would operate only in conjunction with Yasser Arafat's security apparatus - or in the worst-case scenario, with Iraqi military intelligence. No one in Israel imagined the al Qaeda sleeper cells would be operating autonomously within months.
Israeli security sources also ignored three messages that DEBKAfile's sources intercepted on Monday, November 25. Analysis of the transmissions, sourced to the Saudi Red Sea town of Jeddah, pointed to a party associated with al Qaeda being poised for a terrorist attack on the morning of Thursday, November 28. The word "paradise" featured prominently in the message, which DEBKAfile ran on its website that night:
In the last few hours DEBKAfile counter-terror sources report a heightened volume of traffic over the Arabic Internet forums frequented by al Qaeda and its partisans. Most of the last messages end: "The zero hour has come."
One particular release was aired three times today, all posted by "ARAMCO boy". The first one to reach our sources was issued at 12:28 EST, 19:28 IST.
"Today, at 6:20 hours, there will be a surprise program, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen over our Qatari channel. Anyone who knows what I mean must tell no one so as to keep the surprise whose content everyone will love. Only God knows what I mean. The program forced me to write these lines at great speed and I ask God to forgive me and reserve Paradise and not Hell for me. The zero hour has come."
Three days later, on the morning of Thursday, November 28, the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombassa was attacked. It was only then that Israeli policy-makers began to appreciate they had been hit by a new force of nature and that Israeli security and intelligence agencies had been suddenly confronted with no less than a survival test.
Events in Mombasa were al Qaeda's way of saying it had accepted the unspoken proposal presented informally at the Baghdad Trade Fair. For the time being, bin Laden was willing to swing his terrorist axe round to strike Israel and Israeli overseas targets.
At the same time, a number of key questions remain unanswered:
A.
Can al Qaeda be understood to have agreed to desist from terrorist attacks in Europe?
B.
If so, which countries will be spared? London for sure remains in the Islamic terror network's sights despite the Blair government's efforts to stay in Arab good graces.
C.
Will Saudi Arabia, or any other Gulf regime, be let off al Qaeda attacks on their oil fields?
Al Qaeda preachers have often referred to Arab oil as a Muslim resource exploited by the Western infidel instead of benefiting the Muslim masses.
D.
How, when and where will Israel respond to the terrorist attack in Mombasa? What targets will it single out for retaliation and where will that response take the global war on terrorism?
Some answers to these questions come up in a different context: (See separate <>article hereunder on the collapse of Sharon's security conception for the anti-terror war and the secret Wolfowitz visit).
US-Israel
Wolfowitz's Secret Mission
Saturday night, November 30, Ariel Sharon's secure direct line to the White House rang at the prime minister's Sycamore Ranch in the Negev, northwest of Beersheba. It was US President George W. Bush calling to express his personal condolences for the deaths of two Israeli children and a tour guide in the al Qaeda attacks in Mombasa, Kenya two days earlier.
Bush told Sharon that he understood that particularly tough times were ahead of Israel now that it faced a very real threat from al Qaeda. The president then paused and said he had a request. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources, he proceeded to ask the prime minister to delay any active response to the attack until US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz arrived. He would be making a lightning 12-hour visit to Israel before his scheduled trip to Ankara and would be landing on Monday, December 2. Sharon agreed.
The decision to dispatch Wolfowitz to Israel was taken at the White House in the light of intelligence reports from Jerusalem that Israeli security and intelligence authorities had been hit with earthquake force by the attacks in Kenya. Bitter recriminations were going round over their failure to shore up security for Israeli institutions and civil aviation, despite the terror alerts coming in from mid-November regarding al Qaeda plans to strike in Kenya.
The US intelligence reports cite senior Israeli security officials as acknowledging a grave security and intelligence lapse, though naturally preferring the Israeli public to know as little as possible about it. At the same time, a senior Israeli security official, talking to DEBKA-Net-Weekly, held his hands up over the appalling possibility of the Strela missiles bringing the Arkia plane down with more than 260 Israelis aboard.
