Hizballah's Nasrallah Lights a FireA Cell Phone, an Oak Tree or a Grad Missile Could Kindle a Middle East Blaze
Hassan NasrallahAugust 6, 2010
Hizballah's leader Hassan Nasrallah has devised a scheme that would further ramp up the risk of a major Middle East conflict. He has promised to show a news conference called for Monday, August 9, what he calls "proof" of the Israeli secret services' complicity in the five-year old assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
He is clearly engaged in a desperate bid to let Syrian President Bashar Assad's associates and, most of all, senior Hizballah security officers, off the hook for that crime by flying in the face of the evidence piled up in a long UN-sponsored investigation.
Nasrallah threw this match on crackling tinder in a speech he delivered Tuesday, Aug. 3, the day Lebanese and Israeli troops exchanged in fire from the ground, using snipers, tanks, artillery and helicopters.
This did not delay him, because he has no time to lose. It is common knowledge in Beirut that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon will within days instruct the government to arrest and turn over for trial one or more prominent Hizballah operative as suspects in the Hariri murder. Among them is Mustafa Badr Al-Din, one of the heads of the organization's Special Intelligence and Security arm.
As we closed this issue, Ali Akhbar Velyati, Iranian's spiritual leader Aytollah Khamenei's chief of staff, arrived unannounced in Beirut late Thursday, Aug. 5 and went straight into conference with the Hizballah leader.
Nasrallah undoubtedly asked him for Tehran's backing for the scheme to shift the guilt for the Hariri murder onto Israel. If it is granted, he will unveil his "proof," against Israel Monday and force Lebanese Prime Minister Sa'ad Hariri, son of the assassinated politician, to take the following steps forthwith:
Nasrallah plans to force Hariri to declare war on Israel1. Notify UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council that the government of Lebanon is revoking the agreement they signed on March 29, 2006 establishing the International Tribunal for Lebanon to discover and prosecute those responsible for murdering Rafiq Hariri in February 2005. UN Security Council Resolution 1757 of May 30, 2007 endorsed the agreement, including the provision for the UN secretary to appoint half the judges and Lebanese judges named by Beirut to sit on the other half of the bench.
2. Refuse to enter into discussion on the matter with the UN Secretary and unilaterally withdraw the Lebanese judges from the International Court and cease payment for its maintenance, thereby dismantling the tribunal.
The prime minister will explain that Lebanon has been caught up in an emergency due to Israel's covert penetration of the country's infrastructure, particularly its telephone and communications systems.
3. Prime Minister Hariri must use Nasrallah's "evidence" as grounds to accuse Israel of his father's murder and declare war on the Jewish state.
4. The Lebanese government must present the "evidence" to the UN Security Council and demand a resolution imposing severe sanctions on Israel for its undercover agencies' "proven" involvement in the Hariri assassination.
The prime suspect is Mughniyeh's cousin, a top Hizballah officer
Intelligence sources report Hizballah is laying the ground for Nasrallah's "explosive revelations" by stirring Lebanese security into mounting a massive spy-hunt for alleged Israeli agents.
After the border clash with Israel last Wednesday, Lebanese security officials announced the arrest of a senior member of Hizballah's close ally, Michel Aoun's Christian Free Patriotic Movement, on suspicion of spying for Israel.
The news was a sensation in Beirut, because the detainee, Fayez Kayam is one of Aoun's closest friends.
He was the third suspect detained this week on the same charge after a high-ranking army officer and a state telecom operator employee were picked up in different security operations.
The arrests are programmed to demonstrate that Israel's clandestine agencies have seized control not only of Lebanon's intelligence services but also of its telecommunications networks, both the regular phone system and the cell phone companies.
Nasrallah cannot afford to have his plan misfire, mainly because of Mustafa al-Din's unique role in Hizballah's tight inner leadership. Since the end of 2008, he has served as its senior liaison officer with Iran. His arrest would send shock waves through the entire movement in view of his family connections as cousin and brother-in-law of the notorious Imad Mughniyeh, founder and head of Hizballah's security arm for 29 years until he was killed in Damascus in February 2008.
Badr al-Din's sister Ammana was Moughniyeh's first wife. As his widow, she shares his high standing in Hizballah as national hero.
Extracting the right "confessions" from alleged spiesMustafa Badr al-Din was Mughniyeh's right hand in the terrorist stunts he pulled in the 1980s, including the brutal kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon, most of them Americans and Britons, and operations in the Persian Gulf region at Tehran's behest.
He served a long stretch in a Kuwait prison for leading a failed conspiracy to assassinate its ruler. Upon his return to Lebanon in the mid-1990s, he went into semi-retirement and distanced himself from his brother-in-law's nefarious activities. But when Moughniyeh died, he was drawn back by Nasrallah into top operational and intelligence positions.
