Intelligence

Israel's Syria 'raid' remains a mystery

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel's Syria 'raid' remains a mystery

By Jonathan Marcus BBC diplomatic correspondent During the early hours of last Thursday morning, a number of Israeli jets appear to have entered Syrian air-space from the Mediterranean Sea, possibly penetrating deep into the country.

Later unidentified drop tanks, which may have
contained fuel for the planes, were found on Turkish soil near the
Syrian border, indicating perhaps the Israeli jets' exit route.

The Syrian authorities are livid. They say that the
aircraft were driven off but that they fired their weaponry into a
deserted area.

The implication is that the planes effectively dumped their munitions so better to manoeuvre during their escape.

The Syrian government has briefed Western diplomats and complained to the United Nations.

But there have been no images of the empty countryside where the weapons are alleged to have landed.

Israeli sources are saying nothing.

Long-standing contacts are uncharacteristically silent, noting only
that Israel's military censorship on this subject is as tight as they
can ever remember.

Mood of satisfaction

From Washington has come some partial illumination of the shadows.

US officials indicate that at least one target in northern Syria was
hit and despite the Israeli silence there does seem to be a perceptible
mood of satisfaction in Israel; a sense that what they wanted to
achieve was carried out.

So what actually went on during the early hours of Thursday morning? Why were Israeli jets over Syria at all?

And if they indeed released weapons, what were they firing at?

Initially experts suggested that this might simply have been an
over-flight to trigger air defence radars and gather electronic
intelligence.

Such a probe might be linked to new air defence missiles reportedly supplied to Syria by the Russians.

Other pundits wondered if a potential strike path to Iran was being
tested out; though a southern route here into US-controlled Iraqi
air-space would be more logical.

And neither option would explain why such aircraft might be armed with air to ground weapons.

North Korea link

As far as likely targets of any attack go there are two broad suggestions.

One, cited by the New York Times newspaper quoting a US source,
suggests that the attack was in some way linked to North Korea.

The former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, in a
recent article in the Wall Street Journal, raised the possibility that
Syria is sheltering technology or materials relating to North Korea's
nuclear programme.

When I spoke to Mr Bolton in London just the other day
he strongly defended this thesis though he would not be drawn on the
reliability of his sources.

Another suggestion is that maybe a missile store or factory with weaponry heading to Hezbollah in Lebanon was hit.

Israel has long complained that the Damascus government is at the very
least turning a blind eye to such weapons supplies coming from Iran.

Maybe Israel decided to send the Syrian government a message that it would understand.

Muted response

What is intriguing is that the response of both the Syrian and Israeli
governments has been muted - in the Israeli case largely mute.

The Syrians, while angry, are clearly embarrassed that something may have occurred that they failed to prevent.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6991718.stm



Published: 2007/09/12 20:38:31 GMT



© BBC MMVII

September 13, 2007 at 01:50 AM in Israel, Syria | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Eye on Iran, Rivals Pursuing Nuclear Power - New York Times

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER Two years ago, the leaders of Saudi Arabia told international atomic regulators that they could foresee no need for the kingdom to develop nuclear power. Today, they are scrambling to hire atomic contractors, buy nuclear hardware and build support for a regional system of reactors.

Source: Eye on Iran, Rivals Pursuing Nuclear Power - New York Times

So, too, Turkey is preparing for its first atomic plant. And Egypt has announced plans to build one on its Mediterranean coast. In all, roughly a dozen states in the region have recently turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for help in starting their own nuclear programs. While interest in nuclear energy is rising globally, it is unusually strong in the Middle East.

“The rules have changed,” King Abdullah II of Jordan recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Everybody’s going for nuclear programs.”

The Middle East states say they only want atomic power. Some probably do. But United States government and private analysts say they believe that the rush of activity is also intended to counter the threat of a nuclear Iran.

By nature, the underlying technologies of nuclear power can make electricity or, with more effort, warheads, as nations have demonstrated over the decades by turning ostensibly civilian programs into sources of bomb fuel. Iran’s uneasy neighbors, analysts say, may be positioning themselves to do the same.

“One danger of Iran going nuclear has always been that it might provoke others,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London. “So when you see the development of nuclear power elsewhere in the region, it’s a cause for some concern.”

Some analysts ask why Arab states in the Persian Gulf, which hold nearly half the world’s oil reserves, would want to shoulder the high costs and obligations of a temperamental form of energy. They reply that they must invest in the future, for the day when the flow of oil dries up.

But with Shiite Iran increasingly ascendant in the region, Sunni countries have alluded to other motives. Officials from 21 governments in and around the Middle East warned at an Arab summit meeting in March that Iran’s drive for atomic technology could result in the beginning of “a grave and destructive nuclear arms race in the region.”

In Washington, officials are seizing on such developments to build their case for stepping up pressure on Iran. President Bush has talked privately to experts on the Middle East about his fears of a “Sunni bomb,” and his concerns that countries in the Middle East may turn to the only nuclear-armed Sunni state, Pakistan, for help.

“It’s a constant source of discussion,” a senior administration official said recently. “But it’s not something the president thinks he can discuss publicly” after the imbroglio over faulty weapons intelligence on Iraq.

The Middle East has seen hints of a regional nuclear-arms race before. After Israel obtained its first weapon four decades ago, several countries took steps down the nuclear road. But many analysts say it is Iran’s atomic intransigence that has now prodded the Sunni powers into getting serious about hedging their bets and, like Iran, financing them with $65-a-barrel oil.

“Now’s the time to worry,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert at the Nixon Center, a Washington policy institute. “The Iranians have to worry, too. The idea that they’ll emerge as the regional hegemon is silly. There will be a very serious counterreaction, certainly in conventional military buildups but also in examining the nuclear option.”

No Arab country now has a power reactor, whose spent fuel can be mined for plutonium, one of the two favored materials — along with uranium — for making the cores of atom bombs. Some Arab states do, however, engage in civilian atomic research.

