Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 18 NEW BEGINNINGS

On September 11, 2002, every available man and woman in Mossad — apart from those overseas — made his or her way through the featureless corridors of their headquarters in midtown Tel Aviv. Outside it was another of those late summer days, a clear blue sky and the temperature in the mid-twenties Celsius. There had been the same kind of weather, a year ago to the day, on the northeastern seaboard of the United States when al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. The unprecedented assault had forever changed the perception of terrorism for Mossad and the world’s other intelligence services, who worked, in 2002, in a $100 billion global industry employing a million people. Mossad’s entire staff now numbered 1,500, an increase of 300 over the last decade.

It was not the first anniversary of what had become known as 9/11 that preoccupied those in Mossad headquarters heading for the staff canteen. The sense of foreboding in some, coupled with a frisson of excitement in others, came from a mixture of hope, expectation, and a fear of disappointment.

The question uppermost in their minds was simple: Was the new head of Mossad they were on their way to meet in the headquarters canteen going to continue to run the service as it had been run under Efraim Halevy? If so, morale would inevitably plunge further and there would be more resignations.

Halevy had finally been eased out by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as memune — Hebrew for “first among equals.” In the four years he had been director general, the tension he had inherited — caused by interservice rivalry and backstabbing that had set field agents against analysts and turned planners into plotters — had increased. Mossad, which once prided itself on unity, had become increasingly fractured.

Could the new man heal the rifts? Could he do what Halevy had spectacularly failed to do: lead Mossad into the new millennium and turn it back into a force with which to be reckoned? The men and women making their way to the canteen on that September day agreed that anyone at the helm must be better than Halevy.

In his four-year tenure, there had been marked physical changes in Halevy. There was a grayness to his skin, and his eyes were often red rimmed, the result of disturbed sleep from calls by a Mossad night-duty officer. The lines around Halevy’s mouth were more deeply etched. Gone was the sprightly stride that had once heralded his approach down Mossad’s corridors, there was now a stiffness in his gait. Sartorially, too, he was no longer the figure he had been: he had lost weight; his jackets hung on him. His voice, still cultured, was without its crispness; his questions were less incisive. Halevy had come to look and sound like a man edging toward retirement. On that September day, he was sixty-six years of age, the oldest director general to have led Mossad.

In many ways the service had become like Halevy. Its forays onto the international stage had been cut back to operations in the cauldron of the Middle East. Senior Mossad officers accompanied Halevy on his regular visits to the CIA at Langley, to MI6 at its new headquarters at Vauxhall Cross in London, and to Pullach in Bavaria, home of Germany’s BND. Visits to other intelligence chiefs were less frequent. But little came from any of these contacts.

The world in the twenty-first century had become far more dangerous and unstable than ever before. While Mossad had contributed to assessing the technological developments terrorists had acquired, it played no significant part in identifying new roles for the global intelligence community on how to counter drugs and economic espionage. Mossad’s contribution had been to argue the need to bring back the traditional spy as a complement to the satellites and other exotic systems. The view was often coolly received.

Then, on September 11, 2001, the world and the global intelligence community were shocked into a new reality after the most deadly terrorist attack ever known. Yet, stunning as it was, the events of that day had been long in the making: the assault was the climax of the most sophisticated and horrifying scheme masterminded by Osama bin Laden and his jihad group, al-Qaeda.

In the countless millions of words written in newspapers and the accumulating library of books on the subject, one question has remained, until now, unanswered: How much did Mossad know beforehand of the events leading up to the destruction of the Twin Towers and the partial toppling of the Pentagon?

A year after the attacks, only a handful of the most senior Mossad officers from the Operations floor in the Mossad headquarters building knew the answers — and then, not all of them.

From the day bin Laden’s suicide bombers partly destroyed the World Trade Center in 1993, Mossad had placed him at the top of its own list of most wanted terrorists. Its deep-cover field agents in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan had all picked up “whispers in the wind” that bin Laden was planning “something big,” said one report. Another spoke of a “strong rumour bin Laden is planning a Hiroshima type attack.” Still another revealed a flight simulator being used in an al-Qaeda training camp near Kabul. Then came the even more alarming news that bin Laden had been trying to obtain chemical and nuclear weapons.

While Mossad analysts tried, in the words of one (to this author), to “connect the dots,” the reports were also passed on through the long-established back channel to the CIA. The Pentagon was asked to evaluate the threat of an air strike. One of its analysts, Marvin Cetron, wrote, “Coming down the Potomac, you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House.”

A full three years before the September attacks, a commission chaired by Vice President Al Gore had produced a report that urged substantially more spending on airport security. Other reports, again based on input from Mossad, followed. All were ignored, first by the Clinton White House and then by Clinton’s successor, President George W. Bush. When he protested, Marvin Cetron was told by a Pentagon official. “Look, we can’t manage a crisis until it is a crisis.” There was a feeling in Washington that Mossad was once more crying wolf, that it had a vested interest in promoting Islamic fundamentalism as a threat because it feared its terrorists and wanted to persuade the United States that it also faced a similar threat.

