Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 20 GOD’S BANKER, WHISTLEBLOWER, AND OSAMA BIN LADEN

On April 22, 2004, on one of those balmy days when Israelis remind themselves that this was why God had chosen their Promised Land, Meir Dagan watched the live transmission on his television in his top-floor office in Mossad headquarters.

The screen showed Mordechai Vanunu, the former nuclear technician who had exposed Israel’s atomic arsenal, finally emerging from incarceration in the high-security prison at Ashkelon in southern Israel. He had served eighteen years. One of Dagan’s predecessors, Shabtai Shavit, had publicly said that given the chance, he would have had Vanunu assassinated. On the television screen protesters opposed to Vanunu’s release were shouting the same demand: “Kill him! Kill him!” Vanunu responded by raising his clenched hands above his head in a boxer’s victory salute. The screams of “Traitor! Traitor!” mingled with the cheers of supporters who had come from all over the world to welcome Vanunu.

There had never been a scene like it, and it was one that Dagan had difficulty understanding. How could a man who had betrayed his country be treated by anyone as a hero? If Vanunu had done it for money, Dagan had said, that he could almost understand and even accept that Vanunu, once a committed Jew, had converted to Christianity. What the Mossad chief could not understand was the motivation that had driven Vanunu to expose Israel’s prime defense system — the two hundred nuclear weapons that made it the now fourth nuclear power in the world.

Dagan had been part of Israel since its creation, he had played his own part in helping it fight for its place among nations. He believed with passionate conviction that no other people had struggled so much, and for so long, to enlighten others about the moral and spiritual imperatives that govern the ways of mankind. In those long nights when he sat alone in his office reading the incoming traffic from his agents all over the world, his principle article of faith and an inexhaustible wellspring from which he drew his strength was that the State of Israel was the single most important thing in his life.

That was why Vanunu’s great betrayal had preoccupied him. During his imprisonment, Vanunu had filled eighty-seven boxes of documents detailing the production of nuclear weapons at Dimona, out in the Negev Desert. They had, of course, been confiscated on the eve of his release. But what he had put out on paper was to Dagan “proof that Vanunu’s knowledge is still enormous, far too extensive to let him leave Israel.”

That had been one of the conditions accompanying his release; others included that he was not to have contact with foreigners, he would have his Internet and phone calls monitored, and that he would not approach within five hundred meters of any border crossing or foreign diplomatic mission. He would also have a team of surveillance officers close to him day and night.

Vanunu had accepted all the restrictions with a shrug. There had been many other shrugs during Dagan’s final effort to understand his mind-set. The night before his release, two Mossad interrogators had questioned Vanunu on camera about why he had betrayed Israel. He had shrugged them off and launched a strong attack on Mossad and how he had been tricked into captivity. He had spoken of his “cruel and barbaric treatment in prison which was organized and approved by Mossad.”

Now, on the television screen, Vanunu was repeating the same allegations to the cheers of his supporters. To Dagan if “this was a man we had brutalized he looked in very good shape.”

As Vanunu was driven away to pray in St. George’s Anglican cathedral in Jerusalem, Meir Dagan turned back to other matters. Vanunu was free. But he would never be out of Mossad’s grasp.

Like millions of others, “Cindy,” the Mossad agent who had played a key role in the capture of Vanunu in 1986, saw the news of his release on television. She knew that to many Israelis she was still a heroine, someone who had used her guile for a classic sexual entrapment. To others, she remained a Mata Hari, a calculating seductress who destroyed the life of an idealist who felt he was driven by the higher cause of world peace.

But Cindy (the code name she operated under for Mossad) had little to say publicly after she saw Vanunu emerge from his prison. “It’s all in the past. I did my job. End of story,” she said (to the author). Just as Vanunu had spent his long years in jail, reliving what he had done and each time concluding “I did the right thing,” so Cindy had undoubtedly also tried to come to terms with what she had done.

Today she lives in an expensive home beside a golf course twenty-five minutes outside Orlando. She looks good for her age, the color of her hair helped by hairdressing skills to hide the effects of the Florida sun. Deeply tanned, she favors loose-fitting casuals to hide the spread of early middle age. Her two daughters are now teenagers who attend an exclusive private school and never, in public at least, speak about their mother’s past. But friends at the golf club where Cindy enjoys taking lunch say she has developed a real fear that Vanunu or one of his supporters will come and harm her.

Vanunu has denied he has any interest in doing so. “For me, she is just someone who happened. I was young and lonely. She was there. I took her on trust,” was how he summed up the fatal mistake that allowed her to entice him to Rome on the promise of sex. Instead, he fell into the hands of Mossad.

In 2004, Cindy — who is listed in local Orlando records as Cheryl Hanin Bentov — is a Realtor, working with her husband and her mother, Riki Hanin, who lives nearby. All three are active members of their Jewish community. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot claimed that “she left Israel to flee the media and the people who burrowed into her life. This bothered her a lot. She was terrified about journalists who came into her home and asked questions. She felt a need to run. Cheryl wants only one thing: a normal, quiet life. She still has shaky nerves as she tried to bury the past. Even relatives who talked about her found themselves banished from the family. She moves between discretion and paranoia.”

If that is true, then it was a high price to pay for becoming Mossad’s most infamous seductress.

On Meir Dagan’s desk was a report from the New York consulate that there was no need for concern over the much promoted CBS television documentary on the death of Princess Diana. The full role of Mossad was still securely hidden and seemed likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The documentation (which had enabled part of the story to appear in this book) had been sealed in Mossad’s archives with a printed warning on the box. “Not to be opened without prior written order of Director General.”

Of far more concern to Dagan was another report, this one from the Washington embassy, that once more the Bush administration, like its predecessors, was preparing to block the release of a whistleblower as dangerous to America as Vanunu had been to Israel. He was Jonathan Pollard, who was serving a life sentence in a high-security prison in Bulmer, North Carolina, having been found guilty of being the greatest traitor in the history of the United States. Pollard, unlike Vanunu, had been sentenced to die in jail.

Dagan knew the reason for this harsh sentence was the forty-sixpage affidavit Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of defense, had made for Pollard’s trial in 1987. It was so secret that it had never been made public. Every attempt to do so had been blocked by federal lawyers in various Washington courts. In April 2004, the affidavit was still classified “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information” (SCI). This is a restriction to protect the most sensitive data in the U.S. intelligence community.

Dagan believed the affidavit contained crucial details about how Promis software — developed by the specialist Inslaw computer company in Washington and later stolen by Mossad — had been adapted to fit into the artificial intelligence on board U.S. nuclear submarines. The resulting capability was known as “over-the-horizon accuracy,” enabling a submarine to hit targets far within the then Soviet Union and China. The Promis software could program details of the defenses around a target along with the advanced physics and mathematics needed to ensure a direct hit from huge distances.

Dagan also feared the affidavit outlined how Israel had developed its own over-the-horizon accuracy for three German-built nuclear-powered submarines it had bought, based on what Pollard had stolen. Dagan further suspected the affidavit contained details of joint U.S.-British listening posts on Cyprus and in the Middle East, which Pollard had compromised, and revealed how Pollard had also compromised CIA-MI6 operations in the Soviet Union and the former East Germany.

