Levitt Letter Extra News

By Peter Brookes
www.frontpagemagazine.com

Masterfully pitting the East versus the West, Iran is once again likely to slip the noose over its nuclear (weapons) program — avoiding a vote of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors, meeting in emergency session in Vienna, to refer the Iran case to the U.N. Security Council.

It really should come as no surprise.

Why this failure of the best efforts of the United States and the European Union to heel Iran’s atomic aspirations? Tehran is countering via increasingly cozy relationships with China, Russia and India.

And why are Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi dragging their feet on dealing decisively with Iran’s nuclear program? Raw self-interest.

Take China: Now perhaps the world’s No. 4 economy, China is also the No. 2 energy consumer — scouring the globe for new energy sources to stoke a decade of double-digit economic growth. And Iran is now China’s third-largest oil supplier.

Moreover, China has invested nearly $100 billion in developing Iranian oil/gas fields. By some estimates, Iran will provide China with over 250 million tons of natural gas and 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day over the next 30 years.

Plus, Iran buys Chinese conventional weapons, including anti-ship cruise missiles and anti-tank missiles — and technology and equipment for WMDs and ballistic missiles, such as missile control/guidance systems, chemical-weapon precursors and nuclear materials and technology.

Iran is also a commercial cash cow for China. Chinese firms are building Tehran’s billion-dollar subway system. And Beijing plans to invest over $200 million to help finance a new highway connecting Tehran to the Caspian Sea coast; other projects are in the works.

And, strategically speaking, Beijing certainly doesn’t mind keeping the United States off balance in the Middle East with a nuclear-armed Iran (plus Iraq, Afghanistan and war on terror) while the People’s Republic increases its influence in Asia, Africa and even Latin America.

Russia is also heavily vested in Iran. Moscow is trying to broker a self-serving deal to supply and reprocess uranium for Iranian reactors, ostensibly preventing Tehran from turning nuke fuel into bomb material. Iran isn’t sold on it yet; the next round of talks is Feb. 16.

Russia has already built a $1 billion nuclear reactor for Iran at Bushehr, and Tehran has expressed interest in two to three more reactors. Actually, it’s considering building more than 100 nuclear reactors in the years ahead. Russia unquestionably wants a cut of that fat action…

A security relationship exists, too. In December — to our horror — Russia agreed to sell Iran $1 billion in arms, including $700 million worth of advanced surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), the TOR-M1.

Each TOR unit is capable of tracking 48 bogies and firing at two targets at the same time. The SAMs pose a deadly threat to aircraft involved in any strike against the tens of Iranian nuclear-related targets, including the high-value sites at Bushehr, Natanz, Arak and Isfahan.

Reportedly, Moscow and Tehran have also discussed the sale of billions of dollars of other weapons, including more diesel submarines, air-defense systems and anti-ship missiles — and fighters, ground-to-ground missiles and armored infantry vehicles.

India has its own stake in the Iranian nuclear standoff: Delhi’s developing economy also craves access to world energy supplies. Iran and India, along with Pakistan, have agreed to build a $7 billion pipeline to move Iranian natural gas to India via Pakistan.

The pipeline would ease India’s energy crunch by delivering affordable gas, while providing impoverished Pakistan with much-needed transit-fee income. The joint project might improve always testy Indo-Pakistani relations, too.

While India, along with 21 others, voted last September in favor of referring Iran from the IAEA to the UNSC, Delhi’s stance has softened. (Abetting Iran’s atomic ambitions may come with a high price, such as scuttling congressional support for a pending U.S.-India civilian-nuclear-cooperation pact — and forget about gaining a permanent Security Council seat….)

Also working against U.S.-E.U. efforts is the fact that an IAEA report on Iranian cooperation with IAEA inspectors isn’t due before March. This — and the pending Russian deal — make decisive IAEA action improbable.

On the merits, this should (finally!) be the time for referring Iran to the Security Council for tougher measures such as punitive economic sanctions. But the diplomatic stars may not yet be quite aligned in our favor.

Worse: The same self-serving national interests make it less likely that Beijing/Moscow/Delhi will support action when and if we go to the mat at the United Nations over Iran.

www.alertnet.org
By Dan Williams

A pocketful of receipts helped blow the lid off Israel’s most notorious intelligence bungle.

It was in 1973, after spies dispatched to Norway killed a waiter mistaken for the Palestinian mastermind of a raid on the previous year’s Munich Olympics where 11 Israeli athletes died.

The assassins might have gotten away, except that one of them was not a trained member of Israel’s spy agency Mossad but a Danish-born volunteer brought aboard for his language skills.

Hoping to recoup expenses, he had kept his receipts. Once detained by Norwegian police, he provided a paper trail that led to the capture and prosecution for murder of the rest of the team.