Analysts caution that a chain reaction of nuclear emulation is not foreordained. States in the Middle East appear to be waiting to see which way Tehran’s nuclear standoff with the United Nations Security Council goes before committing themselves wholeheartedly to costly programs of atomic development.

Even if Middle Eastern nations do obtain nuclear power, political alliances and arms-control agreements could still make individual states hesitate before crossing the line to obtain warheads. Many may eventually decide that the costs and risks outweigh the benefits — as South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa and Libya did after investing heavily in arms programs.

But many diplomats and analysts say that the Sunni Arab governments are so anxious about Iran’s nuclear progress that they would even, grudgingly, support a United States military strike against Iran.

“If push comes to shove, if the choice is between an Iranian nuclear bomb and a U.S. military strike, then the Arab gulf states have no choice but to quietly support the U.S.,” said Christian Koch, director of international studies at the Gulf Research Center, a private group in Dubai.

Decades ago, it was Israel’s drive for nuclear arms that brought about the region’s first atomic jitters. Even some Israeli leaders found themselves “preaching caution because of the reaction,” said Avner Cohen, a senior fellow at the University of Maryland and the author of “Israel and the Bomb.”

Egypt responded first. In 1960, after the disclosure of Israel’s work on a nuclear reactor, Cairo threatened to acquire atomic arms and sought its own reactor. Years of technical and political hurdles ultimately ended that plan.

Iraq came next. But in June 1981, Israeli fighter jets bombed its reactor just days before engineers planned to install the radioactive core. The bombing ignited a global debate over how close Iraq had come to nuclear arms. It also prompted Iran, then fighting a war with Iraq, to embark on a covert response.

Alireza Assar, a nuclear adviser to Iran’s Ministry of Defense who later defected, said he attended a secret meeting in 1987 at which the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Iran had to do whatever was necessary to achieve victory. “We need to have all the technical requirements in our possession,” Dr. Assar recalled the commander as saying, even the means to “build a nuclear bomb.”

In all, Iran toiled in secret for 18 years before its nuclear efforts were disclosed in 2003. Intelligence agencies and nuclear experts now estimate that the Iranians are 2 to 10 years away from having the means to make a uranium-based bomb. It says its uranium enrichment work is entirely peaceful and meant only to fuel reactors.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s concerns peaked when inspectors found evidence of still-unexplained ties between Iran’s ostensibly peaceful program and its military, including work on high explosives, missiles and warheads. That combination, the inspectors said in early 2006, suggested a “military nuclear dimension.”

Before such disclosures, few if any states in the Middle East attended the atomic agency’s meetings on nuclear power development. Now, roughly a dozen are doing so and drawing up atomic plans.

The newly interested states include Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and the seven sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates — Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Al Fujayrah, Ras al Khaymah, Sharjah, and Umm al Qaywayn.

“They generally ask what they need to do for the introduction of power,” said R. Ian Facer, a nuclear power engineer who works for the I.A.E.A. at its headquarters in Vienna. The agency teaches the basics of nuclear energy. In exchange, states must undergo periodic inspections to make sure their civilian programs have no military spinoffs.

Saudi Arabia, since reversing itself on reactors, has become a whirlwind of atomic interest. It recently invited President Vladimir V. Putin to become the first Russian head of state to visit the desert kingdom. He did so in February, offering a range of nuclear aid.

Diplomats and analysts say Saudi Arabia leads the drive for nuclear power within the Gulf Cooperation Council, based in Riyadh. In addition to the Saudis, the council includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — Washington’s closest Arab allies. Its member states hug the western shores of the Persian Gulf and control about 45 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

Late last year, the council announced that it would embark on a nuclear energy program. Its officials have said they want to get it under way by 2009.

“We will develop it openly,” Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said of the council’s effort. “We want no bombs. All we want is a whole Middle East that is free from weapons of mass destruction,” an Arab reference to both Israel’s and Iran’s nuclear programs.

In February, the council and the I.A.E.A. struck a deal to work together on a nuclear power plan for the Arab gulf states. Abdul Rahman ibn Hamad al-Attiya, the council’s secretary general, told reporters in March that the agency would provide technical expertise and that the council would hire a consulting firm to speed its nuclear deliberations.

Already, Saudi officials are traveling regularly to Vienna, and I.A.E.A. officials to Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “It’s a natural right,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the atomic agency’s director general, said recently of the council’s energy plan, estimating that carrying it out might take up to 15 years.

In all, 85 percent of the gulf states — all but Iraq — have declared their interest in nuclear power. By comparison, 15 percent of South American nations and 20 percent of African ones have done so.

One factor in that exceptional level of interest is that the Persian Gulf states have the means. Typically, a large commercial reactor costs up to $4 billion. The six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council are estimated to be investing in nonnuclear projects valued at more than $1 trillion.

Another factor is Iran. Its shores at some points are visible across the waters of the gulf — the Arabian Gulf to Arabs, the Persian Gulf to Iranians.

The council wants “its own regional initiative to counter the possible threat from an aggressive neighbor armed with nuclear weapons,” said Nicole Stracke, an analyst at the Gulf Research Center. Its members, she added, “felt they could no longer lag behind Iran.”

A similar technology push is under way in Turkey, where long-simmering plans for nuclear power have caught fire. Last year, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for three plants. “We want to benefit from nuclear energy as soon as possible,” he said. Turkey plans to put its first reactor near the Black Sea port of Sinop, and to start construction this year.

Egypt, too, is moving forward. Last year, it announced plans for a reactor at El-Dabaa, about 60 miles west of Alexandria. “We do not start from a vacuum,” President Hosni Mubarak told the governing National Democracy Party’s annual conference. His remark was understated given Cairo’s decades of atomic research.

Robert Joseph, a former under secretary of state for arms control and international security who is now Mr. Bush’s envoy on nuclear nonproliferation, visited Egypt earlier this year. According to officials briefed on the conversations, officials from the Ministry of Electricity indicated that if Egypt was confident that it could have a reliable supply of reactor fuel, it would have little desire to invest in the costly process of manufacturing its own nuclear fuel — the enterprise that experts fear could let Iran build a bomb.

