Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 25 CONFRONTING THE DRAGON

In the fading daylight of an October afternoon in 2005, an Israeli air force plane landed at a high security airport near Beijing. The flight had been specially arranged for Meir Dagan, the sole passenger on board. Only Prime Minister Sharon and members of the Committee of the Heads of Service knew the purpose of his long journey across Asia.

The Mossad station chief in Moscow had obtained evidence that former members of the Russian armed forces had supplied rocket technology to North Korea, enabling the pariah state to build missiles capable of striking not only Israel but all the capitals of Europe. Even more worrying was that the Pyongyang regime had secretly passed on the technology to Iran, immensely boosting its already formidable military capability. In the past month North Korea’s state-owned Chongchengang Arms Corporation, which had brokered the deal with the Russians, had sent tanker planes to Iran loaded with liquid propellant needed to drive the rockets. Each missile was designed to carry a 1.2-ton payload, more than sufficient to reduce Tel Aviv to a wasteland. One of the rockets, the Taep’o-dong 2, could reach America’s West Coast when launched in the Pacific from one of the Soviet SSN-6 submarines Moscow had sold to North Korea in 2003.

Even more disturbing was a later report from a Mossad undercover agent stationed in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The city had long been a haven for spies from all over the world, who were on the constant lookout for refugees from the north who could provide inside information or, more important, who had worked in the secret military programs of North Korea. For weeks the agent had been cultivating a defector who had worked as a production manager at Factory 395 near the town of Jaijin in the far northeast of the country. He had not only provided details of the missile guidance systems being produced but also information about the scores of other factories in the regime’s industry to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. All told, over two hundred thousand people were employed in producing nuclear materials, and chemical and biological weapons. The defector revealed that at Factory 395, its missile guidance systems were capable of delivering warheads filled with chemical and biological agents. His duties had included buying electronic equipment made in a factory outside Nagasaki. Its salesmen regularly traveled to Factory 395. Their names had been passed to Mossad’s Asia Desk and in turn to its station in Tokyo: the possibility of recruiting a salesman as an informer was an enticing one.

The defector had described the all-too-familiar story of the regime’s oppression: dawn roundups, families set to spy on each other, starvation and abuses of power by those who were favored by the regime. The slightest indiscretion was severely punished. Men had been shot after defacing one of the portraits of the country’s leader, which adorned every public place. Women had been taken by the police to their barracks and gang-raped. Some had committed suicide afterward. The names of some of those who had been brutalized and those of their torturers, along with the places where the brutality had occurred, had been recalled by the defector. At the factory he had witnessed a woman being roasted in an electric oven and a man being beaten to death with steel rods. Both had been caught trying to smuggle out food from the factory kitchen.

The Mossad agent’s report had included details of how the Taep’o-dong 2 missile had been modified by North Korean technicians so it could fire the rocket from a land-based transporter. The vehicle had been dismantled and flown to Tehran. With it had gone a warhead designed to carry a biological weapon.

The details had been sent to Washington. Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, had flown to Moscow to protest to President Vladimir Putin about the situation that had resulted from the initial sale of Russian technology to North Korea. She had met with the cold response to direct her protest to North Korea. Dr. Rice had flown to London and discussed the matter with Prime Minister Tony Blair to see what diplomatic pressure could be jointly exerted by Britain and the United States on Iran. He had favored referring Iran to the United Nations Security Council. John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, had publicly announced that he had evidence that Iran was determined to produce nuclear weapons, which could be used to intimidate the Middle East and Europe and to “possibly supply terrorists” with the missiles. His statement was largely based on the Mossad report from Seoul.

Its content was later endorsed when Dr. Rice met MI6 director general John Scarlett. He told her the evidence had been “copper-bottomed” by Mossad, and that it was accepted North Korea could have acted only with the full knowledge of China. There was quick agreement that to avert the situation developing into a full-blown crisis, Beijing should be made fully aware of the intelligence Mossad had obtained and asked to exert its considerable influence over North Korea to withdraw its support from Iran. The overt diplomacy that had failed Condoleezza Rice was now about to go covert.

There were further discussions on how the request should be conveyed. It could be done at ambassador level, but there was no guarantee this would be perceived with sufficient seriousness by Beijing. But neither Dr. Rice nor Britain’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, could jump on the next plane to China; that would create a sense of panic Beijing could well exploit. Yet it was essential to convey to its leaders that North Korea must be stopped and that only Beijing could pressurize a dangerously unstable regime to desist from helping Iran. After hours of consultation by advisers in London and Washington, and finally a secure-line conference call with Tel Aviv to Ariel Sharon, it had been decided that Mossad, who had provided so much of the detail, should once more use its connections with China’s Secret Intelligence Service, CSIS, to convey the seriousness of the situation. “If it is not a full-blown crisis yet, then it will soon be,” said John Bolton.

It was not the first time Mossad had played such a role. In the past it had paved the way for the diplomatic exchange of Egyptian prisoners captured during the Six Day War; it had organized the bridge building that enabled Israeli diplomats to have working relations with Jordan and Lebanon.

All of Israel’s political leaders had used Mossad for covert diplomacy. Some, like Yitzak Shamir, Benyamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak, had exaggerated hopes of what Mossad could, or should, achieve; this was largely due to their own past connections with intelligence operations. In Ariel Sharon, Mossad had a political master who had both the temperament and experience to know how to handle the service. On more than one occasion he had tasked Meir Dagan to use the “backdoor” connection to the CIA to raise a politically sensitive matter and test the response in Washington before Sharon formally raised it with the White House. It was Dagan who told Porter Goss that Israel would continue to attack Hamas while still trying to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon also well understood that in a high-tech world of intelligence gathering, the human factor remained critical when it came to covert diplomacy. The character of Meir Dagan was perfectly suited to the role and complemented Sharon’s own rumbustious personality that had given him a keen interest in spies and their activities. For the prime minister, it was a natural progression to use Meir Dagan as his own secret diplomat.

“Our kind of diplomacy is based on contacts with other intelligence services. We tell their spymasters what our foreign service people would like to see happen. We know their intelligence people usually wield strong influence with the governments or regimes they work for. In more cases than not, it works very well. The diplomats get the public credit. We have the private satisfaction of a job well done,” Meir Amit once told the author.

Setting up Mossad’s latest venture into the dark side of diplomacy was something Meir Dagan had developed over his three years in office. On his personal computer were the updated names, direct-line phone numbers, and encrypted e-mail addresses of intelligence chiefs in over a hundred countries. His contacts also included diplomats, businessmen, and those who operated close to the edge of legality.

This would be Dagan’s second visit to China. Eighteen months before he had been a member of a delegation that had included General Amos Yaron, the director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, and a team of the country’s top armaments salesmen. They had come to develop ties that had already produced for Israel over $4 billion in sales of arms and military equipment. Much of it had originally been sent to Israel by the United States, and when Washington had finally objected to Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) selling an early warning system, AWACS, Israel had reluctantly paid $350 million compensation to cancel the deal. Diplomatic relations between Beijing and Tel Aviv, established in 1992, had become virtually frozen.

In Asia House in downtown Tel Aviv, the directors of IAI were furious after the years spent making Israel’s arms industry its main export. They had brokered deals not only with China but South Africa and the nations of Latin America. IAI had become a home for former Mossad directors Zvi Zamir, Yitzhak Hofi, and Danny Yatom. Amos Manor, the first head of Shin Bet, the country’s equivalent to the FBI, also had his office in IAI. It was a standing joke among them that the “big question is whether the state owns IAI or whether IAI owns the state of Israel.” The corporation’s unique position included being the only one in Israel that had total tax relief on all its income.

Dagan knew that when the time came for him to give up being the Mossad chief, he too would be offered a comfortable desk at IAA. How he performed on this mission to Beijing would be carefully watched.

