Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 21 A NEW CALIPHATE OF TERROR

The sixth floor of Mossad headquarters, with its olive-painted corridors and office doors that each bore a number in Hebrew but no name, housed the analysts, psychologists, behaviorists, and forward planners. Collectively known as “the specialists,” following Yasser Arafat’s death they had combined their skills to evaluate and exploit how it was being perceived in the Arab world and beyond.

Their conclusions would guide Israel’s future military and political moves in such key areas as prime minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the relationship Israel should now have with the Palestinian Liberation Organistation, the PLO.

The withdrawal was to take place in the high summer of 2005. It would be the first time that Israel had handed back settlements since its pullout from the Sinai in 1978 after the Camp David agreement had brought peace with Egypt. But already in the wake of Arafat’s death, the withdrawal was being promoted by the PLO as the first step in finally creating a meaningful Palestine state that had been Arafat’s abiding dream. But the Gaza Strip settlers saw their eviction as a betrayal of Israel’s right to reclaim the land it had once occupied in biblical times. Their feelings of treachery were all the greater since the evacuation had been the work of Ariel Sharon, long regarded as the most powerful supporter of the settler movement.

The Mossad analysts shared the view of deputy prime minister Shimon Peres: “Zionism was built on geography but it lives on demography.” They saw the realpolitik motives that had made Sharon order the razing of twenty-one Jewish settlements that lay along a stretch of the Mediterranean. To protect their eight thousand inhabitants from the surrounding 1.3 million Palestinians was a huge drain on Israel’s resources.

To defend the settlements on the West Bank, Sharon had ordered the erection of a towering security barrier of reinforced concrete and razor wire that snaked down the length of the country; it meant Israel’s effective border would be extended.

Like the majority of Israelis, the analysts were preoccupied by how soon Peres’s prescient remark would become a reality. The forward planners on the sixth floor had calculated that by 2010 the number of Arabs living between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean would surpass the projected 5.2 million Jews living in Israel at the end of the decade.

In the months before his death, Arafat had predicted that not only would Gaza be “cleansed” of its Jewish settlers, but that the West Bank would also see the departure of its settlers from the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria.

The analysts had advised Meir Dagan that Arafat had left a legacy fraught with risk. They predicted that while the PLO would use the withdrawal from Gaza as a huge propaganda victory, Palestinian extremists like Hamas would defy calls by the PLO leadership to stop attacks on the settlements. It had turned out to be true.

The evacuation was conducted with overwhelming force by the Israeli army. Afterward synagogues left by the settlers were burned to the ground by Hamas militants. Following a short interval, the suicide bomb attacks on Israel resumed. Hamas justified them by presenting the Gaza withdrawal as no more than a maneuvre by Israel to create more misery and frustration for the Palestinians. “Until the last Jew is removed from our land there can be no peace,” Hamas said.

Throughout Arafat’s life the PLO and Hamas had competed for control of the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000; each had aimed to persuade the shebab, the Arab youth, whose support was crucial in the direction the fight against Israel would take. By the second Intifada, when suicide bombings became the main symbol as Islamists and Fatah activists blew themselves up while killing as many as they could in Israeli pizzerias and restaurants, at bus stations and marketplaces — and Islamic religious leaders called for all-out jihad on the grounds that all Israelis, including women and children, were legitimate targets because Israel was a military society — Arafat was pressured into taking action against the terrorists, not only by Ariel Sharon, but also by moderate elements in the Arab world. Arafat still possessed a political legitimacy among them. But Hamas had the advantage of its Islamic extremism, a powerful drug to the dispossessed youth, epitomised further by the hero worship they bestowed on Osama bin Laden, who had repeatedly proclaimed, “There will be no solution to the Palestinian problem except through jihad.” As the second Intifada continued to explode in a succession of fiery pyres, Arafat had seen his own infrastructure destroyed by Israel’s sophisticated weapons, guided to their targets by the superb intelligence of Mossad and Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service. In what Mossad analysts saw as a last desperate attempt to bolster his ailing leadership, Yasser Arafat had begun to claim that his way of carefully controlled political tension was the only means to pressure Israel into accepting his demand for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. By the time of his death, Arafat had attracted a considerable body of support among influential Palestinians. For Ariel Sharon the risk of Arafat being granted the martyrdom he was rapidly attracting among moderate Palestinians, while at the same time Hamas continued its violence, was totally unacceptable.

The specialists had known from many years of listening to tapes recorded by the yaholomin, Mossad’s communication unit, that Arafat had often spoken of his conviction that he had been chosen to lead the Arab world, a stepping stone to his assuming the mantle of a modern-day caliph; the position of leadership had been handed down from the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s successors in the seventh century.

This fantasy had succoured Arafat during his darkest hours in exile and those turbulent years he had railed that the very existence of Israel was at the root of all problems, not only for the Arab nations but the entire Muslim world. In Washington and elsewhere it was long argued there was no point in listening to the rant of a demagogue whose sole message was one of violence.

But on the sixth floor the specialists knew it would be dangerous to ignore Arafat’s words. While he and his associates no longer controlled terrorist operations, or at least very few, Arafat’s ideology had inspired many young jihadists to see in his words that they had a sacred duty to somehow strike back at the West for actions in Muslim states. Following the emotional scenes at Arafat’s funeral, Mossad katsas across the Middle East, in Kashmir and Chechnya, had all reported his death had stirred up passions.

