Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 26 MISCALCULATIONS

Mossad’s role in the elimination of Azhari Husin was not publicly acknowledged in the congratulations from countries where his suicide bombers had left a trail of death and destruction. It was ever so: compliments remained between intelligence services involved in a joint operation, along with commiserations over one that failed or led to loss of life. Rafi Eitan, the former director of operations for Mossad, once said to the author: “Herograms have no place in our business. We just do our job. If it works, fine. If not, we make sure it works next time.” Many of the still-unsung operations in which he and his successors have participated will remain forever secret; the only clue to their loss in lives are the growing number of names carved into the sandstone memorial at Glilot (see chapter 3, “Engravings of Glilot,” p. 69).

“Gathering secret intelligence is not only dangerous, but a very imprecise art,” Eitan once said. It is also very expensive. By 2004 the United States was spending $40 billion annually on acquiring it, Israel a small percentage of that; for both countries costs will inevitably rise in the coming years. But in Washington, Tel Aviv, and London, in all those nations with substantial intelligence services, information is power and the cost of obtaining it worthwhile.

Britain in 2005 had a £2 billion annual intelligence budget, half of it devoted to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham in Gloustershire. Costing £1.2 billion to build, contractors spent £50,000 of that to provide stainless-steel handrails to avoid marking by staff with rings on their fingers. Two electric trains circle the building’s basement carrying boxes of files and sandwiches to the desks of its seven thousand staff on four floors. Shaped like a giant doughnut, the building has an inner courtyard the size of the Albert Hall. Eightinch-thick black cladding is fitted to all the outer walls.

Its high-security computers handle strategic intelligence, the most important element of all modern intelligence gathering; it enables Britain’s government and their advisers — civil servants, diplomats, and military chiefs — to be kept fully briefed on other countries and their future plans. Tactical intelligence, second, focuses on a potential enemy’s battle plans, monitoring its training exercises to discern methods likely to be deployed in war. The third element is counterespionage, in Britain called “the defence of the realm.” It focuses on uncovering foreign spying activities.

Mossad’s brief includes all three elements, but it shares discoveries with “friendly” services on its long-established policy articulated to the author by its former director general David Kimche as “Israel, first, last — and always.”

However, GCHQ maintains a “nothing held back” relationship with the most powerful intelligence-gathering organization on earth, whose activities are rooted in the deep black of space. From there America’s National Security Agency (NSA) uses its armada of satellites to spy on the globe. The threat of terrorism has increased NSA’s power; fresh targets are added to its electronic shopping lists by the CIA and other members of the U.S. intelligence community.

NSA cost more than $4 billion to run in 2005, employed twenty-seven thousand full-time experts, analysts, and technicians, plus a team of shredders to dispose of forty tons of paper a day; it also could call upon a hundred thousand U.S. servicemen and civilians scattered around the world. Part of its budget is spent on running highly secret listening posts in Britain: at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, Edzell in Scotland, Brawdy in Wales, and, the largest of all, at Menwith Hill near Harrogate in the north of England. All are linked to GCHQ and its own monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia. It ensures nowhere is beyond surveillance.

Behind NSA’s double-chain fence, topped by barbed wire interwoven with electric strands, its acres of computers vacuum the entire electromagnetic global spectrum, homing in on a dictionary of key words in scores of languages. Nothing politically, economically, or militarily significant in a telephone call, a conversation in the office of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, in a fax or an e-mail, escapes NSA’s attention. While the UN headquarters in New York is sovereign territory and placing a bug there is illegal under international law, it is routinely done by NSA and GCHQ to spy on hostile countries and those deemed to be friendly to the United States and Britain; the latter are spied upon mainly for commercial reasons or to give London and Washington an edge on diplomatic negotiations. NATO allies are also under regular surveillance at the UN, and Mossad keeps a yaholomin unit in New York to spy on Arab and other missions.

The material finds its way through the electronic corridors of the intelligence community in Washington and London, and on to Tel Aviv. In turn, Mossad reveals intelligence to NSA and GCHQ on a need-to-know basis. Master copies of NSA data are stored in temperature-controlled vaults underground. Somewhere among the library of secrets are the 1,015 intercepts of surveillance it admits to carrying out on Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed in the weeks before their deaths in Paris. In 2005, NSA continued to resist all attempts by Dodi’s father, Mohammed, to obtain copies of the intercepts, insisting they contained material of “national importance.”

In the run-up to the war with Iraq, both agencies combined to provide their political masters — ultimately President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair — with sensitive private conversations of at least one leader who had steadfastly pledged his support for the war.

On February 9, 2003, Sir Richard Dearlove, then the dapper, soft-spoken director general of Britain’s MI6, had by early afternoon made several telephone calls about a surveillance operation to be mounted against Spain’s prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s ambassador at the United Nations, and senior officers at the Foreign Ministry in Madrid. Code named Condor, the operation was marked “Beyond Secret,” the highest classification MI6 shared with GCHQ and NSA.

Dearlove had spoken to George Tenet, the director of the CIA. Each had a high regard for the other; they were professionals at the top of the increasingly murky world intelligence gathering had become in the run-up to the war with Iraq. It was a world where, in the memorable words of Britain’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, “no one could surprise like a friend.”