So when director Steven Spielberg, in his new film on the post-Munich reprisals, showed a Mossad case officer ordering agents to hoard receipts while in deep cover abroad, eyebrows were raised among veterans of the intelligence service.

“It’s an absurd version of the modus operandi,” former field agent Gad Shimron said when asked about the thriller “Munich.”

“Agents are expected to account for their expenses, but not if it means incurring the risk of discovery. They can just as easily declare their expenses from memory when they return home, and it’s accepted on trust,” he told Reuters.

That is just one of a list of complaints made about “Munich” by those with direct knowledge of the Israeli reprisal campaign.

Spielberg’s version paints a grim picture of what befell five men sent by Israel to track and kill members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) blamed for the Olympics raid.

The film is based on “Vengeance,” a 1984 book purporting to chronicle the confessions of an assassin who broke ranks in protest at Israel’s two-fisted tactics. It portrays a hit-team unleashed on Europe and the Middle East with little supervision, torn by self-doubt and on the run from Palestinian gunmen.

Spielberg was careful to add the disclaimer that the film was merely “inspired” by real events, but many Israelis say they are disappointed in the Hollywood director famed for his fastidiously researched Holocaust epic “Schindler’s List.”

“I think it is a tragedy that a person of the stature of Steven Spielberg, who has made such fantastic films, should have based this film on a book that is a falsehood,” said David Kimche, a senior Mossad official in the 1970s.

CHOSEN BY GOLDA?

“Munich” shows the Olympic attack, followed by another established fact: Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir instructing Mossad to track down and kill the Palestinians held responsible.

In the film, Meir goes further, personally recruiting the hero, Avner, to lead the team. Shimron said this was unheard of.

“I know it’s tempting to see Golda as a sort of Zionist version of ‘M’ from the James Bond films, but she had nothing to do with Mossad personnel,” he said.

Spielberg shows a hit-team isolated in the field for months, and including a forger and bomb-maker so it can function alone, but Mossad veterans say the reprisals, like all top-priority missions, were executed by a large number of agents, in stages.

First, case officers posted abroad were told to look out for Palestinians on the hit-list. Information came from a variety of sources, the most important being paid PLO informers; the Munich raid was carried out by Black September, a PLO splinter group.

Once the targets were found, specialized agents went through elaborate practice runs in Israel to prepare the assassinations.

“We would set up ‘models,’ by choosing areas in Israel that resembled the place where the person in question would be hit. Then we would drill to make sure the mission went without a hitch,” said a retired operative on condition of anonymity.

“The hit-teams were assembled and sent out on an ad hoc basis. Everything was in place for them, so they never spent more than a few days — or, at most, weeks — in the field. They were monitored and withdrawn as soon as each mission was over.”

The assassins in “Munich” are shown as occasionally inept, especially when it comes to planting novel booby-trap bombs.

But Shimron noted that by the 1970s Mossad had perfected this tactic. As for having a forger, Shimron doubted this would be considered for such short-term missions as no forger would be able to produce high-quality documents under such conditions.

Shimron was more damning of the all-male makeup of the team. “It’s standard practice to include female agents in such operations,” he said. “Anyone who has been on a stakeout knows that having a lady on hand helps you avoid being spotted.”

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DOUBT

Much of the criticism from Israelis in the know focuses on the film’s depiction of the moral debates that burden the team.

A former Israeli special forces officer who took part in a Mossad assassination in the 1980s called this fanciful.

“Look, we all did mandatory military service, we all had combat experience, and we all accepted the necessity of hitting out at our enemies. Israel is a country at war,” he said.

“So you go, you do the job, and you hope you’ll be back in time to eat breakfast with your kids and take them to school.”

Shimron said Mossad provides in-house psychologists to help any agents who develop doubts about their work.

“Munich” also shows three assassins being killed. Other accounts do not mention this, although at the time the PLO did strike at Mossad case officers permanently stationed in Europe.

Michael Bar-Zohar, who wrote an authorized history of the operations, said two officers were shot in Madrid and Brussels.

“But as for Black September, it was wiped off the map for months,” he told Israel Radio.

Bar-Zohar noted Spielberg shows the hit-team hunting 11 Palestinians, and said this built an overly simplistic moral symmetry with the number of Israeli athletes killed in Munich.

Historians say the final Palestinian death toll may have reached as high as 18.  In 1981, Black September mastermind Mohammed Daoud survived a shooting attack at a Warsaw hotel. In 1992, PLO official Atef Bseiso was shot dead in Paris.

Israel neither claimed nor denied responsibility for those operations, but Mossad veterans said that prior to 1993 there was no reason for the post-Munich reprisals to be called off.

That year, Israel and the Palestinians signed an interim peace deal in Oslo, near the site of the botched 1973 hit.

“We decided then that as long as they are not killing us, we would not kill them,” said the retired senior operative.