For the previous sales trip to Beijing, the Israeli delegation had brought with them a number of enticing new weapons, many developed from their American originals. Among them was the latest version of Promis, the software program that could track the movements of literally untold numbers of people anywhere in the world (see chapter 10, “A Dangerous Liaison,” pp. 195–202). China had been among the 142 countries to buy the software whose undetectable “trapdoor” had been installed by Israel’s top programmers, enabling Mossad to monitor all those who used it. The new version could do that even better.

On that first visit, Dagan had seen that technology had become something China could not get enough of; more was spent on this than on food. Nowhere was it more evident than in surveillance. Ultrasonic detectors sensitive to noise or motion, electronic invisible beams that activated hidden cameras and silent alarms, bugging and debugging devices: Israel had the best and found a ready market in China. Some of the equipment the sales team had brought included gadgets developed by Mossad, such as voice analysers that would monitor the tension in a person making a telephone call. IAI had created a new radar that emitted electromagnetic energy pulses that bounced off an enemy aircraft and betrayed its shape and size. Other Israeli companies had found a ready market for the kind of surveillance equipment that had become an integral part of the urban Chinese infrastructure: electronic monitors analyzed every minute of the working day, checked on performance rates, even toilet breaks and personal activities. Meir Dagan had seen that no building in Beijing appeared able to operate without its quota of Israeli microchips that constantly fed the banks of computers by which the government kept track of its citizens from birth to death.

At the banquets where the delegation had been feted, speaker after speaker had spoken of the Asian Century, that by the year 2005, of the thirteen cities with world populations in excess of 10 million, seven would be around the Pacific Rim. China’s predicted economic growth of 8 percent a year would allow it to create the world’s largest cybercity; its reserve of currency, by 2010, would exceed that of Japan; by that year one in ten of all corporations around the Pacific Rim would be under the virtual control of its Chinese investors; by the year 2015, countries like Thailand and the Philippines would be under the economic management of China. All this would be achieved, a banquet speaker had enthused, by China’s ability to export technology it had bought from Israel. The irony was not lost on the guests.

At one banquet Meir Dagan had been introduced to Qiao Shi, once China’s supreme intelligence chief. At over six feet, he was unusually tall for a Chinese man. Qiao’s stoop, it was rumored, was from a childhood illness that had kept him bedridden for long periods during which he had pored over the written Chinese language. By the age of six he had mastered its radicals, strokes, phonetics, and recensions. The discipline of learning was good training for his future as China’s spymaster, and he had become the longest-serving intelligence chief in the world. In their brief encounter, Meir Dagan had found Qiao polite yet distant, but ready to raise his glass of French cognac to toast the Israeli delegation and offer them Cuban cigars.

Now, eighteen months later on that October day in 2005, Dagan had come as an emissary to pass on the request to Qiao that Beijing must intervene to stop North Korea from arming Iran, an action that could not only precipitate a regional war but also might lead to a global conflict.

Their meeting came under the well-honed rule of Total Deniability. There would be no record kept of the secure-line phone calls to set up the meeting or its purpose. The flight plan and the passenger manifest were classified. Only Porter Goss and John Scarlett knew the purpose of the trip. Senior diplomats at the State Department in Washington and the Foreign Office in London had deliberately been kept out of the loop so that they could truthfully deny any knowledge of the mission.

Dagan had familiarized himself with Mossad’s profile of Qiao Shi and the ultimate control he had over the activities of five spying organizations: ILD, the International Liaison Department, was engaged in covert activities primarily directed against the United States; MID, the Military Intelligence Department, targeted the military capabilities of America, Great Britain, and other member states of the European Union; MSS, the Ministry of State Security, handled all counterintelligence within China; STD, the Special Technical Department of the Ministry of State Security, who had helped carry out the theft from Los Alamos, also collated all signals traffic from Chinese embassies overseas; and NCNA, a news service reporting on Chinese affairs and also a cover for CSIS spies abroad.

CSIS had its own buildings in Beijing. Counterintelligence was housed in a four-story structure on West Qiananmen Street; foreign intelligence operated from a modern building near the city’s main railway station. But the major activities of the several thousand men and women CSIS employed were coordinated from inside the compound at Zhongnanhai, where the Chinese leadership lived and worked. Next to the prime minister’s office was a single-story, squarely built building with the traditional curved, red-tiled roof and a paved area containing a helicopter pad and parking space for cars. The building’s roof was festooned with aerials. An American satellite’s photograph revealed the building had an inner courtyard with an ornamental pond and a landscaped miniature garden. Qiao Shi’s private office was the only one with direct access to the courtyard.

It was from there that he ran intelligence networks that extended across the Pacific into the United States and Europe, into the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Japan. At his command was an army of spies and informers and an unrivaled budget to maintain them.

His entire career had been based on adroit, low-key moves, climbing up through one ministry’s bureaucracy to another. His command of languages — he spoke French, Japanese, and Korean — had brought him to the Foreign Ministry. As a diplomat he had traveled widely before being recalled to a senior position in the Ministry. In 1980, he had been appointed by Deng Xiaoping as head of state security. Deng had died, but Qiao’s power remained undimmed: he knew all the secrets, the peccadillos, and other personal shortcomings of the old men of Zhongnanhai, the last survivors of the Long March of 1934 when they had made an unforgettable two-year journey of six thousand miles across mountain ranges and provinces larger than most European nations; it had been not only a strategic military retreat from the terrible reality of brother killing brother but a major migration leading to eventual nationhood for a new China.

One of the first decisions of Mao Tse-tung after he proclaimed the birth of the Communist state on October 1, 1949, was to create a leadership compound in the lea of the Forbidden City from where the emperors had ruled for seven hundred years. Qiao Shi had helped to turn it into one of the most fortified areas on earth. There were guard posts in the most unexpected places: cut into the trunks of trees with each niche just large enough for a man, or concealed within shrubbery. Sensors, tripwires, and body-heat-sensing cameras proliferated. No aircraft was permitted to overfly, and only helicopters, ferrying the old men to and from their summer palaces in the hills to the west of the city, came and went. In the compound they lived along the eastern shore of the lake in the center of the compound. Many of the homes were palaces, often with thirty or more bedrooms, magnificent salons, and indoor swimming pools. Furnished with artefacts removed from the Forbidden City, each mansion had its retinue of servants and guards who lived on the north side of the lake in several barracks screened by vegetation. There were over a hundred varieties of trees and shrubs planted around the compound as a reminder of those the old men had seen on the Long March. The lake itself was filled with carp. Mao had initially ordered a hundred thousand; over the years the number had increased, some said to several million. More certain was that the water was dark with their feces, and a team of gardeners were employed to constantly remove it. The few foreigners who had been admitted to Zhongnanhai had said there was an unpleasant smell from the lake.

Whether Meir Dagan’s meeting with Qiao Shi took place in the compound would remain unknown, just as what was agreed between them. But twenty-four hours after his plane had landed it was in the air again heading back to Israel.

A few days later Mossad was among a number of Western intelligence services that discovered North Korea was weaponizing the bird flu virus. It added to the mounting concern that was already sweeping the world as the prospect grew of a repetition of the 1918 influenza pandemic that had killed 50 million. Then, as now, there was no ready vaccine to inoculate entire populations. Warnings from intelligence services said that in aerosol form the weaponized virus would be undetectable at border crossings, making it an ideal weapon for terrorists. In Washington, the Bush administration gave briefings classified “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” to members of Congress and the Senate, during which CIA Director Porter Goss and John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence, revealed details of the terrorist threat.

The outbreak had originated in Asia and the intelligence chiefs explained it would be relatively easy for North Korean agents to obtain birds infected with the H5N1 strain from which the virus could be weaponized. Biopreperat’s former director, Dr. Ken Alibek, who had defected from Russia and was now a senior adviser to the Bush administration on biodefense, said to the author, “The threat of a weaponized bird flu virus cannot be overemphasized. It would be the most terrible weapon in the hands of a terrorist. An aerosolized bird flu would be impossible to detect from one spread naturally by infected birds. But the lab-produced virus would be far more lethal and could be directed at specific targets.”

