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March 30, 2004
Weary special forces quit for security jobs
Telegraph | News | Weary special forces quit for security jobs
By David Rennie in Washington and Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 31/03/2004)
Exhausted American and British special forces troopers, the West's front line in the war on terrorism, are resigning in record numbers and taking highly-paid jobs as private security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Senior US commanders are so alarmed that they have held emergency meetings to agree new deals on pay and conditions for the men.
Men from the SAS in Britain and Australia and America's Delta Force are said to be weary after almost 30 months of nearly continuous service since the September 11 attacks.
Gen Bryan "Doug" Brown, head of the US special operations command, summoned his commanders to Washington for a crisis meeting last week. He told the Senate armed services committee that the retention of special forces had become "a big issue".
US special forces troopers earn up to £30,000 but are being offered packages of £60,000 to £120,000 to work in combat zones.
For SAS soldiers earning £250 a week in Iraq, the lure of up to £1,000 a week is easily understood. The most experienced men in the most dangerous jobs are reported to be making £5,000 a week.
The manning crisis comes as Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, pushes the military to use special forces more and more widely, favouring them over conventional forces, for their speed, small scale and ability to operate in complete secrecy with only minimal legal oversight.
Gen David Grange, a retired army Ranger, Green Beret and member of Delta Force - the elite, top-secret unit modelled on the SAS - told The Telegraph yesterday that family pressures were also taking their toll on his former colleagues.
"In my Vietnam platoon two people were married. Now it's maybe 60 per cent. Even if special forces are wild characters, with high divorce rates, there's still enormous pressure from families. They've been away more or less continuously since September 11 and wives are asking, 'Where the hell are you?' "
The war on terrorism has placed unprecedented strains on special forces. Gen Grange said: "The US army alone has people in 120 countries.
"A lot of those people are special forces - counter-drug, counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism - as well as our own insertions."
The US government is also increasingly privatising its most sensitive missions, hiring defence contractors for such tasks as guarding Paul Bremer, the Iraq occupation chief, or Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, or heading overseas to train foreign militaries.
Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors, a study of such privatisation, said the US defence department was the largest client for such private security contractors, paying companies large sums to supply them with former special forces whose training was paid for by US taxpayers.
Gen Grange said special bonuses were now being paid to special forces for overseas deployment and hazardous duty. But money was never the key factor for many of his comrades, he said. "In the private sector you don't have the brotherhood or the sense of duty and country."
Though many of Gen Grange's missions remain secret, he conceded that special operations offered greater excitement than private work.
"Going out to destroy something or capture or kill someone - those have to be government or military missions unless you're a mercenary or doing something illegal."
Green Berets and other special forces receive 18 months' training in combat and survival skills, including airborne and amphibious warfare, and are also required to learn at least one foreign language. They may apply only after six to eight years in the military. Army Rangers are also counted as special forces, specialising in seizing airfields and ports.
The precise number of US special forces is shrouded in secrecy, though an overall figure of between 49,000 and 66,000 is quoted for Special Operations Command.
However, Jennifer Kibbe, an intelligence specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, said such large numbers included administrative and support personnel. "What they call 'trigger pullers' is more in the vein of 10,000," she said.
British officials say more than 300 soldiers have left the armed forces in the past six months to take up lucrative jobs with private companies such as Olive Security, Armour Security, Global and USDID. The problem goes beyond elite special forces. There are more than 160 British former paratroopers working in Baghdad, where the Coalition Provisional Authority has hired a battalion of Fijian soldiers to guard money deliveries to banks.
More than 500 former Gurkhas, working for Global Logistics Security, are guarding buildings for the CPA.
March 30, 2004 at 11:18 PM in SAS | Permalink | TrackBack (153) | Top of page | Blog Home
Islamic bomb attack foiled by raids in the heart of suburbia
Telegraph | News | Islamic bomb attack foiled by raids in the heart of suburbia
By John Steele, Home Affairs Correspondent
(Filed: 31/03/2004)
A suspected Islamic plot to launch a huge bomb attack in Britain was disrupted yesterday in one of the country's biggest anti-terrorist operations involving 700 police officers from five forces.
More than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, a basic ingredient of home-made explosives, was discovered at dawn in a self-storage depot in the west London suburb of Hanwell.
At the same time eight men aged between 17 and 32 were arrested in a series of raids in London, Sussex, Surrey, Luton and the Thames Valley. All are British-born citizens of Pakistani descent.
Families peered from behind their curtains as police vehicles blocked normally quiet streets and dozens of officers poured out.
Residents were shocked when they realised that people they knew and chatted to had been arrested.
Hanwell is close to Heathrow airport and one of the suspects was said to work for LSG Sky Chefs, a Gatwick-based company supplying airline food. But there was believed to be no evidence that airports were the intended targets.
The men were detained under a section of the Terrorism Act 2000 that refers to "being concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism".
Last night, as searches continued at 24 locations, mainly houses, they were were being questioned at Paddington Green high security police station in west London, where they can be held for up to 14 days.
Click to enlarge
The operation was carried out a fortnight after Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said that an attack in Britain by al-Qa'eda or a linked group was inevitable. He said that soft targets, such as pubs and clubs, were particularly at risk.
The raids followed a "protracted" investigation by Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch and MI5 and was the largest MI5 operation since the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaigns.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, said: "The fact that such action was felt necessary is a timely reminder that the United Kingdom and its interests abroad remain a target."
The ammonium nitrate was found in a 6ft high plastic sack in the Access self-storage warehouse in Boston Road, Hanwell, near Boston Manor Tube station.
After a thorough search of the warehouse, police removed the fertiliser in case it became unstable and to reassure residents who feared for their safety.
Ammonium nitrate has been used both by the Provisional IRA and Islamic terrorist groups linked to al-Qa'eda. Similar fertiliser was a major ingredient, using fuel as an accelerant, in the Islamic bombs that killed more than 200 people in Bali in 2002.
It was also used in bombings against British targets in Istanbul last year.
The amount found at Hanwell is similar to that used by the IRA in lorry bombs which caused death and destruction in London's Docklands and Manchester in the mid-1990s.
Supplies of ammonium nitrate are not legally controlled in mainland Britain, as they are in Northern Ireland - something that worries security chiefs.
Initial searches did not uncover evidence to point to a potential target for any bomb.
Nor, it is understood, have officers found weapons or other components needed to construct a vehicle bomb, including detonators, small amounts of high explosive as a booster and large amounts of sugar, which is combined with fertiliser to produce an explosive mixture.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the anti-terrorist branch, told a press conference that officers from the Metropolitan, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex and Thames Valley forces searched residential and business premises in Uxbridge, Ilford and Colindale in London, Crawley, Slough, Luton, Horley and Reading.
"As part of the same operation we have recovered more than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser from a self-storage facility.
"Part of the investigation will focus on the purchase, storage and intended use of that material."
Two of the suspects were arrested in Uxbridge, west London; one each in Ilford, east London, at Horley in Surrey, and Slough, Berks; and three were detained at Crawley in West Sussex.
Mr Clarke said the operation was not linked to Irish terrorism or the recent attack on trains in Madrid that killed 190 people.
MI5 and police have been concerned for some time about young Muslims who travelled to Afghanistan under the Taliban to join training camps.
However, they have had to reshape their profile of potential Islamic terrorists to reflect the emergence of a generation of young, British-born Muslims, whose views have been radicalised by their opposition to the war in Iraq and concerns about conflicts in Kashmir and elsewhere.
Mr Clarke said: "As we have said on many occasions in the past, we in the police service know that the overwhelming majority of the Muslim community are law abiding and completely reject all forms of violence."
Police met Muslim community leaders yesterday "to address any concerns they may have".
March 30, 2004 at 11:10 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | TrackBack (126) | Top of page | Blog Home
Muslim leaders urge imams to keep watch for deadly fanatics
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
BRITAIN’S leading Muslim organisation is today writing to every mosque in the country asking imams and other community leaders to be on the lookout for possible terrorists in their midst.
The Muslim Council of Britain wants Muslims to inform police if they have grounds to suspect illegal activity in their mosques or communities.
The appeal to the country’s two million-plus adherents of Islam is an attempt to project an image of Islam as antiviolence and of Muslims as law-abiding British citizens, as the great majority are.
There is concern at the growing use of the term “Islamic terrorist”, especially since the Madrid bombings.
Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the council, said: “There is a letter going to mosques across the country bringing to their attention the concern that has been expressed of an immediate attack taking place in the UK.
“It is important that we exercise vigilance in terms of fulfilling our duty. If there is anything we become aware of, it is our duty to ensure that this is reported immediately to the police. We will not tolerate terrorism.”
The letter was planned before yesterday’s arrests but has been rewritten to take the latest developments into account.
