The fingerprints of Al Qaeda's operations commander Saif al Adal were all over the assault on the important Pakistani Mehran naval air base in Karachi, which began Sunday night, May 22 and ended only after 17 hours of fierce combat, debkafile's counter-terror sources report. The attack  hit a shared strategic Pakistani-US-Chinese installation, destroying US surveillance aircraft. It also impaired Pakistani reconnaissance capabilities against al Qaeda's strongholds in North Waziristan and its watch over the Arabian Sea dividing Pakistan from India. 

Army and security services across the West Bank are out hunting for between five and eight Syria and Hizballah secret agents believed to have slipped across the Golan border under cover of the May 15 Palestinian mob incursion. debkafile's sources report that Hamas and Hizballah West Bank cell members drove them to their hideouts.
Syria plans its next mob border assault for June 5. Hamas is staging a mass offensive to smash the Gaza-Israel border fence Friday, May 20.

The Obama administration is presenting the successful Osama bin Laden hit as an epic American solo operation, unparalleled in military and intelligence annals, while leaning hard on Islamabad to sack certain officers of the powerful military intelligence army ISI including its head Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, accusing them of keeping the dead al Qaeda leader hidden for eight years. Islamabad is fighting both US tactics. debkafile: The feud could boomerang against Washington as a Taliban revenge attack.

Although the Western coalition has gone beyond just enforcing the no-fly zone, it has not crippled the pro-Qaddafi army or its ability to move large forces across long distances and keep its supply routes open.

The US and Israel made the same mistake of using Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman as their single line of information on Egypt - and were caught napping. They are still woefully wanting on Egyptian political and military intelligence.

The young Iranian man who "admitted" on Iranian TV last Tuesday, Jan. 11 that he had acted for the Israeli Mossad in the murder of Iranian nuclear scientist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi is revealed in real life by debkafile's Iranian sources as Majid Jamali Fashi, a champion kick boxer and member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' secret reserve death squad of brawny sportsmen used to cut down opponents of the regime and break up protest rallies.

Iranian intelligence banks on "Israel spy" episodes to upset the new Mossad chief, restore public confidence, deter neighbors from aiding Israel and enemies for waging covert war. It has acquired an eager new collaborator: Turkish MIT secret service.

Tuesday, Jan. 11, Iran's intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi called his second news conference in two days to pour more abuse on Israel and its spy agency and accuse them of trying to retard "scientific progress in Muslim nations." He displayed weapons allegedly used by "more than 10" suspected Mossad agents against Iran's nuclear scientists and threatened neighbors harboring "Zionist facilities" with "heavy blows."
debkafile: Iran is only just starting its intelligence war on Israel. No comment from Jerusalem. 

Monday night, Jan. 10, Tehran launched against Israel a full-scale intelligence onslaught on three fronts: It claimed to have rolled up a Mossad network implicated in the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist last January; accused Israel of kidnapping a former deputy defence minster; put a young man posing as a Mossad agent on television and invented a new blood libel.
debkafile: The "agent's" performance was unconvincing, but the blood libel could imperil Iran's 20,000 Jews.

The Mossad ex-chief Meir Dagan's estimated timeline of 2015 for Iran to attain a nuclear bomb may well be superseded if Tehran takes advantage of available shorts cuts, debkafile's intelligence sources report. Iran is likely to have hidden still undiscovered uranium enrichment facilities and research labs. It could use allied facilities like those of North Korea to reach its target, or again outsource nuclear production like the North Korean plutonium plant in Syria which Israel destroyed in 2007.

Tehran is holding more accused spies ready for execution as a bargaining chip to hang over the heads of the Six Powers when nuclear negotiations resume in the first week of January in Istanbul. This threat is also present for halting the secret war now in full spate.

The CIA and Mossad are presumed to maintain an undercover command center inside Iran for conducting major subversive operations against Tehran's nuclear program and military infrastructure. Iranian intelligence is fighting fire with fire. All three are caught up in the endless maze of double agents.

As the Iranian-Israeli clandestine war heated up, Iran's Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi bluntly accused Israel  Wednesday, Dec. 28, of  "the suspected death" of "Iranian prisoner Ali-Reza Asgari." He said: "If the credibility of this report is proved, the dossier on Israel's kidnappings, assassinations and murders will become thicker." debkafile's military sources: The Iranian charge was serious enough to raise fears that a large-scale act of terror may be on the way. Israel has blacked out news relating to Asgari.

The espionage devices found on Mount Sannine, northeast of Beirut and Barouk Mountain in the Chouf east of the capital, and dismantled by the Lebanese army Wednesday, Dec. 15 after receiving a tipoff from Hizballah, were there to detect and keep track of ground-to-ground missiles installed and operating in central and western Syria and all of Lebanon, debkafile's intelligence sources report. The photos released show no sign of the winter conditions prevailing in the region.

Riyadh has signaled its intention for the secret Saudi-Israeli meetings on Iran taking place for more than a year to continue after the changing of the guard at the Mossad, debkafile's intelligence sources reveal. This message Tamir Pardo found on his desk when he took over from Meir Dagan this week as head of Israel's external spy agency. It means that, regardless of WikiLeaks disclosures, the Saudis stand by their conviction that Iran's nuclear program must be destroyed.

Lebanese Director of Intelligence Col. Wissam al Hassan has been a Hizballah mole has since 2004, keeping his masters a few steps ahead of American and Arab Middle East activities. The Lebanese tribunal found himself also in charge of Rafiq Hariri's security at the time of his murder in ...

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev were persuaded by the betrayal of 10 Russian sleeper agents in America and the capture of the Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout that the time had come to reform Russia's spy agencies.

Gen. Yuri Ivanov, 52, deputy head of GRU, the Russian military's overseas intelligence arm of Russian military, was found dead in mysterious circumstances described in a terse official Russian eulogy as a tragic swimming accident "several days ago." No further details were provided such as where he died. Although he apparently drowned off the shore of Syrian Latakia, his body was recovered from Turkish waters ten days after he went missing.

The riddle of Iranian nuclear physicist Shahram Amiri, who disappeared in June 2009 while on a pilgrimage to Mecca, was never solved - even when he turned up in Washington and flew home to Tehran on July 14.  The glimpses into his story DEBKA-Net-Weekly provided Friday in its latest issue fit a Cold War espionage scenario much more closely than this week's US-Russian spy swap in Vienna, because it brought the undercover war between the American CIA and the Iranian MOIS to a new climax.

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The CIA is busy sorting out how much data was real, how much planted in Shahram Amiri's six-year career as a US double agent - and how far US and allied policy-makers were misled about Iran's nuclear program.