While this had led to a considerable change in U.S. intelligence, the data in the Weinberger affidavit was deemed to be still so ultrasensitive that its publication would provide valuable information to foreign intelligence services — including Mossad.

So important was Pollard to Israel that Dagan had sent a Mossad lawyer to attend Pollard’s first public appearance since he was sentenced. The case was heard in the Washington District Court in September 2003. Pollard looked older than his forty-seven years, his skin paler, his eyes occasionally glancing round the packed courtroom. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles, an embroidered yarmulke, and a green prison overshirt. He had a gray-brown beard and shoulder-length hair, giving him the appearance of an Old Testament prophet. Some forty relatives and supporters packed the small courtroom. They included several rabbis, among them Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu. His wife, Esther, and his father were also present. Pollard closely followed the legal arguments. The Mossad lawyer, a slim, middle-aged man, sat at the back of the court, taking notes in Hebrew.

The nub of Pollard’s case was that he should be allowed to appeal his sentence because his then attorney, Richard Hibney, had failed to file a notice of appeal when the prosecution asked the trial judge, Aubrey Robinson, for a life sentence without parole after “inducing Pollard to plead guilty by promising the State would not ask for life.” A further argument centered around the claim that Pollard’s then defense team had been refused access to the Weinberger affidavit “because they did not have the requisite security clearance.” Pollard’s new lawyers told the court they were also “seeking a pardon or sentence commutation” from the Bush administration. That part of the argument was “based on Pollard’s rights as an American citizen to due process.”

Over the years, Pollard’s attorneys had had meetings with Israeli prime ministers Benyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon. They had also met with Mossad intelligence chiefs Nahum Admoni, Shabtai Shavit, Danny Yatom, Efraim Halevy, and more recently, Meir Dagan. There had been a carefully orchestrated campaign in Israel to bombard the U.S. embassy with requests for Pollard’s freedom. Top Jewish lawyers had traveled from Israel to meet with equally renowned lawyers in the United States to plan legal moves. No defendant had had such a powerful support system. At every opportunity, the all-powerful Jewish lobby in Washington had battled tirelessly.

The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, a consortium of fifty-five groups, continued to argue in 2004 that whatever Pollard had done could not be called treason “because Israel was and remains a close ally.” Further pressure constantly came from many leading Jewish religious organizations. The most vociferous was the powerful Reform Union of American Congregations. Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who had served as Pollard’s lawyer, had said. “There is nothing in Pollard’s conviction to suggest that he had compromised the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities or betrayed world-wide intelligence data.”

But Pollard still had an equally powerful opponent: George Tenet, director of the CIA. In 1998, Tenet had said he would resign if Pollard was released. That still remained his position in 2004. Ted Gunderson, a top FBI agent at the time Pollard was arrested, said “Pollard stole every worthwhile intelligence secret we had. We are still trying to recover from what he did. We had to withdraw dozens of agents in place in the former Soviet Union, in the Middle East, South Africa, and friendly nations like Britain, France, and Germany. The American public just doesn’t know the full extent of what he did.”

In prison, Pollard divorced his first wife, Anne (who had been sentenced to five years imprisonment for being his accomplice), and converted to Orthodox Judaism. In 1994 he married, in prison, a Toronto schoolteacher named Elaine Zeitz. Esther Pollard, as she was from then on known, became the spearhead of the campaign to have her husband freed. In April 2004, she repeated a familiar theme. “The issue of Jonathan concerns every Jew and every law-abiding citizen. The issues are much bigger than Jonathan and myself. We are writing a page of Jewish history.”

An indication of how much more was written on that page of history has surfaced. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former intelligence adviser to the Israeli government who is now a Canadian citizen running a political consultancy in Montreal, strongly opposes Pollard’s gaining his freedom. “The still unresolved question is whether Pollard’s thefts were also passed to China,” said Ben-Menashe. “Much of what Pollard knows is still in his head. A man like that doesn’t lose his touch because he is locked away.”

But in April 2004, Meir Dagan had learned that the U.S. deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, had suggested Pollard’s freedom should be seen in the context of the “big picture” in the Middle East. It was an argument that did not go unnoticed by Pollard supporters. Recently, 112 out of 120 members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, signed a petition demanding Pollard’s release on “humanitarian grounds. Washington has double standards, releasing dangerous Palestinian prisoners while keeping Pollard incarcerated.”

Pollard was granted Israeli citizenship in 1996 to enable the Tel Aviv government to bring further pressure to bear. Two years later, a U.S.brokered peace accord between Israel and the PLO nearly foundered when the then Israeli prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, tried to link the agreement with the release of Pollard. President Clinton held firm, Israel backed off.

A stumbling block to any new move to obtain Pollard’s freedom could be a statement Bill Hamilton, president of Inslaw — the creators of the Promis software — made. “Judge Hogan should also be made aware that the FBI office in New Mexico conducted a foreign counterintelligence investigation of Robert Maxwell in 1984 for selling Promis in New Mexico, which is the headquarters for the two main U.S. intelligence agencies on nuclear warfare, the Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Although the copy of the FBI Investigative Report that Inslaw obtained under the Freedom of Information Act was heavily redacted by the government for national security reasons, the text that is still able to be read reveals that the FBI investigation was based on a complaint from two employees at the Sandia National Laboratory.”

Hamilton’s claims are said by Gunderson to be “the real smoking gun that will put the whole Pollard business into its proper context.” They will also bring Rafi Eitan’s latest activities into the spotlight.

By April 2004, Israel’s legendary spymaster had made several secret trips to the United States. FBI agents tracking him admitted they were unable to question Eitan, who had been Jonathan Pollard’s controller, because he now traveled on an Israeli diplomatic passport. His visits had been to supervise the mobilization of thousands of sayanim — the name comes from the Hebrew for “to help”—many of whom received weapons training during their military service. Others had worked in U.S. military intelligence. A number were currently employed by police forces across the country. They had been briefed by Eitan on how to update the defense systems of Jewish banks, synagogues, religious schools, and other Jewish-owned institutions.

“While their allegiance to their birth country cannot be doubted, each sayan recognizes a greater loyalty: the mystical one to Israel and a need to help protect it from its enemies,” Meir Amit, a former Mossad chief, has said. He created the sayanim secret force. Known as Israel’s “invisible army,” its members are vetted by professional Mossad intelligence officers, katsas, before being recruited to protect Israel’s many interests in the United States. But the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have seen it as a vote of no confidence in their ability to protect those interests.

On his trips, Eitan traveled as “adviser on security and counterterrorism” to Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, a longtime friend. In early 2004, Eitan had visited the Los Alamos area, home of America’s cutting-edge nuclear technology. In 1985, he had arranged to sell to Los Alamos’s Sandia Laboratories a copy of the Israeli version of Promis software. The program’s “trapdoor” enabled Israel to learn something of Sandia’s work in providing U.S. nuclear submarines with the latest computer technology. Pollard provided further details, which are contained in Caspar Weinberger’s still secret affidavit.

