American Blog

Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

By Darryl Mason

Just another one of those strange, but now more often occurring, coincidences….no doubt :

For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.

25 years spying for Israel, from inside Lebanon, working on Palestinian causes no doubt guided by his Mossad handlers, never busted, until now. Even John LeCarre wasn’t game to try and pass something like that off in fiction. This story had to occur in real life, it’s just so strange.

And this is nice :

At the start of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called Mr. Jarrah to reassure him that his village would be spared and that he should stay at home, investigators said.

If only every village in Lebanon reduced to twisted reo and blood-splattered chunks of concrete when Israel unleashed in 2006 had been lucky enough to have a valuable Israel spy living locally.

There’s lots more to this remarkable tale here, but where’s that second big spy thriller twist?

One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Israel’s intelligence services would have maintained files on every member of their spy’s extended family, every old school or university friend or associate, every person he came into contact with in Lebanon on a daily, or fairly regular at least, basis. You can assume it to be pretty certain that they had a zinger of a file on his cousin Ziad al-Jarrah.

Did Israel’s intelligence services, then, have some idea what kind of preparations Ziad al-Jarrah was involved with in, say, August or early September, 2001?

Israel spokesman Mark Regev could barely stop talking a few weeks back about why it was Hamas’ fault that Israel had to kill a few hundred Palestinian women and children. What does Regev have to say about the curious tale of Ali al-Jarrah?

“It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”

Just how big this story becomes in the city papers of New York, London, Washington DC and Melbourne, or how quickly it falls into that quickly filling news pit of “let’s not go there”, remains to be seen. It also depends, of course, but only in part, on how much of the above is actually true.

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