Other officials, especially those responsible for Egypt’s security, focused more on the possibility of further proliferation in the region if Iran succeeded in its effort to achieve a nuclear weapons capability.

“I don’t know how much of it is real,” Mr. Joseph said of a potential arms race. “But it is becoming urgent for us to shape the future expansion of nuclear energy in a way that reduces the risks of proliferation, while meeting our energy and environmental goals.”

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April 14, 2007 at 04:10 PM in Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Humbling of the supertroops shatters Israeli army morale

Humbling of the supertroops shatters Israeli army morale - Sunday Times - Times Online

HUNDREDS of feet below ground in the command bunker of the Israeli air force in Tel Aviv, a crowd of officers gathered to monitor the first day of the war against Hezbollah. It was July 12 and air force jets were about to attack Hezbollah’s military nerve centre in southern Beirut.

Among the officers smoking tensely as they waited for news, was Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, 58, a daring fighter pilot in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war who had become chief of staff a year earlier and now faced the biggest test of his career.

Over the Mediterranean, west of Beirut, the elite F-15I squadron made its final preparations to strike with precision guided weapons against Hezbollah’s Iranian-made long-range Zelzal rockets, aimed at Tel Aviv.

Just before midnight, the order “Fire!” — given by the squadron leader — could be heard in the Tel Aviv bunker. Within moments the first Hezbollah missile and launcher were blown up. Thirty-nine tense minutes later the squadron leader’s voice was heard again: “Fifty-four launchers have been destroyed. Returning to base.”

Halutz smiled with relief and called Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, who was enjoying a cigar as he waited by a secure red phone at his residence in Jerusalem.

“All the long-range rockets have been destroyed,” Halutz announced proudly. After a short pause, he added four words that have since haunted him: “We’ve won the war.”

Even as Halutz was declaring victory, 12 Israeli soldiers from the Maglan reconnaissance unit were already running into an ambush just over the border inside Lebanon near the village of Maroun a-Ras.

“We didn’t know what hit us,” said one of the soldiers, who asked to be named only as Gad. “In seconds we had two dead.”

With several others wounded and retreating under heavy fire the Maglans, one of the finest units in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), were astonished by the firepower and perseverance of Hezbollah.

“Evidently they had never heard that an Arab soldier is supposed to run away after a short engagement with the Israelis,” said Gad.

“We expected a tent and three Kalashnikovs — that was the intelligence we were given. Instead, we found a hydraulic steel door leading to a well-equipped network of tunnels.”

As daylight broke the Maglans found themselves under fire from all sides by Hezbollah forces who knew every inch of the terrain and exploited their knowledge to the full.

The commander of the IDF’s northern sector, Lieutenant-General Udi Adam, could barely believe that some of his best soldiers had been so swiftly trapped; neither could the chief of staff.

“What’s wrong with the Maglans?” Halutz demanded to know. “They are surrounded,” Adam replied quietly. “I must send in more forces.”

As the reinforcements of the Egoz brigade prepared to enter Maroun a-Ras and rescue their comrades, however, several were mown down in a second ambush. Hours of battle ensued before the Maglan and Egoz platoons were able to drag their dead and wounded back to Israel.

Hezbollah also suffered heavy casualties but its fighters slipped back into their tunnels to await the next round of fighting. It was immediately obvious to everyone in Tel Aviv that this was going to be a tougher fight than Halutz had bargained for.

As the war unfolded his optimism was brought crashing down to earth — and with it the invincible reputation of the Israeli armed forces.

In five weeks, their critics charge, they displayed tactical incompetence and strategic short-sightedness. Their much-vaunted intelligence was found wanting.

Their political leadership was shown to vacillate. Their commanders proved fractious. In many cases the training of their men was poor and their equipment inadequate. Despite many individual acts of bravery, some of the men of the IDF were pushed to the point of mutiny.

Last week, in an contrite letter to his soldiers, Halutz admitted to “mistakes which will all be corrected”. It is far from clear whether Halutz will remain in position to correct them.

As calls mounted this weekend — not least from the families of many of the 117 fallen Israeli soldiers — for the resignation of those deemed responsible for the failures, Olmert was expected to set up an inquiry into the conduct of the war. A poll showed that 63% of Israelis believed Olmert should quit, while 74% called for Amir Peretz, the defence minister, to go, and 54% wanted Halutz out.

“Olmert faces a serious risk of a no-confidence vote in the Knesset,” said Hanan Kristal, a leading political commentator. “A State Commission will give him four to six months of critical breathing time.”

Meanwhile the Israeli public are struggling to accept that the country’s security might now depend on whether a French-led United Nations peacekeeping force proves able to disarm Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In addition to 7,000 troops already promised by EU states, the UN has received offers from several Muslim countries, some of which do not even recognise Israel. The force is unlikely to reach full strength for at least two months.

Much attention is being paid, however, to the deployment of these forces and especially to Israel’s apparent over-reliance on air power under the command of the Halutz.

Critics of Halutz, a former air force commander, believe he should have sent in overwhelming forces on the ground to drive Hezbollah back from border areas where they remained active right up to the end of the 34-day conflict.

“The air force can only assist ground forces; it can never win a war — any war,” said one veteran Israeli officer last week.

Another critical factor under consideration was that Hezbollah seemed so much better prepared. They launched nearly 200 rockets a day at Israel. They used advanced anti-tank missiles with lethal professionalism and stunned their opponents with their coolness under pressure and their willingness to “martyr” themselves in battle.

Apparently using techniques learnt from their paymasters in Iran, they were even able to crack the codes and follow the fast-changing frequencies of Israeli radio communications, intercepting reports of the casualties they had inflicted again and again. This enabled them to dominate the media war by announcing Israeli fatalities first.

