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By DAVID HOROVITZ|5/9/2008 -
Aware that some members of both the American and the Israel
intelligence community were not entirely convinced that
President Bashar Assad was building a nuclear facility in
the summer of 2007, Israel in mid-August sent 12 members of
the Sayeret Matkal commando unit into Syria in two
helicopters to collect soil samples outside the nuclear
site. But the commandos' mission was almost exposed when a
Syrian patrol drove past the landing site where the
helicopters were parked.
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 facilitie