Sent to the imams, chairmen and secretaries of more than 1,000 mosques, the letter points out that, according to the Koran, the murder of one individual is “tantamount to murdering entire humanity”. It says: “Islam categorically forbids violence and killing of innocents, let alone indulging in violence which can cause death and mayhem.”
The Muslim Council is urging imams to provide the “correct Islamic guidance” to their communities, “especially to our youth, as to their obligation to maintain the peace and security of our country”. It calls for the “utmost vigilance” against “mischievous or criminal elements” attempting to infiltrate the community.
The council calls for close liaison with the local police and urges the “fullest co-operation” to help the police to deal with any terrorist threat.
The plea to Britain’s Muslims is part of a long-term plan to help the Muslim community to cope in a climate of increasing Islamophobia.
Further details of the plan are expected to be announced this evening at the Muslim News Awards for Excellence, in London. Mr Sacranie said a meeting will be called of all the Muslim leadership in the country to consider what action may be taken to promote the message that Islam has “nothing to do with terrorism” and “condemns violence”.
Other leading Muslims issued a warning yesterday that the police raids could provoke a backlash from the community. Ahmed Versi, editor of The Muslim News, said: “The police have to be more sensitive to make sure they have proper evidence before they detain anyone. Of course we are not against targeting terrorists.”
March 30, 2004 at 11:08 PM in UK | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home
The terrorist's weapon of mass destruction
By Stewart Tendler, Crime Correspondent
LORRY bombs loaded with home-made explosive have become the chosen weapon of mass destruction for terrorists from al-Qaeda to the Provisional IRA and far-right American extremists.
The half ton of ammonium nitrate uncovered yesterday in a storage centre in West London could have been converted with fuel oil and a detonation charge into a device capable of killing hundred
Bombs of a similar size detonated by the Provisional IRA destroyed the Arndale Centre in Manchester at a cost of nearly £1 billion, and killed two men in South Quay, East London, in 1996, creating damage costing £170 million.
Yet ammonium nitrate, used routinely for military explosive manufacture, can be found in the potting shed of every gardener as an ingredient of general fertilisers.
Farmers use it as a main source of nitrogen to improve their land. The chemical is usually sold in half-tonne consignments and the haul found in Hanwell yesterday would have cost only about £65, according to dealers.
But ammonium nitrate is also used in the manufacture of explosives and is a cheap and readily available bomb-making ingredient.
Mike Yardley, a former army officer and security expert, said: “Terrorists and militants use the ammonium nitrate because it’s incredibly stable to store. The risk of terrorists injuring themselves whilst handling ammonium nitrate is dramatically reduced compared to other explosives.”
Garth Whitty, a former weapons inspector and now head of the Homeland Security department of the Royal United Services Institute, said that ammonium nitrate was not effective in isolation. “But it’s very easy to make a bomb with it, provided you know what you’re doing,” he said.
Last year al-Qaeda and its allies used ammonium nitrate in attacks on three compounds housing foreigners in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 29.
It was also used for the suicide bomb attacks on the British Consulate and a bank in Istanbul which killed 160, including the British Consul.
But most countries, including the US and Australia, do not regulate the sale of fertiliser-grade ammonium nitrate. In the EU fertiliser-grade ammonium nitrate is manufactured to higher standards than the explosive grade with large, dense granules to prevent them absorbing fuel oil. Stabilisers are sometimes added to prevent the granules breaking down, and fertilisers may be marked so any bomb can be traced to its source.
In Britain suppliers are supposed to inform the authorities of any irregular or sudden inquiries about buying large amounts. But police say that the system is nowhere near tight enough and are planning to lobby for more controls.
March 30, 2004 at 11:07 PM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home
How surveillance ensnared enemy within
By Stewart Tendler and Daniel McGrory
Operation Crevice led to anti-terrorist raids across London's suburbs.
ANTI-TERRORIST officers had nervously kept their secret for weeks: how close Britain was to a devastating bomb attack. Only a handful of senior figures were trusted with the knowledge that a group of young Britons from half a dozen suburbs around London were finalising their plans to strike.
Most were living quietly with their parents or their young families. Bemused neighbours of the men said that that they had lived at the same addresses for years and had jobs such as taxi drivers and builders; one was an airport caterer. Another of the teenagers arrested yesterday was a student with ambitions to go to university.
All the young men were described as models of suburban respectability. But counterterrorist officers and MI5 suspected otherwise.
“This was truly the enemy within,” said one senior figure involved in what was named Operation Crevice. “This is proof that it’s not a question of if, it’s the when and the where.”
Even as leading politicians argued on television whether the public should be scared by repeated warnings from police and ministers about the inevitability of a terrorist strike, the plot was fast taking shape.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, was informed about it and gave permission for the telephones of some of the suspects to be tapped.
While all the speculation in recent days has been of possible British links to the train bombings in Madrid, the intelligence agencies have been concentrating on a number of terraced houses in locations such as Crawley, Slough and Ilford.
Undercover teams had been closely shadowing some of those arrested yesterday and are reported to have linked them to others in the group through telephone calls and e-mails.
At this stage, the counterterrorist teams said they did not know how any attack was to be carried out. Most of the men picked up yesterday were considered too young to have fought in Afghanistan or to have been schooled in bomb-making at al-Qaeda training camps. Police believe that they were recruited in Britain. Although most of them are of Pakistani origin, all were born in Britain or have spent most of their lives here.
The focus of the inquiry suddenly changed with a string of intercepted telephone calls inquiring about renting space in storage warehouses. These anonymous, prefabricated buildings are the perfect hiding place. They are large enough to store vehicles and, as witnessed yesterday, a builder’s sack full of industrial- strength fertiliser, without anybody paying much attention.
There are a number of Asian-owned building firms that use the Access storage centre in Hanwell where the fertiliser was found, so the sight of young men lugging a 6ft bag of what looked like builders’ materials was not out of the ordinary.
The dilemma for the security authorities was when to move in. Operation Crevice differed from previous terrorist surveillance operations in that the men being watched were spread so widely around London and the Home Counties.
Detectives were understandably guarded about why they chose yesterday to make their move. One suggestion is that they intercepted a telephone call which indicated that the half tonne of fertiliser was about to be moved.
In its industrial packaging in the Access storage unit, it was no danger to anyone. Those planning to fashion it into a bomb needed somewhere to mix the fertiliser with fuel oil and the explosive charge, then pack it into a van or lorry to deliver it to the intended destination.
One of the many addresses reported to have been searched yesterday was a warehouse in Slough, half an hour’s drive from where the fertiliser was stored. Police declined to say if it was from here that they suspected the bombmaker was to operate.
After intense discussions, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, and Assistant Commissioner David Veness, Scotland Yard’s most experienced terrorist expert, chose Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad, for the early-morning raids. They had to co-ordinate in secret with five separate forces and the intelligence agencies for the biggest raid seen in Britain since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The 700 or so officers involved were told to gather before dawn at various assembly points around the Home Counties, where they were briefed as to their targets. Most of those involved were not told details of a possible bombing plot. The first raids began at 4.30am and by the end of the morning police and forensic science teams had moved in to 24 premises. Seven of those were in Crawley. One of the properties was in Juniper Close, where the homeowner was said by neighbours to work for a catering firm which prepares inflight meals for airlines at Gatwick airport. The man, of Pakistani origin, was said to live there with two sons and a daughter.
Another of the men taken into custody was arrested at the Holiday Inn at Gatwick, where police sealed off two rooms on the fourth floor while they were searched by explosives experts.
Curious onlookers were kept away from two neat homes in Gossops Green, where one of the neighbours, Martyn Tidd, 46, said that the father and sons who lived there all worked for a minicab firm which operated from Gatwick. Six more addresses raided were in the Bury Park area of Luton.
Bystanders in Overstone Road watched as an elderly Asian couple who had lived in the street for about 15 years were led away by police. Officers also searched a property across the road that the couple were said to have bought for their married daughter. A middle-aged woman and a man in his 20s left the house carrying an overnight bag as police made it clear that none of them had been arrested.
Anthony Pisano was leaving for work when he saw police in riot gear bursting into a flat near his home in Hencroft Street South, Slough, not far from Heathrow.
He could not remember the name of the tall, slightly built man of North African origin who lived in the converted property, but Dr Pisano described him as being in his late 20s.
On the few occasions that the pair chatted, the man had apologised for the noise he was making but explained that he was renovating the flat where he lived with his sister.
Near by, in Warrington Avenue, Slough, neighbours watched as forensic science teams investigated a white, pebble-dashed, semi-detached house.
When Joey Baynham, 19, looked through his bedroom window in Grovelands Road, Reading, and saw police break down the door of a house, he assumed that it was a drugs raid. An Irish woman who lived there, and who is thought to work at a school in the area, did not appear to be at home. Neighbours said she had a young lodger of Pakistani origin staying there.