“They monitored our secure radio communications in the most professional way,” one Israeli officer admitted. “When we lose a man, the fighting unit immediately gives the location and the number back to headquarters. What Hezbollah did was to monitor our radio and immediately send it to their Al-Manar TV, which broadcast it almost live, long before the official Israeli radio.”

Hezbollah appears to have divided a three mile-wide strip along the Israeli-Lebanese border into numerous “killing boxes”. Each box was protected in classic guerrilla fashion with booby-traps, land mines, and even CCTV cameras to watch every step of the advancing Israeli army.

“Our brass stupidly fell into the Hezbollah traps,” said Raphael, an infantry battalion reserve major. “The generals wanted us to attack as many villages as possible for no obvious reason. This was exactly what Hezbollah wanted us to do — they wanted to bog us down in as many small battles as possible and bleed us this way.”

The casualties from Russian-made anti-tank missiles have caused particular concern. An Israeli-invented radar defence shield codenamed Flying Jacket and costing £200,000 was installed on only four tanks. None of them was struck by anti-tank missiles.

But Hezbollah hit 46 tanks that lacked the shield. “£200,000 per tank is not beyond Israel’s means,” noted one military source acidly.

While the regular army was reasonably well equipped, the reservists were not. “We arrived at our depots only to find that our combat gear had been opened and equipment given to regular soldiers,” revealed Moshe, a fighter in the Alexandroni brigade. “The equipment was, of course, never returned.”

The Alexandroni fought in the west, near the Mediterranean, and did well initially. But logistics were appalling. “We had no fresh water as it was too dangerous to ship it to us,” Moshe added. “I’m ashamed to admit we had to drink water from the canteens of dead Hezbollah, and break into local shops for food.”

The Israeli leadership became determined to destroy the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil because of its powerful symbolism to the enemy.
This was the place where Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s general secretary, had given his keynote speech after Israel withdrew in 2000, ending 18 years of occupation. Nasrallah said in Bint Jbail that Israel would be destroyed. Now Israeli leaders wanted to show him how badly mistaken he had been.

“Conquer Bint Jbail,” Halutz told Adam, the northern sector commander. Adam is said to have replied: “Hold on, Halutz. Do you know what that means? Do you realise that the casbah [old quarter] of Bint Jbail alone contains more than 5,000 houses? And you want me to send in one battalion?”

Adam nevertheless did as he was told and sent the 51st battalion of the Golani brigade to fight a heroic but hopeless, battle.

As the Israeli soldiers approached the town from the east they fell straight into yet another ambush. Hand grenades killed battalion commanders. Then a rescue operation was mounted, which took all night.

Hezbollah fighters were also hit but retreated and waited for Israeli reinforcements to arrive. Brig Gen Gal Hirsch, the commander of the 91 Galilee division, announced: “We control Bint-Jbail.” The next day more Israeli soldiers died as they, too, were ensnared in Hezbollah’s trap.

The Israeli media began to attack the army. “Idiotic military manoeuvres,” was how one commentator on TV1, the state-owned station, summed it up.
Tension now set in among the top brass. Halutz dispatched his deputy, Maj Gen Moshe Kaplinsky, as his special representative to the north, placing him above Adam.

Adam threatened to resign if Kaplinski issued orders to his units. Kaplinski nevertheless did so. Adam did not resign but is expected to go public soon with his story of the war.

Relatively inexperienced reservists were called up. Oded, 27, a reservist from Jerusalem in a combat infantry brigade, was among those summoned to active duty. “In the past six years I’ve only had a week’s training,” he revealed.

“Soon after we arrived, we received an order to seize a nearby Shi’ite village. We knew that we were not properly trained for the mission. We told our commanders we could control the village with firepower and there was no need to take it and be killed for nothing.

“Luckily we were able to convince our commander,” he concluded with a faint smile.

Oded blamed the Palestinian intifada for his unit’s insufficient training. “For the last six years we were engaged in stupid policing missions in the West Bank,” he said. “Checkpoints, hunting stone-throwing Palestinian children, that kind of stuff. The result was that we were not ready to confront real fighters like Hezbollah.”

On the day the chaos in Bint Jbail reached its peak, Amir Peretz, the new and inexperienced defence minister, flew to the northern border to meet reservists about to go into action.

Aviv Wasserman, a reserve major with the 300 brigade who is about to study for a doctorate at the London School of Economics, asked Peretz not to throw them into “unnecessary adventures”.

Lieutenant Adam Kima, of the combat engineering battalion, was in even more rebellious mood after being asked to take his men and clear the road leading to Bint Jbeil from the west. Studying the plan, Kima rejected the idea — 10 Israeli soldiers had already died there “We were foolishly told it was all right — there are no Hezbollah forces ahead of us,” said Corporal Nimrod Diskin, one of Kima’s soldiers. “We didn’t have the equipment to clear this road. We were not ready for the mission.”

When the brigade commander realised that Kima and his soldiers would not carry out their orders, he called the military police. The men were sentenced to 14 days in jail, although they were released a few days later. The soldiers, most of them fathers of small children, believe Kima saved their lives.

“I noticed behaviour I’d never heard of in the Israeli army,” Kima said last week on Israeli television. “In my training I got used to the idea that the commander shouts ‘Advance!’ and is the first to face the enemy. Here my battalion commander was in the back of the group and the brigade commander didn’t even cross the border into Lebanon.”

As the fighting dragged on, some veteran officers lost patience with what they saw as the inexperience of the chief of staff and defence minister. “What are you doing in Lebanon, for God’s sake?’ the former defence minister, General Shaul Mofaz, asked Olmert. “Why did you go into Bint Jbeil? It was a trap set by Hezbollah.”

Mofaz proposed an old-fashioned IDF assault plan to launch a blitzkrieg against Hezbollah, reach the strategically important Litani river in 48 hours and then demolish Hezbollah in six days. Olmert liked the idea but Peretz did not appreciate his predecessor’s intervention and rejected it.

Olmert appeared to lose confidence and began to issue conflicting orders. “Our mission changed twice, three times, every day,” complained one soldier.