"Sharon's government would have fallen," he said, "and the heads of Israel's security authorities would have rolled." The official admitted that Arkia's Boeing 757 had not been equipped with an anti-missile defense system despite media reports to the contrary. The aircraft was saved, and only barely, by the pilot's resourcefulness and courage. Spotting the missiles fired from the end of the runway as he took off, he took evasive action, escaping certain death for himself and passengers by scant inches.
The US intelligence reports cited two further incidents involving Israeli civil aircraft, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources. Both were played down at the time; one was never published. Since the Mombasa attacks, Israeli security authorities are taking them far more seriously.
On November 18, an Israeli Arab tried to hijack an El Al plane flying from Tel Aviv to Istanbul. He was overpowered before he could do any harm and turned over to the Turkish police after a safe landing.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly now reveals for the first time that, on June 30, an El Al plane taking off from Zurich to Tel Aviv was forced to turn around and land after an object traveling at high speed struck its tail hard enough to dent it. This incident was defined as "an unidentified shooting at the aircraft". It is now believed that an assailant stood on an airport balcony or rooftop and shot at the plane, grazing its tail. Had the projectile hit home, the aircraft would have crashed.
The more recent hijacking attempt has come to be regarded now as a test run to gauge security procedures aboard Israeli airliners. A Hezbollah or al Qaeda cell operating in the Arab or Bedouin community in the Galilee is suspected of having recruited the Israeli Arab hijacker, Tawfiq Fukra, to check if the Arkia aircraft - that later escaped harm - could have been hijacked in Kenya. When he failed on El Al's Istanbul run, his controllers decided to resort to a missile attack.
Mombasa changes Israel's rules of engagement
The mood of Israel's security leaders is described in the US intelligence reports as grim. Focused for 26 months on Palestinian terror and its Iraqi military intelligence controllers, Israel and its security services are faced with making an abrupt switch to comprehensive action against another enemy, al Qaeda. To meet bin Laden's network head-on, Israel would have to withdraw its special units from western Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian areas - which is impossible - and deploy them against the new adversaries in their Arabian Peninsular, Gulf and Horn of Africa bases. The reach of the Israeli air force and navy is long, but Israel does not possess sufficient combat-ready reserve resources to replace the forces assigned to fighting al Qaeda. Until now, the Sharon government has refrained from a general call-up of reserves so as not to deepen the country's economic crisis.
The intelligence reports advised the US government to insist on Israel holding off its reprisals against al-Qaeda targets until it is able to set up a special military and intelligence task force tailor-made for the mission.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources, Wolfowitz landed unobtrusively at an Israeli air force base on the morning of December 2. He found Israel's defense and security chiefs ready for immediate action against al Qaeda on the grounds that it would be even more dangerous to sit around and wait for the fundamentalist terrorists to let loose with chemical or biological weapons. The Pentagon official met Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon, Mossad chief Meir Dagan and national security adviser Ephraim Halevy. They warned that a 9/11 type mega-attack in the heart of any of Israel's main cities would paralyze its armed forces and poison its energy and water supplies. Israel's very survival could be in jeopardy should al Qaeda join up with Iraq to stage a missile or air attack with chemical or biological warheads.
They told Wolfowitz, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, that the gloves were now off. The Jewish state was ready to dust off the tactical nuclear arms, and the laser and infra-red weapons hidden for decades in secret depots, and use them against al Qaeda targets anywhere in the Middle East and Gulf. One Israeli general told the American visitor: "We can't afford to play their (al-Qaeda) game with conventional bombs as you did in Afghanistan. This time, we'll be making the rules - not al-Qaeda."
Wolfowitz found Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in a dark mood.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and political sources in Jerusalem, Sharon realizes without admitting as much, that his entire security conception collapsed at Mombasa.
As one informed security source put it:
"Sharon sat at the center of his personal military staff and saw himself directing the war against the Palestinians and Iraq. He surrounded himself with men chosen for their loyalty and gave them key jobs in the security and intelligence hierarchy."
The source noted that Mossad director ex-general Dagan is a personal friend, while the prime minister's military secretary, Major-General Moshe Kaplinsky, was assigned to the army's central command, a strategic position from which to keep the Palestinians and their leader, Yasser Arafat, under the gun and, when the time comes, to hold down a front against Iraq.
Sharon omitted to take one factor into consideration: his minions would be required to take on al Qaeda as well.
