Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 17 BUNGLEGATE

Dawn was breaking on Thursday, January 16, 1998, when the government car pulled away from the white-painted house in an exclusive suburb close to the electrified fence marking the border between Israel and Jordan. In one of those twists of history that abound in Israel, the house stood on grounds where the spies of Gideon, the great Jewish warrior, had prepared their intelligence-gathering missions to enable the Israelis to defeat overwhelmingly superior forces. Now, Danny Yatom was setting off to finalize an operation that could save his career.

Beginning with the debacle on the streets of Amman in July 1997, when a kidon team failed to assassinate the Hamas leader Khalid Meshal, the past seven months had been, Yatom had told friends, “like living on the edge of the block waiting for the ax to fall.”

His executioner-in-waiting was Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Their once-close friendship had soured to the point where not a day passed without snipers in the prime minister’s office targeting the Mossad chief with the same whisper: It was only a matter of time before he was sacked. Other men would have resigned. But not Yatom. Proud and imperious, he was prepared to stand on his record. There were so many successful operations he had ordered that no outsider knew about. “It’s only the failures that get publicly dumped on my doorstep,” he had bitterly told his friends.

They, together with his family, had seen the strain in him: the sleepless nights; the sudden, unexpected bursts of anger, quickly extinguished; the restless pacing; the long silences; all the outward signs of a man under huge strain.

Two years into the job, he still faced pressures no other Mossad director had. Consequently, his own staff were increasingly demoralized, and he could no longer count on their loyalty. The media were circling, sensing he was wounded, but holding back, waiting to see when the one man Yatom had trusted, but no longer, would finally wield the ax. So far Benyamin Netanyahu had only kept an icy distance.

But on this cold February morning, Yatom knew his time was running out. That was why he needed the operation he had nurtured these past weeks to work. It would show the prime minister his spymaster had not lost his skills. But none of this showed on Yatom’s face; despite all he had endured, he kept his emotions under lock and key. Seated in a corner of the backseat of the Peugeot, in repose Yatom looked genuinely intimidating in black leather bomber jacket, open-neck shirt, and gray pants. It was how he usually dressed for work; clothes had never interested him.

His receding hair, steel-framed glasses, and thin lips went well with his nickname — the Prussian. He knew he still commanded by something close to fear. Beside him on the seat were the morning newspapers: for once there had been no speculation about his future.

The Peugeot made its swift way down through the hills toward Tel Aviv, the sun reflecting off the burnished bodywork; morning and evening the chauffeur polished the vehicle to mirror perfection. The Peugeot had bulletproof windows, armor-plated coachwork, and anti-mine flooring. Only the official car of the prime minister had similar protection.

Benyamin Netanyahu had Yatom confirmed in the post of director general of Mossad within minutes of Shabtai Shavit’s going. In Yatom’s first weeks in office, he had spent at least one evening a week with the prime minister. They had sat over cold beers and olives and put the world to rights, and remembered the times when Yatom had commanded “Bibi” in an IDF commando unit. Afterward Netanyahu had gone on to become Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and then, during the Gulf War, a self-styled expert on international terrorism, even broadcasting with a gas mask over his face in case a Scud should fall nearby. Yatom, for his part, had said how much he relished the role of the outsider who had been given the most important post in the country’s intelligence community: the quintessential career soldier, he had served as military attaché to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Yatom and Netanyahu had seemed inseparable until two embarrassments had left a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. There had been the bungled affair in Amman. The operation had been ordered by Netanyahu. When the attack failed and Mossad had been caught in the spotlight of the world’s media, the prime minister blamed Yatom for the debacle. He had taken the criticism without flinching; privately he had told friends that Netanyahu had “the courage of other people’s convictions.”

A second and, in many ways, a graver embarrassment surfaced. In October 1997, a senior Mossad officer, Yehuda Gil, was discovered to have invented, for the past twenty years, top secret reports from a nonexistent “agent” in Damascus. Gil had drawn substantial sums from Mossad’s slush fund to pay the man, pocketing the money for himself. The scam had only come to light when a Mossad analyst studying the “agent’s” latest report that Syria was about to attack Israel had become suspicious. Gil had been confronted by Yatom and made a full confession.

Netanyahu had pounced. In a stormy meeting in the prime minister’s office, Yatom had been brutally questioned over the way he ran Mossad. Netanyahu had brushed aside the argument that Gil had successfully carried off his deception under four previous directors. Yatom should have known, Netanyahu had shouted. It was another foul-up. Staff in the prime minister’s office could not recall such a dressing-down. The details had been leaked to the media, causing further embarrassment to Yatom.

How different it had been when he had come into office and his name had been splashed across the world’s media. Reporters had called him a safe pair of hands and there had been speculation that he would assume the mantle of the great spymasters of yesteryear — Amit, Hofi, and Admoni — and once more rekindle the fire Shabtai Shavit had deliberately damped down.

The proof was not long in coming. Despite the Oslo accord giving the PLO a homeland — the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — Yatom had increased the number of Arab agents to spy on Yasser Arafat. He had ordered Mossad programmers to develop new software to hack into PLO computers, and create electronic “microbes” to destroy, should the need arise, its communication systems. He had asked scientists in research and development to focus on “infowar” weapons that could insert black propaganda into enemy broadcasting systems. He wanted Mossad to be part of the brave new world where the weapons of the future would be in keyboards that shut down an enemy’s ability to mobilize its military forces.

