Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 24 WEB OF TERROR

Collecting the daily editions of the city’s newspapers published in Arabic, Urdu, and other Middle East languages remained part of the daily routine for Mossad’s London Station because the capital remained a center for radical Islamists to fulminate against Israel and the West.

After an initial assessment by the London Station analysts, the material was sent by the embassy’s daily diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv. There it was cross-checked for published names against those on the growing list of captured al-Qaeda operatives who had been spirited away by the CIA to secret interrogation centers where the rules of the Geneva Convention and American law did not apply. Sometimes the relatives of the suspected terrorists gave the Arab-language newspapers details of where they had been captured, which helped the Mossad analysts build up a picture of the CIA’s activities. It was doing so not because Mossad disapproved of torture — far from it — but for Israel’s self-protection. For years Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and other human rights organizations had condemned the Jewish state for its harsh interrogation methods and prison conditions. If the day should come when the United States would be forced to support an investigation into Israeli methods of coercive interrogation, then the file Mossad was accumulating would show that it was not alone in such methods.

Central to the CIA operation were two aircraft it had hired from a private company in Massachusetts, Premier Executive Transport Services. One was a fourteen-seater Gulfstream, with registration number N379P, the other a white-painted Boeing 737, with the registration number N313P (the company later declined to discuss the leasing with the author). Mossad had obtained both aircraft’s flight logs detailing the journeys the planes had made to countries with poor human rights records; by October 2005, there had been forty-nine flights to Jordan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Guantánamo Bay. Rob Baer, a former CIA intelligence officer in the Middle East, would later claim (to The Washington Post): “If you want a strong interrogation you send prisoners to Jordan. If you want them to be seriously tortured fly them to Egypt, from where they never return. If you want them to be most severely tortured for information, send them to Uzbekistan.” Craig Murphy, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, was sacked in the autumn of 2004 for leaking a memo he wrote to foreign secretary Jack Straw, in which the diplomat alleged that some of the prisoners sent to Uzbekistan were “boiled alive. Its Soviet-trained interrogators carry out tortures watched by CIA officers stationed in the country, which is regarded as a close ally of the Bush administration.”

An MI6 officer told the author, “I have personal knowledge that the prisoners are shackled to their seats and are often gagged and drugged during their flights.”

Some of the flights had been cleared to overfly Israeli air space from the CIA secret interrogation center in Kabul known as “the Pit.” It was part of a constellation of worldwide secret detention centers that were sometimes as small as shipping containers or as large as the complex at Guantánamo Bay. Majeed Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who represented the families of dozens of what he called “the disappeared,” said (to the author), “No one will ever know how many have gone. But probably many thousands.”

The conditions under which they were incarcerated were identified by the New York — based Human Rights Watch. “They are shackled continuously, intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time, and forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods.”

Mossad had established that some of the techniques used at the secret interrogation centers were based on the notorious MK-ULTRA brainwashing program run by the CIA at the height of the Cold War. The MI6 officer who had witnessed the shackled prisoners on their way to Uzbekistan claimed (to the author) that upon arrival they were subjected to “sensory deprivation for lengthy periods, mock executions, starvation, sexual violence, rape, immersion in water to the point of drowning, beatings, exposure to intense heat or cold, clamping off blood circulation by wire restraints, near strangulation, flesh burning with cigarettes, and the use of a variety of drugs to weaken a prisoner’s resistance.”

Meantime Mossad continued to identify names in Arabic newspapers of terrorists who had been sent to the torture chambers. The daily trawl also gathered up the latest pamphlets extolling as “heroes” the bombers of 9/11 and issued updated lists of addresses for Britain’s synagogues and the homes of their rabbis. “They should be reminded of the crimes Jews had committed against Muslims,” urged the London-based radical group, Al-Muhajiroun. The same kind of reminder was spelled out by another group, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades. It told its growing number of supporters in Britain it had “declared a bloody war against our non-Muslim neighbors. We will rase the cities of Europe to the ground. We will turn them into cities drenched with blood until its leaders withdraw their troops from Iraq.”

Muslim clerics were regularly invited on to the BBC to justify the “martyrdom” of suicide bombers because, as Dr. Yusuf al-Qardawi told the corporation’s current affairs flagship program, Newsnight: “It is an indication of the justice of Allah the Almighty.” Many young British Muslims still carried with them the fatwa Osama bin Laden had issued in February 1998: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the great Mosques of Mecca from their grip and in order for their armies to move out of the lands of Islam.”

With the help of its sayanim network of Jewish volunteers throughout Britain, Mossad’s London Station gathered mounting evidence on the extent of the threat Muslim extremism posed to the United Kingdom. There were now close to five thousand sayanim in Britain in 2005, who acted as “the eyes and ears” Meir Amit had envisaged when he created the network. They were no longer made up of relatives of European Jews who had arrived in the country in the 1930s, refugees from nazism. Now they included Jews from Lebanon, Syria, and, more recently, Iraq and Iran: shopkeepers, landlords, and café owners in Asian communities who provided a steady stream of information.

