Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 22 OLD ENEMIES, NEW THREATS

In the three years since Meir Dagan had stood on a table in Mossad’s canteen on September 11, 2001, and had punched a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand and told his staff that, metaphorically, he expected them to eat the brains of their enemies, the number and actions of those enemies had dramatically increased.

Suicide bombers continued to strike; some were little more than children. The supply of martyrs appeared to be inexhaustible.

Fissionable materials had been stolen from stockpiles in the former Soviet Union; scientists at the European Transuranium Institute and Karsruhe in Germany, responsible for tracking all such material, had traced a small quantity of uranium-235 to the Paris apartment of three criminals known to broker arms deals with terror groups like al-Qaeda. The uranium was of weapons-grade quality. Two of the men — Sergei Salfati and Yves Ekwella — were traveling on Cameroon passports. The third, Raymond Loeb, possessed South African documents. The material came from a nuclear storage site at Chelyanbisk-70, sited deep in the Ural Mountains. Tipped off by Mossad, French police had arrested the criminals.

Mossad had traced the route along which the uranium had been transported across the Ukraine, through Poland and Germany to Paris by employees of Semion Yokovich Mogilevich. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had positioned himself to traffic not only in humans and arms but fissionable material as well. As with the site in the Urals, it had disappeared from other poorly guarded locations.

President Vladimir Putin had spoken darkly of a “new network of terror against which our forces are increasingly hard-pressed to overcome.”

In Afghanistan and the near-lawless northern provinces of Pakistan, thousands of jihadists — holy war warriors — were being trained for what they were promised would be the endgame, the elimination of Israel from the face of the earth. Some of the graduates had returned to their homes in places like the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the souks of Egypt, the Yemen, and, farther afield, the cities of Britain. All made no secret of their readiness to die in jihad, holy war, to perfect their newfound skills anywhere that could damage the financial and economic structure of Israel.

They were often financed by state-sponsored terrorism, either because of a shared ideology (Hezbollah and Iran), or calculated realpolitik (Hamas and Syria). Israel had worked tirelessly through the United Nations to get sponsors of terrorism to be stopped by sanctions or even military action. Mossad’s department of psychological warfare had spun the story that Israel was ready to launch a preemptive strike should the ayatollahs continue to support Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. The threat created fear among the Iranian population, even though its military tacticians briefed the country’s rulers that geographically the Jewish state was sufficiently far away not to pose a serious and sustained threat. In the case of Libya it had played a background role in persuading Gadhafi that his interests would prosper by avoiding being the bagman for a number of terror groups.

Along with every major Western intelligence service, al-Qaeda remained on top of Mossad’s own threat list. Early on in Meir Dagan’s tenure, two names had emerged to stand beside Osama bin Laden in the cause of Islamic extremism. One was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who increasingly performed the role as al-Qaeda’s chief television propagandist. The Egyptian medical doctor, who had trained in London and Paris, had made over six video and audio broadcasts in 2005, earning himself the adulation of the Arab world as the organization’s intellectual guiding force. Mossad analysts had postulated that bin Laden nowadays reserved his own appearances for major occasions, such as addressing the American people four days before the U.S. election, where he had sat at a desk like a newsreader and promised further attacks if Bush was reelected; and after the Madrid commuter train attacks that killed two hundred and injured almost two thousand, when he had repeated the warning. The other member of this trinity of evil was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian ill-educated peasant responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Iraq. Before he had reached the age of thirty, he had beheaded a dozen Iraqis and foreigners and posted videos of their murders on Islamic Web sites around the world. He, too, had promised that the day would come when he would join bin Laden’s son, Saad, at the head of a triumphal march into Jerusalem.

Now in the first weeks of 2005, it was not only terrorists that Meir Dagan found himself confronting. He had begun to have doubts about the new MI6 director-general, Sir John Scarlett. The roots of these reservations lay in what Dagan knew was seriously inaccurate MI6 intelligence that had led to the politicizing of information about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It had confirmed Dagan’s view that John Scarlett had a tendency to “shoot from the hip.” Certainly for the crew-cropped Mossad chief with a liking for open-necked shirts, Scarlett was radically different as the quintessential English spymaster in his customized suits from Gieves, the Saville Row tailor, and hand-stitched cotton shirts, along with his buff-coloured security files each bearing the red cross of Saint George. Over dinner at the Traveller’s Club, Scarlett would display a taste for expensive claret and his gourmet’s appetite for fine food. After his thirty-two years as an intelligence officer in Moscow, Kenya, and Paris, Scarlett had become chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) that monitored Britain’s other intelligence services and reported directly to Tony Blair in Downing Street. It was a widely held view that Blair had exercised his prime minister’s prerogative to appoint Scarlett to take over MI6. His appointment had brought Scarlett a knighthood to go with his CMG and OBE. It had also continued his close relationship with Blair, and Dagan was not the only foreign intelligence chief who sensed that Downing Street’s hand could be detected in decisions made by Scarlett. It went against Dagan’s own firm belief that an intelligence service should be independent of political influence.

Dagan’s concern over this had turned to anger when Scarlett, with prime minister Tony Blair’s approval, secretly sent a team of officers to Gaza to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas, led by an experienced Middle East veteran intelligence officer, Alistair Cooke. For Dagan, the arrival of an uninvited foreign intelligence service on his doorstep contravened what he saw as a long-standing arrangement over the rules of cooperation. When Dagan had confronted Scarlett, he was reminded that MI6 had a long history of entering into negotiations with outlawed terror groups, notably the IRA in the 1980s, and that dialogue had ultimately led to the armed struggle in Northern Ireland giving way to political negotiation.

