Saudi Crossroads

(In that revolt, several dozen Wahabists led by an Othaiba tribesman and a group of National Guardsmen, seized the Mosque of Mecca and was on the point of toppling the Saudi regime when it was quelled by the desperate measure of importing French special counter-terrorism units.) The Crown Prince then laid down a blunt declaration, addressed to Nayef but meant for the ears of all the Sudairi princes: Al Qaeda’s assault on Riyadh was a turning point. He had now determined to employ all his powers as de facto ruler to save the House of Saud – even to the point of doing away with the traditional power-sharing agreement between the royal family and the religious authorities. This agreement has always been a cornerstone of Saudi rule.

In normal times, Abdullah’s rivals might have dismissed his declaration as an empty threat. But this time, according to DBK sources, the crown prince swiftly showed he meant business. He issued a series of decisions amounting in Saudi terms to revolutionary reforms. If he follows through on only part of his program, this most conservative and cautious member of the Saudi royal family will have taken steps to execute the most drastic upheaval in Saudi history. As a first step, he gathered a group of princes loyal to him and dispatched them to the various Saudi provinces to assume the duties of the governors and take charge of provincial security forces. The governors were to be left with their titles but no authority.

The crown prince acted expeditiously to remove the provincial governors as the weakest links in the royal chain of authority. Removed from the capital by influential princes who regarded them as hindrances, these governors treated their posts as a form of temporary exile until their restoration to the center of government. They did not bother to properly administer the areas under their jurisdiction, leaving an open door that invited Al Qaeda adherents to do as they pleased. The attacks in Riyadh were a wake-up call for Abdullah who was shocked to discover that outside the main cities, the throne had little control over the kingdom.

A break with the clergy?

The second drastic step the Crown prince ordered was designed to silence inflammatory fundamentalist agitation in the mosques and their use as recruiting centers for radical groups. Nayef was instructed to send security and intelligence units around the mosques to arrest clerics and preachers suspected of ties with Al Qaeda. DBK Gulf sources disclose several hundred clerics and preachers have already been arrested in a crackdown never before seen in the oil kingdom. Bent on going all the way, Abdullah took an extreme step he had refused to take even after the September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on New York and Washington. He issued a personal order to shut down all Saudi charitable societies operating in Europe and banned the transfer of Saudi private or public charitable funds abroad. By that single step, Abdullah choked off the main source of operational financing for Al Qaeda and other Muslim terrorist organizations worldwide. Within days, Al Qaeda cells in Western and Eastern Europe, including those in Chechnya, were tapped out and unable to continue operations. Suddenly too, the Hamas terror rings of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, long funded by Saudi largesse, found themselves penniless.

Abdullah clamped down hard after discovering from intelligence reports on his desk that Saudi charities had been funneling cash for two-way al Qaeda movements – not only for overseas operations but also to aid the influx of armed al Qaeda gangs, weapons and explosives into the kingdom itself. The Crown Prince also took to heart the warning from his close advisers that, failing decisive action against the terror bane as a genuine gesture towards the Bush administration, US-Saudi relations would be damaged beyond repair.

DBK sources report exclusively that Abdullah is not done yet.

He is next planning the unthinkable step of severing the hitherto hallowed historic alliance between House of Saud and the Wahhabist clergy that has retarded all attempts to modernize Saudi Arabia. His first step will be to disband the dreaded morality police. He has come to realize that large segments of the religious establishment have succumbed to the influence of Osama bin Laden and represent a threat to the royal family.

Merger of National Guard and Army?

The Crown Prince, driven by a new spirit of reform and house-cleaning, means to merge the regular armed forces with the National Guard – the country’s two main military forces. That done, Abdullah will get down to revolutionizing the secular regime.

Saudi Arabia’s centers of power are traditionally balanced between the Sudairi princes – who were allotted the defense ministry and army and responsibility for border security – and the princely faction led by Abdullah, who commands the National Guard, guardian of home security, the royal house and the oil fields. The National Guard, built on tribal lines, has fallen prey to the infiltrations of secret al Qaeda and radical Wahabi cells. The crown prince has inferred from the terrorist attacks in Riyadh that the National Guard has been invaded by al Qaeda, whose cells readily exploit its vast resources of weapons, intelligence and logistical aids.