"Since the Israeli man in the street still does not appreciate what is going on, Sharon can stay mum and pretend nothing out of the ordinary has occurred. However," the source warned, "few secrets last long in Israel. When the public gets wise, Sharon is in for a rough time unless he is somehow able to restore a semblance of normality."
For the time being, at least, Wolfowitz persuaded Sharon to refrain from irreversible action until he returns to Washington at the weekend and the US leadership discusses the situation, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in the US capital and Jerusalem report.
HOT POINTS
(that you may have missed in DEBKAfile Round-the-Clock)
A Digest of the Week's Exclusives
30 November: The same al Qaeda commander that masterminded the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Daar es Salaam also planned the twin attacks last Thursday, November 28, on the Israeli-owned Mombassa Paradise hotel at Kikamabala, and the missile strike that missed an Arkia Boeing 757. His name is Abdullah Mohammed Fazul and he is still missing.
Fazul, the leader of al Qaeda's East African cells since 1995, was assisted by his lieutenant, another Egyptian called Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah (aka Abu Mohammed al-Masri), who was indicted in absentia by an American court for the embassy bombings. Both are senior members of al Qaeda's operational arm, the Egyptian Jihad Islami.
In 1995, the pair took part in a failed attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak by hurling RPG rockets and explosives at the presidential convoy on its way from the Addis Ababa airport to the venue of a summit of African leaders in the Ethiopian capital.
A year later, on November 23, 1996, Fazul masterminded the hijack of Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 between the Ethiopian capital and Nairobi. The airliner came down with empty fuel tanks 500 yards from Galawa Beach at the Indian Ocean Islamic Republic of the Comoros Islands.
Only 48 of the 127 passengers survived the attack. The victims included seven Israelis, five heads of Israel's Aircraft Industries, and two others, one CIA officer and the head of Ukrainian intelligence.
None of the three governments concerned, American, Israeli and Ukrainian, have ever attributed the Ethiopian Airways hijack to al Qaeda. The Mombasa attacks were therefore not the first the fundamentalist terror network had mounted against Israeli targets. Fazul was never located, even though after though after the embassy bombings, an FBI team was hot on his trail. The American agents ran his hideout down to Morono, on the Comoran Islands, only to find he had skipped just ahead of them.
Four years later, earlier this month, US and Israeli intelligence was tipped off that Fazul and Abdullah had been spotted on the move in early October in the Jubbada Hoose and Gedo regions of West Somalia bordering on Kenya.
30 November: Some initial conclusions drawn by the combined US-Israeli-Kenyan investigation team working on the deadly al Qaeda twin assault on Israeli targets at the Kenyan resort town of Mombasa:
A.
Backup teams were posted at both scenes of attack - the hotel and the airport - to take over if the first teams failed to carry the operation through. This is evident from the testimony of witnesses present at the Mombasa Paradise Hotel assault, in which 13 people were killed, three of them Israelis. They reported that, first, one of the bombers leapt out of the jeep to blow up the hotel lobby; next, the jeep itself crashed into a wall and exploded; then, a light plane flew overhead and dropped explosives on the buildings left standing.
This may have been al Qaeda's first air raid.
Findings around the airport indicate two missile teams, one posted near one end of the runway and the second, some 5 km from the other end, to cover the eventuality of a change of wind altering the Arkia flight's direction of takeoff. Altogether around 25-35 terrorists executed the two strikes, with another 100 accomplices on the fringes of the operation. This would make it one of the largest terror attacks al Qaeda has yet mounted.
B.
The type of shoulder-launched missiles fired at the Israeli airliner has not been established as yet. Some Israeli sources diagnose a SA-7 Grail; others, a Strela, while some Western sources suggest American-made Stingers with alterations by al Qaeda. Intelligence reports have spoken in the past of such adaptations.
C.
Somalia would be the natural escape destination for the Mombasa terrorists - whether by the same light aircraft that bombed the hotel or fast boat along the Indian Ocean shore..
D.