Peter Openshaw, professor of virology at Imperial College, London, said, “It would be more terrifying than engineered smallpox. That would be relatively easy to contain because there is an existing vaccine.” Hugh Pennington, professor of microbiology at Aberdeen University in Scotland, said North Korea’s molecular biologists “could mix the bird flu virus with other flu viruses, making it easier to spread from personal contact.”

Were the reports that North Korea was weaponizing bird flu an indication the regime had dismissed any approach by China to stop arming Iran? Had Qiao Shi simply politely listened to Dagan and done nothing? Or had he agreed with the old men of Zhongnanhai that it would not be in their own interest to put pressure on their unstable neighbor?

The one certainty was that a warhead filled with weaponized virus and launched against Tel Aviv would have disastrous consequences. But it was now not only the possibility of a weaponized bird flu virus that threatened Israel and the world beyond its borders. This one came from six nuclear scientists who had worked in the Pakistan nuclear industry and had left the country.

Mossad had discovered their activities before they had left Pakistan after having worked closely with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Islamic bomb and the godfather of nuclear proliferation. Their technical experience included the complex disciplines needed to use centrifuges to produce enriched uranium, the precursor for a nuclear bomb.

Their skills had been enhanced by South African nuclear experts secretly employed in Pakistan’s nuclear program at the Khan Research Laboratories. South Africa’s own space-age program had been dismantled after America had threatened trade sanctions in 1993. Overnight President Nelson Mandela had canceled his dream of putting an astronaut into space. And along with billions of rands being wasted, hundreds of highly skilled men and women found themselves out of work.

But the more talented did not have to wait long for offers. The first came from Dimona, Israel’s nuclear facility. Its relationship with the South African program had prospered from the time Dimona know-how had fine-tuned South Africa’s first intermediate-range missile, the Arniston, a carbon copy of Israel’s own Jericho II rocket. A decade of close collaboration had finally ended in 1992, again with pressure from the United States. But the ties between the scientists had remained.

To those who had worked at Kempton Park, a facility outside Johannesburg developing high-resolution camera systems for satellites; at Somerset West, in the bushland of Eastern Cape, where rocket motors had been designed; at the systems engineering facility at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, came attractive offers. No longer would they need to live in a country with the highest murder rate in the world and plagued with corruption scandals. In Israel they would earn salaries in a hard currency of their choice that far exceeded what they had previously earned. In no time they had begun to sell their homes near the missile test sites in Kwa/Zula/ Natal and in the former nature reserve near Cape Town, and had flown north on the regular El Al flight to Tel Aviv, joining others from the nuclear warheads manufacturing plant out on the veldt beyond the country’s capital, Pretoria. With all expenses paid and a substantial down payment in their bank accounts, they had settled into their new lives in the palm-fringed settlements that had been created for them in the Negev Desert. They found themselves working alongside a number of Russians who had also been headhunted after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The recruiters from Pakistan had also been busy. Working with even more discretion than the Israelis had shown, they had offered other disaffected scientists salaries at even higher levels than those from Dimona. With them came the promise of a lifestyle in Pakistan that would match those the scientists had enjoyed during the high days of apartheid: servants they had to let go after the collapse of South Africa’s space-age program would once more be plentiful in Pakistan, along with sundowners, the evening ritual of cocktails at sunset that had been an integral part of their South African life. They would live in homes even more lavish than those on the Cape; their children would be educated in private schools whose teachers came from the great universities of England, France, and the United States, and their private medical facilities would be staffed with the best doctors. Along with generous holidays, their income would be tax-free and deposited in any bank of their choice anywhere in the world. The offers were eagerly accepted and flights out of Johannesburg to Islamabad were filled with the scientists and their families.

Over the years, they helped to develop the skills of the six Pakistani nuclear scientists who had discretely slipped out of the country after they had been identified as being involved in what became known in Mossad, MI6, and the CIA as “America’s Hiroshima.” The intention was to smuggle into the United States a nuclear device that would be detonated in Washington. The bomb would be transported in one of the container ships that arrived at American East Coast ports every week. Few were subjected to a full search. Sleeper agents would collect the bomb, packed inside a container, take it to Washington, and detonate it, creating even more deaths and casualties than the September 11 attacks had achieved.

The operation had been devised by Osama bin Laden with an exactness that would have the same terrible synchronicity as the September 11 attacks. The intention was not only to terrorize and appall by the sheer number of victims, but at the same time provide an example of victory won by violence. Politically it was designed as a rallying call for global jihad, worldwide holy war. The leaders of Muslim nations who opposed it would be swept away in what bin Laden had likened to the creation of the new caliphate of which he had long dreamed. He envisaged how, barely a generation after many Muslim countries had won their independence, mostly from Britain, their world would enter a new religious era. Already the first phase was in place in Iran where the 1979 Khomeini revolution had aroused the deprived masses. Next to fall in the aftermath of America’s Hiroshima would be the Saudi royal family, who bin Laden had long accused of betraying their duties as custodians of the holy places of Mecca and Medina.

Details of the plan to detonate a nuclear device in America had emerged with the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden’s military operations chief, in an al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi on March 2, 2003. The arrest was made by Pakistani intelligence agents, allowing President Musharraf to offer further proof to Washington that he remained a staunch supporter of the war against terrorism. It continued to be less than the full truth. While Pakistan had indeed detained scores of al-Qaeda members, it still sponsored terrorist groups in the disputed state of Kashmir, funding, training, and arming them in their war of attrition against India. The Bush administration continued to regard Pakistan as its powerful ally in the war on terrorism espoused by bin Laden. “Kashmir is a side issue,” a State Department official told the author.

The arrest of Mohammed earned further public gratitude from Washington. No mention would be made of the role played by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces, who had flown the high-value captive to their interrogation compound at the American base at Bagram in Afghanistan. They brought with them over a thousand documents and a hundred hard drives recovered from Mohammed’s safe house in a Karachi back street; he had been betrayed for a thousand U.S. dollars. The documents and disks would later be deemed as “an operational gold mine” and served as the basis for Mohammed’s interrogation.

Manacled and hooded in one of the compound’s railroad freight trucks, subjected to sleep deprivation and long periods of amplified “white noise,” denied air-conditioning during the intense heat of the day and no warmth for the icy cold of the night, injected with drugs to weaken his resistance, coupled with physical violence and threats of summary execution — techniques later exposed by Amnesty International — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began to reveal details of America’s Hiroshima. It called for the detonation of seven tactical nuclear devices in seven cities simultaneously. The cities were New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. Each device would be capable of creating an explosion of ten kilotons. The planning for the multiple explosions was still in its early stages, and the operation would ultimately require smuggling into the United States the nuclear devices in seaborne cargo containers. Every year around 18 thousand container ships arrive at U.S. ports; only a small percentage are thoroughly checked. To check all would require manpower far beyond what is available and would have serious consequences for America’s commerce.

It was at this stage, in May 2003, that Mossad became directly involved.

A set of the captured documents and the first interrogation transcripts had been passed to Mossad as part of the close collaboration established between Porter Goss and Meir Dagan. In return Mossad had provided the CIA with electrifying news. Abdul Qadeer Khan had, in April 2003, met with bin Laden. The scientist had flown to Peshawar in the Northwest Province and had been driven through the towering mountains and across the Pakistan border into the hard, unforgiving, and desolate land of eastern Afghanistan. With Khan had gone one of the six nuclear scientists Mossad had been tracking. His name was Murad Qasim and he was the leading expert in the intricacies of centrifugal technology in the Khan Laboratories.

Now, a month later in mid-May, Qasim was among Khan’s guests at his weekend house overlooking a lake outside Rawalpindi on the north plane of the Punjab. The area was a conservationist paradise.