“Gaza is not Belfast,” Dagan had said before ending the conversation. For him this signaled a low point in Mossad’s working relationship with MI6. Not for the first time, he had been heard to say the English had never quite come to terms with not being spymasters to the world. It was a view he shared with Carlo de Stefano, director of Italy’s antiterrorism unit; Manolo Navarette, the head of Guardia Civil Intelligence in Spain; and Porter Goss, who had replaced George Tenet as director of the CIA. Goss was no pushover. He was cut in the same no-holds-barred mold as Dagan, saying publicly that Tenet had ignored the agency’s “hard core mission, and that it must return to the ‘good old days of human intelligence’ when information was gathered not by computers and satellites and other sophisticated eavesdropping, but by planting our agents within or behind enemy lines.” Goss suddenly resigned in May 2006, after a turf battle with John Negroponte, the politically shrewd new director of national intelligence, a post created by President Bush to oversee intelligence gathering after 9/11. Goss was already unpopular with senior managers at the CIA, having forced half a dozen to resign. A high-ranking CIA officer told the author, “When Goss quit, there was more champagne drunk than on New Year’s Eve.”

Dagan’s chagrin had increased over what he had learned about MI6’s involvement in the critical intelligence that had clinched the case for Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush going to war with Iraq. The intelligence service had produced what it insisted was “conclusive proof” that vast quantities of yellowcake, the iron ore from which enriched uranium is extracted, had been secretly shipped from the impoverished West African country of Niger. The evidence had hinged on documents MI6 insisted it had obtained from “a trusted source.” Dagan knew it would be unthinkable to reveal such a high-value contact, providing that was who he or she was. Apart from MI6, no one else had seen the documents and there was a mounting suspicion they were not all that MI6 claimed. But if nothing else, Meir Dagan had come to the conclusion that the insistence of John Scarlett to continue to defend the veracity of the documents raised questions about his judgment.

The saga of how that happened would turn out to be a classic dirty tricks operation culminating in October 2005 with Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, being indicted on perjury charges and Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser to President Bush, facing investigation by a grand jury. Their role centered in the unmasking of a CIA field officer, Valerie Plame, the wife of a former U.S. ambassador to Niger, Joseph Wilson. It is a criminal offense in America to identify an active secret agent. Mossad’s role in the fiasco would remain untold until these pages.

The story had properly begun in the summer of 2004 with a former employee of SISMI, the Italian equivalent of the CIA. A year before he, “Giancomo” Martino, had resigned from the service to set himself up as an “intelligence analyst.” In no time in Rome, a city well-stocked with journalists and spies, he became a source for, among others, Mossad’s station, which was housed in a building near the Vatican.

In the world of spies and reporters eager for news, Giancomo was a useful contact able to peer through the keyhole of Italy’s security apparatus. The tanned, bespectacled sixty-year-old, with a liking for sand-colored suits and whose English was spoken with an American twang, had from time to time provided snippets of information that, if not exactly earth-shattering, were nevertheless often intriguing. His most recent offering had been photocopies of SISMI documents that showed the agency had been involved in the notorious case of Roberto Calvi (see chapter 20, “God’s Banker …,” pp. 413–20). The former head of Banco Ambrosiano had close contacts with the Vatican Bank, whose activities were of abiding interest to Mossad. Calvi had been found hanging beneath Blackfriar’s Bridge in London in 1989. The documents Giancomo produced showed three senior SISMI officers had been closely involved with Calvi before his death.

On that summer day in Rome, Giancomo met his Mossad contact, Sammy-O (in the intelligence world aliases are often on a first-name basis, a piece of tradecraft used by most services). But as they sipped drinks in an open-air restaurant, it was not the murky connections between finance and intelligence that Giancomo had to divulge. The seventeen pages he had stored on his laptop came from a time when the CIA and MI6 had been tasked by their political masters to discover evidence that would bolster the claim in Washington that Saddam Hussein had obtained yellowcake ore from Niger. The rock was not only a key material in the process of producing enriched uranium but was also crucial to the Bush/Blair justification for going to war. Sammy-O’s initial study of the documents showed some of them were encrypted, an indication they could be genuine. But there were also spelling mistakes and inconsistencies with dates. Were these the documents George W. Bush and Tony Blair had used to help recruit support for the invasion of Iraq? Giancomo had shrugged, a favourite gesture when he did not wish to commit himself.

Sammy-O had asked Giancomo to explain the spelling mistakes. The informer had again shrugged. Where had the documents originated? Giancomo had replied, according to the agent’s later report submitted to Tel Aviv, that a contact in SISMI had introduced him to a woman official at the Niger Embassy in Rome. After some discussion she had handed the documents over. Sammy-O had the usual questions: Who else had seen them? Why had the woman done that? What deal did Giancomo have with her? Giancomo had refused to answer. The documents indicated the yellowcake ore had been secretly sold to Iraq. They appeared to reinforce the claims of Bush and Blair that they had been right to go to war.

