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Last Updated: Sep 7, 2008 - 8:13:16 AM |
This is one of the dramatic revelations contained in a new book by
Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman that is being published next week in
the US.
The daring mission to Syria was a success, Bergman writes. "The results
provided clear-cut proof of the joint nuclear project." The following
month, the Israel Air Force destroyed the facility.
Also in the book, The Secret War with Iran, Bergman claims that US Vice
President Richard Cheney contacted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert after the
release of the controversial US National Intelligence Estimate on
Iran's nuclear program late last year to tell him that the US had "not
discarded" the possibility "of an American military operation against
Iranian nuclear targets."
Bergman writes that the Mossad's assessment, as of May this year, is
that President George W. Bush, "out of religious and ideological
motives, will order a strike."
Elsewhere in the book, Bergman provides details of a familiar charge
that France deliberately chose not to arrest Hizbullah terror
mastermind Imad Mughniyeh when he passed through Paris's Charles de
Gaulle Airport in the mid-1980s, because it feared that stopping him
would prompt further terrorism against its interests.
Mughniyeh, who in 1983 had orchestrated simultaneous truck bombings
against French paratroopers and the US Marine barracks in Beirut, in
which 58 French soldiers and 241 Marines were killed, was a prime
target for Western intelligence agencies at the time - and, indeed, for
the next 20 years. Indicted by Argentina over the 1992 and 1994 Israel
embassy and Jewish community office bombings and regarded as the brains
behind Hizbullah's strategy in the Second Lebanon War, Mughniyeh was
finally killed in Damascus last February. Nobody has taken
responsibility for his death.
Israel is currently warning businessmen overseas to guard against
Hizbullah attempts to avenge his death by carrying out kidnappings; at
least two such attempts are said to have recently been foiled.
According to Bergman, Mughniyeh was traveling from Lebanon to Sudan, to
meet with Iranian intelligence officials and mujahideen veterans from
Afghanistan, and made a stopover at Charles de Gaulle. "The CIA had
supplied the French with details of the fake passport Mughniyeh was
using," Bergman writes. "Nevertheless, and despite a positive
identification made by the Americans at the airport, the French never
detained him, claiming 'that he had managed to slip away.'"
US intelligence "never credited this excuse for a moment," Bergman
continues, "believing that the French had let him get away on purpose,
for fear of the fate of French hostages in Beirut."
He also quotes the IDF's former Military Intelligence officer David
Barkai, who was in charge of the "Mughniyeh file," as saying: "The
French were the champions at this kind of thing. After [Hizbullah]
snatched some Frenchmen in Lebanon, the French Foreign Ministry bought
peace through quiet agreements with Hizbullah. I know of at least two
cases where they closed their eyes to blatant terrorist activity, just
so that their interests would not be harmed."
In further sections of the book relating to Mughniyeh, Hizbullah and
Iranian sponsorship of terrorism, Bergman claims that the Hizbullah
terror chief served as "a major connection point" between Osama bin
Laden's al-Qaida and Iran, and as a source of inspiration for bin
Laden, whose attacks he helped facilitate. Bergman describes a pivotal
meeting the two men held in Khartoum, at which the murderously
experienced Mughniyeh described for the impressionable bin Laden "the
enormous effect of the suicide attacks against the Americans and the
French in the early 1980s in Lebanon."
In the wake of this meeting, Bergman writes, basing his account on a
witness's testimony to the FBI, "Hizbullah supplied al-Qaida with
explosives instruction, and Iran used Hizbullah to provide bin Laden
with bombs. Much of the al-Qaida training was carried out in camps in
Iran."
Bergman's new book is an expanded and updated English version of last
year's Hebrew bestseller The Point of No Return.
The English book, published by Free Press, also repeats the Hebrew
volume's claim - which is disputed by other sources - that Russian
S-300 missiles have already been supplied to Iran and are deployed to
help protect various Iranian nuclear facilities.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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