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But the real poison pill may be in the details

July 16, 2015

In the summer of '08, Brigadier General Mohammed Suleiman, who had been in charge of Syria's nuclear program, was shot at his seaside villa.

Besides the nuclear program, Suleiman also handled weapons transfers to Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, which made him a target of special interest for Israel, which has specifically focused on the weapons interface between states and terrorist groups.

His killing was initially a mystery. The assassin(s) had managed to enter Syria, take out a top general and escape. The $80 million found in Suleiman's villa further clouded matters, but then which top Arab official doesn't have hidden stockpiles of money?

Now we supposedly know how it happened.

In a scene that sounds as if it was taken out of a spy movie, Israeli naval commandos are said to have assassinated President Bashar Assad’s top security aide as he hosted a dinner party at his beachfront villa in the coastal city of Tartus in 2008.
General Muhammad Suleiman was killed after multiple bullets hit him in the head and neck as he sat around a crowded dinner table in the summer of 2008, the Intercept reported on Wednesday.
Citing recently leaked NSA documents, the report said that Israel’s elite naval commandos of Shayetet 13 stormed into Suleiman’s seaside vacation from the beach and shot the general before quickly escaping back to the sea.
According to the report, the intelligence files confirm for the first time that Suleiman was the target of an Israeli military operation, ending years of speculation that it was in fact an internal dispute that had resulted in the general’s assassination.
The document was provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who intermittently leaked thousands of classified documents from the American intelligence agency beginning in 2013.

The trouble with this is that Snowden is a Russian agent and any material provided by him or any of his associates may itself be an attempt at planting false intelligence with real intelligence. We've already seen him pull that trick before.

In this case, Snowden and his Russian handlers might have a motive because the killing was supposedly a complicated internal power struggle. The Russians might find it convenient to bandage that over by blaming Israel. On the other hand Israel had made targeting Syria's nuclear program and arms smuggling to Hezbollah a special priority.

But the real poison pill may be in the details.

In a top-secret entry in the NSA internal Wiki, Intellipedia, the assassination was attributed to “Israeli naval commandos.” The entry called “Manhunting Timeline” described the hit as the “first known instance of Israel targeting a legitimate government official.”
The report noted that the entry was marked as “SI,” meaning that the US obtained the intelligence by monitoring communications signals.
“We’ve had access to Israeli military communications for some time,” the Intercept quoted a former US intelligence officer as saying.

And this would be the perfect time for this kind of mischief. And the Russian involvement makes the whole thing that much murkier.

Major-General Yuri Ivanov, 52, was the deputy head of Russia’s foreign military intelligence arm known as GRU which is thought to operate the biggest network of foreign spies out of all of Russia’s clandestine intelligence services.
His badly decomposed body was found washed up on the Turkish coast by local fishermen earlier this month after he disappeared in the Syrian coastal resort of Latakia further south. The Russian army’s in-house newspaper, Red Star, did not report his death until last Saturday when he was quietly buried in Moscow.
According to the Kremlin, he was on holiday in Syria and died in a tragic swimming accident. However, other reports have suggested he was on official business and the location where he is reported to have disappeared was only about fifty miles from a strategically vital Russian naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartus which is being expanded and upgraded to service and refuel ships from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Israel wouldn't have touched someone like that, but the locals might have. And now Moscow may be trying to dump its own complicated mess in Syria on Israel's doorstep while deepening tensions between the US and Israel.

But then again, maybe that is how it happened.