An Iraqi bookseller in the north London suburb of Wembley had provided proof that Islamic extremists had reached the heart of the Blair government. Ahmad Thomson, a Muslim barrister and a senior member of the Association of Muslim Lawyers, had been appointed to advise the prime minister on how to deal with the matter. Thomson was also the author of a fast-selling book in the Muslim community. Titled The New World Order, it claimed there was “a Zionist plan to shape world events” and predicted that events like 9/11 and the suicide bombings in Israel were “part of the coming confrontation between the muminun (those who accept Islam) and the kaffirun (nonbelievers).” Other Muslim advisers to the government had, before being appointed, described Osama bin Laden as a “holy warrior” and defended suicide bombers as “genuine martyrs.”

Though the Blair government had finally promised that extremist preachers and scholars who promoted terrorism would be deported, those radical imams and teachers continued throughout the summer of 2005 to deliver their diatribes about holy war in their mosques and post inflammatory articles on their Web sites.

Mohammed al-Massari, a middle-aged Saudi militant who had fled that country to Britain and managed to convince the government he faced death if he was returned to the desert kingdom, still used his Web site in June 2005 to show videos of British and American hostages being beheaded in Iraq. He also ran an Internet radio station that called for holy war. Abu Qatada, who had fled to London from Jordan claiming he was being persecuted there for his religious beliefs, had been allowed to remain in Britain. He had repaid his host country by inciting his followers to go to Iraq and kill Coalition troops. Pakistan’s Hizb-a-Tehia, the Party of Liberation, outlawed in its own country, used its London office to recruit young Muslims to go to Afghanistan to be trained to wage war against America. In other Muslim enclaves in the north and west suburbs of London, imams preached their invective as they did in the cities of Leicester, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, and Glasgow; thousands of young, impressionable Muslims, many born in Britain, were being indoctrinated into hatred against their own country.

All this information had been stored on his computer by Nathan. Some of it had come from his MI5 liaison officer at the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) in MI5’s Millbank offices. Opened in 2003 as part of Britain’s role in the war on terrorism, JTAC’s one hundred staff were drawn from all areas of the intelligence community fighting international terrorism. They worked in a brightly lit, windowless room in the basement of the building; its unmarked door was opened only by swipe cards whose codes were changed regularly. From the workstations, equipped with state-of-the-art communications, came and went a continuous flow of information. Sensitive material, once shared only with the CIA, Mossad, and the French and German intelligence services, was now more widely distributed since the attacks on Bali and Madrid. The result had been a surge of high-value intelligence from sources like GROM, Poland’s SAS-trained antiterrorist unit. They provided details about Jamal Zougam, who was implicated in the Madrid rail station bombings and who had planned a Christmas bombing campaign in Warsaw. Spanish intelligence had sent details of Zougam’s visit to London, where he had visited the radical Finsbury Park mosque. It’s imam, Abu Hamza, had preached support for bin Laden and was now fighting extradition to the United States from his prison cell for his role in killing Americans in the Middle East. In 2006, Abu Hamza was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for “promoting and taking part in terrorist activities.” After he has served his sentence, he will be deported to America and will face charges of “complicity in killing U.S. citizens in the Middle East.”

A French intelligence report estimated that as a result of a recruitment drive, al-Qaeda support in the country “stands at over 3 5,000, many of them are converts to Islam. They are organized into military-style units and meet regularly for training in the use of weapons and explosives, combat tactics, and indoctrination. They are controlled from local and district command centers under the al-Qaeda national command.” In a further pooling of information, Germany’s BND reported its estimate that there were, in June 2005, around thirty thousand al-Qaeda sympathizers in the Federal Republic. Nathan had told his liaison officer that Mossad believed the movement’s leaders were based in the port city of Hamburg, from where several of the 9/11 bombers had come.

In June 2005, Nathan and his liaison officer had once more traveled to several cities in the north of England as part of an unprecedented security operation. Twenty of the world’s security services had joined forces to help protect the G8 Summit at Gleneagles in Scotland in July.

Between them they had created a security ring, which included Germany’s border with Poland, to intercept terrorists moving out of the Balkans. Spanish intelligence agents were linked through Britain’s listening posts on Gibraltar and Cyprus to monitor the North African coast, long an established launchpad for al-Qaeda into Europe. SISMI, Italy’s secret service, had deployed scores of agents to watch for terrorists coming out of the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union. French and Dutch intelligence officers were stationed in the Channel ports.

At GCHQ, Britain’s listening post in space, linguists, analysts, and technicians continued to track intercepts, seeking the first sign of a threat. Already its computers had deciphered “chatter” that indicated the Italian anarchists planned to enter Britain ahead of the summit. American satellites, controlled by the NSA base at Menwith Hill in the north of England, watched over an area from the deserts of Iraq in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east.

The DGSE, the French intelligence service charged with protecting President Chirac at the summit, discovered that European anarchists, including the Ya Basta group, had recently met with Class War, a notorious British anarchist group, at Calais. Both groups were known to advocate violent protest. Germany’s BND secret service confirmed that German anarchists had also recently attended “a conference of anarchists” held outside Nottingham in England.