Niger’s yellowcake came from two mines controlled by a French company, who operated within strict international laws governing the export of the ore. One document indicated the ore had come from “unofficial workings” whose product was sold on the black market. It was that market into which Saddam had supposedly tapped. Sammy-O had a final question: How much did Giancomo want for the documents? Fifty thousand Swiss francs was the instant response. The silence that followed was broken by Giancomo.

“The documents are forgeries. They were created by SISMI for the CIA and MI6 to support the claim of Blair and Bush that Saddam Hussein had obtained the ore. Don’t you see what that means?”

Sammy-O saw. The forgeries had been the ones which MI6 had insisted were genuine and which Tony Blair and George Bush had used to defend going to war with Iraq. The documents reinforced the claim of the former ambassador to Niger, Joseph Wilson, who had been sent there by Bush in 2002 to check on their authenticity and had reported back that no yellowcake had gone to Iraq. President Bush had rejected his report and gone to war. When the initial conflict ended, Wilson had finally gone public on his findings and found himself discredited in a campaign orchestrated by Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, which had included them revealing the identity of Wilson’s CIA secret agent wife, Valerie Plame.

What transpired under the café awning between Sammy-O and Giancomo came down to this: Mossad had paid the asking price for the forgeries. For the moment they would be used as a teaching tool at the service’s training school, an example of an operation to seriously embarrass two world leaders. Who had asked SISMI to plant the fake documents would remain unknown, but Mossad knew that in the past the Italian service had bugged the country’s presidential palace and the papal library as a favor to the CIA. And that agency had long fallen out with its Washington masters over the White House deliberately misrepresenting the truth about Saddam’s nonexistent arsenal. Mossad believed Langley had set out to seriously embarrass the Bush administration, who had sidestepped the CIA’s own intelligence-gathering apparatus before the Iraq war and after the conflict had condemned the agency for not providing sufficient intelligence. Using SISMI — and not for the first time — the CIA could expect its complicity to have remained undiscovered. That had happened before in black operations in Latin America. What the CIA had not calculated was Giancomo’s greed for a sale. He knew that Mossad would pay for the documents, whether they were genuine or forgeries, once it realized they were the ones upon which Blair and Bush had largely based their case for going to war. Giancomo’s refusal to say who else had seen them was a strong clue he had sold them to the MI6 station in Rome. All else had flowed from that.

As well as MI6’s continued insistence the forged documents were genuine, there were other claims that concerned Mossad’s view of the way the service was operating under Scarlett. He had claimed another “high-value source” had provided “good evidence” in the run-up to war that Saddam Hussein had portable chemical labs roaming in Iraq deserts ready to launch warheads with chemical and biological agents. The then U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell had endorsed the claim in his eve-of-war address to the United Nations, citing the source as MI6. Later, Mossad’s deep-cover agents had established no mobile labs ever existed.

A senior Mossad analyst recalled (to the author): “MI6 was serving up, at best, speculation, at worst, baseless information as fact. It was the constant promise, underwritten by Scarlett, that the details were well sourced which made them acceptable. Only later, after the war was over, did we see that much of the data from London was often no better than the stuff the ‘spy’ in ‘Our Man In Havana’ dreamed up. He used drawings of a vacuum cleaner to support his reports. MI6 produced toy mobile labs for Powell to display before the United Nations.”

Shortly before the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004, MI6 informed Mossad that the expansion could result in an influx of terrorists into Britain whose prime targets would be the Jewish business community. London Station failed to find any evidence to support this.

In May 2004, Dagan had sensed a sea of change happening in Langley, and he was determined that Mossad would benefit from it. He already knew Porter Goss’s reputation from his eight years as the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, during which he had openly declared the CIA had become too “gunshy” after the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa. Dagan had been further won over when Goss had publicly said he was not against assassinations. “I believe it is a concept most Americans are fairly comfortable with. If you have exhausted all other avenues then the possibility of lethal force is well understood,” he had said after President Bush had nominated him to be the CIA’s next director. His words had found considerable support among conservatives at a time when Osama bin Laden’s freedom remained a major threat to America.

From their first meeting the two spy chiefs had formed an immediate bond. Goss had listened as Dagan had explained how he had inherited a Mossad where morale was low and its reputation seriously damaged, and how he revitalized it by the simple expedient of being a hands-on director. Since coming to office Dagan had made close to fifty trips overseas. Goss had spoken about his own stint with the CIA in the 1960s, the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with a poisoned cigar or a booby-trapped seashell when the Cuban leader went diving. Goss explained that ill health had finally made him give up a career with the Directorate of Operations that was responsible for all spying missions. He had entered politics, winning a seat for the Republicans in Florida. But he had never lost touch with the global intelligence world. In London, Paris, and other European capitals, he had kept alive a network that would serve him well in his new post.

As a practical step in their alliance, Goss and Dagan sent their spies into the badlands of Kazakstan, to the mountains of Kashmir, to the seaports of the Horn of Africa, into the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia, and reinforced their presence in Saudi Arabia.

The Kingdom’s increasing volatility continued to provide a fertile recruiting ground for the jihadists and the seemingly unlimited funds available to finance them. Split by a power struggle, the seventy-nine-year-old King Fahd clinging to life (he would finally die in August 2005) and many of the royal family’s five thousand princes living in fear of the fundamentalist groups sprouting in their midst, had provided them with billions of petrodollars in the hope they would be spared in any insurrection by the country’s radicals. The most extreme spoke of the day when Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi, would bring the royal family to its knees in much the way the Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to Iran in triumph. Already bin Laden had fulminated that shariah law was not being implemented strictly enough in the Kingdom.