Many Israelis have been left furious that the legendary deterrent power of their army has been shattered. Even though Hezbollah has lost a quarter of its fighters, its military base in Beirut and its bunkers in the south, Israelis feel less secure.

They hear President Bashar al-Assad of Syria warning that he may retake the Golan Heights by force and the Iranians threatening that if the Americans attack them, Tel Aviv will be hit by ballistic missiles in retaliation.

On the final day of the war, Halutz was sitting in his favourite seat at the air force bunker in Tel Aviv, waiting for the results of a massive airborne operation. Then the news came through that a Sikorsky CH-53 helicopter had been shot down by a Hezbollah rocket. He is said to have felt defeated, both personally and professionally.

Halutz and his political masters may now be living on borrowed time. Israeli’s military elite, such as its fighter squadrons and commando units, may still be among the best in the world but the mediocrity of much of the army has been exposed for all in the Middle East to see.

Israelis can forget and forgive many things, but not the perceived defeat of an army that commanded worldwide respect but suddenly no longer strikes so much fear into its enemies.

Click here to find out more!

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.

August 27, 2006 at 05:35 PM in Israel | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The threat of war

The threat of war | Economist.com

Jul 17th 2006
From Economist.com
Israel’s campaign in Lebanon is supposed to defeat Hizbullah, but risks destabilising Lebanon and the region as a whole

FOR days the pictures from both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border have been unremittingly familiar: buildings bombed to rubble, corpses and grief, refugees fleeing to safer areas. Since Hizbullah, the Shia militant party that controls southern Lebanon, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid last week, Israel has been bombing targets across Lebanon, while Hizbullah rockets have fallen on Israel’s northern towns, including the large port city of Haifa. At least 140 Lebanese and 24 Israelis have so far died.

Israel’s goals are to destroy Hizbullah’s military capabilities and, through the civilian population, to put pressure on the Lebanese government, of which Hizbullah forms part, to disarm Hizbullah. Though Israel has aimed most of its bombs at Hizbullah’s rocket launching facilities in southern Lebanon, it has also hammered a residential neighbourhood of Beirut where Hizbullah leaders live and work, hit the airport and highway to Damascus and blockaded the ports. The idea is both to make it harder to get the kidnapped soldiers out of the country and to make ordinary Lebanese feel the consequences of Hizbullah’s actions.

Some European countries have condemned Israel’s response as “disproportionate”, though the United States has largely stuck by it. One question is whether Israel will achieve its goals. In Gaza, where Palestinian militants are holding a soldier they captured late last month, Israel has been adopting a similar strategy: simultaneously trying to secure his release and stamp out the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. It has attacked militant leaders, shelling the areas where rockets are launched, while also bombing public infrastructure and government buildings in an attempt to put pressure on the Palestinians’ Hamas-run government. So far it is showing little result: although nearly 90 Palestinians have been killed, more Qassams are falling, the soldier remains in captivity, public support for Hamas is steady if not growing, and the government (or what is left of it after a wave of arrests in the West Bank) remains defiant.

The Lebanese, unlike the Palestinians, can at least clearly blame Hizbullah for lighting the fuse after several years of relative calm. But Israel is treading a fine line between alienating the Lebanese from Hizbullah and uniting them against their outside aggressor. And if Israel cannot achieve a decisive victory against Hizbullah with air power, and has to add ground forces, it risks getting bogged down in southern Lebanon once again.

A second question is whether Israel has fallen for a Hizbullah trap. There is much speculation about whether Hizbullah expected Israel’s fierce response. There are reasons to think it did not. Israel had responded to previous kidnappings by agreeing to prisoner exchanges. Hizbullah may have been hoping to secure the release of three prisoners held in Israel. Since 2000 Israel had kept its responses to Hizbullah encroachments on the border somewhat restrained, not wanting to open up a war on its northern border while it was fighting against the Palestinians’ intifada.

Perhaps, with the help of both domestic pressure in Lebanon and a new international peacekeeping force—something that world leaders meeting in St Petersburg agreed to ask the UN to look into—Hizbullah will be beaten back, at least from the south, restoring a fragile calm.

On the other hand, the timing of Hizbullah’s kidnap may have been designed precisely to trigger an Israeli backlash: having gone in so heavy in Gaza in response to the first kidnapping, Israel could hardly stand by and watch as two more soldiers disappeared. Many suspect Hizbullah wants to drag Israel into a war on two fronts, perhaps with the backing of Syria and Iran. These two countries provide financial and material help to both Hamas and Hizbullah and they benefit from chaos and instability in the region. If the fighting prompts not Hizbullah’s capitulation but a breakdown in the fragile balance of power in Lebanon, triggering another of the country’s periodic civil wars, the conflict could spread wider.

July 17, 2006 at 02:42 PM in Israel | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Hizbullah aims to shift power balance

Hizbullah aims to shift power balance | csmonitor.com

Israel, Hizbullah both hope to gain edge in changing war.
By Nicholas Blanford | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIRUT, LEBANON – The operation to kidnap Israeli soldiers took months of planning with Hizbullah's battle-hardened fighters staking out the Lebanese border looking for weaknesses.

Evidently they found one. Five days after they blasted through a border fence and seized two soldiers, Hizbullah is in a rapidly escalating conflict with Israel. It's a climactic struggle between two bitter foes which has become a "defining moment" for the Middle East, says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, author of "Hizbullah: Politics and Religion."

"This is a showdown for both sides in which Israel is attempting to neutralize Hizbullah, and Hizbullah is attempting to impose its will on Israel and [say to] the international community that it's here to stay," she says.

By striking Haifa with a barrage of rockets that killed at least eight Israelis yesterday, Hizbullah has transferred the Arab-Israeli conflict to Israeli territory for the first time in more than 50 years, overturning Israel's long-standing military doctrine of defeating its enemies on foreign soil.

