Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 23 THE PAKISTANI NUCLEAR BLACK MARKETEER

The mountain Spring flowers of the Hindu Kush would have briefly blossomed when the Mossad agent met his Pakistani informer. Both were on the front line against terrorism, bound by a common cause. Pakistan had become part of Mossad’s front line against terrorism since the arrival of al-Qaeda as the world’s major terror group. To recruit informers in the country was a priority. Jamal, the code name for the Mossad agent, had encountered Horaj on his first trip to the region in 2001. Jamal had listened carefully to Horaj as Horaj expressed fears that Pakistan would become a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism he was ready to do anything to stop. Initially, Jamal wondered if Horaj’s offer to inform for Israel had really been motivated by a desire to return respectability to his religion, which had been hijacked by the Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden, who he believed had distorted the words of the Prophet to create hatred and fear. But Mossad psychologists had studied Jamal’s background reports on Horaj and decided he could serve a useful role. Conspicuously excluded from the Washington list of states that sponsored terrorism was Pakistan. Indeed, after the September 11 attacks, the country had been regularly praised in the words of Condoleezza Rice as “our important ally in the war on terrorism.” On the speed dial of her secure desk telephone was a button that enabled the secretary of state to reach Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf. Another button was her direct link to President George Bush. Dr. Rice, a fifty-year-old former academic and Soviet specialist, was Bush’s key adviser on foreign affairs and had guided his decision to keep Pakistan on-side, choosing to ignore that since 1989 the country had supported a number of Kashmiri terror groups in their war against India. They had carried out several mass killings on the subcontinent, helped by Pakistani intelligence agents to select targets and provide advance planning, which had included the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.

Mossad had become alarmed when Pakistan had developed its nuclear capability, which Musharraf had lauded as “our equaliser, which serves as a restraining influence on India.” In Washington, Israel’s fear that Pakistan had a weapon that could threaten the Jewish state was downplayed. A large number of officers in Pakistan’s intelligence services were not only members of the country’s radical religious groups but were also strong supporters of al-Qaeda. Would that terror group one day be able to acquire the means to make at least a “dirty bomb” or even obtain a fully fledged nuclear weapon? It was a question constantly debated within Mossad and which had once more brought Jamal on a long journey through icy ravines and past mountains shrouded in cloud to keep his appointment. Waiting for him was his informer, Horaj. The payment Horaj received each time he met Jamal may also have been a contributing factor to have brought him once more to this bleak vastness close to the roof of the world.

This was a land where Alexander the Great had lost an entire division one winter and, centuries later, where the Russians had fought, and lost, their war against the Mujahideen tribesmen of Afghanistan. And here, against a mountain peak cloaked permanently in snow and deep fissures splitting the rocks, American Special Forces had lost some of their finest in their search for Osama bin Laden.

The most advanced technology in the world had been mobilized in that hunt. A hyperspectral satellite, the first of its kind, was geopositioned in the deep black of space, its hundreds of narrow wavelength bands designed to reflect energy from objects on the ground to detect specific terrain such as rock, vegetation, buildings, caves, and any human presence. Another satellite used the “spectral fingerprints” to take mono photos, each with a resolution of ten centimeters per pixel. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) transmitted images at night in the often atrocious weather conditions of the area. Drones — unmanned aircraft — had constantly imaged an area the size of California every twenty-four hours from a cruising height of sixty-five thousand feet. Closer to ground, Predators — other radio-controlled unmanned aircraft — flying at heights of one hundred to twenty-five thousand feet had relayed data to where the Special Forces waited beside their helicopters, each fitted with “whispering technology,” which made their approach virtually silent. They were armed with AGM-130 missiles that could be radar directed into the mouths of tunnels where bin Laden could be hiding. But the targets had been few and far between, and none of them had been the serpent’s den of the most wanted man in the world.

Now in the spring of 2005, America’s wonder weapons had gone to search elsewhere. Their departure had brought a wry smile from Meir Dagan when he had observed that technology still could not outsmart human intelligence. There is a saying in Mossad that information was only as good as its source. Jamal believed in Horaj he had the best. Jamal was not only fluent in Pakistan’s official language, Urdu, but in several of the local dialects. But like all else about the two men, the dialect they conversed in was cloaked in the essential secrecy upon which their lives depended. Horaj’s ethnic group — whether he was a Punjabi, a Sindhi, a Pushtu, a Baluchi, or a Muhajir — was known only to Jamal and his case officer in the Directorate of Operations. All other personal details, such as his age and marital status, were similarly restricted. Most protected of all was where Horaj worked and the level of access he had to information valuable to Israel. Consequently, none of his reports ever ended up in the Mossad archive’s file on the individual whose actions had once more brought the two men to their clandestine meeting.