Supported by the Bush administration, the House of Saud had finally begun to crack down hard on the fundamentalists. Shoot-outs between the security forces and fundamentalists became routine. Captured jihadists were beheaded, and their heads displayed on spikes in public squares around the country. The displays had only increased the violence. In 2004, over 150 foreigners, agents of the security forces, and terrorists, had died.

While the CIA worked closely with the Saudi secret service to locate the fundamentalists, Mossad’s role was different. With Saudi Arabia having no Jewish economic interests to attack within its borders, Mossad agents were concerned with tracking jihadists coming out of the country and heading toward Israel. All too often before reaching its borders, they met their deaths at the hands of Mossad’s most feared unit, kidon, its assassination squad.

Among the first decisions Meir Dagan had made was to increase its number from forty-eight to sixty; eight of them were women. All kidon had graduated from the Mossad training school at Herseliya before undergoing specialist training at an army facility in the Negev Desert. On graduating, their average age was still in their midtwenties. They regularly underwent the same physical checks as a front-line pilot in the Israeli air force. Between them kidon were fluent in Arabic and the major European languages, English, Spanish, and French. Some had acquired a proficiency in Chinese.

In the $100 billion global intelligence industry, which engaged over a million people, kidon was regarded with respect. With an unpublished budget and no accounting for how it was spent, kidon was also the envy of other secret services. Only the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS) had a similar freedom to kill.

In the past three years Dagan had sent kidon to seek out all those who had been condemned at a meeting he chaired in his office. The assassins had done so in countries across the Middle East, in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, striking in places where the souks and alleys had no names; in each case a killing had been swift and unexpected, using anything from a single bullet to the nape of the neck, to garrotting with a cheese-cutting wire or a knife thrust into the larynx. Kidon had also used nerve agents and a poisoner’s arsenal of substances specially prepared for them. There were many ways of killing, and kidon knew them all.

To perfect their skill they watched some of Israel’s leading forensic pathologists in Tel Aviv’s Institute of Forensic Medical Research at work so as to better understand how to make an assassination appear to be an accident. They learned how a small blemish or a pinprick on a victim’s skin would be a giveaway. Watching the pathologists cutting and dissecting a corpse, kidon were encouraged to ask questions. How had a pathologist decided exactly how a corpse had been murdered? What attempts had been made to disguise the method of killing? What was the significance of some small mark on the skin or damage to an internal organ the pathologist had discovered that had led him to a final conclusion? Later, back at their base, kidon would be closely questioned by an instructor on what they had seen and how it could be used for their own purposes. It was rare that a member of the unit failed the grilling, which would mean coming off the active duty roster for a spell of further intensive study of the pathologists at work.

Kidon routinely drove out to the Institute for Biological Research at Nez Ziona to consult with its scientists in their secure laboratories where they tested the efficacy of chemical and biological weapons prepared in labs in Iran, North Korea, and China. Some of the Institute’s Jewish chemists had once worked for the KGB and the East German Stasi intelligence service. When these collapsed at the end of the Cold War, the scientists were recruited by Mossad.

In a conference room reserved for the purpose, chemists and assassins would sit and discuss the merits and drawbacks of what was available for a specific assassination. Would the killing be at night or day? Some lethal pathogens did not work so well in daylight. Would an assassination be in an open or a closed space? Nerve gas often responded very differently in either situation. Would an aerosol be more effective than an injection? Where should either be aimed at the body? Behind an ear, the back of a hand, a jab into a calf or thigh? The questions required careful answers. A kidon’s life could depend on them.

The choice of location was also important. Some nerve agents smelled of new-mown grass, others of spring flowers. To use them in desert surroundings would risk raising suspicion. Sometimes, however, it was important to leave evidence that kidon had struck to raise fear in others.

More recently, the desert tracks out of Saudi Arabia had been littered with the bodies of dead jihadists who had set off to wage terrorism against Israel — and had encountered kidon.

Mossad’s African safari had been a high mark of its foreign adventures in the 1970s. The classic example of how Meir Amit had put together a textbook operation was part of the curriculum at the Mossad training school. When he came into office, he had studied how a very secret and deadly war had been successfully waged against the KGB and China’s CSIS. Both intelligence services had been training African revolutionaries to mount guerrilla attacks against Western interests from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

The prospect of thousands of well-trained and armed fighters within a few hours’ striking distance of Israel had alarmed the country’s politicians. Meir Amit had sent every available katsa—field officers — and kidon to Central Africa. For three years they waged a pitiless battle of attrition against Russian and Chinese agents. Katsas were killed with the same brutality. Their names were later engraved on one of the sandstone walls of the brain-shaped memorial at Glilot that commemorated Mossad’s dead. In 2005 they numbered ninety-one.

Now this figure could increase as Dagan sent his agents into the jungles of Venezuela, the mountains of Colombia, the back streets of Mexico, the Amazon, and down into Chile and Argentina; in all those countries al-Qaeda was fomenting hatred against Israel. Once more the terror organization was helped by the CSIS Second Intelligence Department of the People’s Liberation Army general staff.