Merging this force with the regular army would make a thorough purge of these radical elements possible. The danger is that the regular army, including the air force and military intelligence, might find themselves opened up to the same sort of invasion.

Bearing this danger in mind, Defense minister Prince Sultan of the Sudairi clan would have to agree to the consolidation of military forces. However, if he objects, the Crown Prince appears to be determined enough to force the merger on Sultan. This could well touch off a fierce confrontation between the rivals at a time that Abdullah may have to contend with a clergy fighting tooth and nail to preserve its privileged position and an al Qaeda insurgency.

In short no one knows exactly where Abdullah’s revolution will lead.

Iran & Terror

Who Let al Qaeda out of the Bottle?

On Monday, May 19, the White House stated it would “pay close attention to what we hear and what we see” in the way of an Iranian response to American complaints that senior al Qaeda members were in Iran under the protection of Iranian government elements.

Two days later, an administration official said the United States now “expects an authoritative answer from Iran on what we’ve been picking up.” This was backed up at a Pentagon briefing by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld who said, “There’s no question but that there are al Qaeda in Iran, and they are busy.”

Those testy comments indicated that, well before the May 12 suicide attacks in Riyadh, the US government had enough intelligence data on al Qaeda activities in Iran to be able to predict when and where the fundamentalist terrorists would strike. They had also picked up a raised level of electronic chatter among al Qaeda cells and bases around the Saudi kingdom and movements of terror operatives from the Pakistan-Afghan frontier region into Iran and on to Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Yemen.

For some time, American intelligence and surveillance agencies have been tracking the movements of al Qaeda figures of interest such as Abu al Walid, Al Masri, Saif al Adil and Osama bin Laden’s eldest son, Saad bin Laden, whose itineraries take them from places like Herat in Afghanistan, to Zahedan in Iran and on to Tehran or Bandar Abbas, thence to Dubai and Yemen, through which entry into the southern Saudi province of Asir is a breeze. With all this information, the Bush administration took no action other than to pass a portion on to the Saudi government with a request to lay on more security.

Specifically, the information was laid before the Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef, whose first reaction, according to DBK counter-terror sources, was amazement – after which he declared, “No one in Saudi Arabia has the number of men you are asking for to guard the locations you say al Qaeda is planning to attack.” He made the same response to British and German requests for thousands of armed troops and security men to guard their embassies, consulates and business centers in the kingdom - the Germans demanded one thousand soldiers – together with a threat to shut their missions down. ”Fine,” said the prince. “Go ahead. Even with the best will in the world I don’t have that kind of manpower.”

By that time, no one ought to have been surprised when al Qaeda struck – especially in view of events leading up to it. The battle Saudi security men fought with a large group of al Qaeda terrorists around their secret hideout in Riyadh on May 7 took place not 500-600 yards from the Al-Hamra compound which was attacked five days later. A large number, 19 of the al Qaeda operatives assigned with carrying out the attacks got away, leaving behind a mountainous cache of weapons and explosives and plain evidence that the Saudi authorities’ grip on internal security was sorely deficient.

Dialogue with Iran held US hand

So why did the Americans – from top officials in Washington down to security and counter-terror specialists – insist on making security demands of the Saudi authorities that they were obviously not up to meeting?

It was also self-evident that 19 men, some of them injured, could not have vanished in thin air without accomplices on hand who must have tucked them away in prepared safe hideouts, where a fresh supply of weapons and explosives awaited them for their next mission.

Since Washington must have been conscious of the great danger hanging over Americans in Riyadh, Saudi royals and the throne as such, why did not Washington offer to fly in several hundred US commandos in civilian clothes to take up security duties inside the targeted compounds for the duration of the threat and leave the kingdom as soon as the menace was foiled.

This omission has several explanations, according to DBK Gulf and counter-terror experts, starting with Prince Nayef’s extreme sensitivity to outside intervention in Saudi affairs and his suspicion that the Westerners’ inordinate demands of him were connected with the succession struggle dividing the royal house between Crown Prince Abdullah and the Sudairi brothers.