By the time Efraim Halevy had come into office, dutifully read the files on terrorism threats, and seen the reaction to Mossad’s warnings, he had decided that, in the words of one of his senior officers, “there was no point in pushing against a bolted door.”

In Washington, the impending debacle of intelligence ignored had led, not for the first time, to a rupture between the FBI and the CIA. Both agencies had concrete evidence that al-Qaeda was an increasing threat: one of its operatives had been stopped at the last moment from flying a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Credible intelligence had emerged at Langley that bin Laden was planning to launch an air strike against the economic summit in Italy earlier in 2001. But the sense of paralysis and denial, compounded by the growing turf war between the FBI and the CIA, had continued to hold the U.S. intelligence community in its grip.

It would take the events of September 11 to break that hold.

In the aftermath, senior officers at both agencies were publicly attacked for their lack of counterterrorism policies and their failure of coordination and cooperation. There emerged a picture of recalcitrant intelligence bureaucracies, too concerned with issues of political expediency to take risks. The CIA, in particular, had failed to grasp the importance of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the crucial role played by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. From its training camps, thousands of terrorists had graduated to leave their mark on the world stage. First came the destruction in 1998 of the American embassy in Nairobe, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in which 213 died. Then followed the attack on the American destroyer the USS Cole in the port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Both were very public preludes to the September 11 attacks.

After September 11, among the hundreds of questions dominating Washington’s collective soul-searching, were: Why had the CIA not had more spies on the ground in Africa and the Middle East? Why had it depended too much on electronic surveillance? And why had it not relied upon what Paul Bremer, the counterterrorism chief for President Reagan, had called “third-country intelligence”?

Everyone knew he meant Mossad.

Since then, Halevy had been bombarded with calls from CIA director George Tenet, himself facing intense criticism. Tenet wanted to know how much more Mossad had known about the impending attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Halevy, in his careful, diplomatic way, had pointed out to Tenet that Mossad had sent several warnings in the weeks prior to September that an attack was coming. Halevy had then cited “credible chatter” Mossad agents had picked up in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. But under mounting pressure from Congress and the White House, Tenet had furiously persisted in challenging Halevy. How much had Mossad known?

A serving Mossad officer later described the “hot line from Langley” as superheated. Sometimes there were a dozen calls a day from Tenet. And then there was all the secure-line high-speed signals traffic. There had never been anything like it. Washington was shocked that a bearded man operating out of a cave somewhere in the Middle East had “done more damage to American prestige than Pearl Harbor.”

In a tense phone call, one which, though he did not know it, would trigger his own downfall, Halevy had snapped at Tenet. Where was your electronic surveillance?

America’s National Security Agency is the most secretive and powerful such service in the world. From Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, it casts an electronic ear over the globe. Its supercomputers hum around the clock, hoping to intercept or identify communications between terrorists. Suspects, names, key words, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses are all sucked up by NSA satellites — either circling or geopositioned around the earth — and downloaded to the computers. There the data are coded into “watch lists,” then fed into the system that takes the lists on secure lines throughout the U.S. intelligence community.

In theory, everyone who had needed to know would have been aware of who was out there posing a real and present danger to the United States. But the reality had been different.

Few know exactly what NSA costs to run, but it is widely reported to be more than several billion dollars a year. Its massive, powerful data crushers are part of the ECHELON surveillance system, which sifts tens of billions of snippets of information, daily, matching them up.

The one drawback with the system is that it still has language difficulties: it cannot recognize the dialects and patois of some of the eighteen languages of the Middle East and the even greater number in India and Pakistan. Some of the material obtained from there has to be scrutinized by old-fashioned methods — linguists trained to interpret what is being said and, equally important, what might have been left out. In the end, the lists depend on being accurate.

Efraim Halevy knew that was the weakness in the American system: any list was only as good as the analysts who put a person’s name on it. And that, he had politely told Tenet in that phone call, was where the Americans had failed.

Tenet was furious. He was wedded to the wonders of electronic surveillance. For him, it was the ultimate billion-dollar instrument of superpower espionage. The sentinels in space, the high-tech spy satellites with exotic-sounding names like Argus, Magnum, and Keyhole, were how Washington — and in many ways Tenet himself as the head of its intelligence community — kept track of the rest of the world. On his own visits to Israel, he had shown Halevy how, out in the icy blackness of outer space, a satellite pointed down on Yasser Arafat’s headquarters on the West Bank had picked up his conversations. Halevy, so the story went, had smiled politely. But what had Arafat been saying that justified the expense of all that surveillance? Tenet had shrugged.

Halevy had studied the satellite photo for a moment longer, noting the date. Then he had asked one of his analysts to fetch a report on the same day. It was a detailed account from a Mossad katsa of what Arafat had said when the satellite had passed overhead. Halevy had murmured that that was the point of human intelligence. A spy on the ground could judge a conversation in its setting, obtain the finer details that are lost to even the most sophisticated electronic surveillance.

At his next meeting with President George W. Bush, the CIA chief had complained that “the old man in Tel Aviv is outta touch.” Bush had discussed the matter with Condoleezza Rice, his closest adviser. She said she would speak to Dick Clarke, who had been President Clinton’s counterterrorism “czar.” Few people in Washington had worked for longer in the field.