Both organizations had established a strong presence in El Salvador — part of their overall campaign to make Latin America both a powerful new player on the continent for China and to provide al-Qaeda with an operational presence that presented an increasing threat to Jewish interests in the region. San Salvador banks — including offshoots of Israeli, British, and U.S. financial institutions — became a routine stopover for the huge sums of money being laundered by both CSIS and al-Qaeda on cash-washing journeys around the world. These profits from drug running supplemented deals al-Qaeda had made with the drug cartels of Colombia.

Katsas and kidon, supported by CIA and DAS agents, ran a “kill or be killed” campaign in the dense jungles of Venezuela to stop al-Qaeda moving massive quantities of cocaine out of the country into the United States, Europe, and Israel. The dead of al-Qaeda were left to rot in the jungle, a warning to others. The bodies of the agents were airlifted out for burial in their homelands. In Israel there was no official acknowledgement where they had been or what they had done. Only the work of the stonemason at Glilot offered a clue as he carved each name with pride.

In al-Qaeda hideouts in the jungle, evidence had been found that over three thousand American-based companies, many in the high-tech industry, had been penetrated by the organization buying stocks. U.S. Treasury officials calculated that in 2004 the terror group had invested over a billion U.S. dollars. The shares had been acquired through investment brokerages in Asia, Malta, and Poland, payment having first been processed through banks in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. FBI director Robert Mueller had assigned 167 senior agents to try and unravel the complicated financial structure that now gave al-Qaeda a growing presence in the global financial markets.

David Szady, the FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, had called the situation “a most grave and present danger. It could undermine the national security and economic advantage of the United States” (to the author).

At the center of al-Qaeda’s money-laundering activities was the software program, Promis, developed by the Washington-based specialist company, Inslaw, and subsequently obtained by Israel. A copy of the software had later found its way into the hands of Osama bin Laden. It had originally been stolen from the FBI by Robert Hannsen, a long-time KGB spy in the agency. He had passed it on to the KGB, and its agents had then sold it to bin Laden.

While in Washington, al-Qaeda’s tangled financial web was slowly being untangled, in Latin America Mossad had established how the terror group’s operatives entered the continent through Honduras and Venezuela. The CSIS had high-speed trawlers based in Cuba capable of running the terrorists across the Caribbean to the virtually unguarded coastline of both countries.

When China’s president, Hu Jinto, had visited Cuba in late 2005, he had agreed to provide Castro with the latest signals intelligence and electronic-warfare facilities. The complex was near Bejucal, twenty miles south of Havana. At the other end of the island, Chinese technicians had installed a surveillance system capable of eavesdropping on classified U.S. military communications by intercepting satellite signals. The presence of these powerful monitoring posts enabled China to conduct electronic surveillance of the southern United States and across Central America. They gave al-Qaeda cells on the continent vital foreknowledge of moves by Mossad and the CIA to attack them.

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan had told senior staff that he shared Porter Goss’s frustration that there could be no preemptive strike against the Cuban sites.

“The memory of the Bay of Pigs fiasco still haunts Washington,” Dagan was quoted as telling his staff.

On an afternoon in early February 2005, when even the air pollution was bearable, a Mossad agent, code named “Manuel,” had arrived in Mexico City’s international airport. He had flown from Florida on a Spanish passport; his base was in the city, a safe house in a neighborhood settled mostly by Jews who had retired.

In the past weeks he had visited the Bogotá headquarters of DAS, Colombia’s intelligence service, and the security services of Peru, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic. His hosts had described the extent of al-Qaeda’s penetration of their countries. In Colombia, it had held meetings with FARC, the country’s terror group, and with Shining Path, the Peruvian anarchists. Before he left, DAS had given Manuel copious documents showing how hard it was trying to cope with the terrorism al-Qaeda had brought within their borders and which they had little firsthand knowledge about. Manuel had promised he would arrange for key members of their security forces to come to Israel and receive firsthand briefing.

Mossad had been doing that for years in third world countries. It was another way to have its own contacts on the inside and work through them to fight terrorism.

In Mexico, Manuel was not yet certain he would find suitable contacts. Its law-enforcement agencies, especially its police, had a deserved reputation for bribery and corruption. Officers were involved in drug smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, and killings. But most alarming of all were the links between al-Qaeda and the country’s Popular Revolutionary Army, EPR. They had been discovered in documents during antiterrorist operations by the CIA in Pakistan to try and locate Osama bin Laden. Copies had been passed on to Mossad at the instigation of Porter Goss. As well as confirming al-Qaeda ties with the substantial student population of Muslims on Dominica and the large number of Arabs living on Peru’s border with Chile, the documents revealed that EPR had a key role in helping al-Qaeda operatives enter the United States through the busiest land crossing in the world, Tijuana.

Mossad analysts believed the documents were authored by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leading strategist. His psychoprofile in the Mossad archives included the observation that his few pleasures included watching videos of the attacks of 9/11. Since then he was reported to have made several visits to Latin America.

Manuel was eager to know if Mexico’s Center for Investigation and National Security, CISEN, could provide further evidence of this. He would be unlucky. Its director, Eduardo Medina, insisted his service had no reason to believe al-Qaeda had any presence in Mexico. “Purely media speculation,” he had said.

Next day Manuel caught a plane back to Florida. He had found no one in Mexican intelligence he would recommend should be invited to Israel. When he had made his report, he would then fly to Washington on a very different assignment.

