"With our intelligence on North Korea so uneven, the doctrine of preemption must return to the fore," wrote Dan Blumenthal, an Asia specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who worked for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during President Bush's first term, in the NRO on Tuesday. "Any talk of renewed six-party talks [involving China, Japan, Russia, the US and the two Koreas] must be resisted."

The North Korean test "has stripped any plausibility to arguments that engaging dictators works", according to Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist at AEI, who added that the Bush administration now faced a "watershed" in its relations with other states that have defied Washington in recent years.

"This crisis is not just about North Korea, but about Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba as well," said Rubin. "Bush now has two choices: to respond forcefully and show that defiance has consequence, or affirm that defiance pays and that international will is illusionary."

Bush "must now choose whether his legacy will be one of inaction or leadership, Chamberlain or Churchill", Rubin said in a reference to the pre-World War II debate between the "appeasement" of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the war policy of his successor, Winston Churchill.

The neo-conservatives, whose influence on the Bush administration has generally been on the wane since late 2003 when it became clear that the Iraq war they had done so much to champion was going badly, nonetheless retain some clout, particularly through the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld.

They are opposed by the "realists" who are concentrated in the State Department and also include former secretary of state Colin Powell; his chief deputy, Richard Armacost; and a number of top national-security officials in the administration of former president George H W Bush, such as former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of state James Baker, who just last weekend publicly called for Washington to engage its "enemies" directly, including North Korea, Syria and Iran.

That stance is anathema to the neo-conservatives and their right-wing allies, such as Cheney, who, at one National Security Council meeting on North Korea several years ago, was reported to have said, "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."

The neo-conservatives' main area of concern has historically been the Middle East - indeed, their central focus in recent months has been publicizing the threats to the United States and Israel allegedly posed by Iran and Hezbollah and opposing any realist appeals to engage Tehran and Damascus in direct talks. But they have also been warning for some time against "the appeasement" of North Korea and its chief source of material aid and support, China.

In their view, Beijing has always had the power to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear-arms programs, and the fact that it has not done so demonstrates that China sees itself as a "strategic rival" of Washington, a phrase much favored by administration hawks during Bush's first year in office.

Indeed, in the most prominent neo-conservative reaction to the North Korean test to date, former Bush speechwriter David Frum called in a column published by the New York Times for the administration to take a series of measures designed to "punish China" for its failure to bring Pyongyang to heel.

Among them, Frum, who is also based at AEI and is credited with inventing the phrase "axis of evil", in which North Korea, Iran and Iraq were lumped together for Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, urged the administration to cut off all humanitarian aid to North Korea, pressure South Korea to do the same and thus force China to "shoulder the cost of helping to avert" North Korea's economic collapse.

He urged that Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore be invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and that Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province of China, send observers to NATO meetings.

Frum, who in 2003 co-authored An End to Evil with former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, also suggested that Washington "encourage Japan to renounce the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent".

"A nuclear Japan is the thing China and North Korea dread most, after, perhaps, a nuclear South Korea or Taiwan," he asserted. "Not only would the nuclearization of Japan be a punishment of China and North Korea, but it would also go far to meet our goal of dissuading Iran [from trying to obtain a nuclear weapon] ... The analogue for Iran, of course, would be the threat of American aid to improve Israel's capacity to hit targets with nuclear weapons."

Other neo-conservatives echoed Blumenthal's position that the six-party talks should be abandoned and called for the US administration to resist any further appeals for bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang - repeatedly made by China, South Korea and Russia, as well as by realists in Washington, over the past several years.

"There will be renewed calls for bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang. That would be a mistake," said the lead editorial in the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal, which also urged the US to "make clear that a military response is not off the table".

Other commentators called for strong efforts to achieve regime change. James Robbins, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, called for covert action, including "sabotage, espionage, information operations, subversion, deception - the works. A highly paranoid totalitarian regime like Kim [Jong-il's] will be highly susceptible to these methods," he predicted.

At the same time, former House of Representatives Speaker and Defense Policy Board member Newt Gingrich, who is also based at the AEI, said he favored continuing shipments of US food aid, but through a covert delivery system "consciously designed to undermine the dictatorship".