But Washington’s most compelling inhibitor lay outside Saudi Arabia - or even al Qaeda’s operation in the kingdom. It emanated from the existence of the long-running secret US-Iran dialogue and its bewildering twists and turns. The Shiite rulers of Iran are proving almost impossible to pin down to a consistent position. They are negotiating in the manner of a prickly flirtation with danger - beckoning on the one hand, menacing on the other. Harboring senior al Qaeda operatives based in Pakistan and Iran and permitting them to carry out terrorist hits in Saudi Arabia is part of this game of brinkmanship.

Al Qaeda, which was hard hit by America’s global war on terror, saw its opportunity to regroup and revive its worldwide terror offensive, proving it was alive and kicking and still capable of provoking Western jitters. This is partly an optical illusion. Osama bin Laden’s network is maimed. It could not have pulled off the three suicide bombing attacks in Riyadh without a logistical hand up from Tehran and Iran’s license for stranded Qaeda elements in Afghanistan and Pakistan to re-establish contact with elements based in Saudi Arabia with which they had been out of touch since January 2001.

An Egyptian boat gives Tehran’s Palestinian game away

It is hard to understand how Bush administration’s negotiators come to let the dialogue with Tehran advance to the point that the Iranians had the effrontery to believe they could get away with encouraging al Qaeda to strike American targets in Saudi Arabia. The Shiite Islamic regime of Iran, generally described as tottering, nonetheless has the brass to brandish four sticks over the Bush administration’s head. One is al Qaeda. Another is the Lebanese Hizballah; the third is the Palestinian Jihad Islami terror group, which is funded from Tehran and used as a conduit to the fourth, Yasser Arafat, his al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and the Hamas.

DBK military and intelligence sources reveal that May 12, on the night of which al Qaeda terrorists blew up three residential compounds in Riyadh, Iran’s rulers decided to bring out two and a half sticks. This was discovered on Wednesday, May 21, when Israeli naval commandos intercepted an Egyptian boat that had made its way from Alexandria to Lebanese waters, collected Hizballah passengers and lethal cargo and was heading for the Gaza Strip.

This was no second Karine-A arms smuggling venture, which Iran was caught sending to the Palestinian Authority in January 2001. But some of its features were similar. This new operation was put together by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Lebanese Hizballah and Arafat’s close advisers at his Ramallah headquarters. Its purpose was to upgrade the terrorist capabilities of Arafat’s combined force of Fatah and its suicide arm, the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hamas and Jihad Islami, with a new explosive. Hizballah’s chief bomb expert, Hamad Amara, was aboard the boat on loan from the Hizballah with samples of the tank-busting super-powerful explosive he had developed and a course of instruction in its use for Arafat’s partisans and allies in the Gaza Strip.

His capture was quite a catch for Israel after a string of Palestinian suicide attacks claimed 12 lives and a painful setback for the Lebanese terror group. Al Qaeda’s attacks and the use of Hizballah to enhance Palestinian anti-Israel terrorist capabilities demonstrate how close to the wind the ayatollahs of Tehran are prepared to sail for leverage in their dispute with the Americans and the high ground for negotiating an accommodation. The Iranians believe they have another stick and a half in reserve: activation of the Iraqi Shiites against the American presence and military action by the Hizballah, even while the Shiite terror group licks its wounds from the loss of its top bomb specialist. Time will tell whether the Iranians really did catch Washington off-guard by letting al Qaeda and the Palestinian terrorists out of the bottle, or whether the Bush administration prepared its response in good time. In either case, the two demons cannot be easily thrust back and the administration will have to move fast to contain them.

Iran – Washinton's Friend or Foe?

Still in the Balance

The Bush administration is engaged in one of the most sensitive and ambitious geo-strategic projects any of its predecessors in Washington has ever undertaken, comparable to landmark events like the termination of the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet empire in the 1990s and the opening of Communist China to the world back in the 1970s. In the short term, the US president is bent on seizing the dividends of the Iraq War in time to lay them before the American voter in November 2004. He will want to demonstrate his success in bringing to fruition an ambitious agenda for sweeping regime change and improvement in the volatile Persian Gulf and Middle East that has transformed the United States into the kingpin of these regions, in control of its oil resources, as well undertaking a similar feat in Central Asia and the Caucasus to establish a strong overarching link from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent and China.

