Tag: iran

Now not only Hizbullah, but Iranian Revolutionary Guards?

I haven’t really had time to weigh in on the Hizbullah-in-Egypt scandal, but the story continues to develop with more allegations and charges made against the Hizbullah cell, including another Shorouk scoop this morning that four Iranian Revolutionary Guards were arrested by Egyptian authorities last December, apparently entering on the country using Shia Iraqi IDs and networking with Iraqi Shia refugees in Cairo. Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said that the public prosecutor is preparing a “surprise” when more charges are formally filed, which some think will include charges against Hassan Nasrallah himself.

The informed consensus among Egyptian commentators is that Hizbullah made a mistake in toying with Egypt’s sovereignty, but that Egypt should not exaggerate in its response either. Most center around the accusation, confirmed by Nasrallah, that Hizbullah was setting up a logistics support network for Hamas’ weapons supply line. It would be naive to assume that this is strictly all they were doing, some level of spying should also be assumed. Most commentators reject the accusation that Hizbullah was planning attacks against Israeli tourists in retaliation for the assassination of its military chief Emad Mughniyeh, although some recent information has surfaced that there may have been parallel networks operating: in addition to the ones helping Hamas, there might have also been one concentrating on the Iraqi Shia community and what one might call general purpose espionage, for instance on the Suez Canal (rather, as some newspapers have alleged, a plan to fire shoulder-launched missiles at passing ships.)

Although the brouhaha over this affair will probably have the intended effect of turning part of Egyptian public opinion against Hizbullah on nationalist grounds — and I would certainly agree that any country should be concerned about arms smuggling and espionage operations taking place — it is also highlighting Egypt’s strangehold on Hamas supply lines (financial and military) which the likes of columnists Fahmy Howeidy, the Muslim Brothers’ General Guide Mahdi Akef and others are condemning. Nasrallah, in his unusual confession that Hizbullah does have operatives in Egypt, also reiterated the helping-Hamas-as-a-duty line that has some resonance here, and not just among Islamists.

Perhaps more details on the accusations to date later…

Update: I wanted to ask readers who are more familiar with Hizbullah than I am the following: the Egyptian press reported in the last couple of days that the name of the Hizbullah handler for their Egypt operation is called Muhammad Qabalan, alleged to be the head of intelligence for Hizbullah. And that Emad Mughniyeh’s replacement as head of military operations is called Talal Hamiyeh. Anyone familiar with those names?

The Hizbullah in Egypt plot

I still don’t know what to think about yesterday’s revelation that Egyptian State Security believes, or is pretending to believe, that Hizbullah tried to set up an Egyptian cell:

CAIRO, April 8 (Reuters) – Egyptian authorities accused the Lebanese group Hezbollah on Wednesday of planning attacks inside Egypt, a development that could plunge Cairo’s relations with the Shi’ite group’s backer, Iran, to new lows.

The office of Egypt’s public prosecutor said it was investigating accusations that Hezbollah had recruited a 49-member cell with the aim of striking inside Egypt, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East.

Hezbollah angered Egypt earlier this year by accusing Cairo of complicity with Israel in its siege of the Gaza Strip.

“The public prosecutor received a note from state security about information confirmed by questioning about Hezbollah leaders sending some elements to the country to attract members to work with the organisation … with the aim of carrying out acts of aggression inside the country,” a statement by the public prosecutor said.

The statement said the group had been trying to monitor Egypt’s Suez Canal, its border with the Gaza Strip, and tourist installations in the Sinai Peninsula and sending information back to Hezbollah.

It also said the group had been establishing links with criminal elements to forge passports and setting up businesses to cover for spying activities.

It gave no details of any attacks being planned, but accused Hezbollah of trying to spread Shi’ite ideology in Egypt.

Culled from various sources, a list of what the “Hizbullah cell” was trying to achieve:

– Carry out terrorist attacks on the Shia holiday Ashura
– Rent housing near the Suez Canal to monitor the passage of ships
– Surveillance of tourist resorts in Sinai
– Procurement of explosives to manufacture bombs
– Renting housing in luxury areas to serve as safe houses
– Recruitment of Egyptians to their cause, with the aim of sending them abroad for paramilitary training
– Using businesses to fund and provide cover for their activities
– Spread Shiism in Egypt

All that seems like a tall order… While I won’t dismiss it entirely as many who have heard Egyptian security cry wolf too many times — after all there is a rich history of Arab states and non-state actors operating in each other’s turf, even if it died down in the post-Cold War world — the idea of Hizbullah suddenly deciding to implant itself in Egypt, where it has no natural constituency, is rather weird. Spying, information-gathering, destabilization — maybe. But this whole affair, like Morocco’s paranoia about Shia infiltration, reflects the deep apprehension many Western-allied Sunni regimes have about Iran, its allies like Hizbullah, and the challenge to the dominant regional order under US hegemony that has taken place since the invasion of Iraq. This, not Shiism, is what they are afraid of.