A priority for the specialists was to show the billion-strong Islamic world that Yasser Arafat was never worthy of being a successor to Abdul Mejid II, the last caliph who had gone into exile after Turkish Nationalists, on March 3, 1924, had abolished the caliphate. Turkey’s leader, Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk, turned what remained of the Ottoman Empire, broken up at the end of the First World War, into a secular republic and forced through the wholesale adoption of European legal codes, writing, and a calendar. The seeds of jihad had been sewn.

In Egypt there followed agitation against British colonialism. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, became a potent political force; and when Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a coup in 1952, he succeeded with their help. But Nasser soon saw the Brotherhood’s extremism as a threat and banned the movement. Its members were exiled, jailed, or hanged. Many found refuge in monarchies such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It was then that Arafat and Osama bin Laden had become radicalized.

Both men, very different in their backgrounds, were influenced by a number of factors: Israel’s defeat of Arab armies in 1967; Saudi Arabia’s petrodollars, which gave Islamists the funds to proselytize around the Muslim world; and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, which overthrew the shah of Iran in 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year, was a rallying call to wage jihad against the Soviet Union, funded by Saudi money and equipped with American weapons and with the full support of the Pakistan secret services.

The only blip in the ever-expanding militancy in the Islamic world was the assassination of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat in 1981 after he signed a peace treaty with Israel. Arab leaders incarcerated their own extremists.

“For the first time the West had become aware of what Israel had been saying for years about the danger of Islamic Fundamentalism,” said David Kimche, a former deputy director of Mossad (to the author).

But the radicalization, exploited by both bin Laden and Arafat, went unchecked. The United States became the Great Satan, the Infidel Empire. The deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 further radicalized the Muslim world.

It was at this stage that the specialists on the sixth floor had decided that Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden chose separate paths to achieve their aims, with bin Laden determining the way forward was to wage war against Israel’s powerful ally, the United States. In 1993 came the bombing of the World Trade Center that brought terrorism home to America. In 1998, from the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, announced they were forming the “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” They issued a fatwa declaring that “it is the duty of every Muslim to kill Americans and Jews.”

On October 12, 2000, suicide bombers rammed a dinghy packed with explosives into the side of the American warship, the USS Cole, in Aden, killing seventeen sailors. Two years later, on November 28, 2002, in Mombassa, three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel. Ten Kenyans and three Israeli tourists were killed. At the same time a surface-to-air missile narrowly missed an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombassa airport with two hundred tourists returning home to Tel Aviv.

Petro-Islam terrorism had risen from the ruins of Arab nationalism. The “impious” precepts of the shah of Persia’s regime had been replaced by the tenets of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which had spread beyond the borders of Iran to become the focus of hope in the greater Muslim world. The politicizing of Islam — until then largely seen in the West as a conservative faith losing its grip in the face of the growing influence of what bin Laden would call “the Coca-Cola society of the Great Satan”—had become a fully fledged revolution. Its first target, and never to lose that position, was Israel. Its defence against a stream of attacks fell upon Mossad. To destroy Arafat, his fedayeen, Hamas, and Hezbollah became prime objectives.

Syria had been quick to support these groups for a self-serving reason: it gave the regime credibility in the Arab world over its long-running enmity toward Israel. But it had become a double-edged sword. While Syrian-sponsored terrorist attacks had indeed finally persuaded Israel to negotiate over the Golan Heights — a precursor for what happened over the removal of the settlers from Gaza — its continued investment in terrorism had reinforced Israeli public opinion not to trust Damascus. Nevertheless, the removal of the Gaza settlements, as the promised precursor for a lasting peace for Israel, had resulted in growing resentment among a population who ironically began to echo the Hamas slogan that attacks would end only when every Jew was driven into the sea.

Mossad’s analysts concluded that one way to win back support for the “road map” to peace was to carefully demolish Yasser Arafat’s legacy. To do so, its Technical Services Department mobilized its skills in using the latest information technology. From the start of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, Arab terror groups, such as Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, had used the Internet to promote their aims. Easy to set up, free to access, hard to censor, cyberspace had become an ideal place for issuing policy statements, claiming responsibility for terror attacks, appealing for funds, offering weapons and explosives training, and selling anything from suicide vests to the ingredients to create biological or germ warfare agents.

Mossad had been probably the first security service to monitor the Internet; as militants recognized that their mosques were almost certainly under surveillance, Web sites offered a new and relatively safe way to communicate with their followers. Mossad had created a large number of its own Web sites on which they posted carefully constructed disinformation in all the languages of the Middle East.

In the aftermath of Arafat’s death, stories began to appear on the sites claiming Arafat had betrayed his own people for his own aggrandizement and noting his lack of moral probity. The sites claimed that vast sums of money intended to improve the lives of poverty-stricken Palestinians had ended up in Arafat’s private portfolio.

The claims were the work of the dozen psychologists in LAP, Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare. It had a long history of creating discord among Israel’s enemies. Arafat’s death had offered a further opportunity for LAP to show its skills.

Working with information from Mossad’s twenty-four stations around the world, the psychologists had proved that Arafat controlled a financial portfolio estimated to be in the region of US$6.5 billion. Yet the Palestinian Authority, which administered the PLO territories in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, was close to bankruptcy.

LAP had planted a story in a Cairo-based newspaper, Al-Ahram Weekly, that Abdul Jawwad Saleh, a leading member of the Authority, wanted Arafat’s financial adviser, Mohammed Rachid — who controlled the PLO portfolio — to be questioned. Soon newspapers and TV stations in the Gulf Straits, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon found themselves in possession of copies of a highly secret PLO report that showed that for years the PLO had a deficit of over US$95 million a month. The story became even more explosive when the IMF (International Monetary Fund) revealed Arafat had diverted “one billion U.S. dollars or more of PLO funds from 1995 to 2000.”

