[middle-east] hezbollah seeking out lebanese defectors

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Next to a UN jeep, the Hezbollah intelligence men had parked their aging white Mercedes. One of them had flattened himself behind the chassis and was watching a Lebanese man on the Israeli side through binoculars.

"If you come with me, we'll go in and get that m*********r back," another Hezbollah man told a member of the international press. "They won't shoot at a journalist," he whispered in an aside in Arabic to his colleague.

With Hezbollah and the UN men having overheard the Lebanese man conversing with the Israelis in Hebrew, they were almost certain that he was an agent of the Jewish state trying to escape the wrath of a victorious Shi'ite political party that claims to have routed Israel over 34 days of conflict.

Analysts say Israel used Lebanese collaborators who remained in the south after its forces' withdrawal in 2000 as human intelligence to identify Hezbollah cadres in each village.

A Shi'ite source with good connections to Hezbollah and local knowledge said that only the houses of Hezbollah members were destroyed in his southeastern village of Blaat. The Hezbollah center of Khiam - formerly a base for Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army - was also largely wrecked from shelling, air strikes and pitched battles between Hezbollah and Israeli soldiers.

Since the latest war, Hezbollah has been particularly anxious to dismantle Mossad networks inside Lebanon that have used everyone from a Druze villager in the southern village of Hasbaya to Sudanese doormen in Beirut's Shi'ite al-Daahiah suburbs to pinpoint buildings affiliated with Hezbollah or that house its cadres.

Israeli intelligence has reportedly equipped collaborators inside Lebanon with radios and sophisticated satellite equipment to stay in contact and receive sensitive information on Hezbollah's movements. In one case, it was discovered that Israeli spies in south Beirut were marking buildings with crosses that were invisible to the naked eye but could be detected by sensors inside Israeli fighter jets.

In addition, an Israeli website specializing on intelligence affairs (www.debka.com) revealed that Hezbollah's security service has begun, in the northern Bekaa Valley, Baalbek and southern Lebanon, rounding up people suspected of tipping off Israeli intelligence on the location of the storehouse holding long-range, Iranian-supplied Zelzal missiles.

Iason Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent with Asia Times.