WarSclerotic

DEBKA.

Iran is building the Palestinian Hamas a network of fortified bunkers in Gaza superior to those provided its Lebanese surrogate Hizballah.
Experts of Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the engineering arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards-IRGC, are reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military and intelligence sources to be on the spot in recent weeks, supervising the rapid construction of a system of fortifications that crisscrosses the entire 360- square kilometer-area of the Gaza Strip – edge to edge and wholly underground.
Military experts say nothing as advanced as this system has ever before been seen in the Middle East. Some Western watchers judge it superior in terms of military conception to the fortifications Khatam an-Anbiya built for Hizballah in 2007 and 2008 to repair the ravages of its 2006 war on Israel.
The Iranian builders appear to be in a hurry to get the Gaza bunker network up and running before a new round of full-scale fighting erupts between the Israel Defense Forces -IDF and Hamas. This is borne out by their heavy investment in terms of time and money (an estimated $ 1billion) – and two additional features:
First, Gen. Rostam Qasemi, Khatam al-Anbiya commander, has consigned his top officers to supervising the Gaza construction project. These officers are rarely assigned jobs outside Iran. Their expertise is normally reserved for their own country’s military and nuclear installations. An IRGC decision to send them to Gaza means that Tehran attaches high strategic importance to the Palestinian Hamas being provided with the best possible fortifications – as fast as possible.
Second, the tempo of construction is even more unusual for the Middle East and unprecedented in Gaza. The work is proceeding nonstop around the clock, seven days a week.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources have discerned five fortified layers in the evolving project:
Ten self-sufficient command centers for Hamas brigades
1. Ten large underground command centers are going up the length of Gaza – 41 kilometers (25 miles) tip to tip – from the Ashkelon dunes in the north to the Gaza-Israel-Egyptian border intersection in the south. These underground centers will be furnished with large stores of munitions, water, food and medical supplies as well as clinics and emergency treatment facilities. Each will house one of the brigade commanders and staff of the Hamas military wing, Izz-e-din al-Qassam.
According to our sources, the command centers are taking shape under Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, Jabaliya, Gaza City, and the central Gaza Strip refugee camps at Nusrayat, Bureij, Mu’aja and Dir al Balah.
Two more command centers are being built beneath the southern towns of Khan Younis and Rafah on the Egyptian-Sinai border.
Each of these facilities is designed to enable Hamas brigades to fight Israeli forces independent of each other. They will also be self-sufficient in ammunition. For the IDF to attain control of the northern Gaza Strip, for instance, the troops would have to beat down all the Hamas command centers under their feet one by one.
2. All ten command centers will be linked to hundreds of scattered fortified positions – also underground – through two tunnel systems.
One will accommodate the rapid transfer of forces and ammo from one point to another in the area under a particular command. A second, equipped with fiber optics, will provide Hamas commanders with continuous communications links in combat conditions.
During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2009, the Hamas commanders and top staff were cut off from outside contact and remained in the dark about what was happening in the battlefield.
Fellow extremists defy Hamas’ order to hold their fire
3. A separate defensive line unconnected to the brigade command centers will cut across central Gaza from east to west – altogether six kilometers from the Kissufim area in the east (frequent scene of clashes between IDF patrols and different Palestinian organizations) to Tel al-Qatifa on the Mediterranean coast.