"Food might be parachuted into the country, delivered from submarines and small boats by clandestine services, shipped in from China and Russia through anti-regime middlemen and delivered in every way possible to divert energy and authority away from the government and toward an alternative organizing system of individuals dedicated to a better more prosperous life," he wrote.

Like his fellow-neo-conservatives, Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, called for accelerated development and deployment of Washington's embryonic but extraordinarily costly missile defense system, including a ship-launched system that can shoot down ballistic missiles of various ranges "whether launched from places like North Korea or from tramp steamers off our coasts".

He also urged Washington to resume periodic underground nuclear tests of its own, ending a moratorium on such testing announced by former president George H W Bush in 1992.

The six face up to 14 years in jail if convicted. Prosecutors said the alleged offenses were committed with a Russian and another Irish man now at large.

Israel's Foreign Ministry confirmed to Ynet that the Israeli citizen was indeed arrested several days ago. According to officials, "The issue is being looked into by the Israeli embassy in Abuja, and is giving the appropriate consular service."

Israel was caught up in a similar affair about two years ago, when two Israelis suspected of counterfeiting passports were arrested in New Zealand.

The country claimed the two were Mossad agents, and an ensuing diplomatic crisis erupted between Israel and New Zealand.

The two suspected Israelis, Uri Kelman and Eli Cara, were arrested under suspicion of fraudulently obtaining a New Zealand passport by impersonating a local handicapped man in a wheel chair.

They pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a six months in prison and received a fine of USD 32 thousand to be paid to the local handicapped association.

Kelman and Cara left New Zealand after having served less than half of their six-month sentence.

Despite the suspects' and the Israeli government's denial, many in New Zealand, relying on government sources, were convinced that the two were Mossad agents.

New Zealand's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, made several remarks to the press referring to the two as "Israeli intelligence agents". Following the scandal, New Zealand announced a number of diplomatic sanctions against Israel.

"Israel supports the steps taken by the Security Council, which include sanctions on Iran and refusal to accept compromises that would allow Iran to continue to develop its nuclear project," it added in a statement.

Israel earlier this week urged that economic sanctions be slapped on Iran, warning of possible atomic cooperation between Tehran and North Korea after Pyongyang's claimed nuclear weapons test.

"The prime minister reiterated that the test carried out recently by North Korea only underlines the need for urgent, determined and united efforts by the international community," Olmert's office said.

Israel and the United States have spearheaded international claims that Iranian nuclear activities are a cover for an atomic weapons programme although Tehran insists it wants only to generate energy.

Among those at Thursday's meeting were Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Defence Minister Amir Peretz.

Also in attendence were Mossad chief Meir Dagan, Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Beth internal security service, military intelligence chief General Amos Yadlin and the head of the nuclear energy commission Gideon Frank.

The five permanent UN Security Council members, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany, are expected this week to begin discussing a resolution imposing sanctions on Tehran if it does not halt its atomic programme.

Olmert is expected to discuss Iran when he visits Moscow next week.

Israel views the Islamic republic as its chief enemy, alarmed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map and his dismissal of the Nazi Holocaust as a myth.

Israel is widely believed to be the only country in the Middle East to have a nuclear arsenal, estimated at 200 warheads, although it has never formally confirmed or denied it holds such weapons.

At this potentially cataclysmic moment in global politics, it is good to see that one of the world's leading broadcasters, the BBC, decided this week that it should air a documentary entitled "Will Israel bomb Iran?". It is the question on everyone's lips and doubtless, with the imprimatur of the BBC, the programme will sell around the world.

The good news ends there, however. Because the programme addresses none of the important issues raised by Israel's increasingly belligerent posture towards Tehran.

It does not explain that, without a United Nations resolution, a military strike on Iran to destroy its nuclear research programme would be a gross violation of international law.

It does not clarify that Israel's own large nuclear arsenal was secretly developed and is entirely unmonitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or that it is perceived as a threat by its neighbours and may be fuelling a Middle East arms race.

Nor does the programme detail the consequences of an Israeli strike on instability and violence across the Middle East, including in Iraq, where British and American troops are stationed as an occupying force.

