AN EVER-THICKENING PLOT
Zvi Bar’el
Ha’aretz
April 17 2009
Israel
This week a fierce war broke out between Egypt and Iran, after brewing
in the interrogation rooms of Egyptian intelligence officials for
at least five months. The ultimate decision about publicizing the
existence of a Hezbollah cell on Egyptian soil was made by Egyptian
intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who – after receiving the nod from
President Hosni Mubarak – was assisted by the minister of information
in making the news available to all government newspapers in Egypt.
The unofficial beginnings of this war date back to November 2008,
when a Lebanese citizen, Sami Shihab, 27, whose real name is Mohammed
Youssef Mansour, was arrested after entering Egypt with a false
passport, apparently through one of the tunnels that connects the Gaza
Strip with the Sinai peninsula. The Egyptians, who began a prolonged
investigation into Hezbollah’s activities in Egypt two years ago, were
waiting for him, after having received confessions from colleagues,
who said Mansour was their main operative and was supposed to fund
the rest of the network’s activities.
Mansour underwent intensive interrogation in the Egyptian intelligence
compound in Cairo for almost five months without revealing the
names of those who had instructed him to operate the espionage
cell. However, the name of Mohammed Kablan, the man in charge
of Hezbollah’s intelligence operations, did come up during the
interrogation; Kablan was active in Egypt from 2007 until the end of
2008, and some of Mansour’s dispatches were sent to him. According to
Egyptian reports, Mansour was a member of the department charged with
activities in the countries bordering on Israel, including Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt and Palestine. However, his exact status within the
department is not clear.
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Mansour received his directives via the Internet, while the money
earmarked for the cell’s activities – several tens of millions
of Egyptian pounds – was transferred via couriers entering Egypt
through official border crossings. The money was for purchase of
homes, businesses and land along the border between Gaza and Egypt,
in the vicinity of Rafah, from tunnels could be dug into the Strip.
According to Egyptian government sources, the members of the cell
also kept watch on the shipping traffic in the Suez Canal; they were
instructed to identify foreign ships flying their own countries’
flags. The Egyptian assessment is that Hezbollah planned at least one
large-scale terrorist attack against Western targets on Egyptian soil;
they suspect that the goal was to attack a ship passing through the
Suez Canal, which would reduce the amount of traffic in the waterway
and hit the Egyptian economy. Reports this week said the members of
the cell were also instructed to collect information about Israeli
tourist haunts in Sinai, with a view to attacking them.
Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah knew about Mansour’s arrest
and was also aware of the arrest of 49 other operatives belonging to
his group, including some Egyptian Shi’ites suspected of belonging
to the network. But, Egyptian sources say their intelligence officers
forced Mansour to continue communicating with his superiors as though
everything was business as usual – which is apparently why it took
so long for the arrests to be publicized. But now that most of those
involved, at least inside Egypt, are known, there is no longer any
reason to withhold publication, especially in view of the rising
tension between Cairo and Hezbollah following January’s Operation
Cast Lead in Gaza.
The Egyptian reports did not make any obvious mention of the
connections between the espionage ring and Hamas, even though it was
clear that the network’s objective was to smuggle weapons, missiles
and sophisticated sabotage materials into the Strip. Hamas announced
this week, in a relatively low-key way, that it knew nothing about
the network’s activities. Why is Egypt not pointing an accusatory
finger at Hamas, instead emphasizing the role of Hezbollah and
Iran? The answer apparently lies in Cairo’s efforts to secure inter-
Palestinian reconciliation: Egypt wants to maintain its status as an
honest broker in talks between Fatah and Hamas, which would become
impossible should Hamas be implicated in the network’s activities.
On the other hand, Hezbollah and Iran have become Egyptian
targets. Nasrallah’s vilification of Mubarak during the 2006 Second
Lebanon War and the way he belittled Egyptian efforts to secure
Lebanese reconciliation, as well as his preference for Qatar over
Egypt – all played a role in igniting the first public crisis between
Cairo and Hezbollah. During the military operation in the Strip,
Nasrallah accused Egypt of collaborating with Israel by placing Gaza
under siege and even went so far as to call on Egyptians to overthrow
their government.
