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Daniel McGrory and Tony Halpin The polonium trail Police have identified the man they believe poisoned Alexander Litvinenko. The suspected killer was captured on cameras at Heathrow as he flew into Britain to carry out the murder. Friends of the ex-spy say that the man was a hired killer, sent by the Kremlin, who vanished hours after administering a deadly dose of radioactive polonium-210 to Litvinenko.
He arrived in London on a forged EU passport and reportedly slipped the poison into a cup of tea he made for Litvinenko in a London hotel room. Litvinenko was reportedly able to give vital details of his suspected killer in a bedside interview with detectives just days before he died on November 23 at University College Hospital.
Police have decided not to publish pictures of this man, who was seen on CCTV cameras as he flew in from Hamburg on November 1, the day that Litvinenko fell ill.
He is described as being tall and powerfully built, in his early thirties with short, cropped black hair and distinctive Central Asian features.
He reportedly travelled on the same flight as Dimitri Kovtun, a Russian businessman who is being investigated for trafficking the radioactive material used in the poison plot.
Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB agent and friend of Litvinenko, who has worked closely with police on the investigation, said: “This man is believed to have used a Lithuanian or Slovak passport. He did not check into any hotel in London using the name or that passport, and he left the country using another EU passport.”
German police are investigating how polonium-210 was found in various locations Mr Kovtun visited in Hamburg.
According to police sources, until now it has not been revealed that Litvinenko visited a fourth-floor room at the Millennium Hotel to discuss a business deal.
He had gone to the room with Mr Kovtun and another former Russian agent, Andrei Lugovoy.
The three men were joined in the room later by the mystery figure who was introduced as “Vladislav”.
Mr Gordievsky told The Times yesterday how “Vladislav was described as someone who could help Mr Litvinenko win a lucrative contract with a Moscow-based private security company.
“Sasha (his name for Litvinenko) remembered the man making him a cup of tea.
“His belief is that the water from the kettle was only lukewarm and that the polonium-210 was added, which heated the drink through radiation so he had a hot cup of tea. The poison would have showed up in a cold drink,” he added.
The hotel room where Litvinenko thought he was poisoned remains sealed off. This room reportedly showed the heaviest concentration of polonium-210 found at a dozen locations across London.
Both Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun were questioned by Scotland Yard detectives in Moscow last month. They strenuously deny playing any role in the posion plot.
Scotland Yard have asked to return to Russia so that they can continue their hunt for the suspected murderer, but have been told that they will not be allowed back until after a team of Russian investigators have completed their own inquiry in London.
The fear is that the Russian investigators will use their trip to pursue enemies of President Vladimir Putin living in London. The Kremlin has offered an amnesty for some on its wanted list in return for information against Mr Putin’s main foes given asylum in Britain. They are thought to include former executives of the fallen oil giant Yukos, whose assets have been seized by the Kremlin.
Alexei Golubovich, former director of corporate finance and strategic planning at Yukos, came back from Italy this month after striking a deal with Russian prosecutors, who had issued an international warrant for his arrest.
Mr Golubovich was held in Italy last year but fought off extradition attempts. He is now said to be co-operating actively with Russian prosecutors.
The Kremlin agreed apparently to drop fraud charges if he returned to Moscow and provided testimony against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the founder of Yukos, and his deputy, Leonid Nevzlin.
Khodorkovsky was jailed for fraud and tax evasion in 2003 in what was widely seen as a government vendetta against the oligarch, who had been highly critical of President Putin. Mr Nevzlin fled to Israel.
Yuri Chaika, the Prosecutor-General in Moscow, has accused Mr Nevzlin of involvement in Litvinenko’s death, a charge dismissed by the former Yukos number two. Mr Nevzlin told The Times how Litvinenko flew to Israel shortly before he was poisoned to warn him about a plan by the Kremlin to claw back millions of pounds from exiled Yukos executives through a covert campaign of intimidation and murder.