With Saddam Hussein gone, the United States is assembling the modular bricks of its policies, building them on the bedrock of victory in Iraq. The main obstacle in the Bush administration’s postwar path is Iran.

In keeping with its star role in Bush’s axis of evil, Iran is pressing ahead with a not so hush-hush nuclear program, as DBK first reported on October 25, 2002. It is also conducting undercover negotiations with fellow axis-member, North Korea, for the purchase of one or two off-the-shelf nuclear bombs.

Teheran’s support for such terrorist gangs as Al Qaeda, Hizballah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is just shy of blatant and it is sparing no effort to set up terrorist and subversive networks among Iraq’s Shiites. Nonetheless, this year, the Bush administration managed to negotiate a series of secret agreements, mostly on military and terrorism issues. Under those deals, Iran agreed to keep its forces out of northern Iraq before, during and after the U.S.-led war. After fighting began, Iranian Revolutionary Guards helped US and British forces take the Faw peninsula and the southern city of Basra. During the war, Iranian naval and air forces prevented Iraqi terrorist attacks in Gulf waters. Iran also helped the Americans calm a jittery Shiite populace and persuade their Iraqi coreligionists to accept limited cooperation with US forces in Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad. In Lebanon, Iran forced Hizballah to cease its attacks on Israel and barred it from carrying out cross-border terrorist raids. It all boiled down to a clear message to the United States: Look what we are prepared to do for you – it would be worth your while to talk with us.

DBK Iranian sources report that Iran’s ethnic Arab defense minister, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, spent the past 10 days explaining this strategy in meetings with senior army and Revolutionary Guards commanders.

Teheran, he argued, must very clear when it tells the United States that Iran is not Iraq and the Iranian military is nothing like the Iraqi armed forces. Taking his message of deterrence a step further, Shamkhani said Iran must accelerate its purchases of advanced weapons systems, such as long-range missiles, warplanes and submarines, so as to make the United States think twice about attacking it. At the same time, he said, Iran must continue to challenge the United States on all fronts -- Afghanistan, the Gulf, the Middle East and Central Asia – while engaging the Americans in dialogue. These negotiations must be dragged out until Iran achieves its nuclear option. DBK Iranian experts sum up Shamkhani’s argument as follows: Tehran is open to an accord with Washington based on Iran occupying a lead-position as a regional power after radical reform of its regime - provided that Washington agrees to Iranian holding a nuclear option. That option need not be consummated immediately as long as Iran has the capability for quickly assembling a bomb. Washington’s refusal on that point would upset the entire deal and lead to confrontation on all fronts, including the sphere of terror.

The United States, of course, take a completely different view. Should it indeed decide to tap Teheran as strongest power in the Gulf and a regional partner, Iran’s government must undergo radical change and on no account be in possession of nuclear weapons in any shape or form. Yet both sides are satisfied that their most recent round of talks and the ad hoc understandings they were able to forge in Iraq’s war zones are the preface to further accords. DBK sources therefore find the United States and Iran busily pursuing their exchanges through five different channels:

The Afghan channel – These contacts go through US and Iranian intelligence officials.

The Iraqi channel – Iran has Shiite agents planted in local population centers. They and Iranian military officers meet frequently, sometimes daily, with American officers at different locations in Iraq.

The UN New York Center channel – These exchanges take place at UN headquarters and are led on the Iranian side by UN ambassador Mohammad Javad-Zarif, who is favored by the Bush administration as an advocate of a US-Iranian strategic alliance. Until recently, he headed the American desk at the Iranian foreign ministry.

The International Atomic Energy Agency channel – As the following item shows, Iran rates this channel highly, second only to the talking point at UN headquarters in New York. Ultimately, the question of whether Iran gets the nuclear bomb, option or both will be settled here.

Iran & the N-Bomb

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose (The More Things Change, the More They Are the Same)

How tightly the Shiite revolutionaries of Tehran are hugging their nuclear arsenal was brought home to the Bush administration at secret parleys between US and Iranian representatives in Athens from Sunday, May 11 to Tuesday, May 13.