The story swept like a desert storm through the Arab world. A Palestinian lawyer who had investigated PLO corruption said he knew of four Arafat loyalists who held secret Swiss bank accounts. The lawyer provided details of widespread corruption. He revealed (to the author on a guarantee of anonymity): “The deals involved the cement and building industries of the Palestinian territories. The corruption ran into millions of dollars, which Arafat covered up in return for the profiteers giving him a portion. He was the godfather of all the other godfathers.”

The effect was to weaken the PLO at a time when, if it was to establish a bargaining position with Israel’s prime minister Sharon, it needed to provide a strong and united front. By focusing on the undoubted murky world of Arafat’s financial dealings, LAP had also effectively ended further speculation about any role Mossad had in his death. It was a textbook example of what Rafi Eitan had once said (to the author): “Well-placed words are often as effective as a bomb.”

The deconstruction of Arafat’s image was only part of Mossad’s role in Israel’s information warfare, infowar, which had become the hottest concept in the Kirya, the Israeli Defense Forces headquarters. Infowar was designed to exploit the ever-advancing technological concepts of the late twentieth century to allow Israel to launch swift, stealthy, widespread, and devastating assaults on an economic, military, and civilian infrastructure before an attack could be launched. Prime targets were Syria and Iran.

Powerful computer microprocessors and sophisticated sensors, and the training to use them, had been provided by the United States under yet another sweetheart deal Sharon had negotiated with the Bush administration.

IDF officers and several Mossad specialists had been sent to the National Defense University in Washington and the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, to learn how to cripple enemy stock markets and morph images of a foreign leader. A favorite among the Israeli students was a tape of the ayatollahs appearing on Iranian television sipping whisky and carving slices from a ham, both forbidden in Islam. Before they had graduated, the students had flown on Commando Solo, the customized former USAF cargo plane that had been given a $70 million refit that enabled its crew to jam a country’s TV and radio broadcasts and substitute messages — true or false — on any frequency. A version of the plane had been acquired by the IDF.

Mossad technicians were researching ways to infect enemy computer systems with a variety of virulent strains of software viruses. They would include the “logic bomb,” designed to remain dormant in an enemy system until a predetermined time when it would be activated and begin to destroy stored data. Such a bomb could attack an enemy’s air defence system or a central bank. The technicians had already created a program that could insert booby-trapped computer chips into weapons a foreign arms manufacturer planned to sell to a hostile country like Iran or Syria. Mossad katsas in key Eastern Europe arms manufacturing countries had also been briefed to find independent software contractors who wrote programs for such weapons systems. They would be offered substantial sums to slip viruses into the systems. An Israeli specializing in information technology said (to the author): “When the weapons system goes into attack mode, everything about it works, but the warhead doesn’t explode.”

Mossad agents were now equipped with a briefcase-size device that generated a high-powered electromagnetic pulse. Placed near a building, the pulse burned out all electronic components in the building. The device had its own built-in self-destruct mechanism that ensured its innards remained a secret. At the Institute for Biological Research, scientists were working to see if microbes could be bred to eat the electronics and insulating material inside computers in the same way that microorganisms consumed trash. Other scientists were working on aerosols that could be sprayed over enemy troops. Biosensors flying overhead would then track their movements from their breath or sweat.

On the other floors below, where the specialists created their Web site entries about Yasser Arafat, other equally skilled experts were going about their work.

The Research and Development laboratories on the second floor continued to create and update surveillance devices and adapt weapons. From there had come the matchbox-size camera, which could record and photograph a subject at over sixty yards’ distance, and a variety of knives, including one that could slice through a spinal cord. These had been designed for the kidon, the unit specializing in assassination.

The third floor was occupied by the archives and the liaison offices with Shin Bet — Israel’s equivalent of the FBI, with responsibility for Israel’s internal security and foreign intelligence services that were deemed friendly. These included the CIA. Britain’s MI6, French and German services, and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Part of the floor was allocated to the Collections Department. This collated all incoming intelligence and distributed it to the appropriate departments on a need-to-know basis. The archives received everything; the data would be stored on high-speed Honeywell computers.

These included psychoprofiles of world leaders, terrorists, politicians, leading financiers — anyone who could be a help or hindrance to Israel. A typical profile contained personal details and close relationships. The one on President Bill Clinton listed the many transcripts from a yaholomin surveillance of his conversations with Monica Lewinsky, some verging on phone-sex calls (see chapter 5, “Gideon’s Nuclear Sword,” pp. 103–5). The profile of Hillary Clinton contained a close analysis of her contact with Vince Foster, the Clinton White House deputy counsel. Mossad concluded that Foster did not commit suicide but, according to one Mossad officer who had read the file, “most likely was murdered to cover up what was a serious attempt by persons in the Clinton White House to keep secret material they would have preferred to keep quiet” (the author was told).

