Exposing Iran's Facility B1 Nori-8500
Brings Israel-Iran Clash Near
Iran Speeds up Its Covert Nuclear Program
The Iranian exile group's exposure on Feb. 20 of Iran's secret B1 Nori-8500 facility for producing a nuclear warhead at Khojir represented another attempt by France and Israel to shoot down the American National Intelligence Estimate of Dec. 2007.
That document claimed Iran had given up its covert military nuclear program in 2003. In Brussels, Wednesday, Mohammad Mohaddessin, foreign affairs director of the exiled National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), presented the media with satellite images, graphic evidence of a functioning Iranian defense ministry missile research site at Khojir on the southeastern edge of Tehran.
There, he reported, Iran is developing a nuclear warhead for delivery by its medium-range missiles.
Mohaddessin also said his clandestine group had identified a guest house on a military compound near the site, which it claimed housed North Korean specialists working at the warhead facility. He stressed that the information had been confirmed in recent weeks and was current.
This classified data, intelligence sources report, was released on the initiative of France and Israel to finally rebut the NIE's conclusions.
It was also timed to pre-empt the report Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei, director of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is due to present Friday, Feb. 22, to the UN Security Council on the state of Iran's nuclear program.
Paris and Jerusalem have been reliably informed that the IAEA director will present his usual vapid, inconclusive findings. He will then ask the Council for more time for negotiations with Iran and a further delay before passing harsh punitive measures against the Islamic Republic.
North Koreans shown bussed to work
The NCRI spokesman?s information broke new ground:
1. While his organization first identified Khojir in 2005 as the new site of the B1 Nori 8500 missile facility transferred from Lavizan, its report that a small plant on the site is developing nuclear warheads is new.
2. Also new are the satellite photos depicting a well-fortified villa and a special bus carrying its North Korean occupants every morning under heavy guard to the secret site, and back again at the end of the working-day. Mohaddessin said he was holding back images obtained which identified the North Korean specialists.
Intelligence experts report that such images are withheld because they might give away the covert methods for obtaining them.
According to our sources, the Iranian exile group is first tipped off on the presence of key data by US, Israeli or French intelligence contacts and asked to send its spies and followers inside Iran to check it out.
After confirmation is received, the data is cross-checked.
In the next stage, the NCRI rents a commercial satellite for imagery of the suspect nuclear sites for public consumption. This system worked in 2002, when NCRI was employed by US intelligence to bring the existence of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz to the world?s attention.
Sensitive photographs, such as the faces of North Korean scientists and technicians at Khojir, can only be obtained by military satellites equipped with sophisticated high resolution cameras, such as those deployed by the secret services cooperating with the Iranian exile group. These images are never released to outsiders, because they would betray ultra-sensitive information about the equipment and angles from which the photographs were taken. Such information would also help targets develop new techniques of concealment.
Therefore, the NCRI and other dissident groups operating in Iran are only given photos which have been smudged to conceal their source. They are handed out among agents in the country to help them find out more about targeted individuals and trace their movements.
Washington sticks to the NIE's clearance of Iran
3. The commercial satellite images displayed at the Brussels news conference depicted a system of heavy security within the Khojir site, and restricted access to the putative nuclear warhead facility, known as "Eight-five hundred".
Visitors to the facility are required to leave their cars and drivers at a car park, Mohaddessin explained. They are then picked up by a car which passes through two checkpoints onto a road that ends at a small group of buildings cut into the hills a couple of kilometers away.
4. The Iranian exile group almost certainly has more secret data which it is holding back for a later date, or when necessary to rebut more negative releases by US intelligence or the nuclear watchdog. This data would back up the charges that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and vehicles for their delivery.
But even before the day was over, Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, said the US intelligence community's view has not changed since the NIE's release.
Clearly, the Bush administration has no intention of checking out the Iranian group's revelations or reopening the discussion on Tehran's nuclear activities.
Intelligence sources comment that Washington?s response did not surprise Nicolas Sarkozy or Ehud Olmert, who were instrumental in bringing the NCRI's disclosures to the world in Brussels on Wednesday.