The United States was represented by President George W. Bush’s personal envoy for Afghan and Iraqi affairs, Zalmay Khalilzad, and a group of officials from the Iran desks of the national security council and the CIA.

Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and current secretary of the hard-line Expediency Council, led the Iranian side. Rezai is close to former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, the most influential figure around Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. All three are Shiite radicals, but Rezai, like Rafsanjani, is in favor of strategic understandings with the United States on three conditions:

1. Washington must bolster Khamenei’s faction in the Iranian regime and Rezai’s clique in the Revolutionary Guards.

2. The United States and Iran will split control of oil and other natural resources in the Caspian Sea region.

3. America must accept Iran as a member of the nuclear club alongside India, Pakistan and Israel.

The US-Iranian meeting in Athens took place at a gathering dubbed euphemistically an academic symposium on the Iraq War’s impact on the region. In fact, the meeting discreetly brought together officials from most Middle East secret services, including Israel’s Mossad, under Washington’s aegis to explore which agencies were willing to work with the Americans and synchronize action among themselves in support of the Bush administration’s geo-strategic objectives in the region. The American delegation countered Tehran’s demands with conditions of its own:

1. Iran must abandon its nuclear weapons program forthwith, dismantle production facilities, discontinue uranium enrichment processing and promise not to buy an atomic bomb or nuclear materials from North Korea.

2. Iran must reform its regime along democratic lines. DBK 109 ran an article last week headlined “To Please Washington, Ayatollahs Decentralize Regime”. Those concessions are not sufficient. Washington is seeking a reform program broader than the one on offer.

3. The US-Iran agreement banning Iranian subversive activities among Shiites in Iraq must be extended for the long term. Thus far, DBK sources report Iran has abided by its commitment in full.

4. Iran must cut off all ties with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, also disarm the Hezbollah and remake the Lebanese terrorist-military organization as a political movement.

Washington opts for hard-liners

The inescapable conclusion from the four American demands is that Washington has opted for Khamenei’s hard-line faction as its strategic partner in Tehran rather the reformist party. According to DBK sources in Washington, the crucial decision was prompted by the realization that the reformists, although the largest faction in the Majlis, stand no chance of removing the radicals and ruling in their stead. All their efforts to attain power are foredoomed to failure by the indecisiveness and ineptitude of their leader, President Mohammed Khatami. Although well into his second term in office, he has never become a force for change in Iran. The Bush administration has also elected the radical Revolutionary Guards, the military arm of the Khomeinist regime, as the sole effective military force in Iran today, rather than the armed forces.

This combination suits US objectives in one important respect: Since Rafsanjani and Rezai both prefer cooperation with Washington to confrontation, regime reform in Tehran could become feasible in harmony with the current rulers without resorting to violent confrontation or ousters.

The Athens meeting registered some progress. Rezai was willing to accept all America’s conditions with one notable exception; Tehran insisted on retaining its nuclear weapons program as part of its strategic collaboration understanding with the United States.

The American delegates swiftly discovered the Iranian official losing no time in building up the pressure on Washington by agilely pursuing alternative avenues. In Athens, he spent more time huddling with Arab security chiefs than with the US delegates. To the Egyptian representative Rezai proposed a united Iranian-Egyptian front to defeat Washington’s plan for disposing of Mohammed ElBaradei as director of the International Atomic Energy Agency and replacing him with Jordan’s prince Hassan.

Tehran clings to nuclear option

The Americans soon realized that Teheran had already focused its campaign for acceptance of its nuclear weapon on the IAEA meeting called in Vienna for June 16 to discuss Iran. Washington is counting on the international agency finding Iran in violation of its commitments under the nuclear non-proliferation treaties it has signed. The issue can then come before the UN Security Council with possible sanctions against Teheran on the table. However, the Iranians trust in their ability to mete out to the United States a diplomatic defeat at the IAEA comparable to the reverse Washington suffered at the Security Council before the Iraq War. If that happens, then Tehran believes the Americans will be forced to turn aside from their nuclear demands and engage instead in bilateral negotiations that leave Iran holding on to a nuclear bomb or at least a nuclear option.

To bend the Americans to their will, the Iranians will not scruple to wield the three weapons they believe they command: Al Qaeda’s presence in Iran, Iraq’s Shiites and the Hizballah.