Deeply embattled over the coming war with Iraq, Tony Blair had secretly agreed for Aznar, a man he called a “trusted friend,” to be spied upon. Britain and America — Blair and Bush — wanted to be absolutely certain that their Spanish ally in the imminent conflict remained as steadfast in his commitment behind the scenes as Aznar did in public. Over 95 percent of Spaniards either opposed going to war or were lukewarm about the idea. “There was an air of crisis, verging on panic in both Downing Street and the White House,” recalled George Galloway, a maverick Labour MP — and later founder of the Respect Party — and regarded by Blair as a leader of the antiwar movement growing in Britain. “For Aznar to crack under pressure would be a disaster.”

The first man Dearlove spoke to on that February day was John Scarlett. Tall, ramrod straight, with a domed head, the former MI6 spy was the then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee — the invisible footbridge over which crossed all MI6 intelligence for Downing Street. Scarlett’s position as the overall monitor of Britain’s intelligence services gave him a seat in Blair’s Cabinet (later he would replace Dearlove as MI6 chief, a job Scarlett had long coveted). But as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, his main task was to know what was happening in Iraq, to know what could be known about Saddam Hussein, and to predict what would happen as war drew closer. That included knowing, from January 2003, the real intentions of allies like Aznar.

In the previous two months, MI6, the CIA, and NSA had also been involved in bugging UN secretary general Kofi Annan and Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector. Those operations finally surfaced when Clare Short, a former cabinet minister in the Blair government, claimed in February 2004 in Parliament that she knew “secret transcripts had been made of Annan’s conversations by MI6 over the looming war with Iraq.” In the aftermath of Clare Short’s revelations that Kofi Annan had been spied upon, Inocencio Arias, Spain’s ambassador to the UN, said: “Everybody spies on everybody. And when there’s a big crisis, big countries spy a lot. If your mission is not bugged, then you’re really worth nothing.” Details of how and why Aznar was bugged had remained secret until now revealed in this book.

In the weeks before the war, Blair had described Aznar as one of his “most frequent and trusted telephone callers,” Alastair Campbell, the strategy director in Downing Street, would recall. Aznar knew and accepted that his regular calls to Blair were listened into and a shorthand note taken. But he would never have expected — not for a moment — that his private briefings to his own aides were about to be spied upon on the orders of the prime minister.

Campbell, an astute judge of character, was among those in Downing Street genuinely puzzled at Blair’s close relationship to the Spanish prime minister. “Aznar was a man on the European right and it was as hard to explain his closeness to Tony Blair as it was the prime minister’s closeness to George Bush,” Campbell would later confide to Peter Stothard, the former editor of The Times.

The fact was that Blair and Aznar were united over how weak their domestic support was for going to war with Iraq. Aznar’s calls to Blair were taken in the prime minister’s Downing Street den. It was a cosy room dominated by a small desk, on which stood a large framed portrait of Nelson Mandela, a hero of Blair’s. Next to it was a telephone. But the ringing came from an extension placed on a small table in the far corner of the room. It was where the note taker sat. The room was closed off from the rest of Downing Street by tall blue-leather doors. Blair always greeted Aznar with affection, saying, “Hullo Jose Maria.” It was Blair at his telephonic best, transmitting his accomplished skills in making a person he was talking to feel like the only person who matters. In these conversations Blair tried to convey his messianic view of the importance of removing Saddam Hussein; speaking of creating a United Nations being freed from its present helpless torpor; how the removal of the dictator would serve as a warning to other extremist nations that terror would be met with massive force. It would also be a message to Palestinians and Israelis that the present conditions of instability in the Middle East must cease.

Across the river Thames on that February day, Dearlove had continued to make his own calls. Aznar now commanded less than 5 percent of the Spanish electorate to support his decision to back Britain and the United States in going to war with Iraq. “That’s even less than the number of those who think Elvis Presley is still alive,” Blair had joked to Alastair Campbell after another call from Madrid. It was that low electoral percentage that lay behind Dearlove’s phone calls. Would Spain’s prime minister remain committed to the ever-louder drumbeat of war, or would he waver and undergo a mind change that could wreck the military plans being finalized in London and Washington to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein? The only way to find the answer was to bug Spain’s ambassador to the United Nations, its key Foreign Ministry officials in Madrid, and the discussions Aznar had with them.

By the end of that cold February 9 day in London, the decision to bug Aznar had been taken. Those directly involved were Sir Richard Dearlove, George Tenet, John Scarlett, and the directors of GCHQ and NSA. The green light to do so had come from Downing Street after a lengthy conversation between Bush and Blair the previous day.

The decision to mount Operation Condor came when Frank Koza, a senior analyst in NSA, had sent his counterpart in GCHQ an e-mail asking for a surveillance “surge” against key members of the UN Security Council. Koza asked for “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policy makers an edge.” His request was marked “Top Secret/COMINT/XI.” The “XI” coding signified the request must never be declassified. It must stay Top Secret. However, a copy of the message somehow later found its way to GCHQ translator Katherine Gun. She passed it to an intermediary, who gave it to the British journalist Yvonne Ridley, who had achieved fame after being freed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and became a strong supporter of the antiwar movement. She, in turn, passed the memo to a journalist on London’s Observer. Gun was arrested under Britain’s Official Secrets Act; later, the case was dropped.