Doomsday cult: Bibi and the Zionist view of Iran

Last week Jeffrey Goldberg, the most important cheerleader for Israel in American journalism, interviewed Benyamin Netanyahu and talked to him about Iran in particular, which of course Goldberg framed within the Iran-will-nuke-Israel-as-soon-as-it-gets-the-bomb meme. The article is full of this kind of stuff, like calling all Islamists (Hamas, the Iranians, Hizbullah, al-Qaeda) “jihadists” as if they were one and the same, and very short on pushing Bibi on the Palestinian question (there’s no questioning of his reversal of Israeli policy since Oslo, i.e. a commitment to the two-state solution.) In fact, throughout the whole interview, Goldberg and Bibi keep coming back to the Iran issue as the most important thing, with some subtle threats from Bibi that Israel would take the Iranian matter into its own hands if Obama doesn’t (which is most likely bluster as a strategic strike on Iran’s nuclear reactor(s) is not believed by military expert to be an effective deterrent.)

Bibi says:

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

I have been struck over the last two years by the apocalyptic tone of Israeli politicians and their supporters around the world about Iran. It appears they view Iran and its mullahs a little bit like a fantastically weird scene in Beneath the Planet of Apes, a rare sequel that is better than its original. The scene shows the remnants of the human race, a bizarre doomsday bomb-worshiping cult that has put a big gold ultimate nuclear weapon at the center of its theology:

Click to play clip from Beneath Planet of the Apes

And while we’re on that movie, one wonders if the Iranians view the Israelis – and indeed the Americans – like the warmongering gorillas in the same movie who decide to wage battle on the last remnants of humanity. Perhaps this is how the mullahs viewed George W. Bush’s axil of evil moment:

Click to play Ursus’ speech

Update: Joe Klein, reacting to the Bibi interview, makes some good points about inconsistencies in what Netanyahu says about the alleged irrationality of the Iranians (esp. his point that they might be responsive to economic sanctions – why, if they are irrational?) but has a very weird part about Arab fears of Iran:

Netanyahu is also completely wrong when he says that Iran, with a bomb, will be able to coerce Arab neighbors to its side. The precise opposite is true: Iran with a bomb would touch off an Arab arms race. The very prospect of Iran with a bomb is freaking out the Arabs now–in private, your average Egyptian, Jordanian or Saudi diplomat is far more passionate about the threat from Iran than the “atrocities” Israel undertook in Gaza.

Funny how I haven’t noticed people, in private conversation, freaking out about Iran, or that they are more outraged by this than by Gaza. What the Arab regimes freak about is not the Iranian bomb but growing Iranian regional influence and what it might mean if they do get the bomb. Our friend Ezzedine Choukri-Fishere articulates this Arab fear of Iranian influence elegantly in a recent article:

srael is not the only party that is nervous about US-Iranian dialogue. Arab states are watching carefully American overtures towards their Persian neighbour. From their perspective, American-Iranian dialogue is a continuation of the risky European approach, which was based on offering Iran regional “incentives” in return for ending some of its nuclear activities. Arab states are more concerned about Iran’s regional ambition than about its nuclear programme; the latter is important only in so far that it constitutes an element in Iran’s bid for hegemony in the Middle East. From where they stand, offering Iran more regional power in return for its uranium enrichment defeats the purpose of the exercise. As far as nuclear programmes go, most Arab states are more worried about Israel’s nuclear arsenal than they are about Iran’s nascent capabilities. Even if they wanted to, Arab leaders would find it politically difficult to cooperate with the US against Iran’s nuclear activities while Israel’s nuclear weapons are shielded from scrutiny.

 

CBS says Israel, not US, behind Sudan strike

More on that alleged air strike in Sudan targeting weapons shipments to Gaza:

– The Sudan Tribune said yesterday it was the US, but today that it’s Israel based on a report by the American TV network CBS.

– Haaretz carries the CBS story and says it’s part of the MOU on arms smuggling inked between the US and Israel at the end of Operation Cast Lead. The Haaretz article adds:

Meanwhile, in May, an international conference is scheduled to take place in Ottawa, the third of its kind since the end of Operation Cast Lead, which will discuss how to prevent arms smuggling from Iran to the Gaza Strip.

In addition to host Canada, Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Denmark, the U.S. and Israel will also take part.

Immediately after the conference a “war game” is scheduled to take place in Washington, with the participation of security officials and diplomats from the countries involved. The “war game” will practice a scenario of foiling arms smuggling from Iran to the Gaza Strip.

The most recent conference took place in London a week ago and the countries cooperating in blocking the arms smuggling from Iran formulated a joint plan of operations. The plan includes the signing of a series of bilateral agreements with countries situated along the path of the smugglers, as well as countries whose commercial fleets carry cargo from Iran elsewhere.

