The new partnership has been discussed in the Senate and House intelligence committees, whose chairmen and vice chairmen are briefed by CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller. “Hezbollah is the A-team of terrorism,” said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the chairman of the Senate panel.
Analysts say there is an evolving pattern of decentralized alliances between terrorist groups and cells which share a desire to cripple the U.S. and force it out of the Middle East, and Israel out of Palestinian territory.
“There’s a convergence of objectives,” said Steven Simon, a former National Security Council terrorism expert. “There’s something in the zeitgeist that is pretty well established now.”
A senior administration official said Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants have used the Internet to tell their followers to ally themselves with helpful Islamic-based groups like Hezbollah. The official said there is “no doubt at all” the two groups have been in communication on logistics.
Among the methods cited by counterterrorism experts are computer chat rooms, with operatives changing passwords when necessary and exploiting the chat rooms to plan operations.
However, some analysts believe that the fact that Hezbollah is a Shiite organization and Al Qaida operatives are largely Sunni Muslims means true cooperation is doomed to failure, according to the Post report.
“I just don’t see it,” said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service. “There’s not a lot of commonality there.”
However, testimony regarding just such an alliance was provided by Ali Mohamed, a former U.S. Green Beret who conspired with bin Laden to bomb U.S. embassies in Africa.
According to the report, in October 2000, he testified about securing a meeting in Sudan “between Al Qaida… and Iran and Hezbollah… between Mughniye, Hezbollah’s chief, and bin Laden.” He said Hezbollah provided explosives training for Al Qaida, while Iran used Hezbollah to provide explosives that looked like rocks.
The report states that U.S. and European intelligence operatives have had a hard time convincing their superiors of the new alliance until now.
“We have been screaming at them for more than a year now, and more since Sept. 11, that these guys all work together,” an overseas operative said in the report. “What we keep hearing back is that it can’t be because Al Qaida doesn’t work that way. That is [expletive]. Here, on the ground, these guys all work together as long as they are Muslims. There is no other division that matters.”