Senior officers made clear last night this was just the first phase of Operation Crevice. Searches will continue today at all the properties that were raided.
Officers admited that they could not be certain that others involved in any plot may still have access to other homemade explosives. Above all, they do not yet know the targets the men may have had in mind.
March 30, 2004 at 11:03 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (30) | Top of page | Blog Home
The truck bombers of suburbia
By Stewart Tendler and Daniel McGrory
Eight young British Muslims questioned
Explosives found in 27 raids around London
A PLOT by al-Qaeda supporters to set off a massive lorry bomb was foiled yesterday after the biggest counterterrorist operation seen in Britain since September 11.
MI5 agents and anti-terrorist officers were questioning eight young Britons last night after the discovery of the ingredients for a half-tonne fertiliser bomb in a storage unit in West London. The bomb would have been five times the size of the devices used in the al-Qaeda attack on Bali, which claimed more than 200 lives.
Seven of the men arrested are 22 and under, including a 17-year-old student who was seized at an address in Slough. The other man is 32 years old.
The police, who believe an al-Qaeda inspired operation is by far the most likely explanation for the intended attack, fear that terrorists were intending to kill hundreds of civilians with an attack on a “soft target” such as a shopping centre. Only last week Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said that terrorists would target crowded bars, nightclubs, pubs and shopping centres in an attempt to cause mass casualties. He was criticised by David Blunkett for saying that an attack was “inevitable”.
Sir John did not mention that MI5 and five forces were involved in Operation Crevice, which culminated in yesterday’s arrests.
Mr Blunkett praised what he called a first-class police and security operation. In a statement yesterday, he said: “I would like to record the Government’s thanks to all those from the police and security services who work so tirelessly and bravely on our behalf.”
At dawn yesterday 700 officers raided 24 homes and businesses across London and the South East. Police marksmen were on standby as arrest teams and search units raided properties in Ilford, East London, and Uxbridge, Colindale and Hanwell in West London. Other addresses around the M25 were in Luton, Crawley in West Sussex, Horley in Surrey, Slough and Reading. Experts say that the explosive was the same type used by al-Qaeda sympathisers last November in their attacks against targets, including the British Consulate, in Istanbul. Police did not identify the suspected target for the bombers here, but a security source said they are confident that they have the ringleader of this plot among those being held in custody.
With the Easter holidays approaching, security will be tight at many civilian targets including football grounds and shopping centres. Security arrangements for this weekend’s Grand National and other sporting events are certain to be reviewed.
All those in custody in the high-security wing at Paddington Green police station are British citizens, and the majority are of Pakistani origin. The biggest discovery in the raids was at the Access storage company in Boston Road, Hanwell, where police found the ammonium nitrate. The fertiliser could easily have been bought on the internet and would have cost about £60.
The supplier of the chemicals has been traced but detectives are concerned at the lack of effective control on the sale of a chemical that is used to make military explosive.
This same mixture has been used regularly by al-Qaeda groups since their 1998 lorry bomb attacks on two US embassies in East Africa and in the bombings of residential compounds in Saudi Arabia, where Western workers live.
The storage unit is a short drive from Heathrow, and at least three of those arrested live close to Gatwick and addresses were raided near Luton airport. Police do not believe that any of the three airports were the intended target.
The man leading yesterday’s operation, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, took the unusual step of making a public statement within a few hours of the arrests in an attempt to calm public concerns.
He said the operation was part of “continuing and extensive inquiries by police and the Security Service into alleged international terrorist activity and I must stress that the threat from terrorism remains very real. The public must remain watchful and alert.”
More arrests are expected. The police said they were in contact with Muslim leaders in the areas raided to brief them about the reason for the arrests and to assure them that this was not an attack on the Islamic communities living there.
March 30, 2004 at 11:02 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home
Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?
ABCNEWS.com : Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?
June 21 — Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.
Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.
She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye.
Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said.
The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange," she said.
She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. Before long, the FBI was also on the scene, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van.
The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey's Giants Stadium. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police.
The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens.
‘We Are Not Your Problem’
According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan "during the incident" — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem." The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.
When the men were transferred to jail, the case was transferred out of the FBI's Criminal Division, and into the bureau's Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases, ABCNEWS has learned.
One reason for the shift, sources told ABCNEWS, was that the FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.
After the five men were arrested, the FBI got a warrant and searched Urban Moving's Weehawken, N.J., offices.
The FBI searched Urban Moving's offices for several hours, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives. The FBI also questioned Urban Moving's owner. His attorney insists that his client answered all of the FBI's questions. But when FBI agents tried to interview him again a few days later, he was gone.
Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse.
The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.
‘A Scary Situation’
Steven Gordon, the attorney for the five Israeli detainees, acknowledged that his clients' actions on Sept. 11 would easily have aroused suspicions. "You got a group of guys that are taking pictures, on top of a roof, of the World Trade Center. They're speaking in a foreign language. They got two passports on 'em. One's got a wad of cash on him, and they got box cutters. Now that's a scary situation."
But Gordon insisted that his clients were just five young men who had come to America for a vacation, ended up working for a moving company, and were taking pictures of the event.
The five Israelis were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, ostensibly for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported. But sources told ABCNEWS that FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case.
The five men were held in detention for more than two months. Some of them were placed in solitary confinement for 40 days, and some of them were given as many as seven lie-detector tests.
Plenty of Speculation
Since their arrest, plenty of speculation has swirled about the case, and what the five men were doing that morning. Eventually, The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported the FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS, said federal authorities' interest in the case was heightened when some of the men's names were found in a search of a national intelligence database.
Israeli Intelligence Connection?
According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence. Cannistraro said there was speculation as to whether Urban Moving had been "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area."
Under this scenario, the alleged spying operation was not aimed against the United States, but at penetrating or monitoring radical fund-raising and support networks in Muslim communities like Paterson, N.J., which was one of the places where several of the hijackers lived in the months prior to Sept. 11.
For the FBI, deciphering the truth from the five Israelis proved to be difficult. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks — then failed it, according to his lawyer. Another of his lawyers told us Kurzberg had been reluctant to take the test because he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
Sources say the Israelis were targeting these fund-raising networks because they were thought to be channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, groups that are responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Israel. "[The] Israeli government has been very concerned about the activity of radical Islamic groups in the United States that could be a support apparatus to Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Cannistraro said.
The men denied that they had been working for Israeli intelligence out of the New Jersey moving company, and Ram Horvitz, their Israeli attorney, dismissed the allegations as "stupid and ridiculous."
Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, goes even further, asserting the issue was never even discussed with U.S. officials.
"These five men were not involved in any intelligence operation in the United States, and the American intelligence authorities have never raised this issue with us," Regev said. "The story is simply false."
No ‘Pre-Knowledge’
Despite the denials, sources tell ABCNEWS there is still debate within the FBI over whether or not the young men were spies. Many U.S. government officials still believe that some of them were on a mission for Israeli intelligence. But the FBI told ABCNEWS, "To date, this investigation has not identified anybody who in this country had pre-knowledge of the events of 9/11."
Sources also said that even if the men were spies, there is no evidence to conclude they had advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. The investigation, at the end of the day, after all the polygraphs, all of the field work, all the cross-checking, the intelligence work, concluded that they probably did not have advance knowledge of 9/11," Cannistraro noted.
As to what they were doing on the van, they say they read about the attack on the Internet, couldn't see it from their offices and went to the parking lot for a better view. But no one has been able to find a good explanation for why they may have been smiling with the towers of the World Trade Center burning in the background. Both the lawyers for the young men and the Israeli Embassy chalk it up to immature conduct.
According to ABCNEWS sources, Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home.
While the former detainees refused to answer ABCNEWS' questions about their detention and what they were doing on Sept. 11, several of the detainees discussed their experience in America on an Israeli talk show after their return home.
Said one of the men, denying that they were laughing or happy on the morning of Sept. 11, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."
ABCNEWS' Chris Isham, John Miller, Glenn Silber and Chris Vlasto contributed to this report.
March 30, 2004 at 09:52 PM in Israel | Permalink | TrackBack (76) | Top of page | Blog Home
Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ...
Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA? Neil Mackay investigates
THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.
Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: “It’s very good.” Then he corrected himself, adding: “Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans].”
If Israel’s closest ally felt the collective pain of mass civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists, then Israel would have an unbreakable bond with the world’s only hyperpower and an effective free hand in dealing with the Palestinian terrorists who had been murdering its innocent civilians as the second intifada dragged on throughout 2001.
It’s not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who first spotted the five Israelis and their white van wants to preserve her anonymity. She’s insisted that she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her apartment building had called her just after the first strike on the Twin Towers. Maria grabbed a pair of binoculars and, like millions across the world, she watched the horror of the day unfold.