MI5, who would jointly coordinate the multinational security operation with MI6, were already hunting for an Italian terrorist nicknamed “The Raven” who was believed to have entered Britain and was known to have links to an al-Qaeda cell in Bologna, Italy, a well-known hotbed for terrorists. Details about him were discovered in a raid by Italian agents that led to the arrest of eighty anarchists who had been planning to go to Gleneagles. The CIA had assigned two hundred agents and state-of-the-art electronic equipment to protect President Bush. Russia’s three intelligence services, the GRU, the FCS, and the SVR, had provided MI5 with identikits of Chechnyan terrorists who could attempt an attack on the summit. The FCS, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, had warned JTAC (Joint Terrorism Analysis Center) that it should not discount a suicide bomber attacking during the summit.

Trying to avert that possibility had taken Nathan once more into the Muslim enclaves in the north of England. Not only did Mossad have its sayanim there, but it had also built up a network of informers within the Muslim communities. Mostly young, they risked their own lives and those of their families by providing information. They, too, had been alerted to watch for any signs that a suicide bomber attack was being planned.

In London, as part of the preparations for the G8 Summit, Mossad had already circulated a document to the police and security services on how Mossad had learned to identify a suicide bomber. In part the document read:

Mossad was not alone in its penetration of Muslim communities. MI5 had set up sophisticated surveillance sites in areas where Asian communities had become assimilated into British society, where the young held steady employment and made regular trips to see aunts and uncles in Pakistan and other places, where young men were never publicly seen mixing with angry militants after Friday prayers. These were the men that MI5 watched for. On those trips to Pakistan some had made contacts with al-Qaeda. Known as “Trojans,” they had been recruited to become home-grown terrorists. Their cell phones were bugged, their conversations recorded and analyzed, their movements filmed, and their contacts subject to the same deep surveillance. Radio waves were bounced off windowpanes to monitor conversations in a room; the latest technology was used to screen e-mails and search for incriminating files on Web sites. Each MI5 surveillance unit had a lawyer from JTAC attached to it who oversaw the surveillance to ensure any evidence would be admissible in a court. The arrests had numbered few.

In part, this was because Islamic groups have been quick to embrace new information technology to achieve their goals. The Internet’s full potential in the Arab world was first realized at the onset of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000. The most successful Web site was Electronic Intifada, dubbed by Yasser Arafat “as our weapon of mass destruction.” Its founding members were based in the Netherlands, Canada, Chicago, and Leicester in the English midlands. From there they waged asymmetric warfare using the latest technology to spread their message of hate across cyberspace.

Like MI5, Mossad’s London Station collected the biweekly online magazine for all jihadists and, since 2001, a quarterly version for women mujahideen. The same Web sites were monitored by diplomats at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. There was one significant difference. Mossad stations had staff able to instantly read what the Web site said; no such capability existed among those diplomats. They merely transmitted the material on to the State Department or the CIA. Their already hard-pressed translators and analysts played what one translator called “pick and choose” from the daily input of foreign language material. He told the author: “Lookit, not much has changed since the week before 9/11 when Mossad picked up a phone call from bin Laden to his mother — yes, his mother, for Chrissake! — that he couldn’t come to her birthday party because he was too busy. The message was passed up the line to middle management at the CIA. It was deemed to be too vague to act upon.”

From his contacts with sayanim and informers in Leeds, where Jews and Muslims lived cheek-to-jowl, Nathan had learned radicals had started to write messages on Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail accounts — but not sending them. Instead they left them stored in the “draft” folders of the accounts. Unsent, they could not be intercepted. However, any other radical who knew an account password could log on from anywhere in the world and read a message.

An informer had provided Nathan with a password. But there was nothing on the site to indicate an impending suicide bomber attack, or any form of assault, on the Gleneagles summit.

In the first week of July 2005, Nathan began each day began by listening to the BBC Radio-4 program Today as he drove to work. The program had long established itself as required listening for London’s politicians, foreign diplomats, the mandarins of Whitehall, and the capital’s intelligence community. All were expecting another clash with the Blair government and the BBC over the continuing fallout from its role in the Iraqi war. Though the initial war with Iraq had ended, the issue of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction had remained at the center of a political maelstrom that had threatened the governments of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush. At the core of the increasingly bitter storm was the original Today claim on air that Tony Blair had approved of the “sexing-up” of a dossier stating that Saddam had the capability of launching weapons of mass destruction against the West, the reason Blair had given for joining Bush in the war against Iraq. Dr. David Kelly had been publicly identified on the program as the scientist who had given one of its reporters evidence that the dossier had been “sexed up.”

Dr. Kelly worked for the British government. He was a world-ranking expert on biological weapons at Britain’s Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down and head of its Microbiology Department. In the still largely secret world of how to combat the threat from biological weapons, Dr. Kelly became the voice of unchallengeable authority regularly consulted by officers on the counterproliferation desks in the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defense, MI5 and MI6, and Mossad. For over a decade he had confronted the deceits, lies, and trickery of Saddam’s biological weapons program. Into his office, room 2/35 in the Ministry of Defense Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat in Whitehall, came daily e-mails and phone calls asking for his help.