Yatom had returned to Mossad’s old stomping ground, Africa: in May 1997, the service had provided important intelligence that had helped rebel forces to topple President Mobutu of Zaire, who for so long had dominated central Africa. Mossad also increased its ties with Nelson Mandela’s security service, helping it to target white extremists, many of whom it had previously worked with. Yatom also increased the budget and strength of the special Mossad unit, Al, responsible for stealing the latest U.S. scientific research.

At fifty-one years of age, there was something unstoppable about Danny Yatom; tireless and ruthless, he had the chutzpah of a street fighter. That was typified by his response to the discovery by the FBI in January 1997 of Mega — the high-level Mossad deep-penetration agent within the Clinton administration. He had told the Committee of the Heads of Services, whose role included preparing a fallback position in the event of an operational failure, all that needed to be done was to make sure that the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States countered demands from Arab organizations that the hunt for Mega must be pursued as vigorously as the FBI dealt with spies from other countries. Jewish dinner guests at the White House dinner table — Hollywood stars, attorneys, editors — all lost no opportunity to remind the president of the damage an ill-conceived manhunt would produce — even more if one of his own staff was arrested. In a presidency already besieged by scandal, that could be an opening that could finally destroy Clinton. Six months later, on July 4, 1997, Independence Day in the United States, Yatom had learned that the FBI had quietly downgraded its hunt for Mega.

Then two months later had come the disaster on the streets in Amman, swiftly followed by the scandal of the agent-who-never-was. Danny Yatom had begun to seek a new operation that would reestablish his authority. Now, on that January morning in 1998, he was on his way to put the finishing touches in place.

Planning for the operation had begun a month before, when an Arab informer in southern Lebanon had met his Mossad controller and told him that Abdullah Zein had made a brief visit to Beirut to meet with Hezbollah leaders in the city. Afterward Zein had driven south to see his parents in the small town of Ruman. The occasion had been one for celebration: Zein had not been home for a year. He had shown his relatives photographs of his young Italian wife and their apartment in Europe.

The controller had steeled himself not to rush the informer; the Arab way was to give his information in all its fine detail: how Zein had left his parents’ home the next day laden with Arab delicacies and gifts for his wife, how Hezbollah had escorted him all the way to Beirut Airport to catch the flight back to Switzerland.

Was that Zein’s final destination? the controller had finally asked. Yes, Bern, in Switzerland. And that was where Zein lived? The informer thought so, but could not be certain.

Nevertheless, it was Mossad’s first positive news about Zein since he had left Lebanon to organize Hezbollah’s fund-raising activities among wealthy Shiite Muslims in Europe. Their money, along with that from Iran, funneled through its embassy in Bonn, paid for Hezbollah’s war of attrition against Israel. In the past year, Zein had been variously reported as operating from Paris, Madrid, and Berlin. But each time Yatom had sent someone to check, there had been no trace of the slim thirty-two-year-old with a taste for snappy Italian-cut suits and customized shoes.

Yatom had dispatched a katsa to Bern from Brussels, where Mossad had recently transferred its control center for European operators from Paris. The katsa had spent two fruitless days in Bern searching for Zein. He decided to extend his inquiries. He drove south to Liebefeld, a pleasant dormitory town. The katsa had last passed through its streets five years before, on his way out of Switzerland after being part of a team that had destroyed metal vats in a bioengineering company near Zurich; the vats were designed to manufacture bacteria and had been ordered by Iran. The team had destroyed the vats with explosive devices. The company had canceled all its contracts with Iran.

In Liebefeld, the katsa had shown that good intelligence work often depended on patient footwork. He had walked the streets, looking for anyone who could be from the Middle East. He had checked the phone book for a listing for Zein. He had telephoned house-leasing agencies to see if they had rented or sold a property to anyone of that name. He had called the local hospitals and clinics to see if a patient of that name had been admitted. Each time he had said he was a relative. With still nothing to show for a day’s work, the katsa had decided to make another sweep of the town, this time in his car.

He had driven for some time through the streets when he spotted a dark-skinned man, wrapped against the night cold, driving a Volvo in the opposite direction. There had been only the briefest of glimpses, but the katsa was convinced that the driver was Zein. By the time the katsa had found an intersection to turn his car, the Volvo had disappeared. Next evening, the katsa was back, this time parked in a position to follow. Shortly afterward, the Volvo appeared. The katsa fell in behind. A mile later, the Volvo parked outside an apartment block and the driver emerged and entered the building, 27 Wabersackerstrasse. The katsa had no doubt the man was Abdullah Zein.

The katsa followed Zein into the apartment block. Beyond the plate-glass door was a small lobby with mailboxes. One of them identified the owner of a third-floor apartment as “Zein.” A door off the lobby led to a basement service area. The katsa opened the door and went down to the basement. Fixed to a wall was a junction box for all the telephones in the building. Moments later he was back in his rental car.

Next day he leased a safe house half a mile from Wabersackerstrasse. He told the letting company he was expecting friends to join him for a skiing holiday.

Danny Yatom had continued planning. He had sent a communications specialist to Liebefeld to examine the junction box. The technician had returned to Tel Aviv with a set of photographs he had taken of the inside of the box. The prints were studied in the research and development department and adjustments made to the devices being prepared. One was a sophisticated bug capable of monitoring all calls in and out of Zein’s apartment. The bug would be linked to a miniature recorder capable of storing hours of phone calls. The recorder had a built-in capacity to be electronically emptied by a prearranged signal from the safe house. There the recordings would be transcribed and sent by secure fax to Tel Aviv.