Al Qaeda has been able to turn up the heat in the last two months, both in scale and intensity. On October 6, suicides crashed the Limburg tanker in the Gulf of Aden; on October 18, the terrorists brought off a massacre on the Indonesian island of Bali; the Moscow theater siege occurred on October 23; USAID administrator Laurence Foley was murdered outside his Amman home on October 28; terrorist gun and missile fire have been constant in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan throughout October and November. The Mombasa strikes appear to be part of an escalating series entailing the deployment of hundreds of terrorists and multi-million dollar funding.
E.
US and allied intelligence services, including that of Israel, have still not overcome their inability to predict al Qaeda's moves, a shortcoming glaringly exposed on September 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden's reappearance in Saudi Arabia underscores this lack of intelligence tools. >From time to time, the capture of yet another high-ranking terrorist is announced. DEBKAfile's intelligence and counter-terror experts are certain that the intelligence value of these captures is extremely limited because all the information they seem to have relates to past al Qaeda activities - not its future plans.
2 December: Monday, December 2, five days after the event, Al Qaeda took formal responsibility for the two attacks against Israeli targets at Kenya's Indian Ocean resort of Mombasa last Thursday, November 28. Shortly before the al Qaeda admission, three Israeli security kingpins suddenly found their voices on the dangers posed by al Qaeda and the grave implications as regards Israel's abilities to fight back.
As DEBKAfile reported last April, the brutal murder of 21 celebrants at the Park Hotel Passover feast in Netanya on March 27, 2002, provided cover for the first contingent of 15-20 heavily armed al Qaeda men to land on Netanya beach from the sea. The week before, a group of Osama bin Laden's men poured across the Syrian-Israeli frontier and headed for prepared hideouts in Ramallah and the Nablus district.
Monday, December 2, under the impact of the attacks in Kenya, defense minister Shaul Mofaz finally confirmed that the al Qaeda network had sent "octopus arms not only into countries on the other side of the ocean but also to our region."
Chief of staff Lt. General Moshe Yaalon was a little more specific. He told reporters that al Qaeda operatives had landed in this country and planned terror attacks employing Palestinians that were foiled.
DEBKAfile's experts on terror assert that al Qaeda terrorists are in this country at the invitation of Yasser Arafat and with logistical support approved by him in person. He imported the Hizballah first, then Osama bin Laden's Islamic fighters, to advance his single, never-changing goal, to fight Israel until it is destroyed, turning Israel and Palestinian areas in the last six months into an international center for the most dangerous professional terrorists alive: Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hizballah, Jibril's Popular Front - General Command, Iraqi military intelligence, the pro-Iraqi Arab Liberation Front and al Qaeda, all have established a presence within Israel's borders in four, unfolding waves:
1.
Raising arms and personnel: From January to March, the Palestinian Authority raised a vast supply of terror weapons and explosives, most smuggled in from Iran. The terrorists followed via secret routes through Jordan, the Golan, North Sinai and Israel's shores, to be picked up and hosted by Arafat's men. They came with heavy weapons, various types of portable missiles.
2.
First operations: They came raring for action and have since been discovered to have executed in March and April some of the deadliest attacks Israel ever suffered. They targeted hotels in Netanya, wedding halls and restaurants in Haifa, Ashdod and Tel Aviv and West Bank roadblocks at Wadi Kharmieh and Adora.
3.
Summer inertia: From May to November, the foreign cells were quiescent, quietly improving their communications skills and gathering intelligence.
4.
Back in action: In November, orders for the cells to return to action issued from al Qaeda's senior command posts in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Lebanon and from Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. DEBKAfile's military and counter-terror sources report that the first attack in this cycle was the ambush laid in Hebron on Friday night, November 15, in which 12 Israeli officers, troops and security men were gunned down, and the Mombasa strikes on November 28. Later that day, A Likud polling station in the northern Israeli town of Beit Sheana was struck with a hail of gunfire and grenades, killing six Israelis, just as prime minister Ariel Sharon beat his rival Binyamin Netanyahu in the party leadership contest.
That night, a mega-terror strike was rumored to have been thwarted in Jerusalem, although a court gag order prevented its publication.
This penultimate stage for the year 2002 is viewed by our experts as the prelude to a mega-terror offensive already in the works to culminate an ascending cycle of "ordinary" terrorist attacks.