Osama bin Laden had an entire shelf of computer discs divided into his speeches, his sightings since 9/11, and the structure and restructure of al-Qaeda. In painstaking detail his profile explored how he had created the plans that had led to more innocent people being killed in the West than had died in Europe during any conflict since the Second World War. The analysis of his speeches showed bin Laden to be a slave to literal interpretations; the usual intellectual extrapolations upon which much European thinking depends appeared to be beyond his range. A late entry was the appointment of his eldest son, Saad, as his successor, and in the meantime the instructions were to concentrate on developing strategies for attacks on U.S. targets. The announcement had come from “the Jerusalem Force,” the name bin Laden used when addressing his followers as a reminder of his ultimate ambition to ride in triumph through that city. A transcript of the message promised: “when that day comes our son Saad will ride at the head of our great cause.” The Mossad analysts had concluded that the words were a further sign bin Laden did not expect to live long enough to see such an event. A separate file on Saad gave his age, twenty-six, and described him as the son of bin Laden’s first wife and his favorite among the other twenty-three children he had fathered. The file described Saad as “the mirror image of his father, both physically and mentally.” It revealed Saad had served with his father in Afghanistan and had fought against the Soviet occupiers. “Americans who met him there recall his readiness to kill.” The last entry in the file said that Saad was on Mossad’s list for assassination by kidon.

As Arafat lay dying in Paris, bin Laden had again resurrected his own demand to create a great caliphate of terror that would stretch from Asia to southern Spain. It was this claim that the specialists on the sixth floor had used for their own purposes. They had created documents, sourced to Hamas, that Osama bin Laden was set on “dishonouring” the memory of the PLO leader. In the Arab world, such a claim would create unease while, at the same time, would not diminish the impact of statements that Yasser Arafat had robbed the Palestinians of tens of millions of dollars. Setting one enemy of Israel against another was a tactic in which LAP was unrivaled.

One way of doing so had been to exploit the behavior of Libya’s leader, Colonel Mu’ammar Gadhafi. Since he had seized power in 1969, as the twenty-seven-year-old head of a group of young officers, Gadhafi had been a prime target for assassination by Mossad. Having survived several attempts, it drove him to create a team of tall, muscular female bodyguards trained by the former KGB. LAP had focussed on ridiculing him in the Arab world by using fake photographs created in the Mossad psychological warfare photo lab showing Gadhafi in sexual poses with the women. Meanwhile Gadhafi had backed terrorists, including arming the IRA and sponsoring attacks on airports in Vienna and Rome and in a Berlin discotheque, a favorite with U.S. servicemen based in the city. He had been linked to the Lockerbie bombing in 1998. At times his behavior seemed to drift beyond sanity. In 2001, he offered to buy all the bananas grown in the Caribbean to break the “stranglehold” of the World Trade Organization. Sartorially, he rivaled Michael Jackson, his favourite pop star; Gadhafi regularly wore orange robes, gold-braided military garb, and a powder blue jumpsuit.

In 2002, LAP scored another propaganda hit by planting a story Gadhafi had received a hair transplant. Later that year he arrived at an African summit with a container ship loaded with one thousand goat carcasses and distributed them to his fellow delegates. Afterward Jaafar Nimeiri, the former president of Sudan, described him as “a man with a split personality — both of them totally crazy.” LAP was able to use this to great effect. It also focused on Gadhafi’s sexual activities. Having fathered seven children by two wives, he had taken to offering interviews to foreign female journalists if they slept with him. That also became another item for LAP to promote around the world. More recently, in 2003, LAP planted stories that Gadhafi was terminally ill with cancer. But in mid-December 2004, his image as a buffoon who possessed a powerful nuclear arsenal, which he frequently threatened to unleash against Israel, was about to dramatically change.

Mossad’s London Station was situated deep within the Israeli Embassy in the fashionable district of Kensington. Accessed only by swipe cards that were changed regularly, and with a separate communications system from those of the main switchboard, the station was the most protected within a building where security was paramount. Each of the station’s offices had a keypad door and a safe, the combination of which was known only to the office’s occupant. Often a technician from Mossad’s Internal Security Department, Autahat Paylut Medienit (APM), used a hand-operated scanner to check for any bugging devices; none had ever been detected. The half dozen intelligence officers and a support staff had been carefully selected for a key overseas posting in Mossad. The London Station now rivaled in importance that of the service’s Washington base.

The staff worked under the direction of a man they all called Nathan. He had seen service in Asia and Africa before taking over as station chief. His formal duties included liaising with MI5 and MI6, Scotland Yard’s antiterrorist squad, and foreign intelligence services based in the capital. He was a familiar face on the capital’s diplomatic cocktail circuit and regularly dined at one of the city’s members-only clubs alongside senior British politicians. It was one of those clubs, the Traveller’s in Pall Mall, that focused Nathan’s attention on that cold winter’s day in December.

As Londoners made their way to another round of Christmas office parties, seven individuals arrived separately at the club, long a favourite meeting place for the senior officers of Britain’s intelligence community. Situated within walking distance of the Ministry of Defense, Foreign Office, Home Office, and Downing Street, it was comfortable and discreet, a place where secrets could be shared over one of the finest steaks in clubland or a reputation gently questioned over a postdinner port in the club’s lounge.

Six pinstripe-suited men and a woman in a black dress made their way past the club porter’s lodge to a back room. It had been booked in the name of William Ehrman, the director general of defence and intelligence at the Foreign Office. A self-service buffet of tea, coffee, soft drinks, and the club’s famed selection of sandwiches had been set up on a side table: the food did not include ham out of deference to the three men already waiting in the room with Ehrman. They were Musa Kusa, the head of Libyan intelligence, Ali Abdalate, the Libyan ambassador to Rome and Mohammed Abul Qasim al-Zwai, the Libyan ambassador to London.

They were introduced by Ehrman to Eliza Manningham-Buller; John Scarlett, head of MI6; David Landeman, head of counterproliferation at the Foreign Office; and two high-ranking officials from Ehrman’s department. He showed them all to opposite sides of a long mahogany table. At precisely twelve thirty on the mantle clock over the gas-fired Adams fireplace, Ehrman spoke.

