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Tax dollars at work...find the Talmud
Thu May 8 23:40:30 2003
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U.S. troops find Israel-related documents in Baghdad

By Yossi Melman and Amos Harel



American troops in Baghdad yesterday found a collection of Iraqi intelligence documents related to Israel, including maps of terrorist strikes against Israel over the last 12 years, a satellite picture of the Dimona nuclear reactor and detailed mock-ups of the Knesset, downtown Jerusalem and other official Israeli buildings, The New York Times reported yesterday.

The findings also included a map of where the Iraqis thought the Scuds they had launched at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War had landed, with the locations marked by red and yellow paper flowers, a female mannequin dressed in an Israeli air force uniform and a list of Israel Defense Forces ranks and insignia.

Soldiers from the MET Alpha unit, the "mobile exploitation team" responsible for the search for nonconventional weapons, discovered the documents in a flooded Baghdad basement while in pursuit of an unusual quarry: a copy of the Talmud said to date from the seventh century, which would make it one of the oldest Talmuds in existence.

A former senior official of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police, who is now working for the opposition Iraqi National Congress had informed the INC of the Talmud's existence, saying it was hidden at his headquarters. The INC passed the information on to MET Alpha, which, despite the fact that ancient Talmuds are not usually part of its mission, decided that the book was to valuable not to pursue, the Times said.

The soldiers never found the Talmud - but they did find the collection of intelligence documents. According to the former Mukhabarat official, the building had served as the operations center of the Mukhabarat's Israel-Palestine department.

American military officers said the documents were significant, but did not in and of themselves provide proof of direct Iraqi involvement in anti-Israel terror, the Times reported.

Another document of great interest to the Americans that was discovered at the site was a "top secret" memo from the Iraqi intelligence station chief in an African country. This memo, dated May 20, 2001, described an offer by a "holy warrior" to sell uranium and other nuclear material to Iraq. The memo said the offer had been rejected due to the UN "sanctions situation," but that the source would be happy to renew the offer if Iraq felt able to accept it later.

The soldiers also found several Jewish books of more recent vintage than the missing seventh-century Talmud, including a Babylonian Talmud from Vilna, accounting books of the Jewish community of Baghdad between 1949 and 1953 and dozens of modern scholarly books, including "Generals of Israel," by Moshe Ben-Shaul, David Ben-Gurion's "Memoirs" and "Semites and Anti-Semites," by Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, the Times said.

Israeli defense sources yesterday said the findings were "very interesting" and that they hoped the Americans would send the material to Israel for examination. They said the picture of the Dimona reactor was probably obtained from either a commercial source or the former Soviet Union, as Iraqi intelligence gathering in Israel over the last decade has been "at the most basic" level.

Military sources said most of this intelligence gathering was apparently aimed at enabling Iraq to prepare terror attacks against the sites in question, should it so choose.



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