DBK counter-terror sources have found Al Qaeda rings operational in three Iranian locations - two in the province of Khorasan and one in Baluchistan near western Afghanistan. In Khorasan, some 600 Al Qaeda men have taken up positions in a base in Tayebat, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Afghan border, and in the suburbs of the city of Gonabad, about 140 kilometers (85 miles) from the frontier. Senior Al Qaeda personnel in Iran have moved into the town of Garmab, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Mashad, the provincial capital.

In Baluchistan, Al Qaeda personnel are operating in two bases near the cities of Zabul and Zahedan. All of three bases are directed by the Nasr command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the arm dedicated to exporting Iran’s Islamic revolution.

The existence of those bases is known in Washington. They were discussed by DBK several times last year. In the spring of 2002, US special forces gathered in bases outside the Afghan city of Herat near the Iranian border were ordered to strike at the Al Qaeda bases and choke off continuous cross-border traffic, including lucrative drug smuggling. A deteriorating security situation at the time in other parts of Afghanistan – mainly in the capital, Kabul – along with the approaching war in Iraq caused some of the special forces contingents to be transferred to places where they were more urgently needed. The Al Qaeda bases in Iran were left intact and fully operational.

HOT POINTS

A Digest of the Week’s Exclusives

17 May: In between Riyadh and Casablanca, some salient facts emerged from investigations carried out by the intelligence and counter-terror sources of DBK:

1. The casualty count in al Qaeda’s chain of attacks in Riyadh on Monday, May 12, was between 94 and 96 killed and 196 injured – almost triple the 34 dead grudgingly admitted by the Saudi authorities.

2. The assailants aimed for American targets at the hub of the US-Saudi strategic partnership.

3. Some of the al Qaeda terrorists wore National Guards uniforms; some also drove vehicles with the unit’s insignia to the areas of attack. Eye witnesses saw terrorists clearly in command positions using keys to open up sentry booths in some places. Others had keys ready to operate the barriers and gates from inside those booths. These and other indications point to a very unusual terrorist strike; the attackers clearly had senior accomplices on the inside in the National Guard.

4. Ten days before the multiple bombings in Riyadh, John Bolton, the State Department Undersecretary for Disarmament, on a visit to Moscow, was invited to watch a video-film secretly shot by Russian intelligence: It showed a Chechen conclave in which Saudis were a heavy component in the new rebel Chechen leadership, the new top gun being Saudi tribesman Muhammed al-Ghamedi, cousin of Ahmed and Hamza al-Ghamedi, two of the Saudi members of the suicide team that crashed an airliner into New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He uses the nom de guerre of Abu Walid and belongs to the Ghamid tribe that controls large areas of the southern Saudi province of Asir. The group was clearly planning to operate outside Russia as well as Chechnya and was well supplied with funds from Saudi Arabia.

5. Washington has received ample evidence in recent months that direct Saudi involvement in – and funding of - al Qaeda’s terror networks goes on uninterrupted by the 9/11 attacks and the Afghan War. In some ways, it has expanded.

According to DBK's intelligence sources, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zuwahri are alive and active and have assumed personal command of the current wave of terror. The Saudi and Persian Gulf cells are commanded by two Saudis, Khaleb al Jehani - who travels constantly between Riyadh, Jeddah, Damascus, Beirut and south Lebanon; and Seif al Adal – who commutes between Qaeda camps in northern Iran near Mashhad, Tehran, northern Iraq, Damascus and Lebanon. Al Qaeda maintains another key base in East Africa under the command of Mohammed Fazul, planner of the 1998 US embassy attacks in Tanzania and Kenya, the hijacking of Ethiopian Airways Flight 961 in 1996 – in which a group of Israeli Air Industries executives was murdred, and the attacks on an Israeli hotel and Arkia airliner in Mombasa last December.

19 May: The White House has said it hopes the postponed visit by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in response to the latest spiral of Palestinian terror will take place within days. President George W. Bush clearly wants to see Sharon as soon as possible. DBK’s Washington and Jerusalem sources explain Israel’s postponement and US urgency by a certain conflict of immediate goals: Bush is in trouble with his global war on terror following al Qaeda’s deadly strikes in Riyadh and Casablanca. He thinks Sharon’s visit to Washington can help allay some of the pressure on him. However, Sharon is also in trouble with his counter-terror war against Yasser Arafat and prefers to stay at home.