Nathan had met him after Dr. Kelly had taken part in a joint Canadian /Mossad operation to interdict biological materials being shipped to Iraq from Montreal. Later, Nathan had accompanied the scientist to the Institute of Biological Research in Tel Aviv, one of the few outsiders allowed such a visit. When the second war against Iraq ended in 2003, Dr. Kelly returned to Baghdad. He had been told by the CIA and MI6 there were shells and missiles with warheads capable of delivering huge quantities of germs that had been secretly developed between the wars. He had found no such weapons. He had been urged by his superiors to go and look again. Still he had found nothing. The pressure continued. No one suspected the inner gyroscope that balanced Dr. Kelly’s decision making had begun to slip out of kilter. Nathan had followed every twist and turn in the very public humiliation of Dr. Kelly that had followed his failure to find weapons of mass destruction: his appearance before a House of Commons Intelligence Oversight Committee, the leaking of his name as the source for the Today story that the government had “sexed up” its dossier, his subsequent hounding by the media. Finally, it had all become too much for Dr. Kelly.

At two thirty on the afternoon of Thursday, July 17, 2003, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Young sat down before his secure computer and began to create a highly restricted file. Across the top of his screen he typed a code name: Operation Mason. Beneath it he added: Not for Release. Police Operational Information. Below that he added the figures: 14.30 and 17.07.03, indicating the file had been opened at two thirty p.m. on Thursday, July 17, 2003. Young’s file had been created after a morning of tense discussions in various government offices in Whitehall. In his pastel-painted office suite in the Joint Intelligence Committee location, John Scarlett, its chairman for the past two years, had taken his share of the calls. Scarlett had a well-attuned nose for trouble and must have sensed Dr. Kelly’s responses before the parliamentary committee and the continuing government row with the BBC were becoming a serious problem.

Scarlett had played a key part in producing the controversial dossier. In doing so, he had discarded the carefully judged input of Dr. Kelly in the early drafts. The original intelligence had come from MI6 and was approved by its then director general Sir Richard Dearlove before it had electronically made its way through the intelligence community, passing across the desk of the Defence Intelligence staff. None of them had supported Dr. Kelly’s original assertion that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. He had become the lonely voice who had finally decided to speak to the BBC. What else could Kelly do, would he do? And say? These were the questions troubling Scarlett.

Dr. Kelly had received phone calls his wife, Janice Kelly, was certain came from MI6. She remembered her husband taking some calls behind the closed door of his study, fitted out with seven laptops and his high-security computer on his desks installed by MI5 along with his direct high-security line to Porton Down. It later emerged that when he had left the house, he received two more calls on his cell phone as he walked. The identity of the callers would never be traced.

Dr. Kelly’s body was found in a woodland the next day. Two separate police teams gave different locations for where and how his corpse was positioned. By then, officers from the MI5 Technical Assessment Centre had removed from Dr. Kelly’s study all his electronic equipment. The data on them would remain secret. However, three eminent British medical specialists took the highly unusual step of publicly saying Dr. Kelly could never have committed suicide based on the published forensic details. Their conclusions raised disturbing questions. What could account for the lack of blood from the small wrist slash? What part, if any, had the small number of painkillers he had swallowed played? Could the answers be linked to Dr. Kelly’s own prediction made to a friend that he “would not be surprised if my body isn’t one day found in the woods”?

There were a number of reasons for Mossad to pay more than a passing interest to those words. Dr. Kelly had triggered an unprecedented crisis for the Blair government after publicly questioning the validity of the now notorious “sexed-up” dossier. “Preposterous though it seems to outsiders, taking out a troublemaker is not unknown in the dark side of secret intelligence. Mossad does it with its kidon. Other services have their hit men available, contract killers who cannot be traced,” claimed Ari Ben-Menashe (to the author).

There were persistent reports that Dr. Kelly had been targeted by Saddam Hussein’s hit squads while he had been in Iraq probing the country’s arsenal. His own MI5 contacts had warned him he was at risk. There were other possible threats to his safety. His work in unscrambling the Soviet Union’s secret biological arsenal had angered many of its scientists when he refused to help them come to Britain to work. MI5 had warned Dr. Kelly that some of the scientists had maintained close contacts with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, which currently had thirty agents working out of the Russian Embassy. Dr. Kelly had been provided with a list of all the number plates of their cars. Only a week before his death, a Land Rover — bearing the diplomatic number plate prefix 248D, assigned to all Russian diplomatic vehicles — had been spotted less than twenty miles from Southmoor, the village where Dr. Kelly lived.

Meir Dagan had asked Nathan to prepare a report on the scientist’s death. The London Station chief updated himself on the background to Dr. Kelly’s death after he had been found on Harrowdown Hill, a beauty spot near his home. The technicians at the Tactical Assessment Center had deconstructed the computer disks recovered from Dr. Kelly’s study, and calls to and from his cell phone found on his body had been analyzed. While most dealt with his daily workload at the Ministry of Defense and Porton Down, personal details had also emerged. They included two job offers he was considering to work in the private sector in America.