"If the Israeli public begins clamoring for a cease-fire, then the Israeli army will have been neutralized," says Ms. Saad-Ghorayeb, who is also a professor of politics at the Lebanese American University. "It will shatter the myth of Israeli invincibility, proving Hizbullah's point that military force is not the same as power. This will change the shape of the region."

In response to the Haifa attacks, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday there would be "far reaching consequences." Much of Beirut's southern suburbs lay in ruins after multiple Israeli air strikes had destroyed Hizbullah's headquarters and television station.

The roots of the current conflict go back to 2000, when Hizbullah fighters advanced as Israel withdrew from an occupied strip of Lebanese territory along the Israeli border. Over the following months, Hizbullah established a military infrastructure along the frontier, and its fighters occasionally attacked Israeli positions in the Shebaa Farms, a strip of mountainside running along Lebanon's southeast border.

The clashes followed certain unwritten rules. If Israel was to react disproportionately to Hizbullah's needling attacks, it ran the risk of incurring a massive rocket bombardment by Hizbullah. On the other hand, if Hizbullah overstepped its boundaries in attacking Israel, the resulting heavy retaliation against Lebanon could backlash on the group's domestic popularity. The rules ensured a tense, but stable, calm along the border.

Yet Hizbullah's preparations along the border were in anticipation of an eventual showdown with Israel, which Hizbullah officials believed was inevitable. "This will happen and we are constantly preparing for it," a Hizbullah official told The Monitor as long ago as February 2002.

Similarly, the Israeli military drew up its own contingency plans.

The status quo began to change in 2004 when Syria, which dominated Lebanon politically, began facing pressure to disengage from its neighbor. The US and France co-sponsored UN Security Council resolution 1559, which demanded a free and fair Lebanese election and the withdrawal of Syrian troops. But the US pressed for additional clauses calling for the "dismantling of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias," a reference to Hizbullah and armed Palestinian groups, and the deployment of Lebanese army troops to replace the Shiite group's fighters.

The effect of the resolution was to polarize the Lebanese into pro- and anti-Syrian camps, a divide aggravated by the murder in 2005 of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister, which was blamed by most Lebanese on the Syrian regime.

With Syria's disengagement from Lebanon two months after Hariri's death, Hizbullah lost its political cover and was forced to defend its interests more directly.

It struck an alliance with its Shiite rival, the Amal movement, which effectively turned the attempt to disarm Hizbullah into one perceived as disarming the Shiites. The alliance strengthened Hizbullah politically but at the expense of exacerbating sectarian tensions between Shiites and Lebanon's other communities, the Christians, Sunnis, and Druze.

"The country is split one-third, two-thirds very simply," says Chibli Mallat, a presidential aspirant. "Unfortunately, the Shiites are on their own."

By the end of 2005, an anti-Western alliance was crystallizing in the Middle East, linking Iran, under the newly elected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with Syria, Hizbullah, and the Damascus-branch of the Hamas movement. By closing ranks, the alliance felt emboldened to challenge the US in the Middle East.
(Graphic)
RICH CLABAUGH - STAFF
Click here to enlarge the image

Hizbullah had made it known for months that it was interested in kidnapping Israeli soldiers to exchange for prisoners. It even launched a well-planned assault on an Israeli position last November with the intention of snatching soldiers. The bid failed, however.

Although a fresh kidnapping was bound to incur a massive response from Israel and the wrath of non-Shiite Lebanese, analysts believe that Hizbullah and its Iranian patron calculated that the Shiite group would prevail.

"Quite frankly, they don't care" about the views of non-Shiite Lebanese, says Saad-Ghorayeb, as long as they have the support of their own constituency.

In June, the Israeli government became embroiled in the Gaza kidnap crisis, and for Hizbullah and its allies it appeared an opportune moment to strike again, opening a new front and placing additional pressure on Mr. Olmert.

Israel's response has knocked out roads, bridges, and power stations, and left more than 100 people dead in the airstrikes. With Israel telling residents of south Lebanon to leave their homes, a senior UN officer in the south says that much of the district had become "a free-fire zone."

"This is a pure intimidation campaign," says Timur Goksel, professor and former UN officer in south Lebanon. "If these hardships continue, people will begin to support Hizbullah against Israel again."
Hizbullah leader Nasrallah

• Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is secretary-general of Hizbullah, a Lebanese political party and military group that is classified as a terrorist organization by the US and Europe.

• He became Hizbullah's leader in 1992 after Israel assassinated his predecessor.

• Under Nasrallah, Hizbullah is widely credited in the Arab world with causing Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.

• He is believed to have passed intelligence to Palestinian groups and has praised Palestinian suicide bombers.

• After last year's assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, Nasrallah led Hizbullah to win 14 parliament seats and to join the government for the first time.

Sources: AP, BBC.

July 17, 2006 at 02:39 PM in Israel | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Israel's Hezbollah headache

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Israel's Hezbollah headache

By Jonathan Marcus
BBC diplomatic correspondent

The confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah is clearly unbalanced. Israel is a significant military power with sophisticated land, sea and air forces at its disposal

Hezbollah began as a guerrilla force but over the years it has evolved a complex military infrastructure. Nonetheless it has few of the types of weapons available to the Israelis. Its only long-range punch comes from an assorted arsenal of missiles.

Most of these are relatively short-range systems, generically known as Katyushas, capable of striking targets out to about 25km (16 miles).

But the Hezbollah missile strikes on Israel's northern port city of Haifa demonstrate that it also has an unknown quantity of longer-range systems in its arsenal.

Most of these are Iranian-manufactured systems like the Fajr-3, with a 45-km range; the Fajr-5, with a range of some 75km; and the more potent Zelzal-2 with a range of up to 200km.

See the rockets' range

This would bring much of Tel Aviv - Israel's largest population centre - within range.

None of these are guided or accurate systems but if the target is an urban area, accuracy is not needed.

In addition, as the successful attack on an Israeli naval vessel demonstrates (an Egyptian freighter was also hit and abandoned by its crew), Hezbollah also has relatively sophisticated Iranian-supplied anti-shipping missiles at its disposal.