The man was Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Physically unremarkable, his lack of size was compensated with a winning smile for any woman who caught his eye — and many did — and matched by an overbearing arrogance toward those who dared to challenge him. He had easy access to Pakistan’s leaders; lesser politicians spoke his name with awe. Those who refused to do his bidding found themselves banned from his inner circle; former prime minister Benazir Bhutto admitted that during her term of office even she was not allowed to visit Khan’s research laboratories. It was there, in July 1976, he had used his years of research in Germany, Belgium, and Holland to understand the techniques for producing the enriched uranium needed to make a nuclear bomb. Eight years before, after neighboring India had tested its own nuclear bomb, Khan had been put in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Mossad discovered that during his time in Holland on the staff of the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (FDO), Khan had access to the nearby URENCO uranium enrichment plant at Almemo. Established in 1970 by Britain, West Germany, and Holland, it provided a supply of enriched uranium for European nuclear reactors. To do so it used highly classified centrifuge technology to separate fissionable uranium-235 from U-238, spinning a mixture of the two isotopes at up to one hundred thousand revolutions a minute. Mossad established that successfully mastering the complexity of this technology had enabled Khan to create Pakistan’s own nuclear arsenal in the utmost secrecy. After doing so, the country’s newspapers front-paged his boast: “Our detractors who told the U.S. that Pakistan could never produce the bomb now know we have done it.” For adoring millions of Pakistanis he became a revered figure, the genius who had provided a means to stop any preemptive strike by India.

Khan had remained a magical figure like no other in Pakistan, perhaps like no person in the Muslim world they had read about in their newspapers or heard of on radio or television. Fawned upon by the rich and famous, he was invited to sail on their luxury yachts on the French Riviera, flying there in their private jets.

Mossad knew there was another darker, and for Israel, far more dangerous side to Abdul Qadeer Khan. During one of his European jaunts, a Mossad agent had managed to gain entry to Khan’s hotel suite and accessed his briefcase. Using a matchbox-sized camera, the agent had photographed documents that provided the first concrete evidence that Khan had recently bought five thousand specialized magnets from a government company in Beijing. The magnets were to speed up the process of uranium enrichment. Other documents showed that Khan had also made contact with other aspirant nuclear states, notably North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. In his book-lined office was a report from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Khan liked to show visitors the passage he had highlighted: “A 10-kiloton bomb is smuggled into Manhattan and explodes at Grand Central. Some half-a-million people are killed and the United States suffers $1 trillion in direct economic damage.” Khan would snap shut the book and replace it without comment on its shelf, no doubt secure in the knowledge he had created for Pakistan the weapon to achieve such a horrific scenario. Khan was the flawed genius, not only motivated by personal greed but also driven by a religious fanaticism and a contempt for Western values. As the Khan Research Laboratories became a mecca to which the scientists of third world nations came to seek his services for helping them acquire skills in the black art of nuclear bomb making, he had become rich and powerful. He had also become a target for Mossad’s kidon. The unit had begun the slow, meticulous process of ascertaining all information its assassins needed when devising the most effective way of killing him.

Mossad had already dealt with one foreign scientist who had been identified as a threat, Gerald Bull. He had created, for Saddam Hussein, a supergun capable of launching nuclear warheads directly from Iraq into Israel. On March 20, 1990, three kidon had executed Bull on the doorstep of his luxury apartment in Brussels (see chapter 6, “Avengers,” pp. 119–21). However, assassinating Khan was more complex. He was a national hero and the repercussions would extend beyond any direct retaliation against Israel. While Washington had imposed sanctions on both Pakistan and India for conducting nuclear tests, the United States wanted to maintain its support against the steady expansion of China; it would condemn Israel for the assassination. Nevertheless, kidon were asked to prepare a number of “options”—the detailed research that would be the prelude to any killing of Khan. Ari Ben-Menashe, who had tasked kidon to prepare “options” during his time with Mossad, said (to the author): “What they were doing was essential to their kind of operation. Their baseline is getting to know their target, his or her habits and style. How he or she reacts to a situation, what pushes his or her buttons. Only then could they construct an operational plan.”

Footage of Khan’s appearances on television and on cinema newsreels had been studied along with his endless newspaper interviews and magazine profiles. The names of his close associates were noted — fellow scientists in the nuclear program, secretive background men who worked directly with him. His journeys around Pakistan, Asia, and to Europe were carefully charted; how he liked his favorite seat when flying with Pakistan Airways—3A in First Class — and that his accommodation choices in Europe’s capitals were usually presidential suites. It was there that he had met diplomats from China, Iran, and Iraq. Many of these hotel suites were already on kidon computers so that if it were required to bug them it would be possible to do so. Details of his sexual preferences were investigated. Did he have a liking for a particular kind of woman? Could any of the companions he had been seen with in public be open to blackmail?