As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on the roof of a white van in her parking lot. Here’s her recollection: “They seemed to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know ... they didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was strange.”
Maria jotted down the van’s registration and called the police. The FBI was alerted and soon there was a statewide all points bulletin put out for the apprehension of the van and its occupants. The cops traced the number, establishing that it belonged to a company called Urban Moving.
Police Chief John Schmidig said: “We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down.”
By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was spotted near New Jersey’s Giants stadium. A squad car pulled it over and inside were five men in their 20s. They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at their heads and handcuffed.
In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of box cutters – the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers who’d flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon just hours before. There were also fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert. The driver of the van then told the arresting officers: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers were Kurzberg’s brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were dragged off to prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI’s Criminal Division and into the hands of their Foreign Counterintelligence Section – the bureau’s anti-espionage squad.
A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving premises in Weehawken in New Jersey. Boxes of papers and computers were removed. The FBI questioned the firm’s Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when agents returned to re-interview him a few days later, he was gone. An employee of Urban Moving said his co-workers had laughed about the Manhattan attacks the day they happened. “I was in tears,” the man said. “These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, ‘Now America knows what we go through.’”
Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with the CIA, says the red flag went up among investigators when it was discovered that some of the Israelis’ names were found in a search of the national intelligence database. Cannistraro says many in the US intelligence community believed that some of the Israelis were working for Mossad and there was speculation over whether Urban Moving had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists”.
This makes it clear that there was no suggestion whatsoever from within American intelligence that the Israelis were colluding with the 9/11 hijackers – simply that the possibility remains that they knew the attacks were going to happen, but effectively did nothing to help stop them.
After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving looked as if they’d been closed down in a big hurry. Mobile phones were littered about, the office phones were still connected and the property of at least a dozen clients were stacked up in the warehouse. The owner had cleared out his family home in New Jersey and returned to Israel.
Two weeks after their arrest, the Israelis were still in detention, held on immigration charges. Then a judge ruled that they should be deported. But the CIA scuppered the deal and the five remained in custody for another two months. Some went into solitary confinement, all underwent two polygraph tests and at least one underwent up to seven lie detector sessions before they were eventually deported at the end of November 2001. Paul Kurzberg refused to take a lie detector test for 10 weeks, but then failed it. His lawyer said he was reluctant to take the test as he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
Nevertheless, their lawyer, Ram Horvitz, dismissed the allegations as “stupid and ridiculous”. Yet US government sources still maintained that the Israelis were collecting information on the fundraising activities of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mark Regev, of the Israeli embassy in Washington, would have none of that and he said the allegations were “simply false”. The men themselves claimed they’d read about the World Trade Centre attacks on the internet, couldn’t see it from their office and went to the parking lot for a better view. Their lawyers and the embassy say their ghoulish and sinister celebrations as the Twin Towers blazed and thousands died were due to youthful foolishness.
The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March 2002, however, that it had received a briefing on the case of the five Israelis from a US official who was regularly updated by law enforcement agencies. This is what he told The Forward: “The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it.” He added that “the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs”, but the men were released because they “did not know anything about 9/11”.
Back in Israel, several of the men discussed what happened on an Israeli talk show. One of them made this remarkable comment: “The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.” But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?
We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad – whose motto is “By way of deception, thou shalt do war” – was spying on Arab extremists in the USA and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could have prevented the terror attacks.
Following September 11, 2001, more than 60 Israelis were taken into custody under the Patriot Act and immigration laws. One highly placed investigator told Carl Cameron of Fox News that there were “tie-ins” between the Israelis and September 11; the hint was clearly that they’d gathered intelligence on the planned attacks but kept it to themselves.
The Fox News source refused to give details, saying: “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” Fox News is not noted for its condemnation of Israel; it’s a ruggedly patriotic news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch and was President Bush’s main cheerleader in the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.
Another group of around 140 Israelis were detained prior to September 11, 2001, in the USA as part of a widespread investigation into a suspected espionage ring run by Israel inside the USA. Government documents refer to the spy ring as an “organised intelligence-gathering operation” designed to “penetrate government facilities”. Most of those arrested had served in the Israeli armed forces – but military service is compulsory in Israel. Nevertheless, a number had an intelligence background.
The first glimmerings of an Israeli spying exercise in the USA came to light in spring 2001, when the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies alerting them to be wary of visitors calling themselves “Israeli art students” and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings in order to sell paintings. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report suggested the Israeli calls “may well be an organised intelligence-gathering activity”. Law enforcement documents say that the Israelis “targeted and penetrated military bases” as well as the DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, including secret offices and the unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel.
A number of Israelis questioned by the authorities said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, but Pnina Calpen, a spokeswoman for the Israeli school, did not recognise the names of any Israelis mentioned as studying there in the past 10 years. A federal report into the so-called art students said many had served in intelligence and electronic signal intercept units during their military service.
According to a 61-page report, drafted after an investigation by the DEA and the US immigration service, the Israelis were organised into cells of four to six people. The significance of what the Israelis were doing didn’t emerge until after September 11, 2001, when a report by a French intelligence agency noted “according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells”.
The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of the 9/11 hijack teams. The pair had settled in Hollywood, Florida, along with three other hijackers, after leaving Hamburg – where another Mossad team was operating close by.
Hollywood in Florida is a town of just 25,000 souls. The French intelligence report says the leader of the Mossad cell in Florida rented apartments “right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi”. More than a third of the Israeli “art students” claimed residence in Florida. Two other Israelis connected to the art ring showed up in Fort Lauderdale. At one time, eight of the hijackers lived just north of the town.
Put together, the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9/11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA. But that’s not quite true. In August 2001, the Israelis handed over a list of terrorist suspects – on it were the names of four of the September 11 hijackers. Significantly, however, the warning said the terrorists were planning an attack “outside the United States”.
The Israeli embassy in Washington has dismissed claims about the spying ring as “simply untrue”. The same denials have been issued repeatedly by the five Israelis seen high-fiving each other as the World Trade Centre burned in front of them.
Their lawyer, Ram Horwitz, insisted his clients were not intelligence officers. Irit Stoffer, the Israeli foreign minister, said the allegations were “completely untrue”. She said the men were arrested because of “visa violations”, adding: “The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11.”
Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman in New York, implied that the public would never know the truth, saying: “If we found evidence of unauthorised intelligence operations that would be classified material.” Yet, Israel has long been known, according to US administration sources, for “conducting the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any US ally”. Seventeen years ago, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian working for the American Navy, was jailed for life for passing secrets to Israel. At first, Israel claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but the government later took responsibility for his work.
It has always been a long-accepted agreement among allies – such as Britain and America or America and Israel – that neither country will jail a “friendly spy” nor shame the allied country for espionage. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Boston’s Political Research Associates and an expert in intelligence, says: “It’s a backdoor agreement between allies that says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn’t do too much harm, he goes home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always visa violation.”
What we are left with, then, is fact sullied by innuendo. Certainly, it seems, Israel was spying within the borders of the United States and it is equally certain that the targets were Islamic extremists probably linked to September 11. But did Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a war which would give Israel the power to strike its enemies almost without limit? That’s a conspiracy theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling that, in this age of spin and secrets, we do not know the full and unadulterated truth won’t go away. Maybe we can guess, but it’s for the history books to discover and decide.
March 30, 2004 at 09:51 PM in Israel | Permalink | TrackBack (135) | Top of page | Blog Home
'Flawed circle' of intelligence
From Stephen Farrell in Jerusalem
BRITISH, American and Israeli intelligence agencies passed information around in circles before the Iraq war, reinforcing each others’ exaggerated analyses of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction capability, an Israeli parliamentary investigation concluded yesterday.
In a scathing indictment of its own intelligence services, including Mossad, it said that there was a general failure of intelligence based on mutually reinforcing evaluations based on “speculation” without any hard data.
“The uniform evaluation of the international intelligence bodies was implanted somewhat in a sort of ‘magical circle’ and in a way of reciprocal feedback, which for most cases was harmful rather than useful,” an 81-page report by the Knesset’s all-party Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee concluded.
“This created a structural failure, it led to exaggerated self-confidence and lack of scepticism among the international intelligence communities in the Western world.”
The report is a severe blow to Israel’s much-vaunted and highly secretive intelligence agencies. Yuval Steinitz, the committee chairman, called for changes in intelligence- gathering and analysis and demanded to know why officials had not relied on signals and intelligence technology instead of “speculation.”
The problem, he said, arose after 1998, when the withdrawal of United Nations inspectors from Iraq removed the intelligence community’s best source of hard information.
While other Western services focused on Saddam’s nuclear capability, he said that Israeli intelligence began an “inexplicable escalation” in its estimates of Saddam’s missile arsenal “without the committee finding any data to support this change in estimates”.