If Nasrallah is the target from an intelligence and legal point of
view, with Cairo now mulling over the idea of indicting the Hezbollah
leader in absentia, the political target is Iran, which uses Hezbollah
to suit its own purposes in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen. In
exposing the Hezbollah cell, Egypt wants to focus all responsibility
on Iran.
The timing here is not coincidental. Now, while the U.S. is beginning
to openly court Tehran, with President Barack Obama seeing it as
a potential partner in solving regional problems – from Iraq and
Afghanistan, through Lebanon and even Palestine – the time has come
to expose Iran’s plotting for terrorist activities.
Egypt has now become an overt enemy of both Iran and Hezbollah, and
like Israel, Cairo, too, fears a reprisal action by Hezbollah. An
Egyptian government source told Haaretz that there is now a danger
that there will be an "Egyptian Gilad Shalit" in addition to the
abducted Israeli soldier.
"This is an organization that knows no boundaries, in every
respect," wrote Tareq al-Hamid, the editor of the Saudi Arabian
newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat. "Nasrallah is like Osama bin Laden,"
he continued. "He knows no limits and obeys no laws. His people
act like dormant cells and just like al-Qaida activists went to the
United States, so Hezbollah activists will go to Egypt." The question
is whether this affair will also have an effect on the emerging ties
between Washington and Tehran.
Post-nuclear phase?
Iran is in no hurry to rush things. "We will examine Obama’s
declarations closely," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said
this week. "Negotiations are possible on the basis of mutual respect
and estimation," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clarified. And when
exactly will this happen? "When the U.S. proves that it is changing
its policy and does not merely make do with declarations," the supreme
religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared.
Ahmadinejad informed the Iranian nation that of the 50,000 centrifuges
scheduled to be installed within the next five years, 7,000 were
in place and "the nuclear issue is a closed matter." Mottaki, for
his part, coined a new phrase: "We are already in the post-nuclear
phase." Iran will continue to develop its nuclear technology and the
dialogue with the U.S. will be postponed until after the presidential
elections, scheduled for June 12.
If Ahmadinejad was worried that the dialogue with Washington would
turn into a central issue in the upcoming elections, Obama put that
fear at rest. It seems that the debate in the U.S. administration
over whether to wait for official election results before proposing
new gestures to Iran, or whether to announce the new policy at an
earlier stage has already been decided.
Dennis Ross, the U.S. State Department official tasked with Iran,
has already prepared a detailed policy report. He believes America’s
guidelines should rest on the assumption that Ahmadinejad will be
elected to another term, which is why there is no point in delaying
the start of the new policy. But Ross, who is opposed to a dialogue,
was forced to reconcile himself to Obama’s desire to formulate a new
policy toward Iran. In an effort to maintain certain aspects of the
Bush administration’s conservative policy, he says the dialogue must
be of limited duration and should be accompanied by the threat of
using a heavy hand.
The substantive change in the American approach lies not merely
in the offer to conduct a direct dialogue with Tehran, in which
Under-Secretary of State William Burns would participate, but in
promoting two principles that directly contradict those espoused by
the Bush administration: refraining from posing preconditions for a
dialogue and recognizing Iran’s sovereign right to develop nuclear
technology for peaceful purposes. In this way, Obama has removed the
main obstacle to an active dialogue with the Iranians. But, at the
same time, he shocked several Arab countries, which once again find
themselves on a collision course with the U.S. administration.
If the Bush administration was seen as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, as
an administration that divided the Middle East into "good Arabs and
bad Arabs," occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, saved Israel from itself,
and considered Iran to be the central point of the "axis of evil" –
the Obama administration is beginning to look as if it might prefer
Iran to the Arab axis.