On that February day, the focus in GCHQ, NSA, MI6, and the CIA was spying on Aznar. The operation would be run out of Menwith Hill using NSA’s ECHELON system’s program called the Dictionary: its computers can target specific telephone numbers, words, and voiceprints, and includes “Tempest,” which deciphers individual voices from laser beams directed at windows to read vibrations generated by people speaking. A segment of Aznar’s voice was fed into the Dictionary computers, which were programmed to track every word Aznar and his key officials spoke in relation to Iraq anywhere in the world. Information obtained was downloaded to the Menwith Hill computers. Interlinked banks of computers decoded and analyzed the data and fed it down a secure line to GCHQ, where the material was turned into transcripts marked “Highly Classified.” These were then sent to John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. From there they were hand carried the short distance to Downing Street in buff-coloured files each with the bold Cross of Saint George on their covers, an open indication of Scarlett’s patriotism. To reach Blair, the intelligence supremo had to frequently step over the toys of Leo, the prime minister’s youngest son, who often used the floor of Downing Street as a playground. Copies were sent via NSA to George Bush. For both politicians they became the prime source for judging the mood of Aznar and his officials. After the war it emerged that Aznar had remained consistent in his support. It would cost him his post as prime minister in Spain’s next election.

In the closing weeks of 2005, Meir Dagan opened a staff meeting with what Sergei Kondrashov, a retired KGB chief of counterintelligence, had said, that if the KGB had been forced to chose between what a Russian mole in the U.S. administration reported and a subscription to The New York Times, he would believe the newspaper any day. Dagan reminded them that until Porter Goss became the CIA director, the agency evaluated intelligence reports on a simple scale: ABCD for the reliability of the source and 1234 for how accurate the information was. A1 meant the source was unchallengeable and the information unquestioningly true. B2 indicated the source was good, and the intelligence was very probably true. Category D4 meant the source was totally unreliable and the information demonstrably false. Dagan had paused and said that Goss had spoken to a number of his deputy directors who admitted they had rarely seen A1 and only a small number of D4s. The great majority of reports crossing their desks were designated C3—the source had been reliable in the past and so his information was possibly true. Dagan had looked around the conference table and said that logically this meant a usually reliable source was sometimes also unreliable and the information described as possibly true could just as well be untrue. He reminded them that for Mossad good intelligence was always required to contain the caveat as Saint Paul glimpsed heaven—“through a glass, darkly.” It was an indication of how Mossad must continue to face threats as the world became a global village and the demands made on an intelligence service grew daily. Gone were the clear divisions between the Soviet Union and the West. Terrorism, international money laundering, ruthless dictators, and ethnic conflicts had all changed the traditional role of spying and counterintelligence. In the desperate hunt for information to combat the new targets, intelligence services had been forced to operate in unfamiliar areas.

As 2005 drew to a close, the war on terrorism had not achieved many of its targets. While Saddam had been captured, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda remained a potent threat. Mossad’s analysts had concluded that capturing or killing bin Laden would do nothing to eliminate al-Qaeda; it had a well-defined command structure ready to replace him, and the organization itself was increasingly focused on spreading its ideology to inspire others and imitate what had been achieved on September 11, 2001. Madrid, London, Bali, and Amman were all signposts on the road to further massacres. The analysts estimated al-Qaeda was now entrenched in sixty countries, truly a hydra-headed monster.

No one could have said what the effect would have been from the power play between Ayman al-Zawahiri, a fanatic with a scholar’s beguiling mind, and the clinically insane Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Both grasped the importance of using the Internet as a virtual base from which to proselytize and provide instruction. It meant that al-Qaeda training camps could attract jihadists who had already acquired the essential hatred of the United States, Britain, and, above all, Israel. The time recruits needed to be in the camps could be shortened, reducing the risk of them being caught in an air strike or a ground assault. Ironically, al-Zarqawi would be killed by a carefully planned air attack by the United States in Iraq in 2006.

Increasingly, state-sponsored terrorism had flourished and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Countries like Syria, North Korea, and Iran had calculated the risk of punishments they could face — and concluded they were worth the risk. In Damascus, Pyongyang, and Tehran the collective view was that not even the United States would contemplate starting a global war by launching a nuclear bomb against those states; neither would Israel, for all its posturing with nuclear submarines posted in the Gulf of Oman, be likely to launch a preemptive strike. So Islamic radicalism continued to grow, its sponsors knowing they would face, at most, no more than conventional military strikes. Sanctions, as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had demonstrated, did not work.

Al-Qaeda had also recognized that terrorism was war by another name, but was not treated as acts of war. Pakistan could arm Kashmiri terrorists to attack the Indian Parliament in 2001; Iranian-trained Saudis blew up the U.S. military base at Khobar in 1996; and Syrian-born members of Hamas bombed Israeli buses as they had done for years: yet none of these actions were treated as acts of war to be declared on the sponsoring states.

The danger of terrorism, as Meir Dagan had regularly lectured new members of Mossad, was its cost effectiveness. It cost little to produce a suicide bomber. One attack can create havoc, forcing a government to use its resources — manpower and technology — to try and capture the terrorists. A Mossad analyst had once calculated (for the author) that “one terrorist cost as much as a hundred expensively trained men to catch or capture him or her.”

Into this already complex situation there was the ever-expanding role of the Chinese secret service, CSIS. China has a tradition of espionage that reaches back over twenty-five hundred years. But never had its activities been more far-reaching than today.