The profile of Abdul Khan had been painstakingly built from a wide range of sources. Part of that planning included the recruiting of Horaj. He and Jamal had met again after that momentous day, February 4, 2004, when Khan had sat in a television studio in Islamabad, faced the camera and made one of the most astonishing confessions in the long history of treachery.

“I am solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear weapons material,” he intoned.

Before a stunned nation could adjust to the revelation, Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, dressed in commando fatigues — he had been an army general — took Khan’s place and announced that though “I was shocked by these revelations,” he would nevertheless pardon Khan, whom he called “my hero,” because of all his services to Pakistan. The excuse was less than the truth. Mossad knew that Musharraf could not afford to bring Khan to trial.

While the kidon continued preparing the ground for any decision to assassinate Khan, Meir Dagan and his analysts saw the scientist’s confession and the equally extraordinary response by Musharraf as evidence of a massive cover-up to hide the full extent of Pakistan’s complicity in nuclear proliferation. It was a cover-up buttressed by cynical political maneuvring. It had started when Pakistan won over China by supporting its border dispute with India. This led to a deepening relationship between Islamabad and Beijing. In the region’s political jigsaw of alliances, it brought North Korea, an old ally of China, into friendly contact with Pakistan. At first it was only cultural and exploratory visits by diplomats. But in Islamabad, Khan was watching and waiting; his finely tuned political nose told him it would not be long before the way was open for nuclear deal making.

China had also been nurturing its relationship with Iran. It began in October 1984 when the first planeload of nuclear components had landed in Tehran. Since then Beijing had provided three subcritical and zero-rated reactors and an electromagnetic isotope separation machine used in the process of creating enriched uranium. An 80-kilowatt thermal research reactor had followed. Each shipment had been monitored by Mossad’s deep-cover agents in Iran.

Meantime Saddam Hussein, in the midst of his eight-year war with Iran, had turned to India for help to kick-start his nuclear arsenal. To encourage Delhi, he had publicly endorsed India’s nuclear testing, and Iraq began to receive equipment to create a small amount of enriched uranium. It was all done in great secrecy, with the equipment described as “agricultural components.” Mossad set out to expose what was happening. It dusted down a copy of a long-forgotten treaty of nuclear cooperation Iran had signed with India in 1974. The document was fed to the Iranian media. The revelation caused the furor in Tehran Mossad had intended.

Alarmed, the ayatollahs turned to China for assistance. But by then Beijing was already engaged, with the same secrecy it armed Iran, in providing Iraq with missiles to help Saddam fulfill his dream of reshaping the Middle East in his image and creating mayhem for the world’s economic and political security. Beijing, ever ready to assist the rogue states, suggested the ayatollahs should invite Abdul Qadeer Khan to visit Tehran. Arrangements were quickly made. Khan was issued a false passport and papers describing him as a carpet salesman. In reality he was a carpetbagger, a scientist, with his country’s blessing, off to market its most precious secrets for money.

He returned weeks later, cast by his hosts as the godfather of their nuclear hopes and with a substantial sum of money in a Swiss bank account. No doubt having enjoyed the favors bestowed by the ayatollahs, Khan had looked for other nations he could similarly service. To do so he enlisted the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Service intelligence agency, ISI, the most powerful of the country’s security apparatus. The service already had a large number of officers who were anti-Semitic, and Khan’s verbal attacks on Israel made him a welcome guest in their midst. They readily devised the documentation needed for the scientist to carry out nuclear-technology transfers.

After Tehran, the tireless Khan’s next port of call was to the closed world of North Korea. He did so on the back of Pakistan’s deal for Pyongyang to supply a range of conventional military equipment. In return Khan agreed to provide blueprints and state-of-the-art P1 centrifuges for the country’s nuclear program. What began as a deal based on North Korea’s need for hard currency and Pakistan’s requirement for conventional army equipment soon developed into a barter arrangement.

“One of Khan’s blueprints appeared to be worth a container filled with North Korean field artillery,” a Mossad analyst said (to the author).

Khan’s activities had gained Pakistan increased influence as the Muslim world’s first nuclear power; this was demonstrated by continued vast sums paid directly into Khan’s bank accounts. By the time he had made his confessions on television, Mossad calculated he had acquired over $10 million. It made him one of the wealthiest men in Pakistan.

