I Spy Hezbollah

Jeff Stein’s CQ story is packed tight with fas­ci­nat­ing tid­bits about what the West’s intel­li­gence ser­vices know about Hezbollah — and why they’re not say­ing more. So make sure to read the whole thing. Here’s a snip­pet.

Irans role as quar­ter­mas­ter to Hezbollah mis­sileers in Lebanon is beyond dis­pute…
“Lots of pho­tographs exist” of the Iranian sup­ply oper­a­tions, Reynolds says… “The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are well aware of the loca­tion of rock­ets…”
“The trans­fers are also detectable by U.N. peace­keep­ers,” Reynolds added, who are head­quar­tered “near the air­port, and [by] for­eign mil­i­tary attaches in Damascus. These weapons are then fol­lowed into Lebanon by human and tech­ni­cal means…”
“The Israelis are very hes­i­tant to reveal pho­to­graphic electro-optical evi­dence from Mt. Hermon,” Reynolds says, “because it would reveal to the Syrians some Israeli [sur­veil­lance] capa­bil­i­ties and the Syrians would then use that knowl­edge to counter them.”
Washington, Reynolds says, resists “reveal­ing them for the same rea­son” so as not to dis­close the qual­ity of its tech­ni­cal col­lec­tion capa­bil­i­ties, which include satel­lites and ground-station inter­cepts of Iranian and Syrian elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions.
But pretty good pic­tures of the Hezbollah posi­tions are avail­able to any­body with a lap­top, via Google Earth.
Reynolds even e-mailed me a cou­ple of pho­tos of the Lebanon-Israel-Syria bor­der region that he had down­loaded from Google arth and marked up around the Hezbollah sites.

July 25th, 2006 | Cloak and Dagger | 20435 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/07/25/i-spy-hezbollah/I+Spy+Hezbollah2006-07-25+18%3A42%3A57david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.