Since the theft of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos, CSIS had continued to expand its activities in the United States. Many of China’s accredited diplomats in its Washington embassy, various consulates, and trade missions throughout the United States were either full-time intelligence officers or directly linked to the service. The FBI estimated that in 2005 the number of CSIS agents and informers was larger than any other foreign intelligence service operating within the country. Since Los Alamos they had between them obtained, either by theft or deception, an estimated $35 million worth of secrets, mostly from technology companies working in or for the defense industry. FBI Director Robert Mueller, had ordered that all the firms be briefed on improving their security and that organizers of technology conferences, which had always attracted Chinese scientists, were instructed on “how to recognize a possible CSIS agent.” Universities were asked to provide details of courses “and other interests” of the thirty thousand Chinese students on their campuses after the FBI established that CSIS had paid for an increasing number to study in America; many were attending postgraduate courses at universities like UCLA, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. After graduating, often in computer or science-related subjects, they had applied for jobs at companies with sensitive defense contracts. A former senior FBI officer, Ted Gunderson, who had worked on counterterrorism out of the Los Angeles field office, told the author: “The students are taught how to steal, photocopy, and return valuable blueprints and secret contracts and smuggle them out past the security guards. The material is often on microfilm inserted into a tooth cavity or swallowed to be excreted later in one of the many safe houses CSIS has around the country.”

Meir Dagan’s now-close relationship with Porter Goss enabled the backdoor channel to be used to provide details of what Mossad knew about CSIS activities in the United States. Both intelligence chiefs knew much of the material was too politically sensitive to pass on to the White House or the State Department until there was absolute proof of espionage.

In October 2005, a Los Angeles — based katsa informed Tel Aviv that a CSIS spy ring in California was about to courier to China disks containing ultrasecret details about U.S. weapons systems, which had been encrypted and hidden behind tracks of music CDs and the latest movie releases. A Mossad sayanim who worked for the same high-security defense contractor, Power Paragon, in Anaheim, California, which employed a member of the spy ring, Chi Mak, had become suspicious and informed his katsa. The sayanim was told to keep watch. In weeks, he had provided sufficient details for the katsa to alert Tel Aviv.

The details were passed by Meir Dagan to Porter Goss down the backdoor channel. A major FBI operation was mounted. On October 27, the day before Chi Mak was to fly out of Los Angeles with his wife, Rebecca, along with two other members of the spy ring — Chi Mak’s brother, Tai Wang Mak, and his wife, Fuk Heung Li — the two couples were arrested at Chi Mak’s home in Downey, California.

Federal officers discovered what one FBI agent, James E. Gaylord, described as “a house full of secrets.” They would turn out to be the most damaging espionage operation against the United States since the theft at Los Alamos. Hundreds of thousands of documents and computer printouts were found in Chi Mak’s home. Both he and his wife were naturalized American citizens who had arrived in the United States in May 2001. The CSIS spy ring was already in place. But Chi Mak set about upgrading its activities. He obtained a job as an engineer with Power Paragon. It gave him access to highly classified weapons systems, including blueprints of the new Virginia-class submarines and the Aegis battle-management systems, which are the core of U.S. Navy destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers. Chi Mak, an electronics engineer with what the FBI called “advanced computer skills,” had stolen material that would give China superiority if the United States went to the defense of Taiwan in any conflict with the Beijing regime.

Neighbors described Chi Mak and his wife as “polite but reserved” and “regular folk who lived quiet lives.” Short of calling them “pillars of our society,” they fitted the standard profiles of deep-cover agents, no different from the untold numbers who toiled every day in the dark and always dangerous world of secret intelligence. For them it was over. But how long before the next spy scandal came? When it did, Meir Dagan was determined it would not be Mossad caught pillaging secrets.

Arriving at work at his usual hour of 6:30 on the morning of Tuesday, January 24, 2006, Meir Dagan found on his desk the report he had eagerly awaited from Mossad’s Research and Development Department. Its scientists, programmers, and technicians had finally succeeded in creating a new range of gadgets that would ensure the service remained at the forefront of intelligence gathering. Each item had been field-tested across Europe by katsas. In Paris and Brussels they had tried out the EDLB, the updated electronic dead letter box, which used a state-of-the-art miniaturized computer system so that an agent could exchange information with other field agents or his controller at Mossad headquarters. Built into the EDLB was an encryptor that R & D programmers believed even the code breakers of the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service — acknowledged to be the best in the world — could not break. With it came a specially adapted mobile phone the size of a cigarette packet. Known as an “infinity device,” it could hack into any cell phone, making it activate itself without triggering its display light. The device had been tested outside the European Union headquarters in Brussels, providing an eavesdropping conduit over a twenty-four-hour period and automatically transmitting, on the hour, every conversation it had downloaded. Another gadget known as “keystroke” was designed by the R & D team to be inserted into a target computer to download everything stored on its hard drive. This had been tested out on a dating agency in Madrid. Yet another device code-named “Tempest” was designed to scan all the computers in a building to discover the level of electronic protection each one had. The test site chosen was an unsuspecting Siemens Building in Munich. The R & D report indicated that Tempest had “provided a satisfactory result.” Undoubtedly the greatest triumph had been creating a surveillance device known as “Smart Dust.” These were ant-sized sensors that could be scattered in hostile territory — hidden in dust, grass, or soil — and their microdot microphones would pick up data transmitted to an EDLB designed to store several megabytes of information, which would then be automatically transferred to Mossad headquarters. The life of a sensor was a month before they would self-destruct.

