More on the Dubai Assassination

Interesting article by Jay Epstein, published in The Wall Street Journal. 

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James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief, once discussed a series of suspicious deaths in Germany with me. "Any gang of thugs could murder someone," he said, "but it took an intelligence services to make a murder appear to be a suicide or natural death."

According to this precept, the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on the evening of Jan. 19, 2010, was almost certainly the work of an intelligence service. When Mabhouh's body was discovered the next day in his room in the five-star Al Bustan Rotana hotel, it appeared he'd died in bed of natural causes. There were no wounds, bruises or other signs of foul play.

Room 230 had no balcony or windows that could be opened, and the electronic door latch appeared to have been locked from the inside. If an ordinary tourist died under such nonsuspicious circumstances, investigators would routinely assume he had died in his sleep from natural causes.

But Mabhouh was no ordinary tourist. He was a senior commander and a co-founder of Hamas's military wing, Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades. His activities included the abduction of Israeli soldiers, and he was wanted in three countries: Israel, Egypt (where he had been imprisoned for almost a year for his Muslim Brotherhood activities and was wanted on suspicion of subversion) and Jordan, on suspicion of terrorism.

Based in Damascus, Syria, Mabhouh was also a key intermediary in the covert arms traffic between Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the Syrian intelligence service, the Hamas government in Gaza, and other militants. He was ordinarily protected by a team of armed bodyguards. But they had not been allowed to accompany him to Dubai on Jan. 19 because there was no room on the flight, according to a Hamas spokesman in Damascus, Talal Nasser. So whether by design or accident, he was stripped of his protection, making his assassination easier to accomplish.

When the Dubai police, under pressure from Hamas, looked more closely into the crime scene, they found that the electronic lock on the door of his room had been reprogrammed to allow others to enter. The electronic lock can be accessed directly at the hotel room door by a sophisticated hacker.

Then a Dubai forensic lab retesting his body fluids discovered traces of succinylcholine. This is a quick-acting, depolarizing, paralytic drug that, by rendering Mabhouh incapable of resisting, could account for the lack of bruise marks on the body.

In February, Dubai's chief coroner, Fawzi Benomran, reversed his verdict of a natural death. Instead, describing the death as "one of the most challenging cases" in the history of the emirate, he concluded it was a disguised homicide "meant to look like death from natural causes during sleep."

Meanwhile, Dubai investigators examined 645 hours of videos from surveillance cameras at the hotel and elsewhere. They saw that, after Mabhouh left his hotel room, four suspicious-looking individuals got out of the elevator on the second floor near his room. Several hours later, at 8:25 p.m., Mabhouh returned to his room (according to the electronic lock). Shortly afterwards, the four men were seen via the cameras leaving the floor.

The police theorized that these men had surreptitiously entered Mabhouh's room while he was out, incapacitated him with the paralytic drug on his return, induced a heart attack by suffocating him with a pillow, and reprogrammed the electric lock to make it appear it had been locked from the inside.

With the aid of facial recognition software, Dubai police then identified 26 suspects. All had been in Dubai at the time of Mabhouh's brief visit. All had entered Dubai using fake or fraudulently obtained passports from countries not requiring a Dubai visa, including Britain, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia.

All the passports turned out to be stolen identities with faked passport photos. The charge cards, airline tickets and pre-paid phone cards these suspects used were also in the name of their stolen identities. The only real clue to their real identities was that eight of the identities had been stolen from people with dual Israeli citizenship. Since Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, had previously used dual citizens' passports to fake identities, Dubai authorities concluded the suspects were from Mossad.

Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the head of the Dubai police force, stated on a government-owned Web site, that he "is 99 percent, if not 100 percent, that Mossad is standing behind the murder." While this authoritative finger-pointing was largely accepted as am "aha" moment by the media, Dubai is not exactly an uninterested party in the Mabhouh affair. It is, after all, the principal transshipment points for the lethal arms trade between Iran and Hamas—and Mabhouh had been one of the major players in this trade.

The much-publicized hotel surveillance videos, while highly diverting on YouTube, do not show any of the 26 suspects engaging in any illegal activities other than using false identities, a practice which is not unknown in Dubai. (Mabhouh himself reportedly had five different passports.) Even if all 26 identity thieves were intelligence operatives, as seems the case, it does not necessarily follow that they were all in Dubai on the same business, or even working for the same side.

Since Iran maintains its largest offshore financing facility in Dubai—which is used by the Revolutionary Guard, among others, to support its traffic in covert weapons— more than one intelligence service might be interested in Mabhouh's trip. Consider, for example, the peculiar fact that two of the 26 Dubai suspects exited by boat to Iran, according to Dubai authorities; this is not a likely escape route for Mossad agents.