The son of a Boston chocolate factory worker, Clarke was a survivor of the American politico-military establishment. For successive administrations, from President Reagan onward, he had become a source of endless advice. He saw himself as a defender of American values.

Despite his enemies, people listened to him. Privately they may have mocked the way Clarke strove to look like the latest incumbent in the White House — he had even dyed his hair silver when Clinton was in office, so they said — but he was the man who knew the standing of every intelligence chief in the West, and of many in China and Arab countries. He told Rice that Halevy was “past his sell-by date.” She told Bush. He called Sharon. It was only a matter of time before Israel’s prime minister would find a reason to send Halevy into retirement.

The men and women making their way through Mossad’s corridors knew, if not all, then part of this. Some of their colleagues had already left Mossad, either resigning or being driven out by a feeling that there was no real future in the organization. For them it was no longer enough to create situations that sought to draw fact out of surmise, to spend their days applying the art of informed conjecture and dealing in the middle range of probability. Others had stayed on in the hope that one day things would change — that there would, for instance, be no repetition of an operation for which Efraim Halevy would forever be remembered in these corridors.

On May 9, 2001, two young men drove up to the guard post at Volk Field in Wisconsin, one of several air bases the Air National Guard maintains across the country. Volk Field has another claim of interest. Within its perimeter is a small aeronautical museum. Every year from spring until September, a steady stream of visitors comes to inspect the display of aircraft.

The guard asked the men for their IDs, and was surprised when they produced Israeli passports. He could not recall visitors coming from so far. They explained they were “art students” at the “University of Jerusalem.”

As with all visitors, the guard noted down their names — Gal Kantor and Tsvi Watermann — then directed them to the museum. Ten minutes later a military police patrol caught them taking photographs of parked fighter planes. The men were arrested but pleaded that they had not known they were committing an offense. The base duty security officer released them with a warning. His report of the incident made its way through the Wisconsin military command structure and on to the Pentagon.

From there it was sent to the FBI. On that May day, the bureau had already received twenty-seven other reports involving Israeli “art students.” The reports came from as far apart as Los Angeles and Miami, Denver and Dallas, Seattle and New Orleans.

The details were remarkable in their consistency. Two “art students” in St Louis had been caught “diagramming the inside of a Drug Enforcement Agency building.” In another federal building in Dallas, another pair had been stopped doing the same thing. In several cities, other “art students” had shown up at the homes of senior federal officials — men with unlisted addresses, known as “black addresses” in the U.S. intelligence community. In other cities — Phoenix and San Diego were two — the “students” had been found in possession of photographs of federal agents and their unmarked cars. All the reports said that the students had given their address as the “University of Jerusalem” or the “Bezalei Academy of Arts” in the city.

The FBI had asked the State Department to have the United States embassy in Israel run a check. It reported that no “University of Jerusalem” existed. The nearest was the city’s Hebrew University, and it had no record of the “students.” The Bezalei Academy was genuine. But the dates of birth, passport numbers, and in some cases military registration numbers of the “art students” were not listed on the academy’s enrollment list, or lists of those who had attended up to ten years before. While this information was being obtained, FBI agents in Washington had traced the cell phones the mysterious “students” were carrying. All had been purchased by an Israeli diplomat in Washington who had now returned to Israel.

The news caused consternation in FBI headquarters. Robert Mueller, then the bureau’s director, called for a meeting with George Tenet. Uppermost in their minds was whether they were facing another spying operation by Mossad. But would an agency that had made its name for unrivaled planning and stealth have mounted one that, on the surface at least, was so amateurish?

Tenet placed a call to Halevy, who denied that any operation was going on.

He was lying. The operation had been his brainchild. Stung by the refusal — and this was months before the September 11 attacks — to take heed of Mossad’s warnings that al-Qaeda was a growing threat within the United States, Halevy had decided to test how vigilant were American defenses. Students from their final year at the Mossad training school on the outskirts of Tel Aviv had been selected to go to America. It would not be the first time that Mossad had used its students for this purpose; it gave them valuable field experience, and anything they acquired could be useful to Mossad.

Halevy had chosen to run the operation with only a few Mossad staff involved. Again, it was not uncommon for a director general to do this. But what made it unusual was that the preplanning and cover stories were a disaster waiting to happen. Just as at Lillehammer and on the streets of Amman — both debacles that had cost Halevy’s predecessors their jobs — there was an element of recklessness about what the “art students” had been briefed to do that baffled the FBI. Surely, Mossad could not have slipped so far, to be running something like this?

As the FBI began its investigation, the inevitable happened: the news leaked. Soon a number of reporters were trying to pin down the story. Much of their initial reporting was wide of the mark. The “art students” were described as “Middle Easterners” and “speaking Arabic.” They were identified as members of an unnamed terrorist group.

Then the Fox News channel entered the arena. It assigned a hardworking reporter, Carl Cameron, to the story. He picked up the first hint that this could be a Mossad-generated operation.

That provoked an immediate response from the vast and powerful Jewish lobby in Washington, whose tentacles reach out across America. The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a leading political lobby, able to penetrate Congress, the intelligence community, and the White House. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) has equally powerful connections. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) are strident watchdogs over what the media publish about Israeli affairs.