All these details had been passed by Mossad to the CIA at the time George Tenet was on the verge of resigning. But there was no sign the Bush administration had ever warned Musharraf to stop Khan’s activities. Or an explanation why, eventually, Washington had only finally delivered a mild response to Khan’s television admission. Indeed, Musharraf’s pardon had earned praise from Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state. Poker-faced, he said, “Pakistan’s president is the right man in the right place.”

Armitage’s words were seen as further evidence that Washington’s hunt for Osama bin Laden had become, said a Mossad officer with years of experience in counterterrorism (to the author), “that most dangerous of all in intelligence, a hunt driven by an obsession that overrides all else. For Bush, nailing bin Laden had become personal from 9/11. He would continue to sanction huge sums, men, and materials to capture him. Anyone who could help do that could ask for anything. Musharraf was in that category.”

The president had seized power in a coup d’état in 1999. Despite the country’s large Muslim majority, many of whom were fundamentalists, when 9/11 happened Musharraf offered unwavering support for Bush’s war on terrorism. It was a huge gamble for a president who by then was already finding it hard to hold on to power. He had survived three assassination attempts and daily found himself confronting not only the country’s religious leaders over their entrenched anti-American views but also the army and the ISI for his support in the war on terrorism. For many of them bin Laden was a folk hero. As he flitted through the mountains bordering Afghanistan with the peaks of the Northwest Frontier, always one step ahead of the U.S. Special Forces hunting him, he received help from members of the ISI.

At the time Khan was making his confession on television, the Special Forces near the northern provinces of Pakistan had once more picked up bin Laden’s trail. The sightings were sent to the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on to the CIA, and finally to the Pentagon and State Department. Everyone recognized that this was a sensitive time. Only a week before, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Musharraf had said he would not allow American troops to search for bin Laden inside Pakistan. Washington had gritted its teeth and said nothing.

Mossad’s station in the capital had pieced together the understanding of what had transpired behind the scenes. Washington would not pressurize Musharraf to bring Khan for trial over nuclear arms trafficking. Instead, it would remain focused on Pakistan’s continued support for the war on terrorism. In return the Pakistan army and the ISI would hunt for bin Laden inside the country. U.S. Special Forces would be allowed to participate but only under Pakistani command. It was a recipe for mutual suspicion in the field; and after four weeks, not surprisingly with no trace of bin Laden, the search was abandoned.

Bin Laden had issued several tapes since he had first exulted over the destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The Mossad specialists — psychiatrists, psychologists, and behavioural scientists — determined that bin Laden continued to sound like a man who had created his own reality. Their conclusion (seen by the author) was: “At the core of his thinking is death. From his manner and his speech patterns, death is now an integral part of his life. It is not rage that drives him. There is a deeper and all-animating and all-emerging force. His voice is not simply that of the classic street demagogue. It displays what can be called ‘the evil of the truly evil.’ Hitler and Stalin possessed the same vocal traits. He is driven by masked violence. This allows him to operate in a completely detached manner against all those he does not accept have a right to live.”

The arrival of his latest video in November 2004 had caused a frisson of excitement among the Mossad analysts. It had been made in a television studio with good quality sound and lighting. He had been filmed against a silk drape; its yellow color was known to be that of his favourite Afghan flower. But it was bin Laden himself who intrigued the analysts. His robes were no longer those of the mountain man but those worn by wealthy city dwellers. His stick and the Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder — props he had always displayed on previous videos — had gone. His beard was neatly trimmed, his eyes clear, his skin healthy. He no longer looked the sick man of his previous videos. When he spoke, his delivery was calm and measured. In earlier videos his mumbling and hesitations had been marked. The latest video suggested he had received professional voice coaching. When he spoke, it was directly into the camera.

The Mossad analysts wondered if the video had been made either in Pakistan or even possibly in one of the northwest provinces of China, where several million Muslims lived in uneasy communion with the Beijing regime. Untold thousands were al-Qaeda supporters and worked in gangs smuggling humans or narcotics into the West. The analysts concluded that one of those gangs had been entrusted to bring the video to Al-Jazeera. As usual, the station publicly insisted it had no idea how the tape came into its hands.

But on that Spring day in 2005, Jamal had met Horaj, not to receive further confirmation that, despite its angry denials, China was offering shelter to bin Laden, but to discover more about a secret underground route along which defectors from China and North Korea made their perilous way to freedom in the West. Of special interest to Mossad was the North Korean scientist who had been working on genetic weapons.

Since March 1984, when Saddam Hussein’s pilots had dropped 100-liter canisters of biological agents on the Kurdish population in the township of Halanja, killing five thousand in minutes, the threat of a biowarfare attack on Israel had become a priority for Mossad.