By the first week of February 1998, all the technical plans were in place. Yatom moved to the most crucial part of the operation: choosing the team who would carry it out. The operation had two stages. The first was to gather sufficient evidence to show that Zein continued to be a key player in Hezbollah’s activities. The second part was then to kill him.

By mid February 1998 everything was ready.

Shortly before 6:30 A.M. on that Monday, February 16, Yatom’s Peugeot entered the parking lot in the basement of Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, and he took the elevator to a fourth-floor conference room. Waiting there were two men and two women. Seated around a table, they had already paired off as couples, the role they would assume in Switzerland. Each was in his late twenties, suntanned, and superbly fit-looking. For the past few days they had been up in the snow of northern Israel brushing up on their skiing.

The previous evening, they had been fully briefed on the mission and had selected their cover identities. The men were to pose as successful stock-market traders taking a short break from the trading floor with their girlfriends, but never quite able to put work behind them: that would explain the laptop computer one of them would carry. The laptop had been wired to provide the link between the concealed recorder to be installed in the apartment basement and the safe house. One couple were to monitor the recorder around the clock once it began working. The other pair were from the kidon unit. Their job was to find the best means to kill Zein. They would travel unarmed to Switzerland; their guns would be provided later by the Brussels office.

On the conference table were the listening device and the recorder. Yatom inspected them, saying the gadgets were far more sophisticated than any he had seen before. His final briefing was short. He asked each for the alias he or she had chosen from the list kept in operations. The men had selected “Solly Goldberg” and “Matti Finklestein”; the women were “Leah Cohen” and “Rachel Jacobson.” Because they were flying directly out of Tel Aviv on an El Al flight, they would travel on Israeli passports. They would resume their aliases in Switzerland, where false passports would be waiting.

All four, in the later words of an Israeli intelligence source, had “earned their stripes.” But the truth was that, after the debacle in Jordan, there was a limited selection of agents available for such a mission. The Amman team had been the best Mossad had been able to field, and its members had been able to pass themselves off as Canadians; all had experience operating on the international stage. The quartet chosen for the Swiss mission had only operated in Cairo — nowadays a relatively safe Mossad target — and none of them had had firsthand knowledge of working under cover in Switzerland.

That may have accounted for why, according to the London Sunday Times, Yatom ended the briefing with a reminder that the Swiss who lived in German-speaking cantons where Liebefeld was situated had a “tendency to call the police if they saw anything improper.”

Yatom had shaken their hands and wished them luck, the standard benediction for any team leaving on a mission. The group had picked up their airline tickets and spent the next twenty-four hours in a Mossad safe house in the city.

Next Tuesday morning, February 20, they boarded El Al Flight 347 to Zurich, obediently arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, as requested by the airline, two hours before takeoff. They joined the lines of passengers, mostly Swiss nationals or Israelis, making their way through the security checks. By 9 A.M., the two couples were in their business-class seats and sipping champagne and discussing their forthcoming holiday. In the hold of the aircraft were their skis.

Waiting for them at Kloten Airport in Zurich was the katsa from the Brussels station with a minibus. He had assumed the role of their guide and had adopted the alias of “Ephrahim Rubenstein.”

By late afternoon they were installed in the safe house in Liebefeld. The two women cooked dinner and they all settled down to watch television. Early in the evening two rental cars arrived from Zurich, driven by sayanim. They left in the minibus, their role over. At around 1:00 A.M. on Saturday, February 20, the team left the safe house, each couple in a separate car. Rubenstein was in the first car, leading the way to Wabersackerstrasse. Reaching there, the two vehicles parked almost directly opposite the apartment block. There was no light from Zein’s apartment. The persons who called themselves Solly Goldberg, Rachel Jacobson, and Ephrahim Rubenstein walked quickly toward the glass door of the building. Rubenstein carried a roll of plastic, Goldberg the laptop, Jacobson a carrier bag containing the listening devices. Meantime, Leah Cohen and Matti Finklestein had enthusiastically begun to act out their lookout role, pretending to be lovers.

Across the street an elderly woman who suffered from insomnia — Swiss police would later insist on referring to her only as “Madam X”—was once more unable to sleep. From her bedroom window, she stared out at a strange sight. A man — Rubenstein — was draping plastic across the glass door to stop anyone’s looking into the apartment block opposite. Behind the sheet, she could see two other figures. Out in the street in a parked car was another shadowy couple. Just as Danny Yatom had warned, what she saw was certainly improper. The woman called the police.

At a little after 2:00 A.M., a BMW squad car arrived in the street, catching Cohen and Finklestein in midembrace. They were ordered to remain in the car. Meantime, police backup had arrived and the trio inside the lobby were asked to explain what they were doing. Goldberg and Jacobson said they had mistaken the building for one where friends lived and Rubenstein insisted he was taking down, not putting up the plastic.

Matters then became farcical. Goldberg and Jacobson asked permission to go to their car and check the address of their friends. No policemen accompanied them. At the same moment, Rubenstein fell to the ground, appearing to have suffered a heart attack. All the policemen gathered around to help and summon medical assistance. No one moved to stop the two cars as they raced out of Wabersackerstrasse into the frosty night. Shortly afterward, the cars stopped to transfer one couple into the other car. The foursome crossed the border into France in the small hours of the morning.