The moment Cameron went on air on the Fox network to announce he had uncovered “a possible espionage and surveillance operation by Israelis against al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S.,” the combined resources of the Jewish lobby directed their fire against him.

But even as they launched their first volley, Cameron was saying in a second report that “many of the Israelis had failed polygraph tests when asked about their alleged surveillance activities in the United States.”

In Paris, Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, reported that “a vast Israeli spy network had been dismantled in the United States, the largest operation of its kind since 1985 when Jonathan Pollard was caught selling top secrets to Mossad.”

With renewed ferocity, the Jewish lobby set to work.

The Israeli embassy predictably reiterated what it said to all such allegations: “No American official or intelligence agency has complained to us about this. The story is nonsense. Israel does not spy on the United States.”

The Israel lobby excoriated Carl Cameron for his exposé. Representatives of JINSA, the ADL, and CAMERA argued that the Fox report “cited only unnamed sources and provided no direct evidence.” CAMERA’s associate director, Alex Safian, said “it was having ‘conversations’ with representatives of Fox News regarding Cameron’s piece.”

Safian also questioned Cameron’s “motives” in running the story. “I think Fox has always been fair to Israel in its reporting. I think it’s just Cameron who has something, personally, about Israel. He was brought up in the Middle East. Maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe he’s very sympathetic to the Arab side. One could ask.” The implication was that Carl Cameron was a bigot; Safian would later make the same allegation about the entire editorial staff at Le Monde.

“I’m speechless,” said Cameron when he heard of Safian’s statement. “I spent several years in Iran growing up because my father was an archaeologist there. That makes me anti-Israel?” Cameron, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, had never before been attacked for “biased” coverage.

Michael Lind, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation — a think tank — and former executive editor of The National Interest, a journal, said: “Among foreign service officers, law enforcement, and military, there is an impression that you can’t mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an Arabist.”

While the attacks on Cameron and Le Monde were at full throttle, the “art students” were quietly deported to Israel for what the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service called “routine visa violations.”

No mainstream media outlet asked why the CIA, through its National Counterintelligence Executive, had been involved. Or why the FBI had established that the “students” had visited no fewer than thirty-six Defense Department facilities.

Finally, as the “students” were flying out on El Al back to Tel Aviv, all traces of Cameron’s reporting vanished from the Fox News Internet site. In its place ran a note. “This story no longer exists.” A CIA spokesman said: “We’ve closed the book on it.”

Shortly afterward, Halevy’s tenure at Mossad came to an end.

There was one other legacy Efraim Halevy would take into retirement: his decision to revisit the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. After reading the Mossad file on the incident, he had asked Maurice, the agent who had been involved in trying to recruit Henri Paul — the driver of the car in which the young lovers had died — to prepare a new record of the couple’s last day together.

Had it been mere curiosity on Halevy’s part? There were rumors that he had met Diana during his time as Israel’s ambassador to the European Community. If so, he would not be the first diplomat to come under her spell. But more likely is that Halevy wanted to ensure that there was no new evidence to support the claims that Mossad had been indirectly involved in the deaths.

Maurice, now a desk man at headquarters, had prepared a detailed account of the last day in the life of Diana and Dodi.

Those who have read the account say it does flesh out the detail in the original Mossad report. Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Dodi, is described as a man with a continuing obsession that Diana was pregnant and that she was the object of surveillance by the CIA, MI6, and French intelligence from the moment she and Dodi flew into Paris. There are transcripts of various phone calls, including one from Diana’s former Scotland Yard bodyguard, warning her to “be careful.” The evening of August 30, 1997, which the couple spent together in Paris, is carefully time-tabled. Next comes a similar recounting of how, in the first moments of Sunday, August 31, the couple rushed from the Ritz Hotel to try to reach Dodi’s apartment a short drive away. Then Maurice had focused on the white Uno. It had been parked close to the Ritz. Other photographers say it belonged to the paparazzo James Anderson. He had made taking photos of Diana his speciality. It had earned him a fortune. But it has been established Anderson was not present on the night in question.

Maurice described the white Uno in hot pursuit of the Mercedes, Henri Paul at the wheel, Diana and Dodi in the back, as the two cars raced neck and neck into the place de L’Alma underpass, where Diana and Dodi met their deaths.

Later a car of the same make, but recently painted blue, was found in a Paris garage. When the paint was scratched, the car was white underneath. The police did not pursue the matter. Did they already suspect this was not the vehicle they were searching for? If so, why did they not visit the car-crusher facility in the Paris suburb where another white Fiat Uno, hours after the fatal crash, had been reduced to a block of unidentifiable metal? Did they also realize that would be a waste of time?

Maurice noted in his report: “Almost four hours after the crash, James Anderson suddenly flew to Corsica. There was no known professional reason for him to do so. There was no one famous on Corsica to photograph at the time. In May 2000, a burned-out car was found in woodland near Nantes in France. The driver was still inside the car. DNA tests showed the body was that of James Anderson.”