The key evidence gathered against Badr Al-Din by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon consists of
eight cell phones discovered at the scene of the Hariri murder and in an apartment overlooking it which housed the conspirators' forward command.
Two years of painstaking analysis of the cell phones and the lines channeling incoming and outgoing calls found them registered to Hizballah's security arm. Badr al-Din has been identified as the man issuing instructions to the perpetrators up to and in the course of the massive bombing attack which killed the former Lebanese prime minister and 22 others.
Nasrallah plans to accuse Israeli intelligence of orchestrating the Hariri assassination from a war room in Cyprus. His agents are in the process of extracting "confessions" from the latest batch of alleged spies in order to "prove" that Israeli intelligence used its control of Lebanon's telecommunications system five years ago to plant the eight incriminating cell phones at the scene of the crime and forge the records of phone calls to fix the crime on Hizballah and Badr Al-Din.
Damascus and Tehran keen to sabotage Obama's peace initiativeThe Hizballah leader's plan is both devious and part of other strategies afoot in the Middle East.
He took the precaution of obtaining Syrian president Assad's support for his scheme to incriminate Israel.
Intelligence sources report it was granted when the two met secretly in Damascus on Saturday, July 31, the day after Saudi King Abdullah's visit.
Assad made it clear that even after the king persuaded him to transfer his protection from Hassan Nasrallah to Saad Hariri, this change did not affect matters related to Israel.
It is strongly suspected in Washington and Jerusalem that the flare-ups this past week, starting with the Grad missile fired at Ashkelon by Hamas and culminating in the Lebanese-Israel cross-border clash, may have been orchestrated from Tehran and Damascus, with Hizballah playing along, for the purpose of sabotaging President Barack Obama's efforts to bring about direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Two of Israel's borders are still seething with tensionIsrael responded to the Hamas attack on Ashkelon the next day, Saturday, July 31, by bombing several locations in the Gaza Strip. August 2, Hamas hit back by shooting six Grad missiles from Egyptian Sinai at Eilat and hitting Jordanian Aqaba instead.
Within 24 hours, the central sector of the Lebanese border was ablaze after a local Shiite battalion commander told his men to start shooting at Israel soldiers across the border - contrary to orders from the Lebanese army's high command in Beirut.
The situation on two of Israel's borders is still seething with tension.
The Israeli government refuses to let the death of a high officer from Lebanese cross-border fire go unpunished. Beirut has been given an ultimatum to dismiss or court-martial the Lebanese officer who set the border on fire without delay, or resign itself to the entire Lebanese army being treated as an enemy and its border positions wiped out.
The Hariri government has five days to comply. Monday, Nasrallah plans to launch his bid to pin the Hariri murder on Israel's intelligence service. This is seen - and not only in Israel - as a dangerous fantasy with the potential for tipping the region into multilateral violence.
Furthermore, the Netanyahu government has yet to settle the score with Hamas for the missile fire on Eilat.
Hidden Tit-for-Tat War: Rumor and FactDrones Crash into Bushehr Reactor, Iranian UAV Program Chief Killed
BushehrThe Persian Gulf region is awash with wild rumors of a tit-for-tat war of stealth gaining momentum between the US and Iran.
Sources cite a couple of the tall tales before testing their credibility.
For instance, on Aug. 1, an American warship cruising in the Persian Gulf lofted three unmanned aircraft and crashed them deliberately on the dome atop the Iranian nuclear reactor in Bushehr.
The townspeople (app. 250,000) panicked in the belief that an Israeli or American attack on Iran's nuclear installations had begun. They speculated that the US retaliated for a supposed Iranian submarine assault on the Japanese M Star supertanker in the Straits of Hormuz four days earlier, on Wednesday, July 28.
(See the next item on the Japanese tanker incident.)
And if the Iranian sub attack was true, was it Tehran's reply to statements by US officials, according to which the military option against the Islamic Republic was back on the Pentagon's table?
This surmise led to the next guess that the Americans drones bombed Bushehr both as a military exercise and as Washington's answer to the latest round of threats from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other top Iranian officials. They have threatened to bring the United States to its knees if their nuclear sites are attacked, wipe Israel off the map and set the Middle East on fire, especially Tel Aviv.
And where did the reported murder in another part of Iran of Reza Baruni, father of Iran's military UAV program, fit into the rising climate of confrontation?
Sorting fact from fictionMilitary, intelligence and Iranian sources sift through the regions' gossip mill in order to separate fact from fiction - or at least, determine which narratives stand up to scrutiny.