Meanwhile Rubenstein had been taken to the hospital. Doctors said he had not suffered a heart attack. He was taken into custody.

At 4:30 A.M. Tel Aviv time, Yatom was awoken at home by the night watch officer in Mossad headquarters and told what had happened. Not bothering to call his chauffeur, Yatom drove himself to headquarters.

After the Amman fiasco, a plan had been put in place to deal with further such disasters. The first step was for Yatom to call the senior duty officer at the foreign ministry. The officer telephoned the head of the prime minister’s office, who informed Benyamin Netanyahu. He called Israel’s ambassador to the European community in Brussels, Efraim Halevy. The English-born diplomat had spent nearly thirty years as a senior Mossad officer with responsibility for maintaining good relations with security services of foreign states that had diplomatic relations with Israel. He had also played an important role in patching up relations with Jordan after the bungled operation in Amman.

“Fix this, and you’ll be my friend for life,” Netanyahu was later quoted as saying to Halevy.

The ambassador had consulted the Filofax he carried everywhere before deciding whom to call first: Jacob Kellerberger, a senior officer at the Swiss foreign ministry. Halevy was at his diplomatic best: there had been a “regrettable incident” involving Mossad. How “regrettable”? Kellerberger had demanded. “Most regrettable,” Halevy had replied. The tone had been set, an understanding in the wind. Or so Halevy believed, until Kellerberger telephoned Switzerland’s federal prosecutor, Carla del Ponte.

With a jutting lower lip and steel-rimmed spectacles that matched those of Danny Yatom, del Ponte was a figure within the Swiss legal system as formidable as Yatom had once been in the Israeli intelligence community. Her first question set the tone she would maintain: Why had the Liebefeld police not arrested all the Mossad agents? Kellerberger did not know. Del Ponte’s next question raised a specter he was all too familiar with: Could the Mossad operatives have had a “Tehran connection”? Since the Gulf War, Israel had repeatedly claimed that several Swiss companies were supplying technology to Iran to produce missiles. Could the operation even be somehow connected with Israel’s other preoccupation over what had become known as the “Jewish gold scandal”? Swiss banks had concealed for their own profit huge sums of money deposited in their vaults before World War II by German Jews who later became victims of the Nazis.

Throughout the weekend of February 21–22, her questions continued while Halevy struggled to keep matters quiet.

He had not counted on the forces arraigned against Danny Yatom in Israel. Within Mossad, as news of the incident percolated through the organization, morale plunged even lower. This time Yatom could not blame Netanyahu for what had happened in Liebefeld. The prime minister had known nothing beforehand of the operation. From within the prime minister’s office whispers began to reach the Israeli media that Yatom was now doomed. For three more days, Efraim Halevy continued to plead and argue with Kellerberger to keep the incident quiet. But Carla del Ponte would have none of it. On Wednesday, February 25, she called a press conference to denounce Mossad: “What happened was unacceptable and disconcerting between friendly nations.”

Within hours, Danny Yatom had resigned. His career was over and Mossad’s reputation even more in tatters. In his last moments as director, he surprised staff who had assembled in the Mossad canteen. The cold Prussian image was replaced by an emotional tone: he was sorry to be leaving them at such a time, but he had tried to give them the best possible leadership. They should always remember Mossad was bigger than anyone. He ended by wishing whoever took over his place the very best of luck; he would need it. It was the nearest Yatom came to saying what he thought about a prime minister who continued to believe Mossad could be ultimately controlled from his office. Yatom walked out of the silent canteen. Only when he was in the corridor did the applause start, and it died as swiftly as it began.

A week later Efraim Halevy agreed to take over the service after Benyamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged, the first time any Israeli prime minister had done so, “that I cannot deny that Mossad’s image has been affected by certain failed missions.”

Ever the consummate politician, Netanyahu made no mention of the role he had played.

Efraim Halevy became the ninth director general of Mossad on Thursday, March 5, 1998. He broke with tradition and did not summon his senior staff to hear his views on how the service should be run for the next two years. In appointing Halevy, Netanyahu had also announced that, on March 3, 2000, the new deputy director of the service, Amiram Levine, would take over running the service. The news was greeted with some surprise. No other director general had been given a fixed tenure; no other deputy had been assured he would step into the top job.

By 1999, Yatom had found himself a niche in Israel’s thriving arms industry. He became a salesman for one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of arms; the company not only provides a range of weapons for internal use but has a thriving export industry to Third World countries. Yatom makes regular visits to African countries and South American nations. From time to time he turns up in Washington.

Like Meir Amit, Levine had no previous intelligence experience, but he had commanded with distinction the Israeli army in northern Israel and south Lebanon.

Halevy’s first task was to reduce the tremendous tension and resentments inside Mossad that had so seriously damaged its image both within Israel and beyond. In routine congratulatory telephone calls from both the CIA and MI6, the new director had been told those services would prefer to wait and see how he dealt with the crisis within Mossad before wholeheartedly committing their own services to no-secrets-based collaboration. One factor would be how Halevy dealt with the hard-liners in the Israeli government, especially its prime minister.

