The website that spies use

Two war stories that emerged this week, although sensational, had a familiar ring about them to some. The first, which made headlines yesterday, was the arrival of Russian troops in Kabul 12 years after they left the Afghan capital.

The second was the search, reported by Time magazine, for members of the Bin Laden family willing to give the Americans DNA samples to aid identification of Osama bin Laden, should he be killed and his remains be unrecognisable.

Who were the select few for whom these developments were month-old news? Intelligence operatives? Or well-connected journalists? The answer is neither, exactly, but readers of a website run from a flat in Jerusalem by a husband-and-wife team of former Economist journalists. It just happens that a lot of the site's subscribers are spies and reporters.

The site, DebkaFile ( www.debka.com ), is a fascinating mix of information and speculation from the not-so-grey area where journalism meets intelligence work. DebkaFile - motto: "We start where the media stop" - is constantly updated with tips from journalists and intelligence people around the world, most of them Israeli, but also Russian, American, British and other correspondents.

Journalists, spooks and business people from 96 countries are currently logging in 100,000 times a day, according to proprietors Giora Shamis and his wife Diane Shalem. There is even, they say, a mysterious reader in Afghanistan, where the phones do not officially work, who has managed to log on five times a day for the 14 months they have been operational.

DebkaFile makes money by sending customised newsletters to news and - perhaps - intelligence organisations, even in Arab countries in conflict with Israel. Its daily news digest is often scary and, at times, requires elastic credulity.

So how reliable are DebkaFile's stories? The website's main boasts have been predicting Al Gore's choice of Joseph Lieberman as his running mate and being first to say that Yasser Arafat would reject former Israeli PM Ehud Barak's peace proposals. More recently, DebkaFile was first to say that US forces were operating in Afghanistan, adding that German commandos were involved and that Russian intelligence officers were acting as guides for allied forces.

But the two stories that were proved correct this week will add hugely to the site's credibility. It said several weeks ago that George Bush had agreed with Vladimir Putin that the Russians should mobilise a million-strong army, paid for by the US, to work side-by-side with America in an occupied postwar Afghanistan. A fortnight ago, it reported that Bin Laden may fake his own death and stage an event in which a lookalike body turned up on the battlefield - hence the attempts to secure Bin Laden DNA.

What other surprises, then, is debka.com predicting?

Russia will let the US use tactical nuclear weapons against Bin Laden in certain circumstances - including radiation-emitting (and cave-penetrating) neutron bombs, nuclear mines and shells - so long as the Americans allow the Russians to use similar weapons against Chechen rebels.

China is so worried by the new chumminess between its old enemies that it has been pouring Muslim Chinese fighters into Afghanistan to support the Taliban.

Bin Laden has enough fissionable material to build between three and five nuclear devices, having procured between 12 and 15 kilos of uranium-235 through a Ukrainian-born Jewish mobster.

Iraq has ordered its atomic scientists to prepare nuclear devices for arming, the first time such an order has been issued.

The FBI believes German or Austrian scientists working in American labs, but linked to fundamentalist Islamic, Iraqi and fugitive Nazi communities, may be behind the anthrax attacks.

But, naturally, we can't confirm any of it.