Secret Israeli papers found their way to Hizbollah
Top secret documents and plans stolen from a secret naval base a year ago were believed to have found their way to Hizbullah in Lebanon and helped the party's commandos set up the ambush for the ill-fated Israeli naval raid on Ansaria in Lebanon last October.
An investigative report published by Israel's leading daily, Yediot Ahronot, on Friday said the documents contained very sensitive secrets, which, if published, could cause a major threat to Israel's security.
A soldier in charge of those documents said he left them on his desk in a highly restricted room and went out for a ten-minute break. When he returned he found out that the papers had disappeared. He first thought a drill might have been conducted by his superiors but later found out that the disappearance of those documents was true. Not only this, but when officers in the naval base checked another restricted room, entrance to which is authorized only to personnel with special security clearance, they found out that other papers related to the same plan had disappeared too.
The report said the base commander acted with great negligence when he did not order to seal off the base immediately after the documents disappeared. "It took some two hours until the base was shut down and it was reopened 36 hours later without anything being achieved in locating those documents," said one of the soldiers. Besides, the naval command failed to take normal procedural steps in cases like these and decided not to change any of its plans. The raid on Ansaria is believed to be one of those plans, but an Israeli army spokesman issued a statement saying the documents had nothing to do with the raid in Lebanon.
Senior naval officers believe otherwise. They think the ambush Hizbullah commandos set on the route the raiding force used was not coincidental at all and they guess that Hizbullah must have had a way to obtain those documents, or at least an idea of what they contained. Other officers in the ground forces also share this view, noting that in the past two years, Hizbullah commandos in south Lebanon had managed to set successful ambushes against Israeli troops that were on their way to attack Hizbullah bases.
In June 1996, five Israeli soldiers were killed and nine others wounded, all part of a special bomb disposal unit in the army, by a roadside bomb that was planted by Hizbullah. In October 1996, a commander and a soldier from a paratrooper force were killed as they were on their way to attack a Hizbullah base in South Lebanon. In December the same year, a commander and another soldier of the special elite Nuts unit were killed in blast near the village of Markaba.
And in May 1997, three soldiers of a special paratrooper commando unit were killed in the explosion of a roadside mine planted by Hizbullah near the village of Kulei'a. A senior army source said that all those incidents had fired a number of warning shots within the senior command "but when the raid on Ansaria failed, red lights went on to warn that the wall of secrecy had been penetrated by hostile forces."