Day: November 7, 2023

Photo: US Citizens Cross Rafah Border Into Egypt Amid Israeli …  UPI News

Israel is running out of time before Biden damns it to defeat  The Telegraph

Tlaib again faces censure resolutions over Israel comments  CNN

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THERE WAS A TIME many years ago that I’d drive past a soccer stadium in South Vietnam looking for a chalk scratch on the wall.  Horizontal meant that my net of spies had reports for me. Posing as farmers, rice peddlers and the like, my spies eyeballed and engaged communist soldiers and units and reported back the essentials: names, numbers, weapons, uniforms, morale and so forth.

This was old-timey military espionage for sure, a legacy of the OSS and its allied spy services  in World War Two, who depended on agents in the French underground and elsewhere to track and subvert the Nazis. By the end of the century, though, advances in technology had eclipsed much of battlefield HUMINT, as human-based spying efforts are called.  In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. field commanders increasingly came to favor electronic intercepts and “overhead”—eavesdropping spy planes, satellites and eventually drones—to locate the enemy and suss out its plans. HUMINT was just too hard, too time-consuming and too unreliable against the likes of Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban. Better to just trace the insurgents’ cell phone calls.

Two weeks ago, however, Hamas put old-timey intelligence methods to good use against the Israelis. Documents taken from the bodies of its savage raiders showed they had carried “detailed maps of the towns and military bases that they targeted. Some also carried tactical guides identifying weak spots on Israeli army armored vehicles,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Other captured documents showed that “Hamas had been systematically gathering intelligence on each kibbutz bordering Gaza and creating specific plans of attack for each village that included the intentional targeting of women and children,” according to NBC News. “The dental office, the supermarket, the dining hall,” an amazed Israel Defense Forces source told NBC. “The level of specificity would cause anyone in the intelligence field’s jaw to drop.”

That source had to have been born yesterday, so to speak—and/or arrogant to the point of incompetence, evidently unable to comprehend that the benighted Palestinian militants couldn’t possibly mount the kind of spy ops that Israeli intelligence had practiced against them for decades. 

Back to the Future 

As it turns out, Hamas had advanced intelligence capabilities that have generally gone unrecognized. Years ago it had “established electronic warfare units that sought to neutralize Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and disrupt IDF communications,” an Israeli think tank reported in 2021. To that end, it had a “server farm” of “hundreds or thousands of computers” running around the clock, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs reported.

Brigadier Gen. Nati Cohen, former chief of the IDF’s C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence) unit, was quoted as saying that “Hamas sought to disrupt the IDF’s cybernetic superiority and established elite units for that purpose.” In May 2021, the IDF targeted at least 10 Hamas C4I and electronic warfare targets, the center said. It didn’t say whether it was able to obliterate the “server farms.” Whatever, Hamas engineers have not been able to neutralize Israeli air defenses.

But none of that explains how Hamas was able to equip its fighters with detailed maps, right down to the layouts and manpower of Israeli police stations and the location of safe rooms in kibbutzim homes. 

That could only come from old fashioned HUMINT—eyes and ears (and cell phone cameras, no doubt) inside those settlements. Israel’s sophisticated surveillance cameras along the Gaza border were useless in detecting them.

Worker Spies

In 2022, Jerusalem authorities issued some 17,000 permits for Palestinians in Gaza to work in Israel, The Guardian reported last January. “Most were given to married men over the age of 25 to work in agriculture and construction,” it said.  The permits, of course, provided Hamas with a potential army of spies to float in and around the Jewish settlements, not to mention IDF units and tanks. 

No doubt a number of Palestinians were eager to enlist in the espionage corps, but many others, including—or particularly—those who had forged friendships with their more ecumenically minded Jewish hosts could well have been threatened with harm to their families if they refused.  

At the end of their works shifts in Israel their Hamas case officers would have debriefed them, extracting details on their targets: names, numbers, weapons, uniforms, morale and so forth, just like I had in Vietnam decades back. The reports I provided U.S. Marine units in my area enabled them to disrupt communist attacks. Israeli counterterrorism units, likewise, have planted many a spy in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Still, Hamas shocked Israel with the depth and expertise of its murderous campaign. Likewise, despite ubiquitous and overlapping U.S. intelligence efforts, the Vietnamese communists surprised U.S. commanders again and again, no more so than in January 1968, when they unleashed their legendary Tết holiday attacks on Saigon and provincial capitals across South Vietnam. In the end, Tết was a tactical disaster for the communists—U.S. and Saigon troops decimated the insurgents—but a monumental psychological victory, which served to bely the American command’s stated optimism about the war’s progress and cratering fragile U.S. domestic support for it. 

It remains to be seen whether Hamas is having its own Tết.  U.S. backing for Israel is rock solid, President Biden has said again and again. “So, in this moment, we must be crystal clear,” he said at the White House on Oct. 10, three days after the attacks. “We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel  And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”  

And that stance is reflected in U.S. opinion polls.—with caveats.

“At this point, more Americans, but not a majority, think Israel’s response has been appropriate, though an overwhelming number of respondents are worried the war will spill over into a broader regional conflict,” NPR reported last weekend, citing the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

Hamas is no Viet Cong, which is to say, it enjoys a fraction of the respect, even enthusiasm, that many Western elites showered on the Vietnamese revolutionaries over their decades of struggle to oust the French and then the U.S., which had propped up a succession of corrupt Saigon regimes with ruthless free-fire zones, napalm and carpet bombing.