Al Qaeda’s targets in Casablanca were two-edged: In addition to the classical al Qaeda aim for Jewish and Israeli locations – the Casablanca Jewish community center, a Jewish-owned restaurant, the old Jewish cemetery and a hotel frequented by Israelis – Osama bin Laden was implicitly striking at the Saudi royal presence in the kingdom of Morocco, where almost every prince of any importance – from Crown Prince Abdullah down - maintains a palace and harem for frequent recreational visits. Members of the two royal houses are also joined by business ties accompanied by the inevitable court intrigue.

Whereas the US president needs to satisfy Americans and the world that he is seriously pursuing his declared war on terror – before, after and despite the Iraq War, Saudi rulers to survive must prove the very opposite to their home front. They must persuade Saudis as well as Arab and Muslim opinion that they are not collaborating with Washington – certainly not to harm fellow Muslims. It is at this tricky juncture that Sharon visit to the White House comes into focus.

The US president has made two solemn public commitments: To pursue the war on terror and to work for his vision of a Palestinian-Israel peace based on two states. The two pillars set up by the US president, his secretary of state Colin Powel and the Israeli prime minister to support a process of accommodation between the Palestinians and Israel are bending low under the tornado force of Palestinian suicidal terror, instead of fighting it. It is common knowledge that the attacks are instigated from the West Bank town of Ramallah just north of Jerusalem. From his headquarters there, Arafat retains control of the bulk of Palestinian security forces; from there he looses his terror gangs. Abu Mazen and Dahlan make no bones about being neither willing nor able to take on the forbidding task of fighting Arafat’s legions in which Hamas has been integrated. They have passed the buck back to Sharon.

However, just as Crown Prince Abdullah ties President Bush’s hands in the fight against terror, so too does Bush bind those of Sharon. The US president’s immediate priority is to show that his efforts have achieved good progress in at least one major international conflict, i.e. the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. A fresh round of bloodletting and crisis in that arena would defeat that goal.

However, Sharon like Bush and Abdullah, is laboring under the pressure of an upsurge of terrorist attacks. The Israeli prime minister was not averse to putting off his talk with the US president in the White House, originally set for Tuesday, May 20.

21 May: The terrorist mega-attack against which Israeli security - like the US, Britain, Australia and other western powers – has been on high alert since Tuesday, May 20, almost happened this week.

On Monday, May 19, Saudi authorities detained three Moroccan al Qaeda suspects at Jeddah international airport just as they were preparing to board a Saudi national airlines plane bound for Sudan. While “Saudi security sources” claimed the next day that the men planned to hijack the Saudi plane and crash it over Jeddah, DEBKAfile’s exclusive counter-terror sources reveal that, under interrogation, the suspected al Qaeda terrorists admitted they had intended flying the captive Saudi airliner over Israel and crashing it over an Israeli city.

That first Saudi announcement claimed the suspects carried knives and their last testaments. The Saudis make it a habit never to mention Israel in the context of al Qaeda’s attacks – even one which they thwarted. Then, Wednesday evening, May 21, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef denied there had been any hijack plot. He said two not three Moroccans had been detained in connection with “previous security cases”. According to DBK’s sources, neither Saudi version is correct. The terrorists were not just armed with knives but were loaded with explosives, and there were three of them, not two.

The high alert declared in Israel Tuesday also placed the Israeli Air Force on round–the-clock patrol to guard against hijackers reaching Israeli skies to attack Israeli towns. Later, DBK’s counter terror sources added another detail: The three men detained at Jeddah airport Monday May 19 were not Moroccans but Saudi nationals married to Moroccan women and using false passports. The Saudi government is anxious to remove the stigma of aircraft hijackers attached to Saudis since 9/11 – hence the obfuscation over the detainees’ nationality. Final identification of all the remains found on the sites of the May 12 bombings Riyadh jumps the death toll to 60. Nonetheless, the Saudis refuse to budge from the figure of 34.