At least a dozen former Yukos personnel have been given asylum in Britain. Three attempts by the authorities in Moscow to have them sent back to Russia were blocked by the English courts.
All these executives are understood to be on the list of people the Russian investigators want to question in their murder inquiry.
Mr Chaika added to the intrigue this week by announcing that Moscow had “evidence of attempts to poison several witnesses in the Yukos case with mercury”.
He also asked Scotland Yard to investigate the sudden deaths of two Russians working in London, although police here insist the men died of natural causes.
January 21, 2007 at 11:37 AM in Russia | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
QUETTA, Pakistan
The most explosive question about the Taliban resurgence here along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is this: Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?
Source: Pakistani Role Seen in Taliban Surge at Border - New York Times
The government of Pakistan vehemently rejects the allegation and insists that it is fully committed to help American and NATO forces prevail against the Taliban militants who were driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.
Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervor but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank.
More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.
The evidence is provided in fearful whispers, and it is anecdotal.
At Jamiya Islamiya, a religious school here in Quetta, Taliban sympathies are on flagrant display, and residents say students have gone with their teachers’ blessings to die in suicide bombings in Afghanistan.
Three families whose sons had died as suicide bombers in Afghanistan said they were afraid to talk about the deaths because of pressure from Pakistani intelligence agents. Local people say dozens of families have lost sons in Afghanistan as suicide bombers and fighters.
One former Taliban commander said in an interview that he had been jailed by Pakistani intelligence officials because he would not go to Afghanistan to fight. He said that, for Western and local consumption, his arrest had been billed as part of Pakistan’s crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan. Former Taliban members who have refused to fight in Afghanistan have been arrested — or even mysteriously killed — after resisting pressure to re-enlist in the Taliban, Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders said.
“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.
Pakistanis and Afghans interviewed on the frontier, frightened by the long reach of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, spoke only with assurances that they would not be named. Even then, they spoke cautiously.
The Pakistani military and intelligence services have for decades used religious parties as a convenient instrument to keep domestic political opponents at bay and for foreign policy adventures, said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to several of Pakistan’s prime ministers and the author of a book on the relationship between the Islamists and the Pakistani security forces.
The religious parties recruited for the jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan from the 1980s, when the Pakistani intelligence agencies ran the resistance by the mujahedeen and channeled money to them from the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani said.
In return for help in Kashmir and Afghanistan the intelligence services would rig votes for the religious parties and allow them freedom to operate, he said.
“The religious parties provide them with recruits, personnel, cover and deniability,” Mr. Haqqani said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Inter-Services Intelligence once had an entire wing dedicated to training jihadis, he said. Today the religious parties probably have enough of their own people to do the training, but, he added, the I.S.I. so thoroughly monitors phone calls and people’s movements that it would be almost impossible for any religious party to operate a training camp without its knowledge.
“They trained the people who are at the heart of it all, and they have done nothing to roll back their protégés,” Mr. Haqqani said.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, President Pervez Musharraf, under strong American pressure, pledged to help root out Islamic extremism, and, as both head of the army and president, he has more direct control of the intelligence services than past civilian prime ministers. But according to several analysts, Pakistani intelligence officials believe it is more prudent to prepare for the day when Western troops leave Afghanistan.
Pakistan has long seen jihadi movements like the Taliban as a counter to Indian and Russian influence next door in Afghanistan, the Western diplomat and other analysts said, and as a way to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth,” or a friendly buffer on its western border.
In Pashtunabad, a warren of high mud-brick walls and narrow lanes in Quetta, the links of the government, religious parties and Taliban commanders to a local madrasa are thinly hidden, said a local opposition party member who lives in the neighborhood.
Three students from the madrasa went to Afghanistan recently on suicide missions, he said. The family of one of the men admitted that he had blown himself up but denied that he had attended the school. The man’s brother suggested that he had been forced into the mission and that someone had recruited him for payment.
