How Qaeda Warned Its Operatives On Using Cell Phones!

Taken from The New York Sun, October 18, 2006
By ELI LAKE

When an aspiring Al Qaeda terrorist is buying a cell phone, it's best that he purchase the chip inside the device under a phony name or from a black market vendor that does not sell the accompanying documentation. If he has any reason to believe his phone has been tapped, he should sell it immediately to a stranger.

This is the kind of advice contained in "Myth of Delusion," a 151-page manuscript making the rounds on password-protected jihadi Web sites. The book recently caught the attention of American intelligence analysts, who estimate that it was released sometime this summer.

An English translation obtained by The New York Sun and whose authenticity was confirmed by a senior intelligence official gives an insight into what America's Islamist enemies believe they know about the CIA and the National Security Agency. It also underscores the paranoid mind at the heart of the international jihad movement, devoting paragraphs to how South Korean intelligence influences America's national security through a newspaper controlled by the Unification Church, the Washington Times.

The author of the book is a little-known terrorist named Mohammed al-Hakaymah, a member of a violent group that recently splintered off from an Egyptian Islamist organization, Gama'a al-Islamiyya, when it signed a cease-fire agreement with Cairo. Mr. Hakaymah gained some notoriety on August 5, when Osama bin Laden's Egyptian-born deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, mentioned his name in an announcement that Al Qaeda was merging with the splinter group.

An independent analyst affiliated with the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, Chris Zambelis, said yesterday that the book is similar to a military manual published by a Syrian named Abu Musab al-Suri, which was based largely on open sources and information released by the Pentagon.

"You see this kind of thing a lot. On the radical Islamic forums, you have people put up U.S.military manuals advising followers about American military tactics. In terms of an actual manual for intelligence, though, this is the most extensive and comprehensive I have seen," Mr. Zambelis said.

Intelligence community analysts are aware of the book, but it is seen as more of a strategic document and contains no tactical threat information, a senior intelligence analyst who spoke to the Sun on condition of anonymity said.

In the scope of its sources and its attempt to write a history of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, Mr. Hakaymah's book is different from other jihadist tracts on American intelligence.

While he makes no mention of the December 2005 New YorkTimes article that first disclosed that the National Security Agency was tapping phone numbers found in cell phones captured from suspected Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, he does devote a chapter to electronic surveillance.

In it, Mr. Hakaymah writes that any electronic communication between operatives can be monitored using key words such as "Mullah Omar," the name of the Taliban leader, or even voice printing.

Two pages are devoted to the Echelon surveillance system, which Britain and America developed in the 1990s. Mr. Hakaymah warns future terrorists not to repeat the mistake of the Kurdish terrorist leader Abdullah Öcalan, who was captured in Nairobi, Kenya, after making a cell phone call to northern Iraq.

"The surveillance may be for a certain number or for detecting a certain voice fingerprint for a wanted person," Mr. Hakaymah writes. "When a person's number is detected, the recorded calls can be retrieved whether it was incoming or outgoing on that number."

The book also gives a detailed description of how the CIA recruits spies, based on information widely available in fiction and nonfiction books about espionage. But in this section, the author conflates the training of spies and officers, writing that recruited spies are trained in the West Virginia CIA facility known as the Farm, when in fact only officers receive training there.

Yesterday, the senior intelligence official summed up the book as "an assessment of American intelligence, a mixture of a couple of things. There is some element of training from things they gather from open sources. ... But this is also clearly propaganda."

The propaganda element appears to be aimed at certain Islamists who have rejected Al Qaeda's view that America, or what the group's leaders call "the far enemy," is too powerful and too efficient to challenge.

One of the purposes of the book is to show that America's intelligence agencies "make mistakes and are not infallible," a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, Mary Habeck, said. The author is saying, "We don't have to fear them like we always fear them. That is why it is called the ‘Myth of Delusion.' One of bin Laden's purposes, he says, in authorizing 9/11 was to break the media blockade, to show the invincibility of the United States as a media myth," Ms. Habeck added.

In his preface, Mr. Hakaymah writes that the book will "use the published reports, news, and research, which expose the extent of the failure of the American intelligence services inside and outside the United States."

To that end, he speculates that a high-level spy may have tipped off Al Qaeda's September 11 hijackers or that elements of the American intelligence apparatus had prior knowledge of the plot. He writes that the November 2001 killing of a CIA officer, Michael Spann, in Afghanistan represented an enormous victory for Al Qaeda because the agency had to admit his death publicly.

But the book also shows a paranoid and conspiratorial worldview that mimics many of the more radical critiques of American intelligence. The RAND Corporation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies were founded, Mr. Hakaymah writes, by a cabal of "financial and industrial groups of Texas, including the giant weapons manufacturers together with the intelligence community headed by the CIA."

Mr. Hakaymah also devotes several pages to the pending case against a former Pentagon analyst, Lawrence Franklin, who pleaded guilty last fall to mishandling classified documents but was initially reported in the press to be a spy for Israel.
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The document shares nothing new that an ordinary member of the public did not know. Most of the information was probably gleaned from open sources like the internet, documentaries, news media and as stated in various news reports, most of the information was false. – but this news piece is nor very newsworthy and is very suspect – maybe this was deliberately posted to cause uncertainly and needless worrying?

Anyway you can read the document here…
Fox News: English Translation of "Myth of Delusion" - PDF Format