One offer was from the Washington-based company, Hadron Advanced Biosystems. It was run by a Soviet defector, Kamovtjan Alibekov, who had been the top scientist in that country’s biowarfare program and the inventor of the world’s most powerful genetically engineered anthrax. He had found a home in America’s biodefense industry and changed his name to Ken Alibek. His company had close ties to the Pentagon and the CIA and described itself as “specializing in the development of technical solutions for the U.S. intelligence community.” The other company was Regman Biotechnologies, one that Dr. Kelly had helped to set up in Britain. At the time of his death, the company had a contract with the U.S. Navy to “develop a diagnostic and therapeutic treatment for anthrax.” It stated its prime function was to “research powerful alternatives to antibiotics.” Both companies had offered Dr. Kelly remuneration double his present salary, sufficient to pay for private medical treatment that Janice urgently needed and for which there was a lengthy waiting list on Britain’s National Health Service.

Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxfordshire coroner, concluded Dr. Kelly committed suicide by cutting his left wrist with a blunt penknife he used as a gardening tool. He had also ingested twenty-eight coproxamol tablets, a painkiller for arthritis. Dr. Kelly did not suffer from the condition. They would have been hard to swallow without water or crunching them with his teeth. A bizarre twist came when, an hour after his body was found, Dr. Kelly’s dental records went missing from the local surgery. His dentist reported this to the police. Two days later the records reappeared in the surgery. Dr. Nicholas Hunt, the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, was sufficiently alarmed to ask the police to conduct a DNA test to “make sure the body was really Dr. Kelly’s.” The pathologist noted that there were “several superficial scratches on the wrist and one deep wound that had severed the ulnar artery but not the radial artery.” He concluded this had led to a fatal hemorrhage.

The three experienced medical specialists, who had already questioned whether Dr. Kelly had committed suicide, again challenged the conclusion: Dr. David Halpin, a consultant in trauma injuries; Dr. Stephen Frost, a radiologist; and Dr. Martin Birstingi, a vascular surgeon, all said that in their combined clinical experience — numbering some fifty years — they had never come across a case where somebody had died from cutting their ulnar artery. “To die from hemorrhage Dr. Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood,” stated Dr. Halpin. Dr. Frost said, “It is unlikely from the stated injury Dr. Kelly would have lost more than a pint of blood.” In Dr. Berstingi’s opinion, “When the ulnar artery is cut, there is a rapid fall in blood pressure and after a few further minutes the artery stops bleeding.” None of these experts were asked to testify at the inquest.

Piece by piece Nathan had collected and analyzed the testimony of those involved in the scientist’s death. He uncovered details of Dr. Kelly’s hitherto unsuspected links to the biowarfare program of South Africa’s apartheid regime — and that in the week before his death the scientist had been told he would be questioned by MI5 over bringing the program’s head, Dr. Wouter Basson, to Porton Down. With all the other pressure he was facing, had the prospect of a grilling by security service interrogators finally been the last straw? Could his death possibly have any connection with the madcap schemes of Basson? Had he been killed to be silenced, another victim of the “dark side of intelligence” that Ari Ben-Menashe had identified? The questions would remain unanswered until Michael Shrimpton, a lawyer who has briefed the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on national security issues made a bid to end the mystery.

He claimed to the London Sunday Express that “Dr. Kelly was most likely murdered by a team of assassins from the French DGSE security service and his body dressed up to look like a suicide. Within forty-eight hours of the Kelly death, I was contacted by a British intelligence officer who told me he had been murdered. Neither MI5 nor MI6 were involved and both services are unhappy over what happened. It is my opinion that well-placed persons in Whitehall considered Kelly to be a threat to the survival of the government and used a team from outside the country to take out Kelly. My information is that the French used Iraqi intelligence killers to carry out the killing.” Shrimpton produced no copper-bottomed evidence to support his claim. But they formed part of Nathan’s report, which, in turn, would become part of the curriculum at the Mossad training school.

In that first week of July 2005, high summer had come to London, filling the city with optimism. A continuing heatwave had clothed the crowds in pretty dresses and open-necked shirts. Cafés had moved tables outside for al fresco dining. The stock market was still on the rise, and the shops were offering discounts on already bargain prices. The television images from Baghdad had faded from the screens.

Mossad had been among foreign intelligence services informed by the Home Office that the threat of a terrorist attack on Britain had been downgraded from “severe general” to the third highest alert, “substantial.” That week Scotland Yard’s commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, had briefed his senior staff that MI5 was “quietly confident” the battle against terrorism was under control.

Nathan had met, and liked, the commissioner. Since he had been appointed the previous January, Blair had started to run London’s police force as a modern corporation based on the latest management techniques. With his calm, measured tones, the stocky uniformed figure, police cap clamped firmly on his head and jaw thrust forward, Blair radiated a bullish certainty. He had set out his stall in much the way Meir Dagan had done when taking over a dispirited Mossad. Blair had told his force of thirty thousand officers and fifteen thousand civilians that he intended to drag them away from what he saw as a sexist, homophobic, and often racist past. He had reminded them that he was a policeman who knew what it was like to extract a corpse from a train crash and had peppered his laying-down-the-rules-first speech to his senior officers with quotations from Voltaire. He raised a smile when he said that on his deathbed the great French thinker, asked to renounce the devil, replied this was not the time to make new enemies. He told the officers he didn’t want them to treat him as their enemy, but he would not tolerate anyone who clung “to the old ways.” From then on he slipped easily into the business jargon of “multitiered policing,” “customer-shaped service,” and “infrastructure connectivity.” He used such unlikely police terms as “encapsulate,” “ex cathedra,” “antithesis,” and “counsel of perfection.”