Posing as fishermen, a Mossad yaholomin team had set up surveillance near the house. Direction mikes had been disguised as rods.

Five years had passed since Khan had successfully detonated Pakistan’s first nuclear bomb at the test site beneath the Baluchistan Desert. In the intervening years he had continued to sell nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. As well as Murad Qasim, Mossad had identified five of his colleagues who had also traveled there; Muhammad Zubair, Bashiruddin Mahmood, Saeed Akhther, Imtaz Baig, and Waheed Nasir. All were senior managers at the Khan Laboratories. On that weekend in May, they completed the guest list at Khan’s retreat by the lake.

Like their host, Khan’s guests were confirmed al-Qaeda supporters. Bashiruddin Mahmood, in addition, had held a meeting with bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, in Kandahr,Afghanistan, earlier in the year. On his way back to Pakistan he had been briefly detained by U.S. forces in the town. Mahmood had claimed diplomatic immunity and insisted he was in the country on an “agricultural visit.” Faced with documents supporting his claim, he had been allowed to fly back to Islamabad. After being prompted by the CIA to interview him, Pakistan intelligence officers were astonished when Mahmood admitted he had indeed met the terrorists, who had asked him to devise a radiological bomb. It would be constructed from nuclear material wrapped in conventional high explosives, which bin Laden had obtained from a former Soviet Union nuclear site in Uzbekistan. Mahmood had insisted he had refused the request. The Pakistani government informed Washington that Mahmood was above suspicion. No mention was made of his meeting with bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

Now the eavesdropping Mossad team heard Mahmood tell Khan and his guests that his own contacts in Pakistan Intelligence had warned him that the CIA knew about their own role in America’s Hiroshima after their names had surfaced in the documents discovered with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s capture. Mossad’s long-rooted suspicions had been confirmed: Mahmood had gone to Kandahr not to discuss with bin Laden the making of a relatively simple “dirty bomb” but to pledge the services of himself and the five other scientists around Khan’s table.

Next day, even as Meir Dagan was sending Porter Goss details of what the yaholomin unit had recorded, all six scientists had left Pakistan. Khan subsequently resolutely denied any knowledge of his staff being involved in the plot to launch nuclear strikes against America.

Their names had gone onto the Detain Lists of a number of security services. But like others with terrorist links, the scientists had vanished like proverbial thieves in the night. A year would pass before Mossad once more picked up their trail. They were in Saudi Arabia.

Almost a year after Abdul Qadeer Khan had made his televised confession of being a nuclear weapons black marketeer, a commercial flight from Cyprus landed at Tel Aviv airport. Among its passengers was Moshe Feinstein (a pseudonym). He was a Mossad katsa and its expert on nuclear proliferation. In Nicosia he had met with a member of Saudi Arabia’s large foreign community. After months of careful cultivation and detailed checks into his background and that of his family, the foreigner had been recruited as a sayanim and given the code name of “The Salesman,” a nod toward his business acumen. Meetings would be arranged through The Salesman placing a notice in the Lonely Hearts section of a London newspaper available in Riyadh. Two days after it appeared, Moshe would fly to keep the appointment.

The Salesman had developed strong connections with the House of Saud, exploiting the fact that its administration was highly personalized, often being no more than functionaries surrounding one individual, usually a prince of the kingdom. It was The Salesman’s ability to target those key individuals that had made him important to Mossad. In an early briefing, The Salesman had explained to Moshe that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revolved around Prince Saud al-Faisal; and no decision, however inconsequential, could be made without his approval. Other ministries were similarly run. The Salesman had summed up the situation as “if you give them a list of more than one item, they often don’t get to the second. Negligence and incompetence are bywords.” In November 2008, five years after the lakeside meeting, Waheed Nasir chose to deny the Mossad report that he had been present or had gone to Iran.

His tantalizing glimpses into the closed world of the kingdom came during his regular trips to Europe and vacations on Cyprus to escape the ferocious high temperature of summer in Riyadh. A contact in the Ministry of Information had revealed details of the increasing anti-Americanism in the country (in 2005, a regime-approved poll showed that 97 percent of the population held a negative view of the United States). Even more disturbing was the growing extent of the penetration of al-Qaeda into Saudi Arabia and how the ruling family had tried to avoid attacks on its members by allowing them to pay substantial sums to the organization — providing the money was used only to attack targets outside the country. The Salesman had provided details of how Saudi petrodollars had financed the September 11 massacre and the attack on the USS Cole. The Salesman’s evidence enabled Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador with close ties to Mossad, to publicly warn: “Saudi Arabia is paying a ransom to be left alone. It does not care who else suffers. It will reap what it is sowing.”

Within the House of Saud, a power struggle had persisted after the death of King Fahd and the appointment of Abdullah to rule over the desert kingdom. He was a half brother of a powerful faction within the royal family. It was comprised of Prince Sultan, the defense minister; Prince Nayef, the interior minister; Prince Turki, director of intelligence and now ambassador to the Court at St. James; and Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh. They were known as the Sudairi after their mother, Hassa bint Ahmad al-Sudairi, the favorite wife of King Ibn Saud, the founder of the kingdom. Abdullah, their half brother, since coming to power had antagonized the Sudairi by his constant rebukes for their profligate spending habits, which were also a cause of smouldering public resentment. This had led to a groundswell of religious fervor among the population, half of whom were under the age of eighteen. This had been compounded by the country’s oil income fluctuations, leading to a decline in living standards. It had been a fertile breeding ground for al-Qaeda to exploit.

Moshe Feinstein had returned to Israel with important information from The Salesman. His ID card allowed him to bypass airport formalities and quickly reach the waiting car and driver. On the windscreen was a sticker bearing the motto of the Israel Tourist Office: two men carrying grapes and a pitcher, a reminder of the time Moses had sent Caleb and his men to seek the Promised Land and to find out if its people possessed poisons or disease-spreading germs that could be used with devastating effect on the Jews who had already endured much on their flight from Pharaoh’s Egypt. Caleb had returned with news that the land, which later became Israel, “flowed with milk and honey.” It was a running joke in Mossad that this was the first — and best — intelligence the country had received.

Thirty minutes later the car arrived at the gates of the Kirya, the headquarters of the Israeli Defense Forces. A sentry checked IDs, a hydraulic barrier was raised, and the car drove a short distance to halt before a featureless concrete building. Inside was the spartan conference room where the Committee of the Heads of Services met. With them was the director of military intelligence, Brigadier General Moshe Ya’alon. Within Israel he was a legend, a former paratrooper in the elite Saynet Maktal, the equivalent of Britain’s SAS, who had served in all those trouble spots in the Middle East where the streets and souks often had no names and where it was kill-or-be-killed. Beside him sat Meir Dagan.

Even allowing for the flat, emotionless tone in which Mossad encouraged its officers to deliver their reports, the men around the conference table could only have been galvanized when Moshe Feinstein revealed what The Salesman had told him. Abdul Qadeer Khan had secretly traveled to Riyadh and had met with Abdullah. The purpose of the meeting had been to activate the ultrasecret agreement on nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, which was designed to provide the House of Saud with nuclear weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil. Mossad had already discovered — through the network of informers its agent, Jamal, ran across Asia — that the pact also called for Pakistan to respond to any nuclear attack from Iran by launching its own nuclear arsenal. The pact had been signed during Abdullah’s visit to Islamabad in 2003. Mossad’s analysts had dismissed the promise to assist Saudi Arabia in such an event as little more than window dressing.

But the presence of Khan in Riyadh had heightened Israel’s fear that if Saudi Arabia developed a nuclear weapons capability, its missiles posed a serious threat to the Jewish state.

