Hizballah's "change of mind" over assassinating Israeli - a face-saver
Goodtiding
DEBKAfile Special Report June 22, 2010, 1:22 PM (GMT+02:00)
Hizballah's secretary general Hassan Nasrallah did not feel safe enough to
take up Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan's invitation to visit Ankara last
week in with the protection of the four intelligence agencies of Iran, Syria,
Turkey and Hizballah's own service, debkafile's counter-terror sources disclose. To compound this
fiasco, the two Lebanese vessels he planned for breaking Israel's sea blockade
of Gaza are still stuck in Beirut despite bulletins
about their imminent departure.
To save face, Nasrallah had his sources
"leak" to the Kuwaiti A-Rai a claim that his organization pulled back at the
eleventh hour from a plan to kill an unnamed high-ranking Israeli on vacation,
who was thereupon recalled to Tel Aviv.
Our intelligence sources report that
Nasrallah decided to stay home in his Beirut
bunker, where he has lived in hiding for four years, for fear that even he went
to Ankara with
the promised fourfold security shield, an Israeli hit team would get him.
The cancellation of his Ankara trip turned out to suit both host and invitee:
1. Nasrallah, who looks after his security in person, found the two travel plans on offer were chancy. One was to be flown in to Ankara by a Syrian or Iranian military aircraft after Turkey refused to provide one. But neither was keen to provide this service or in a hurry to make the arrangements.
The other was to make his way to Turkey secretly by road through
Syria. Nasrallah decided that the
10-hour journey on Syrian highways would expose his convoy to surveillance by
Israeli drones and he would very likely not reach his destination
alive.
2. As the negotiations between Nasrallah and Turkish security
MIT officials in Beirut on his personal security dragged on,
Erdogan cooled on the prospect of hosting him.
Not only would this vindicate
the Israeli charge that the Turkish leader is not above using terrorists in his
hate campaign against Israel, but the campaign itself is running into more and
more criticism at home from broad political, military and intelligence circles,
who accuse him of a policy which is detrimental to the country's own
interests.
Erdogan was persuaded to shelve his plans for Nasrallah's visit
and order the MIT team to return home.
To save face for this humiliation -
and his failure to browbeat the Lebanese government into permitting the flotilla
he sponsored to embark for Gaza - the Hizballah leader engineered a leak
to the Kuwaiti A-Rai of Tuesday, June 22. The same story also threatened that an
Israeli attempt on the lives of any Hizballah leaders would be deemed a
declaration of war and precipitate hundreds of rockets against Tel Aviv and its
environs and thousands against other locations.
debkafile recalls the dire Shiite
terrorists' threatened to avenge the murder of Imad Mughniyeh, head of their
special security branch in a high-scale Damascus suburb in February 2008. While
accusing Israel, they have never made good on
their threat