“Nowadays people are getting money from somewhere and they are killing other people’s children,” he said. “We are afraid of this government,” he said. His father said he feared the same people would try to take his other son and asked that no family names be used.
President Musharraf relies on the religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, or J.U.I., which dominates this province, Baluchistan, as an important partner in the provincial and national parliaments.
At a madrasa, called simply Jamiya Islamiya, on winding Hajji Ghabi Road, a board in the courtyard proudly declares “Long Live Mullah Omar,” in praise of the Taliban leader, and “Long Live Fazlur Rehman,” the leader of J.U.I.
Members of the provincial government and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam are frequent visitors to the school, the local opposition party member said, asking that his name not be used because he feared Pakistan’s intelligence services. People on motorbikes with green government license plates visit at night, he said, as do luxurious sport utility vehicles with blackened windows, a favorite of Taliban commanders.
Maulvi Noor Muhammad, a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam representative from Baluchistan in the National Assembly, recently received a guest barefoot while sitting on the floor of a grubby district office in Quetta, a map of the world above him painted on the wall to represent his belief in worldwide Islamic revolution.
He denied providing the militants any logistical support. “The J.U.I. is not supporting the Taliban anymore,” he said. “We are only providing moral support. We pray for their success in ousting the foreign troops from the land of Afghanistan.”
On a recent morning, the deputy director of the Jamiya Islamiya madrasa, Qari Muhammad Ibrahim, declined to meet a female reporter for The New York Times but answered a question from a local male reporter.
He did not deny that some of the madrasa’s 280 students had gone to fight in Afghanistan. “In the Koran it is written that it is every Muslim’s right to fight jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Koran, and then it’s up to them to go to jihad.”
NATO officials and Western diplomats in Afghanistan have grown increasingly critical of Pakistan for allowing the Taliban leaders, commanders and soldiers to operate from their country, which has given an advantage to the insurgency in southern Afghanistan. In September, Gen. James L. Jones, then NATO’s supreme commander, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Quetta remained the headquarters of the Taliban movement.
Still, Pakistan has insisted that the Taliban leadership is not based in Quetta. “If there are Taliban in Quetta, they are few,” said Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan. “You can count them on your fingers.”
American officials and Western diplomats noted that, when put under enough pressure, Pakistan had come through with flashes of cooperation. But that only seems to reinforce the view that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are more in touch with what is going on in the Taliban insurgency than the government lets on publicly.
For instance, a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Osmani, who operated on both sides of the border, was killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan on Dec. 19, after Pakistan helped track him, an American official in Afghanistan said.
At the same time, a kind of dirty war is building between Afghan and Pakistani intelligence agencies. A senior Afghan intelligence official said one of its informers in Pakistan was recently killed and dumped in pieces in Peshawar, a border town. The Afghan intelligence service has also recently arrested two Afghan generals, one retired, who have been charged with spying for Pakistan, as well as a Pakistani suspected of being an intelligence agent.
President Musharraf has acknowledged that some retired Pakistani intelligence officials may still be involved in supporting their former protégés in the Taliban.
Hamid Gul, the former director general of Pakistani intelligence, remains a public and unapologetic supporter of the Taliban, visiting madrasas and speaking in support of jihad at graduation ceremonies.
Afghan intelligence officials recently produced a captured insurgent who said Mr. Gul facilitated his training and logistics through an office in the Pakistani town of Nowshera, in the North-West Frontier Province, west of the capital, Islamabad.
NATO and American officials in Afghanistan say there is also evidence of support from current midlevel Pakistani intelligence officials. Just how far up that support reaches remains in dispute.
At least five villages in Pishin, a district northwest of Quetta that stretches toward the Afghan border, lost sons in the recent fighting in Kandahar between the Taliban and NATO forces, opposition politicians said.