This line is designed to prevent Israel forces from cutting northern Gaza from the south and blocking the main coastal highway which links the two halves of the enclave and runs from the northern border (opposite Israeli Zikkim) to the southern town of Rafah, which is divided between Palestinian Gaza and Egyptian Sinai.
4. Underground bunkers are being built around each of the 10 command centers and the defense line, alongside which open firing positions will be situated for surface-to-surface, anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles.
5. Fortified shore outposts will defend the Gaza coastline against Israeli naval attack and be equipped with shore-to-ship missiles for striking Israeli warships.
So as not to impede this vast enterprise, Hamas’ Gaza leaders are anxious to defer a military showdown with Israel until they are ready. Tuesday, January 11, Hamas’ Mahmoud A-Zahar tried ordering fellow terrorist organizations, the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to stop shooting at Israeli civilian and military targets, excepting only mortar fire against the Israeli troops advancing past the Gaza border. On no account must Israel be given a pretext for an invasion until the new fortifications are all in place, he said.
Neither organization nor the smaller groups united under the Al Qaeda-linked Jalalat roof organization showed the slightest willingness to heed him, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources report. They all vowed to keep up their cross-border missiles and mortar fire, confident they could get away with defying the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip because they are backed from Tehran.
Iran enlists Al Qaeda to keep IDF busy in Gaza and away from Lebanon
In fact, the Jihad Islami was told not only to step up its attacks on Israel but to pass missiles and mortar shells round to all the Palestinian organizations willing to join in the assaults, even though the Israeli Air Force this week began bombarding the new fortifications, singling out the command centers under Iranian construction.
According to one theory making the rounds in Jerusalem and IDF headquarters Iran is not averse to heightened clashes around the Gaza Strip – even at the cost of an IDF campaign – if they keep Israeli troops pinned down in the Gaza sector and out of the Lebanese crisis.
(See separate article in this issue on Lebanon.)
A scarcely noticed development this week finally settled the two-year debate among intelligence experts in the US, Israel and its military over whether certain Palestinian radical groups in the Gaza Strip may be classified as linked to al Qaeda or not. The prevailing view in Washington and Jerusalem was that no such link had been proven.
But on Saturday, January 8, after IDF combat helicopters attacked a mortar-firing unit and wounded some of its members, Israeli field intelligence identified some the wounded as Yemenite fighters belonging to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula-AQAP, whom Iran had smuggled into the Gaza Strip via Sudan and Egyptian Sinai. The discovery quietly set of alarm bells in Washington and Jerusalem.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s counterterrorism sources report that an unknown number of Yemenite AQAP fighters have established a presence in the Gaza Strip in partnership with a small Palestinian organization called the Monotheism and Jihad Group, which has headquarters in Gaza City.
In the past two weeks, this group has launched against Israel 10 missiles supplied by the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad. This is further proof, in any were needed after Afghanistan and Iraq that radical Shiite Iran is perfectly willing to collaborate with Sunni Al Qaeda ad hoc, when it comes to fighting America or Israel.
Radical Islamist groups in the Gaza Strip have established operational ties with al Qaeda, in response to which the AQAP dispatched fighting strength to boost their campaigns of terror on the borders of Israel and Egypt.