Nathan had suspected those words would not sit easily with Meir Dagan’s blunt language, nor the way Blair signed his memos with a gold-tipped fountain pen, nor how he had a Miro painting on his office wall and filled his bookshelf with copies of Tennyson and Yeats.

Satisfied that London was not at risk from an impending terrorist attack, Blair had ordered fifteen hundred Metropolitan police officers to the Gleneagles summit, where anarchists were among the protesters. The Yard’s antiterrorist squad had also sent almost all its officers to Scotland. MI5 and MI6 had drawn tight its part of the net, which had been cast far and wide to catch terrorists. Not one had been spotted. Even the hunt for the “Raven” had petered out when Mossad said he had come and gone from Britain, disappearing somewhere into Europe. Around Gleneagles the massed ranks of police had overwhelmed protesters. The only moment of tension had come when President George W. Bush fell off his bicycle and grazed his hand.

Britain’s capital awoke on July 6 to find the city had won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, and driving to work that morning, tuned into the Today program, Nathan heard Commissioner Blair assuring Londoners that “we will cope with any terror threat to the games. Our police force is the envy of the policing world in relation to counterterrorism. We’ve upped our game.”

That Wednesday afternoon a war game was winding down in JTAC (Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre). Predicting disaster scenarios on their computers was a regular part of the work of the specialists at their interlinked work stations. This one centered on two different types of attack on London. The first scenario predicted that terrorists would fly over the capital in a light plane leased from one of the private airfields to the west of the city and dump VX nerve gas to catch the prevailing wind. The specialists calculated 30 people would die at the point of release and another 250 downwind. The next scenario was based on terrorists spraying pneumonic plague in aerosol form at Heathrow. Not only would several thousand die in the chosen terminal, but the wind could carry the plague into London. The calculated death toll was put at 2 million as all the emergency services would be overwhelmed. To cope with the dead, JTAC had recommended that the London Strategic Disaster Mortuary Working Group, part of the UK Mass Fatalities Working Group, should set up mobile mortuaries on the outskirts of the city to provide “overflow capacity for hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

That evening Mossad Station in London received its daily report from Tel Aviv that there was no evidence of any increase in “terrorist chatter” involving a threat to the United Kingdom. In MI5 headquarters, overlooking the river Thames in Westminster, the vast, open-plan operations room that stretched along most of one wing was in stand-down mode: its plasma screens were blank, the whiteboards empty, the maps of London streets rolled up, the scores of telephones silent.

Not one of the police and security services had picked up a hint of the atrocity about to happen.

On Thursday morning, July 7, Nathan was running a staff meeting in his office at the Israeli Embassy when his MI5 liaison officer telephoned shortly after 9:00 A.M. He did not bother to hide the tension and anger in his voice. There had been three separate attacks on rush-hour trains on London’s subway system and one on its famous double-decker buses. The death toll would be heavy (it turned out to be fifty-five dead and more than two hundred injured). The atrocity bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda suicide attack. The MI5 officer concluded by asking Mossad to provide all possible assistance.

In the past three years MI5 had made several requests for Mossad’s help over suspected plots to attack London’s transport system, which the security service believed had Middle East links. They included poisoning the subway with sarin gas, planting cyanide in its air-conditioning system, placing the deadly poison ricin on the trains. Another plot had centered on exploding a car bomb in the city’s Soho District, a favorite tourist area. Mossad had failed to find any evidence to support the MI5 claims that the plans had originated in the Middle East. Yet shortly before the London bombings, Lord Stevens, taking time out from his investigation into the death of Princess Diana, had publicly insisted MI5 had thwarted the plots. The claim had irritated Mossad.

Nathan knew that this time the request for help was being made to all foreign intelligence station chiefs in the capital. Within the hour they would have pulled back their own agents from the G8 Summit to help piece together the background on those who had carried out the worst terrorist attack Britain had ever experienced. Mossad would focus its own efforts on the Middle East and Africa, areas where its network of field agents and informers was unrivaled. Their information would be directed through Mossad headquarters for assessment and then routed by encoded e-mail to the London Station. It would receive a further assessment by Nathan and his own agents before being sent on to JTAC. A katsa based in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia on the Horn of Africa, had been briefed to listen out for “chatter” that could link the London bombings with al-Qaeda terrorists who controlled the country through the local warlords. In the past three years more than thirty-five thousand Somalis had been granted asylum in Britain to escape the brutality. One or more of them might have become radicalized by Britain’s imams.