At 10:00 a.m. EST, on a biting cold winter day, January 14, 2005, a war game chaired by POTUS — White House speak for the president of the United States — stand-in Madeleine Albright entered a hotel ballroom in midtown Washington, D.C., to preside over a summit of world leader stand-ins. They had convened in the expectation that they would discuss how best to handle the greatest natural disaster in modern history, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the death toll of which had climbed to over one hundred thousand and would eventually reach beyond three hundred thousand.

Instead, Manuel was among a select number of official observers invited to see how another and even more dangerous crisis would be handled. It posed a threat that successive Mossad directors, like intelligence chiefs everywhere, feared more than any other attack. What was about to be unveiled in the ballroom was a threat virtually impossible to detect in its creation or launch.

The CIA had learned that a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda had stolen a small quantity of smallpox virus from a biocontainment laboratory in Siberia. The lab was one of two places in the world where the virola was contained under stringent World Health Organization (WHO) protocols. The other was the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. The Siberian facility had a security system built by the Bechtel Group and paid for by the U.S. government to protect freezers containing 120 different smallpox samples. The CIA had still not established how the theft had happened or where the virus had been taken.

The president had been briefed that the virus was one of the most deadly diseases on earth; in the twentieth century alone it had killed 300 million people. It was not until 1980 that WHO announced smallpox had been eradicated. Now on that January morning, POTUS had summoned her fellow leaders to tell them it was once more a threat.

They sat in a U-shaped area of desks on which were phones, computers, and TV screens. Each desk bore a name: Prime Minister of United Kingdom; President of France; Chancellor of Federal Republic of Germany; Prime Minister of Canada; Prime Minister of Poland; President of European Commission; Prime Minister of Sweden; Director General of World Health Organization.

POTUS took a seat in their midst and began to outline the theft from the Siberia laboratory. She was still speaking when the television screens on the desks came alive. A masked man said he represented New Jihad, a group affiliated to al-Qaeda, and claimed responsibility for the theft of the virus. It would be used against the enemies of Islam.

The screens went blank and the stunned listeners looked at each other in disbelief. The ringing of their telephones broke the silence. The calls brought news that the first cases of smallpox had already been reported in the Netherlands; in Rotterdam over eight hundred people had become infected with the virola, which had been spread through the air ducts in the city’s subways. Some victims were already displaying rashlike spots on their skin and lesions in their mouths, a sign victims were at their most infectious. Similar cases were being reported in Istanbul. Turkish doctors saw that papules, the rashlike dots of the disease, had begun to turn into pustules. This usually occurs on the fifth or sixth day. A few infected saliva droplets on the breath would bring a victim close to death.

The next report came from Frankfurt International Airport, where passengers were showing difficulty in eating and swallowing. Some of the travelers had flown in from Munich from where the first reports of the presence of smallpox in Germany had come: a family had manifested the symptoms after arriving from Turkey. By noon, two hours after the first telephone calls, the number of cases had risen to 3,320. Most were in Europe, but in the early afternoon reports came of infected passengers from Mexico arriving at Los Angeles International Airport.

Meantime, anti-Muslim riots had broken out in Rotterdam, and panic-driven Poles along their country’s border with Germany had fought with border patrols trying to stop them entering the Federal Republic. Poland’s stockpile of smallpox vaccine was able to protect only some 5 percent of its population. The Federal Republic was only one of a handful of countries with sufficient stocks to vaccinate its entire population. The others were the United States, Great Britain, France, and Holland. The U.S. government had stopped mass vaccination of its population twenty years previously, when it was decided the risk of side effects from the vaccine outweighed the possibility of catching the disease. The death from side effects was calculated at 100 per 100 million vaccinated.

Five hours into the outbreak, just as in the wake of 9/11, the United States closed its borders. But it was too late. On Wall Street trading came to a halt, as it did in London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, and all the other financial centers around the world. It was the onset of global economic collapse.

As the crisis unfolded, so did the decisions. An appeal from Turkey — a NATO ally and a moderate Muslim country — for the United States to provide vaccine was rejected.

“The United States feels unappreciated now because of world condemnation of our position in Iraq. A lot of Americans are asking why should we help countries who do not support us,” said POTUS.

The British prime minister reminded his fellow leaders that “the harsh economic climate following the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a brain drain of former laboratory scientists who had worked in the country’s bioweapons programs. Leaving in droves, some made their way to Syria, Iran, and North Korea. The result is what we’re confronting here.”

By early afternoon, POTUS and the other world leaders had received projections on how the smallpox would spread. Within a month, there would be hundreds of thousands of deaths. Within a year the global number would have reached tens of millions. The computer projection showed that neither the medieval Black Death, the bubonic plague that had come close to destroying Europe, nor the influenza pandemic of 1918 would match the pandemic created by the smallpox disaster of 2005.

It was only then that POTUS looked around to her fellow leaders and spoke. “Gentlemen, we all know now what we face. We should all thank God this has not happened.” There were murmurs of agreement from those present.