“Gentlemen, we have come a long way. Let us now move to resolution.”

So began a meeting that would last six hours to negotiate one of the most stunning breakthroughs in international diplomacy in decades. The meeting was to draft and approve every word of the text that would enable Colonel Gadhafi, the man President Reagan once called “the mad dog of the Middle East,” to voluntarily give up Libya’s weapons of mass destruction.

Over the years Gadhafi had created an arsenal that was the most powerful on the continent of Africa. Close to its southern border with Egypt was the Kufra biological and chemical factory. Concealed deep below the desert sands, it was beyond the bunker-buster bombs the United States had given to Israel’s air force. The possibility of launching a successful sabotage attack had also been ruled out after a deep-cover Mossad agent managed to obtain a blueprint of the heavily guarded warren of laboratories where nuclear scientists from the former Soviet Union and former East Germany worked.

Sixty miles south of Tripoli, the country’s capital, was a chemical weapons factory at Rabta that produced mustard gas, a First World War weapon, and more up-to-date nerve agents. These were also manufactured at the Tajura Nuclear Research Center, sited on the Mediterranean coast. In all, there were ten weapons of mass destruction facilities. All were guarded by long-range Scud missiles built with the help of North Korea.

On that December day the meeting in the Traveller’s Club back room was the climax of efforts to end Gadhafi’s thirty-five years of torrid relations with the West and allow Libya to be finally removed from the list of pariah nations.

The road to redemption had begun with the collapse of Soviet communism, which had erased Libya’s hope that the continuous U.S. pressure would end. There had been the failure of a succession of economic programs that had made Gadhafi eager to attract foreign investment. Finally he had come to realize the ever-growing Islamic militancy was a threat of retaliation against his own regime and its long record of supporting terrorism. Even before Saddam had been captured, Libya had begun to ostracize the terrorist groups it had once embraced; at times Gadhafi had increasingly sounded almost like a moderate voice. In April 1999, Libya had agreed to allow two of its intelligence officers to stand trial under Scottish law for the destruction of the Pan Am 103 flight over Lockerbie. After the September 11 attacks, Gadhafi had secretly provided information to the CIA and FBI on al-Qaeda. In 2002, he had supported a Saudi initiative to offer Israel diplomatic recognition (yet to happen), and he had told Arafat not to declare a Palestinian state. All this had been summarized by his son Saif ul-Islam Gadhafi: “If we have the backing of the West and the United States, we will achieve more in five years than we could achieve in another fifty years.” The proof was the presence of his father’s emissaries in the bastion of the English establishment.

During the meeting, Ehrman and Musa Kusa took turns using a telephone in an adjoining room to make calls. Ehrman’s were to prime minister Tony Blair, who was on a visit to his Sedgefield constituency in the north of England. Using a second phone call, Blair kept President Bush in the White House updated on progress. Kusa’s calls were to a phone in a Bedouin tent where Gadhafi was enjoying another of his desert sojourns.

In the preceding months, Kusa had, under Libyan diplomatic passport, traveled to London several times. As the man most trusted by Gadhafi, his mission was to agree to a text that would ensure the Libyan leader did not lose face and satisfy the British team that he could not renege. In an MI6 safe house near Gatwick airport, Kusa and document drafters from the Foreign Office agonized over every word. Time and again, when a breakthrough seemed to be close and a draft was sent to Libya on a secure fax, it came back with suggestions and amendments that were unacceptable to the Foreign Office.

A further complication was Kusa’s suspicion of the need to involve Washington. Initially the Bush administration was also dubious about approving any deal with Libya. But as the secret meetings went on, the CIA asked to participate. Again Kusa was hesitant at their presence. He feared that Israel would learn of the plan from the CIA and possibly sabotage it. A Washington official involved in the negotiations said later: “Kusa was paranoid that the Israelis would want to torpedo the negotiations so that it could attack Gadhafi’s weapons sites. The Brits were finding that trying to do a deal with Gadhafi involved a lot of walking on eggs without breaking one.”

It had been like that from the August day in 2002 when Mike O’Brien, the Foreign Office minister, had visited Gadhafi in his desert tent. He was the first British envoy to do so. He was kept waiting for several hours before two female bodyguards finally ushered the gently perspiring minister into Gadhafi’s presence.

“Gadhafi sat with dark glasses on and spoke through a translator, though I knew he had learned English at a course in England. When it became appropriate I raised the matter of his weapons of mass destruction. To my astonishment he did not deny he possessed them, adding that this was a serious issue. Time and again he emphasized he was genuinely interested to improve relations with the West and in particular to attract foreign investments to the Libyan oil and gas industries,” O’Brien later recalled.

O’Brien returned to London convinced that Gadhafi was “genuinely ready to do a deal.” But there was still a way to go. O’Brien made further visits to Libya. Though he was certain he had taken every possible precaution to maintain secrecy, the deep-cover Mossad agent in Libya had picked up his trail.

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan decided to fly to London. He arrived on the eve of the Iraqi war. During his visit Dagan managed to meet with Scarlett and Manningham-Buller and the man Scarlett was due to replace at MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Later it emerged that Dagan, in his usual blunt manner, had told the intelligence chiefs, according to one Israeli source (who spoke to the author): “Be assured that Israel will not impede your plans. But I do expect you not to try and hoodwink us.”

In October 2003, with the initial Iraqi war offensive over, O’Brien was asked by Gadhafi to arrange for a team of British weapons experts and intelligence officers from MI6 and the CIA to inspect Libya’s weapons of mass destruction sites. One expert had a close relationship with Mossad. His recall perfectly captured the atmosphere on the trip.