Russian-speaking agents had tracked down scientists who had once worked for the secret Department 12 of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Their work had been responsible for biological espionage, the planning and preparation of biological terrorism, and all-out biological war. The United States, Britain, and Israel had been among Department 12’s prime targets. Its biologists had successfully genetically weaponized in their Moscow laboratories some of the world’s most dangerous viruses: Ebola, anthrax, smallpox, and baculavius. They had also been working on genes responsible for specific sex, race, and other anthropological features. Another weapon being researched included a toxin that would result in the corruption of human mental processes, induce uncontrollable fear, and lead to death. Substances had also been created to specifically poison reservoirs, food stocks, and pharmaceutical factories; and other Department 12 scientists had been developing sophisticated airborne delivery systems for the Plague, the medieval Black Death, and the equally deadly botulinium. The Mossad agents discovered that when the Soviet Union collapsed, a number of the scientists were recruited to work in North Korea and China.

Links were also found between these countries and genetic weapons research, which had been carried out in the apartheid regime of South Africa; its Project Coast was specifically intended to create an ethnic bomb. The project’s leader, Wouter Basson, was a gifted, totally ruthless, and amoral scientist whose ability to develop biological weapons had made him, in the later words of Archbishop Tutu, “the Devil’s disciple working in the most diabolical aspect of apartheid.” Using front companies that claimed to be conducting bona fide research, Project Coast gathered scientific information from around the world. Some of it came into a small, rented cottage near Ascot in Berkshire, England. Number 1 Faircloth Farm Cottage, Watersplash, was an unlikely address to receive germ warfare material from, among others, the scientists of North Korea. But for them — as isolated as South Africa was from the global scientific community in the days of apartheid — the cottage provided a means of exchanging data, one that escaped the surveillance of MI5. Later, scientists from Project Coast visited Iraq and Libya, and finally Iran.

At first the ayatollahs had refused to keep producing biological weapons as they were contrary to Islamic doctrine, a truth that Mossad’s propagandists skillfully promoted across the Middle East. But after Iraq’s massacre of the Kurds, the Tehran regime reversed the Koran teaching and the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, voted unanimously that biological and chemical weapons should be mass produced. The document the South African scientists had left behind on their visit to Tehran were dusted down by the newly formed Quds Force — in the Arabic language Quds is Jerusalem — which was entrusted in providing Iran with a frontline capability until it had its nuclear arsenal. The South African blueprints ensured the work progressed rapidly.

Among the Project Coast documents was one (seen by the author) that claimed: “The key to creating a successful ethnic bomb lies in isolating the small but critical differences in the human genetic code. That difference consists of no more than 0.1 percent. But this minute amount, which accounts for 3 million letters of the genome code, makes it possible for a comparison between one individual and another. This also makes it possible to identify the differences between large ethnic groups. These differences make them exploitable as a military weapon.” Project Coast’s aim had been to isolate the DNA of certain genes so they could be attacked by deadly microorganisms its scientists were creating in their laboratories. Like Department 12, they also called it an “ethnic bomb,” and it was designed to incapacitate, and even kill, the South African Black population. The work was still in its infancy when the apartheid regime collapsed.

Mossad discovered one colorful figure who had also worked with South Africa and North Korea, a Mormon gynecologist, Dr. Larry Ford, based on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. With his cultivated bedside manner, casual clothes, and hightop basketball shoes, none of his patients suspected he was a villain from the pages of the thrillers he kept in his waiting room bookcase. Dr. Ford had built up a close relationship with Wouter Basson and, through him, had established contacts with the equally sinister scientists of North Korea. Not one of his patients suspected Dr. Ford regularly carried deadly toxins in his baggage on flights to South Africa. The mystery of where he had obtained them, who had authorized their transportation out of the United States, and the identity of the end user were also secrets Dr. Ford would carry to his grave. In the spring of 2000, he had committed suicide. When the police dealing with the case opened Dr. Ford’s refrigerator in his home in Irvine, California, they found sufficient vials to poison, in the words of one officer, “pretty well the whole of the state. We knew then we were not dealing with some routine suicide.” There were bottles containing cultures of cholera, botulism, and typhoid fever. It would remain an unresolved mystery how they got there.

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Mossad had been allowed to interrogate Dr. Rihad Taha, the notorious “Dr. Germ” who directed Saddam Hussein’s biowarfare program. Her total willingness to conduct terminal experiments on humans and her eagerness to find new ways to weaponize germs into even more effective armaments had made the slim, mousy-haired biologist a firm favorite with the Iraqi dictator. The daughter of one of the country’s ruling Baath families, she had acquired her skills at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She had gone there in 1979, arriving at Heathrow Airport on a First Class ticket with Iraqi Airlines from Baghdad. In her suitcases were designer suits from Paris. Taha took a $150 taxi to the campus. No one thought this was remarkable; foreign students were renowned free spenders. She had enrolled to study crop diseases. She was twenty-three years old, with an unattractive way of chewing flower stalks, a habit that had already turned her teeth yellow. While students found her arrogant, tutors were impressed by Taha’s dedication and were sympathetic when her end-of-term results were disappointing. No one suspected this was a deliberate ploy to ensure she would remain at the university to continue her degree course.