The events unfolded in that Washington ballroom, titled “Atlantic Storm,” were designed by the world’s leading experts on bioterrorism. Former prime ministers and senior diplomats represented other countries. For five intense hours they had tried to cope with one emergency report after the other. Increasingly, their efforts to stop the spread of smallpox had faltered. Albright told her fellow “world leaders” that “the crisis we have failed to successfully cope with will face us, if not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow. But it will come …”

When Meir Dagan read her words, he echoed them. Then he and Porter Goss wrote a document that was circulated to European intelligence chiefs. Titled “The Future of Bioweapons,” it concluded: “Al-Qaeda will soon be in a position to create artificially engineered biological agents which can spread disease on an unparalleled scale. The same science which is taught in universities can now be adapted to create the world’s most frightening weapons. We must be aware that al-Qaeda is investing in postgraduate Muslim students on our campuses in the same way it invested in sending the 9/11 pilots to our flying schools.”

There was no more than a polite response from other intelligence chiefs. The feeling was that once again Mossad and the CIA were combining to raise the level of the terrorist threat. This was particularly felt in London where MI5 and MI6 were still irritated by the constant demands from Israel that Britain should curb the activities of radical Muslim preachers allowed to remain in the country. In mosques in London and elsewhere in Britain they openly preached hatred against Israel and the United States.

On a Monday morning in the first week of March 2005, the heads of Israel’s intelligence community drove down Tel Aviv’s Rehov Shaul Hamaleku and turned into the Kirya, the headquarters of the Israeli Defence Forces. They included the director of Shin Bet, the service responsible for internal security; the heads of Air Force and Naval intelligence; the commander of the Sholdag special forces battalion, and the chief of the Research and Political Center that advised the country’s policy makers on long-term strategy. Meir Dagan, in his capacity as menume, which roughly translates from Hebrew as “first among equals,” chaired the meeting. On the agenda was a subject never far from the minds who had assembled in the conference room: Iran.

Every man could recall the years of tension the Islamic Republic had brought to Israel since 1979. Over the ensuing twenty-six years, its policy had been articulated in a huge banner draped above the main entrance to the foreign ministry in Tehran. It bore the chilling words in Farsi: “Israel Must Burn.”

For all those years Iran had been a terrorist-sponsoring nation, with particularly close ties to Hezbollah. Most of the weapons used by that group came from Iran. It was also currently engaged in undermining the fledgling democracy in Iraq by supporting its growing terrorism. Yet the diplomats of Washington’s State Department and Britain’s Foreign Office still clung to the belief that Iran was in a transition period toward democracy, and that there were moderates in the regime who could be persuaded to enter into an “accommodation” with the West and convince Hezbollah and other terror groups to cease their attacks on Israel. Mossad’s eavesdroppers and informers in Gaza had overheard the MI6 team reiterating the claim.

John Scarlett’s continued refusal to withdraw the team had led to an increasing coldness in Mossad’s relationship with MI6. While important intelligence passed between both services on the usual need-to-know basis, Nathan, the London station chief, no longer took a regular cab ride from the Israeli Embassy in Kensington to the glass-faced building overlooking the river Thames, known as “the wedding cake” for its tiered shape, to share a convivial hour with senior MI6 officers over drinks and sandwiches. The occasions were a chance to get to know the thinking within MI6 on a wide variety of issues, and there were lively discussions on what one MI6 officer had called “the current state of play” in Damascus, Riyadh, and Egypt. In that closed world in the hospitality suite on the fifth floor, what was not said was often as important as what was said. Scarlett had sometimes dropped in on those gatherings to inquire how things were in Tel Aviv.

But until the “Gaza business” was settled, contacts with MI6 were to be confined to essentials. Mossad’s mood had not improved when Nathan’s MI6 liaison officer had said that the Hamas team believed it was making good progress in persuading Hezbollah to end its attacks on Israel.

But for the moment the stand-off with London was of less importance than the reason for the meeting. For the men around the conference table, who had helped Israel to survive war and Intifadas, the high-resolution satellite photographs spread before them told a grim story. The images were of Iran’s nuclear facilities filmed only a week before by Israel’s own satellite. They showed the six prime plants that were scattered across the country. Each facility was buried under thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, hard to penetrate with even the BLU-109 “bunker buster” bombs the United States had recently sold to Israel.

Accompanying the images were reports from Mossad’s deep-penetration agents in the country. Their identities were a closely guarded secret between Dagan and his assistant director on the seventh floor of the headquarters building. One agent had revealed that the Natanz facility in southern Iran was working around the clock to enable its fifty thousand centrifuges to eventually produce huge quantities of enriched uranium in its three heavily fortified underground structures. Another report demonstrated how Russia had provided 150 technicians to upgrade the Bushehr nuclear power plant on the Persian Gulf, severely damaged in Iran’s war with Iraq. A third report described the installation at the Sharif University of Technology of centrifuges capable of running a uranium-enrichment program. Yet another report highlighted the capability of the University of Tehran’s nuclear reactor to come on stream in Iran’s drive to build a nuclear bomb. One agent had pinpointed the entrances to underground facilities in the desert fastness of Yazd Province. The most detailed report described a plant on the outskirts of the ancient city of Esfahan. Sited close to the eastern suburbs, the cluster of modern buildings were near the towering Emam mosque and the magnificent eleventh-century bridge over the Zadaneh Rud River along which the carpet weavers of Esfahan have exported their wares for a millennium.