Air war limitations

This missile build-up has worried the Israeli military for some time.

Israeli planes return from mission over Lebanon on 12 July
Israeli strategists know an air war has its limits

No surprise then that Israeli leaders have taken the opportunity of the Hezbollah raid which captured two of their men, to set about the full-scale weakening of Hezbollah's infrastructure.

Headquarters, television stations, and missile storage bunkers have all been hit.

But the Israelis have also sought to blockade Lebanon - closing Beirut's airport, striking the Beirut-Damascus highway, and hitting various key transport links, especially bridges.

The Israelis explain all this by saying that they are acting to prevent Hezbollah bringing in or moving up additional missiles to the border. Inevitably, such attacks, however precise, cause civilian casualties.

Israel's long-term goals are obvious. It wants to end the cross-border missile threat to its towns and cities by applying a blunt lesson in deterrence.

It would like to see Hezbollah disarm and the Lebanese Army extend its control down to the international frontier. That is what UN Security Council Resolution 1559, of 2004, also demands - but it is hard to see how it can be enacted.

Israel's tactics are to some extent puzzling. The bludgeoning of Lebanon's transport infrastructure will hinder, but will probably not stop, missile movements.

Indeed, Hezbollah has shown remarkable resilience, and the rockets are still flying across Israel's northern border. It is very hard to deliver a body blow to Hezbollah from the air.

So is this all a prelude to some significant Israeli incursion on the ground?

On the face of things Israel has not yet mobilised sufficient troops for such an operation. And a comprehensive assault on Hezbollah would require a move into the strategically important Bekaa Valley, a step that would send alarm bells ringing in Syria, risking an even wider confrontation.

Dangers of complacency

Israel's own military performance raises several questions.

Damaged Israeli missile ship enters Israeli port of Ashdod on 15 July
A deadly missile attack on one of its warships shocked Israel

Even Israeli commentators have pointed to the fact that the capture of Israeli soldiers, first by Palestinian militants and now Hezbollah, shows clear signs of laxness and a lack of vigilance on the part of the reserve units involved.

Hezbollah has clearly signalled its desire to carry out such operations and it has attempted similar things in the past. Has reserve training been reduced too far? Has a certain complacency set in?

The attack on the Israeli missile boat - one of its most sophisticated warships, a Saar-5 class corvette - also raises many questions.

It was hit by a Chinese-made, radar-guided C-802 missile.

Did Israeli intelligence not know that these anti-shipping missiles had been given to Hezbollah by Iran?

Israel's naval electronics and defensive systems are among the best in the world, defensive systems intended to counter just such a threat. Some reports suggest that they were not even operating on board the vessel that was hit.

Proportionality

But most of all there is the question of the new Israeli government's relationship with the military.

Much has been made of the limited military experience of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defence Minister Amir Peretz.

Mr Olmert is in a tight spot. He has to act to protect Israel's citizens. But ask a general what action can be taken in response to a threat and he will generally supply a long list of targets.

Israel seems to be working through just such a list. But the real strategic calculation is to weigh up military advantage against wider political and diplomatic considerations.

Has Israel got the balance right?

Clearly there are many views. But the overwhelming international consensus - not least from the G8 summit in St Petersburg - is that disproportionate military force has been used.

President George W Bush - who has strongly backed Israeli action - nonetheless put this point rather neatly.

"Defend yourself," he said, "but be mindful of the consequences."

July 16, 2006 at 12:35 PM in Israel | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Japan takes another step away from post-war pacifism

Japan takes another step away from post-war pacifism

Japan has taken another step away from its post-World War II pacifism with the ending of its decades-old ban on military exports and telling defense planners to regard China and North Korea as potential threats.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's cabinet agreed to allow military sales -- only to the United States and for missile defense -- a day after it extended Japan's ground-breaking troop deployment in Iraq for another year.

The policy change Friday came in the form of a set of guidelines for defense policymakers, updated for the first time in nine years, along with a five-year outline for military procurements set to begin from April 2005.

The guidelines approved by the cabinet said Japan needed to change its mindset to have "multi-function, flexible defense capabilities" to deal with new threats such as terrorist and missile attacks.

A statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said Japan decided to export missile parts to the United States under "strict controls" to contribute to "the Japan-US security alliance and secure the safety of our country."

Hosoda said any other military exports would be approved on a case-by-case basis. Koizumi on Friday held out the possibility that Japan, which is heavily dependent on oil shipments, could sell arms to Southeast Asian nations to fight piracy.

Hiroshi Okuda, chairman of the country's largest commercial lobby, the Japan Business Federation or Keidanren, hailed the new defense policy, saying Japan was "in the midst of a major turning point."

The constitution imposed by US occupiers after World War II said Japan would forever renounce war. Japan has since produced top-of-the-line equipment which its military -- known as the Self-Defense Forces -- is forbidden to use.

Embracing its pacifist role, Japan in 1967 said it would ban all weapons sales to communist countries and other states perceived to threaten world peace. The self-imposed ban was tightened in 1976 to rule out all military exports.

Tokyo and Washington began to study a missile interception shield after Stalinist North Korea shocked the world in 1998 by firing a missile over Japan.

But Japan was forbidden from exporting missile components to its close ally because it has had a defense-only security policy since its bitter defeat in World War II.

The new defense outline comes as Japan sees increasing tension with both North Korea and China.

Japan has said Chinese ships have crossed into Japanese waters, often near disputed gasfields, at least 33 times this year, including a nuclear submarine that set off a diplomatic incident last month.

Hosoda played down the symbolism of the guidelines, noting they did not explicitly label China a threat. But he said that due to growing Chinese military and economy strength, Japan "needs to watch China."

The guidelines said: "China, which has a great impact on security in this region, is pushing ahead with enhancing its nuclear and missile capabilities in modernizing its navy and air force while expanding marine activities."