Following its barbaric slaughter of Israeli innocents, Hamas has even less claim on the West’s sympathy, even on the hearts of those who have supported Palestinian rights to statehood. Pro-Hamas protests here have largely been confined to liberal universities.

Shifting Sands

But Israel’s next steps could dramatically alter that equation. Already, Arab capitals are beset by seething popular support for Hamas, no matter—or even because of— its slaughter of Jews.  Iran and its proxies in Syria and Lebanon are no doubt sorely tempted to intervene, especially if an Israeli invasion of Gaza gets bogged down while killing thousands of innocent Palestinians. There is mounting fear that Muslim militants in Europe, Africa and the U.S. may well join the fray with more terrorist attacks on local Jewish targets. Innocent Muslims here, too, have been victimized. Mutual fears and loathing are ascendent.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist regime, meanwhile, was already held in contempt by the majority of Israelis, not to mention much of the world,  before the Hamas attacks. Its pathetically weak response to the Oct. 7 attacks and beyond has served only to deepen popular disdain for the regime. Support for its national unity government is fragile, and could deteriorate, depending on what happens next.

The Middle East is wobbling on its axis. And for that, Hamas’s old-fashioned spymasters can take credit. 

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THERE IS NO HIGHER PRIORITY for intelligence services in a war than locating the enemy. That’s why “find” is the first word in the combat mantra of “find, fix and finish.”

For the intelligence officers helping the Israel Defense Force plan its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, the first piece of business is to map the vast complex of underground tunnels that provide shelter for Hamas’s military leaders and weapons stores, not to mention the 220 hostages held by it and other militants.

And now, thanks in part to 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz,  an Israeli hostage who was released earlier this week, we now have confirmation that the tunnel system is as vast and daunting as reputed, an elaborate underground fortress that can provide Hamas fighters with formidable defensive and offensive advantages once the expected Israeli ground operation gets underway.  The prospect of “an intractable urban battle inside Gaza,” however, is one of the reasons Israel has paused its invasion plans, according to a New York Times report Friday.

“They brought us to the entrance to the tunnels,” Lipshitz told a news conference  at a Tel Aviv hospital soon after her release. “We arrived in the tunnel and walked for kilometers on wet dirt. There is a giant system of tunnels, like spiderwebs. . . .We started walking in the tunnels, the dirt is damp and everything is always damp and humid. We reached a hall with 25 people in it.  . . They guarded us closely.”

With the captives most likely separated into small groups and being held in different tunnels, the Israelis will have to pinpoint their exact locations and try to rescue them before the army can destroy Hamas’ subterranean redoubts.  And to do that, Israel’s use of sophisticated ground-piercing surveillance technology may determine both the fate of the hostages and the outcome of the battle.

A person familiar with the technology says Israel has advanced hyperspectral sensors, which can confirm the presence of people, weapons, explosives and other objects deep beneath the ground, among other things. 

Hyperspectral sensors use a vast portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to analyze and identify objects buried beneath the ground or under the water. They operate on the principle that all materials leave unique fingerprints in the electromagnetic spectrum. These sensors, first developed by NASA in the 1970s, scan these fingerprints, known as spectral signatures, and identify the materials that make up the scanned object. 

Geologists were the first to use hyperspectral sensors to find subterranean oil fields and mineral deposits. Since then, their utility has spread to farmers, who use the sensors to track the development and health of crops, and to environmentalists, who use them to aid in recycling by their ability to identify different types of plastic. They’re also used in medicine and food processing,

But these sensors also can read subterranean soil densities and the signatures of other buried materials, such as concrete and metal rebar, which would permit the Israelis to pinpoint the exact location of underground tunnels. They also can identify the spectral signature of the weapons and explosives that Hamas stores in their tunnels. And the sensors can pick up the chemical fingerprints of subterranean carbon dioxide, a sure sign of people—both Hamas fighters and hostages—living underground. 

This person said Israeli drones outfitted with these sensors can linger over Gaza collecting data on what lies beneath the surface. The army then downloads that data to a receiver close by inside Israel or aboard an Israeli naval vessel offshore.

But this person cautioned that hyperspectral sensors have their limits: They cannot penetrate any tunnel segments that Hamas has reinforced with concrete or metal rebar. And the sensors can’t distinguish between Hamas fighters and hostages.

“These sensors can tell if there’s a person or persons in those tunnels, but they can’t tell if it’s Ibrahim or Abraham,” this person, who asked not to be identified, told SpyTalk.

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Israelis are not the only civilians hearing air raid sirens. They’re heard daily in Ukraine’s cities as well. Both nations are carrying the battle to their adversaries. For Israel, it’s Hamas and other Islamist terrorists, who have the backing of Iran, and by proxy, Russia. Ukraine is going right to the source.

Ukraine’s intelligence and special ops agencies have grown increasingly bold in taking the war to Russia itself, with assassinations, sabotage, and drone attacks well inside their adversary’s territory—even Moscow—with, according to a recent report in The Washington Post, the somewhat jittery support of CIA bosses.

In light of all that, we thought it was time to catch up on intelligence ops related to Ukraine and Russia—and Iran and Israel, as Gaza burns. And to that end, we’ve invited back our old friend John Sipher, a former top Russia hand at the CIA.

Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jewish man dies from injuries suffered at Southern California Israel-Palestine rally  NBC Southern California

Donald Trump goes crazy in court: In a rare moment of public testimony, the former president railed against the judge and the case against him while appearing in court Monday. 

The post Did He Think It Was a MAGA Rally? Donald Trump Went Wild in Court appeared first on 19FortyFive.