Would the urbane Halevy, only a year away from his pension and, by many years, the oldest to be given the office, be able to keep Netanyahu at a proper distance? And for all Halevy’s undoubted diplomatic skills — he had played a central role in the negotiations that led to the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan — he had been away from the coalface of intelligence for several years. Since his time with Mossad the agency had increasingly shown signs of being out of control as senior officers had tried to stake their own claims for promotion. Most of those middle-aged men remained in office. Could Halevy deal firmly with them? Would the new director have the essential hands-on skills to raise morale? Mingling on the cocktail circuit in Brussels had hardly been the best preparation for the task of leading agents away from the brink of resignation. Critically, Halevy had no personal operational field experience. He had always been a desk man in his previous time with Mossad. And what could he really achieve in two years? Or was he really there to rubber-stamp what Netanyahu wanted done, or, for that matter, what Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, wanted done? Speculation continued within the Israeli intelligence community over the part she had played in the removal of Yatom, a man to whom she had never warmed.

Halevy found a way to charm her. He presented Sara with a microchip that Mossad research scientists had developed. It could be implanted under her skin and allow her to be rescued in the unlikely event she ever fell into the hands of terrorists. Using natural body energy, the bleep was linked to one of Israel’s new space satellites, enabling a person who wore it to be swiftly tracked to his or her hiding place. No one knows if Sara has had the implant inserted in her body.

But soon there were more pressing matters than beguiling the prime minister’s wife. The first major operation Halevy had enthusiastically approved, an attempt to set up a spy base in Cyprus, came disastrously unstuck. Two Mossad agents, posing as teachers on vacation, were swiftly unmasked by the small but efficient Cypriot security service. They raided the apartment the agents had rented and discovered it was filled with high-tech equipment, capable of spying-out Cypriot plans to stiffen its defenses against neighboring Turkey.

Halevy sent his deputy to Cyprus to negotiate the release of the two men. He might well have wished he had gone himself. Israel’s president, Ezer Weizman, was a close personal friend of the Cypriot president, Biafcos Clerides (in their youth both men had served together in the Royal Air Force). Weizman dispatched his chief of staff to “eat humble pie in Cyprus” and then lambasted Halevy in a manner that even Netanyahu would have hesitated to have used against Yatom.

Further public embarrassment followed when, having approved a plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein during a visit to his mistress, it was canceled after details were leaked to an Israeli journalist. Netanyahu learned what had happened when the reporter called his office for comment. Once more the hapless Halevy found himself facing a severe dressing-down.

For weeks the mercurial prime minister avoided all but essential contact with the Mossad chief, until late November 1998. Then the Turkish prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, telephoned Netanyahu and asked if Mossad would help capture Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader, long designated as a terrorist by other countries. Turkey held him responsible for 30,000 deaths on its soil. For over twenty years Ocalan’s Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, had waged a guerrilla war to get autonomy for Turkey’s 12 million Kurds who have no minority rights such as education or permission to broadcast in their own language.

Ocalan had constantly evaded Turkey’s own security service with effortless ease. He was a leader who inspired messianic fervor in his people. Whether a man, woman, or child, they were ready to die for him. To many he was the epitome of the legendary Scarlet Pimpernel; his deeds of derring-do endlessly recited where two or more Kurds met. There was a raw passion about his speeches, an unnerving defiance in his challenge to Turkey.

That November — after flitting through Moscow — Ocalan turned up in Rome. The Italian government refused to extradite him to Turkey — but also refused his request for political asylum. Earlier Ocalan had been arrested on a German warrant for traveling on a false passport. He was freed when Bonn withdrew its extradition demand for fear of inflaming its large Kurdish communities. That was the moment that Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit telephoned Netanyahu.

For Israel, a close working relationship with Turkey is an important element in its strategic and diplomatic survival in the region. Netanyahu agreed and ordered Halevy to find Ocalan. It would be a “black” operation — meaning Mossad’s own involvement would never surface publicly. If successful, all the credit would go to Turkish intelligence.

The plan was given the code-name “Watchful.” It reflected Halevy’s own concern to do as little as possible to disturb his own running operation inside Iraq. There, Mossad katsas were working alongside Kurdish rebels to destabilize Saddam’s regime.

Six Mossad agents were dispatched to Rome. They included a bat leveyha, a woman, and two technicians from Mossad yahalomin, its communications unit.

Working out of a Mossad safe house near the Pantheon, the team set up surveillance on Ocalan’s apartment close to the Vatican. The woman agent was briefed to try and make contact with him. She followed the well-established guidelines that had been used by another Mossad female agent to entice Mordechai Vanunu to his doom in this same city over a decade before. But a plan to do the same with Ocalan failed when the Kurdish leader suddenly left Italy.

The Mossad team began to scour the Mediterranean basin for him: Spain, Portugal, Tunis, Morocco, Syria. Ocalan had been to all those countries — only to move on when refused sanctuary. On February 2, 1999, the Kurdish leader was discovered trying to enter Holland. The Dutch government refused him permission to do so. A Dutch security officer at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport informed the head of the local Mossad station that Ocalan had caught a KLM flight to Nairobi. His Mossad pursuers set off for the Kenyan capital, arriving on Thursday morning, February 5.

Kenya and Israel had developed over the years a close “understanding” on intelligence matters. As part of Mossad’s “safari” in Central Africa it had exposed to the Kenyans the activities of other foreign spy networks. In return, Kenya continued to grant Mossad “special status,” allowing it to maintain a safe house in the city and providing ready access to Kenya’s small but efficient security service.