By April 2004 the sayanim had been fully mobilized. Eitan made no secret of their role. Quoting Meir Amit, he confirmed (to the author): “Sayanim fulfill many functions. A car sayan, running a rental agency, lets his handler know if any suspicious person has rented a car. A Realtor sayan provides similar information on anyone seeking accommodation. Sayanim also collect technical data and all kinds of overt intelligence. A rumor at a cocktail party, an item on the radio, a paragraph in a newspaper, a story overheard at a dinner party.”

It was a sayan in Phoenix, Arizona, who discovered in the spring of 2004 that one of the most notorious figures in the history of the Catholic church, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, had kept his undertaking never to divulge what he knew about Mossad’s role in the disappearance of $200 million. It had been sent to the Polish Solidarity movement by the Vatican Bank when Marcinkus had been its president.

By the early 1980s, Marcinkus was implicated in massive financial scandals and a stunning list of other crimes, including “being involved in arms smuggling, trafficking in stolen gold, counterfeit currencies, and radioactive materials,” according to an indictment lodged by the Rome public prosecutor in 1989. The charges were still on the open file in April 2004. Marcinkus was never interviewed or arrested. Pope John Paul II allowed him to remain in the Vatican so that he could be protected under the city’s sovereign immunity, which had been granted to the Holy See in 1929 by Benito Mussolini.

Then one night — the date remains one of the Vatican’s many secrets — Marcinkus was quietly driven out of the Vatican in a car bearing diplomatic plates. Next day he arrived in Chicago. From there he was flown to Sun City, a satellite town in Phoenix. Close by lived another colorful character, Victor Ostrovsky. The former Mossad officer was a whistleblower. Like Ari Ben-Menashe, Ostrovsky had revealed many of Mossad’s secrets in interviews. Both men in 2004 still lived comfortable lives. But Marcinkus, at eighty years of age, was living out his closing years in a modest white-painted cinder-block house close to a country club fairway in Sun City. Unlike the two Mossad officers, he had still kept the silence when he was known as God’s banker and a confidant of popes — Paul VI, John Paul I, and his now dying successor, Pope John Paul II. The Polish pope, the supreme pontiff to the Catholic world, was the one man, apart from Marcinkus, who could answer the question: What was Mossad’s role in the mystery of the missing $200 million?

The mystery can properly be said to have begun when another limousine arrived at the Vatican.

Close to midnight the dark blue limousine, with its diplomatic plates, stopped before the wrought-iron gates of the Arch of the Bells, the gateway to the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. It was the prelude to a sequence of events that to this day cast a dark shadow over the pontificate of John Paul. Now, as he waits to die, the answer to questions that will form the final judgment on his long rule is a deeply troubling one for all those who care about the church and what was done in its name.

Did the pope allow himself to be moved from his own personal moral standards to help Solidarity because of his passionate and abiding commitment to Poland? Was he purely an innocent and unsuspecting victim of what was about to transpire once that limousine entered the Vatican?

In the judgment of David Yallop, the English financial investigator long recognized as the bête noir of the secret financial world of the Vatican, John Paul allowed his papacy “to become a triumph for wheeler-dealers and the international financial thieves. The pope also gave his blessing for large quantities of U.S. dollars to have been sent, secretly and illegally, to Solidarity.”

Christopher Story, the publisher of the International Currency Review, the journal of the banking world, called it “one of the great black hole mysteries of modern-day financing.”

Certainly on that April night in 1983 when the Renaissance-costumed Swiss Guard, caped against the cold, stepped forward to salute the Fiat’s passenger, it signaled the start of a chain of staggering events. They began at a period John Paul had called “a very dark time in the history of the world.” Two years before, the KGB — through its surrogate, the Bulgarian secret service — had tried to assassinate him in St. Peter’s Square. To further distance itself, Moscow had allowed a Muslim fanatic, Mehmet Ali Agca, to carry out the attempt. Until his death in April 2005, the pope felt the pain from the shrapnel still in his body. But his defiance of Communism had led to the creation of the Solidarity movement in Poland. In Washington, President Ronald Reagan had called its birth “an inspiration to the free world. We shall support it.”

How he did so has remained secret. Now the extraordinary and, at times, bizarre story can be told of how the CIA and the Vatican Bank created that $200 million secret fund for Solidarity. In 1983, the CIA maintained a well-developed slush fund to mount “no-questions-asked black operations” all over the world.

Richard Brenneke, a mild-mannered man with the careful speech pattern of an accountant, was the senior CIA operative in charge of the agency’s secret funding for those operations. He worked sixteen-hour days juggling covert funds in and out of Swiss banks, like Credit Suisse in Geneva, and sending them on complex transfers around the banking world. With the full authority of CIA director William Casey, Brenneke had started to use the Vatican Bank for money laundering. Casey had introduced Brenneke to Bishop Paul Marcinkus. Brenneke had since made a number of visits to Marcinkus’s office in a seventeenth-century tower inside the Vatican walls. “On a good day $400 million was laundered,” Brenneke recalled. A substantial portion of the money came from the CIA’s ultrasecret operations.

“Like other intelligence agencies, the CIA had established backdoor links with the mafia. The CIA, like the Vatican, had a very real fear Italy could fall into the hands of the Communists. The CIA saw the mafia as a bulwark against that happening. Consequently, the CIA took the view that the mafia’s activities in Italy were to be tolerated if they helped to ensure that NATO member Italy did not fall into Moscow’s hands at the polling booths,” said David Yallop (to the author).

By 1983, the CIA had extended its secret links to international crime to include arming Iran and the contras in Nicaragua. Brenneke said: “Money from guns sold to the Iranians was used by the agency to buy drugs in South America. Cocaine was shipped back to the States and sold on to the mafia. That money was then used to buy weapons for the contras in Nicaragua. It got so out of hand I told President Reagan’s national security adviser, Don Gregg. I was told to forget it.” By then, Brenneke said, he had laundered $10 billion. A considerable portion of the money came from the Gotti mafia family of New York. The Gotti family, like the Gambino and Columbo crime families, were devout Catholics. FBI intercepts show the bosses gave generously to the church. Another mafia chief, Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano, boasted of visiting the Vatican before his death.

“By 1983 the Vatican Bank was being routinely used by the mafia to move money both into and out of Italy. The money came from drugs, prostitution, and a variety of other crimes that the Vatican officially condemned,” said Yallop.

Did the $200 million earmarked for Solidarity come from the mafia? Twenty-one years would pass after that Fiat limousine drove on through the Arch of the Bells gateway before those and other questions would be asked.

The solitary passenger on that April night in 1983 was Archbishop Luigi Poggi. He was the pope’s diplomatic troubleshooter, a nuncio extraordinary and a seasoned operator in the world of very secret papal politics. Among the direct-line numbers in his briefcase were those of CIA director Casey — a devout Catholic himself — Lech Walesa of Solidarity, and the foreign ministers of half a dozen European nations. The most recent addition to the list was that of Nahum Admoni, then the director general of Mossad. The archbishop and spy chief had met in Paris during the latest journeying around Europe that Poggi had just completed. Poggi knew that with Admoni’s Polish background — his parents had been middle-class immigrants to Israel from Gdansk — the spy chief had more than a passing curiosity about the church.