Mr Steinitz refused to say what Israeli intelligence received from its Western counterparts before the war, but said that the United States and Britain had big advantages in intelligence-gathering capability because their jets were flying over Iraq, their troops were based in neighbouring Kuwait and they had satellite data.
He described what he called the circular “trap” that Western intelligence agencies appeared to have fallen into.
“The Israeli services give information to the foreign services, who use it for their own purposes and pass it on and it comes back to the Israeli intelligence services,” he said. “That is a circle of feedback that feeds on itself without any substance in the field.”
Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Ltd.
March 30, 2004 at 09:49 PM in MI6 | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home
British Broadsheet Links Mossad to 9/11
There was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes. Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for USA-Israeli relations. He said: “It’s very good.” Then he corrected himself, adding: “Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans].” If Israel’s closest ally felt the collective pain of mass civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists, then Israel would have an unbreakable bond with the world’s only hyperpower and an effective free hand in dealing with the Palestinian terrorists who had been murdering its innocent civilians as the second Intifada dragged on throughout 2001.
It’s not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who first spotted the five Israelis and their white van wants to preserve her anonymity. She’s insisted that she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her apartment building had called her just after the first strike on the Twin Towers. Maria grabbed a pair of binoculars and, like millions across the world, she watched the horror of the day unfold. As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on the roof of a white van in her parking lot. Here’s her recollection: “They seemed to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know … they didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was strange.”
Maria jotted down the van’s registration and called the police. The FBI was alerted and soon there was a state-wide all points bulletin put out for the apprehension of the van and its occupants. The cops traced the number, establishing that it belonged to a company called Urban Moving. Police Chief John Schmidig said: “We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down.”
By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was spotted near New Jersey’s Giants stadium. A squad car pulled it over and inside were five men in their 20s. They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at their heads and handcuffed. In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of box cutters – the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers who’d flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon just hours before. There were also fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert.
The driver of the van then told the arresting officers: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers were Kurzberg’s brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were dragged off to prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI’s Criminal Division and into the hands of their Foreign Counterintelligence Section – the bureau’s anti-espionage squad.
A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving premises in Weehawken in New Jersey. Boxes of papers and computers were removed. The FBI questioned the firm’s Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when agents returned to re-interview him a few days later, he was gone. An employee of Urban Moving said his co-workers had laughed about the Manhattan attacks the day they happened. “I was in tears,” the man said. “These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, ‘Now America knows what we go through.’”
Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with the CIA, says the red flag went up among investigators when it was discovered that some of the Israelis’ names were found in a search of the national intelligence database. Cannistraro says many in the USA intelligence community believed that some of the Israelis were working for Mossad and there was speculation over whether Urban Moving had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists”. This makes it clear that there was no suggestion whatsoever from within American intelligence that the Israelis were colluding with the 9/11 hijackers – simply that the possibility remains that they knew the attacks were going to happen, but effectively did nothing to help stop them.
After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving looked as if they’d been closed down in a big hurry. Mobile phones were littered about, the office phones were still connected and the property of at least a dozen clients were stacked up in the warehouse. The owner had cleared out his family home in New Jersey and returned to Israel.
Two weeks after their arrest, the Israelis were still in detention, held on immigration charges. Then a judge ruled that they should be deported. But the CIA scuppered the deal and the five remained in custody for another two months. Some went into solitary confinement, all underwent two polygraph tests and at least one underwent up to seven lie detector sessions before they were eventually deported at the end of November 2001. Paul Kurzberg refused to take a lie detector test for 10 weeks, but then failed it. His lawyer said he was reluctant to take the test as he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
Nevertheless, their lawyer, Ram Horvitz, dismissed the allegations as “stupid and ridiculous”. Yet USA government sources still maintained that the Israelis were collecting information on the fundraising activities of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mark Regev, of the Israeli embassy in Washington, would have none of that and he said the allegations were “simply false”. The men themselves claimed they’d read about the World Trade Centre attacks on the internet, couldn’t see it from their office and went to the parking lot for a better view. Their lawyers and the embassy say their ghoulish and sinister celebrations as the Twin Towers blazed and thousands died were due to youthful foolishness.
The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March 2002, however, that it had received a briefing on the case of the five Israelis from a USA official who was regularly updated by law enforcement agencies. This is what he told The Forward: “The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it.” He added that “the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs”, but the men were released because they “did not know anything about 9/11”.
Back in Israel, several of the men discussed what happened on an Israeli talk show. One of them made this remarkable comment: “The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.” But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?
We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad – whose motto is “By way of deception, thou shalt do war” – was spying on Arab extremists in the USA and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could have prevented the terror attacks.
Following September 11, 2001, more than 60 Israelis were taken into custody under the Patriot Act and immigration laws. One highly placed investigator told Carl Cameron of Fox News that there were “tie-ins” between the Israelis and September 11; the hint was clearly that they’d gathered intelligence on the planned attacks but kept it to themselves. The Fox News source refused to give details, saying: “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” Fox News is not noted for its condemnation of Israel; it’s a ruggedly patriotic news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch and was President Bush’s main cheerleader in the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.
Another group of around 140 Israelis were detained prior to September 11, 2001, in the USA as part of a widespread investigation into a suspected espionage ring run by Israel inside the USA. Government documents refer to the spy ring as an “organised intelligence-gathering operation” designed to “penetrate government facilities”. Most of those arrested had served in the Israeli armed forces – but military service is compulsory in Israel. Nevertheless, a number had an intelligence background.
The first glimmerings of an Israeli spying exercise in the USA came to light in spring 2001, when the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies alerting them to be wary of visitors calling themselves “Israeli art students” and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings in order to sell paintings. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report suggested the Israeli calls “may well be an organised intelligence-gathering activity”. Law enforcement documents say that the Israelis “targeted and penetrated military bases” as well as the DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, including secret offices and the unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel.
A number of Israelis questioned by the authorities said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, but Pnina Calpen, a spokeswoman for the Israeli school, did not recognise the names of any Israelis mentioned as studying there in the past 10 years. A federal report into the so-called art students said many had served in intelligence and electronic signal intercept units during their military service.
According to a 61-page report, drafted after an investigation by the DEA and the USA immigration service, the Israelis were organised into cells of four to six people. The significance of what the Israelis were doing didn’t emerge until after September 11, 2001, when a report by a French intelligence agency noted “according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells”.
The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of the 9/11 hijack teams. The pair had settled in Hollywood, Florida, along with three other hijackers, after leaving Hamburg – where another Mossad team was operating close by.
Hollywood in Florida is a town of just 25,000 souls. The French intelligence report says the leader of the Mossad cell in Florida rented apartments “right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi”. More than a third of the Israeli “art students” claimed residence in Florida. Two other Israelis connected to the art ring showed up in Fort Lauderdale. At one time, eight of the hijackers lived just north of the town.
Put together, the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9/11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA. But that’s not quite true. In August 2001, the Israelis handed over a list of terrorist suspects – on it were the names of four of the September 11 hijackers. Significantly, however, the warning said the terrorists were planning an attack “outside the United States”.
The Israeli embassy in Washington has dismissed claims about the spying ring as “simply untrue”. The same denials have been issued repeatedly by the five Israelis seen high-fiving each other as the World Trade Centre burned in front of them. Their lawyer, Ram Horwitz, insisted his clients were not intelligence officers. Irit Stoffer, the Israeli foreign minister, said the allegations were “completely untrue”. She said the men were arrested because of “visa violations”, adding: “The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11.”
Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman in New York, implied that the public would never know the truth, saying: “If we found evidence of unauthorised intelligence operations that would be classified material.” Yet, Israel has long been known, according to USA administration sources, for “conducting the most aggressive espionage operations against the USA of any USA ally”. Seventeen years ago, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian working for the American Navy, was jailed for life for passing secrets to Israel. At first, Israel claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but the government later took responsibility for his work.
It has always been a long-accepted agreement among allies – such as Britain and America or America and Israel – that neither country will jail a “friendly spy” nor shame the allied country for espionage. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Boston’s Political Research Associates and an expert in intelligence, says: “It’s a backdoor agreement between allies that says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn’t do too much harm, he goes home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always visa violation.”
What we are left with, then, is fact sullied by innuendo. Certainly, it seems, Israel was spying within the borders of the United States and it is equally certain that the targets were Islamic extremists probably linked to September 11. But did Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a war which would give Israel the power to strike its enemies almost without limit? That’s a conspiracy theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling that, in this age of spin and secrets, we do not know the full and unadulterated truth won’t go away. Maybe we can guess, but it’s for the history books to discover and decide.