And there lies the last mystery, one that will now perhaps never be resolved. Had Anderson gone to Corsica to collect a substantial fee for loaning his white Uno? But to whom? Mossad certainly had no interest in pursuing Diana or Dodi. Could it have been another secret service? Anderson was reputed to have connections to both French and British intelligence. Even if that was true, it is still an unacceptable leap — as Mohamed al-Fayed made — to suggest that Anderson’s car had been “borrowed and used to force Henri Paul to lose control over the Mercedes.”

But the questions do not stop. Why was the police investigation into Anderson’s death so perfunctory? Why had the police neither attempted to find out why he had gone to Corsica nor conducted a detailed investigation into his bank accounts? Like all wealthy men, Anderson kept a number of accounts around Europe. But none of these were checked to see if he had deposited a substantial amount after his trip to Corsica.

More intriguing is the possibility that it was Anderson’s death that had concerned Halevy. Had someone in the past tried to recruit him for Mossad? While there may well have been nothing on a Mossad file, it was still a possibility that a katsa on an operation had come across the photographer and tried to use him.

Whatever Efraim Halevy had thought of all this he had kept to himself. He was that sort of man. His inability to share some secrets may well have contributed to his downfall. He had arrived quietly in Mossad. He left the same way.

Now, on that eleventh day of September 2002, the staff of Mossad waited for his successor to arrive in the canteen to address them. No one knew what to expect. The tension, one man recalled, was “a living thing.”

Meir Dagan waited in the corridor until he was sure there was total silence in the canteen. Long ago, when he had been a military commander briefing his troops, he had learned the importance of making an entrance. Now the tenth memune to take charge of Mossad, he was equally determined to stamp his authority from the outset. Since his appointment, he had studied staff files. He had a prodigious memory, and a face once seen was not forgotten.

At fifty-seven years of age, his own face was a road map of all the recent wars Israel had fought. He had himself crushed the first Intifada in Gaza in 1991. He had led his men from the front in the Yom Kippur War. In Lebanon, he had fought with distinction. In all these places, he had displayed the same regimen to awaken from a combat veteran’s light sleep, take a cold shower, and eat a daily breakfast of natural yogurt, toast spread with honey, and strong black coffee. Blunt, proud, and imperious, he was prepared to stand on his record.

The battle-hardened hero of past wars had earned his reputation in Arab capitals as a man to be feared, one who would not hesitate to venture into those alleys that often have no names with no more than a handgun in his pocket. Twice he had been wounded in action; on some days, when the twinge in his knee became too severe, he walked with the help of a walking stick. He disliked doing so; he had an antipathy to any sign of weakness in himself or others. On that September day he had no stick.

In his spare time he was a student of military history and the intelligence lessons to be learned from battles lost and won.

Few knew he was also an accomplished landscape painter (he had already earmarked a corner of his office where he would set up his easel to produce one of his watercolors). Like everything else about him, this fact remained part of his private world. A man of few friends and with a happy domestic life, he came to Mossad with only one aim: to make it the intelligence service it had once been.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had taken him out of military command to do so. The two men had been friends from their days together fighting the PLO in Lebanon. Dagan had made an impression in that political quagmire by showing his skill at morale building. That, Sharon had said, was now a priority in Mossad. He had chosen Dagan because in many ways he was cast from the same steely mold as perhaps the greatest leader Mossad had ever had, Meir Amit.

Satisfied that the sense of expectation in the canteen had built sufficiently, Dagan entered the room. Making his way rapidly past the silent staff to the center, he used a chair as a step to stand on a table. For a long moment, he stared down at the faces looking up at him. Then he spoke.

“In Lebanon I witnessed the aftermath of a family feud. A local patriarch’s head had been split open, his brain on the floor. Around him lay his wife and some of his children. All dead. Before I could do anything, one of the patriarch’s sons scooped up a handful of the patriarch’s brain and swallowed it. That is how they do things in family feuds in that place. Eat the brain. Swallow its power.”

He paused, letting the impact of his words have their full effect.

“I don’t want any of you to have your brains eaten. You eat their brains.” Dagan emphasized his point by punching a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand.

His words could only have held his listeners in thrall, even though what he said may also have sent a shudder through some of them. Others in the canteen had killed enemies of Israel who could not be brought to trial because they were protected deep within the boundaries of Arab neighbors.

Underpinning Dagan’s words was a clear guarantee that from now on he would sanction any operation against those who would “eat their brains.” In turn, he would protect Mossad with every means he knew — legal or illegal. That meant he would effectively allow his agents to use proscribed nerve toxins, dumdum bullets, and methods of killing that even the mafia, the former KGB, or China’s secret service rarely used. But he was also implicitly reminding them that he would not hesitate to expose them to torture and certain death at the hands of their enemies. No wonder he held them in thrall.

Some of them who had recently graduated from the training school might well have remembered the words long ago articulated by Meir Amit, and which formed part of the schooling lectures on assassination: “Mossad is like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal injection. Your actions are all endorsed by the State of Israel. When you kill, you are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day.”

Once more Dagan spoke. “I am here to tell you that the old days are back. The dice are ready to roll.”