On December 2, former Mossad chief and current national security adviser, Efraim Halevy, spoke of a mega-terror menace hanging over Israel as essentially one of "genocide" with the aim of destroying Israel to its very foundations. "To meet a threat on this scale," he said, "Israel possesses a broad and diverse array of capabilities, some of them not yet revealed." Inherent in Israel's national security balance, he explained, is the ability to countervail menaces of this kind. Should the danger come to pass, that ability will take the conflict to a new plane which, Halevy was sure, would be understood and accepted by world opinion.
DEBKAfile's military and counter-terror sources have no doubt that the Israeli prime minister's chief emissary for delicate foreign assignments was hinting darkly both at an unconventional threat to Israel, that could take the form of a large-scale massacre, and at the Jewish state's forceful retaliation by means of weapons and war tactics never yet brought into use. Such a counter-strike could well be pre-emptive. Hebron, and even more so Mombasa, were Israel's watershed.
2 December: Every few weeks, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak tells Israel it must resume negotiations with the Palestinians that will lead them to a state. But on Sunday, December 1, he went a lot further. Addressing a Muslim clerical group in Cairo in an occasion marking the final prayer of the Ramadan holy month, he declared that international terror is not religious; nor is it the fault of Muslims or Arabs, but their reaction to political injustices meted out by the "international community".
The Egyptian leader thus became the first Arab leader to say out loud what every Arab and Muslim ruler believes - that Islamic terror, including suicide homicides, is a justified means of venting their sense of injustice towards the non-Muslim world.
5 December: Israeli prime minister and Likud leader Ariel Sharon delivered his first major campaign speech Wednesday December 4, declaring that after the January 28 general election he will ask his new government to endorse the Bush peace outline and the creation of a Palestinian state with Yasser Arafat as its "symbolic" head.
Sharon offered thereby to honor a terrorist chief with a nominal title - hardly the way to beat terror or uphold his pledge of security to Israeli citizens.
As politicians at home blasted his speech, DEBKAfile's Washington sources disclose that National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice also reacted with anger and impatience, saying that the domestic politics of Sharon and his bureau staff would not be allowed to govern American Middle East policies. Interestingly, not a single member of his own Likud was prepared to comment on the speech.
He endorsed the peace plan put forward by President George W. Bush on June 24, while taking issue with the published versions of the "road map", which call for a provisional Palestinian state to be established in 2003 and a final-status agreement by 2005. Instead of a timetable, Sharon called for progress determined on the basis of performance. "There will be no political concessions until there is proven calm and the Palestinian leadership is replaced by one which is able and willing to achieve peace with Israel," he declared.
But then he said enigmatically that past concessions to the Palestinians are "irreversible". In the second stage of the process, Sharon explained, a Palestinian state would be established with provisional borders approximating areas A and B currently held by the Palestinians - "except for essential security zones". This state would be completely demilitarized but allowed to maintain a "lightly armed police and internal force to ensure civil order."
Israel will continue to control all the new state's passage points, command its airspace and not permit alliances with Israel's enemies.
The last stage will be final-status negotiations to fix permanent borders.
DEBKAfile's analysts discover the key to the prime minister's timing and judgment in accepting the two-state formula in his assertion that, after the January 28, he will strive for form another broad administration. This was a beckoning finger to the opposition Labor party's new dovish leader, Amram Mitzna, asking him to join.
Sharon feels he is on a winning streak and takes it for granted that the voter will accept a version of the American "road map" for a Palestinian state as the guideline for his partnership plan with Labor leaders.
Sharon may find his speech was not only unpopular in Washington, but also counter-productive as a campaign tool. From one end of the political spectrum to the other, everyone is up in arms. Right-wing opinion slams it as granting a reward for Palestinian terror; the left, whom he is courting, accuse him of poaching votes in its preserves. The average Israeli voter still clings to Sharon as a sort of sheet anchor in a dangerous sea, but Arafat is anathema and he has yet to absorb the shock of being exposed to Osama bin Laden and his works. Most Israelis don't want to hear about the Palestinian's future, but how their leaders cope with the expanding terror threat and how their prime minister proposes to restore the equilibrium of the security system that is still reeling from the shocks of Mombasa.
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