Moshe Feinstein’s briefing brought the possibility that much closer. The Salesman had told him that Saudi C-130 military transporters had started to make regular flights from their Dharan military base. It was from there that America had launched its first Iraqi war aerial onslaught on Iraq; the base was totally under the control of Riyadh after U.S. forces had now been pulled out of the country. The giant aircraft made round trips to Lahore and Karachi that had started after Khan’s visit. The Salesman had discovered the aircraft returned with payloads of materials that had come from Pakistan’s uranium enrichment factory at Kahuta.

Some of The Salesman’s information dovetailed with what Mossad knew. In 1987, Saudi Arabia had bought CSS-2 missiles from China. Though their range brought Israel within reach, they were capable only of carrying conventional warheads and would prove no match for Israel’s high-tech defenses. Saudi Arabia’s first serious attempt to enter the nuclear arena was in 1990 when the House of Saud secretly transferred to Saddam Hussein $5 billion to build them a nuclear bomb. The transfer of the money was handled by Tiny Rowland, the London financier who was Saddam’s bagman, hiding his massive fortune in banks around the world; it has remained undiscovered to this day (see chapter 19, “After Saddam,” pp. 397–402). The bomb was never built, and the deal had surfaced only when Mohammed Khilevi, the first secretary at the Saudi mission to the United Nations, had defected in July 1994, taking with him over ten thousand documents that detailed the House of Saud’s attempt to become a nuclear power. The International Atomic Energy Agency sent inspectors to the country to examine its nuclear facilities. They decided the kingdom had neither the technical capability nor the skilled manpower to handle a nuclear weapon.

Nevertheless the discovery of Riyadh’s intentions had created international alarm, especially in Israel. This increased as evidence emerged of Saudi Arabia’s support for jihadist causes in Kashmir, Uzbekistan, and Chechnya that were linked to bin Laden. It was the Saudi link with Kashmir that Mossad had focused on; Riyadh supported the Kashmir insurgents by funneling the funds through Pakistan; tens of millions of dollars were laundered through Islamabad’s central bank. Vast sums were sent by the same route to support the Taliban in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden, already lionized in Riyadh for his fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, remained a heroic figure in the desert kingdom. Too late the House of Saud realized he was its mortal enemy. The September 11 attacks against the United States made the king and his thousands of princes realize the extent of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. With the American withdrawal of its protective military shield, the House of Saud found itself urgently needing a nuclear arsenal. Pakistan, still one of the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism, had the capability of providing the weapons. It became the first port of call for the frightened rulers of the kingdom. The arrival of Abdul Qadeer Khan in Riyadh was further proof of Pakistan’s readiness to satisfy their demands in return for unlimited oil at a bargain price.

Tel Aviv saw the real danger from a Saudi-Pakistan pact was that the House of Saud could be tempted to try and buy peace for itself by providing al-Qaeda with nuclear weapons.

The katsa had one final piece of information. The Salesman had identified the six Pakistani nuclear scientists who had vanished after being named in the America Hiroshima documents from photographs Mossad had obtained and had shown him.

It was then that the scientists had moved from Mossad’s Detain List to the separate and very secret one it kept for those it was tasked to assassinate.

Rules for an assassination had not changed. Each execution had to be approved by a committee chaired by the incumbent prime minister and was of a person, the evidence showed, who posed a clear and present danger to the state of Israel and who could not be brought to trial because he or she was protected within the borders of one of Israel’s enemies. Among them were Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, and the numerous Islamic republics of the former Soviet Bloc. In Mossad’s eye view, the need for kidon had increased with the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in all its guises: Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Solidarity Front, Palestinian Liberation Front, the terrorists of the Philippines; all were pledged to destroy the Jewish State. The kidon had killed in all those places, employing the many skills acquired through their extensive training under the precise guidelines they had learned and that had remained in force since Meir Amit, the most innovative and ruthless director general of Mossad before Meir Dagan had taken over, had written out the rules in his bold handwriting: “There will be no killing of heads of state however extreme they are. They will be dealt with politically. There will be no killing of a terrorist’s family unless they are also proven to be implicated in terrorism. Each execution must be legally sanctioned by the prime minister of the day. It is therefore the ultimate judicial sanction of the state and the executioner is no different from a legally appointed hangman or any other lawfully appointed executioner of the state.”

Part of what Amit once likened to a “theology of death” (to the author) is based on an eighty-page manual written in 1953 by a scientist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who at the time was head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division. The manual has remained to this day in the midrasa, the Mossad training school, and is used as part of the two-year course for its agents. From them came the kidon. Rafi Eitan, a former Mossad operation chief, told the author, “Only a handful show the requirements; a total coldness once committed, and afterwards no regrets.”

Those requirements were imbued in the team who had begun to devise ways to assassinate the six Pakistani scientists the State of Israel had decided must die. Kidon assembled profiles of the scientists with the help of the Asia Desk, with information from The Salesman provided to Moshe Feinstein, from Jamal’s informers in Pakistan and elsewhere. Ari Ben-Menashe articulated to the author: “They were getting to know their targets; background, family, and friends, any connection that could be useful. How they reacted in a situation; what pushes their buttons. Only then could an operational plan be constructed. They would study every inch of the country where they worked, its geography and climate. They would study videotapes, travel brochures, local newspapers. Their methodology was anchored in their well-honed ability to separate fact from conjecture and the plans they created were governed by the golden rule that facts could not always wait for certainty.”

Late in October 2005, The Salesman gave Moshe Feinstein the news that the six scientists had flown from Riyadh to Tehran, a week after North Korea had delivered liquid propellant to power Iran’s Shahab-3 rocket with its range of eight hundred miles and a capability of delivering a warhead that would obliterate Tel Aviv. On Tuesday, October 25, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a Tehran conference called “The World Without Zionism.” It was the last week of Ramadan, the time of prayer. Five months before, he had replaced a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, who had advocated international dialogue and improving Iran’s relationship with the West. With words reminiscent of Hitler, Ahmadinejad said, “Israel and the Jews must be wiped off the map. Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”

In the kirya Israel’s three nuclear submarines and their arsenal of missiles with nuclear warheads were brought to a level one stage below launch as they kept silent watch on the seabed in the Strait of Hormuz opposite the Iranian Coast.

On November 2, 2005, a Mossad-inspired operation was moving to a climax in the Indonesian tropical city of Batu. A month had passed since a katsa in Delhi, the Indian capital, had learned that Azhari Husin, al-Qaeda’s most experienced bomb maker, who had already been identified by Mossad as the mastermind behind the July bombers in London, had been in Delhi shortly before bombs had ripped through the city’s Pahargani District. The attack was later earmarked as the work of an al-Qaeda group in Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Soldiers of Fortune. Over sixty people had died and over a hundred were seriously injured. Mossad’s offer to help Indian intelligence track Husin was swiftly accepted.

For three weeks the search yielded no trace of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Then a sayanim on East Java, part of the Indonesian archipelago, told his katsa controller that a number of men had rented a house in a suburb of Batu, and two of them bore a resemblance to newspaper photographs of the terrorists suspected of being behind the previous month’s attack on a restaurant in Bali in which twenty-three people had died. Within hours the katsa arrived in Batu. The newspaper photographs were of Azhari Husin and the leader of another militant group, Jamaah Islamiah, called Noordin Mohammed Top, a ruthless killer cast from the same pitiless mold as Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. The sayanim reported that Top had left Batu the previous evening.

Working through a well-established rule that ensured Mossad’s presence remained unknown, the katsa informed his station chief at the Israeli Embassy in Dehli. The Indian Foreign Ministry was told. From there a call went to its counterpart in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. Within an hour of the first call, a full-scale operation was underway in Batu. Led by Indonesia’s elite antiterrorist unit, snipers were posted on neighboring roofs and a pitched battle began. From within the house, hand grenades were hurled and gunfire raked the street as the unit stormed the house. As they entered, Husin reached for the detonator on the explosive belt he was wearing, but was stopped from doing so when a police officer shot him in the chest and legs. But there was no time to stop another terrorist from detonating his own belt. The blast knocked the roof off the house. Azhari Husin ended his life like most of his victims, amid the devastation of a suicide bombing.