Two other individuals whom the Dubai police had named as suspects worked for the Palestinian Authority, an arch-enemy of Hamas. (They were arrested in Jordan and turned over to Dubai.) Another person wanted by Dubai for questioning returned to Damascus just prior to the killing. And then there is the question of who in Syria played a role in stripping Mabhouh of his protection just hours before his flight to Dubai.

The key missing piece in the jigsaw remains Mabhouh's mission to Dubai—apparently important enough for him to travel there without his normal contingent of bodyguards.

Mabhouh arrived from the airport at his hotel shortly before 3 p.m., and after changing his clothes left for an unknown destination. He was gone for several hours. But even with its state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in Dubai, and extensive interviews with all the taxi drivers at the hotel, authorities claim they cannot determine either his whereabouts during these hours or the identity of whom he met.

The world-wide focus on the spooks—whose false identities allowed many of them to vanish in the intelligence netherworld—has diverted attention from the potentially embarrassing mission that brought Mabhouh to Dubai. The real intrigue here is not who killed a wanted terrorist, but what he was up to. Without this missing piece, any rush to judgment about who his killers were may be premature.

Mr. Epstein, who frequently writes on intelligence issues, is the author most recently of "The Hollywood Economist" (Melville, 2010).

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, Mrch 27, 2010, page A15

More from Seymour Hersh, Ian Fleming wannabe

Once again Seymour Hersh has come with an unsubstantiated James Bondian tale of conspiracy, and The New Yorker provides him with a platform to disseminate these manufactured tales. This time Hersh presents us with the story that vice-president Cheney, all by himself, ran an executive assassination team. Wow. All that’s missing is Cheney sitting on a high platform caressing a cat while ordering, “Bring me Abdullah’s head.”

Like all good tales, this story has its basis on fact. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), together with the CIA's Special Activities Division has been involved in black operations in the course of searching for al-Qaeda and other terrorists. However, Hersh has weaved a tale where Chaney was the sole master of these operations. This is absolutely false.

JSOC was formed in 1980, as a result of the failed rescue operation of the hostages in Iran and has operated under the U.S. Special Operations Command, which reports to the secretary of defense, the president, and is under congressional oversight.

If Cheney was involved in ordering the assassination of al-Qaeda operatives, he did so within the law and with the full knowledge of Congress. Therefore, I must conclude with a heartfelt “Thank you, Mr. Cheney.”

Thank you, Weekly Standard.

The Arbiter of Fairness

Well, Timothy Geithner is not only a financial genius, but also an expert on global warming and Turbo Tax. Sorry…forget Turbo Tax.

Yesterday the wizard of Wall Street testified before Congress that subsidies in the form of tax breaks to oil and natural gas producers should be abolished because they contribute to global warming. He also voiced the position of the messianic administration, which proposed levying an excise tax on oil and natural gas producers in the Gulf of Mexico that would help raise 5.3 billion dollars between 2011-2019. An additional proposed fee of $4 per acre on leases in the Gulf would generate an additional 1.2 billion dollars over said period of time.

Let us ponder this. We are in the midst of a recession that, according to Obama, might turn into a depression, and now the proposal is to add new taxes? I am not sure how many economics courses Obama took in college, but does he really believe that the oil companies will swallow the tax increases and the additional fees, and deduct it from their dividends? Of course not. Every additional dollar in the cost of exploration will be passed along to the consumer, and each dollar going to the coffers of the state, is a dollar less in the circular flow of currency of the free market.

As I watch members of the cabinet testifying, I came to realize that Obama has surrounded himself with two types of acolytes. Those who are radicals just like him, and this group includes Hilda Solis at Labor, Attorney General Eric Holder, HHS secretary Kathleen Sibelius, Janet Napolitano at Intelligence and Lisa Jackson at EPA. The other group includes characters that probably know better, but are too enthralled of being in this historic administration and have become yes men for Barack Obama. Geithner, who seems sick every time he testifies, heads this group with trade representative Ron Kirk, who is another tax evader, OMB director Peter Orszag, Hilary Clinton at State and Leon Panetta at the CIA. The rest seem to belong to the Tabula Rasa Club.

I remember hearing presidential candidate Obama interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on CNBC. He mentioned raising taxes on the wealthiest American, a group that in New York City would include a policeman married to a teacher. When presented with evidence that tax cuts lead to increase revenues he responded that increasing taxes on the wealthy was “a question of fairness.”

Just like Chris Matthews, I felt a tingling sensation crawling up my leg. In contrast to Matthews, I recognized the feeling. It was the hand of the IRS inside my pockets.