DEBKA.

Tamir Pardo

Tehran believes it can turn the tables on Israel’s spy agencies, using the transition of Mossad directors from Meir Dagan to Tamir Pardo to catch the new man off-balance.
Iran’s intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi boasted Tuesday, Jan. 11, that his agents had penetrated several of the Mossad networks operating inside Iran and among several of its neighbors. Gone were the days, he said, when Israel’s clandestine agents and their Iranian hirelings enjoyed free rein in Iran as they did under Dagan.
He was giving Pardo due warning, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence and Iranian sources report, that he had ratcheted up the Iranian-Israeli intelligence contest and was taking aim at Mossad footholds among the Iran’s neighbors in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus, the Caspian region and Central Asia.
Moslehi told a news conference in Tehran that while Israel-linked networks had been set up among Iran’s neighbors, “we… have created intelligence bases next to them through which we could strike heavy blows on [Israel intelligence].”
Tehran’s latest offensive was sparked by a number of factors:
Iranian nuclear physicist’s murder was never solved
One: An entire year went by after nuclear physicist Prof. Massoud Ali Mohammadi was murdered in Tehran without Iranian law enforcement laying hands on the culprits. Public pressure had been building up and so, Tuesday, June 11, the day before the first anniversary of the attack, was chosen for the intelligence minister to claim a breakthrough to a solution for a slaying that had stunned the regime and the country.
Mohammadi’s car was booby-trapped outside his home by two helmeted motorcyclists and blew up when he took his seat. Iran’s leaders never imagined that anyone knew the professor, officially described as a quantum field theorist and distinguished professor of elementary particle physics at the University of Tehran’s Department of Physics, was also a head of Iran’s military nuclear program. Officials were at a loss to explain to the public how his killers, assumed to be Mossad, knew his real job and his private address. They needed to produce answers – not least to calm the thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians employed in the program and their families, who have been living in fear of the Mossad’s long arm ever since the assassination.
This pressure became acute when a second nuclear physicist, Prof. Majid Shahriari was killed and another, Prof. Majid Fereidoun Abbasi, was injured in coordinated attacks in Tehran on November 29, 2010.
Prof. Shahriari was in charge of the nuclear program’s secret code systems and Prof. Abbasi, director of centrifuges at Natanz. Both were faculty members of Shahid Beheshti Space University in Tehran, a center of nuclear research.
A new mainstay for Iranian intelligence – the Turkish MIT secret service
Two: Iran had finally found In the Turkish intelligence agency, the MIT, a strong collaborator for its clandestine war against Israel. Its intelligence chiefs believe the partnership has grown solid enough for them to start relying on the MIT – and especially on its pro-Iranian director, Hakan Fidan – for support in their campaign against Mossad.
On August 1, 2010, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that Ankara and Tehran were deepening their intelligence ties. He said: “The nomination in recent weeks of a new chief of the Turkish secret services who is a supporter of Iran worries us.”
This warning, which was addressed to Washington, fell on deaf ears at the time.
Five months later, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu are preparing to bolster Turkey’s position in Iraq according to joint plans hatched by Turkish MIT chief Fidan and Iranian intelligence minister Moslehi.
Washington was finally stirred into pressing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to cancel their anticipated visits. And so, Ankara announced officially on Tuesday, Jan. 11, that Davutogul’s visit to Iraq scheduled for Jan. 10-11 was postponed – but only for now. It is expected to take place in the next couple of weeks, with Erdogan arriving in Baghdad soon after his foreign minister.
This slight setback was not enough to dent the Iranian leadership’s high expectations of Turkey’s assistance in the intelligence war against the Israeli Mossad in countries like Qatar, Azarbaian, Turkmenistan, Armenia and others – not least because Ankara and Tehran share the same interest in cutting down Israeli influence in those places.
A confident Iran would scare its enemies into abandoning covert warfare
The intelligence minister therefore felt confident enough to threaten regional and neighboring countries at his press conference Tuesday for the first time that their interaction with Israel and any facility they provide the Zionist regime would be judged hostile to the region and the Islamic Republic.
Apparently referring to electronic tracking stations used to monitor military and nuclear activity in Iran, Moslehi stated those facilities would be seen as a legitimate target for Iran’s “heavy blows.”
Confidence and the undermining thereof is integral to Iran’s latest intelligence-oriented campaign against its foes, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence and Iranian sources report.
Iran’s intelligence minister Moslehi believes that if the Mossad’s Tarmir Pardo, CIA Director Leon Panetta and the British MI6 chief John Sawers are confronted head-on with a new and more aggressive Iranian intelligence, backed by the Turkish, Syrian and Hizballah secret services, they will lose confidence in Meir Dagan’s tactics, ditch them and re-evaluate their covert plans of operation against Iran.
Ahead in the coming days or even weeks, are therefore more TV interviews with “Zionist spies” freely describing their “terrorist training” and role in the assassination of Prof. Mohammadi – and other apparent crackdowns.
Iranian intelligence has more than one reason for highlighting these charges of Israeli espionage.
Using ties with Israel to smash Iranian opposition
1. Moslehi’s minions are drawing up indictments for the trials of its leaders Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mahdi Karroubi framing them for collaboration with Israel and the West – an extreme charge subject to the severest penalties which the regime hopes will finally discredit and eradicate Iran’s opposition Green Movement.
Supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei opened that door when he charged in a speech last week that last July’s street demonstrations in Tehran against the alleged rigging of the presidential election were organized by Israel and the west and their leaders – Moussavi and Karroubi – had collaborated with the enemy.
2. Deterrence. The regime’s opponents at home are put on notice they had better refrain from collaborating with the regime’s enemies and foreign elements on pain of humiliating exposure – like Majid Jamali who was put on television Tuesday to admit he took part in murdering Prof, Mohammadi on behalf of Israel’s spy service – followed by extreme penalties.
3. Intimidating Arab and Muslim governments and nationals into abandoning ties of cooperation with Israel.
4. Making an example of the Israeli Mossad for the benefit of Western governments. They are advised to bear in mind that Israel does not stand in the dock alone on charges of espionage, subversion and assassination. The US and Britain are frequently mentioned too as partners in the foreign intelligence conspiracy against the Islamic Republic of Iran and could experience the same roughshod treatment.

