The peace process at sea: the Karine-A affair and the war on terrorism.

• Author: Satloff, Robert

ON JANUARY 3, in the clouds high above the waters of the Red Sea, Lt. General Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, peered anxiously through a specially designed telescopic lens at an old, rusty, blue freighter several kilometers below. For the previous three months, Israeli intelligence had tracked the boat from its purchase in Lebanon to its current position in international waters between Saudi Arabia and Sudan, heading toward the Suez Canal. Operation "Noah's Ark"--the plan to intercept the ship on the high seas--was given the go-ahead. But so nervous was Mofaz that he might authorize an unwarranted attack hundreds of kilometers from his country's territorial waters, he himself needed to confirm the letters hand-painted on the side of the ship. It was, as intelligence had said it would be, the Karine-A. Within minutes, Israeli naval commandos operating from both sea and air boarded the ship, surprised the crew, and took control without firing a shot.

What they found in the cargo hold, beneath crates of cheap textiles, sunglasses and other freight, was stunning: scores of professionally manufactured submersible containers that held enough weapons and explosives to supply a small army. The fifty-ton arsenal included dozens of 122 mm and 107 mm Katyusha rockets with ranges of twenty and eight kilometers respectively; hundreds of shorter-range 81 mm rockets; numerous mortars, SAGGER and RPG 18 anti-tank missiles, sniper rifles, AK-47 assault rifles and mines. The rockets and mortars were of Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian origin. Some were advanced munitions, such as the VR7 anti-tank warhead, capable of penetrating the armor of main-battle tanks. Perhaps most ominously, the boat held about 3,000 pounds of C4 explosive, enough for about 300 suicide bombs--three times more than all the suicide bombers Israel has faced in its entire history.

The magnitude of the weapons cache notwithstanding, the strategic implication of the Karine-A lies less in the lethality of its cargo than in the identity of the unlikely partnership that implemented the smuggling scheme. As Israeli, American and even European officials confirmed, (1) the karine-A was a joint undertaking of Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Islamic Republic of Iran, facilitated through the good offices of the Lebanese terrorist organization Hizballah.

The facts are these: On August 31, the head of the PA'S procurement department, one Adel Awadallah (a.k.a. Adel al-Mughrabi), purchased a 4,000-ton freighter in Lebanon with $400,000 provided by a man named Fuad Shobaki. With the rank of brigadier general in the Palestinian military; Shobaki held the tide of director of the Military Financial Administration; in practice, he was widely considered to be Arafat's closest financial advisor. The acquisition itself was supervised by two PA naval police officials, Fathi Razam and Omar Akawi. On September 12, the day after the World Trade Center/Pentagon terrorist attacks, the boat was registered with the Kingdom of Tonga and renamed the Karine-A. After steaming to Aden, Akawi took over as captain, with a crew of nine Egyptians and Jordanians--who evidently did not know about the arms smuggling plan--plus four armed and well-trained Palestinians. The ship proceeded to waters off the Iranian island of Kish. There, under the watchful eye of a chief aide to Imad Mughniyah--Hizballah's operations commander and the man thought responsible for the bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon and the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Argentina--the boat was loaded with eighty crates of weapons. Though the weapons were not an outright gift from the ayatollahs to Arafat, they were sold at steep discount--$30-50 million of goods for just $10 million.

On December 12, the boat departed for Dubai, where it was loaded with innocent cargo as camouflage. In mid-December, just as Arafat was taking to the airwaves under intense U.S. pressure to announce a ceasefire in the 15-month old intifada-cum-guerilla war, the boat was chugging around the Arabian peninsula. Evidently, the plan was to pass through the Suez Canal, with Palestinian agents poised to bribe canal inspectors to avoid detection, and then unload the weapons in floating containers off the coast of Gaza and el-Arish, where local fishing boats would pick them up for transshipment to the Palestinian authorities. "They told me it was weapons for Palestine and I am a Palestinian officer merely doing what he has to", admitted the ship's captain in a remarkably candid interview given after his capture. (2)

At the start, Arafat and his PA colleagues denied any connection to the Karine-A, but after catching the first wave of American outrage, Arafat established an investigative committee" to look into the matter. The membership of the committee, however, consisted of three men who themselves could have been in on the scheme--the PA military chiefs in the West Bank and Gaza and Arafat's own head of military intelligence, his cousin Musa Arafat. Shobaki and his accomplices were subsequently "detained" and "interrogated." Still, despite overwhelming evidence, neither Arafat nor the PA took responsibility for the smuggling effort. In late January, under additional pressure from Washington, Arafat wrote a letter to the Bush Administration accepting "responsibility" for the affair, though not actually admitting that he or the PA had anything to do with it. In public, he continued to reject all assertions of PA complicity. "Regarding the armed ship, the leadership re-iterates that it has no knowledge of the issue", declared an official PA communique on February 8. Finally, on February 20, the PA Military Prosecutor issued indictments against four of the Karine-A conspirators, including the captain, but not against key players like Shobaki whose participation would link the episode to Arafat.

On the supply side, Iran too denied any part of the Karine-A. "The Islamic Republic of Iran has had no military relations with Yasir Arafat and no steps have been taken by any Iranian organization for the shipment of arms to the mentioned lands", Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Iran's official news agency. Though Iranian leaders, both moderate and hard-line, publicly deny Israel's right to exist, they rejected accusations of cooperation with Arafat. Interestingly, of the three partners in the arms deal, only Hizballah did not issue a categorical denial. In an official statement, it only noted that what "is surprising is that the U.S. administration provoked such a fuss over the arms ship while it provides unlimited military support to... Israel." (3)

Broken Assumptions

THAT ARAFAT would truck with the ayatollahs--and vice versa--was a strategic shock. Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, a cardinal principle of regional politics has been Iranian opposition to any diplomatic recognition of Israel and hostility toward any negotiated settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hence Iran's condemnation of the Egypt-Israel and Jordan-Israel peace treaties, of the October 1991 Madrid peace conference, and of all Israel-PLO agreements from the September 1993 Declaration of Principles onward. Unlike some armchair critics of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, Iran has a long history of backing up its words with deeds, especially the provision of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of training, arms and logistical support for Hizballah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and, more recently, Hamas. (Indeed, Tehran founded PIJ because it believed that Hamas, with its social welfare wing and political aspirations, was too moderate and insufficiently committed to the speedy establishment of an Isl amic state in all of Palestine.)

Withering Iranian criticism of the peace process did not always mean that Yasir Arafat and the ayatollahs were enemies. On February 17, 1979, just 16 days after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile, Arafat was the first international leader to visit Tehran to offer his personal support. At the time, the Palestinian-Iranian entente was based on common antipathy toward Israel. However, that relationship was eclipsed by the Iraq-Iran War when Arafat (and most Arab leaders) sided with Saddam Hussein. Since then, Iranian-Palestinian relations have been in a deep freeze, with Arafat even accusing the Iranians of fomenting assassination plots against him.

Despite the early friendship between Arafat and the ayatollahs, mutual antagonism has long been a fixture of the accepted analytical framework for U.S. Middle East policy. This flowed in part from Arafat's long-term alignment with Saddam, even when it cost the Palestinian leader substantial goodwill in the West. But as Palestinian Islamist organizations grew in popularity and brazenness, it was taken for granted, too, that...