The bomb maker had been high on the list of terrorists to be “rendered” by the CIA Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers (CTIC) at Langley. Originally created in the mid-1990s by the Clinton administration, it had rapidly expanded after the 9/11 attacks to counter the threat of Islamic terrorism and overcome CIA difficulties in obtaining convictions against terrorists. Further expansion followed the end of the war with Iraq when a number of meetings took place in London and Washington, chaired by both countries’ intelligence chiefs, to decide how to best deal with the large number of captured suspected terrorists. Mossad had a seat at the table. Out of those meetings came the creation of a purpose-built interrogation center at the U.S. base at Bagram in the charge of forty CTIC men and women, including doctors trained in the use of psychotropic drugs. Many were familiar with the use of mind-bending chemicals that had been developed for the notorious CIA MK-ULTRA program in the 1960s. Mossad’s own interrogators were given full access to the captives. Intelligence they acquired was shared with CTIC.

Bagram quickly became crowded with captured Taliban and foreign mercenaries. In the first weeks, two died during interrogation and several were left permanently physically incapacitated. But the center was soon overflowing with prisoners. At a meeting in London in April 2002 chaired by John Scarlett at the offices of the Joint Intelligence Committee and attended by CTIC officers and at which Meir Dagan was also an observer, it was decided that Bagram was not able to operate efficiently under such conditions. Even when detainees were transferred on the so-called Guantánamo Express to Cuba, the freight car cells at Bagram quickly filled up with new prisoners. Could another site — possibly several — be found? Scarlett had served in Moscow as an MI6 officer and recalled the existence of interrogation centers throughout the Soviet Union: he said the worst had been those run by the KGB in Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Poland. They could well serve CTIC’s purpose. Scarlett knew two senior officers of Polish military intelligence who had worked with GROM, a specialist Polish intelligence unit in Iraq. They were invited to London to meet senior members of MI6 who had worked in Eastern Europe. George Tenet, now in the dying months of his tenure, sent several senior officials to attend. The Poles confirmed the KGB interrogation centers remained intact and were used by local security services to question criminals.

Because of the considerable distance involved, the only way to transfer high-value al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists from Bagram would be by air. CTIC already had its own aircraft, and its senior officer at the meeting said there would be no problem in arranging overflying and refueling rights in countries like Britain, Germany, and Spain. The Polish officers identified airfields within the old Warsaw Pact that could be used as stopovers; the air base at Tazar in south central Hungary, the Szczytno-Szymany air base in Poland, and the Markuleshti airfield in Moldova. During the Cold War they had all been used for secret operations by Warsaw Pact Special Forces. Interrogations had also been conducted there by the KGB.

The operational plans sufficiently advanced, it was time for them to be politically rubber-stamped. Scarlett informed Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Tenet briefed President Bush. Both quickly endorsed them. Recognizing that Poland would have an important role to play as the refueling point for all flights going to Uzbekistan — selected by CTIC to be the prime interrogation center for the terrorists — it was essential to get the support of Leszek Miller, the country’s soon to be ousted prime minister who had staunchly supported the war on Iraq. He immediately agreed to allow the Szczytno-Szymany base to be used as CTIC’s prime refueling point in Eastern Europe and would inform his cabinet colleagues of his decision. A London intelligence source told the author: “Miller may well have not known the ultimate fate of those who would be secretly flown in and out of his country. But he was also desperately wanting to remain a player in the post — Iraq war coalition.”

The first flight began in May 2002. A Gulfstream V executive jet, registration N379P, landed at Northolt airport, a secure military airfield near London. It had a long history of being a staging post for CIA and MI6 officers en route to secret missions in Europe during the Cold War. Under what the Ministry of Defense later called “standing regulations,” the only details listed of the Gulfstream flight were the names of the pilot and the aircraft owner. No record was made of any passengers on board. The aircraft was registered to Premier Executive Transport Services. Subsequently, the Mail on Sunday, a mass-circulation newspaper in Britain, reported that the company’s directors “appear to exist only on paper. Bryan P. Dyness, Steven E. Kent and Audrey M. Taylor, appear to have no personal details or previous employment history. This is the kind of sterile identity the CIA uses to conceal involvement in clandestine operations.”

On a sunny spring day the Gulfstream V and its unrecorded passengers flew across from Northolt to the Szczytno-Szymany base in northern Poland still blanketed by winter snow. After refueling, the aircraft flew south from there to Uzbekistan. Soon the executive jet was on a regular run, picking up detainees in Jakarta in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bagram. One was the Yemeni microbiologist Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, wanted by CTIC “in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole while the warship was at anchor off Aden.” He was flown to Uzbekistan and his fate remains unknown. Another passenger had been Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian suspect who had worked with the British “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. He was rendered from Jakarta to Egypt. His fate also remains unknown.

By December 2005, CTIC employed over one thousand people: field officers, analysts, translators, and liaison officers with foreign intelligence services. Their closest relationship remained with Mossad: its own katsas in Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Afghanistan constantly provided updates of the movements of terrorist suspects on the CTIC list. The decision as to who would be rendered was made by CTIC in conjunction with CIA director Porter Goss.

The decision on how rendition would be carried out had been fine-tuned. CTIC officers were now stationed in twenty-two countries around the globe to handle the arrests and transportation of suspects. They were usually arrested by the local security service and held in solitary confinement until they could be flown out to a designated “black site”—the CTIC description of the interrogation centers. The decision as to which site a suspect should be sent was made by the senior CTIC officer on the spot.

“If a strong psychological interrogation with some physical force is required, a detainee is flown to Jordan. If a suspect is to be interrogated in between periods of strong physical force, he is sent to Egypt. For the most severe of torture for information, he is sent to Uzbekistan, where he is killed after he can reveal no more,” a senior Mossad officer told the author.

Craig Murray, then a British ambassador in Uzbekistan, wrote in a memo to Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary, in November 2004 (a copy of which the author has seen): “The CIA chief in this country acknowledged to me that torture of those rendered includes the boiling in vats of prisoners.” Murray was relieved of his post, labeled as “mentally unstable,” and finally dismissed from the diplomatic service. By December 2005, he had become one of the first to publicly reveal details of the rendition process. As a result he said he was threatened by Britain’s security services.

But the flights continued with CTIC’s aircraft crisscrossing the world. The Gulfstream V had now been joined by a C-130 Hercules, a Casa Turboprop, a Gulfstream, and a Boeing 737. All were painted white and bore no markings. Some were also leased from the Premier Executive Transport Service. When contacted by the author, it declined to discuss the planes or the purpose for which they were used. A glimpse of what happened on board the aircraft came from two intelligence sources — one in London, the other in Washington.

“The prisoners are shackled to their seats and are gagged and often drugged during their flights. CTIC officers travel with them to their interrogation country. The flight manifests contain no details of who they are. At a refueling stop, the aircraft window blinds are drawn. No local official is allowed on board. Fuel is paid for by a credit card the pilot carries. It is billed to CTIC,” the London source told the author. The Washington source added: “In countries like Uzbekistan, Soviet-trained interrogators carry out the torturing. They have a list of ‘information targets’ to obtain. The answers are passed to the resident CTIC officer. He sends it to Washington.”

From there the information was distributed within the U.S. intelligence community and sent to selected foreign intelligence services, including Mossad. In Tel Aviv it was carefully tested against other material gathered by the service’s own network of agents and informers.