Then he told them about himself. How he was born on a train between Russia and Poland. That he spoke several languages. That he operated on the premise that action could not wait for certainty. He finished with a final punch of his fist into his palm.

It had been a bravura performance. As he jumped down from the table and walked from the canteen, applause followed him all the way to the door.

The time swiftly came when Meir Dagan would show what he meant by eating their enemies’ brains. In Mombasa in East Africa, an explosive-laden land cruiser had driven into the reception area of the island’s Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in October 2002. Fifteen people were killed and eighty seriously injured. At almost the same time, two shoulder-fired missiles had nearly downed an Israeli passenger plane bringing tourists back to Tel Aviv from Kenya. Two hundred seventy-five people on board had barely missed a Lockerbie-style death.

Meir Dagan immediately decided that the attacks had been the work of al-Qaeda and that the missiles had come from Iraq’s arsenal. Confirmation of this had come from his own deep-cover agents in Baghdad and from the CIA and MI6.

Within hours, Dagan had assembled a team to go to Mombasa. All had local language skills. They could pass for Arabs or for Asian traders on the island. His men not only dressed the part, they looked the part. Their prime task in Mombasa was to find and kill the men behind the three suicide bombers, who had gone to their deaths laughing as they plunged their vehicle into the hotel.

The team would carry a small laboratory of poisons, sealed in vials until the moment came to strike. They had long- and short-bladed knives. Piano wire to strangle. Explosives no bigger than a throat lozenge capable of blowing off a person’s head. They would take an arsenal of guns: short-barreled pistols, sniper rifles with a killing range of a mile. Each agent carried several passports to enable him to cross borders in different guises.

And so they flew south in their own plane to Mombasa. Mossad agents from Lagos, Nigeria — from where Israel gets the bulk of its oil — were there to support the team from Tel Aviv. Other katsas from South Africa, Rome, Malta, and Cyprus had sped through Africa into the fierce heat of Mombasa.

Dagan’s men were polite to officers from the CIA, MI6, and other European services, and paid lip service to the atrocity’s having been committed within Kenya’s jurisdiction. But for the team, the dead and injured were Israelis. That made it their job.

In Tel Aviv, Dagan waited. He knew his operatives had melted into the region’s multiethnic population.

To this day, no one knows for certain what success the Mossad team had. But sources in a number of other intelligence services say it did kill several suspected terrorists and dumped their bodies in crocodile-infested swamps. If so, that would fit into Mossad’s way of doing things. The reality of their world is a different one from that of others.

And while his agents carried out their ruthless safari against al-Qaeda, Meir Dagan was immersing himself in the struggle against another, equally fearsome enemy: the suicide bombers who continued to terrorize Israel in the closing weeks of 2002.

The first suicide bomber had struck in Israel on a warm spring day in April 1993. Others soon followed, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Men, women, and children had died on buses, in shopping malls and cafés, and on the way to school. Each death had one common purpose: to wreck any hope of bringing peace to the region. Most of the bombers had come from a terrorist group known as the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. For Israelis, it was more feared than Hezbollah and Hamas.

Each potential bomber was recommended to the Martyrs Jihad Committee. So far the combined resources of Israel’s intelligence community had failed to locate its members. All that was known was that they communicated important decisions through handwritten notes.

Long before a candidate was approached, careful checks were made into the family background. A critical decision in the selection process was the religious standing of any bomber. The imam, the prayer leader of the mosque where a candidate worshiped, was consulted on how well the person knew the Koran, how regular was his attendance at Friday prayers. There were other preconditions before a person was accepted for martyrdom. No bomber was selected who was the sole wage earner in the family, if two brothers volunteered, only one was chosen.

Having passed those basic requirements, a candidate was invited to meet the Martyrs Jihad Committee. These meetings were often held in public places, like crowded cafés, to reduce the risk of electronic surveillance.

The first meeting focused on a candidate’s religious knowledge. Next he was questioned about his political commitment. If his answers were satisfactory, he was placed on the list of suicide bombers. No one knew its size. But it was believed to number hundreds.

Meir Dagan had found the details in Mossad files. But he wanted to know more. And so, in every spare moment, he had dug deeper into the close world of the bombers and the men who prepared them.

The preparations for martyrdom were conducted in a mosque, usually in a back room away from prying eyes. The iman was assisted by a member of the Martyrs Jihad Committee. They spent up to eight hours a day with a candidate, the time divided between silent prayer and reading portions aloud from the Koran.

An important task at this stage was to give the candidate repeated assurances, that on the Day of Judgment, he or she — for women were eligible to become bombers — would be allowed, upon entering paradise, to choose seventy relatives to also enter; that in heaven a male bomber would have at his disposal seventy-two houris, the celestial virgins who are reputed in Islamic folklore to live there.

These promises were interspersed with checks to see that a bomber’s belief in martyrdom never wavered. The imam and his assistant repeated time and again the same exhortation. “You die to achieve Allah’s satisfaction. You have been chosen by Allah because he has seen in you all that is good.”

The first sign to a bomber that he was about to go to his death came when he was joined by two “advisers” who replaced the assistant. Older men, steeped in Islamic extreme dogma, their task was to ensure that a bomber did not waver in his readiness to die. They focused on the “glory” waiting in paradise of being finally in the presence of Allah, of being allowed to meet the prophet Muhammad.