This image is evolving at a time when most Arab countries, particularly
the Gulf states, see Iran as a two-pronged danger. Iranian nuclear
plans are no less of a threat to them than to Israel, and Iran is
determined to be involved in any effort that until now was limited
to a purely Arab front, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – via
Hamas – through Lebanon – via Hezbollah – and culminating in Syria,
Sudan and Algeria. The Arab effort to promote the peace process, or
at least to bring about a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, is
not isolated from the desire to expel Iran from the Arab diplomatic
arena. All of a sudden, the Arab countries and Israel have a joint
interest and a joint "suspect": Barack Obama.
Bridge of contention
Toward the end of the week, Turkish newspapers reported on swimming
pools at the Ottoman Palace Hotel in the southeastern province of
Hatay: the temperature of the water in them, how much iodine it
contained and how beneficial it was to health. That is where Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is vacationing after Obama’s recent
Istanbul visit.
It is not by chance that Erdogan chose Hatay: It is the only
Mediterranean province where his Justice and Development Party won
the local elections, held at the end of March. These were the first
elections since 2002, when the party’s popularity slumped and the
government’s power was undermined. True, it won 39 percent of the
votes, but the results still smacked of failure – Erdogan had been
aiming for 47 percent, the same number the party received in the
parliamentary elections.
If Erdogan had hoped for results that would yield the necessary public
support to change the constitution substantially, now he can only make
small amendments, if anything. This means it will apparently become
impossible to pass an amendment to the paragraph that allows for
banning political parties – a clause the constitutional court invoked
excessively and which it also used to threaten the ruling party.
The changes to the election law will also be put on ice, as will
the amendments to the structure of the constitutional court and
its authority, which allowed the Turkish army to seek the arrest
of political activists or those who were too vociferous in their
criticism of Turkey’s secular nature. All these initiatives will be
shelved indefinitely. Erdogan paid the price in the elections for
incorrectly assessing the economic crisis. He told his citizenry a
few months ago that Turkey was immune to serious crises and that the
country’s troubles were caused by large Turkish companies, not the
economic system or the global crisis.
His rivals also attribute his drop in the polls to his behavior toward
Israel, and especially his dramatic appearance at last year’s Davos
conference. "Erdogan showed just how haughty he is when he left
the television studio in Davos," a source in the Turkish foreign
ministry said. "His remarks about Israel are correct in principle,
but the way in which he expressed his criticism is unacceptable."
However, aside from his political failures, Erdogan has also chalked
up several diplomatic achievements – the most important of which was
Obama’s visit to Turkey, the first Muslim country he has visited,
and his reaction to it. To Turkish ears, it was no mere feat that
Obama chose not to refer to the murder of the Armenians as genocide;
they were also satisfied about the fact that he refrained from
calling Turkey a moderate Muslim state, saying instead that it was
a country where most citizens are Muslim. The Turks used to cringe
every time Bush described Turkey as a country that represents "moderate
Islam," thereby trying to differentiate it from other Muslim and Arab
countries. Even though it is governed by an Islamic party, Turkey
takes pains not to define itself as a Muslim country, and Erdogan’s
party refers to itself as a "social-democratic party" – along the
lines of Germany’s Christian Democratic party. More importantly,
any mention of Turkey in an Islamic context is perceived as another
obstacle in Turkey’s path to the European Union. Obama was briefed in
details about Turkey’s sensitivities and was therefore well prepared
when he arrived there.
France and Germany, in particular, are opposed to Muslim Turkey joining
the EU. Last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said unambiguously
that Obama should not interfere in the question of Ankara’s efforts to
join the EU. Turkey is aware that, in this matter, Washington’s support
will not count for much – it is for Europe to decide. During his
visit, Obama spoke about Turkey being a bridge between two cultures,
but France did not understand what he was trying to say. Indeed, the
French and the Americans collided on this Turkish bridge – a mere 90
days after Obama took office.