Two major misfortunes shook Iran on the same day, Sunday, Aug. 1 - that is not in doubt.
The first was a mighty explosion that destroyed Reza Baruni's closely secured villa in the high-scale neighborhood of the southern Iranian town of Ahwaz in oil-rich Khuzestan. Rescue teams fighting their way through the debris pulled out the bodies of Baruni, his wife, two children and a guest who was staying with them.
Very few people in Iran knew about Baruni's job and therefore failed to appreciate his death's disastrous impact on Iran's top-secret military drone program.
The official version produced the old standby of an exploding gas canister as the cause of the blast. However intelligence source report that bombs were planted in at least three corners of the building and expertly rigged to explode simultaneously and bring the ceilings crashing down on its occupants. The bomber must therefore have had access to the Baruni home.
Hiding behind his public face as a retired army major, the dead man created Iran's program for manufacturing military drones from scratch and trained a new generation of engineers and planners to take over. But despite his efforts and the hefty sums Iran invested in the industry for some years, the product never really came up to par. His death is likely to bury the program for years to come.
The authorities tended to fix the blame on underground organizations representing the local Arab-speaking Ahwazis' fight for self-rule against the repressive regime. They suspect certain Gulf Arab emirates' intelligence services commissioned them to execute Baruni's murder.
The drone attack on Bushehr was realThat same day, close to midnight, three unmanned aerial vehicles did indeed crash into the Bushehr reactor dome leaving at least five staff members confirmed dead. Speculation was rife in the panic-stricken population - that the huge bang was either the opening shot of an American invasion of Iran, or that a series of well-spaced US-Israeli operations was underway for knocking out installations in other parts of the country.
Some locals claimed they had received information about widely-spread attacks on the phone from relatives in Arak, the site of a new heavy water plant in the Markazi province of western Iran, and in Darkovin, the southern Ahwaz province, where secret nuclear facilities are under construction and where the UAV pioneer Buruni had just been killed.
To calm the populace, Bushehr's city leaders asked Tehran for some straight answers. They elicited a Ministry of Defense communiqu? which confirmed that a single drone had indeed crashed into the nuclear reactor dome, but insisted it was launched by Iran's Revolutionary Guards to test the alertness of the air defense personnel guarding it and the effectiveness of its anti-air radar system.
According to Iranian and intelligence sources, Tehran could not dismiss the incident out of hand after three mighty explosions racked the town. So the deputy district governor for security affairs, Mohammad Hossein Shenidi, who is responsible for safeguarding Bushehr and its reactors against air or missile attacks, pitched in with a minimized version:
A single drone had indeed been fired, he admitted, but it carried no explosives because its only purpose was to simulate a loud bang to check the level of local alertness.
Retaliation for Japanese tanker hitBut Bushehr's citizens got it right. Three drones carried out the bombing.
They were not fooled by the deputy governor's claim of "a snap inspection exercise" and only confirmed in their alarm when all the Revolutionary Guards and military units in the region went on high alert and special operations forces driving tanks and armored troop carriers jammed the main roads leading to Bushehr and encircled the reactor.
Shenidi's inventiveness was further taxed Monday, August 2, to counter the rumors (originating in the city's Revolutionary Guards naval base) to the effect that the American drone was fired in reprisal for an Iranian submarine strike on the Japanese oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz.
The deputy governor tried unavailingly to protest that the supertanker had caught fire outside Iranian territorial waters.
Military experts say Shenidi may have been correct in describing the drone attack on the Bushehr reactor as a test of local security alertness - except that the test was more likely carried out not by the Iranians but the Americans, who wanted to gauge the effectiveness of Iranian radar, its susceptibility to jamming and the alertness of the Iranian security details guarding it.
From the debris collected after the explosions, the Iranians were flummoxed for clues to the drones' senders. The crashed UAVs were equipped with self-destruct devices which had chopped them up into tiny metal slivers. They caused substantial damage to the targeted structures without leaving identifying marks.
Iranian-US Tit for Tat - Covered upIt was an Iranian Sub which Struck the Japanese Supertanker in Hormuz
M.Star supertanker
A dense veil of secrecy continues to cloud the attack of Wednesday, July 28 on the Japanese M.STAR supertanker near the Straits of Hormuz.
At 5:30 a.m., several things happened on the Mitsui O.S.K.-owned tanker as it turned toward Japan, its holds full of 270,000 tons of crude, through the territorial waters of Oman in the strategic straits.
The huge vessel was rocked by a powerful shock. A big fire broke out on its port side and, when the flames licked the top deck, the lifeboats tethered there disintegrated, sending a shower of burning fragments into the sea. The crews' mess hall was completely destroyed as were some of the sailors' cabins.