The Mossad team soon located Ocalan in the Greek embassy compound in Nairobi. From time to time Kurds — whom the team assumed were his bodyguards — came and went from the compound. Every night the head of the Mossad team reported to Tel Aviv. The order was the same: Watch — do nothing. Then the order dramatically changed. By “all means available,” Abdullah Ocalan was to be removed from the embassy compound and flown to Turkey.

The order was Halevy’s.

Luck played into the team’s hands. One of the Kurds came out of the embassy and drove to a bar close to the venerable Norfolk Hotel. In what is a classic Mossad tactic, one of the team “came alongside” the Kurd. With his dark skin and fluent Kurdish patois, the agent passed himself off as a Kurd working in Nairobi. He learned that Ocalan was getting restless. His latest application for political asylum in South Africa had received no response. Other African countries had been similarly loath to grant the Kurdish leader an entry visa.

Mossad’s eavesdropping team were using their equipment to monitor all communications in and out of the compound. It was clear that Greece would also refuse Ocalan sanctuary.

The Mossad agent who had met the Kurd in the bar made his move.

He telephoned the Kurd in the embassy compound and asked for “an urgent meeting.” Once more they met in the bar. The agent told the Kurd that Ocalan’s life was in danger if he remained in the compound. His only hope was to return to join his fellow Kurds, not in Turkey, but in northern Iraq. In its mountain vastness, Ocalan would be safe and could regroup for another day. The plan was something that Ocalan had actually begun to consider — and had been overheard doing so by the Mossad surveillance team. The agent persuaded the Kurd to return to the embassy and try and persuade Ocalan to come out and discuss the proposal.

Simply — and lethally — the trap was set. It was now only a matter of waiting to see how long Ocalan could hold but from taking the bait.

Based on its intercepts of radio traffic from the Greek Foreign Ministry to the compound, the Mossad team knew it was only a matter of days before Ocalan’s increasingly reluctant hosts would show him the door. In an “eyes only for ambassador” message, Greek prime minister Costas Simitis had said that Ocalan’s continued presence in the compound would trigger “a political and possibly military confrontation” in Greece.

Next morning a Falcon-900 executive jet landed at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport. The pilot said he had come to collect a group of businessmen flying to a conference in Athens.

What happened then is still a matter of intense debate. Ocalan’s German lawyer later claimed that “based on a misrepresentation of the situation by the Kenyan authorities,” Ocalan was “effectively dragged out of the compound.” But the Kenyan government and the Greek Embassy in Nairobi strongly denied the charge. The Greeks insisted that the Kurdish leader left the compound against the advice of his hosts.

One thing is certain.

The executive jet took off from Nairobi with Ocalan on board. As the aircraft cleared Kenyan air space the questions began:

Had the Mossad team followed its normal practice and injected Ocalan with an incapacitating drug as he stepped out of the compound? Had they snatched him off the street — as another team had snatched Adolf Eichmann all those years ago in Buenos Aires? Had Kenya turned a blind eye to an action that broke all international laws?

Hours after Ocalan had been incarcerated in a Turkish jail, an exultant Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit appeared on television to speak of an “intelligence triumph … a brilliant surveillance operation conducted in Nairobi over a twelve-day period.” He made no mention of Mossad. He was sticking to the rules.

For Efraim Halevy the success of the operation was measured against the loss of a spy network in Iraq that had depended so much on Kurdish support. He was not the first Mossad chief to wonder if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhyahu’s readiness to place Mossad in the role of “gun for hire” would have long-term repercussions in the wider business of intelligence gathering.

The success of the operation was undoubtedly muted by another fiasco that Halevy had inherited.

On October 5, 1992, an El Al cargo jet had plunged into an apartment block near Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport, killing forty-three persons and injuring dozens. Since then hundreds of people living in the area had fallen ill. Despite a relentless campaign to conceal that the aircraft had been carrying lethal chemicals — including the components to produce Sarin, the deadly nerve agent — the facts had emerged, drawing unwelcome attention to a secret research center in the suburbs of Tel Aviv where scientists had, among much else, produced a range of chemical and biological weapons for Mossad’s kidon unit.

Twelve miles southeast of downtown Tel Aviv is the Institute for Biological Research. The plant is at the cutting edge of Israel’s multilayered defense system. Within its laboratories and workshops are manufactured a wide range of chemical and biological weapons. The Institute’s chemists — some of whom once worked for the Soviet KGB or East German Stasi intelligence service — created the poison used to try and kill Khaled Meshal, the leader of the Hamas Islamic fundamentalist group.

The Institute’s current research programs include developing a range of pathogens which would be, according to a secret CIA report for William Cohen, U.S. defense secretary, “ethnic-specific.” The CIA report claims that Israeli scientists are “trying to exploit medical advances by identifying distinctive genes carried by some Arabs to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.”

The report concludes that, “still at the early stages, the intention is to exploit the way viruses and certain bacteria can alter the DNA inside their host’s living cells.” The Institute research mimics work conducted by South African scientists during the apartheid era to create a “pigmentation weapon that will target only black people.”

The research was abandoned when Nelson Mandela came to power but at least two of the scientists who worked in the program in South Africa later moved to Israel.

The idea of the Jewish State conducting such research has triggered alarm bells — not least because of the disturbing parallel with genetic experiments conducted by the Nazis. Dedi Zucker, a member of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, is on record as saying, “We cannot be allowed to create such weapons.”

