July 9, 2006

Intelligence Briefing:
Revolution & Terrorism

Burying the July Fourth Massacre

Part 2: Attack of the Red Sphinx
– Continued from Part 1 –

U.S. State Dept.

Allies Against Israel: President George Bush meets Soviet-trained dictator Hosni Mubarak in Communist Egypt, less than one year after the LAX massacre, to discuss pressuring Israel to surrender to the PLO (June 3, 2003).

If Hesham Mohamed Hadayet had conducted the 2002 attack at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on his own initiative, President Bush would have had little reason to deny the shooting was terrorism. But like all terrorists, Hadayet must have been sent by some organization with state sponsorship — one so sensitive that the Bush Administration moved aggressively to protect it.

The fact that Hadayet had immigrated from Communist Egypt leaves little room for speculation. Any activity that takes place in Egypt remains under the tight control of the all-pervasive secret police, for whom Hadayet must have worked, directly or indirectly.

Egypt’s dreaded General Directorate for State Security Investigations (GDSSI) was established under the Marxist dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Designed by Soviet officers, staffed by Egyptians trained in the Soviet Union and recruited as agents of the Soviet secret police, and modeled after the USSR’s own terrifying KGB, the powerful GDSSI decades ago penetrated all aspects of Egyptian life with its vast network of agents and informants. Its tentacles permeated “all government departments and public-sector companies, labor unions, political parties, and the news media,” according to various sources.¹ No workplace, no residential community, no organization was exempt; only GDSSI-approved people could advance in the system, while those it opposed would disappear forever in its labyrinthe of torture chambers and deadly prisons.

As part of the Communist Bloc intelligence apparatus and supervised by the Soviets, the GDSSI has also played a major role in coordinating the world terror network. It worked fairly openly in the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and in placing Egyptian agent Yassir Arafat in charge, and to this day the GDSSI continues to coordinate and supply the PLO and its close allies with money, weapons, and other logistical support.

Since the 1980s, Egypt’s Marxist regime has tried to disguise its ongoing role in international terrorism by forming terror groups labeled as “Islamic” rather than being openly Communist, and by publicly distancing itself from them. Most of the new groups orbit around the older Muslim Brotherhood, a Communist-affiliated movement that participated in the Communist-led Free Officers movement that brought the Marxists to power in 1952. Though officially illegal, the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied terrorist groups are allowed to participate in all parts of the government, their members being top political officials and military officers in the Soviet-controlled regime. All those “illegal” groups are controlled by the GDSSI, whose agents fill their ranks, and they are allowed openly to dominate university campuses, where they recruit hundreds of thousands of activists and future terrorists.² In the Egyptian police state, none of those groups could receive military training, weapons, or the ability to travel abroad to conduct terrorist strikes without GDSSI coordination. Yet by occasionally pretending to “crack down” a bit on the terrorists, the Cairo regime maintains an image of innocence.

Egypt receives a big payoff for such deception. Israel treats the Marxist regime as if it were an ally, and the United States provides Cairo with about $2 billion in foreign aid annually, including a steady flow of advanced military technology and participation in joint military exercises. Meanwhile, dictator Hosni Mubarak, himself a Soviet agent trained directly in the Soviet Union, continues to foment terrorism through the GDSSI and its web of nominally “independent” groups.³

Much evidence points to Hadayet, the LAX suicide attacker, having been an agent of Egyptian intelligence. His family was well connected in the upper levels of the Marxist regime, with “several senior officers in the armed forces.”⁴ His father previously served as a general in the Egyptian army, having fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars against Israel; that alone would suggest Hadayet’s father may have been Soviet-trained and -recruited. One of Hadayet’s uncles was even more intimate with the regime, having been a member of the Communist-front Society of Free Officers that brought the Communists to power, and later working as the Cairo regime’s Minister of Scientific Research.⁵

Hadayet himself was able to earn a degree from a university in Cairo, a privilege normally reserved for the children of the Communist elite. Shortly after he started his career at an Egyptian bank, he was promoted with lightning speed past his colleagues to become chief of the securities and credit division at an exceptionally young age.⁶ His well-to-do position in Egyptian society raised one of the most puzzling questions faced by investigators: Why did he move to the U.S. in the first place, thereby having to start from scratch as a taxicab driver? The picture made no sense — unless Hadayet was one of many “sleeper” agents sent by the GDSSI to prepare for future operations.

From the time Hadayet arrived in the U.S. in 1992, one of his close associates was fellow Egyptian immigrant Medhat Mahmoud, previously an Egypt Air security official — a position normally held by intelligence agents — who, like Hadayet, inexplicably moved to America to start over as a produce wholesaler.⁷ After Hadayet’s suicidal July fourth attack at LAX, Mahmoud did his best to throw law enforcement off the track, to the point of fabricating a story about Hadayet’s work history and insisting Hadayet was no terrorist.⁸ In all likelihood, Mahmoud is another GDSSI “sleeper” agent awaiting future orders.

Even though Hadayet’s wife and children had been expected to be home to celebrate his birthday, he sent them back to Egypt one week before his suicide attack, thus guaranteeing the FBI would have only limited access to them in the wake of his death.⁹ That gave Egyptian intelligence full control of the most critical sources of information. Two days after Hadayet’s LAX assault, the Cairo regime acted surprised by all the attention, protesting that the investigation was blowing things out of proportion.¹⁰ Meanwhile, Egyptian police blocked access by the news media to Hadayet’s family and conducted its own interviews; immediately afterward, the GDSSI denied even having a file on Hadayet, and insisted that Hadayet was motivated only by a financial dispute with Israel’s El Al airline over late payments.¹¹ But when El Al investigated, it found no record of any dealings with Hadayet,¹² and Egyptian authorities themselves had admitted the existence of files on Hadayet back in 1993.¹³ The GDSSI had made up the entire story.

Hadayet’s family also denied Hadayet had ever belonged to a terrorist or radical group of any kind.¹⁴ But as mentioned in part 1, Hadayet had in the early 1990s confessed his membership in the Gama’a al-Islamiyya; other sources connected him to the leadership of Islamic Jihad in Egypt. Both groups form part of the larger GDSSI-controlled Muslim Brotherhood network that serves as cover for Egyptian-sponsored terrorism.

Thus in late June of 2002, Hadayet presumably received the order for his suicide attack from the GDSSI, at which point he made his preparations and erased any evidence pointing back to his spymasters. Then, on July fourth, he put on his suit with calm discipline, loaded two semiautomatic handguns, filled his pockets with additional ammunition, took a 6-inch knife, and drove to the LAX international terminal for the last time — focused on nothing but his final mission.

If Americans were to realize Egypt conducted a terror attack on American soil — and might do so again — President Bush could find himself battling enormous political resistance to the billions of dollars he sends each year to both Egypt and the PLO. As at least some observers would agree, that explains the Bush Administration’s insistence on labeling the attack an “isolated incident” and on promptly closing the investigation.