“The Libyans showed us everything. It was a case of: on your right, our famous chemical weapons; on your left, our secret uranium centrifuge; and tomorrow you’ll see our biological weapons. At the end of our visit it was clear that while Libya had not yet acquired nuclear weapons capability, it was closer to having one than we had realized. It was also working on a variety of delivery systems, including ballistic missiles with a range capable of hitting any major city in Europe. The truth was that Gadhafi posed a far greater threat than Saddam did.”

But with Saddam defeated, the negotiators in London decided to exert pressure on Gadhafi. A team of senior American negotiators from the State Department flew to London. They told Kusa they had “overwhelming” evidence that Libya could not have developed its programs on weapons of mass destruction without the help of Iran and North Korea.

“As a fully paid up member of the ‘axis of evil’ it was made clear to Kusa that Libya remained very much on our target list,” an official who attended the meetings said (to the author).

Nelson Mandela, the retired South African leader, was called upon to deliver a warning to Gadhafi that he must act — or face the consequences. Mandela called Bush and said that Gadhafi was “very serious about making an agreement.”

But still the cautious fencing persisted between Libya and the negotiators. Finally it was made clear to Kusa that time was running out if Gadhafi continued to prevaricate. The deadline was January 1, 2005. The Traveller’s Club meeting was convened.

The key part of the agreement was to be contained in the broadcast Gadhafi would make on Libyan television that evening. The text was sent to Tripoli for endorsement. A copy was faxed to Condoleezza Rice in Washington, whom Bush had asked to oversee the negotiations. She asked for minor changes to wording and emphasis. These were conveyed to Kusa.

The smiling intelligence chief said, “A woman’s prerogative. But these are acceptable. We have a deal.”

The historic announcement was to be made on Libyan television that night. The BBC monitoring unit at Caversham was sent a copy of the text and asked to monitor the broadcast. Shortly after the meeting at the Traveller’s Club broke up, a copy of the text was handed to Nathan. In minutes it was on the desk of Ariel Sharon.

Having read the document, the Israeli prime minister told Dagan that as far as Libya went, Mossad was to maintain its close surveillance on the country. A copy of the document was sent to the third-floor archives and inserted in the Gadhafi psychoprofile. It contained a report that Musa Kusa had been one of the planners behind the bombing of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie in which 270 people had died fifteen years before in the very week that Gadhafi was welcomed back from being a tyrant to a statesman.

In London, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, praised Gadhafi’s “huge statesmanship.”

In Washington, the State Department announced that American companies with contracts on Libyan oilfields due to expire in 2005 were being allowed to open talks in Tripoli to extend their concessions.

In Paris, the French government confirmed that Kusa was still wanted in connection with the 1989 bombing of a French UTA airlines DC-10. But a spokesman admitted that given the spy chief’s diplomatic status, it was “highly unlikely he will ever be questioned.” In the French capital another long-running investigation was on the move again.

Mossad had continued to monitor events about the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. Faced with mounting public disquiet in Britain, the new Royal coroner, Dr. Michael Burgess, had overruled his predecessor’s decision not to hold an inquest. He announced an inquiry, and the investigation would be headed by the former London Metropolitan police chief Lord Stevens. Stevens traveled to Paris to inspect the crash site. Among the media scrum that accompanied his every move was a Dutch-born katsa, Piet, a member of the Mossad Paris Station. Among those he had recruited was a mahuab, a non-Jewish informer, in the Paris police department. She was code-named Monique.

When the critically injured Diana arrived at the Saleptrie Hospital, Monique was on duty in the emergency room to ensure no media entered. Shortly afterward, Diana was pronounced dead. She was draped in a clean gown and taken to a side room. Two nurses washed her body. One would later tell a reporter, “She looked so beautiful as if she was asleep.”

The pathologist, Dominique Lecomte, arrived to find a scene of controlled chaos: “There were people around who you would not find in an operating room,” she said later. They included two senior diplomats from the Paris British Embassy, senior officials from the French Ministry of Justice, and the chief of the Paris police. The diplomats and the French officials stood in separate groups, whispering among themselves. Standing apart from the others was a member of the MI6 team in Paris who had been tracking Diana after her determined campaign against land mines. In London government circles, she had been called “a loose cannon.” He was there to ensure there would be no obstacles to what Professor Lecomte was told “must be the swift transfer of Lady Di’s body back to England. The order comes from high up in London.”

Professor Lecomte asked for the body to be transferred to a side room adjoining the operating theater so she could conduct an autopsy. That was the moment the first conspiracy theory took root. The hospital had a fully equipped mortuary where an autopsy could have been performed. Had it not been used because transferring her there would delay matters? Alone with the body, Professor Lecomte began her “partial autopsy and partial embalming.” Highly experienced though the pathologist was, even a “partial embalming” required time after she had performed a “partial autopsy.” This would have required Professor Lecomte to remove a number of Diana’s organs — probably including her heart and kidneys. She would also have removed organs from Diana’s pelvic area. This would later further the speculation that Professor Lecomte had removed any evidence that Diana was pregnant. The pathologist then performed the “partial embalming,” which French law requires before a body can leave the country. Even partial embalming is usually left to a mortician trained in the process. Skill is required in correctly diluting the formaldehyde so as not to discolour the skin or leave an unpleasant chemical odor.