Convinced that the US intelligence estimate of last December tied President George W. Bush?s hands for a military option against Iran's nuclear sites, the French and Israeli leaders decided to go forward without America towards an Israeli military operation. France intends to take America?s place in providing intelligence and diplomatic backing in the European and international arenas.
Hizballah plans to precipitate the opening for an Iranian attack on Israel
The chronology of events leading up to this ultimate prospect, is instructive:
September 6, 2007: Israeli air and ground forces raided two presumed nuclear sites in Syria. North Koreans were involved in their development.
The information broadcast by these attacks was that Israel is capable of striking nuclear sites similar to Iran's B1 Nori 8500 facility. This capability demonstratively extends to demolition and removing the equipment housed at the facility, lock, stock and barrel, to home base.
The operation also demonstrated that the Russian air defense systems guarding Iran's most sensitive military sites were electronically permeable and therefore not proof against Israel air attack.
January 17, 2008: Israel tested a ballistic missile over the Mediterranean fitted with a powerful new propulsion engine. This told Tehran that the Israel Defense Forces has missiles capable of reaching any point on earth. Before this test, the Iranians had judged large areas of their north and east outside Israeli missile range.
February 4, 2008: Tehran quickly responded by launching its Kavoshgar-1 long-range missile to test its launching systems.
February 12, 2008: Imad Mughniyeh, master of Tehran?s overseas military-terrorist branch, was killed in the heart of Damascus. Iran thus lost the key strategist assigned with charting and commanding its overseas reprisals for a possible Israeli attack.
That day, too, Israel took the precaution of placing its military forces and intelligence services on the ready in case of a comeback from Iran, Syria, or Hizballah.
February 20, 2008: Iran's secret plants for producing nuclear weapons and warheads were identified and exposed at the Brussels news conference.
For the last six months, tensions around Iran and its nuclear activities can be seen by these events to have steadily escalated.
Also on Feb. 20, the Israeli chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi commented dryly at the graduation ceremony of an IDF officers training course: "Unfortunately, I cannot promise that we will not be caught up in a tough ordeal in the near future."
His comment gained little attention.
Military sources report that Ashkenazi was alluding to current predictions of a Hizballah attack on Israel, both to avenge the death of its military commander and to draw Israel into a conflict to precipitate Iran's intervention for a pre-emptive strike against the Jewish state.
Sarkozy's game
Our sources in Paris analyze Sarkozy's rationale for pursuing a proactive course on Iran alongside Israel: He believes an unambiguous and strong French line on Iran's ambition to attain a nuclear bomb could be the vehicle that carries him to European if not world leadership.
Secondly, he is bound by a commitment to Saudi and other Gulf rulers.
During his mid-January tour of their region, Sarkozy informed his hosts that French intelligence had obtained incontrovertible evidence that Iran had begun building nuclear bombs and warheads. The decision to establish a French base in Abu Dhabi was presented as necessary for tracking Iran's nuclear and military activities. He promised to keep Gulf rulers abreast of events with full updates.
At home, the French public had been told repeatedly by officials in the president's bureau and government from the end of last year that Iran is heading for a nuclear bomb. Sarkozy needs to show he is not all talk, but also capable of action.
Saudi-Syria Feud Heats up
Riyadh Arms Syria's Lebanese Foes, Washington Clamps down on Damascus
Syria's most implacable foes in Lebanon were furnished this week with an urgent supply of weapons from an unusual source.
Scenting a new civil war in the air, Saudi Arabia shipped arms by air and ground routes to the Lebanese national army, as well as to three allied militias, without whom the pro-Western government of Fouad Siniora has little chance of survival.
Middle East sources reveal the end-users as being the Maronite Christian Phalange headed by Samir Geagea, the majority leader Saad Hariri's private Sunni army and the Druze militia of Walid Jumblatt.
These forces are steeled for pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian opposition forces, led by the Shiite Hizballah, to launch into violence to break the political impasse in Beirut over the election of a president.
To punish the Assad regime for stirring up trouble in Lebanon, the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control has reached high into Bashar Assad?s inner circle and placed his kinsman Rami Makhlouf on its sanctions list.
This was a shrewdly aimed move. Makhlouf is one Syria's richest men and the godfather of its national economy.
At home, the Assad regime is in trouble.