It was the raw materials for such weapons that the El Al jet was carrying on that October night in 1992 in its 114 tons of cargo that also included Sidewinder missiles and electronics. Most lethal of all were twelve barrels of DMMP, a component of Sarin gas. The chemicals had been bought from Solkatronic, the New Jersey-based chemical manufacturer. The company has steadfastly insisted that it had been told by Israel that the chemicals were “to be used for testing gas masks.” No such testing is carried out at the Institute for Biological Research.

Founded in 1952 in a small concrete bunker, today the Institute sprawls over ten acres. The fruit trees have long gone, replaced by a high concrete wall topped with sensors. Armed guards patrol the perimeter. Long ago the Institute disappeared from public scrutiny. Its exact address in the suburbs of Nes Ziona has been removed from the Tel Aviv telephone book. Its location is erased from all maps of the area. No aircraft is allowed to overfly the area.

Only Dimona in the Negev Desert is surrounded by more secrecy. In the classified directory of the Israeli Defense Force, the Institute is only listed as “providing services to the defense Ministry.” Like Dimona, many of the Institute’s research and development laboratories are concealed deep underground. Housed there are the biochemists and genetic scientists with their bottled agents of death: toxins that can create crippling food poisoning and lead to death; the even more virulent Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis and anthrax.

In other laboratories, reached through air locks, scientists work with a variety of nerve agents: choking agents, blood agents, blister agents. These include Tabun, virtually odorless and invisible when dispensed in aerosol or vapor form. Soman, the last of the Nazi nerve gases to be discovered, is also invisible in vapor form but has a slightly fruity odor. The range of blister agents include chlorine, phosgene, and diphosgene which smells of new-mown grass. The blood agents include those with a cyanide base. The blister agents are based upon those first used in World War I.

Outwardly featureless, with few windows in its dun-colored concrete walls, the Institute’s interior has state-of-the-art security. Code words and visual identification control access to each area. Guards patrol the corridors. Bombproof sliding doors can only be opened by swipe-cards whose codes are changed every day.

All employees undergo health checks every month. All have been subject to intense screening. Their families have also undergone similar checks.

Within the Institute is a special department that creates lethal toxin weapons for the use of Mossad to carry out its state-approved mandate to kill without trial the enemies of Israel. Over the years at least six workers at the plant have died but the cause of their deaths is protected by Israel’s strict military censorship.

The first crack in that security curtain has come from a former Mossad officer, Victor Ostrovsky. He claims that “we all knew that a prisoner brought to the Institute would never get out alive. PLO infiltrators were used as guinea pigs. They could make sure the weapons the scientists were developing worked properly and make them even more efficient.”

Israel has so far issued no denial of these allegations.

The start of the NATO spring offensive against Serbia in 1999 gave Halevy an opportunity for Mossad to provide an intelligence input to the nineteen countries that formed the Alliance. Mossad had long-established contacts in the region — out of real concern that the Balkans could eventually become a Muslim enclave, so providing a back door from which to launch terrorist attacks against Israel. It gave Halevy a welcome opportunity to visit NATO headquarters in Brussels and meet his counterparts. He traveled to Washington to see the CIA. Back home he worked a long day, often not taking a day off from one week to the next. In that respect he reminded people of Meir Amit.

In the spring of 1999, Mossad’s old bete noir, Victor Ostrovsky, surfaced to irritate the service. Carefully leaked reports from the team acting for two Libyans finally charged with the Lockerbie bombing said that Ostrovsky would give evidence for the defense. Given that the former katsa had left Mossad well before the incident, it was hard to see what he would have to contribute. Nevertheless, the sight of Ostrovsky in the witness box in the specially convened court in the Hague had, according to one senior Mossad source, deeply angered Halevy. He believed that an “understanding” had developed between Ostrovsky and his former employers that he would do nothing more to embarrass the agency in return for being allowed to live an unfettered life. For a while Halevy considered if there was any legal action he could take to stop Ostrovsky; in the end he was advised there was none.

In any event, by the time Ostrovsky appears in court, if he does, Halevy would have retired.

To achieve all he must do before he leaves the service would continue to be a huge test of Halevy’s physical and mental stamina. Aman and Shin Bet had seized upon the trouble in Mossad to boost their own position to be first among equals. Yet no one had suggested that Mossad should not retain its role as Israel’s secret eye on the world. Without its skills Israel might well find itself defeated by its enemies in the next century. Iran, Iraq, and Syria were all developing technology that needed to be closely monitored.

In the beginning, the operational style of Mossad had been to do what must be done, but do it secretly. In one of his one-to-one meetings with a staffer, Halevy had said he would like to see the Israeli intelligence community become a united family once more, “with Mossad the uncle no one talks about.”

Only time would tell whether that is an unsupportable dream or whether, as many observers fear, the further Mossad is from its last public humiliation, the closer it is to the next.

That came a step closer when, in June 1999, Mossad learned it could be asked to move its European headquarters in Holland following highly embarrassing claims that it has been secretly buying plutonium and other nuclear materials from the Russian Mafia. The allegation had been made by Intel, a small but formidable division of Dutch intelligence.

Intel’s investigation had been run out of a deep bunker — ironically built to shelter the Dutch Royal Family in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on Amsterdam. The bunker is near the city’s Central Railway Station. Intel had established the terminus was journey’s end for some of the nuclear materials stolen from Russian weapons labs such as Chelyabinsk-70 in the Ural Mountains and Arzamas-16 in Nizhnii Novgorod, formerly Gorky.