As the time grew closer to a mission, the bomber was moved to a specially prepared room. Its walls were inscribed with verses from the Koran. Between the verses were painted green birds flying in a purple sky, a reminder that they carry the souls of martyrs to Allah. The indoctrination became more focused. The bomber was told paradise was very close. When the time came, all he must do was press the detonator button to enter the promised world.

For hours the advisers and the human bomb continued to pray and fast together. In between, the practical side of his departure to paradise was taken care of. All of the bomber’s earthly debts were settled by the Martyrs Jihad Committee. He was told his family would become honored members of their community.

There were constant checks to ensure that the bomber showed no signs of fear. Reassured, the advisers then conferred on him the title al shaheed al hayy, the living martyr.

In the final stages, the bomber placed a copy of the Koran inside his clothes. Over it went the body suit. A wire to the detonator button was taped to the palm of his right hand.

The advisers escorted the bomber close to the target area. They bade farewell with the promise given to all human bombers: “Allah is with you. Allah will give you success so that he can receive you in paradise.”

Later, as the bomber pressed the button, he cried out, “Allah akbar.” Allah is great. All praise to Allah.

Almost certainly these were the last earthly words Wafa’a Ali Idris spoke.

Meir Dagan had made a close study of the young woman who had chosen to die. She was assured of her place in the pantheon of Islamic martyrdom. She was the first woman suicide bomber to launch herself against unsuspecting Israelis, doing so on a fine spring morning in 2002—the kind of morning that Israelis liked to remind themselves was why they called this troubled land the Promised Land.

On that Sunday morning Wafa’a was close to her thirty-second birthday. Her proudest gift was a signed, framed photo of Yasser Arafat, personally given to her by the chairman of the PLO. She had been a member of his Fatah organization since, as a teenager, she threw her first stones against Israeli soldiers on the West Bank.

At eighteen, she had married a distant cousin who was a blacksmith. Ten years later his mother forced the couple to divorce because Wafa’a had been unable to produce a child.

She joined the Red Crescent Society after the divorce, working as a paramedic for Islam’s equivalent of the Red Cross.

“She was in the thick of the fighting. She would help the injured and often carry the badly wounded and dying children,” her mother later said with pride. “At the end of a long day in the front line, my daughter would cry in my arms as she recalled the terrible things she witnessed.”

Wafa’a’s circle of friends started to change. In the back street cafés she sipped coffee with members of Hamas, founded in 1987 during the first Intifada, in which she had participated. She listened to their plans to create an Islamic state. She also began to mix with Hezbollah, an equally extreme group. They filled her mind with more fanaticism.

Israel’s Shin Bet — its internal security force — later established that she became involved with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It was another step into the world of ruthless militancy that now permeated her life. During the month of Ramadan, 2001, she met a recruiter for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

Her mother said, “Wafa’a had finally found what she wanted. A chance to show she was a true daughter of Palestine.”

Now, on that Sunday, five months after she had been accepted by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, she was ready to die for them.

On the night before, while the streets of Ramallah were filled with young discogoers, an elderly woman delivered a packet to the house where Wafa’a lived with her widowed mother. The packet contained a new bra and panties, along with a customized body suit. It was designed to conceal up to three kilos of high explosives and specially sharpened nails and razor fragments. The suit was designed to fit under Wafa’a’s street clothes. It had several pockets deep enough to take sticks of explosives. They would be distributed around her upper torso. Other pockets around her waist were for the nails and razor fragments. There was a separate pouch that extended over the genital area. Later Dr. Ariel Merari, a ranking expert at Tel Aviv University on the techniques of suicide bombers, suggested the pouch was created “because the Israeli security forces never search Arab women in that area of their body.”

Wafa’a had never met the person who made the suit. He was said to come from Jenin, the Arab city that would later be destroyed by Israeli forces. To Mossad the man was known as “the Tailor of Death.” The intelligence service eventually established that he was a highly skilled craftsman who used a treble stitch to sew the suit. It was made from a cloth sold in Arab shops for making undershirts. The sewing cotton came from a similar source. Mossad technicians decided the tailor probably used an old-fashioned hand-operated Singer sewing machine. Later it would emerge that Wafa’a’s suit, like all those worn by male suicide bombers, had been designed so that the distribution of explosives was carefully balanced, and the explosive effect would cover the widest possible area.

Wafa’a may also have received advice on the choice of outer clothing. “We know that some male suicide bombers have worn wigs and been well dressed. This has helped them to gain access to upmarket cafés and restaurants, which have been among their targets,” Dr. Merari has said. Wafa’a’s mother later recalled that her daughter had laid out her body suit and clean underwear on her bed early on that Sunday morning. Then she had chosen her finest hipster jeans and a loose-fitting blouse to conceal her body suit.

She had been joined by her spiritual adviser — a male member of the Martyrs. They had prayed together. Then he had recited passages from the Koran. He had handed her a copy of the Koran, which she tucked into her back trouser pocket.