And there is no consideration of how in the longer term unilateral action by Israel, with implicit sanction by the international community, is certain to provoke a steep rise in global jihad against the West.

Instead the programme dedicates 40 minutes to footage of Top Gun heroics by the Israeli air force, and the recollections of pilots who carried out a similar, "daring" attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor in the early 1980s; menacing long shots of Iran's nuclear research facilities; and interviews with three former Israeli prime ministers, a former Israeli military chief of staff, various officials in Israeli military intelligence and a professor who designs Israel's military arsenal.

All of them speak with one voice: Israel, they claim, is about to be "wiped out" by Iranian nuclear weapons and must defend itself "whatever the consequences".

They are given plenty of airtime to repeat unchallenged well-worn propaganda Israel has been peddling through its own media, and which has been credulously amplified by the international media: that Iran is led by a fanatical anti-Semite who, like Adolf Hitler, believes he can commit genocide against the Jewish people, this time through a nuclear holocaust.

Other Israeli misinformation, none of it believed by serious analysts, is also uncritically spread by the film-makers: that Hizbullah in Lebanon is a puppet of Iran, waiting to aid its master in Israel's destruction; that Iran is only months away from creating nuclear weapons, a "point of no return", as the programme warns; and that a "fragile" Israel is under constant threat of annihilation from all its Arab neighbours.

But the programme's unequivocal main theme -- echoing precisely Israel's own agenda -- is that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is hellbent on destroying Israel. The film-makers treat seriously, bordering on reverentially, preposterous comments from Israel's leaders about this threat.

Shimon Peres, the Israeli government's veteran roving ambassador, claims, for example, that Iran has made "a call for genocide" against Israel, compares an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp", and warns that "no one would like to see a comeback to the times of the Nazis".

Cabinet minister Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet domestic security service, believes Israel faces "an existential threat" from Iran. And Zvi Stauber, a former senior figure in military intelligence, compares Israel's situation to a man whose neighbour "has a gun and he declares every day he is going to kill you".

But pride of place goes to Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and the current leader of the opposition. He claims repeatedly that the only possible reason Iran and its president could want a nuclear arsenal is for Israel's "extermination". "If he can get away with it, he'll do it." "Ayatollahs with atombic bombs are a powerful threat to all of us." A nuclear Iran "is a threat unlike anything we have seen before. It's beyond politics" -- apparently worse than the nuclear states of North Korea and Pakistan, the latter a military dictatorship and friend of the US barely containing within its borders some of the most fanatical jihadist movements in the world.

Apart from a brief appearance by an Iranian diplomat, no countervailing opinions are entertained in the BBC programme; only Israel's military and political leadership is allowed to speak.

The documentary gives added credence to the views of Israel's security establishment by making great play of a speech by Ahmadinejad -- one with which the Israeli authorities and their allies in Washington have made endless mischief -- in which the Iranian president repeats a statement by Iran's late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, that went unnoticed when first uttered.

In the BBC programme, Ahmadenijad is quoted as saying: "The regime occupying Jerusalem should be eliminated from the page of history". This is at least an improvement on the original translation, much repeated in the programme by Netanyahu and others, that "Israel must be wiped off the map".

But for some strange reason, the programme makers infer from their more accurate translation the same diabolical intent on Ahmadinejad's part as suggested by Netanyahu's fabricated version. Iran's nuclear weapons, we are told by the programme as if they are already in existence, have "presented Israel's leaders with a new order of threat". In making his speech, the BBC film argues, Ahmadinejad "issued a death sentence against Israel".

But, as has now been pointed out on numerous occasions (though clearly not often enough for the BBC to have noticed), Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the need for regime change, the ending of the regime occupying the Palestinians in violation of international law. They were not talking, as Netanyahu and co claim, about the destruction of the state of Israel or the Jewish people. The implication of the speech is that the current Israeli regime will end because occupying powers are illegitimate and unsustainable, not because Iran plans to fire nuclear missiles at the Jewish state or commit genocide.