Senior Mossad officers had insisted to Intel that precisely because the deadly materials were stolen, their agents purchased them from the Russian Mafia. It was the only way to stop the material being sold to Islamic and other terror groups.

While conceding that the Mossad claim was plausible, Intel investigators had become convinced that the nuclear materials had also been secretly shipped out of Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport to Israel to boost the country’s own nuclear weapons manufacturing plant at Dimona. Already stockpiled there were, by 1999, an estimated 200 nuclear weapons.

That Mossad had been trafficking with the Russian Mafia rekindled a nuclear nightmare that has never quite gone away. While the chilling Cold War doctrine of MAD — mutually assured destruction — had gone, in its place has come a more dangerous scenario where nuclear know-how and materials are on sale. It is capitalism, Wild East style, in which organized crime syndicates and corrupt government officials work in league to create new markets for nuclear materials — a bazaar with some of the world’s most dangerous weapons on offer.

Much of the work of tracing the origins of stolen nuclear material is done at the European Trans-Uranium Institute (ETUI) in Karlsruhe, Germany. There, scientists use state-of-the-art equipment to track whether stolen materials have come from a military or civilian source. But they concede “it’s like trying to catch a thief who has never been fingerprinted.”

To head off undoubtedly awkward questions should Mossad’s own fingerprints be found, Halevy made a secret visit to Holland in early June to explain to Intel Mossad’s role. Dutch intelligence remained unconvinced.

Halevy returned to Israel to tell its new prime minister, Ehud Barak, that Mossad should be prepared to move its European headquarters in the El Al complex at Schipol Airport.

Mossad had been based there for the past six years. From second-floor offices in the complex — known at Schipol as “Little Israel”—eighteen Mossad officers have run European operations. According to one Mossad source, Halevy’s position was clear: Better Mossad moves than be kicked out of Holland, a fate it suffered in Britain under the Thatcher government.

It was Mossad’s decision to run its own operations within a host country without telling Britain that had led to a souring of relations with London. Ironically. If Mossad left Schipol, it may be to return to Britain. Under the uncritical approval of Prime Minister Tony Blair — Halevy is said to have told Barak — Mossad would find a ready welcome. Blair believes a strong Mossad presence would benefit MI5’s efforts to keep track of the many groups from the Middle East who are now based in London.

A deciding factor in a move to Britain would be whether El Al, the Israeli national carrier, also moved its hub from Schipol to Heathrow. Given El Al’s thriving cargo business, the boost to Heathrow would be considerable.

Intel had established that the link between Mossad and the airline is an integral part of the traffic in nuclear materials.

The Dutch agency insists that Mossad would never have begun the dangerous business of buying nuclear materials unless those materials could be safely and secretly transported to Israel.

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison, now director of Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs, has observed that “a criminal or terrorist group could even ship a weapon into the United States in places small and light enough to be sent through the postal service.”

Implicit in those words is the fact that a highly efficient organization like Mossad, supported by the vast resources Israel puts at its disposal, would have little or no difficulty in smuggling nuclear materials out of Schipol.

Intel’s suspicion about such smuggling was first aroused when it was tipped off that the El Al cargo freighter that crashed shortly after take-off from Schipol in October 1992 was carrying chemicals.

Since then the agency has gathered what an Intel source describes as “at minimum strong circumstantial evidence” that Mossad has also shipped nuclear materials regularly through Schipol.

A “mule”—a courier — who in return for her cooperation was given a guarantee against prosecution — has told Intel that she had smuggled nuclear materials from the Ukraine across Germany and finally into Holland.

The courier has claimed to Intel that she was met at Amsterdam’s Central Station. Shown photographs, the courier picked out the person. It was a Mossad officer Intel knew was based at Schipol.

In the “old days”—the words are those of Meir Amit — a Mossad operative would never have allowed himself to be so easily identified. Many others within the Israeli intelligence community believe such basic failures in trade craft do not augur well for Mossad as it enters the new millennium.

There has been a change of attitude within Israel that has led to anger and disillusion over Mossad’s operational failures. In those “old days” few Israelis had really minded that Mossad’s successes often depended on subversion, lying, and killing. All that mattered was that Israel survived.

But with peace, of a sort, edging closer to Israel’s borders with its Arab neighbors, increasing questions are being asked about such methods being used in Mossad’s continuing role as shield and sword.

Within Mossad itself there is a stubborn feeling that a great institution can only survive by, in the words of Rafi Eitan, “not giving in to every murmur of a new opinion.” Equally there is also a feeling, articulated by Ari Ben-Menashe, that if Mossad persists in locking itself into yesterday’s goals, it “will be in danger of being smothered, like a medieval knight in his armor left unhorsed and forgotten on the field of battle.”

Behind such evocative words lie some hard truths. Fifty years on, Mossad is no longer seen as a derring-do agency, its deeds burnished bright in the consciousness of Israel. Born in those memorable few years in which Israel built a new world for itself, Mossad was one of the guarantors that world would survive. That guarantee is no longer required.

Ari Ben-Menashe put it as well as anybody: “Israel, and the world, should think of Mossad as they would a dose of preventive medicine — to protect against an illness that could be fatal. You only take the medicine when the illness is threatening. You don’t take it all the time.”

The still unanswered question is whether Mossad will be content to play a role where maturity and moderation must replace the policy of doing hard things for hard reasons.