Among the first to be equipped with this arsenal of gadgets were Mossad field agents in the Balkans, where al-Qaeda had set up a network that ran from Bosnia in the north down to Albania and where, under cover of mosques, Islamic fund-raising organizations and information centers operated. In the mountains behind the Adriatic Sea were the staging camps for jihadists from England, France, Spain, and Italy to be assessed before continuing their long journey east to Afghanistan, traveling along one of the many well-established heroin-smuggling trails. Later, their training completed in the mountains of Afghanistan — where bin Laden and his senior aides remained hidden — the jihadists made their way back across Iran into northern Turkey, through the south of Bulgaria, across Macedonia, and back into Albania. From there they either crossed the Adriatic into Italy or traveled north through Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and into Austria. From there they made their way back home. Mossad called them “Trojan Horses,” the silent, watchful, suicide bombers, the explosives makers, the terrorists trained in urban warfare ready to strike at the heart of Europe. Their prime target, Meir Dagan had told his katsas, were always going to be Jewish institutions — banks, synagogues, schools, and any organization in which Jews had invested. Then would come the American and British institutions. But those owned or partly controlled by Jews would be the first.

He had dispatched his finest operatives to interdict and kill the jihadists ideally as they made their way to Afghanistan or on their return journey. Those who survived were hunted down as they made their way north back into Europe. Those who still managed to avoid death were brought to the notice of other security services. By 2006, Mossad had provided the Dutch security service, Algemene Inlichtingen — en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD), the names of fifty jihadists who had arrived back in Holland in the past three years. In Belgium, Mossad had helped its intelligence service to uncover an al-Qaeda cell whose members had survived the long journey back from Afghanistan. In the cell’s apartment in Brussels were discovered expertly forged passports and an al-Qaeda textbook on how to assemble a bomb. But once more Mossad had been frustrated to see that the much-vaunted security cooperation between Europe’s own security services was not as close as its political leaders maintained. French intelligence continued to argue in 2006 that Holland was failing to extradite terrorist suspects wanted in France. The Dutch had rejected the accusation.

The suspects were members of Taqfir wal Hijra. Its founders had fled from Egypt to Algeria. There the organization had been absorbed into al-Qaeda. In 2003, it had arrived in The Hague. Operating in highly secret cells, its members set about recruiting jihadists to travel to Afghanistan for training. The bodies of those who did not return home lay along the trail to and from Afghanistan. As usual, Mossad arranged for their obituaries to appear in local Arab newspapers. Sometimes their families received flowers and a condolence card before a jihadist was killed. The gesture was designed to create panic among jihadists.

One who had escaped was Lionel Dumont, a native Frenchman from Roubaix, an industrial town in the north of France. In his early teens he had converted to Islam and later spent his military service with the French army in Somalia. The brutality of many of his fellow soldiers toward the Muslim population had a powerful and lasting effect on Dumont. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, he went to Bosnia to fight with al-Qaeda — sponsored Mujahideen.

It was a time when Osama bin Laden was looking for new places to defeat the infidel. Almost simultaneously with the fighting in Bosnia, the conflict in Chechnya erupted. Then Albania provided another battlefield for al-Qaeda; chaos and anarchy already prevailed in the country, making it a fertile ground for arms traffickers and other terrorist-linked groups. Al-Qaeda welded them into a powerful force; unlimited funding was provided, along with humanitarian aid. Albania became a springboard into neighboring Kosovo. Dumont was among some five hundred Mujahideen smuggled into the Albanian capital of Tirana. The operation was led by Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. After a kill-or-be-killed conflict against government forces, the Mujahedeen swept on into Macedonia. Again money and aid won over impoverished villagers. In the end it would be NATO that drove them out. But by then al-Qaeda had scooped up hundreds more recruits. Many went to Afghanistan for specialist training.

When an uneasy peace came to the region, Dumont returned to Roubaix and formed his own group, which he trained and led to conduct a number of terrorist attacks. The French police tried, but failed, to arrest him, and Dumont fled to Bosnia. There he became a senior member of the rapidly expanding al-Qaeda organization. Finally captured, he escaped from prison and was spirited along the trail to Afghanistan. Twice Mossad katsas almost killed him before he reached the safety of the mountain fastness where al-Qaeda had its camps along the Afghanistan border with Pakistan. In January 2006, Mossad believed Dumont was still there, supervising the training of other French-born jihadists. The gadgets Mossad’s R & D department had created would be used to track and kill them.

The budget of hundreds of millions of dollars to create the surveillance arsenal had been approved by Ariel Sharon. But on that morning of January 24, Meir Dagan knew that the one Israeli politician he revered above all others would never recover from the massive stroke that had left Sharon in an ever-deepening coma, paralyzed, and kept alive by a life-support system in his Jerusalem hospital. His medical team had indicated they could do no more. As often as he could Dagan had visited the seventh-floor suite where his old friend lay at death’s door. Each time Dagan stood in the doorway, his sharply intelligent eyes watching Sharon’s heartbeats continuing to move across the monitor positioned near the bed, the blips on the screen pulsing, reducing the old man’s grasp on life to an endless trace. Sharon’s family would be there, grouped around the bed, quiet, the emotions aroused by approaching death seeming to settle even more over them. Dagan could detect the sorrow, despair, and helplessness of the family and the barely concealed resignation of the doctors and nurses. He had wondered if Sharon sensed their presence. More certain was the family gathered around the bed were caught in some deep, primitive, and instinctive ritual, staring silently at the motionless figure, almost as if no words could communicate their inner feelings. Dagan well understood that; in his life as a soldier and head of Mossad, he had seen the effect of death on others many times.