DEBKA.

Barack Obama and Saad Hariri

President Barack Obama and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have thrown all their weight into propping up Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and are backing to the hilt the international tribunal-STL probing the 2005 assassination of his father, the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Transforming Lebanon into the primary arena of confrontation between the US and Iran represents a particularly bizarre strategic decision on the part of the American president.
Until the Lebanese crisis erupted this week, the current US administration, like its predecessor under George W. Bush, took care to avoid tangling directly with Iran on any front, including Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf – barring covert operations and sanctions. Suddenly, a week before nuclear negotiations begin in Istanbul (Jan. 21-22) between the Six Powers and Iran, the Obama administration changed course.
His decision is hard to explain in the light of America’s ill-fated Lebanese ventures in the past.
Twenty-eight years ago, in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon in pursuit of Palestinian terrorists, President Ronald Reagan forced the IDF to withdraw from Beirut for fear that the Arab and Muslim world not tolerate Israel’s occupation of an Arab capital. American and French marines were brought in within the framework of the Multinational Force in Lebanon-MNF to take the place of Israeli troops.
Past ill-fated US ventures in Lebanon
But less than 18 months later, the US Marine units shook Lebanese soil off their boots on Feb. 26, 1984 after two terrible terror attacks, in both of which Iran, Syria and Hizballah took a hand: the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in which 19 top CIA agents in the Middle East and Near East lost their lives, and the blasting of US and French Marine headquarters which left 241 American troops dead – 220 of them Marines.
That was the deadliest single attack to take place against Americans overseas after World War II.
After singeing their fingers so badly, US administrations fought shy of getting involved in Lebanon, which had always proved to be one of the most unpredictable countries in a volatile region.
Much later, in 2005, right after the shock of the Hariri assassination, the second President Bush briefly forced Syrian President Bashar Assad to cut Lebanon loose, remove his troops from Lebanon and take his meddling hands out of Beirut. Within a short time, Syria was back through the back door.
In 2006, when Washington pressed Israel to counter Syrian influence by waging war on Hizballah for which it was unprepared in response to a grave provocation, the contest ended in a flop with grave repercussions for the US and Israel: The IDF performed inadequately and failed to defeat Hizballah, a disadvantage on which Tehran and Damascus subsequently capitalized for transforming the small Shiite organization over the years into one of the most powerful and effective military forces in the Middle East.
Hizballah now commands 50,000 rockets, an arsenal unmatched by any power in the Middle East, including the US military.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military and intelligence sources report that in deciding to play the Lebanese card against Iran, the Obama administration is counting on four advantages:
The Hariri Tribunal to drive a wedge between Tehran and Hizballah
1. The expected Special Lebanese Tribunal indictments of Hizballah officials for the Hariri assassination five years ago, is one. President Obama is preparing to press on with his drive against Hizballah and has charted a series of moves and counter-moves.
Should the Iranian-backed Shiite organization’s attempt to establish an alternative government in place of the Hariri administration and have it pronounce the SLT – and hence its indictments – invalid, the US will counter by arranging to have the tribunal try Hizballah defendants in abstentia.
Tehran and Hizballah will then have to choose between aggravating their political or military disruptions or accepting growing international isolation. (See DEBKA-Net-Weekly 475 of Dec. 24, 2010: A New Option for UN Hariri Tribunal-US Brainchild: Trial in Absentia for Hizballah Leaders).
The Obama administration is consistent in that it is applying to Lebanon the same rationale of international sanctions and isolation it pursues for bringing Iran’s nuclear program to a halt. This means placing Hizballah, Iran’s military arm in the eastern Mediterranean under international pressure, a ploy that may work because many Muslim countries and some other powers like Brazil and India support the UN and the international Lebanese Tribunal’s mission.
In this way, Washington hopes to drive a wedge between Tehran and its Lebanese proxy by non-military tactics, an objective which a direct confrontation with Tehran was unable to achieve.
US military pressure on Lebanon
2. President Obama is adding an extra layer of muscle to the US Sixth Fleet cruising the eastern Mediterranean. This week, he dispatched to Lebanese waters the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and its Strike Group of five warships – altogether 6,000 sailors and marines with 80 fighter-bombers on deck, together with the USS Bainbridge missile destroyer.

