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Covert U.S. Negotiations Underway with Iraqi Sunnis (Maariv International)
    Covert negotiations between the U.S. administration and senior members of the Saddam-era Iraqi power structure have been confirmed by an intelligence source.
    The most important negotiations are with Major General Sofian Maher Hassan el Tikrity, commander of Saddam's Republican Guards, who was reportedly "captured" by U.S. troops, but intelligence sources say he turned himself in to begin negotiations.
    During the war el Tikrity ordered his troops to withdraw from vital Tigris river bridges, a move which expedited the fall of Baghdad.
    After the war, he felt the U.S. had not lived up to its pre-war understandings with him, and subsequently encouraged his troops to become the backbone of the Sunni insurgency.

The Price of Sunni Reintegration
    The main point being discussed is the degree of political and economic autonomy the Sunni tribal chiefs will be able to extract from the U.S. in exchange for their quitting their alliance with the non-Iraqi terrorist elements fighting the Americans in Iraq, most of whom are linked to al-Qaeda.
    The Sunnis' aim is to gain as large a slice as possible of the new Iraqi pie, not see it destroyed in an endless and unwinnable jihad against the Americans.
    Moreover, they have no desire to become the tail to the jihadist terrorist dog, since most Iraqi Sunnis have very little theological common ground with the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia.
    Last week Iraqi Sunnis evicted over 100 al-Qaeda terrorists from bases near Samarra, who fled to Iran.
    At the same time, Iraqi Premier Allawi has begun expediting the reintegration of up to 75,000 Sunnis into the country's military establishment.

Kurds to Regain Dominance in Kirkuk
    Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar, a Sunni, declared that the Kurds have the right to retake properties in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk from which they were expelled, restoring the Kurdish majority in the area.
    This will entail the resettlement of Sunnis that Saddam had brought to Kirkuk back inside the Sunni Triangle, to be funded primarily by the U.S.

Israeli Athletes to Get Extra Security in Olympic Village (USA Today)
    Israeli athletes have been given an additional layer of security at the Olympic Village with a fence placed around the team's residential compound, the Greek public order ministry said Monday.
    The U.S. team also had asked for a fence but withdrew the request.

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In Defense of the Intelligence Services - Efraim Halevy (Economist-UK)

• When commissions of inquiry investigate intelligence failures of extraordinary magnitude, their conclusions inevitably have an overwhelming influence on the conduct of intelligence chiefs and their political masters for generations to come. Several assumptions and concepts, implicit or explicit in the reports, warrant close study. I wish to take issue with the findings on both terrorism and the WMD.
• Three times within close to a quarter of a century, Saddam Hussein has attempted to develop capabilities in the field of WMD, with emphasis on the nuclear area. In the early 1980s, Israel destroyed his French-supplied nuclear reactor. In the early 1990s, the first Gulf war, launched after Iraq invaded Kuwait, revealed extensive Iraqi activity in all three WMD fields (nuclear, chemical, and biological); the UN destroyed some of these capabilities after the war, and tried to monitor others before it withdrew from Iraq in 1998 and was not allowed back. In the years leading up to the American-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was evidence that Saddam was trying to renew his nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and to restore his original capabilities. Nobody outside Iraq knew how far he had succeeded.
• On the terrorist scene, it became obvious when two American embassies, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, were simultaneously attacked in 1998, that al-Qaeda had entered a new phase in its war against the U.S. This threat was clearly recognized by the American intelligence community. Serious collection efforts were initiated. However, I believe that if the CIA had come up with proposals to adopt measures like those that were hastily implemented after September 11, 2001, the American public would not have been capable of approving them.
• I have reason to believe that George Tenet, the director of the CIA who resigned in June and left in July, got it right on both key issues. He correctly assessed the terrorist threat, and his basic approach to the Iraqi conundrum was similarly accurate. The fact that WMD have not yet been found in Iraq is no proof that there was nothing there; those who can conceal complete squadrons of aircraft in the sand could easily act similarly when it comes to WMD.

  Efraim Halevy was head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, from 1998 to 2002. Since 2003 he has been head of the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.