One village, Karbala, is a main center of support for the jihad, local people say. Unlike the other villages, which blend into the stark desertlike landscape with their mud-brick houses and compound walls, Karbala has lavish houses, mosques and madrasas, suggesting an unusual wealth.
Farther on, in the village of Bagarzai, lies the grave of Azizullah, a religious scholar who used only one name and acquired fame as a Taliban commander.
Only 25, he was killed with a group of 15 to 20 men in an airstrike in the Afghan province of Helmand on May 22, said his father, Hajji Abdul Hai. Thousands of people attended his funeral, including senior members of the provincial government, the father said.
Mr. Hai, 50, who is a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam member, denied that his son had been persuaded to fight by anyone. “From the start it was his spirit to take part in jihad,” his father said. “It’s all to do with personal will. If someone agrees, then he goes. Even if someone wishes to, no one can stop him.”
It is an argument that supporters of the jihad use frequently. But for some of the families mourning their sons, there is no doubt that the madrasas and the religious parties are the first point of contact.
That was the conclusion reached by the family of Muhammad Daoud, a 22-year-old man from Pishin who disappeared more than a year ago.
“In our search we went to many places and everyone said different things,” said his father, Hajji Noora Gul. “We went to the madrasa in Pashtunabad, but no one was ready to tell us his whereabouts.”
“Even the madrasa people did not know,” he added. “Behind the curtain of the madrasa, maybe there are other people who do this. Maybe there are some businessmen who take them.”
Then, he said, a Taliban propaganda CD came out showing his son with a group of others taking an oath before the Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah.
“He had a shawl over his head and was preparing for a suicide bombing,” Mr. Gul said. “He said, ‘I am fighting for God, and I am ready for this.’ ”
His eldest son, Allah Dad, 33, blamed the jihadi groups and the Inter-Services Intelligence. “We don’t know how he made contact with those jihadi groups,” he said. “There are some groups active in taking people to Afghanistan and they are active in Quetta.
“All Taliban are I.S.I. Taliban,” he added. “It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the I.S.I. Everyone says this.”
David Rohde contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
January 21, 2007 at 11:16 AM in Al Qaeda, Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Telegraph | News | US forces turn on Iranians
By Philip Sherwell in New York, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 14/01/2007
President George W Bush has ordered US forces to launch a military offensive against Iranian officials and Revolutionary Guards officers behind a support and funding network for anti-American fighters in Iraq.
Mr Bush signed the clandestine directive after he was given new intelligence on the scale of Iranian operations to foment violence in Iraq.
US troops were operating under the new instructions when they raided an Iranian "liaison office" in northern Iraq last week, detaining five men, in the latest showdown with Teheran's agents.
The swoop, which was condemned by Iran and its political allies in Iraq, came less than two weeks after a senior Revolutionary Guards commander was seized in another raid near Baghdad with documents linked to the bloodshed. It has fuelled fears of direct armed clashes between US forces and Iranian operatives.
In a further development, US intelligence has learnt that the Shia-led Islamic regime is backing Sunni insurgents in Iraq, as well as the murderous militia operated by its fellow Shia clerics.
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Iran's policy of pursuing "managed chaos" in Iraq is mainly conducted by the Revolutionary Guards' Quds (Jerusalem) Force, the military's foreign arm, which also supports the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Sunni Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
Shia and Sunni armed factions have for months been fighting a vicious sectarian conflict, murdering thousands of civilians. But the top Quds commander arrested late last month - known by the alias Chizari - was carrying documents that showed links with both sides, according to a senior official.
It comprised "a smoking gun," he told The New York Sun. "We found plans for attacks, phone numbers affiliated with Sunni bad guys, a lot of things that filled in the blanks on what these guys are up to," he said.
One document contained a Quds assessment of the Iraqi conflict that throws fresh light on the growing battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for influence in the region. It said that because Iraq's Sunni neighbours - including Saudi Arabia - were likely to intensify their support for Sunni insurgents in Iraq, Iran should also step up its aid to those groups.