He knew that the medical equipment surrounding Sharon, machines that clicked and pinged, would provide some confirmation for the family that all was not yet lost; that active measures were still being taken to keep the inevitable at bay. Close to the bed was a red-painted surgical trolley. This was the crash cart, the ultimate emergency aid with drugs to stimulate cardiac output, sponges, needles, tourniquets, probes, catheters, airway tubes, an aspirator, and a defibrillator capable of delivering through its paddles a powerful electric shock to start Sharon’s heart if it stopped. The decision to resuscitate would come only when that moment arrived. Dagan had told aides that if it were his choice, he would not revive his friend to exist in a vegetative state.

After reviewing the R & D report, Dagan prepared for his first meeting of the day. It would be with two senior officers of France’s Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory (DST). The largest of the Republic’s six intelligence agencies, it employed several thousand staff and, over the years, had developed close ties with Mossad. These had been cemented when Mossad had helped the DST foil a terrorist plot to launch a jetliner into the Eiffel Tower. Since then both services had collaborated to thwart a number of al-Qaeda attacks in France. None of the details had subsequently emerged in public, but they had included a plan to assassinate President Chirac.

While France, like many European countries, publicly advocated a judicial approach to the war on terrorism, wherever possible arresting and trying terrorists; behind the scenes the DST were as ruthless as Mossad. This had followed a major overhaul in 1986 of the country’s police and its intelligence-gathering apparatus. After the 9/11 attacks the cooperation with Mossad rapidly expanded. Both services had common ground in dealing with the effects of the jihad in Chechnya, Gaza, the West Bank, and Kashmir, which had led to a radicalization among Middle East Arabs who had arrived in Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon, cities where Jewish investment and influence was well established. The al-Qaeda network in France consisted largely of North African second-generation emigrants from working-class or middle-class families. The majority were still in their early twenties and had been seduced by the messianic preaching of Osama bin Laden on a video or persuaded to become a jihadist after listening to a radical preacher in a mosque. Hundreds had made their way to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq.

The closeness of Spain to North Africa made it an important conduit for al-Qaeda to smuggle operatives into France. A document that a Mossad analyst prepared in 2005 (which the author has seen) accuses the Moroccan police of receiving payment in return for smuggling terrorists into Spain. “Al-Qaeda controls criminal networks in Spain who deal in money laundering and trafficking in drugs and prostitutes from the Balkans. Spain is still considered a safe haven for Islamic extremists even after the Madrid bombings. The current estimate is that they are linked to eighteen radical groups that Spanish intelligence has not been able to successfully penetrate.”

Information produced by Mossad’s Spanish sayanim was passed on to the DST, together with al-Qaeda’s growing presence on France’s border with Germany. The Federal Republic had itself become a fertile ground for al-Qaeda to recruit jihadists in university cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Weisbaden, Duisburg, and Munich. Though Mossad had helped to destroy the most important al-Qaeda cell in Germany, the Meliani Kommando, as it was about to launch a terrorist attack in Strasbourg against the city’s cathedral and its historic synagogue, al-Qaeda still had a sizeable network; many of its members had come from the Balkans.

To update themselves, DST officers regularly visited Tel Aviv and Mossad Station in Paris and had free access to the DST data bank. Central to this relationship was the joint monitoring of mosques and individuals across France. Warrants for wiretapping were easily granted and, since December 2005, surveillance had been extended to use video cameras in public areas and access to phone and e-mail communications of suspects. Again with the help of Mossad the DST had developed an unprecedented number of Muslim informers within the country’s Muslim communities. For Mossad the value of its ties to the DST was that it served as an intelligence data clearinghouse from other French agencies, including the national police.

Through the DST Mossad could provide evidence to the country’s judicial arm when it came to issuing arrest warrants, wiretaps, and subpoenas. These were served by a team of investigating judges who could also order the detention of suspects for an initial six days and even keep some of them imprisoned for years. In court, the suspects were judged by professional magistrates rather than under the jury system of Britain and the United States. Meir Dagan felt this approach could offer lessons to the Bush administration as it faced growing pressure and controversy over its own approach to fighting terrorism: its incarcerating suspects in its Guantánamo Bay camp, its continued rendition of suspects to secret prisons in Eastern Europe, and the doubtful legality of its military tribunals to try suspects.

The meeting with the two DST officers was conducted in Dagan’s office and not in one of the small conference rooms where he usually met senior foreign intelligence officers; the choice of venue was a further indication of the closeness between the DST and Mossad. Like agents from British and European services, the DST regularly sent senior officers to the Palestinian Territories before traveling on to see Dagan. The visits were known as “pulse taking” by the Mossad director, who saw them as another way to check the strength of Palestinian fervor. On the surface it was a means to try and expunge decades of isolation that the removal of the Jewish settlers from Gaza had done little to diminish.