3. Israel’s recovered military prowess. The IDF has staged several war games practicing both strikes against Iranian military compounds and responses to devastating Hizballah assaults on Israel’s armed forces. Simulated too was a three-front war fought against Syrian units coming to Hizballah’s aid and Palestinian organizations attacking from Gaza.
4. The pro-Western forces in Lebanon united in Lebanon’s ruling March 14 bloc headed by Prime Minister Hariri are seen in Washington as an American ace in Beirut. The Obama administration must try and calculate in advance the strategic advantages versus the risks of pitting a pro-Western Christian-Sunni bloc against the Shiite Iran-Hizballah combination. Much depends on which of the two sides Sunni Muslim Damascus and Ankara chooses to back – or join.
The Iran-Hizballah combination’s three assets
A. Hizballah is native to Lebanon and very much in control of many parts of the country supported by a powerful militia and intelligence system. The supreme commander of its military force is not a local man but Iranian Revolutionary Guards General Hassan Madavi, who answers directly to the Al Qods Brigades chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani, supreme chief of Iran’s covert campaign against the US in Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan.
Since no Lebanese force, including the national army, is a match for Hizballah, Iran and its proxy face Obama’s challenge in Lebanon with a definite military and intelligence edge.
B. Iranian strategists believe American optimism regarding Syrian and Turkish behavior is misplaced. They see great advantage in Lebanon being surrounded by pro-Iranian, Sunni Muslim governments in Damascus and Ankara and are certain of their support. Tehran calculates that neither President Bashar Assad nor Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan will welcome large American air, naval and marine forces massing opposite their shores. They both worked hard to get US troops to leave Iraq and away from their eastern borders and will not be happy to see American ships foregathering to their west.
Therefore, Iran believes it can enlist the backing of Syria and Turkey against the American drive for influence in Lebanon.
Tehran believes rockets will stop Israel’s military in its tracks
C. The war planners in Tehran are confident that if Washington gives Israel the green light as it did in 2006 to mount an attack on Hizballah, Iran can stop that offensive in its tracks by an order to Hizballah to release thousands of rockets against Israel’s military command centers and main cities and instruct the Palestinians of Gaza to open a second front with hundreds of missiles.
Tel Aviv and its heavily-populated environs on the Mediterranean coast are within the range of both Hizballah and Hamas thanks to Iranian upgrades of their arsenals.
(See a separate item in this issue – Iran Builds Hamas Fortifications for War on Israel).
Tehran will be able to calibrate the levels of attack from both fronts by means of its military presence in Lebanon and the Gaza.
In short, the Obama administration by choosing Lebanon as its arena of confrontation with Iran will be starting out in a proxy game in which Revolutionary Iran is an old hand. Military and strategic planners in Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem will need strong nerves for a gambit that could last far into 2011 with Lebanon’s fate in the balance.
But if Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah succeeds in his effort to muster a parliamentary majority behind a new government which he heads, the contest between Washington and Tehran which the Obama administration planned will be resolved before it gets underway.