Iran has set up a network of fake import-export companies in Iraq's Anbar province to channel funds to Sunni fighters, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
At secret meetings, tribal sheikhs with close ties to the insurgents revealed details of the money-laundering to Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority.
"Truckloads of Iranian appliances like televisions are shipped into Iraq, apparently legitimately, and then sold for cash that can be channelled to Sunni insurgents," said Mr Rubin, now at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank. "The Iranians are very pragmatic about who they will deal with.
"The underlying assumption of those like Tony Blair and the Iraq Study Group, who back talks with Teheran, is that a stable Iraq is somehow in Iran's interests. But that's not so. Iran does not want a new Somalia on its borders, but nor does it want to live next to Switzerland. They are happy with managed chaos."
Iran has worked with individuals linked to al-Qa'eda-related groups responsible for some of the worst atrocities against Iraqi Shias, including the attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra last February.
Alireza Jafarzadeh, the Iranian exile leader who first revealed Teheran's secret nuclear programme to the world, has compiled a dossier detailing the vast network run by Quds in Iraq. Its operations are centred on Basra and Najaf, and use a series of supposed religious and cultural organisations as well as diplomatic consulates across the country to develop, fund and arm militia and rebel groups.
Thousands of Shia militiamen have reportedly travelled to Iran for training and indoctrination, while Quds sends millions of dollars cash in the other direction each month, through diplomatic pouches and border crossings it controls.
British and American officials have also identified Iran as the source of the materials and manufacture of a new, more lethal variety of roadside bomb that has claimed coalition lives.
"New information from sources in Iran further confirms that the Revolutionary Guards Corps and its notorious Quds Force are the biggest threat inside Iraq," said Mr Jafarzadeh. "Unless Iran's influence is curbed, its agents arrested and brought to justice and its proxies exposed, a genuine national unity government cannot take shape in Iraq."
In a sign of Iran's influence at the highest levels in Baghdad, the Quds Force commander captured by US forces last month was released at the insistence of the Iraqi government. He was said to have diplomatic status.
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, revealed in an interview published yesterday that President Bush had signed the order authorising force to break Iranian networks in Iraq.
She said: "I don't think there is a government in the world that would sit by and let the Iranians, in particular, run networks inside Iraq that are building explosive devices of a very high quality, that are being used to kill their soldiers."
Some Democrats have accused Mr Bush of using events in Iraq as an excuse to plan military action against Iran. His spokesman, Tony Snow, denied that any "war preparations were underway", but said the president was determined to defend US forces.
January 14, 2007 at 12:29 AM in Iran | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
SAS hunts fleeing Al-Qaeda Africans - Sunday Times - Times Online
Hala Jaber in Nairobi and Michael Smith
AN SAS team is hunting down Al-Qaeda terror suspects as they try to flee war-torn Somalia after the crushing defeat of the country’s Islamist forces last week.
The suspects are trapped between invading Ethiopian troops — assisted by US special forces and American mercenaries — and the Kenyan army and SAS troops who are acting as “training advisers” but have been leading operations along the border, providing a “screen” to trap terrorists.
Somalia’s interim government yesterday claimed the last stronghold of the Islamic movement had been captured with the fall of Ras Kamboni, a coastal area less than two miles from the Kenyan border.
Eleven suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists were said to have been arrested last week but three key suspects, believed to be responsible for the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and an attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, were still on the run yesterday.
The dramatic victory by Ethiopian troops was the culmination of months of preparation inside and outside Somalia by American and British special forces, and US-hired mercenaries.
The “professional assistance” was recruited by officials based in the US embassy in Nairobi at the end of 2005 as part of a deniable operation, sources claimed.
“The brief was to enter Somali territory with the objective of studying the terrain, mapping and analysing landing sites and regrouping areas, and reporting on suitable ‘entry and exit points’,” one source said.
