The Senate Intelligence Committee plans to investigate allegations that Syria killed pro-Israel undercover agents working in a Damascus-based terrorist group after receiving U.S. data on Syria’s links to terrorism.
Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.), the committee’s chairman, announced the probe after congressional leaders met with President Bush for their weekly meeting Thursday.
The White House refused to comment on a report in The New York Times that the information was provided to Syrian President Hafez Assad by Secretary of State James Baker when they met in Damascus on Sept. 14.
Nor would it comment on Boren’s planned investigation. “We don’t comment on intelligence matters,” said deputy White House spokesman Roman Popadiuk.
State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler issued a statement saying that “any suggestion that Secretary Baker handed over a demarche that led to the death of any individual is categorically untrue.”
She added that the United States last year received a “credible and serious threat” against a U.S. ambassador in the Middle East. “Any demarche that may have been passed on such a subject would have been done solely to protect the life of an American ambassador and would be fully coordinated within this government, including our intelligence community.”
An Israeli Embassy official here had no immediate reaction to the report.
The Times, quoting anonymous U.S. officials, reported that “two or three undercover agents believed to be working for Israel in a Syrianbased terrorist group were unmasked and killed last fall, not long after the United States gave the Damascus government information about terrorist activities in the country.”
Those in the administration who favored disclosing U.S. terrorist data argued “that Mr. Assad should be given an unusually detailed briefing about the actions of Syrian-based terrorists, to impress upon him the weight of the evidence against his government,” the Times said.
The link between the killings and the sharing of U.S. intelligence “has not been proved,” the Times reported. “It is a causal relationship,” it quoted one official as saying. “There is no doubt in my mind.”
Baker, in testimony Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he had no plans to remove Syria from the U.S. list of countries engaged in “state-sponsored terrorism.”
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