In the years following the events in the early hours of that Sunday night, August 31, 1997, Professor Lecomte has refused to explain her crucial role. “The decision to embalm Diana’s body would have tainted any samples taken at the postmortem in London. As a result the issue of pregnancy would have been covered up,” insisted Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Dodi, to the author.

Mossad’s files on the deaths of Diana and Dodi contained detailed information on the role played by the CIA, MI6, MI5, and French intelligence. They answered speculation that Henri Paul was being used by MI6 to keep a discreet eye on Diana as her affair continued to attract world attention and contained details of the thirteen separate bank accounts held by Henri Paul for money he received from French intelligence. The former Israeli intelligence officer, Ari Ben-Menashe, had offered to provide Mohamed al-Fayed with copies of the files, claiming “they are the smoking gun that could reveal the full extent of the intelligence role in the deaths of Dodi and Diana,” he stated to the author. He had asked for £750,000 for the files. Al-Fayed refused.

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan decided there would be no benefit to Mossad in providing Lord Stevens with access to the service’s files. In that first week of 2005, he then had more important matters on which to focus.

Once more the specter that had haunted Dagan’s predecessors had surfaced. The FBI had reopened its investigation to try and establish the identity of Mega, Mossad’s deep-penetration agent high-level spy in Washington. He had originally been identified as working within the Clinton administration. But the FBI now believed he had successfully managed to conceal himself to secure a place in the Bush presidency. Like his predecessors, Dagan was probably the only spy chief in Israel who knew the true identity of his prized informer (see chapter 5, “Gideon’s Nuclear Sword,” pp. 100–2).

In the aftermath of George Bush being returned to the White House for another four-year term, FBI director Robert Mueller had briefed National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice — soon to become secretary of state — that Mega was the conduit for how highly sensitive policy documents on Iran had been passed to Israel. Mueller had told Rice that Mega would now be more important than ever for Israel as Bush began to formulate his policy toward the Middle East.

The FBI had already spent more than a year covertly investigating, using the latest electronic surveillance equipment, a Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, who was a senior analyst in a Pentagon office dealing with Middle East affairs. Franklin formerly worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Defense Department had confirmed the investigation, adding that Franklin worked in the office of defense undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, an influential aide to defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The FBI had publicly said their investigation centered on whether Franklin passed classified U.S. material on Iran to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. The AIPAC is a highly influential Israeli lobby in Washington. Like Franklin, it had been swift to deny “any criminal conduct.” In Israel, Ariel Sharon had taken the unusual step of issuing a similarly worded statement insisting: “Israel does not engage in intelligence activities in the United States.”

Meir Dagan knew better. The United States had remained a prime target for Mossad operations after the 1985 conviction of navy analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of passing secrets to Israel.

The FBI now believed Mossad had been responsible for how America’s nuclear secrets, stored on computer drives, had been stolen from Los Alamos. The drives were each the size of a deck of playing cards and kept in the facility’s most secure, password-protected vault in X-Division, twenty feet below the Mexican mountains.

The theft was discovered after a massive forest fire threatened the area and scientists were ordered to enter the vault to remove the drives. But because of the intensity of the fire, Los Alamos was closed down for ten days, which meant a full-scale search for the drives was launched only after this period. The drives were designed to fit into laptop computers carried by members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) on permanent readiness to fly to the scene of any nuclear incident within the United States. NEST squads would use the highly detailed technical information on the drives to disarm and dismantle nuclear devices. The drives had been checked as all-present in an inventory taken in April 2002.

When the FBI finally arrived on the scene in May that year, their first suspicion was that a terrorist group had carried out the theft. But then, three months later, they discounted this when the drives were found behind a photocopier in another Los Alamos laboratory. In a report to Bill Richardson, the then energy secretary responsible for the lab, and its security chief, Eugene Habinger, the FBI concluded the theft was the work of a highly professional foreign intelligence service “like Mossad.”

Now, three years later, the agency had not changed its view, Mueller told Condoleezza Rice. He also remained certain that somewhere within the Bush administration, Mega was securely entrenched. It was not a comfortable thought for the FBI director.

The Los Alamos theft had been prepared by the director general of CSIS, Qiao Shi. As well as being China’s longest serving and most senior spy master, the eighty-two-year-old Qiao Shi was also chairman of the Chinese National Assembly since 1993 and the security chief of the Chinese Communist Party. It effectively made him overall intelligence supreme of the entire Chinese spying apparatus.

In the month preceding the Los Almos operation, Qiao Shi had seen his power as vice-minister and overall co-coordinator of China’s security services eroded in a series of internal struggles within the Politburo. Finally he was, effectively, demoted to be head of the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service’s foreign intelligence branch. “The reason he was given was that the country’s need in global intelligence gathering required more than one man to head up those requirements,” a source told the author.

Qiao Shi was told that operations in place under his directions would remain his to control. He remained in post till June 2006.

The entire Los Alamos operation was given “total deniability” status by both Washington and Tel Aviv. The author was told in July 2006 by a former Canadian diplomat with knowledge of the operation “that publicity would have seriously damaged ongoing trade relations between both countries!”

Under Qiao Shi’s direction, the Los Alamos theft had been prepared and carried out by PLA-2, the Second Intelligence Department of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff. Its multifunctions include tasking military attachés at Chinese embassies abroad and organizing clandestine operations. For months he had planned it in his office inside Zhonganhai, the government compound where the Chinese leadership lived in splendid isolation. As part of that planning, Qiao Shi had called upon CSIS’s long-standing relationship with Mossad, which went back to their original collaboration in Africa (see chapter 13, “African Connections,” pp. 250–2). For Mossad the chance to learn some of the secrets at Los Alamos was too good an opportunity to pass up. Mossad arranged for a team of LAKAM programmers and surveillance experts from its own yaholomin unit to travel to Beijing. They became part of the team that would electronically rob Los Alamos.