According to a CIA source, American intelligence and military have been bankrolling the Ethiopians since the start of last year, as well as providing them with satellite surveillance, technical, military and logistical support.
“They not only gave them money and technical support but even spare parts where needed,” the source said.
Although it was a goal of US policy to overthrow the Union of Islamic Courts which had taken power in most of Somalia, “all the investment in the Ethiopians was ultimately to get to the three suspects,” said the source.
“No army in Africa was capable of doing this on its own, and it was unlikely that these Al-Qaeda bad guys were just going to go away, so the United States decided to do something about it. The goal was limited to liquidating these targets. It was certainly not to re-establish ourselves in Somalia, nor to open up a new front.”
Last week America showed its hand when it unleashed an airstrike from an AC-130 gunship on a Somali village where intelligence suggested the three key suspects, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, 32, Saleh ali Saleh Nabhan, 38, and Abu Taha al-Sudani, were holed up.
The airstrike missed the men but, according to a senior American official, the attack killed eight to 10 “significant Al-Qaeda affiliates”. A small team of US special operations troops has remained at the scene collecting evidence to identify the victims.
Monday’s strike was the first overt American military action in Somalia since US forces withdrew from the Horn of Africa after 18 servicemen were killed by Somali militiamen in the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in 1993.
Last week US congressmen were briefed by General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, that the Somali attack was executed under the Pentagon’s authority to hunt and kill terror suspects around the world, a power bestowed by the White House after 9/11.
Kenyan counter-terrorism police said the wives and three children of two of the Al-Qaeda main suspects, Mohammed and Nabhan, were caught as they attempted to cross into Kenya. The women were reportedly flown to Nairobi for questioning.
Despite the swift victory, there were fears that American intervention would spark a new insurgency. Gunfire could be heard in Mogadishu yesterday as militias struggled for control.
There were reports of murder, rape and armed robbery, and roadblocks have been re-established on many routes into the city by militias extorting money.
A senior western diplomat said already warlords and extremists were regrouping and rearming, though the price of weapons has risen by nearly 200% in the past few weeks.
“Unless the international community intervenes quickly it could slip back into the anarchy of the 1990s,” he warned.
Additional reporting: Richard Lough
January 13, 2007 at 10:48 PM in SAS | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Pentagon Sees Move in Somalia as Blueprint - New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: January 13, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — Military operations in Somalia by American commandos, and the use of the Ethiopian Army as a surrogate force to root out operatives for Al Qaeda in the country, are a blueprint that Pentagon strategists say they hope to use more frequently in counterterrorism missions around the globe.
Military officials said the strike by an American gunship on terrorism suspects in southern Somalia on Sunday showed that even with the departure of Donald H. Rumsfeld from the Pentagon, Special Operations troops intended to take advantage of the directive given to them by Mr. Rumsfeld in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.
American officials said the recent military operations have been carried by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which directs the military’s most secretive and elite units, like the Army’s Delta Force.
The Pentagon established a desolate outpost in the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti in 2002 in part to serve as a hub for Special Operations missions to capture or kill senior Qaeda leaders in the region.
Few such “high value” targets have materialized, and the Pentagon has gradually relocated members of the covert Special Operations units to more urgent missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But officials in Washington said this week that the joint command had quietly been returning troops and weaponry to the region in recent weeks in anticipation of a mission against members of a Qaeda cell believed to be hiding in Somalia.
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of Congress on Friday that the strike in Somalia was executed under the Pentagon’s authority to hunt and kill terrorism suspects around the globe, a power the White House gave it shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
It was this authority that Mr. Rumsfeld used to order commanders to develop plans for using American Special Operations troops for missions within countries that had not been declared war zones.
But since the retreat of the Taliban in 2001, when American Special Forces worked with Afghan militias, Mr. Rumsfeld’s ambitious agenda for Special Operations troops has been slow to materialize.
