FBI HELPED ISRAEL TRACK TERROR CELLS

FBI Helped Israel Track Palestinian Terror Cells - Shmuel Rosner (Ha'aretz)
During 2003 and 2004, the FBI passed information on Western Union money transfers to Israel to help track down Palestinian terror cells in the West Bank, according to a new book about America's war on terror by Ron Suskind. In April 2003, an Islamic Jihad activist went to a Western Union office in Lebanon and ordered a money transfer to Hebron. The Justice Department authorized Western Union to release this information to the FBI and the CIA, and eventually to Israel's Shin Bet security service, enabling Israeli intelligence to track the person who collected the transfer in Hebron and to uncover the terror cell. This method was used successfully many times until Palestinians realized that their Western Union transfers were being used to trap them.

Intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and Israel has increased over the past several years. Suskind quotes President Bush as saying during his first National Security Council meeting that the U.S. must refrain from active mediation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To then Secretary of State Colin Powell's argument that such behavior could be interpreted by Israel as a green light to apply force, Bush responded that sometimes a show of force can clarify the issue at hand.