Overlooked by the programme makers is the fact that "fragile" Israel is currently the only country in the Middle East armed with nuclear warheads, several hundred of them, as well as one of the most powerful armies in the world, which presumably make most of its neighbours feel "fragile" too, with far more reason.

And, as we are being persuaded how "fragile" Israel really is, another former prime minister, Ehud Barak, is interviewed. "Ultimately we are standing alone," he says, in apparent justification for an illegal, unilateral strike. Iran's nuclear reasearch facilities, Barak warns, are hidden deep underground, so deep that "no conventional weapon can penetrate", leaving us to infer that in such circumstances Israel will have no choice but use a tactical nuclear strike in its "self-defence". And, getting into his stride, Barak adds that some facilities are in crowded urban areas "where any attack could end up in civilian collateral damage".

But despite the terrifying scenario laid out by Israel's leaders, the BBC website cheerleads for Israel in the same manner as the programme-makers, suggesting that Israel has the right to engineer a clash of civilisations: "With America unlikely to take military action, the pressure is growing on Israel's leaders to launch a raid."

As should be clear by now, the Israeli government's fingerprints are all over this BBC "documentary". And that is hardly surprising because the man behind this "independent" production is Israel's leading film-maker: Noam Shalev.

Shalev, a graduate of a New York film school, has been making a spate of documentaries through his production company Highlight Films, based in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, that have been lapped up by the BBC and other foreign broadcasters. With the BBC's stamp of approval, it is easy for Shalev to sell his films around the world.

Shalev, who claims that he doesn't "espouse a political view", started his career by making documentaries on less controversial subjects. He has produced films on Ethiopian immigrants arriving in Israel, and on the Zaka organisation, Jewish religious fundamentalists who arrive at the scene of suicide attacks quite literally to pick up the pieces, of human remains.

In the past his films managed to bypass the reticence of broadcasters like the BBC to broach the combustible subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside their news programmes by touching on the topic obliquely. Importantly, however, Shalev's films always humanise his Israeli subjects, showing them as complex, emotional and caring beings, while largely ignoring the millions of Palestinians the Israeli government and army are oppressing.

According to a profile of Shalev published in the Israeli media in 2004, his success derives from the fact that he has developed a "soft-sell approach", showing Israel in a good light without "the straightforward 'hasbara' [propaganda] efforts which explain Israel's case that Israel's Foreign Ministry is required to disseminate to European and American news outlets."

In the words of an Israeli public relations executive, Shalev has a skill in telling Israel's story in ways that international broadcasters appreciate: "[Shalev] also shows the Israeli side, he is not one of those traitors who sell their ideology for money. He has the skill to market it in such a way that overseas they want to see it, and this is very important."

But recently Shalev has grown more confident to try the hard sell for Israel, apparently sure that the BBC and other foreign broadcasters will still buy his films. And that is because Shalev offers them something that other film-makers cannot: intimate access to Israel's security forces, an area off-limits to his rivals.

Before the disengagement from Gaza last year, for example, Shalev made a sympathetic documentary, shown by the BBC, about a day in the life of one Israeli soldier serving there. The film largely concealed the context that might have alerted viewers to the fact that the soldier was enforcing a four-decade illegal occupation of Gaza, or that the Strip is an open-air prison in which thousands of Palestinian have been killed by the Israeli army and in which a majority of Gazans live in abject poverty.

Interviewed about the documentary, Shalev observed: "The army really is very, very careful. There is no indiscriminate firing. I saw, and this was not a show put on just for us, that before any shot is fired there is confirmation that there is nobody behind or in front of the objective. The army is very sensitive to non-deliberate fire."

In other words, Shalev's film for the BBC shed no light on why Israel's "deliberate" fire has killed hundreds of Palestinian children during the second intifada or why a large number of civilians have died from Israeli gunfire and missile strikes inside the Gaza Strip.

Earlier this year Shalev made another film for the BBC, "The Hunt for Black October", to coincide with the release of Stephen Spielberg's movie Munich. "The BBC gains exclusive access to the undercover Mossad agents assigned to track down the Palestinian group responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics," the BBC was able to glow in its promotional material.

Shalev's latest film, "Will Israel bomb Iran?", follows this well-trodden path. Arabs and Muslims are again deprived of a voice, as are non-Israeli experts.