This week, several score officers serving in the air force, intelligence and armored brigades were secretly arrested, intelligence sources disclose, after the heads of intelligence laid before the president proofs that they were in mid-preparation to overthrow him.
The conspiracy's brains were named as two of the opposition leaders in exile, former vice president Khalim Haddam, who lives in Brussels, and the president's tycoon uncle, Rifat Assad.
Hearing that his two enemies were royally hosted in Riyadh, the president concluded that the Saudi royal house had aided the conspirators with support, money and intelligence aid.
Damascus accuses Saudi Prince Muqrin of masterminding Mughniyeh hit
This alleged conspiracy marked another stage in the flaming dispute between Saudi King Abdullah and President Assad, and their respective political and military establishments.
It was not the first. After the death of Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus on Feb. 12, Syrian officials threw out hints alleging Saudi intelligence complicity in the planning and execution of his murder. They suggested the purported Israeli Mossad assassins could not have made their hit in the Syrian capital without Saudi confederates.
This week, Syrian intelligence officers, in briefings to local elite politicians and business leaders, said they had proof that the director of Saudi General Intelligence Prince Muqrin had personally run those confederates.
By then, Damascus had embellished its allegations with detail. This Syrian version now goes like this, according to our sources:
Saudi and Jordanian spies picked up Mughniyeh's trail in Lebanon, followed him from Beirut to the point where he crossed over from Lebanon to Syria and trailed him as far as Damascus.
These agents then filed the information to Riyadh, whereupon Prince Muqrin passed it on to US intelligence in Washington knowing it would be bounced to the Mossad.
Damascus contends that the Mughniyeh killing was the work of a joint US-Saudi-Israeli intelligence operation. Without Saudi collaboration, the Mossad could never have pulled it off.
Gulf sources report that when the Syrian allegations were brought to the attention of King Abdullah at the beginning of the week, he ordered all Saudi-Syrian contacts and communications cut off forthwith.
As one Gulf source put it: Abdullah there and then wiped Syria off the map of Arab nations worthy of his recognition.
Assad plans to parody Abdullah at Arab summit
The crisis caught Syrian foreign minister Walid Mualem making the rounds of Middle East and North African capitals, handing out official invitations to the Arab League summit scheduled for the end of March in Damascus.
A sharp note reached him on his travels informing him he had better not try and land in Riyadh.
Abdullah is enraged with Assad on more than one score.
Intelligence sources report that he hit the ceiling when Prince Moqrin told him about the surprise or rather bad shock - the Syrian president was preparing for the forthcoming summit.
According to our sources, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to be spirited into the presidential palace in Damascus shortly before the summit opens. He will then be produced with a big flourish at the opening. Assad proposes to walk in hand in hand with his surprise guest.
The Saudis can hardly object; the spectacle would be a parody of King Abdullah's own much photographed and loudly applauded entrance to the GCC summit in Doha, Qatar, on Dec. 4, 2007, hand in hand with the Iranian president.
Assad is scheming not on to ridicule Abdullah?s gesture, but to make one of his own: He believes it will seal the reconciliation between Iran and the Arab governments and mark the failure of American Middle East strategies.
The Syrian president means to force the Arab rulers present in Damascus to acknowledge not only Iran's strategic eminence in the region, but also that of its partner, Syria.
But before Assad achieves his ambition, a number of powder kegs threaten to blow up in the region, notably in Lebanon
Iran Is Coiled to Spring
Israeli and Jewish Targets Are on Guard
A special emissary from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) special units with the rank of colonel arrived secretly in Beirut on Feb. 20. He assumed his role in the intensive preparations in progress in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut for revenge attacks against Israel, which is accused of killing Imad Mughniyeh.
Intelligence sources identify the Iranian colonel, who goes by the code name of ?Ramadan,? as an outstanding specialist in the planning of terrorist operations.
Tehran is set on staging a spectacular act of violence against an Israel-Jewish target, major enough to spark a world crisis that will distract attention from Iran?s nuclear weapons program.