The idea had been that of her Iraqi intelligence controller based at the Iraqi Embassy in London and enabled her continued access to restricted papers on germ warfare, some of which came from Porton Down, Britain’s own center for biowarfare research. The documents showed her how to weaponize anthrax, botulism, and other toxins. She learned how deadly germs could be sprayed in shopping malls and bomblets of pathogens distributed over a sports arena. All this could be achieved by using little more than the equipment in a school science lab. When Taha returned to Iraq in 1984, she had a degree in microbiology and joined a small team of other British-trained Iraqi graduates to spearhead Saddam’s biological program. After she became its director in 1986, she abandoned her designer suits for the battle fatigues Saddam favored and hennaed her hair to the color of the Euphrates, which flowed past her mansion home. She set up her laboratories in the Al-Hasan ibn al-Hatham Institute outside Baghdad. It was there she started to kill her victims, the methods including how to inject babies with lethal doses of diarrhea. The babies were taken from women prisoners.

In the summer of 2004, Dr. Taha attempted to barter her freedom for the lives of American, British, and Irish hostages held by a fanatical Islamic terror group in Iraq. When the deal was rejected by the United States, the hostages were beheaded by the group’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In Tel Aviv, the Committee of the Heads of Services had met that year under Meir Dagan’s chairmanship and agreed that after Iran the most serious threat posed to Israel by bioterrorism was from North Korea. The regime continued to threaten Israel with destruction by providing Iran with rockets capable of delivering warheads filled with germs. Mossad had established that a week before the meeting, the Pyongyang regime had been about to ship a container of warheads to Tehran. Using Mossad’s “backdoor” channel with the CIA, Meir Dagan had asked Porter Goss to persuade the White House to ask the Beijing regime to halt the transfer. A phone call from Condoleezza Rice had produced the required result. But in Tel Aviv the intervention was seen as doing little to stop the deadly and illegal traffic between the two pariah states.

The meeting ended with the request that Dagan should send a small team of agents to South Korea to discover what was happening across the border with its northern neighbor. One of its members was Jamal. Under cover of being an Iranian businessman trading in artefacts, he had established a network of informers across South Asia. One had been Horaj, who had provided the first details of what became known in Mossad as New Exodus, the secret route refugees used to escape from the harsh regime of North Korea. For them it had become the equivalent to the biblical Exodus.

The route had a long and colorful history. Originally created by the CIA at the end of the Korean War, it had been used to smuggle its own agents and high-value informers out of North Korea and China. The informers were moved from one safe house to another and escorted by guides through China’s towns and villages to the borders of Cambodia, Laos, and Hong Kong, and who received little or no payment for this dangerous work. One guide probably spoke for many when he told his CIA controller, “I do this for democracy.”

A journey could take weeks, even months. A CIA officer involved in running the operation recalled (to the author): “It was like traveling on a railway where you never knew when the signal would turn from green to red. Then everything shut down until there was another green light.”

The route out of China was a torturous one, often doubling back, and involved traveling by road, river, and train. Several of those who set out never reached safety; the risk of betrayal was a constant threat. China’s Public Security spies and its formidable secret intelligence service were a fearsome duo. No one knows how many CIA agents or informers were captured and never heard of again. Eventually the Exodus route ceased to operate. Then during the 1990s, once more shocking accounts of the depravity of the North Korean regime began to emerge. Defectors all told the same story of a nation living increasingly in near starvation, of torture, and forced labor. Most horrifying of all were the reports of inhuman experiments on prisoners from relatives who managed to cross the 880-mile-long border into China. But those who had fled found little relief there. It had an estimated 5 million of its own prisoners in camps as grim as the gulags of North Korea. When caught, asylum seekers were swiftly transported back across the border to an inevitable fate of interrogation, torture, and death.

To save them, two remarkable human rights activists reopened the old CIA route. Their Mossad profiles paint ennobling pictures.