To prepare a candidate for death, contacts with the family were reduced to a minimum. This was to reduce any hesitation over severing earthly ties. He or she was constantly reminded of the new life ahead. Only when a candidate was on the eve of martyrdom was time with his or her family allowed. In part this was to test whether or not he or she would weaken in his or her resolve.

Wafa’a, for example, spent her last two days with her mother. Only when she had taken delivery of her underclothes and body suit did she let her mother know what was going to happen. “We prayed together. For Palestine. For my daughter’s safe journey to a better world,” Was-fiya Ali Idris would recall.

Wasfiya is herself a woman who sees life through the prism of Islamic extremism. Her reading is confined to the Koran, her hero is Yasser Arafat. Her dream was that her daughter was going to her death to help create a Palestinian homeland.

In some respects Wafa’a Ali Idris did not quite fit the profile of a shaheed, a Martyr. Until she had been enrolled by the Martyrs, she had not shown any strong religious feelings. “After time with the Martyrs she became a devout follower of all that I had taught her as a child. There was not a day when she did not study the Koran,” said Wasfiya.

Her anger against Israel also became a living vibrant force that sustained her during her work as a paramedic. In the year before her death, she had been injured three times by Israeli soldiers as she had tended to Arabs wounded on the streets of Ramallah. Her mother would remember. “At that time my daughter was getting more and more angry. All she was doing was trying to save lives. But the soldiers did not care. Then one day she said to me, ‘Mother, I have joined the Martyrs. It is the only way I can serve my people. All those who have died have to be avenged!’ I understood her feelings.”

To grasp the power of martyrdom for such people, you need go no further than the Ramallah mosque where one of the imams explained (to the author): “First you must understand the meaning of the spirit. It draws us upward while the power of material things tries to hold us back. But when you are filled with a true desire to be a martyr, the material influence recedes. Only if you are a true believer will you begin to understand that. To all nonbelievers it is impossible to comprehend. But for those who have chosen to die, they know they are close to eternity. They have no doubts of the wonderful world that awaits them. Each and every one understands the legitimacy of what they are about to do. They have each made an oath on the Koran to carry out their noble action. It is the oath of jihad. We call it bayt al ridwan, named after the Garden of Paradise for the true prophets.”

In Ramallah suicide bombers are heroes. There are posters for the “Martyr of the Month.” They are celebrated in song and verse. They are remembered in Friday prayers in every mosque in the West Bank and Gaza City.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, said: “Love of martyrdom is something deep inside the heart. But these rewards are not in themselves the goal of the martyr. The only aim of the true believer is to win Allah’s satisfaction. That can be done in the simplest and speediest manner by dying in the cause of Allah. And never forget it is Allah who selects the martyrs.”

In March 2004, the sheikh was assassinated by an Israeli gunship as he left a mosque in Gaza City. His sermon had contained a familiar refrain: the need for more young men and women to sacrifice themselves.

There is no shortage of volunteers to follow Wafa’a Ali Idris.

Shortly after noon on that Sunday in March 2002, she blew herself up in a crowded Jerusalem street. She killed an eighty-one-year-old man and injured more than one hundred other men, women, and children. The explosives blew off her head and one arm and left a gaping hole in her abdomen. An hour later the radios in Ramallah proclaimed her to be “a true heroine of our people.”

Wafa’a had been manipulated in the name of religious extremism by the dark and dangerous world of Islamic fanaticism, which would ultimately lead to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and all the other suicide bomber attacks across the Middle East, in Pakistan, and in the Philippines.

Since Wafa’a died, more young women have experienced similar fates. Between them they have killed or injured close to 250 more Israelis.

Their actions are described as “sacred explosions.” The act of suicide is forbidden in Islam. But the spin doctors of the Martyrs are well versed in the black art of propaganda.

For families who have allowed their children to be sacrificed, the financial rewards are good. Each family receives a pension for life. While it varies, it is said to be a minimum of twice the income they received before their son or daughter died.

The money comes from Iran. It is laundered through the central banks from Damascus to Athens. From there it is electronically transferred to an account in Cairo. Then it is couriered to Gaza City for distribution by the Jihad Committee.

Meir Dagan made it a priority to trace the final destination of the money in the hope it could lead Mossad to the men who prepared the bombers. But it was a daunting task. The Martyrs operate on a small-cell basis. Often there are no more than two or three persons in a cell. In the closed world of the refugee camps, informers for Israeli intelligence are hard to recruit. Those discovered are executed. For them death can be agonizingly slow, preceded by unspeakable torture. For their families there is the odium of having bred a traitor to Islamic extremism.

But for the suicide bomber there was only glory. In the world they inhabited there was little enough of that. For them death was perhaps all too often a welcome relief.

After Wafa’a died, a leaflet with her photo was circulated throughout the West Bank. It read “We do not have tanks or rockets. But we have something superior — our Islamic human bombs. In place of a nuclear arsenal we are proud of our arsenal of believers.”

The one certainty is that other young men and women will blow themselves — and many others — into eternity. Meir Dagan knew that the further Israel was from the last suicide bomber, the nearer it was to the next.

That was the fearful reality of life and death in the Holy Land.