Dagan usually learned little from the visits by MI6 officers, Germany’s BND, Spain, and the CIA. “Indeed some of their interpretations were wide of the mark,” one of his aides told the author. But the DST usually provided well-informed judgments, helped by the ability of its agents to not only speak Arabic fluently but to understand its culture. It meant a DST evaluation could be trusted enough to be matched against what Mossad’s own informers in Gaza and the West Bank reported. For Dagan it was essential to get the French view of the coming Palestinian elections and the influence wielded by Hamas at ground-roots level in its challenge to Fatah, the ruling party. Yasser Arafat had designed it to create a nationalist mythology using the symbols of his kaffiyeh, stubble, and gun, to fuel a revolutionary belief in which political struggle was heroic, fiery militance superior to mundane governance, vehement rejection better than compromise, that all opponents — especially Israel — were evil, that terrorism was cleansing, and that the eventual victory would be all the better for it. But Arafat was gone and in the past year Fatah the organization had become increasingly inured to corruption. In the Palestinian Territories the despair among the young had grown by the day, along with unemployment, social chaos, and Fatah’s seeming inability to recognize that governing required attention to the prosaic details.

Into this situation had emerged Hamas. The terrorist organization had also been founded on hatred, paranoia, and an apocalyptic vision of how Israel would be destroyed by a plentiful supply of suicide bombers and huge financial support from Iran. Hamas politics were rooted in absolutionist terms: vengeance was glorious and victory was achieved through martyrdom. Founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who became its spiritual leader, Hamas was cautiously encouraged by Israel as a means of balancing the extremists within Fatah. “Incredibly as it seems today, we thought the ‘divide and rule’ policy that had worked so well in the past would do so this time,” recalled Rafi Eitan. In August 1988, Hamas published its “charter,” calling on all Muslims to “destroy Israel and its people.” The response was swift. Yassin was killed in his wheelchair by a fusillade of rockets from Israeli gunships. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the organization’s strategist, was killed by the same method shortly afterward. In 1997, Mossad failed to kill Khaled Meshal, the head of the organization’s international branch in Amman (see chapter 17, “Bunglegate”). Salah Shehade, the architect of Hamas’s suicide-bombing strategy, was killed by Israeli F-16 jets who precision-bombed his home in Gaza. His wife and children also died in the attack. By then more than three hundred suicide attacks had claimed four hundred Israelis, many of them women and children. But Hamas had continued to attract support among Palestinians with its pledge it would control the Palestinian Territories by 2027.

For Meir Dagan on that Tuesday morning the question was: How much closer would Hamas come to achieving its eventual aim through the coming Palestinian elections? Any success would be due largely to the failure of Yasser Arafat to leave Fatah a legacy of a properly functioning government after it had been given a monopoly on power by the Oslo peace accords of 1993. Thirteen years later, Fatah had still not been reinvigorated by promoting new young blood from within its ranks. Its leadership consisted of old men who clung to the past. The truth was that most Palestinians were worse off in 2006 than they were before the Oslo agreement. They lived inside a ring of Israeli military steel, and their economy, especially in the southern enclave of Gaza, was gradually being strangled by punitive restrictions on their movement. Would they awake in a few days’ time to a green dawn — a mass of verdant Hamas flags heralding a victory?

The indications from Mossad’s informers in Gaza and the West Bank, and its own analysts, were that Hamas would make a respectable showing at the polls — but that Fatah would be returned to office. This was echoed by the surveillance reports on Khaled Meshal in Damascus; his telephone calls to Hamas leaders in Gaza and the West Bank indicated their success in running hospitals, schools, and support agencies would, in the end, not be enough. What Dagan could not decide was whether Meshal, knowing he was being monitored, was indulging in skilled disinformation. Mossad’s analysts thought not: that Meshal also saw the coming election as only the first step on the political ladder, that Hamas would not expect to have real political power for many years to come.

It later emerged the two DST officers had echoed this view to Dagan. On that note, the Mossad chief took his senior aides to see a film.

Meir Dagan had been a young conscript in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) when in the early hours of September 5, 1972, in the city of Munich, Germany, where the Olympic Games were being staged, eight Black September terrorists used a passkey to enter an apartment block where a number of Israeli athletes slept. Twenty-five minutes later two of the sportsmen were dead, murdered in cold blood. Nine others had been captured. They would also die in the days to come. The atrocity on that warm autumn night shocked the world. In Israel, even before the tears had dried, cold anger called for vengeance even as the terrorists demanded the release of 236 political prisoners. For twenty-four hours there was a tense standoff between the hostage takers and the German police. In mounting disbelief, Israelis, including Dagan, sat glued to their television sets as rescue operations were bungled. An attempt to storm the apartment block was aborted when the Munich police realized the terrorists were watching their preparations live on television. Two more attempts failed after the Black September group demanded a jet to fly them and their hostages out of Germany. The Germans swiftly agreed to provide two helicopters to fly them to Munich airport. Waiting near the getaway aircraft was an armed police team dressed as Lufthansa staff. But only moments before the helicopters landed, the team was told to abort the mission as it was too dangerous. Posted around the area were five German army snipers to deal with eight heavily armed terrorists. When the helicopters landed a firefight ensued as the snipers tried to hit their targets. The terrorists detonated a grenade in one helicopter and raked the inside of the other with gunfire. The snipers continued to shoot. In minutes all nine surviving hostages from the initial attack on the apartment were dead, along with five of the Black September group. Three were captured. But six weeks later, on October 29, 1972, a Frankfurt-bound Lufthansa jet was hijacked. The terrorists demanded the release of the captured trio. This was swiftly agreed to by the German government. The terrorists, smiling broadly, were flown to a Black September base in the Middle East and disappeared.