Article courtesy of Scottish-based Herald Newspapers
March 30, 2004 at 09:44 PM in Berlin | Permalink | TrackBack (251) | Top of page | Blog Home
MI6 and Tripoli to share information on al-Qaida
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | MI6 and Tripoli to share information on al-Qaida
Nicholas Watt in Tripoli
Friday March 26, 2004
The Guardian
Britain and Libya are to swap sensitive intelligence on al-Qaida suspects as they intensify their co-operation in the war against terrorism in the wake of Tony Blair's historic handshake yesterday with Colonel Muammar Gadafy.
MI6 agents, who played a pivotal role in persuading Tripoli to abandon its nuclear and chemical weapons, are to work alongside their Libyan counterparts to stamp out al-Qaida's north Africa network.
The new co-operation was hailed by Mr Blair yesterday as a sign of the success of his carrot and stick approach to foreign policy, which persuaded Col Gadafy to begin disarming last December. Speaking after nearly two hours of talks in the Libyan leader's tent on the outskirts of Tripoli, the prime minister praised Col Gadafy for his "historic decision".
"I was particularly struck by Col Gadafy's insistence not only of Libya's determination to carry on down this path of co-operation but also his recognition that Libya's own future is best secured by a new relationship with the outside world and the recognition also of a common cause with us in the fight against al-Qaida extremism and terrorism which threatens not just the west but Arab nations too," he said.
Diplomats accompanying Mr Blair said that the Libyans have been handing over intelligence about an al-Qaida offshoot - the Libyan Islamic Fighters Group. "The Libyans obviously have intelligence that we would never be able to lay our hand on," a diplomatic source said. This information will be passed to US intelligence.
The process is two-way. It is understood that Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, has travelled to Tripoli to meet his Libyan counterpart, Musa Kusa, to discuss the dismantling of Libya's banned weapons and the fight against terrorism.
Libya made clear that it warmly welcomes the chance to join forces with Britain to tackle al-Qaida, a point reinforced by Col Gadafy when he had a lengthy discussion with Mr Blair about September 11 and its aftermath.
But Tripoli could not resist pointing out that it had identified the threat posed by Osama bin Laden when the west was arming his fighters in the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Abdulrahman Shalgam, the Libyan foreign minister, said: "When we started speaking about terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s some countries in America and Europe were supporting these people. At the time we spoke about Bin Laden and others - and we considered them terrorists."
But Mr Shalgam said it was time to work together to defeat al-Qaida, which tried to assassinate Col Gadafy in 1998.
March 30, 2004 at 09:39 PM in MI6 | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home
March 28, 2004
Who Killed George Polk?
Every spring for the past 45 years, the most distinguished names in journalism have gathered in New York City for the George W. Polk Awards, commemorating an American reporter murdered during the Greek civil war. But for all the honors they have bestowed in his name, George Polk's fellow journalists failed him when they accepted as truth a sham investigation and murder trial. The story of how and why that happened is the subject of this book.
On Sunday, May 16, 1948, a boatman discovered the body of CBS correspondent George Polk floating in the bay of Salonika in northern Greece. He had been shot in the back of the head at point-blank range. The Greek government declared that it would spare no effort to find the murderer. The United States, which was spending a million dollars a day to help the conservative Greek regime suppress a communist rebellion, promised to monitor the investigation closely.
The list of possible murder suspects was long. Polk had relentlessly criticized players on both sides of the Greek civil war. He had called the communist guerrillas thugs, accused the Greek government of greed and corruption, branded a former minister of public order a gangster, and blasted Washington for supporting the repressive, right-wing Greek government.
Journalists in New York City attempted to raise funds to send an independent team of reporters to Greece to look into the murder. Their efforts were soon eclipsed by more powerful, mainstream Washington journalists who formed a committee and chose Walter Lippmann as its chair. With the creation of the Lippmann Committee--which was content to work through official channels--any hope for an independent journalistic investigation into George Polk's death vanished.
Who killed George Polk?
From the start of their investigation, the fiercely anti-communist Greek security police planned to convict a leftist for Polk's murder. Four Greeks were eventually accused. The first, a mid-level official of the Communist Party, was hundreds of miles from Salonika at the time of Polk's death. The second, a Greek newspaper reporter and alleged communist, was in his office at the time police said Polk's body was dumped in the water. The third, the reporter's aging mother, confessed to save her son from torture. The fourth, a member of the Central Committee of the Greek Communist Party, had died four weeks before Polk was killed.
The Lippmann Committee and CBS endorsed the assertion of the Greek security police that communists were responsible for Polk's murder. With the conviction in April 1949 of three of the four suspects, they were satisfied that justice had been served. More than 40 years after the trial, however, the case mounted by the Greek government--and largely unquestioned by the American press--has collapsed.
In 1956 the American intelligence operative assigned to the case--who had repeatedly warned the Lippmann Committee that a coverup was taking place--told Walter Lippmann that the "whole truth never came out." In 1978 he characterized the trial as "a show to cover up the real perpetrators of the crime."
In 1976 the journalist convicted in the case appealed for a new trial, charging that he "confessed" only after two months of torture by the Salonika security police. The Greek Supreme Court denied his request.
In 1977 experts proved that the only physical evidence produced at the trial, a handwriting sample used to indict the journalist's mother, was written by someone else. The original sample has since disappeared.
In 1978 one of the two men convicted in absentia, living in exile in Rumania, proclaimed his innocence of any crime and asked for permission to return to Greece to stand trial. The Greek government refused his request.2
A 15-year search of U.S. government archives and an examination of the personal papers of some of the central figures in the case have documented that the Greek Government and the United States Department of State played a role in framing innocent men for George Polk's murder. And that some of the most respected names in American journalism stood by and let it happen.
March 28, 2004 at 07:41 PM in UK, US | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home
A Murder and Its Meaning
by Elias Vlanton
from The Nation, January 28, 1991 pp. 93-95
THE POLK CONSPIRACY: Murder and Cover-up in the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk. By Kati Marton. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 369 pp. $22.93.
By the middle of 1947, American intervention in the Greek civil war between Communist-led guerrillas and the American-backed rightist regime had made Greece a coveted dateline for ambitious journalists. In July, George Polk, a young, irreverent and respected foreign reporter, moved his base of operations to Athens. Unwilling just to rewrite Greek government handouts, the CBS correspondent began voraciously gathering information about the people and politics of Greece. Over time his dispatches--always well reasoned and well researched--began questioning the honesty and competency of the Greek government, and of the American aid program propping it up.
On May 16, 1948, a few days before he was to return to the United States, a boatman pulled Polk's body out of the Bay of Salonika; his hands and feet were bound and he had been shot once in the back of the head. Within hours Greek authorities announced to the press that Polk had been killed by Communist guerrillas while on his way to meet their leader, General Markos--an assessment foreign-policy officials and the press largely accepted, even defended, throughout the case.
Efforts by members of the New York Newspaper Guild to send an independent team of journalists to Greece to investigate their colleague's death were quickly pre-empted by a committee of prestigious media representatives, headed by Washington columnist Walter Lippmann. The Lippmann Committee refused to back an independent inquiry, electing instead to work with the State Department in monitoring the Greek government's investigation. Lippmann appointed General William (Wild Bill) Donovan, the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services, as the committee's counsel.
When, a month after Polk's death, Greek officials had made no progress toward identifying his killers, Donovan dispatched a young Greek-American intelligence operative, Lieut. Col. James Kellis, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder. In the course of his inquiry, Kellis discovered that Polk had received information that Greek Foreign Minister Constantine Tsaldaris had deposited $25,000 in a New York bank, money Polk may have suspected came out of U.S. aid funds. Shortly before his death the CBS correspondent had confronted Tsaldaris and threatened to destroy him and his government. In late July, as Kellis gathered indications that the rightists, not the Communists, were responsible for Polk's murder, the State Department had him recalled from Greece.
A few days later Donovan dramatically stepped up the pressure on Greek authorities to make an arrest. By August 14 the police had picked up journalist Gregory Staktopoulos; over the next six weeks the security police systematically tortured Staktopoulos until he agreed to "confess" to his role in helping the Communists to set up Polk. At a show trial the following April, Staktopoulos announced that the crime had been committed by two high-ranking Greek Communists acting on orders from the Kremlin. Staktopoulos was sentenced to life imprisonment as an accomplice. With a few notable exceptions, among them I.F. Stone, as well as Constantine Poulos writing in this magazine (May 28, 1949), the American press and government praised the verdict. The case was closed and largely forgotten for the next four decades.
Now Kati Marton has written a thrilling account of Polk's murder and of the cover-up by the American press and foreign-policy establishment. Her story is fast-paced, compellingly written and entirely engaging, and many will finish it convinced that American journalism has finally gotten its man. Marton rightly condemns American government officials for having been more concerned with protecting their investment in the Greek government than in finding Polk's killers. She also properly raps Walter Lippmann for his gullibility in having accepted, virtually without question, information supplied by American officials and General Donovan. But by singling out Donovan and Lippmann as the chief villains in the press cover-up of the murder, Marton misses a larger point.
