Damascus Smears Lebanese PM Siniora as “Israeli agent”
Syrian military intelligence, the main subversive arm of the Bashar regime in Lebanon, has launched a campaign in minor Syrian, Lebanese and Persian Gulf media to blacken the pro-Western prime minister Fouad Siniora as an agent of the Israeli Mossad.
In a tale planted in various websites, blogs and small papers, he is accused of spying for Israel for 34 years. His controller is named as Lt. Col. Aharon Goldbard. The Syrian sources try to pin on them both the intrigue to murder former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri three years ago.
Damascus also sees Mossad machinations in the Syrian army.
Defense minister Gen. Hassan Turkemani has told army officers to beware because, “The Mossad has been able to penetrate the officer elite with gifts of satellite tetephones linked to Israeli spy satellites.
debkafile‘s Middle East sources report: The Assad regime has been maneuvering desperately to discredit the Lebanese prime minister for approving an international tribunal to prosecute the plotters of the Hariri murder, suspicions of which reach high up in the Damascus regime.
To lend verisimilitude to their allegations, Syrian military intelligence embellishes them with details. The Siniora-Mossad conspiracy is said to have been uncovered when Syrian agents identified the Lebanese prime minister’s purported controller as Col. Goldbard, who is said to have served the Mossad from 1970 to 1989 as a headhunter for agents in Lebanon.
He is described as entering Lebanon with a French passport No. 84/33455, although no photo of the document is displayed.
The Israeli colonel is described as having first got together with Siniora at a Mt. Lebanon venue in 1974. After he was recruited, the story runs, the Lebanese politician traveled to Greece, was flown secretly to Israel and underwent training at a special Mossad facility for senior agents. He has since become one of the most important intelligence assets Israel has ever acquired in the Arab world, according to the Syrian sources.
In 1977, Siniora was back in Israel for another special training stint, say the sources, after which he began meeting Israeli officers in Paris to deliver updates and receive new orders and missions.
The next part of the tale gives the game away.
The Syrian sources cite “Prof. Eliahu ben Simon” who is said to have interviewed Goldbard [where?] and learned that the purported Mossad agent was present in Beirut at the time of the Hariri assassintion in Feb. 2005 and personally involved in the crime. Asked to explain, the Israeli colonel is quoted as admitting that it was he who tipped the killers on the exact time of the Hariri convoy’s departure and the moment he would pass the spot on the road under which the fatal bomb was planted.
This “revelation” is meant to demonstrate that Goldbard was free to move around Beirut because he enjoyed Siniora’s protection. Therefore, the Israeli agent abetted by Siniora, a close friend of Hariri bore responsibility for the assassination, as Mossad tools – not Syrian militlary intelligence.
As for the second tale Damascus is disseminating against Israeli intelligence, debkafile‘s sources have seen the memo which the Syrian defense minister circulated this month, under the heading: The Syrian Army-General Staff, Operations Director. Top Secret. For Immediate Attention. Officers Only.
Gen. Turkemani “reveals” that the Israeli Mossad director Meir Dagan recently visited Irbil, capital of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, and stayed at the private, fortified guesthouse of Kurdistan’s prime minister Nechirvan Barzani, son of President Massoud Barzani. There, he is alleged to have briefed Kurdish agents operating undercover in Syria on methods for delivering satellite cellphones to Syrian elite officers through Kurdish members of the Syrian armed forces. The phones contained chips which route their conversations via Israel spy satellites.
The spy phones quickly reached their destinations and, according to the Syrian chief of staff, have been recovered from officers serving in Syrian air defense units, commanders of military air facilities and heads of the Syrian arms industry.
debkafile‘s Middle East sources report that this allegation has aroused fears among Kurdish officers serving in the Syrian army that it will be used as a pretext to purge them.