In Warsaw, Poggi had conferred as usual with Cardinal Josef Glemp in his palace. They had spoken in a lead-lined room to overcome the surveillance of Poland’s intelligence services. Even so, the two men had spoken in Latin. A clue to what followed is provided by Admoni, who lives today in the United States.

“I soon knew that the Vatican would help Solidarity. I calculated they would do so through Solidarity’s Brussels office, a kind of unofficial embassy. A Polish Jew, Jerzy Milewski, good on knocking on doors, was the main fund-raiser.”

Boris Solomatin, the KGB rezident (station chief) in Rome, would confirm. “We knew all about the secret alliance between the CIA and the Vatican to support Solidarity.” Less certain is Solomatin’s claim that the KGB had “an important spy in the Vatican.” Yet the claim cannot be totally dismissed. The papal nuncio in Ireland, the late Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi, said in an interview (with the author) following the attempt on the pope’s life in May 1981: “The Soviets appeared to have inside information as to the Holy See’s position on foreign affairs.”

On that April evening in 1983, late though the hour was, the pope’s then senior secretary Stanislaw Dzwisz and Marcinkus were waiting to be briefed. Marcinkus had recently been promoted by Pope John Paul to become governor of Vatican City. He was also now in charge of security for all the pontiff’s foreign trips.

The pope’s former English-language secretary, Monsignor John Magee, now bishop of Clones in Ireland, provided a rare insight into Poggi. “He was imbued with well-founded confidence in his own abilities, his mission in life and his relationship with God.”

Settled in Dzwisz’s office in the papal secretariat in the Apostolic Palace, Poggi told them that the outgoing United States ambassador to Poland, the soft-spoken Francis J. Meehan, had revealed that the Reagan administration was going to arrange the transfer of $200 million to support Solidarity. The news came at the end of Poggi’s twenty-third visit to Warsaw in the past two years. Each time he had stayed with Cardinal Josef Glemp, primate of All Poland, availing himself of the lead-lined room and speaking in Latin. It made no difference. Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, had carried out a major coup only two months before Poggi was briefing Marcinkus and Dzwisz.

It had been set up by Nahum Admoni, the spymaster who had dined with Poggi in Paris and discussed church affairs. Then Mossad’s director of operations, Rafi Eitan, had smooth-talked the U.S. Department of Justice and the developer of the software it prized above all else in its electronic arsenal to part with a copy. The software was Promis.

Down the years Bill Hamilton, the president of Inslaw, would say of Rafi Eitan and the cool way he stole Promis: “Rafi fooled me. And he fooled a lot of others.” Eitan, now in his seventies, admitted (to the author in 2004): “It was quite a coup. Yes, quite a coup.”

The Israelis deconstructed Promis and inserted a trapdoor in the software. Dr. Jerzy Milewski, the hardworking Polish Jew responsible for Solidarity’s fund-raising, was persuaded by Eitan on a visit to Brussels to accept the doctored software “as a gift from Israel.” Mossad had become the first intelligence service to penetrate the heart and soul of Solidarity.

Born and bred in Cicero — the Chicago suburb that was also the birthplace of Al Capone — Paul Marcinkus had acquired many of the gangster’s mannerisms, evident in the way he would terrorize a teller in the Vatican Bank or threaten a bishop. Marcinkus also rejoiced in being on what he once claimed was “Moscow’s Top Ten list of targets. Next to the pope, I am the man they most want to knock off.” But for the Vatican’s banker he had some unusual clients: the casino at Monte Carlo, the Beretta firearms company, and a Canadian company that made oral contraceptives. From the day he took over as the bank’s president, Marcinkus had increased its investments beyond all expectations. By 1983, on the night he listened to Poggi, the overall bank deposits were worth tens of billions of dollars. Marcinkus had once boasted to Monsignor John Magee, “It is a real gravy train.”

The arrival of the CIA as a client was welcomed by Marcinkus, hosting Casey and Brenneke for dinner in the Villa Sritch, where the banker had a three-bedroom apartment. Served by handsome young Romans — youths Marcinkus was known to refer to as “my bodyguards”—the tall, heavyset archbishop learned how the Vatican Bank would act as a conduit for the $200 million for Solidarity. Later, as he and his dinner guests played a round of golf at the Aquastina — Rome’s most exclusive golf club, which had gifted Marcinkus a membership — the final details were settled.

The money would leave America from a number of banks, the Bank of America and Citibank among them. Brenneke had devised special codes for all his transactions. These changed on a regular basis. No transactions remained in any of his accounts for more than seventy-two hours. The money for Solidarity would enter the Vatican Bank from the Banco de Panama (the Panamanian national bank), the Standard Bank of South Africa, and Coutts, the Queen’s bankers, in London. The money would then be rerouted to Bank Lambert in Brussels. The system was what Brenneke called “SOP”—standard operating procedure. In part, it was designed to deal with what Casey had called “a tricky little problem.”

Solidarity was concerned that if it became known it was receiving substantial financial aid from Washington, it could lead the Jaruzelski regime to crack down on the movement — even perhaps arrest its leaders. But that secrecy would later lead to a very public clash between one of President Reagan’s key advisers, Professor Richard Pipes, and President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Pipes was said to have alleged that he knew well that large sums of money had been transferred to Solidarity through several accounts operated by the CIA. There were reports Pipes had challenged Brzezinski that the money had never reached Solidarity — where did it go? It was a question Brzezinski did not answer then, and has not since.

At best, only a small portion of foreign money — which was urgently needed by Solidarity to pay its members a token weekly wage while on strike — was ever received by the Brussels headquarters of Solidarnosc. Elizabeth Wasiutynski, whose parents had served in the NSZ, part of the Polish resistance, became head of Solidarnosc in Brussels. She insisted that money for Solidarnosc came from the AFL–CIO, international trade union organizations, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Further sums came later through an organization called the Stanton Group in the United States. It was donated on behalf of American taxpayers.

“We received no more than two hundred thousand dollars annually. There was no large or even small amount of money I’m aware of funded to the Solidarnosc leadership from the CIA. Nor is there an echo of any such activity since Poland’s independence in 1989. I think the CIA is taking credit for something it did not do,” she said. “Had the CIA indeed been involved, we would have had some sort of more fertile ground in Washington.”

Sources at the Bank Lambert in Brussels insist it had no record of such a large payment coming into its coffers from the Vatican Bank. So where did it go? Enter now, not for the first time, one of the undisputed grand villains of financial chicanery — Robert Maxwell.