The problem has partly been a shortage of valuable intelligence on the whereabouts of top terrorism suspects. Mr. Rumsfeld also dispatched teams of Special Operations forces to work in American embassies to collect intelligence and to develop war plans for future operations.
Pentagon officials said it is still not known whether any senior Qaeda suspects or their allies were killed in the airstrike on Sunday, carried out by an AC-130 gunship. A small team of American Special Operations troops has been to the scene of the airstrike, in a remote stretch near the Kenya border, to collect forensic evidence in the effort to identify the victims.
Some critics of the Pentagon’s aggressive use of Special Operations troops, including some Democratic members of Congress, have argued that using American forces outside of declared combat zones gives the Pentagon too much authority in sovereign nations and blurs the lines between soldiers and spies.
The State Department and Pentagon took control of Somalia policy in the summer, after a failed effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to use Somali warlords as proxies to hunt down the Qaeda suspects.
The trail of the terrorism suspects in Somalia, blamed for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, had long gone cold. But American military and intelligence officials said that the Ethiopian offensive against the Islamist forces who ruled Mogadishu and much of Somalia until last month flushed the Qaeda suspects from their hide-outs and gave American intelligence operatives fresh information about their whereabouts.
The Bush administration has all but officially endorsed the Ethiopian offensive, and Washington officials have said that Ethiopia’s move into Somalia was a response to “aggression” by the Islamists in Mogadishu.
In the weeks before the military campaign began, State Department and Pentagon officials said that they had some concerns about the impending Ethiopian government’s offensive in Somalia.
But as the Ethiopian’s march toward war looked more likely, Americans began providing Ethiopian troops with up-to-date intelligence on the military positions of the Islamist fighters in Somalia, Pentagon and counterterrorism officials said.
According to a Pentagon consultant with knowledge about Special Operations, small teams of American advisers crossed the border into Somalia with the advancing Ethiopian army.
“You’re not talking lots of guys,” the Pentagon consultant said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You’re talking onesies and twosies.”
January 13, 2007 at 09:08 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Occra Hills, Sierra Leone�September 10, 2000: The fate of six soldiers abducted in West Africa lies in a perilous rescue attempt by British troops.
The light is faint and the coast is quiet when the choppers sweep in. At 6:00 in the morning, there is a leap of faith that the roar from three CH-47s won�t wake the sleeping rebels. If it does, the hostages will die.
Six members of the Royal Irish Regiment are held captive by one of Sierra Leone�s most fearless and violent rebel groups, the West Side Boys. The hour is early and the kidnappers lay sleeping, unaware of the intrepid assault that is unfolding around them.
The Chinooks rapidly lower 150 British paratroopers. In succession, the soldiers descend chest-deep into the swamp. They wade through 500 meters of thick, murky water to the dry land south of Magbeni, Sierra Leone. It is the jungle, rampant with fierce animals like bush pigs and wild chimps. And it is rampant with military guerrillas.
From the surrounding swamps emerge Special Air Service snipers. Patient, silent, undetected: snipers have observed the hostages for nearly a week from the mire. At last, they mobilize with stealth, wading slowly to the jungle�s edge, where they lead the troops through 150 meters of dense foliage to the edge of the village. But stealth is no guarantee: As they approach, enemy bullets sear through the tangle of flora surrounding them.
Simultaneously, 24 Special Air Service agents and more paratroopers descend swiftly down ropes, infiltrating the enemy retreat across the river. They silently approach the crude huts marking the village of Geri Bana, where the lives of six members of the Royal Irish Regiment have hung in the balance for 16 agonizing days.
Barely visible in the faint morning light, the rebels are slumbering in their hammocks when the SAS unleash a rude awakening: a sudden barrage of fire from M16 rifles and machine guns, and an explosion of flash bang grenades. Deaf and blinded, the enemy is weakened for five precious seconds.
And an astounding rescue begins.
Release Date: February 28, 2005
January 5, 2007 at 09:04 PM in SAS | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home