It wasn't Walter Lippmann alone who failed George Polk and Gregory Staktopoulos; it was American journalism. Although a central figure in the case, Lippmann was hardly the only journalist to accept blindly that the Communists killed Polk, while ignoring evidence that suggested right-wing involvement. He has to share that responsibility with most of his fellows, including Edward R. Murrow and other top journalists at CBS, the major dailies such as The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, and other American reporters then covering Greece. The only dissenters were a handful of members of the New York Newspaper Guild.
This was not a gigantic conspiracy, but journalism-as-usual. It was reporters writing about countries whose language, customs and politics they were unfamiliar with and accepting the word of official sources--American and Greek--without doing the necessary legwork to confirm the information. Worse, there was a failure to apply basic standards of logic and fairness, whether to a murder confession riddled with inconsistencies or to a trial that mocked the notions of justice and the rule of law.
Unfortunately, Kati Marton, too, practices journalism-as-usual. Marton suggests that Foreign Minister Tsaldaris ordered the assassination of Polk to prevent the reporter from carrying out his threat to bring down Tsaldaris and his government. She names Michael Kourtessis as the man who planned and carried out the murder. Kourtessis, she says, was part of a secret paramilitary organization within the port authority of Piraeus (OLP), to which Tsaldaris had close ties. Marton bases her claim on a series of letters written to Colonel Kellis by one of the Greek informants he used during his investigation into Polk's death.
Marton did not get these documents from Kellis, now deceased, but from sources she does not disclose, "for I have assured them anonymity." Her grant of anonymity to her sources raises several relevant questions: Who needs anonymity in providing forty-two-year-old documents? Did the documents come from the C.I.A., where Kellis served in the early 1950s? If so, why were they given to Marton? Did she receive all the reports in Kellis's possession, or were they leaked selectively to lead the author's inquiries down a particular path?
Also, if the documents sent to Colonel Kellis were so convincing, why did Kellis himself evidently dismiss them? In a 1977 deposition Kellis testified he did not know who killed Polk, and he went on to suggest that a British information officer was involved. (That testimony is mentioned in The Polk Conspiracy, but Marton doesn't mention that it contradicts the thesis of the book.)
Had Marton independently confirmed the story told by Kellis's informant, and/or produced Michael Kourtessis, she would have made a valuable contribution to efforts to clear up the mystery surrounding Polk's death. But the evidence she has "uncovered" appears to be little more than forty-year-old hearsay--the kind of raw intelligence that informers routinely supplied to Kellis and other American officials, information that was often disproved, contradicted or replaced by new information a few days later and hearsay is a far cry from hard evidence. Not only does Marton fail to prove that Kourtessis was a right-wing thug working for the OLP, she does not even prove that anyone named Michael Kourtessis ever existed.
In her analysis of the crime, Marton willingly sacrifices accuracy for drama. For example, The Polk Conspiracy claims that Kourtessis flew to Salonika between May 4 and May 6, 1948, to plan the murder, yet Polk himself only decided to fly there on May 7. How is this possible? Saturday night, May 8, Marton says, Polk dined in a private home with a group of right-wing conspirators posing as Communists. Sometime during the meal they put a soporific into Polk's drink; after the meal, Marton says, they said good night to Polk, who returned to his hotel, the Astoria. But why let him leave alive? How could the killers be sure Polk would return to his hotel? Why not murder him during dinner, in the relative seclusion of a private home in Salonika, rather than risk killing him near the Astoria, which sits on one of Salonika's busiest intersections?
After following Polk up to his room, they stuffed the dazed journalist into a laundry basket, which the murderers wheeled out of the hotel and into an alley. The killers supposedly then shot Polk, dragged his body across a deserted Nikis Street to the edge of the quay and heaved him into the Bay of Salonika. No one familiar with Salonika or Greek habits will find this scenario convincing. Getting Polk's body from the Astoria Hotel to the bay required dragging it three long blocks in an area filled with outdoor cafes, restaurants and movie theaters. Why would the murderers have chanced such a display around midnight (Polk's watch stopped at 12:20, a fact Marton fails to mention), when the streets would have been full of Greeks taking a stroll after their typically late Saturday night dinner? Nor does Marton try to explain how a body dropped over the edge of the quay wound up miles out in the bay; given the action of the waves the body, if it had moved at all, would have been washed closer to the shore, not farther away from it.
In addition to her failure to reconstruct accurately the story of Polk's murder, Marton inflates as revelations her discoveries of facts others made long ago. She writes, for example, that a C.I.A. document on Polk "was declassified in 1988 by the C.I.A. as a result of a Freedom of Information suit by this author." In fact, the document had been released a decade earlier at the request of other journalists. Nor, as Marton implies, was she the first to bring to light the Polk-Tsaldaris fight, news of which appeared in left-wing American newspapers two months after Polk's death. And by 1949 the story of the Tsaldaris illegal bank deposit was known to the dissenting journalists based in the New York Newspaper Guild.
The Polk Conspiracy does not chronicle the efforts of John Donovan, a colleague of Polk's, who strove, largely without recognition, to uncover the truth about Polk's death from 1948 until his debilitating stroke in the 1980s. He traveled to Athens to talk with Gregory Staktopoulos after he was released from prison in 1960 (apparently the only American journalist to do so), and he doggedly pressed Kellis and others connected to the case for possible leads. Donovan unsuccessfully tried to interest every broadcast network, including CBS, and countless newspapers to cover new developments in the case, and he submitted his own articles about the case to magazines and newspapers nationwide. Ironically, many of the same publications that have heaped praise on The Polk Conspiracy, among them The New York Times and The Washington Post did not publish John Donovan's investigations ten and twenty years ago.
Nor does Marton's bibliography even list The Salonika Bay Murder (Princeton, 1989), by Edmund Keeley. Keeley's work, while not as intriguing or compellingly written as Marton's, remains a more reliable source about the murder, investigation and cover-up. Although Keeley fails to assign adequate blame to American officials for their role in the cover-up, his book is thoroughly footnoted and factually correct, whereas Marton's is very poorly referenced and replete with errors. For example, throughout the course of her book Marton manages to get almost every detail of Staktopoulos's life wrong, including what he did during the war, how he was arrested, when he was transferred from jail to prison, when he was freed, when his brother died, and that his sister went insane.
To its credit, The Polk Conspiracy has again drawn attention to how American journalists forty years ago sacrificed their integrity to solidify domestic support for the cold war. The uncritical praise The Polk Conspiracy has received, however, shows how American journalists today accept a terrific story and stylish prose in lieu of meticulous research and critical analysis. Either way, they are still not getting it right.
March 28, 2004 at 06:55 PM in UK, US | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home
March 27, 2004
Comment: Liam Clarke: Gadaffi's lesson to the IRA: cling onto power
It was strange enough for the rest of us, but what did they make of it in Ballybinaby when they turned on their television sets to see Tony Blair shaking hands with Muammar Gadaffi, cementing a new alliance against terror?
Ballybinaby, for those who don’t know it, is the rural South Armagh redoubt of old-style republicanism where Tom “Slab” Murphy, millionaire bandit and chief of staff of the IRA, rules the roost. Like some Third World warlord he provides most of the local employment and levies “taxes” on smugglers using Larkin’s Road, which runs past his front door.
Murphy’s mind must have slipped back to the day in August 1985 when he stood on Clogga Strand in Co Wicklow to take delivery of 300 boxes of Libyan arms, a gift from Gadaffi. They included AK-47 rifles, pistols, Semtex, grenades and heavy machine guns. It was enough to supply the IRA for 30 years; Murphy needed a tractor to haul it ashore.
He may have remembered Colonel Nasser Ashour, the Libyan intelligence officer whom he first met a few weeks after Constable Yvonne Fletcher was murdered by gunmen firing from the Libyan People’s Bureau in London.
Now Murphy and, Gadaffi, Ashour’s boss, are allies of Blair in the war against terror. There is a parallel: the IRA keeps the dissidents in line while Gadaffi opposes the militant Islamists to help secure the West’s oil supply. They may be sonsabitches, to paraphrase the Americans’ description of Latin American dictators they propped up, but they are now our sonsabitches.
The IRA’s weapons deal with Libya worked out well for both. The IRA was kept in business as a result. The weaponry helped sway hardliners to back the leadership’s move towards politics and secured Murphy’s power base.
Gadaffi later won brownie points in the West by giving the British government an inventory of what he supplied to the IRA. Murphy and the IRA are still using the same guns to buy political influence by demanding concessions in return for decommissioning them. And that’s not counting the concessions they won when the guns were in use.
They were well worth the £100,000 in used notes with which Murphy personally paid Adrian Hopkins, the captain who smuggled them, in a Dundalk bar.