By early afternoon Mossad Station in Cape Town, South Africa, had learned of a dispute between MI6 and CIA operatives over what to do with a British citizen of Indian descent, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who was under arrest in Zambia for an alleged connection with al-Qaeda. The CIA said he was wanted on an arrest warrant in the United States, which charged him with providing “material support to al-Qaeda and attempting to establish a terror training camp in Bly, Oregon, in 1999.” The CIA had told MI6 they had a “strong supposition” that Aswat had made a number of phone calls to suspected Muslim radicals in Britain shortly before the bombings.

The CIA wanted Aswat to be collected by its Gulfstream and flown to a torture chamber in Uzbekistan. But while MI6 was ready to support having Aswat legally extradited to America over the Oregon charges, it would not allow a British citizen to be subjected to brutality. It had also told the CIA that Aswat’s phone calls did not link him to the London bombings.

While the hunt for the London suicide bombers continued, the relationship within the international intelligence community developed its first crack. The French and German security services told MI5 they had no evidence to support its claim that a senior al-Qaeda operative, identified as “Mustafa,” had traveled halfway across Europe and in and out of England shortly before the bombings. Yet Mustafa had continued to be listed as a “priority target” on the Anacapa charts, the specialist diagrams used in the MI5 operations center to try and build up a coherent picture from the information coming in. Nathan had been asked by his MI5 liaison officer to help establish whether Mustafa could still have been the mastermind behind the suicide bombers. Had he told them which targets to hit? Once more Mossad put out the word among its sayanim across Britain and informers in the Middle East. In the weeks to come the mysterious Mustafa would remain just that — a mystery.

London had remained in a grip of fear when, on July 21, the city was subjected to a further suicide bomb attack. But this time the operation bore all the signs of amateur bungling: the homemade bombs failed to explode and the bombers were soon identified. Nevertheless hundreds of reports continued to reach Scotland Yard of people acting suspiciously. Each one had been checked and the suspect shown to have behaved, at most, foolishly. The police had warned that people who behaved like this in a time of high tension ran the risk of their behavior “being misunderstood.”

And such was the case with Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian electrician, on his way by subway to fix a fire alarm in north London. Somewhere walking between his home and the nearby Stockwell underground station he had come to the attention of one of the many antiterrorist police teams on the streets. Each member was aware of the rule they could fire only if they believed a suspect was carrying a bomb. The order of shoot to kill, aiming at the head of a person, would come after a “gold commander” at Scotland Yard had given the order by radio phone to a team commander. The police did not have to shout a warning before they fired; to do so would negate the essential surprise. The rules of engagement were based on those drawn up by Israeli Special Forces to deal with the country’s suicide bombers.

The unsuspecting de Menezes was tracked through the subway station, down an escalator, and onto the platform, where a train was about to depart. As he boarded, the police team moved. One wrestled de Menezes to the floor. Two others fired a total of seven bullets into his head and body. The details caused a growing public furor as it emerged Scotland Yard had lied in claims that de Menezes was “dressed like a suicide bomber.” He had worn lightweight clothes. Police Commissioner Blair found himself progressively challenged over his statements that attempted to justify the shooting. Within his own police force, he was increasingly subjected to criticism by senior officers, who began to leak details to the media about unhappiness within the ranks over Blair’s leadership. The criticism deepened when the early stages of the investigation into de Menezes’s death showed a failure in communication between the team tracking de Menezes and their controllers at Scotland Yard. It transpired that one of the team had taken an unauthorised toilet break during a key part of the surveillance, and radio links between the team and Scotland Yard had temporarily broken down at a crucial stage. Later came the embarrassing news that Blair had authorized a small payment to be offered to the de Menezes family to help them with funeral expenses. The family rejected the offer.

Meantime, the death of the young electrician continued to fuel a huge outcry in Britain’s media. Human rights organizations had seized upon the shooting to mount a campaign against police methods and demand a reassessment of its shoot-to-kill policy. In March 2006, Blair found himself mired in a new controversy. He admitted that he had secretly bugged his conversation with Britain’s attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. They had been discussing telephone surveillance and the bugging of suspects at the time. The revelation brought new demands he should resign, the fifth call to do so since the death of de Menezes. He had brushed all those aside. But over the shooting he had one firm supporter. Nathan had told his MI5 liaison officer, “Those policemen thought they were acting in the best interests of everybody on the information they were given. Mistakes do happen.”

In Tel Aviv for Meir Dagan one death had to be weighed against the loss of life suicide bombers had already carried out, not only in London and Israel, but all around the world. The one certainty, he had told his staff, was the further away the last attack, the closer was the next one.

In the early hours of the first Saturday in October 2005, the duty officer on the Asia Desk in Mossad headquarters received a “Flash” e-mail from the katsa based in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. It brought news that al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers had struck again on the popular holiday resort of Bali, killing and injuring over fifty people. In 2002, other bombers had destroyed nightclubs on the island, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. The message ended with the chilling words: “All indications are this is the work of Husin.”

The forty-eight-year-old graduate engineer from Reading University in England had been personally recruited by Osama bin Laden to become the organization’s master bomber. As well as the previous Bali bombing, the Malaysian-born Azhari Husin had organized suicide bomb attacks on the American-owned Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and the Australian Embassy in the city in 2004. Thirty people had died in the attacks and over a hundred were injured.