Douglas Shin and Norbert Vollersten were both in their late forties and came from very different cultural backgrounds. Shin was a Korean-American church pastor who had been ordained after a career as a businessman and filmmaker, and he lived in a Los Angeles suburb as pastor of his church. He had the Asian’s mannerisms of being polite and diffident; only when he spoke of the gross abuses of North Korea or its people was he aroused to quiet passion. Then his words filled with religious metaphors; the pain and anger in his eyes was there for all to see. There was about him then a sense that if you were not part of the answer he wanted, you were part of his many problems in rescuing people from the terror of Kim Jong Il’s regime. He was one of the two “station masters” for New Exodus. The other was Vollersten.

A tallish, stocky man, broad across the shoulders, Vollersten looked and, at times, sounded like one of the hippy protestors who had taken to the streets against Vietnam and, later, the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Some people called him “a little crazy”; others said the world needed more men like him. Vollersten accepted their plaudits the way he dealt with his detractors: with that same slow smile, the flick of a hairstyle rooted in a bygone generation. “It made him disarming even when he would continue to argue his point until there was no point left to argue,” his Mossad file noted.

Vollersten’s student life in Düsseldorf had encompassed politics and journalism until he became a medical doctor, married, and fathered four sons. But on the eve of a new millennium all that was soon to change. He argued with the German health authorities how community care should be run. Ignored, he organized his patients to publicly demonstrate — the first time a doctor had done this in Germany. He was again ignored. He organized more patient marches. His Medical Association in the conservative city of Goettingen disowned him. Finally his wife divorced him, claiming he was “crazy.” With his long blond hair and full moustache, he looked like an aging rock star. Finally he joined an organization called “German Emergency Doctors”; it sent physicians anywhere there was a need for humanitarian aid. Vollersten was offered either the baking Sahara of South Sudan or North Korea. He read several travel guidebooks about Sudan. But there was not one available for North Korea. He decided that was where he should go.

Shin had come from South Korea to California as a twenty year-old. But the knowledge of what was happening in North Korea had followed him, and by the time he became a pastor, all he had read and heard made a decisive impact on him. He began to lay down the tracks for what became New Exodus and plugged into other human rights organizations around the world.

Meantime, in North Korea, Vollersten had repeatedly encountered the terrified silence of patients asked about their lives. Leaving North Korea at the end of his contract, he mounted a ferocious campaign against the regime. He sought out North Korean refugees and retold their stories to anyone who would listen: journalists, politicians, other human rights workers. He traveled around Asia, lecturing, appealing; there was about him, he would admit, the angry passion of someone whose eyes had been opened. His battle cry of “inform, provoke, and mobilise” became his rallying call. He and Shin became two voices united in common cause to promote the plight of all those trapped in North Korea or who had fled their homeland into the hostile environment of China. New Exodus became the focus of all they wanted to achieve. By 2004, over three hundred thousand had traveled its length.

Along the invisible railway “platforms”—safe houses in China’s cities, farms in its countryside, boats on its rivers — waited the intelligence agents and their informers. As usual, Jamal and the other Mossad agents worked alone. It was their way. Their brief was simple: to locate any defector who could provide the latest information about North Korea and its work on developing weapons of mass destruction. Then the spies and their informers all became united in common cause: to locate Dr. Ri Che-Woo. He was undoubtedly the most important escapee to be traveling along New Exodus.

Dr. Ri was a microbiologist and director of a project more secret than all the other secret projects in a country where secrecy itself was instilled from birth. Just as Department 12 and Project Coast had sought to create their ethnic bombs, Dr. Ri was employed at Institute 398, located at Sogram-ri in the south of Pyongyang Province to develop a similar weapon, this one designed to strike the white populations on earth. A sign of the institute’s importance was being ring fenced by three battalions of troops. The first hint about Dr. Ri’s work had come from a defector. Over the following months, details emerged from more defectors suggesting that Dr. Ri and his 250 geneticists could be further advanced than the South Africans and Russians had been. Now, many more months later, Horaj had sought a meeting with Jamal, bringing information that Mossad, like other intelligence services, had eagerly awaited. Dr. Ri was somewhere along the New Exodus route trying to make his perilous way to freedom. Norbert Vollersten had learned Dr. Ri was carrying a dossier detailing human experiments used in North Korea’s biological program. Western intelligence agents watched the moves of the CSIS and the country’s Public Security as they tried to locate Dr. Ri. But amid a population of 1.3 billion people who were used to being constantly spied upon, the microbiologist had vanished into the air faster than the spent fireworks at Chinese New Year celebrations.

In Tel Aviv, Mossad’s scientists consulted their own network of researchers at some of the world’s leading science institutes. One recalled how, at the height of America’s intervention in Nicaragua, the idea of creating a genetic bomb had occupied the CIA’s geneticists. They had been ordered to locate what became known in the agency as “the Nicaraguan gene.” Substantial sums of money were spent in obtaining blood samples of Nicaraguans and testing them in the CIA laboratories. No gene specific to Nicaragua was identified. The project was abandoned only to be later resurrected to select a “Cuban-only gene.” This research also came to nothing.

