[iwar] [fc:Various.interesting.stories.from.Janes]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-26 16:57:24
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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                            26 October 20
                        Al-Qaeda and Argentina
One of the more bizarre tangents of the 11 September suicide attacks
on the USA is a report that purports to link Osama bin Laden’s
Al-Qaeda network to two deadly bombings in Buenos Aires in 1992 and
1994 that killed 177 people and which remain unsolved.

Argentine, US and Israeli authorities have repeatedly blamed those
attacks on Hizbullah and Iran, but no one has ever been charged, let
alone convicted, for them. On 18 October, however, Argentina’s foreign
ministry made the disclosure that its embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
received telephone calls — purportedly from Al-Qaeda — on 20, 23 and
24 September 2000 warning that an attack on a US target was planned
for 26 September of that year and claiming responsibility for an
unspecified ‘explosion’ in Argentina. As far as is known, no US
facility was attacked on 26 September 2000, but the US naval destroyer
USS Cole was hit by suicide bombers in Aden harbour on 12 October that
year, killing 17 American service personnel.

It remains unclear to which of the Buenos Aires bombings the callers
to the Riyadh embassy were referring, although Argentinian judicial
sources believe that it was the 18 July 1994 attack on the
Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community centre in which
85 people were killed and 300 wounded. An earlier attack on the
Israeli embassy in the Argentine capital had been carried out on 17
March 1992, killing 92 and wounding 200.

                                . . .

 The Mughniyeh connection

Tehran and Hizbullah have both denied that they were involved in the
Buenos Aires bombing. However, in September 1999, Argentinian
authorities issued an arrest warrant for Imad Fayez Mughniyeh (alias
‘Hajji’), a top Hizbullah security official in the 1980s and alleged
leader of a sub-group called Islamic Jihad, in connection with the
1992 embassy bombing. He was later indicted for the AMIA atrocity as
well.

Mughniyeh, a Lebanese Shi‘a Muslim, was indicted by the US in 1985 for
the hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a US Navy diver was killed.
He is also suspected of being behind a whole host of other attacks in
the 1980s, including the kidnapping and murder of CIA station chief
William Buckley in Beruit in 1984, as well as suicide bombings of the
US embassy and a US marine barracks in which some 300 people perished.
Mughniyeh and some of his associates were named in the FBI’s ‘Most
Wanted’ list after the events of 11 September. His present whereabouts
are unknown, although he is said to have undergone extensive plastic
surgery to disguise his appearance.

Whether hard evidence of a direct link between Mughniyeh and Bin Laden
will eventually be revealed remains unclear, although there has been
speculation that he might have played a key role in the planning of
the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Perhaps those
mysterious calls to the Argentinian Embassy in Saudi Arabia back in
2000 offer a tantalising clue.

    ************************************************************

                           25 October 2001
                          Peres on the verge

 Israel’s 78-year-old foreign minister, Shimon Peres, is on the verge
of resigning from the cabinet of Ariel Sharon, FOREIGN REPORT has
learned. If he does indeed resign, he will take with him other Labour
party ministers in Sharon’s national coalition government. The
coalition will fall and Sharon will hold new elections. We predict the
result.

“Shimon [Peres] is fed up with Arik [Sharon],” says Peres’s political
chief of staff, Ram Aviram, privately. “What Shimon is building, Arik
is spoiling. Arik is stuck in the fifties where there was only black
and white TV. Shimon failed to convince him that the world moved long
time ago from a black and white era to a wide spectrum of colours”.

This week Peres paid what may be his last visit as a minister to New
York and Washington. He was treated with respect. Successive
administrations have favoured his policies of conciliation and
co-operation between Jews and Arabs. But he was unable to convince
ordinary Israelis of the rightness of his views. Administration
officials realised that Peres exercised little power in the cabinet,
which was dominated by Sharon. Peres’s time seemed to be over.

Before leaving for the United States, Peres met Sharon at the Israeli
prime minister’s ranch. Sharon told him the armed forces would make
bigger incursions into Palestinian territory. Peres urged him to
withdraw the troops. Sharon promised to discuss Peres’s idea at a
cabinet meeting on Sunday. Peres left this meeting at around midnight
and flew overnight to New York. Before the El Al airliner touched down
on New York, the armed forces had entered more Palestinian towns.



