Israel Hails An Intelligence Success

JERUSALEM (Nov. 5) – Israel may be hurting in the public relations war over last winter's incursion into Gaza, but it's winning the intelligence war against Iran. That, at least, is the conclusion of Israeli analysts after a ship was interdicted near Cyprus with what Israel says was 500 tons of weaponry on board, allegedly bound from Iran to Hezbollah guerrillas.

"We are witnessing a major recovery of Israeli intelligence in the last few years vis-à-vis Iran, Hezbollah and Syria," said Ronen Bergman, a journalist and author of The Secret War with Iran. "Israel now has the upper hand."

Israeli navy commandos boarded the Francop, an Antigua-registered, German-owned transport ship, near Cyprus and escorted it into the Israeli port of Ashdod on Wednesday. On Thursday, Israel released the Polish captain and other crew members after determining that they had not known their cargo, destined for a Syrian port, included more than 3,000 Iranian rockets.

Iran and Hezbollah denied any connection with the shipment, while the Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Muallim acknowledged that the cargo was Syrian, but that it contained no weapons. Israeli officials said the ship's manifest showed the cargo originated in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas before it was unloaded and transferred to the Francop in Egypt. The Israelis offered no documented proof that they were bound for Hezbollah.

For Bergman, a series of successes in recent years suggest Israel is getting the edge on Iran and its allies in southern Lebanon and Gaza. He claims Israeli intelligence played a role in uncovering the hidden facilities near Qom connected to the Iranian nuclear program. Last March, details emerged of Israel's bombing in January of a large arms convoy in the Sudanese desert, which Israeli officials said was bound for Palestinian forces in Gaza. He is hardly alone, too, in seeing Israel's hand in the Feb. 2008 assassination of a senior Hezbollah figure, Imad Mughniyah, in Syria, something Israel has never officially acknowledged.

Bergman says the improvement in Israel's intelligence capabilities followed a decision by Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, to focus the intelligence agency's resources on terrorism and Iran's nuclear project.

At a news conference on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the significance of the interdiction.
"The main component of this war materiel was rockets whose sole objective was to attack and kill as many civilians – women, children and the elderly – as possible," Netanyahu said. "This is a war crime. This is a war crime that the UN General Assembly, which is meeting today, should investigate, discuss and condemn."

Meanwhile, the General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a measure, vociferously opposed by Israel, demanding "independent and credible" investigations by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority into alleged war crimes committed during last winter's Gaza conflict. Those charges were laid out in the UN's Goldstone report, which is especially harsh in criticizing Israel's conduct in Gaza.

The weapons discovery offered Netanyahu a golden opportunity to chastise the UN for focusing on the Goldstone report instead of on the threat of Iran's nuclear program. To underscore the point, Israel even trucked foreign diplomats out to the Ashdod port to show off the neatly stacked boxes of weapons.

Israeli analysts say that while the quantity of weapons is impressive, Hezbollah already has thousands of medium range 107- and 122-millimeter rockets like those captured. They said the amount captured was equivalent to what Hezbollah would use in one month of fighting Israel.

The arms seizure called up comparisons to Israel's interdiction in 2002 of the Iranian ship Karine A with similar arms. Those weapons -- only a tenth the size of the current cache -- were determined by an Israeli court to have been destined for the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat.

Writing in the Ha'aretz newspaper Thursday, Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff said the capture of that ship convinced the Bush Administration that Yasser Arafat could not be trusted. It was after that find, they wrote, that the U.S. gave Israel tacit approval to launch a large-scale incursion into the West Bank, which almost toppled Arafat's rule. "In the coming days," they wrote, "Israel will use this affair to try to do to Iran what it did to Yasser Arafat in the West Bank."

For now, Israel plans to use words, not tanks. The Foreign Ministry has instructed its diplomats to make use of Israel's seizure of the ship to turn up the temperature on Iran.

That was only one of several indications that the prospects are narrowing for progress in the Middle East. On Thursday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, with whom U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had met only days before, announced he will not compete in Palestinian elections scheduled for January. Abbas cited the lack of progress in peace talks with Israel for his decision, which he said was final.