But Dr. Ri’s research showed that creating an ethnic bomb was no longer a fantasy. It had become what the Nobel Prize — winning scientist Joshua Lederberg had called the “monster in our backyard.” Anthropologist John Moore, an acknowledged expert in the threat from an ethnic bomb, had predicted its creation would unleash genetic variations that could produce widespread contagion of the human population with rates of mortality like the fictional Andromeda Strain, sufficient to exterminate the whole species.

By the time Jamal and Horaj had separated after their meeting in the Hindu Kush, the Mossad agent had acquired a photograph of Dr. Ri. It showed he was physically the quintessential Korean, short and stocky with a pleasantly rounded face, eyes set wide apart behind his glasses. With the photo came a curriculum vitae that indicated his importance after graduating from the country’s Hambung University of Chemical Industry, which produced scientists for North Korea’s nuclear, chemical, and biological programs.

During the years that followed, Dr. Ri was transferred from one biotechnology center to another, and from time to time he would have encountered some of the thirty-eight thousand scientists and technicians from the Soviet Union who had been recruited to work in North Korea’s biological warfare program. Others had gone to China, Syria, Libya, and Iran.

In 1999, he was appointed to work at Sogram-ri’s Institute 398. NSA satellite images routinely passed to Mossad showed the compound was a half-mile square area, bordered by heavily patrolled roads. The featureless buildings included a headquarters block, a communications building, barracks, and fuel storage tanks. To one side were living quarters for officers and scientists close to a tunnel entrance. The photo analysts believed it led to the underground complex where Dr. Ri and his team worked.

The Institute was under the overall command of Dr. Yi Yong Su. Intelligence sources had established the fifty-one-year-old geneticist was widely respected and not a little feared by her fellow geneticists. She was known to have a close relationship with Kim Jong Il, who had succeeded his father in 1994 to become the country’s supreme leader.

News that Dr. Ri planned to defect had alerted not only Mossad but the CIA, MI6, and the German, French, and Australian intelligence services. Then, as so often happens in the intelligence world, came a whisper: Dr. Ri was heading for Guangzhou, the port city of Canton Province in South China. With Hong Kong a short distance away, there was an opportunity to smuggle Dr. Ri on to one of the many foreign ships in the harbor. In the early hours of one morning — the day of the week or month would remain unknown — Dr. Ri, wearing a dark blue coverall, had appeared at one of the staff entrances to the Guangdong Hotel. Apart from its many fine facilities, the hotel also houses a number of foreign consulates on the fifteenth floor. Dr. Ri used a swipe card to access the building; how he obtained it would remain unknown. At some point inside the hotel, he was confronted by Chinese Public Security officers. Shortly afterward a police van drove him away from the hotel staff entrance.

In Tel Aviv, the file on Dr. Ri was closed and sent to the registry. Jamal and the other Mossad agents, who had hoped to find and persuade the scientist to work for Israel, were reassigned to other duties. They knew that by the very nature of their work, another “target of opportunity” would inevitably show up.

Early in May 2005, Jamal was tipped off by one of his informers in Rawalpindi that two men in the custody of the Pakistan Intelligence Service had revealed to their interrogators they had been asked to take part in an attack on London’s subway system. The men were identified as Zeesham Hyder Siddiqui, who had been arrested by Pakistani agents in Peshawar, and Naeem Noor Khan, who had been arrested in Lahore.

On Mossad’s computers they were both already listed as members of two of the forty-five extremist groups in Pakistan. Khan belonged to Jundullah, the Army of God; Siddiqui to Karkat-e-Jihad-e-Islami, the Movement for Islamic Jihad. Both groups were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

Scant though the details from Jamal were, nevertheless Meir Dagan sent an encrypted message to Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5. The months of frost between Mossad’s and Britain’s intelligence services, caused by MI6’s presence in Gaza to try and broker a deal with Hamas, was returned to normal after Meir Dagan had flown to meet with MI6 director John Scarlett. The two men and Eliza Manningham-Buller met in a private room in the Traveller’s Club over lunch. Details of their discussion would remain secret. But shortly afterward, the MI6 agents left Gaza and Nathan, Mossad’s London Station chief, received details of the interrogation by two MI5 officers who had flown to Pakistan to question Siddiqui and Khan. Both admitted being close associates of two other young British Muslims who had launched a suicide bomb attack on a Tel Aviv nightclub two years before. They had also provided further details about the extent of al-Qaeda’s network throughout Britain’s Muslim community.