One interesting thing in the Sudan Tribune article is that it said something about the planes coming from Djibouti. That would put the French on the suspect list too!

At least it now appears that an air strike did happen (although casualty reports are around 40, not 300) – and confirms the reports from intelligence circles that the smuggling route for Hamas’ weapons is indeed from or through Sudan, through Egypt (a whole other story: how do they keep under the radar, especially in Sinai?), possibly originating from the horn of Africa.

al-Shorouk’s story on secret Sudan raids

The relatively new Egyptian newspaper al-Shorouk has been making some news yesterday, reporting that the US air force had been engaged in a series of attacks against convoys of trucks carrying arms in Eastern Sudan. The destination of the trucks, apparently, was Gaza via Sinai. Needless to say this is a huge story, not only because it would appear to confirm allegations that Hamas is obtaining Iranian-purchased arms via Sudan (and probably originally Djibouti) and that they are being smuggled through Sinai and the Rafah tunnels. It followed up on the story today alleging that US Air Force raids had claimed 300 lives.

The reason we’ve never heard about any of this, apparently, is that the US is not advertising the operations, the al-Bashir regime in Khartoum has declared a media blackout, and Egypt is respecting the blackout but keeping a close eye since this involves major arms traffic (it’s an old route, once used by the French poet Rimbaud) going through its territory. Today al-Shorouk said that an Egyptian intelligence agent visited the area to verify the issue.

I’ve been talking about this with a few people who closely follow the news yesterday and we’re all rather skeptical at this point. Some of the Egyptian press (not necessarily al-Shorouk though, as far as I know) has a bad reputation for pulling things out of thin air or basing them on unreliable disinformation websites like Debka. This would be a huge, world scoop if it turns out to be true, involving so many of the region’s hottest issues: arms trade, illegal US operations, Hamas’ supply line, Iran, Sudan and its recently indicted president. The story also assumes that a convoy of trucks carrying weapons (presumably the Grad rockets Hamas is launching against Israel) are able to make their way through Egypt, which seems impossible without the cooperation of the government or serious wasta up high. (That being said, drugs use the same route, and small arms did come from Sudan during the Islamist insurrection of the 1980s and 1990s.)

So basically, either al-Shorouk got it wrong, or it has revealed the first secret military actions of the Obama administration to control the arms smuggling to Gaza issue – as the Bush administration had promised Israel in the MOU it signed in mid-January. I’m a skeptic, but I’ll be watching how this develops.

Sinbad The Spy

In the last two years, there had been repeated leaks that some of the best intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program was coming from Germany, which was explained as one reason the Europeans (and Germany in particular) were leading the diplomatic offensive against Tehran and letting the US take a back seat in negotiations.

It turns out that a key source of intelligence for the BND, Germany’s intelligence service, was coming from a rather dodgy businessman who has just been arrested for smuggling key technology into… wait for it… Iran. Der Spiegel has published the first story on the case, and I am reproducing a full BBC Monitoring translation after the jump. First some choice excerpts:

His colleagues know the businessman from Iran as manager of a medium-sized company based in Hesse: a dignified gentleman, 61 years of age, who had just returned from a trip abroad.

The customs officers know him as a smuggler of armaments technology for Iran – this, at least, is the suspicion that has now landed him in pre-trial detention.

The BND knows him as “Sinbad.” This was the cover name under which he spied for the German foreign intelligence service for more than a decade.

. . .

The documents that Sinbad supplied came obviously from the holy of holies of the state apparatus in Tehran. He obtained pictures of tunnel rock drills, details of secret deposits, and up-to-date documents on progress in developing carrier technology for nuclear warheads. The information must have come mainly from ministries in Tehran to which he had excellent access. In Pullach, where Department 1 is based that supervised Sinbad, and in Berlin, where the analysts of Department 3 processed Sinbad’s information, everyone was thrilled. What the source from Tehran served up went together well with the fragments that the BND obtained from other sources.

As a result, a relationship of mutual trust developed between the BND and its spy in the mid-1990s, when their cooperation began. The BND paid its top spy about 1 million euros, an unusually high amount that is invested only in exceptional cases. He was, an officer said, “one of our best-quality sources in the area of proliferation in general.”

Apparently “Sinbad” was delivering technology for use in delivery systems — the Shahab series of missiles unveiled by Iran in recent years and that are a more plausible medium-term threat/deterrent against Israel and US allies (or installations) in the region, even if they don’t carry a nuclear payload. So perhaps the Iranians very well knew who they were dealing with, giving him info on a nuclear program they know they won’t be able to complete in the near-future anyway, in exchange for making progress on building a more effective deterrent against a US/Israeli preemptive strike on the nuclear program. If you can deter and project strength effectively, after all, then you can afford to take the time on the nuclear program anyway.
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