         ****************************************************



                       14 December 2000
        The successor to 'Carlos' may strike an Israeli target

 ACCORDING to an unconfirmed report by Israeli military sources, Imad
Mughniyeh, a master-terrorist also known as the "Lebanese Carlos",
visited France and Germany last month to meet with his agents, who
have been inactive, awaiting orders (such agents are known in the West
as sleepers). He is said to have provided them with a plan to hit
prime Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe and the financial resources
to carry out such attacks, according to these sources.

During his one-week tour, Mughniyeh met with Lebanese allies in
Germany and France. This group of old supporters forms the core of his
European network. Some of them belong to his own South Lebanese clan,
others come from the eastern Beka'a Valley.

Some but by no means all of these family friends/activists are making
their living in Europe from trafficking in Lebanese drugs and shipping
stolen Mercedes cars to Lebanon. Some of Mughniyeh's people were
arrested in the past, mainly by German authorities after they were
tipped off by the Israeli Mossad. But some have returned in recent
years and are now preparing the return home of their boss.

A believer in a big bang
Mughniyeh thinks big. His kind of expertise is most effective when
used in high-profile bomb blasts like the one in Buenos Aires and the
one about to explode any minute now (if Israeli intelligence is
right). Argentina's Supreme Court formally accused Hizbullah and
Islamic Jihad of being responsible for the Buenos Aires bomb and
issued an arrest warrant for Mughniyeh).

According to the unconfirmed Israeli report, Mughniyeh, 48, is
considered by western intelligence agencies as the most dangerous
active terrorist. Indeed, even if he was involved in half of the
terrorism incidents which the Israelis claim, his record is still a
formidable one. Some of the incidents in Mughniyeh's life, according
to the Israeli defence expert:
1983: Suicide bombing at American Embassy, Beirut. At least 63 killed.
Bombing of US Marine and French paratroop barracks, Beirut. More than
300 killed. Bombing, with the Iranian-backed, anti-Iraqi ad-Dawa
Islami (Islamic Call), of US and French Embassies and other targets in
Kuwait, killing five people.
1984: Bombing of US Embassy Annexe, Beirut. Fourteen killed, at least
30 wounded. Seventeen men, including Mughniyeh's brother-in-law and
cousin, arrested and convicted. A wave of terrorist attacks followed.
Hijack of Kuwait Airways airliner. Kidnap of chief of CIA office in
Beirut.
1985: Unsuccessful attempt to kill the amir of Kuwait. Hijack of TWA
airliner. Bomb blast supposedly arranged by Mossad and CIA kills
Mughniyeh's brother.
1988: Kuwait Airways airliner hijacked.
1992: Israeli embassy in Argentina blown up, killing 92 people.
1994: Mughniyeh's second brother, Fuad, killed in bomb blast as
revenge for Buenos Aires explosion. Bomb intended to be taken aboard
El Al airliner detonated prematurely.
2000: Kidnap of three Israeli soldiers.
As the Palestinian uprising entered its second month, Israeli and
European security services are waiting for a bomb attack in Europe.
"We've received all the indications that Mughniyeh's apparatus is
planning a devastating hit in Europe," says an Israeli officer who has
followed Mughniyeh for years. As a result the Israelis, in
co-operation with European security services, have increased security
around synagogues, embassies, schools and other Jewish targets in
Europe.

Meanwhile, other unconfirmed reports are circulating in Tel Aviv. One
is an Israeli claim that Iraq is training young Palestinians to be
combatants in the uprising on the West Bank against Israel and
offering money for "martyrs". Some 2,000 Iraqi volunteers are ready to
join them. The man in charge, President Saddam Hussein's son Qusai,
wants to receive Palestinian intelligence in return for aid, or so it
is said. Another well placed source said the story was "plausible" but
could not be proved.

A third report that worries the Israelis is over the release of
convicts from Palestinian jails. They have been convicted of murder,
rape, grievous bodily harm and other serious offences yet some have
been given weapons and all of them have been told to join the
intifada.


             *******************************************




                                      19 September 2001
       Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view

 Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is
the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade
Center and the Pentagon in Washington. Directing the mission, Aman
officers believe, were two of the world’s foremost terrorist
masterminds: the Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special overseas
operations for Hizbullah, and the Egyptian Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri,
senior member of Al-Qaeda and possible successor of the ailing Osama
Bin Laden.

The two men have not been seen for some time. Mughniyeh is probably
the world’s most wanted outlaw. Unconfirmed reports in Beirut say he
has undergone plastic surgery and is unrecognisable. Zawahiri is
thought to be based in Egypt. He could be Bin Laden’s chief
representative outside Afghanistan.