Tomohide Murai, professor of Japan's state-run National Defense Academy and specialist on East Asia security issues, said Beijing "will surely upgrade and modernize its military" as its economy grows.

"Although China has never said it would attack Japan, we cannot really rule out its offensive intention given the fact that the Chinese nuclear submarine just entered our waters," he said.

Bilateral visits have been on hold, with China voicing anger over Koizumi's repeated visits to a Tokyo shrine dedicated to 2.5 million Japanese war dead including seven men hanged for World War II war crimes.

The guidelines said North Korea was "developing, deploying and proliferating weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles," describing its military moves as serious, destabilizing factors in the region.

An advisory panel to Koizumi mapping out the defense strategies recommended in October that Japan study acquiring the ability to launch pre-emptive strikes.

But there was no explicit reference to that point in the new outline. Murai said it probably reflected "a lack of debate among people" as well as fear that such a major move would cause unnecessary concern at home and abroad.

December 11, 2004 at 02:01 AM in Israel | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage

eyespymag.com: the magazine that lifts the lid on the world of intelligence, espionage, terrorism, and much more

By MARC PERELMAN FORWARD STAFF

Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned.

However, far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.

In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI�s counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.

Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance.

Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel media outlets have suggested.

The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem, sources told the Forward, arose not because of the operations� targets but because Israel reportedly violated a secret gentlemen�s agreement between the two countries under which espionage on each other�s soil is to be coordinated in advance.

Most experts and former officials interviewed for this article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising.

In fact, they said, Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funnelling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December.

�I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on those groups,� said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches justice administration at San Jose University. �The Israelis give us good stuff, like on the Hamas charities.�

According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.

After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations.

However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.

�The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it,� he said. �The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11.�

However, he added, the bureau was �very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn�t know about it.�

Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.

However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.

The five men � Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel � were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van.

In addition to their strange behaviour and their Middle Eastern looks, the suspicions were compounded when a box cutter and $4,000 in cash were found in the van. Moreover, one man carried two passports and another had fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background.

The Bergen County police immediately handed the suspects to the INS, which turned them over to a joint police-FBI terrorism task force set up after September 11 to deal with all possible links with the attacks.

The five Israelis were detained in the high-security Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn in solitary confinement until mid-October. On September 25, they all signed papers acknowledging violations of Immigration law. At the end of October, the INS issued a deportation order which was enforced a month later after a review by the Justice Department and prodding by Jewish and Israeli officials However, the former official said, this is just the official story.

In fact, he said, the nature of the investigation changed after the names of two of the five Israelis showed up on a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives, he said. At that point, he said, the bureau took control of the investigation and launched a Foreign Counterintelligence Investigation, or FCI.

FBI investigations into possible links to the September 11 attacks are usually carried by the bureau�s counterterrorism division, not its counterintelligence division.

�An FCI means not only that it was serious but also that it was handled at a very high level and very tightly,� the former official said. That view was echoed by several former FBI officials interviewed.

Steven Gordon, an American lawyer hired by the families to help secure their release, said he could not confirm which FBI division was in charge of the investigation. However, he acknowledged that �there were a lot of people involved, including counterintelligence officials from the FBI.�

The men all underwent at least two polygraph tests each, the lawyer added. He said one of the Israelis took the test seven times, a very unusual total according to several polygraph experts interviewed by the Forward. After the men were arrested, FBI agents searched the warehouse of Urban Moving Systems in Weehawken, N.J., seizing computer hard drives and documents. The warehouse was closed on September 14, said Ron George, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Division of Consumer Affairs.

On December 7, a New Jersey judge ruled that the state could seize the goods remaining inside the warehouse. The state also has a lawsuit pending against Urban Moving Systems and its owner, Dominik Otto Suter, an Israeli citizen.

The FBI questioned Mr. Suter once. However, he left the country afterward and went back to Israel before further questioning. Mr. Suter declined through his lawyer to be interviewed for this article.

Earlier this year, the New York State Department of Transportation revoked Urban Moving System�s license after discovering that the company�s midtown Manhattan base was only a mailing address.

After they returned to Israel at the end of November, the five men told local media that they were kept in solitary confinement, beaten, deprived of food and questioned while blindfolded and in their underwear.

Mr. Ellner, one of the five Israelis, said on two occasions in recent weeks that the five men had decided not to grant any interviews right now �because we went through a very difficult period and we are not ready for this.�

Their Israeli lawyer, Ram Horwitz, told the Forward he was still waiting for the results of the medical tests undertaken by the men in Israel to make a decision on an eventual lawsuit in the United States for mistreatment.

Mr. Horwitz insisted the men were not intelligence officers.

Irit Stoffer, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the allegations were �completely untrue� and that there were �only visa violations.�

�The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11,� Ms. Stoffer said.

Charlene Eban, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Washington, and Don Nelson, a Justice Department spokesman, said they had no knowledge of an Israeli spying operation.

�If we found evidence of unauthorized intelligence operations, that would be classified material,� added Jim Margolin, a spokesman for the FBI in New York.

One leading expert in American intelligence operations, Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at the Boston-based Political Research Associates, explained that there �is 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 a visa violation.�

� Forward

MARK IAN BIRDSALL COMMENT: Though both official US and Israeli spokespersons have denied that Mossad was operating the spy ring, it is fairly certain that many of the young Israelis were in search of information. The main talking point relates to the connection with al-Qaida. Is it really conceivable that the young men and women removed by the FBI, were indeed seeking the agents of terror? Mossad has an extremely long arm, and often carries out daring operations, it would not surprise me, if some of the �students� were indeed aware of the likes of Mohammad Atta. The primary question of course, is did the spy ring have any knowledge of the September attacks?

Like MI5 in the UK, I suspect that evidence had been acquired on an operation, though even Mossad did not know when... but they may well have known where.

I suspect this puzzling affair will run and run.

Eye Spy Publishing Ltd.
Copyright � 2001 All rights reserved.

November 10, 2004 at 09:49 PM in Israel | Permalink | 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 ...

Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ... - [Sunday Herald]

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