Bahrain in Secret Contact With Israel

The Washington Times reports:

The Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain has had secret contacts withIsrael’s Mossad intelligence service, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable.

The cable reportedly was sent to Washington from the U.S. Embassy in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, after a Feb. 15, 2005, meeting between then-U.S. Ambassador William Monroe and Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

“[The king] revealed that Bahrain already has contacts with Israel at the intelligence/security level (ie with Mossad) and indicated that Bahrainwill be willing to move forward in other areas,” the cable said.

The king also told the ambassador that he had ordered his public information minister to stop calling Israel the “enemy” or the “Zionist entity” in official statements of the kingdom, said the cable, which was released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

The Israeli newspapers Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth recently published reports based on the cable.

The cable’s revelation comes at a delicate time for Bahrain’s Sunni royal family, which invited troops from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states last month to help quell an uprising by the country’s Shiite majority.

“In the Arab world, they hate this sort of thing and in Bahrain I’m sure it will be yet another sin [for the opposition] to beat the government with,” said Simon Henderson, a Gulf anaylst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.