By late 2005, the “torture flights” (the description was coined by Amnesty International) had flown hundreds of suspects to the secret black sites far beyond the public eye and the U.S. justice system. In December, Swiss intelligence — a small but well-respected spying organization — intercepted a fax sent by Ahmed Abdul Gheit, Egypt’s foreign minister, to its London Embassy’s intelligence chief. The minister wanted to know the fate of twenty-three detainees rendered from Afghanistan to a black site on Romania’s Black Sea coast. Swiss intelligence, whose relationship with Mossad is close, sent a copy of the fax to Tel Aviv, where the authenticity of the fax was quickly established. In it the minister had referred to “similar interrogation centres in Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia, and in Bulgaria.”

By late December 2005, the torture flights had made more than two hundred flights in and out of Britain and close to four hundred through German airspace. Other flights had passed through Spanish airports and Shannon, Ireland’s international airport. The logs kept by air traffic controllers in those countries listed more than seven hundred flights of CTIC aircraft. One of those who survived a flight was Kuwait-born Khaled al-Masri, who had become a German citizen. He had gone on holiday to Macedonia in 2003 when the local police took him off a bus and held him for three weeks in a windowless cell. One night he had been taken to Skopje airport and handed over to CTIC officers. Al-Masri claims this is what happened to him then.

“I was taken to a room at the airport and injected with drugs. I was then put on an aircraft, it was a Gulfstream I think. On the flight I was told that I was going to a special place where no one would find me. I still have no real idea where it was. But after a long flight I was hooded and driven to a prison. I found myself among prisoners from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. I was there for five months, regularly beaten, and told to confess I was a terrorist. Then one day I was dragged from my cell, put inside a closed truck, and driven to a plane. It was the same one that had brought me there. After a flight, I was taken from the plane. An American told me that a mistake had been made. He put me in a car with more Americans. They drove for a while, told me to get out, and drove off. I found out I was in Albania. I made my way back to Germany.”

He reported his story to the police in Frankfurt. The details were passed on to the kriminalamt, the country’s equivalent of the FBI. Al-Masri was interviewed by two agents. Satisfied, they informed the Bundesamt Fur Verfassungschatz, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It contacted the CIA station chief in Berlin. He sent a report to Langley. He was told, according to a German police file on the case, there “was a mistake, a confusion of names.” The German interior minister, Otto Schily, on a visit to Washington, raised the matter with Condoleezza Rice. She offered him the same response. Officially the matter ended. Al-Masri’s attempts to obtain compensation have failed at the time of this writing and he has been told there is no point in pursuing it.

In Tel Aviv, senior members of Mossad began to view rendition as an embarrassing sideshow that was obstructing the CIA’s real work and was unable to provide reliable intelligence. A veteran Mossad katsa said (to the author), “The danger with the torture flights is that they provide invaluable propaganda for our enemies. Where does harsh interrogation cross the borderline into torture? We are not averse to harsh questioning, but we draw the line at methods that allow prisoners to be severely beaten, sexually assaulted, and given repeated electric shocks and threats to their families. It is not that we are squeamish, but practical. That kind of interrogation does not produce credible intelligence.”

But the torture flights continued in the closing days of 2005. At the time of this writing there were no plans to stop them. An intelligence source in Washington told the author, “They will continue as long as Bush’s war on terrorism.”

More certain, the flights were illegal and broke every United Nations convention against torture.

As New Year’s Day, 2006, dawned over Tel Aviv, Mossad’s specialists — its psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and psychoanalysts — continued to evaluate the mind-set of Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For weeks, often working from dawn until midnight seven days a week, they had studied his speeches and watched videos of his public appearances to get a fix on his personality and the world he had come from.

Born in a village in the shadow of the Alborz, the fourth of seven children, he was a year old when his father, Ahmed, had moved the family to Tehran to work as a blacksmith. The specialists had pondered how much the poverty that had plagued his formative years had influenced his future career and shaped his radical views. The youth who had ranked 130th in the nation’s university entrance exam, sat by three thousand students, had become a committed campus activist during the reign of the shah and had gone underground from the regime’s dreaded Savak security service. After the shah was deposed Ahmadinejad had welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini as the country’s new ruler.

The wiry, gaunt-faced, heavily bearded youth with piercing coal black eyes became a familiar figure at Tehran’s University of Science and Technology (IUST) recruiting for his student organization, the Office for Strengthening. It became world famous when it held hostage American diplomats in their Tehran Embassy in 1979 for 444 days. Ahmadinejad displayed unusual political skills in exploiting the situation to humiliate the United States. In 2006, Ahmadinejad became the focus of intense speculation when a photograph was published that claimed to identify him as the ringleader of the hostage takers and that he had personally ill-treated their captives. The CIA established there was no truth in the allegation. Long before then, he’d obtained a doctorate in engineering, joined the Revolutionary Guards, and saw action in the Iran-Iraq War. In quick succession he became vice governor of the remote province Maku and then governor of the more important Ardabil Province. The mayor’s office in Tehran was his next goal, and he was elected in 2003 with a 12 percent turnout. He canceled many reforms introduced by his predecessor, emphasized the need for religious piety, and courted popularity by setting up soup kitchens for the city’s poor. It was the platform for his campaign to become president, offering “jobs for all and oil money on your tables.” The incumbent president, seventy-year-old Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was swept from power. The world watched and hoped that the forty-nine-year-old Ahmadinejad would continue the dialogue with the West over its fears that Iran’s quest for nuclear power was really a cover for producing nuclear weapons. Rafsanjani had indicated he was prepared to give the guarantees Washington and London sought and which Israel insisted on. But the first hint that the new president would not be so malleable came when he told a Tehran rally in October 2005 that he would “develop the most powerful of forces to give us everlasting power and peace — nuclear power.”

Since then every word Ahmadinejad had spoken, every diplomatic move he had made, every escalating threat against Israel he had delivered in the harsh tones of his mountain village dialect had been carefully studied by the Mossad specialists. His biography provided a useful means for them to explore what drove Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Part of it certainly was shrewd realpolitik, designed to win approval at home and to spread fear abroad. He understood the power of Iran’s oil resources on the global market and its rising price. He also saw America had been weakened by the insurgency in Iraq. He was equally as much an Islamic fanatic as Osama bin Laden and had latched on to the appeal for Muslim fundamentalists of demanding the elimination of Israel and being a Holocaust denier. In all this Ahmadinejad was not an original thinker; many of his ideas came from radical Islamic scholars who had long advocated jihad against Israel and the West. Ahmadinejad continued to use the Koran to reach out to pious Muslims yet maintained his appeal to Iran’s militant youth. To them he emphasized the religious authority for all he said, none more so than invoking a lethal “Prophet’s Tradition” against all Jews and their motherland.

Increasingly the specialists saw an issue of major concern was whether Ahmadinejad would realize his idea of Armageddon across the Middle East — and possibly soon. On that New Year’s Day they knew whether Israel would be forced to launch a preemptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would depend on their analysis.

Plans had been finalized. Fifty Alsatian dogs would spearhead the attack on Natanz, the nuclear bomb-making complex ninety miles northeast of Tehran. The animals would be fitted with body belts of armor-piercing explosives able to penetrate the entrance to underground laboratories where Mossad’s deep-cover agents had established thousands of centrifuges — the crucial device essential to produce weapons-grade uranium — were working around the clock. The dogs had been trained at an exact replica of the Natanz site constructed in the Negev Desert. Their handlers were part of the elite Oketz unit. The body belts would be detonated by remote control by their handlers. They had practiced mounting low-level helicopter attacks on the dummy site. Providing covering fire for any attack would be the Sholdag force modeled on the SAS. They would be supported by Israel’s Air Force 69 Squadron, based at the Herzerim air base in the Negev. Over the New Year its pilots continued training for the long-haul flight to Iran and back without refueling. Each £60 million plane was equipped with the latest weaponry, including the “over the horizon” Promis software that could pinpoint a target forty miles away. The Dolphin submarines remained hidden in the depths of the Gulf of Oman. Their twenty missiles each would support the air attack.