From that moment, the accounts of what had happened aboard the M.STAR became muddled, contradictory and enigmatic. A cover-up had clearly gone into action, managed by US officials and the US Fifth Fleet command in Bahrain, which is responsible for security in a broad region encompassing the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea - up to the fringes of the Indian Ocean.
First, it was claimed that the tanker had been struck by a mammoth freak wave, even though nothing of the kind had been seen by crew members standing on the deck. One or more crewman had in fact noticed a large flash approaching the vessel from the distance.
Next, the Omani coast guard suggested the ship had been roiled by a mild earthquake around Bandar-Abbas on the Iranian shore of the Strait of Hormuz. This notion was seconded by a spokesperson of the Iranian Seismological Institute who cited its magnitude as being precisely 3.4 on the Richter scale - until America's national seismological institute debunked the theory. The last earthquake in this region had occurred Saturday, July 24, said its spokesman, and there had been no tremors since.
US, Iranian accounts converge - up to a pointThat afternoon, however, the Japanese owners of the supertanker came forward with a statement asserting that it had been damaged in an explosion "from a suspected attack from the outside." There is nothing that can explode in that part of the vessel, they said, insisting the explosion was caused by something from outside the tanker.
Wednesday night, American and Iranian officials sang the same tune - up to a point. They agreed the Japanese supertanker had been damaged by an explosion as the result of an attack from an unknown source.
But then their accounts diverged.
The US Navy spokesman added nothing further, whereas the Iranian spokesperson said the fire which was caused by an explosion on the deck was contained "with the help of the crew and regional forces."
The way the episode was treated indicated to military sources that the US Navy and Washington had been caught unawares and were embarrassed by an attack on a oil supertanker in this busy shipping lane - through which about 40 percent of the world's oil supply passes every day and which ought to have been the most thoroughly-secured maritime route in the world.
Yet the next day, Thursday, July 29, a US Fifth Fleet spokesman said that there were no US Navy or coalition vessels anywhere near the supertanker when it was hit: "No, there were none close to the ship? none of our vessels were involved," he said.
The US cover-up disguised ignorance, the Iranian - guiltBut what the Iranian statement revealed was that it had maintained a naval presence in the immediate vicinity of the damaged vessel and kept it under close scrutiny from the moment it was hit until it reached the United Arab Emirates dockyards at Fujairah early Wednesday evening.
Unlike the US and NATO fleets, the Iranians were on hand for manipulating the accounts of the incident, first spreading disinformation about a non-existent earthquake, then describing events aboard the M.STAR which could only have been seen from close up.
According to intelligence and Iranian sources, Tehran issued the vivid account of a concerned onlooker to conceal the fact that an Iranian Revolutionary Guards-IRGC Tarig-type submarine was responsible for the attack on the Japanese tanker and had rammed its portside hull to create the effect of an explosion.
A second Iranian sub, a Yunis, hovering nearby in case of trouble and as mission back-up, fired a dummy missile or shell to engender the flash effect witnessed by the ship's crew.
Knowledge of this attack was not meant for general consumption. It was designed by Tehran as a warning-off message to Washington against US or NATO fleets venturing to intercept Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden or Gulf of Oman and search them for goods prohibited by UN sanctions.
Washington warned, Iranian submariners rewardedIran pulled its punches for the Japanese supertanker to convey a warning that next time, a loaded oil supertanker would not just be dented, but sunk and the Strait of Hormuz blocked to choke the most important oil transit sea lane in the world Iranian sources report.
Tuesday, August 3, the Commander of the Iranian Army, Maj. Gen. Ataollha Salehi, on a visit to Bandar Abbas, stressed that Iran would not tolerate any inspections of its ships. "There is no difference between Somali pirates and US pirates for Iran," he said.
He did not reveal that he was at Bandar Abbas, home base of the IRGC's navy, to shake the hands of the two Iranian submarine crew members who took part in the operation against the Japanese supertanker. They were awarded medals together with a one-thousand dollar handout for each crewman, a gift from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
More ominously, he inspected the construction of submarines of the four homemade types, Al-Gadir, Noah, Yunis and Tarig, which he said would be handed to the Naval Forces in the next ten days "for exploitation."
If this was the first round of an Iranian-US showdown in the Persian Gulf, Tehran came out on top, an outcome which, despite the attempted cover-ups, was not lost on the Persian Gulf Arab emirates which are keeping a worried watch on US military moves.
To deprive Tehran of the last word, the Obama administration, which is up to its ears in the perplexities of Afghanistan and Iraq (see next item), is reported by our sources to have sent unmanned aerial craft to bomb the Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr on Sunday, Aug. 1. Tehran will not let anything get in the way of its response.
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