The Iraqis, who for several years paid smaller groups to do their
dirty work, were quick to discover the advantages of Al-Qaeda. The
Israeli sources claim that for the past two years Iraqi intelligence
officers were shuttling between Baghdad and Afghanistan, meeting with
Ayman Al Zawahiri. According to the sources, one of the Iraqi
intelligence officers, Salah Suleiman, was captured last October by
the Pakistanis near the border with Afghanistan. The Iraqis are also
reported to have established strong ties with Imad Mughniyeh.

"We’ve only got scraps of information, not the full picture," admits
one intelligence source, "but it was good enough for us to send a
warning six weeks ago to our allies that an unprecedented massive
terror attack was expected. One of our indications suggested that Imad
Mughniyeh met with some of his dormant agents on secret trips to
Germany. We believe that the operational brains behind the New-York
attack were Mughniyeh and Zawahiri, who were probably financed and got
some logistical support from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (SSO)."

Mughniyeh was the only one believed to have tried it before. On April
12th 1997, he was reported to be only two hours away from achieving
the highest goal of any terrorist organisation (until last week):
blowing up an Israeli El-Al airliner above Tel Aviv. A man carrying a
forged British passport with the name Andrew Jonathan Neumann was in a
Jerusalem hotel preparing a bomb he was supposed to take on board an
El-Al flight leaving Israel, when it accidentally went off. Andrew
Jonathan Neumann was very badly injured but strong enough to reveal
later to the Israelis that he was not British but Lebanese, and that
his operation was supposed to be a special "gift" to Israel from Imad
Mughniyeh.

‘A psychopath’

"Bin Laden is a schoolboy in comparison with Mughniyeh," says an
Israeli who knows Mughniyeh . "The guy is a genius, someone who
refined the art of terrorism to its utmost level. We studied him and
reached the conclusion that he is a clinical psychopath motivated by
uncontrollable psychological reasons, which we have given up trying to
understand. The killing of his two brothers by the Americans only
inflamed his strong motivation."

Experts on Iraq and Saddam Hussein also believe that Iraq was the
state behind the two terror masterminds. "In recent months, there was
a change, and Iraq decided to get into the terror business. On July
7th, they tried for the first time to send a suicide bomber, trained
in Baghdad, to blow up Tel Aviv airport (Foreign Report No. 2651)."

Our sources believe that it will be very difficult to get to the
bottom of this unprecedented terror operation. However, they believe
the chief of the Iraqi SSO is Qusai Hussein, the dictator’s son, and
his organisation is the most likely to have been involved.

Mughniyeh, 48, is a "sick man", says an intelligence officer who was
in charge of his file. He is considered by Western intelligence
agencies as the most dangerous active terrorist today. He is wanted by
several governments and the Americans have put a $2m reward on his
head.

It was the assassination of one man in March 1984 that is said to have
made Mughniyeh the CIA’s most wanted terrorist. Mughniyeh allegedly
kidnapped the head of the CIA station in Beirut, William Buckley. The
kidnapping triggered what later became known as ‘Irangate’, when the
Americans tried to exchange Buckley (and others) with arms for Iran.
However, the attempt ended in a fiasco. By one unconfirmed account,
Mughniyeh tortured and killed Buckley with his own hands.

A year later, in a combined CIA/Mossad operation, a powerful car bomb
went off at the entrance to the house of Hizbullah’s spiritual leader,
Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. Seventy-five people were killed.
One of them was his brother. Hunted by the CIA and the Mossad,
Mughniyeh hid in Iran.

In February 1992, Israeli helicopter gunships attacked the convoy of
the then head of Hizbullah, Sheikh Abas Musawi, in South Lebanon.
Musawi, his wife and children were killed and the revenge attack
followed a month later. According to press reports, Mughniyeh was
called back into action and, in a well-planned and devastating attack,
his people blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina. The building was
demolished and 92 were killed. Only last year, after a long
investigation, did Argentina issue a warrant for Mughniyeh’s arrest.

The reprisal for the attack in Argentina came in December 1994, when a
car bomb went off in a southern Shi’ite suburb of Beirut. Four people
were killed. One of them was called Mughniyeh, but to the deep
disappointment of those Israelis who planted the bomb it was the wrong
one. Mughniyeh’s life was saved, but his other brother Fuad was
killed. Mughniyeh waited for his opportunity for revenge.

Our Israeli sources claim to see Mughniyeh’s signature on the wreckage
in New York and Washington. How to counter this kind of terrorism? "To
fight these bastards you don’t need a military attack," said an
experienced Israeli commando officer. "You only need to adopt Israel’s
assassination policy."

------------------
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