A few days before, Mossad had finally confirmed the MI5 claim that the mysterious “Mustafa” had been Husin, who had planned and recruited volunteers for the London bombings. Meir Dagan had told Eliza Manningham-Buller that Husin had traveled to London before the attacks, using one of the many passports known to be in his possession and traveling under one of his disguises. He may even have been in the capital when the attacks occurred: one of his trademarks was to observe the effects of the destruction for which he was responsible. He had been spotted at previous locations each time escaping in the confusion to return to one of his hideouts, which Mossad believed were in the Toba Kakar range of mountains separating Pakistan’s Northwest frontier from the equally inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan.

America’s National Security Agency geopositioned a satellite over an area that extended from Murgha and Khanozai, small towns in the foothills of the Toba Kakar range. Pakistani troops, supported by U.S. Special Forces and Britain’s SAS, began to prepare for another foray into the region. In the early hours of October 8, the entire region was devastated by an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale. Millions of tons of rock and rubble buried the area. The Mossad analysts, who had been closely monitoring the area, decided that if Husin was buried beneath the debris it was unlikely his body would be found.

Then came reports that not only galvanized the analysts in Tel Aviv but also those in every major intelligence service; Osama bin Laden could be among the dead. Informers had told their intelligence controllers that he had been seen in the devastated area. One report said his face looked thinner. Could that be an indication his kidney condition had worsened? In recent weeks, Mossad had discovered that bin Laden had received from China a portable kidney dialysis machine. Drones, unmanned aircraft launched by U.S. Special Forces to overfly the search area, reported that all power supplies had been destroyed. In Islamabad, President Pervez Musharraf agreed to a CIA request to keep rescue teams looking for earthquake survivors from entering the search area for bin Laden and Husin. In Washington bin Laden watchers joined the speculation. Bruce Hoffman at the RAND Corporation, a think tank with good connections in the U.S. intelligence community, said that if bin Laden had survived he could have made his way back into Afghanistan. Milt Beardman, a CIA officer with hands-on experience of the search area, added: “If bin Laden is dead the world will never know. We just have to wait until somebody drags out his body, does the DNA checks, and says ‘this is bin Laden.’ My bet is that it won’t happen.”

Nevertheless the speculation continued. Donald Rumsfeld, the feisty U.S. secretary of Defence, said it was now almost a year since bin Laden had made his last public appearance, and he could be dead; Nature’s justice. “No longer the face of al Qaeda,” Rumsfeld had mused. Certainly on the jihadist Web sites Mossad analysts noticed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Iraq, was increasingly labeled as a prime mover in the dream of restoring the Islamic caliphate.

On one of the Web sites appeared a chilling document titled: The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad and the Way to Enrich Uranium. Its eighty pages contained detailed instructions on how to “look for radium, an effective alternative to uranium and available on the market.” Matti Steinberg, one of Mossad’s experts on al-Qaeda’s search for a nuclear weapon, said the manual was “dangerously impressive.” While the author described himself as “Layth al-Islam,” the Lion of Islam, it was to whom he had dedicated the manual that raised doubt that bin Laden was dead. “A gift to the commander of the jihad fighters, Sheikh Osama bin Laden, for the sake of jihad for the sake of Allah.”

On October 18, a deep-cover Mossad agent in Tehran recorded a conversation between bin Laden’s oldest son, Saad, and his siblings Mohammed and Othman. The three men were living in secure compounds in the city suburbs from where they ran terrorist operations rather than languishing under house arrest as the Iran government claimed. In the conversation, Saad reported he had spoken that day to his father, who wanted his sons to know he was alive and well. The recording was made ten days after the earthquake had struck.

Shortly afterward came the first clue for Mossad analysts that there was a shift of power in the upper echelons of al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan the CIA had intercepted a letter to be hand-couriered from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the long-time deputy to bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s long-time strategist, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose ruthless bombing campaign in Iraq had brought a $25 million bounty on his head, posted by the United States. A copy of the letter was sent to Mossad to study. Its analysts were surprised: while the usual flowery Arabic remained, there was a sharpness to the tone over the deaths of many hundreds of Shias who had died in suicide bombings launched by al-Zarqawi. Zawahiri questioned “the wisdom of such a policy by you. Such action is not acceptable to our Shia supporters and will do nothing to achieve our aims. I have personally tasted the bitterness of American brutality when my family was killed in a bombing attack in Afghanistan. Despite that I say to you: we are in a battle and more than half of that battle is fought in the media. What you are doing is killing our Shia brothers and it will not help us win that battle.”

Days later al-Zarqawi delivered his response. On a cold night in Amman, his suicide bombers lit the sky over the Jordanian capital with massive explosions that seriously damaged three hotels and a nightclub, which in the tourist season would be filled with foreign visitors. But on that night, the majority of the ninety-six dead and scores of wounded were Arabs, including a number of Shia families who had traveled over the border from Iraq to holiday after Ramadan.

The atrocity was seen by Mossad analysts as evidence al-Zarqawi was making a grim presentation to the al-Qaeda membership that he was their leader in waiting.