On Trial For Treason

"Hezbollah uncovered and arrested Mohammed Shawraba, and they consider his arrest a significant achievement despite the blows that his activities dealt to their operations."
Unnamed Lebanese official

"We call upon you to assist in our activity, whose purpose is to end Hezbollah-perpetrated terror in Lebanon and abroad. We ask that you send us any and all details that you have to help in this effort, especially information on the true identity of the people in the photos displayed on this site."

"Hezbollah's elite and strictly compartmented clandestine unit is commanded by Talal Hamia, and functions as the far-reaching strategic arm of Hezbollah and Iran."

Stop 910 website ['an association of western intelligence organizations']

"Hezbollah's response to this is very deliberate, and it's a response that was certainly decided on by the senior leaders, even Hassan Nasrallah himself."

"The public is now entirely aware of this, and Hezbollah's response is basically an admission that this happened."

Hilal Khashan, professor of political science, American University of Beirut

 

Israeli soldiers and trucks are seen from southern Lebanon, as a Hezbollah flag flutters.. (photo credit:REUTERS)

The Lebanese English language Daily Star reported that a senior Hezbollah operative, Mohammed Shawraba was being tried in a Hezbollah court, for treason. He had been arrested along with four others who worked for him, as the head of Hezbollah's foreign-operations unit whose purpose is to plot against Israeli interests in foreign countries, mounting violent attacks against Jews. 

As Lebanon's Elnashra news would have it, a man who became an agent of the Mossad spy agency had succeeded in infiltrating the upper echelons of Hezbollah and was responsible for leaking information about them for years before his activities were discovered. The agent, according to the news source, helped to "foil many attacks against Israeli targets." Those attacks had an avenging purpose after the assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in 2008, blamed on Israel.

After close monitoring of the most important security officials, the unit arrested five Hezbollah members including the [Unit 910 deputy chief], according to Hezbollah sources. There was the Hezbollah Unit 910, launched to carry out covert and destructive-to-Israel foreign operations, and there was the mysterious website called "Stop910", said to be comprised of a small group of operatives, Lebanese Shiites who travel globally under false identities.

If, as analysts claim, the website is operated by Israeli intelligence services, based on the detectable amount of high-level raw-intelligence it contains, why would they target the very Hezbollah unit that has been so indispensable to them in past years in aiding Israeli intelligence in stopping attacks against Israeli interests and/or Jews in foreign venues? To do so would be tantamount betraying one of their own operatives.

In any event, while Hezbollah remains mute on reports claiming that their top agent for their externally-based operations had been giving Mossad intelligence on their unit of interest which he had been heading since 2008, he had in that position been of immense assistance to Israel. Enabling Israel to be alerted to pending attacks and to counter them; no mean feat and impossible without internally-based information.

The Daily Star had reported that Hezbollah's suspicions had been aroused after five attempted retaliation attacks against Israel spurred by the fatal Mughniyeh assassination had all failed. According to Lebanon's Elnashra news website, Mr. Shawraba, originally from a village in southern Lebanon, had at one time been head of the security detail for Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

Hezbollah appears to have come to attention when Bulgaria's Interior Ministry released names and photographs of two Hezbollah operatives they claimed to have been responsible for the 2012 Black Sea town of Burgas attack in which five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed. Suspicion arose then against the 42-year-old Mohammed Shawraba, that he had given details of the attack to Israel, who passed the tip on to Bulgarian officials.


And then there is also the intelligence assistance of Hezbollah's mentors, where Iranian intelligence agents aided in the revelations of a mole operating from within the terrorist organization's highest ranks. What are friends and allies for, after all? Some are friends because of sectarian-ideological ties, and others become friends because the allure of profiting from being a double operator has its appeal.



Sources close to Hezbollah claim that under questioning it had been revealed that Mossad-friendly Mr. Shawraba had been rewarded to the tune of $1-million. The failure of Unit 910 evidently "caused a state of frustration in the party's ranks", leading to the formation of a secret, separate unit operated by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, according to Al-Janoubia. The Revolutionary Guards are famously resistant to Mossad.