Hizballah's "change of mind" DEBKAfile Special Report June 22, 2010, 1:22 PM (GMT+02:00)
Hassan Nasrallah stays in bunkerHizballah's secretary general Hassan Nasrallah did not feel safe enough to take up Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan's invitation to visit Ankara last week in with the protection of the four intelligence agencies of Iran, Syria, Turkey and Hizballah's own service, debkafile's counter-terror sources disclose. To compound this fiasco, the two Lebanese vessels he planned for breaking Israel's sea blockade of Gaza are still stuck in Beirut despite bulletins about their imminent departure.
To save face, Nasrallah had his sources "leak" to the Kuwaiti A-Rai a claim that his organization pulled back at the eleventh hour from a plan to kill an unnamed high-ranking Israeli on vacation, who was thereupon recalled to Tel Aviv.
Our intelligence sources report that
Nasrallah decided to stay home in his Beirut bunker, where he has lived in hiding for four years, for fear that even he went to Ankara with the promised fourfold security shield,
an Israeli hit team would get him.The cancellation of his Ankara trip turned out to suit both host and invitee:
1. Nasrallah, who looks after his security in person, found the two travel plans on offer were chancy. One was to be flown in to Ankara by a Syrian or Iranian military aircraft after Turkey refused to provide one. But neither was keen to provide this service or in a hurry to make the arrangements.
The other was to make his way to Turkey secretly by road through Syria. Nasrallah decided that the 10-hour journey on Syrian highways would expose his convoy to surveillance by Israeli drones and
he would very likely not reach his destination alive.2. As the negotiations between Nasrallah and Turkish security MIT officials in Beirut on his personal security dragged on, Erdogan cooled on the prospect of hosting him.
Not only would this vindicate the Israeli charge that the Turkish leader is not above using terrorists in his hate campaign against Israel, but the campaign itself is running into more and more criticism at home from broad political, military and intelligence circles, who accuse him of a policy which is detrimental to the country's own interests.
Erdogan was persuaded to shelve his plans for Nasrallah's visit and order the MIT team to return home.
To save face for this humiliation - and his failure to browbeat the Lebanese government into permitting the flotilla he sponsored to embark for Gaza - the Hizballah leader engineered a leak to the Kuwaiti A-Rai of Tuesday, June 22. The same story also threatened that an Israeli attempt on the lives of any Hizballah leaders would be deemed a declaration of war and precipitate hundreds of rockets against Tel Aviv and its environs and thousands against other locations.
debkafile recalls the dire Shiite terrorists' threatened to avenge the murder of Imad Mughniyeh, head of their special security branch in a high-scale Damascus suburb in February 2008. While accusing Israel, they have never made good on their threat .