The Israeli-doctored Promis software had been sold to General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s Communist ruler, by Maxwell. It was to be used — and was — against Solidarity and anyone who supported Poland’s then fledgling democratic opposition. But during his global sales drive for Promis, Maxwell had, in 1985—when the money transfer to help Solidarity had already taken place — sold Promis to Belgium’s counterespionage service, the Sûreté de l’Etat. It gave Mossad a window into Belgium’s intelligence operations — including financial operations by Semion Yukovich Mogilevich.

At that time, still operating from his base in Budapest, Hungary, Mogilevich was rapidly establishing himself as a specialist in major financial crime in preparation for stepping into the post-Communist financial world. By 1985, he had offices in Geneva, Nigeria, and the Cayman Islands. He also held an Israeli passport, which Maxwell had arranged. Mogilevich had been introduced by Maxwell to a Swiss banker who ran an investment brokerage in Geneva, and had regular business dealings with the Vatican Bank and Bank Lambert.

Marcinkus already was deeply ensnared in massive financial scams involving the bank, which had led Pope John Paul to agree to reimburse those swindled by Marcinkus’s activities. In one of the more remarkable documents publicly issued by any bank, the Vatican stated in May 1984 that “international banks will get back approximately two-thirds of the 600 million dollars they had loaned to the Vatican Bank. Of that some 250 million dollars will be paid by June 30, 1984. This payment is being made by the Vatican on the basis of non-culpability but in recognition of a moral involvement.”

By then, Marcinkus was a virtual prisoner inside the Vatican, not daring to step outside its walls for fear of arrest. A mounting number of criminal charges awaited his appearance in court. But Marcinkus still went to his office every weekday to “supervise”—the word the Vatican used — the daily affairs of the bank.

Somewhere in that tangled web — the CIA, Marcinkus money laundering, Polish intelligence, Mossad, and Maxwell — lay the answer to that question asked publicly by the distinguished Richard Pipes. Where did the $200 million for Solidarity go? The answer turned out to be staggeringly simple. Using Promis, the money had been intercepted by Mossad to finance its own black operations.

In the past, the intelligence service had used its doctored version of the software to access foreign bank accounts held by Israeli millionaires that they hoped had been discreetly transferred out of a country strapped for cash. Mossad had not only seized the sums, but had also summoned the hapless millionaires to a meeting. They were told that they would be levied a “fine” for their breach of the country’s strict currency regulations. To refuse would mean a trial and certain imprisonment. “They all paid,” Rafi Eitan said (to the author) with undisguised satisfaction.

In March 2004, William Hamilton, president of Inslaw, told the author that using Promis would “make it a relatively simple operation for Mossad to have stolen the money.”

A copy of the software had also ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden. It had been stolen by Richard Hanssen, a senior FBI computer specialist who was a longtime key spy in the bureau. He is now serving a life sentence for espionage. By then the KGB had sold it to bin Laden for a reported $2 million.

By the spring of 2004, Mossad had continued its hunt for bin Laden. Along the way Meir Dagan had acquired, through his field agents and analysts, a striking psychological profile of bin Laden that probably no other intelligence service could equal. It included how the world’s most wanted man ran al-Qaeda.

If it was a multinational, bin Laden would be its chief executive. There is a board: the close group of terrorists who have been with him from the foundation of al-Qaeda. It has, just like any corporation, divisions: one for finance, another for forward planning, a third for recruiting. There is even one division that handles the making and distribution of his audio- and videotapes. Al-Qaeda’s sole reason for existing is to launch global holy war.

No other organization in living memory has changed the world as completely as al-Qaeda did when on September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down and one side of the Pentagon burst into flames. Thousands of men, women, and children lost their lives in the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil. Never in its history had the mainland United States been the target of such a massive attack. The surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan was the only precedent in living memory — and that had been an assault against a distant military base on a Pacific island.

“The carnage of September 11 was deliberately aimed at civilians and struck at the principal symbols of American hegemony, commercial and financial power, military supremacy and political power. It was a seismic event with incalculable consequences. It exposed the fragility of the United States empire, exploded the myth of its invincibility, and called into question all the certainties and beliefs that had ensured the triumph of American civilisation in the twentieth century. Many correctly feared it was only the first of many atrocities,” wrote Professor Gilles Kepel of the respected Institute for Political Studies in Paris.

Since then, the world has watched numbed at the destruction in Bali and Istanbul, and the massacre in Madrid. The result has been a continual witnessing of the agony of the victims and their families, precipitate drops in stock markets, the threat of bankruptcy of several airlines, and a general upheaval in the world’s economy.

Those are the inescapable truths about a fanatic who knows almost nothing about Western culture, Western thought, or Western ways. He is a man of the Word, and, as history shows, absolute adherents to the text — Hitler and Stalin being two examples — seldom have any imagination, or it is warped beyond comprehension.

Bin Laden is a slave to literal interpretations: the normal intellectual extrapolations upon which much European thinking depends is far beyond his power. For instance, in one of his rambling speeches, he once said he was certain that “a few attacks will see American states secede from the U.S.”

“We must look with total revulsion at the way he has made al-Qaeda a brand name for terror. He has ensured that neither his death, nor a refutation of violence on his part — never likely — will halt Islamic terrorism. Instead, he will continue to release a toxin of poison on our world,” said Dr. Ariel Merari, director of terrorist studies at the Jaffee Center in Tel Aviv.

Bin Laden has resurrected his claim for the restoration into Arab hands of Andalusia, whose civilization marked the high point of Islamic pride. He has began to rekindle across the Muslim world a reminder of that golden era in 1200, for instance, when the Spanish city of Córdoba had nine hundred public baths, and seventy libraries whose shelves were filled with the finest writings in the Muslim world. It had the finest doctors, the greatest restaurants, and, it is said, the most beautiful women. The Madrid bombing massacre has more to do with this dream than with the presence, and now withdrawal, of Spanish troops in Iraq. That is why al-Qaeda terrorists — having been efficiently located by Spanish security hiding in an apartment block in a Madrid suburb — blew themselves up even after the election of Jose Zapatero as the country’s new prime minister in March 2004.

The nearest parallel in history of using violence to reclaim ancient lands was the Nazi dream of Aryan reclamation of those parts of Europe that had Germanic roots. The distinguished commentator Janet Daley has written that “the Wagnerian German romantic mythology of expulsion from homelands leading to a sacred Teutonic mission of rebirth has an uncannily similar ring to the new Islamic claims of Muslim displacement and injustice.”

As bin Laden sat in his cave in the Tora Bora Mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he was driven by the dream of creating a great caliphate that would stretch from Asia to southern Spain and beyond.

“That is the very real danger of this man. To try and achieve his aim, he will kill and slaughter on a scale that even the Mongols, Genghis Khan, the Crusaders, the Nazis, and the pogroms of Russia would pause to blink over,” said Dr. Merari.

It is now estimated by the CIA that over $100 million has been spent in these past two years on satellite tracking and the use of state-of-the-art electronic tracking equipment to locate bin Laden.

Unlike Saddam Hussein, bin Laden has vowed he will die a “martyr’s death” rather than face capture. His body is festooned with hand grenades, making him a pin pull away from eternity. At night he sleeps on a mat surrounded by explosives.