Iran also intends the attack to be a striking example of Iran's capacity to wreak pain, enough to deter the United States and other Western governments from expanding their sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
Some members of Iran's ruling elite would prefer restraint, fearing that an extravagantly brutal operation would be a boomerang; instead of acting as a deterrent, Russia and China might be driven to supporting harsh sanctions. These advocates of moderation have been silenced; supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has forbidden them to voice their views in public. Badly shaken by the loss of Mughniyeh, the Ayatollah feels his death keenly as a home hit to the very survival of the Iran?s Islamic regime.
This week, Iranian leaders resorted to exceptionally vicious language for their threats to Israel.
Wednesday, Feb. 20, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never one for cultured speech, outdid himself when he declared: "World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region."
?Billions will rejoice over the Zionist entity's destruction"
Monday, the Revolutionary Guards chief Mohammad-Ali (Aziz) Jaafari said the Hizballah Umah (community, people) will soon destroy ?this cancerous microbe Israel.?
He added: "We have overcome all security impediments and the time has come to start exporting the revolution."
The gush of Iranian warnings of Israel?s approaching extinction began Sunday, Feb. 17 at a private memorial ceremony in Tehran for the dead Lebanese terrorist.
Gen. Hassam Firouz-Abadi, supreme commander of all Iranian armed forces, including the Revolutionary Guards, declared that Israel would soon be destroyed by the "strong arm of Hizballah Umah." He sent on to say: "Billions of people the world over will soon rejoice when they hear the news of the Zionist entity's destruction."
The general did not elaborate on how this was to happen, but there were indirect allusions to nuclear or radioactive weapons.
Iran's Vice president Parviz Davoodi, in his message of condolences to Hizballah?s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, vowed that Iran and Hizballah would together teach the "Zionist entity" a lesson so harsh that nothing would remain.
Another general, Yahya Rahim-Safavi, until last year, commander of the Revolutionary Guards, accused Israel of an error that would cost it its very existence.
For Iranian leaders, vicious anti-Israel rhetoric is routine. But experts on Iran find the intensity and frequency of their diatribes unusual. Even when Ahmadinejad last year declared Israel should be wiped of the map, he never committed Iran to executing the threat. But this week, two top generals pointed for the first time to the "Hizballah Umah" as the instrument of Israel?s demise.
This concept encompasses Iranian citizens, the Shiites of Lebanon and all Shiites and other Muslims who follow the precepts of the Iranian Islamic regime.
The most comprehensive threat was published in the Revolutionary Guards weekly publication Sobh-e Sadegh (Dawn of Truth) this week.
Various Israeli-Jewish massacre options bandied
An editorial dedicated to the life and death of Imad Mughniyeh quoted Sura 5 (Repent) which says: After the passing of the Month of Haram (in which belligerent activity is prohibited), you must kill the infidels wherever they may be, trap them, torture them and lay ambushes for them.
The Month of Haram ended Wednesday, Feb. 20. The next day, the month Safar began, during which (from the day of the Prophet) it is permissible to renew attacks on pagans and infidels.
The founder of Iran?s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini defined infidels for his followers as the Jews and the Christians of this day and age, who falsify the Torah and the New Testament and do not live according to the precepts of Moses or Jesus. It is therefore permitted to kill them.
The Sobh-e Sadegh editorial continues: "Hizballah's eagle of death" has been freed from its cage and is soaring towards its prey. It is seeking out prominent Zionist figures across the world to slaughter them. Nasrallah's words are a message of death for high-placed Zionist personalities around the world. The brave men of Hizballah will soon carry out the prophecy of the Koran.
Intelligence and Tehran sources reveal the following options are being tossed back and forth in the conferences of Iranian and Hizballah terror experts attended by Colonel "Ramadan:"
1. A showpiece operation inside Israel, such as a combined attack on crowd centers. They include bombing attacks in air ports; bombardment from drones of select targets; multiple-casualty hits in population centers, the poisoning of water sources and explosions of office towers.
2. A painful attack outside Israel against a sensitive target, such as a government minister or high-ranking army or police officer on overseas trips.
3. The transfer of unconventional weapons to the Gaza Strip for striking at the heart of Tel Aviv.
4. A long-range Hizballah rocket attack from Lebanon.
5. An attack on Israeli and Jewish locations in Europe and the Persian Gulf. The countries under consideration are Italy, Austria, Spain, Paraguay, Argentina, India, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
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