So why did the BBC buy this blatant piece of propaganda?

Here are a few clues. Shalev's film includes:

* footage taken from inside Hizbullah bunkers under the supervision of the Israeli army as it occupied south Lebanon.

* a "rare view" of the inside of the Israeli army's satellite control room, which spies on Israel's Arab neighbours and Iran and which, according to programme, is "incredibly guarded about its security arrangements".

* an exclusive appearance by Israel's former military chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, who we are told is "rarely interviewed".

* a glimpse inside a Rafael weapons factory, which the programme tells us is "rarely filmed".

In other words, the BBC, and the other broadcasters who will air this "documentary" in the coming weeks and months, has been dazzled by Shalev's ability to show us the secret world of the Israeli army. So dazzled, it seems, that it has forgotten to check -- or worse, simply doesn't care -- what message Shalev is inserting between his exclusive footage.

It might have occurred to someone at the BBC to wonder why Shalev gets these chances to show things no one else is allowed to. Could it be that the "hasbara" division of the Israeli Foreign Ministry has got far more sophisticated than it once was?

Is the Israeli government using Shalev, wittingly or not, and is he in turn using the BBC, to spread Israeli propaganda? Propaganda that may soon propel us towards the "clash of civilisations" so longed for by Israel's leadership.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

The change comes in the wake of Raul Castro's temporary accession to the presidency of Cuba on July 31 and coincides with reparations in Venezuela for presidential elections set for Dec. 3.

As a measure of the seriousness with which the U.S. government regards Cuba and Venezuela, the new post is one of only six agencies operating at the strategic level within the intelligence bureaucracy. One of them covers Iran and North Korea -- the only other countries with a mission manager - and four others deal with counter-proliferation, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and weapons of mass destruction.

Negroponte gave Maher responsibility "for ensuring that policymakers have a full range of timely and accurate intelligence on which to base their decisions." That objective, analysts suggest, portends a buildup of agents and field officers in both countries.

Stepped-up U.S. intelligence attention to Cuba comes five weeks after the Bush administration released an update of its plans for returning Cuba to capitalism. Fidel Castro's departure from power was supposed to have signaled the time for implementation to begin, facilitated by $80 million set-aside for Cuban government opponents. That clock, of course, has started.

Intelligence operations in Venezuela are intensifying just as new

indications of massive U.S. spending to get rid of President Hugo Chavez are in the limelight. According to an Associated Press report on Aug. 26, the U.S. Agency for International Development since 2002 has distributed $26 million via 220 grants to Venezuelan recipients under a "Venezuela Confidence Building Initiative." The data emerged from a survey of 132 contracts detailed on 1,600 pages made accessible under the Freedom of Information Act.

Within USAID, an "Office of Transition Initiatives" sees to spending in Venezuela and other "priority countries" such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Bolivia and Haiti. Reportedly, OTI funding is free of stipulations applied to other USAID grants, and funds are available on short notice because they originate from "disaster assistance" appropriations.

As a parallel program poised to complement U.S. intelligence activities in Venezuela, the National Endowment for Democracy has distributed some $2.9 million over a four-year period for technical training in organizing of political parties and for voter education.

If other Latin American experience holds true, U.S. undercover work will try to influence the media in Venezuela, a fertile field inasmuch as opposition newspapers and television stations there are far from silent.

On Aug. 25, for example, a few newspapers throughout Latin America, among them La Nacion of Buenos Aires, carried an article by Simon Romero of Caracas claiming that Venezuela has collaborated with Iran in a uranium enrichment program.

Journalists working with that paper and others told the Association of Media Professionals in Argentina that the CIA had fostered that line. They alleged that U.S. "diplomats" had offered them bribes to present the U.S. side in stories covering Venezuela's admission into the Mercosur trade group and Brazilian President Lula da Silva's bid for re-election in October.

The exposé by Victor Ego Ducrotto, appearing on the Rebelion web site on Aug. 25, claimed that CIA personnel worked "elbow to elbow" with the representatives of the right-wing Inter American Press Society, based in Miami.