The fine-tuning of the operation had been placed in the hands of Wang Tomgye at the Science and Technology Department in the monolithic Ministry of Defense headquarters in Beijing’s Dencheng District. In all, a hundred experts had been brought in to carry out the unprecedented heist. Many were experts in the difficult art of undetected computer hacking. Some of them had learned their skills while working for various companies in California’s Silicon Valley. One by one they had been recalled to Beijing to take up their specialist work for the robbery.

The date was set for May 5, 2004. The target was the high security vault in what was itself Los Alamos’s most secret facility. X-Division was a network of cramped offices on the third floor of the main laboratory building. Guarded by coded swipe cards whose entry numbers changed every day, the most sensitive of X-Division’s data was stored in a strong room that had every device known to U.S. security experts. It was claimed to be more secure than Fort Knox’s gold repositories. Inside the vault was a fireproof bag that could be opened only by using a special password. Inside that were the computer drives. Each disk contained detailed technical information, including how to dismantle the bomb designs created by rogue states like North Korea. They would provide anyone who obtained them with a massive advantage in knowing the nuclear secrets that the United States possessed.

Chinese and Israeli technicians had devised a hacking system that could electronically penetrate all the X-Division defenses. A replica of the Los Alamos vault was specially built in the basement of the Science and Technology Department. Inside the vault’s steel walls was placed a fireproof bag. Inside the bag were put hard drives containing nonsecret information. The task of the hackers was to remove the information without revealing they had done so. They were to do so not from somewhere in Beijing, but at a considerable distance from the Chinese capital. The hackers were dispatched to Shanghai, several hundred miles away. They set to work. When the vault was later opened, there was no evidence the fireproof bag had been penetrated. The team of hackers returned to the basement. With them they brought true copies of the information electronically lifted from the hard drives stored in the bag.

The Chinese planners had worked on the premise that from time to time the hard drives in Los Alamos would be removed from their fireproof bag and placed in a computer they were certain would be inside the X-Division vault. This would either be done to check for a piece of information or to make sure the disks were in perfect working order. In Shanghai, the hackers had waited several days for the disks in the replica vault to be removed and inserted in a computer nearby.

The Chinese and Israeli team had also worked on the premise that at Los Alamos there was a good chance the hard drives would be left in the computer in an emergency. To create one, CSIS agents would light a brushfire that, given the prevailing wind direction, would sweep toward Los Alamos.

The next test took place in the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippine Islands. This time the hacking team was on board a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine of the blue-water fleet of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy. The submarine rose close to the surface, and the hackers went about their business. Once more they succeeded in electronically penetrating the replica vault in the Beijing basement. They returned to report their success to Qiao Shi.

Everything was ready. The team of hackers arrived in Puerto Penasco at the upper reaches of Mexico’s Golfo de California. They were supplied with fishing equipment and boxes of tackle. Their journey to the port had been a long one. From Hong Kong they had flown into Mexico City and then driven to Puerto Penasco. Waiting for them was their rented fishing boat. Hidden on board, placed there by a CSIS agent in Mexico, was their equipment for hacking. They set to sea, ostensibly on a fishing trip.

With Los Alamos evacuated as the brushfire threatened to engulf the facility, the team set to work. Using the coordinates they had been provided with, the hackers had homed in on the X-Division vault at Los Alamos. Just as they had waited in Shanghai for the right moment, so they had electronically lifted all the data from the hard drive disks in the fireproof bag. A week later, the team was back in Beijing.

No one would ever establish how the disks were subsequently found behind the photocopier. Was there a Mossad or CSIS agent inside Los Alamos? Late in November 2002, a meeting was held at Los Alamos to discuss the possibility. Gathered in a conference room in X-Division was George Tenet, then director general of the CIA; Britain’s current MI6 chief, Dearlove; Director Freeh of the FBI (soon to lose his job); and Los Alamos security chief, Eugene Habinger. There was a consensus the theft had changed, almost certainly for the foreseeable future, the close intelligence links between Washington and London with Israel.

The sheer cold professionalism of the operation had placed CSIS, in Mossad’s mind, as the one service it could rate as an equal. But in the past, the CIA had also worked with the Chinese. In 1984, William Casey, then head of the CIA, had secretly met Qiao Shi and persuaded him to act against the Triads who controlled over 60 percent of New York’s heroin market. Every major American city had its Triad godfather, through whom an increasing amount of cocaine from Colombia and the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia was marketed by dealers whose lineage went back to the opium dens of the 1800s. Casey had proposed a joint intelligence operation to combat the traffickers who had also started to target students on China’s campuses. Mossad had monitored a meeting in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong between senior CSIS officers and a team from the CIA, FBI, and the DEA in January 1985. It was another striking example of the hidden links and interdependencies between intelligence services.

CSIS had helped to produce some spectacular results in the drug war, including the now celebrated Golden Aquarium case in San Francisco. A million pounds of heroin had been discovered wrapped in cellophane and condoms inside fish imported from Asia. American federal agents had taken the credit for the bust. Privately they admitted they could not have succeeded without the CSIS team who had trailed the consignment across the Pacific. Later, after the Los Alamos theft, Qiao Shi had handed over to Mossad valuable information it possessed about the Triads. With an estimated million members scattered worldwide, the Triads were the largest drug traffickers on earth.