Al-Qaeda operatives — its suicide bombers who die on missions — do so knowing that the organization’s Pensions Department will take care of their families. No one knows where or when the organization meets. It has no offices. Its turnover is measured by the number of deaths it achieves, the buildings it destroys. Its assets — the explosives and cash that keep it running — are hidden from even the most prying satellite camera.

Bin Laden’s own personal assets — once estimated at £20 million from his share in the family construction business — were frozen in 2001. But he has managed to keep al-Qaeda fully funded from donations from Saudi Arabian princes, oil sheikhs, and wealthy Muslims in Asia.

“Bin Laden is the glue between terror groups that have little in common with each other but are united in a common hatred of the West,” said a U.S. State Department analyst in Washington.

In 2003, perhaps sensing the net was closing on him, bin Laden appointed “twenty regional commanders” to run al-Qaeda operations. There have been persistent reports that their funding reaches them through the diplomatic bags of rogue states like Iran and, until recently, Libya. In Britain, MI5 has spent months trying to track money earmarked for al-Qaeda.

“So far we have had only our suspicions confirmed, but no hard evidence,” said an MI5 source (to the author).

Whether he lives or dies is of little concern to bin Laden. To his millions of followers in the Muslim world he is a folk hero: the Saudi Arabian multimillionaire who feeds the poor, encourages their children to dance before him, and knows the verses of the Koran better than any Islamic preacher. To them all he is a living prophet come to cleanse the world of what he calls “Western decadence.” With his high cheekbones, narrow face, and gold-fringed robe, he is the classic mountain warrior of the tribesmen who now hide him. His distinct pepper-and-salt beard and sharp, penetrating eyes are the most recognizable image on earth. But his smile is only for his followers, who see him as a hell-storming advocate, living a personal life of such frugality that even they find it hard to match. He is also a man steeped in personal violence, having once driven a captured tank over Russian prisoners in the Afghan war.

Ironically, in those days he was armed by the CIA, who gave him an arsenal of Stingers. When he had helped drive out the Soviet occupiers, he turned against America and its “hamburger and Coca-Cola values.” He takes pride in being its most sought-after enemy. Everywhere he goes, so do his bodyguards: some fifty heavily bearded, taciturn figures. Every man is hand-picked. Each is ready to die for him. Little is known about his private life: his four wives remain at home in Jeddah in Islamic purdah.

When he awakens, he will brush his teeth in the Arab fashion with a stick of miswak wood. Then he will pray for the strength to destroy his enemies. Like a cancer they consume him, burrowing into his mind, even capable at times of making him weep. Then, real tears will fall down his cheeks, the crying of an unforgiving fanatic who hates with a passion that is awesome. Though they far outnumber him, he continues to outwit their vast electronic and human resources — because the forces arrayed against him cannot agree on a strategy that will capture Osama bin Laden.

In Tel Aviv, a senior Mossad analyst said (to the author), “Part of the problem is the old one of the Americans thinking putting up more satellites and pouring in electronic surveillance equipment is the answer. We have told them that the best solution is human intelligence.”

Rafi Eitan, who masterminded Mossad’s capture of Adolf Eichmann, identified the problem of capturing bin Laden. “There is a need for patience. Satellites can only tell you what is happening now—not what could be happening in the future. That can only come from having men on the ground. The greatest successes Mossad has had are through ‘humint’—human intelligence.”

Long realizing that the United States has the capability to electronically eavesdrop on his discussions, bin Laden writes his orders in a neat hand, then distributes them to trusted aides. They travel to neighboring countries and transmit them from there to bin Laden’s global network of some 2,500 terrorists. It was such an order that led to the Madrid massacre.

In 2003, via an Islamic Web site, bin Laden said, “We don’t consider it a crime if we try to obtain nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Our holy land is occupied by Israeli and American forces. We have the right to defend and liberate our holy land.”

Washington has doubled its bounty for bin Laden’s capture to $50 million. Meir Amit, a former director general of Mossad, has said such a tactic often does not work. “Betrayal for money is a hard thing to induce in someone committed to a terrorist leader. Part of the reason is fear of someone discovering the treachery. Part of the reason is that the leader has picked his men with care. No promise of a bounty will make them think about turning bin Laden in.”

However, in Tel Aviv a former Mossad katsa, Eli Cohen, said (to the author) that a weakness could be bin Laden’s strong family ties to his four wives, seven children, and forty grandchildren. “We know where they live and their movements. If a wife and some of his children were kidnapped it would certainly focus bin Laden’s mind. At minimum they could be held as hostages against him carrying out any further outrage. If he still did, then he should expect ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ policy to exist. In other words, his family would be executed.”

But no one knows if such a threat would be brushed aside by Osama bin Laden with the same indifference with which he treats all human life.

During the summer months of 2004, the world was shocked by the pictures and descriptions of Iraqi prisoners being abused by their U.S. military guards in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail. One of the most unpleasant images was of a naked Iraqi prisoner being held on a lead by a woman soldier. The consensus was that, horrific though the images were, they resulted from a toxic mixture of boredom, sadism, and a warped idea of entertainment by the guards. The Pentagon insisted it did not go beyond that. But action would be taken; severe punishment meted out to the guilty.

The prison commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, was relieved of her post. A damning report, which effectively ended her career in the military, accused her of lack of leadership during her tenure as prison governor.

On July 4, Karpinski hit back. She publicly announced that among the interrogators at Abu Ghraib had been Mossad interrogators. Fluent Arab speakers, they had been given free access to the high-value prisoners.

Karpinski’s claim had political implications that extended far beyond the walls of the prison. The Arab media used her claim to inflame further Muslim opinion. There were allegations that the Mossad interrogators had been responsible for the interrogation of Palestinian detainees in Iraq. Israel vehemently denied this. There was no way of independently confirming the claims. There may never be.

But soon there was an even more compelling moment to focus world attention. It was the appearance of Saddam Hussein in court in Baghdad in July to face an indictment for war crimes including genocide. Gone was the man who had emerged from a hole in the ground. His old arrogance had returned. He refused to recognize the court. He treated the prosecuting judge with indifference and at times, contempt. It was a chilling reminder of who Saddam had once been: a despot, a tyrant who held the fate of his people in his hands. It will be two years before his trial gets under way. In that time Saddam will, away from his court appearances, live the same daily routine.

Every morning at 4:30—an hour the many millions of Iraqis terrorized for years by Saddam Hussein call “the true dawn”—he will awaken. In the distance he will hear the call of the muezzins to prayer. But Saddam is only a lip-service follower. He will not prostrate himself toward Mecca — even though an arrow on the wall of his bedroom indicates the direction. Next door is his dayroom. The floor is covered with a carpet from his palace. It is the only visible reminder of his past.

For a moment he will blink owlishly in the bright wire-covered bedroom ceiling lights. Above the door, out of reach, is a security camera that provides a wide-angle view of the fifteen-by-fifteen foot room. It has a chair over which is draped the Arab robe he has taken to wearing. In a nearby control room, a bank of monitor screens and computers record his every movement, his occasional mumblings, his angry glares at the camera. Sometimes he shouts for the lights to be turned off. They never are.