The men around the conference table saw the area around the uranium conversion facility had been recently reinforced, making it the most heavily guarded of all the facilities. A defense perimeter of antiaircraft guns, razor wire, and thousands of heavily armed soldiers now surrounded the plant hewn into a hill. It was its capability to enrich uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas that was reason enough for Israel’s intelligence community to assemble in the room. The Mossad agent’s report had ended with the revelation that Esfahan’s uranium conversion facility had already produced three tons of UF6 gas. This was sufficient to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear power — which Iran claimed it would be used for — or for the fifty thousand centrifuges at Natanz ninety miles to the northwest to produce a nuclear weapon.

The agent’s report listed other sites where missile production was underway. The largest was Darkhovin, south of the city of Ahvaz. The facility was heavily fortified with two battalions of the Revolutionary Guard. It employed three thousand scientists and engineers. Most of their work was underground building rocket motors. Mu-allimn Kalayeh was sited in the mountains near Qasvin, its uranium enrichment gas centrifuges produced the enriched weapons-grade material for warheads. Saghand was in the remote desert east of Tehran. It employed eight hundred technicians building casings for the rockets. Nekka, near the Caspian Sea, was buried underground; the complex employed over a thousand scientists. Its facilities included a Neutron Source Reactor purchased from North Korea.

A separate report on the table before the intelligence chiefs was from Israel’s own atomic experts. They estimated between fifteen hundred and two thousand centrifuges would create sufficient enriched uranium to manufacture one atomic bomb a year, and that could come as early as 2007, when the Natanz nuclear facility’s centrifuges would all be fully operational.

Dagan revealed that Mossad had discovered Ali Shamkhani, Iran’s defense minister, was in secret discussions with Syria to move eleven Iraqi nuclear scientists from Damascus to Tehran. They had arrived in Syria shortly before the collapse of the Saddam regime, bringing with them CDs of their research on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program. In Syria the scientists had been given new identities and hidden away in a military base north of Damascus. Syria’s president, Bashir Asad, made one stipulation for the transfer to Iran: it must share its nuclear research with Syria. It could provide al-Qaeda with the basis to make a dirty bomb — yet another threat the men around the table had long feared.

Six years before, on April 21, 1999, over a hundred Israeli sailors had checked into small hotels and gasthause in the German port city of Kiel. They wore casual clothes and, when asked, told their hosts they were members of a holiday club. Each was a member of Force 700, created to give Israel a crucial third pillar of its nuclear defense to equal their country’s already powerful land- and air-strike capability.

Thirty-two years before, their predecessors had performed a similar function to smuggle seven gunboats out of Cherbourg, which had been paid for but which the French government of the day had embargoed after Israeli commandoes had destroyed thirteen Lebanese aircraft at Beirut airport — itself a reprisal for a PLO attack on an El Al 707 at Athens airport two days’ previously.

The decision to create Force 700 had come only much later, when Israel had placed an order with the Howaldswerke Deutsche Werft shipyard for three Dolphin-class submarines, among the most modern afloat, each displacing 1,720 tonnes and costing US$300 million apiece. The arrival of the sailors in Kiel on a warm spring day was surrounded with even more secrecy than Operation Noah had used to smuggle the gunboats out of France.

Critical to the Kiel operation had been keeping secret that among the thirty-five Israeli naval officers and ratings for each submarine were five specialist technicians who would be responsible for firing the nuclear weapons each submarine would carry if the order was given. These armaments would be fitted when the boats reached Haifa.

The three Dolphins left Kiel and headed for Haifa where specially prepared pens awaited them. For the next six weeks they were fitted with an adapted version of the Promis software that had been developed by Inslaw, the specialist Washington-based company. The software would allow each submarine to locate and destroy a target up to one thousand miles away. Promis was also programmed to probe defenses around a target and calculate the complex mathematics that would ensure a direct hit. After the software had been installed, each submarine was equipped with twenty-four cruise missiles. Fitted with nuclear warheads, each missile would have a destructive power greater than the Hiroshima bomb. Test firings, using dummy warheads, had been successfully carried out in the Indian Ocean.

Now, on that March day in 2005, the three Dolphins were directed to take up station on the seabed in the Persian Gulf and target Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The matter of if and when to launch a preemptive strike against Iran would require Mossad to make a clear recommendation to prime minister Ariel Sharon. As the air in the Kirya conference room grew heavy with cigarette smoke, everyone knew that, depending on what the response would be, it could destroy President Bush’s Middle East peace plan — already plagued with uncertainties — and trigger a powerful retaliation from Tehran against Israel and Jewish interests around the world. A preemptive strike against Iran could also draw fire from Syria and unleash the various terrorist groups in all-out jihad.

The head of the Research and Political Center raised other considerations. How would America, Britain, and the rest of the world react to such a strike? There were now powerful voices in the United States and Europe who would launch a verbal onslaught against Israel because an attack on Iran would create an environmental catastrophe on a par with the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986. Israel could find itself politically and economically isolated in the world.

But any attack would require a measure of coordination with American forces in the Gulf. Israeli warplanes would probably require to overfly Turkey and close to Iraqi airspace, which was under the complete control of the Pentagon. But that would present a further problem with Washington. The Arab world, and probably beyond, would see an air attack as part of a joint effort with the United States. Almost certainly it would be followed by new terrorist strikes on American soil.

Increasingly the feeling among the men in the Kirya conference room was to take all necessary precautions but not recommend a preemptive strike. In the meantime, Meir Dagan would send his already hard-pressed agents back into Kurdish Iraq, long a listening post close to Iran, and send other katsas into a country that had also become an area of mounting concern for the Mossad chief: Pakistan.