They predicted 9/11—what else does Debkafile know?

Although the attacks of September 11, 2001 stunned the world, they came as no surprise to Giora Shamis and Diane Shalem—two veteran foreign-affairs reporters for the Economist who, like a handful of other journalists at the turn of the millennium, had turned to the Internet to go into business for themselves. In February of 2001, their freshly-launched website devoted to terrorism reported that Osama bin Laden intended to attack the World Trade Center towers in New York. "We'd been following his activities since his days as an organizer of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the '80s," recalls Shalem. "We knew what he was capable of."

There is no truth in politics, certainly not in the labyrinth of terrorism, and certainly not in war. But you can be as precise as possible to the effects that are happening on the groundBack then, Debkafile.net had few readers, but like a lot of things, all of that changed after 9/11. Since that time, no true aficionado of the global war on terror skips a day without checking in on the site (except, we assume, those critics who accuse it of being a pro-Israel propaganda machine). The free daily Debkafile and its subscription-only Debka-Net-Weekly boldly proclaim to "start where the media stop," and, indeed, Debka draws on its sources within the worldwide intelligence community to report stories that are so alarming they are oftentimes hard to believe—and yet still have the disturbing habit of being confirmed later by mainstream media. Besides Bin Laden, Debka has been reporting early and often on the nuclear ambitions of Iran and has been the occasional bearer of relatively good news, too: In April of 2004, it broke the story that Libya's Muammar al-Qadhafi had abandoned his own plans to build a bomb.

Not surprisingly, Debka's traffic spikes considerably during periods of international crisis; for the month of August, as the war in Lebanon raged, Debka's number of daily hits, by their own reckoning, surpassed six million. Radar spoke to Shamis and Shalem in Jerusalem about just what might be the cause of their next Web-traffic spike, the nature of their clandestine sources, and whether or not they are working for Mossad.

RADAR: In the U.S. media, your site has a shadowy reputation. There's the suspicion that you must be spies. Ever killed anyone with a poison-tipped umbrella?
DIANE SHALEM: Not yet, but we've wanted to assassinate a lot of people—not all of them necessarily terrorists.

That sounds like a non-denial denial to me, but even if you were Mossad agents, would you tell me?
SHALEM: It would be very hard, very hard to prove that one isn't. On the other hand, we both have records as reporters and editors. It's something we've been doing since our teens.
GIORA SHAMIS: Once, many years ago, the editor of the Economist asked us the same question.
SHALEM: He made a joke of it.
SHAMIS: Whenever we'd go out to do our reporting, he'd say, "Has Mossad called you yet?" Of course, we've got contacts with many intelligence bodies ... not only Mossad.