Saddam is treated with the same vicelike grip that exists for any inmate on death row in America. Officially now under the legal authority of the new Iraqi interim government, he is in reality still a prisoner of the United States. But he has already won one tonsorial battle. His captors wanted to shave off his beard.

“Saddam convinced them his beard is a sign of mourning for his two sons. Tradition demands he must go unshaven for at least a year. Yasser Arafat, an old friend of Saddam’s, maintains a close beard out of mourning for the Palestinian people,” said Alice Baya’a, an expert on Saddam’s life.

But they will control his every movement outside the time he meets with his defense team for his appearances in court. They will watch over him until the moment he is sentenced. But that would be at least two years away (it would finally open in 2006). Saddam also plans to delay matters by calling as witnesses presidents and prime ministers. The names of George Bush, Tony Blair, and Vladimir Putin appear on the list he has given his Iraqi prosecutors.

By July 2004, six hundred lawyers had already offered to defend him. For them it was a golden opportunity to showcase their talents. Twenty were selected by his family. None have been allowed to visit him in captivity — let alone enter his monastic quarters.

His iron bed is bolted to the floor. The bedding is standard U.S. military prison issue, a long way from the years Saddam slept between silk sheets purchased from Harrods of London. His pillows then were filled with the finest of feathers from rare birds shot by his guards in the marshlands of southern Iraq.

Saddam’s quarters are in a storeroom. Once his retinue of servants used it to keep vats of fragrant oils for perfuming Saddam’s bathwater. Other vats were reserved for masseuses to knead his body. Now his toiletries consist of a weekly bar of supermarket soap, a sponge, and a tube of toothpaste. But he has returned to the days of his childhood for his oral hygiene. He brushes his teeth in the Arab fashion with a stick of miswak, a hardwood.

In an alcove in his bathroom is a ceiling shower and a European-style toilet bolted across the original hole over which his servants once squatted. A metal washbasin and two towels complete the facilities. Like any cheap hotel, the towels are changed once a week. The toilet paper is the kind sold in any Baghdad marketplace.

When his breakfast arrives — his staple diet is yogurt, toast, and weak tea served on the same cheap plates his guards eat off — the guards treat him with respect. They call him “President Saddam,” the only title he will respond to. While he uses airline-style plastic cutlery to eat with, they stand watch at the door. The guards are unarmed — a precaution in the unlikely event Saddam would attempt to grab a weapon. A high-ranking British intelligence officer who has firsthand knowledge of Saddam’s conditions said (to the author): “The psychiatrists have ruled out that Saddam has suicidal tendencies. But he can be highly temperamental and abusive. And he can be very confrontational if his demands are not met.”

Those demands have included international law books. There were growing signs that Saddam, like Slobadan Milosovich, plans to star in his own defense.

“He is consumed by the idea he can cause huge damage to President Bush and Tony Blair. When he talks about them, his eyes mist over and he hates them with a passion which is awesome,” said the British intelligence officer.

Each day follows the same pattern. Saddam has a noonday lunch — Arab-style food cooked by an Iraqi specially recruited by the Coalition. There is a food taster who samples every dish before it is brought to Saddam. Drinking water comes from sealed bottles — part of consignments flown in from the United States for its troops.

Twice a day, after lunch and late afternoon, Saddam is taken out to a small courtyard to exercise. He often wears a T-shirt and a pair of military shorts — far from the days he had customized underwear of the finest Egyptian cotton. Those were bought by the box load from a New York store. In a corner of the yard is a water tap. The first thing Saddam does is to turn on the tap. The sound of flowing water has always been a reminder for him that, in a land parched by nature, he could always command water. In his palaces there were magnificent tumbling waterfalls and the sound of water was pumped into his office. As he paces the courtyard, the water is a mere trickle. When his exercise time is up, the tap is turned off.

As the sky darkens into deep ebony, Saddam prepares for his night. His dinner will be fruit — dates and olives are a must on his menu — along with soup, possibly chicken and rice. The diet has led to Saddam shedding his potbelly. His shaggy salt-and-pepper beard is trimmed once a week, enhancing his sharp, penetrating eyes. After supper he will return to his law books, trying to fashion a defense for what the world thinks was indefensible. When his trial opened in January 2006, Saddam made good use of his studies, ranting at the trial judge and challenging court rulings.

Like his predecessors, Meir Dagan had come to accept the reality that intelligence is only occasionally successful and that the agency’s best work is ignored, never makes it to the public domain. Coupled with this was the daily routine of giving unwelcome news to Mossad’s political masters.

Increasingly, the sheer volume of intelligence reports meant politicians often had little time to digest what was being said. Dagan continued the system whereby only a few people — usually senior members of Sharon’s cabinet — had access to all the intelligence information. It was not unique to Mossad; the CIA, Germany’s BND, and even the two services Dagan most admired, MI6 and MI5, were careful about what they allowed to go beyond their own closed doors. All too often, the inquisitive media had increasingly ensured that no significant facts or operations could be kept totally secret for long.

Dagan continued to resist the way other agencies employed more specialists, being called in to operate satellites and other technological intelligence. He still believed technology alone could not unravel secret plans. He was committed to show in the first decade of the twenty-first century that the number of good spies was in inverse proportion to the size of Mossad’s support apparatus.

For him, Mossad’s spies were more important than any piece of technology. He relished the thought that Mossad still remained a mysterious organization, where a small number of extraordinary individuals, armed with great courage, could achieve extraordinary results. That, for him, and his men and women, was a comforting assurance as they prepared to face the rapidly changing and frightening world ahead.

In the last week of October 2004, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who had once publicly embraced Saddam Hussein and brought upon himself further fury from Israel, sat down for dinner in his compound in Ramallah on the West Bank. For the past three years he had been confined to shell-pocked buildings on the orders of Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. The decision to isolate him was in the hope that Arafat would call off the suicide bombers and the terror they had inflicted across Israel. Sharon felt Arafat had only paid lip service to stop the killing and mutilation.

Surrounded by Israeli tanks and his every word listened to by the surveillance experts of Mossad, Arafat’s influence on peace in the Middle East remained strong. World leaders, like President Jacques Chirac of France, still telephoned him. His following among millions of radicals across the Arab world was constant. Sharon had said again publicly that until Yasser Arafat was removed from power there could be no lasting peace.

His own life had been a testimony to his ultimate failure to become president of a Palestinian state. He had seen his people demoralised by high unemployment through his failure to compromise, especially over the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees, a concession that would have sounded the knell of the Israeli state. His intransigeance was matched by his autocratic style of governing, highlighted by increasing sycophancy and corruption.

Now thinner and physically frailer than when he had first swept onto the world stage at the United Nations thirty years before as leader of his people, Yasser Arafat was now in his seventy-fifth year and, to ordinary Israelis, still a terrorist godfather whose complete annihilation of their state was a burning aim. To other previous U.S. administrations he was a Nobel Prize winner and the only Palestinian to do business with. To the Bush White House, he was a pariah.