While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continued to threaten Israel would be “wiped from the map,” Meir Dagan chaired a “crisis meeting” in the Kirya in early January to study the latest satellite pictures from Israel’s own spy in the sky. The images showed the completed construction of a large new underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Accompanying the images were new reports from Mossad deep-penetration agents in Iran and other Arab capitals. The meeting had been asked to assess the fallout from a preemptive strike against Iran. It was accepted that a wave of terrorism would follow. Hezbollah would launch rockets from Lebanon. Arab nations would publicly condemn. But Mossad chief Dagan said his intelligence predicted that Arab nations, while publicly condemning, would be “relieved that Iran’s fangs had been drawn.” The meeting was told that two more Chinese air force transport aircraft landed at a military airfield near Natanz and unloaded crates of the state-of-the-art centrifuge known as P-2. It is designed to interconnect 164 centrifuges to form a “cascade.” Gas is spun at high speed in a cascade to weaponize uranium 235 to the same capability as the Hiroshima bomb. Both China and North Korea in the past have provided Iran with nuclear-weapons technology. Pakistan’s maverick scientist, A. Q. Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb,” later sold designs and nuclear components to Iran and other rogue states.

Mossad chief Dagan told the defense chiefs at the Kirya meeting: “Our latest intelligence shows that scientists at Natanz have begun to produce weaponized uranium. That means our original estimate that Iran would go nuclear in five years has been cut in half. We are at three minutes to midnight.” In May 2006, Dagan cut the estimate to possibly a year — one minute from midnight. Against this background the Mossad specialists continued their analysis of a man who had emerged from the shadows of Iranian politics to become a major threat to world peace. Increasingly Ahmadinejad appeared to believe he had a sense of divine mission. He had told his people he felt “the hand of God” continued to guide him after he had first threatened Israel. In December 2005, when an aircraft crashed in Tehran, killing 108 people, the president had thanked the dead “for they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow.” He daily expressed his devotion to the Mahdi, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, who would return to lead the Muslim world to freedom. All streams of Islam believe in a divine savior whose return would be preceded by cosmic chaos and widespread war. The vision is similar to the Christian version of Apocalypse. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed the Mahdi would return in his own lifetime and that he had been given the task of creating chaos to hasten his arrival. He had opened the New Year with another virulent threat to destroy Israel and had exulted at the renewed fears across the world his words had generated. Was that why he had even welcomed a conflict with Israel and the United States — because he saw it as the launchpad for the Mahdi to appear? These were the questions the specialists studied but could as yet find no conclusive answers for.

As the meeting in the Kirya conference room came to an end, Meir Dagan reminded the others around the table of some of the last words Ariel Sharon had spoken before he had been rushed to hospital with a stroke: “Israel cannot, and will not, allow a nuclear-equipped Iran.” Then the Mossad chief had left the room to update himself on the medical drama that had cast a great shadow over Israel’s hopes for the New Year.

On January 4, with the setting sun low over the Judean Hills, Meir Dagan drove into the Negev Desert past the first of the guard posts which protected the perimeter of Ariel Sharon’s most prized personal possessions, his Sycamore ranch. Blending into the barren landscape, the building reflected its owner, strong and seemingly indestructible. On the seat beside Dagan was his briefcase containing the latest reports of Shaul Mofas, the soft-spoken minister of defense, and the abrasive General Dan Halutz, the chief of staff of the armed forces. Between them they had approved ten prime targets for any preemptive strike against Iran. Mofas had written: “Iran is now the greatest challenge facing us.” The decision to launch an attack would be taken by the Committee of the Heads of Services. Dagan would provide the latest intelligence. There would be consultations with Benyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, a former prime minister who had resigned from the Likud Party only to take over as its leader when Ariel Sharon had quit in December to form his own party, Kadima (Forward). His move had broken the mold of Israel’s two-party system, Likud and Labor, to establish a powerful new force. A number of key Likud politicians had joined him, among them Shimon Peres, another former prime minister. While Israelis struggled to absorb the upheaval, Sharon suffered a ministroke, but in days he was back at his desk and, at the age of seventy-seven, was still working a twelve-hour day. It would be his final decision to attack Iran.

As Dagan drove toward the ranch, he knew the next time he would see the prime minister after this meeting would be following recovery from an operation to repair a small hole in his heart, which had been discovered when he was being treated for his stroke. Alongside the plans for a strike on Iran was Mossad’s assessment of Hamas ending its “truce” of attacks on Israel. It came at a time when Sharon was still considering whether to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to vote in elections due later in the month; all the signs were that Hamas would make a good showing. But Dagan knew there were also personal troubles Sharon had to cope with. His son, Omri, had been forced to resign from the Knesset over a finance scandal that had led to criminal charges against him. The previous night’s television news carried a report that the net was closing on a police investigation into $3 million secretly donated by an Austrian tycoon to help the prime minister repay expenses from his last election.

Dagan reached the ranch, built on the ruins of a Palestinian village and covering two thousand acres. As usual Sharon was waiting for his intelligence chief before sitting down to eat a meal prepared by his daughter-in-law, Inbal. The relationship between the two men had always been close, united by their common background of having fought in Lebanon. Then, Sharon had been as trim as Dagan had remained, but the prime minister, at 280 pounds, was now massively overweight for his five-foot-seven-inch height. To discuss the plan for the Iran attack, they sat in the ranch’s spacious lounge. Afterward they had sipped coffee while Sharon reminisced; his eyes, restless and hard when he was younger, had now taken on an old man’s softness, but his memory was as sharp as ever. He recalled in detail how he had captured a fortified zone in the Sinai by dropping paratroopers from helicopters, a tactic still studied in military academies in the U.S. and Britain. And how in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Mossad had been caught off guard, he had virtually single-handedly turned certain defeat into a brilliant victory. Dagan, as usual, listened intently as Sharon went on to explain how he had helped form the Likud Party after Labor had refused to accept him — and how he now intended to make Kadima live up to its name. He had spoken of his dislike for Netanyahu for his fierce opposition to the evacuation of the Jewish settlements. As the evening wore on, old friends dropped in to wish Sharon well for the next day’s surgery. He told one, Reuven Adler, that he was worried about the general anaesthetic. Adler had joked, “What’s the matter, Arik, you have turned into a coward all of a sudden?” When it came time for Dagan to leave, he noticed that Sharon looked more tired and pensive.

Shortly after Dagan had left, Sharon complained to his other son, Gilad, that he felt unwell and had some difficulty in focusing and had a strange feeling in the left side of his body. Soon he was finding difficulty in speaking at all. Schlomo Segev, Sharon’s personal physician who was at the ranch, was summoned. By then Gilad had called one of the paramedics on standby duty with an ambulance and the head of Sharon’s bodyguards. Gilad said his father should be moved to the nearest hospital, twenty minutes away. Segev overrode them, insisting the prime minister had suffered a major second stroke and should be taken directly to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The journey took fifty-five minutes, during which Sharon’s condition worsened. In the ambulance he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage caused by the rupture of an artery wall.

After seven hours of surgery, doctors put Sharon into a deep coma and onto a life-support machine. Meir Dagan was among those told that Ariel Sharon had suffered irreparable brain damage. He would never again make his mark on Israel’s future. Mossad, whom Sharon admired, would never again have a political leader who had given it unprecedented freedom to operate. Emblematic of the gaping void left in Israeli politics by the loss of Sharon’s leadership was the huge chair in the adjoining conference room to Dagan’s office. It was where Ariel Sharon liked to sit when he came calling. Dagan told his senior aides that whoever rose to the daunting task of replacing Sharon would never sit in that chair. He had the piece of furniture removed.

In Gaza and beyond, extremists clamored for his death. From his mountain fastness in the Tora Bora range that divides North Pakistan from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden called upon all Muslims to pray for Sharon’s death to “be long and painful and that he should not die like our hero Azhari Husin, who went to Paradise like a true martyr.”