Double agents, car bombs and antics worthy of James Bond

A mystery visitor leads our man in Beirut to wonder what Syria was up to when it aired a mass confession on state TV

By Robert Fisk

"When it comes to spy stories, Ian Fleming couldn't match Lebanon – and Sister Syria – for the kind of head-spinning espionage and murder mystery now engulfing the Levant.....

Yet this weekend, Chakar Absi's chadored daughter Wafa, along with 10 dozen rueful-looking men, appeared on Syrian state television to announce that Fatah al-Islam and its "head of security" – a certain Taha Hussein Abdel-Baki al-Hussein al-Walid – had organised the suicide bombing of civilians in a Damascus street on 27 September in an attempt to overthrow Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime. The bombing was carried out by a Saudi and the organisation, according to the somewhat frightened men on the television screen, obtained funds from "Salafist groups" and Saudis and – here was the dagger in the story – from the Future Movement and the Lebanese BankMed financial institution, both run by Saad Hariri, son of the Lebanese ex-premier killed in 2006.

The US journalist Seymour Hersh has already hinted in The New Yorker that Hariri money – and even American money – had been given to Fatah al-Islam, but Syria's TV spectacular was on a far greater scale. Hariri immediately denounced the claim.

No one, of course, doubts that Syria's principal concern remains the UN's international tribunal into Rafik Hariri's murder....

The young man, who described himself as a reporter for Syria's first non-government television station – an institution I had never heard of – left without learning anything more than I had myself reported in The Independent. But his questions mirrored Syria's own preoccupation with the UN inquiry. Already, one of the UN's regular reports was censored in New York to delete the names of Syrian officials who might have been involved in Hariri's murder, and there is a growing fear in Lebanon that the Americans – in their desire to persuade Syria to hinder the flow of insurgents into Iraq – may be prepared to close down the UN tribunal. All of which makes the US helicopter strike into Syria this month against alleged al-Qa'ida fighters all the more mysterious......."