“The world is changing and we have got to do everything we possibly can to tackle the security threat that faces us,” Blair told Gadaffi, his upper lip so stiff and his smile so thin that it might have been Botoxed on. Murphy, like the beaming Gadaffi, could hardly have disagreed with a word the prime minster said.
Winston Churchill summed up these situations very well. When he concluded a pact with Stalin against Nazi Germany he observed that if Hitler had invaded hell he would have felt it his duty to give the devil a favourable mention, at the very least, on the floor of the House of Commons. Of course, once the German threat was vanquished, Churchill changed his tune and was an enthusiastic advocate of the cold war. An iron curtain had descended over Europe, he warned.
Realpolitik dictates that yesterday’s pariahs are often today’s allies. More disturbingly, if a dictator or a terrorist can hang on to power long enough, democratic politicians — who come and go every few years — will eventually shift their positions to accommodate him.
The West tried to isolate Gadaffi when he toppled King Idris in a military coup that he claimed was a socialist revolution 30 years ago. He stuck to power, resisting their pressure, and now they need him. In the changed climate of the 21st century, Gadaffi’s Libyan Jamahiriya looks like one of the most secular regimes in the region and possibly a more stable source of oil than Saudi Arabia.
Iraq used to look like that too. Saddam Hussein was favoured for holding the Shi’ite extremists, as they were then regarded, in check and keeping Iran at bay. Donald Rumsfeld used to visit him; he was a friend and client of the West which armed and supplied his long, futile war with Iran.
Things changed when he invaded Kuwait and it became clear he was trying to wage a war of conquest that would give him a stranglehold on the oil supplies of the region and allow him to hold the West to ransom. That led to the first Gulf war and sanctions.
In Afghanistan, too, Osama Bin Laden was our sonofabitch when he was fighting the Russians. It was then the Soviets who were accusing America of sponsoring terrorism by supplying Osama, the Taliban and their cohorts with money, weapons and advisers with which to topple the relatively liberal pro-Soviet regime of Mohammad Najibullah. Yesterday’s freedom fighters are today’s Frankenstein’s monster.
Now world politics has been moved around to take account of the new dispensation. Bin Laden’s talk of restoring the Muslim empire, expelling the Americans from Saudi Arabia and taking over the place was once regarded as just rhetoric. Since September 11, it is taken seriously.
The decision to take Saddam out followed Bin Laden’s attack on the twin towers, even though the two men were not linked ideologically or practically. After September 11, as we now know, western governments began to say that Saddam was actually doing the things that they feared he might. “No terror state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein,” said Rumsfeld in September 2002.
“Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.”
We now know that was bunkum but it doesn’t mean that there is no rhyme, reason, or consistency in the attitude of the West and of democratic governments towards dictators and terrorists. International politics is usually a matter of choosing between unpalatable alternatives and it is almost always a search for stability.
After September 11 it seems America wanted to project its power in the Middle East and create a new world order in which Osama Bin Laden’s virulent brand of Islamic extremism would be contained. The aim of setting up Iraq as a stable democracy and ally was not the war’s stated aim but it was there in the background, and may yet be achieved.
The invasion of Iraq, even if it wasn’t justified by weapons of mass destruction, did change the world order. American troops are now in reach of any country in the Middle East and former “problem” states as diverse as Iran, Libya and Pakistan are being brought on board for a new relationship with the West.
All the same, how will it look in Ballybinaby, and all the other places where tinpot dictators cling on to power in their fiefdoms across the globe? The lesson they draw from it won’t necessarily be a moral one; it may well be “stick to your guns”.
March 27, 2004 at 11:27 PM in IRA | Permalink | TrackBack (85) | Top of page | Blog Home
RUC 'covered up agent's murders'
Liam Clarke
POLICE in Northern Ireland covered up nine murders committed by an informer to protect the flow of intelligence, a whistleblower claims.
The retired detective says his colleagues prevented the arrest of an Ulster Volunteer Force spy who took part in at least nine killings and ordered several more.
The accusations, made by Johnston Brown, a former sergeant, are contained in three dossiers being investigated by Nuala O’Loan, the Northern Ireland police ombudsman. Last week the whistleblower stopped co-operating with her investigators after they threatened to interview him under caution for failing to prevent the killings.
“It has made me question whether the ombudsman is the appropriate person to investigate this case,” said Brown. “I am risking my neck by exposing wrongdoing but it seemed that I was the one being put in the dock. I am putting the matter in the hands of my solicitor.”
Brown, who has 30 years service as a detective, is best known as the man whose evidence jailed Johnny Adair, the Ulster Freedom Fighters mobster known as Mad Dog. He also brought to light the allegation that the man who police believe killed Pat Finucane, the Catholic lawyer, was a Special Branch agent who had allegedly confessed to the crime but had not been charged.
The deaths in which Brown believes this informer was personally involved include:
Sharon McKenna, 27, a Catholic taxi driver, who was shot dead at the home of a Protestant pensioner for whom she was cooking dinner on January 17, 1993. McKenna had been supplying information to the CID in light of her concern about paramilitary activity.
Thomas Sheppard, 41, who was shot dead on March 21, 1996, allegedly by the informant, who was a personal friend of his. Sheppard had been lured to a meeting in Towers Tavern, Ballymena, Co Antrim, and his murder was part of an internal UVF dispute.
William Harbinson, 39, a Shankill Road Protestant who died on May 19, 1997, after being handcuffed and beaten in an alley on north Belfast’s Shore Road.
David Templeton, 43, a Presbyterian minister who died of a heart attack some weeks after a punishment beating in February 1997. He had earlier resigned from the ministry after being arrested by customs with a gay pornographic video.
Gary Convie, 24, and Eamon Fox, 44, Co Tyrone Catholics gunned down at a north Belfast building site in May 1997 in a sectarian killing.
David McIlwaine, 18, and Andrew Robb, 19, both Protestants who were found stabbed to death by the side of Druminure Road near Tandragee, Co Armagh, on Feburary 19, 2000. They were victims of a feud involving the UVF and the Loyalist Volunteer Force.
Tommy English and David Greer, two loyalists shot dead by the UVF during a feud with the Ulster Defence Association in October 2000.
The informer also ordered an attack in which Raymond McCord Jr was beaten to death, and then dumped in a Ballyduff quarry in November 1997. This killing was part of a dispute over drugs money. McCord’s father, also called Raymond, has since become a campaigner against paramilitary violence.
“In CID we were hearing of this man’s involvement in these murders from informants who were working around him and with him,” said Brown. “Every time we reported his actions, we were taken to task for feeding information that was embarrassing a Special Branch source. Some of the informants who told us about it also suffered for helping us.”
Questioned about Brown’s allegations, a spokesman for O’Loan said: “[We] have been talking to a former police officer in relation to a current investigation and have had discussions with him about how we could interview him at a later stage. At no time did we say we would arrest him.”
Brown’s dossiers indicate there was strong competition between the Special Branch, which gathers intelligence, and the CID, which investigates crime, for control of key agents within the paramilitary underworld.
Brown recruited three agents, each of which is the subject of a separate dossier. He believes two were “burnt off” by Special Branch for reporting crimes by fellow agents. One fled and the other was jailed. “In some cases, the loyalist paramilitaries were warned that these people were helping me,” he said.
The third informant was handed over to Special Branch in October 1991, because he was a senior figure in the UVF. His information was judged too valuable for CID to manage. “When I was handling him he saved lives: when Special Branch took control he became a killer. Once he started to take life, you could have caught this boy real handy and I tried a few times but I wasn’t allowed,” said the whistleblower.
March 27, 2004 at 11:23 PM in Ireland | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home
Focus: The confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Christina Lamb in Kabul
'I met Osama Bin Laden in Kabul. It was at this time we discussed the Heathrow operation'
It makes a chilling picture. The mastermind behind the September 11 attacks has told interrogators that he and his terrorist nephew leafed through almanacs of American skyscrapers when planning the operation.
Sears Tower in Chicago and Library Tower in Los Angeles — which was “blown up” in the film Independence Day — were both potential targets, according to transcripts of interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda operations chief.
“We were looking for symbols of economic might,” he told his captors.
He recounted sitting looking at the books with Ramzi Yusuf, his nephew by marriage, who was the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In that attack Yusuf succeeded only in ripping a crater into the foundations with a van bomb. “We knew from that experience that explosives could be problematic,” said Mohammed, “so we started thinking about using planes.”
When he was captured in March last year in the house of a microbiologist in Rawalpindi, the paunchy 37-year old was unshaven and wearing a baggy vest. He looked more like a down-and-out than one of the most dangerous men in the world.
The interrogation reports make clear, however, that he was not only the chief planner for September 11 but also introduced Osama Bin Laden to Hambali, the Indonesian militant accused of th