But he sensed that soon, with the return of George W. Bush for another four-year term, Israel might finally decide to remove him. For twenty years he had been telling his doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, “They will do something.”

“‘They,’ was Mossad; ‘something’ was to kill him,” Dr. al-Kurdi said (to the author).

On October 26 Arafat sat down for dinner. He began with a cream-based soup, the recipe for which he claimed had been handed down to him by his mother. Then came a fried piece of Saint Peter’s fish from the lake of Galilee and named after the catch the apostle Peter was reputed to have made before Jesus converted him. All the fish bones had been carefully removed before Arafat ate. Next Arafat consumed roast chicken, hummus, bread, tomatoes, and a green salad. The ingredients were, as usual, from the local market in Ramallah. The food was set out on the long table in Arafat’s workroom. There was also a nonalcoholic drink. Arafat had insisted it be prepared from homeopathic potions and herbs.

“He secretly chose them himself. The drink smelled awful. It made people unwell just sniffing it. But Arafat swallowed it as if it was champagne,” Dr. al-Kurdi would tell Al-Jazeera Television.

The drink was based on homeopathic ingredients not available to the souks of Ramallah. But they could be obtained in one of the upmarket alternative medicine outlets in Tel Aviv. Within hours Arafat was complaining of severe stomach pains. Dr. al-Kurdi diagnosed gastric flu. But when the prescription medicine did not help, the physician decided Arafat had a blood disorder, “perhaps one of the many types of leukemia.” But again the symptoms did not confirm that. Just a few hours later, more expert medical aid was on the way to Ramallah. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt dispatched his personal medical team, including a cancer specialist. King Abdullah of Jordan also sent the best doctor available in Amman. Both teams recommended that the increasingly ill Arafat, whose symptoms could not be firmly diagnosed, be sent to Europe. President Chirac was contacted. He said the Percy Military Hospital outside Paris would make its own renowned specialists available to treat Arafat.

On October 29 the still-conscious Arafat was helicoptered out of the Ramallah compound. But by then the Arab world was already asking one question. Had Mossad’s chemists obtained a sample of the contents of Arafat’s homeopathic concoction? Had Meir Dagan done what his predecessors had resisted — out of the understandable fear of escalating the suicide bomber attacks — and taken charge of an audacious operation to assassinate Yasser Arafat?

Even as Arafat’s plane was heading toward Paris, Dr. al-Kurdi added his medical guess to the souk rumors. He said, “Poisoning is a strong possibility.” The other Arab doctors who had seen Arafat hinted darkly that they also did not rule out poisoning. In Paris, Arafat’s wife, Suha, compounded the intrigue by saying she alone would reveal details of his medical condition — but only when she received “guarantees of my own personal position” regarding the whereabouts of $2 billion of Palestinian Authority funds, which the International Monetary Fund, having carried out an audit in 2003, said were still missing. A deal would later be made in which the Palestinian Authority agreed to pay her $2 million a year for the rest of her life “in recognition of her importance to the Palestinian movement and in her husband’s life.” She had, in fact, not seen him for four years before she visited his bedside at the Percy Military Hospital. She had traveled from her large suite at the deluxe Hotel Le Bristol in Paris; Arafat had also bequeathed her a magnificent villa on the city’s elegant rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

But by the time the deal was cemented, the medical mystery of Arafat’s condition had deepened. He was variously reported as having liver failure, kidney failure, that he was brain dead, semiconscious, or unconscious. His French doctors refused to provide any details of scans, biopsies, or blood tests, which would have shown the condition of his vital organs. The information that dribbled out of the hospital came from Arafat’s Palestinian aides. Apart from Dr. al-Kurdi, none of them were qualified and had been denied further access to al-Kurdi’s long-time patient. Arafat’s aides announced on November 4 that Arafat was on a life-support system. Then abruptly the hospital spokesman said its doctors had found no trace of poisoning “having conducted two tests for a substance.” He would not say what substance Arafat had been tested for.

In the Arab world speculation and anger raged. Somewhere in the innuendos and half-truths certain inescapable facts floated to the surface. Mossad had used a lethal chemical agent to kill newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell when he’d threatened to expose Mossad’s activities in his newspapers unless they agreed to help bail him out of his serious financial problems. Dr. Ian West, the Home Office pathologist who’d conducted Maxwell’s autopsy, had written in his report (a copy of which the author possesses): “We cannot rule out homicide being the cause.”

Mossad had used a drug to try and assassinate the Hamas leader on the streets of Amman, Jordan (see the chapter 6, “Avengers”). Since the start of the new millennium, Mossad agents have been credited with poisoning over a dozen terrorists by using a variety of lethal drugs that can never be traced. Some were designed to act slowly. Others were fast acting so that by the time medical intervention came, it was too late — and the drug was no longer detectable in the victim’s body. All these weapons had been created at Israel’s Institute for Biological Research (see chapter 17, “Bunglegate” pages 341–42).

As Arafat’s condition further deteriorated, his aides said he had suffered a brain haemorrhage, a stroke caused by bleeding into the brain. Could that be true? The hospital spokesman would not say.

On Thursday, November 12, Yasser Arafat died in the early hours of the morning. The hospital spokesman told waiting reporters there would be no details released on tests of the cause of death. There would be no autopsy. And so Mossad’s bête noire died mysteriously, surrounded by secrecy. He was brought back to his compound and buried in Ramallah the next day in a concrete coffin, which had been hastily constructed some days before. There were two reasons for this unusual casket, Dr. al-Kurdi said. Arafat’s body would be preserved for an autopsy to be conducted and then he could be replaced in his concrete casket and one day be buried in the holiest of all mosques in the Muslim world — the one in Jerusalem.

When Meir Dagan heard this, he is said to have smiled. There was also a more important matter on his mind. The day before, hours after Arafat died, Mordechai Vanunu had been arrested in his rooms in St. George’s Church in Jerusalem. He was charged with once more revealing classified information about Israel. Three months previously, Vanunu had said he would like to give up his Israeli citizenship and become a Palestinian. Vanunu said his one great wish was to be received by Yasser Arafat. The whistleblower’s naïveté had not been tempered by his long sojourn in prison or his short months of freedom since his release. There can be little doubt that if the two men had ever been allowed to meet, Arafat would have exploited the occasion. He was a master of manipulation. In the end he had died as he had lived: amid confusion, intrigue, and farce. If he had been poisoned, no one now would ever know. If he had not, Arafat had left a legacy that would continue to promote the idea.

For years Arafat had operated according to the chaos theory of politics: as long as the Palestinians remained a festering problem for Israel, he would stoke the fires of not only his followers but the entire Muslim world. In his famous speech to the United Nations General Assembly that had marked his entry as a revolutionary icon, taking his place alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Arafat had declared, “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat, do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

On the day of Arafat’s death, at a briefing later to his senior aides on what Arafat’s death could foretell, Meir Dagan said that the only tragedy about Arafat’s death was that it had not come sooner because Arafat had failed to ever let go of the gun.