- WMR's intelligence sources are scoffing at the Pakistani
Interior Ministry contention that it could prove that former Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of "Al Qaeda's"
chief in South Waziristan, Baitullah Mehsud. The Interior Ministry claims
that it recorded an "intercept" of Mehsud's communications in
which Mehsud allegedly congratulated his followers for the attack on Bhutto
in the heavily-garrisoned city of Rawalpindi.
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- Bhutto's political party and Mehsud both rejected the
claims about the communications intercepts of Mehsud and said the Pervez
Musharraf regime was behind the assassination of Bhutto.
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- US National Security Agency (NSA) sources have told WMR
that signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts of Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders
are rare in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.
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- Not only is cell phone coverage spotty to non-existent
in remote areas like Waziristan but ever since the 1996 NSA intercept of
Chechen President Dzokhar Dudayev's satellite telephone call to Moscow,
which was passed in to Russian security authorities who triangulated his
position and killed him with an air-to-surface missile, Al Qaeda and Taliban
leaders, including Osama Bin Laden, have refrained from using electronic
communications. mindful of U.S. intelligence's capability to lock in on
the locations of cell phone and sat phone signals.
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- This editor wrote about this in Covert Action Quarterly
in 1997:
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- "During the evening of April 21, Dudayev went outside
his headquarters, a small house near the village of Gekhi Chu, some 20
miles southwest of Grozny, the Russian occupied Chechen capital. At 8:00
p.m., he phoned [Duma Deputy Konstantin] Borovoi in Moscow to discuss [Boris]
Yeltsin's latest olive branch. 'Soon, it could be very hot in Moscow,'
he told Borovoi. "Do you live in the center?' In the center and even
next to the Interior Ministry, Borovoi responded. 'You should probably
move out for the time being,' Dudayev warned. Dudayev may have been telling
Borovoi that a Chechen attack on the Interior Ministry was imminent. 'That's
out of the question,' Dzhokar Mussayevich, Borovoi responded, using the
familiar Russian term of address. Then Dudayev said, 'Russia must regret
what it is doing.' Borovoi's line suddenly went dead. This time, Dudayev
had stayed on the phone too long.
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- Just seconds before what were to be the Chechen's last
words, a Russian Sukhoi Su-25 jet, armed with air-to-surface missiles,
had received his coordinates. It locked on to Dudayev's phone signal and
fired two laser-guided missiles. As one exploded just a few feet away,
shrapnel pierced Dudayev's head. He died almost immediately in the arms
of one of his bodyguards.
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- The Russians had previously tried some less advanced
methods to kill Dudayev and failed. On one occasion, Dudayev had been given
a knife with an electronic homing device embedded in the handle but it
was discovered before Russian aircraft could lock in on the signal
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- Suspicion centered on the US and the National Security
Agency's Vortex, Orion, and Trumpet, the world's most sophisticated (SIGINT)
spy satellites.
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- They were partially designed to intercept the mobile
telephone systems used by the big brass in the Soviet and Warsaw Pact high
commands. The NSA SIGINT birds were, therefore, extremely useful against
the kind of telephone Dudayev had been given by his Turkish friends."
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- The familiar stock footage of Bin Laden coming out of
an Afghan cave holding a satellite phone handset was made long before the
Dudayev assassination by the Russians.
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- Not only did Bin Laden heed the lesson of Dudayev's death
but so did Shamil Basayev, the Chechen guerrilla commander who was often
linked to "Al Qaeda." Before his assassination in 2006 by Russian
Federal Security Bureau agents in a remote car bombing attack, locating
Basayev was hampered by his avoidance of using any telecommunications.
NSA failed to record one intercept of Basayev while he was being hunted
by Russian and American intelligence agencies.
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- However, Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)
agents in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal regions in the northwest
of the country have not been so reticent in using telecommunications. According
to WMR's source in NSA, U.S. SIGINT operators in Afghanistan and elsewhere
have routinely intercepted communications of ISI agents dealing with the
provision of arms and ammunition to Taliban and "Al Qaeda" forces
in Afghanistan that use the weapons against U.S. and other NATO military
forces in the country. The knowledge of ISI's and the Musharraf regime's
involvement in arming the killers of American troops has resulted in a
general belief by experienced U.S. SIGINT analysts that anything coming
from the Musharraf government relating to Bhutto's assassination can be
completely disregarded as falsehoods.
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- Copyright 2005-2008 WayneMadsenReport.com
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