There was not a man, woman, or child in Israel who could not recount what followed. Mossad was given the task of hunting down not only the Munich killers, but all those who had planned the massacre. Every Mossad director general who had come into office had made it his business in the first days of his tenure to study the files of how Mossad had carried out its mission, one that Golda Meir, then the prime minister, had called the Wrath of God. Her successors, like Benyamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon, had never tired of reading how Mossad’s kidon had sown the seeds of fear in every terrorist heart. In Barak’s later words (to the author): “The intention was to strike terror, to break the will of those who remained alive until there were none of them left.”

For two years Mossad had carried out a carefully planned, clinically executed series of assassinations. The first was shot dead in the lobby of his Rome apartment eleven times — a bullet for each Israeli athlete he helped to murder. Another died when he answered a phone call in his Paris apartment; the bomb in the receiver blew off his head. The next to die was expertly pushed under a London bus at rush hour. In Nicosia, Cyprus, a bomb exploded in a bedside lamp. Hours before they died, each man’s family received flowers and a condolence card bearing the same words: “A reminder we do not forget or forgive.” After each kidon execution, a notice about the dead terrorist was published in Arab language newspapers across the Middle East. The flowers, cards, and notices had all been sent by LAP, Mossad’s department of psychological warfare. While the kidon carried out the executions, it had required a team backup of some eight units. One group was responsible for tracking down each Black September killer. Technicians from yaholomin, Mossad’s vaunted communications unit, set up eavesdropping equipment to monitor each terrorist as he was located. Another team organized dead-letter boxes in a dozen European capitals to receive messages from informers. Safe houses were rented for secret meetings in London, Paris, and Madrid.

Now, thirty-four years later, Steven Spielberg, arguably one of the world’s most successful moviemakers, has transposed the massacre into a $65 million film. When Dagan had heard of Spielberg’s intentions, he had been surprised to learn that Spielberg had made no approach to Mossad for, if not exactly seeking cooperation, at least asking for guidance on the accuracy of the screenplay. It was based on Vengeance by George Jonas, which had been published in 1984 to be quickly dismissed by Mossad as “mostly pure fantasy.”

In the book Jonas claimed to “explore at first hand the feelings and revulsion and doubt that gradually came to haunt each member of the Mossad hit team and which, in the end, inexorably changed their view of the mission and themselves.” He concluded that his story — the genesis of the Spielberg movie—“will inspire and horrify. For its subject is an act of revenge that goes to the very heart of the ancient biblical questions of good and evil, or right and wrong, which ultimately remain the deepest concerns of the Jewish people and which continue to haunt ‘Avner’ and his comrades on their mission.”

But the book’s mysterious “Avner”—who was the movie’s leader of the hit team — had never worked for Mossad, let alone been selected to be a member of kidon. Even before Meir Dagan settled down for a private viewing of Munich, he knew that other members of Mossad had trashed the movie. David Kimche, the former deputy director, had castigated it “as a tragedy that a person of the stature of Steven Spielberg, who has made such fantastic films, should now have based ‘Munich’ on a book that is a falsehood.” Avi Dichter, a former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence service, had dismissed the film as “a children’s adventure story.” From all over the world other retired members of Mossad had joined in the criticism.

In the film the kidon are portrayed as increasingly filled with doubts about the morality of the mission. Conversely the terrorists are given a platform to rationalize their murders, just as the apologists for suicide bombers today defend their atrocities. All this was done with the consummate skill of a great filmmaker. What angered the real-life members of the hit team, together with current members of kidon, was that like the book, the movie did not explain Israel’s well-established justification for hunting down and executing terrorists who cannot be brought to trial by the usual means of arrest. In the movie the hit team is depicted as being isolated in the field for months. Two of its members are a forger and a bombmaker.

Rafi Eitan, the former Mossad operations chief who had played an important role in tracking down the Black September group, told the author: “It would have been unthinkable to expect a forger to produce documents under high-stress operational conditions. All the paperwork for the real operation was produced by Mossad’s forgery department. There was no bomb maker as such on the team. The explosives were created in Tel Aviv and brought to the team in the field. The movie team did not include a woman. Yet female kidon have always been part of a hit squad. Having them there helps to get closer to a target. But where the film went totally wrong was the hit team members questioning the morality of their actions. It never happened. It could never happen. The real hit team chosen for the mission were hand-picked for their mental stability. Like all kidon, they had undergone intense evaluation by Mossad psychologists. At the mission’s conclusion, they were debriefed by the psychologists. The team showed not the slightest sign of personality disorders. For them it had been a mission that was legally supported by the State of Israel.”

But Dagan wanted to judge for himself. He brought with him to the private viewing men who had been directly involved in the operational planning and execution of the Black September killers. His verdict at the end of the 145-minute movie was succinct: “Entertainment — maybe. Accurate — absolutely not.”

It was a review Dagan doubted would ever appear in any Spielberg filmography.

On Thursday, January 26, 2006, a day that came to be known in Israel as Black Thursday, Meir Dagan watched in mounting disbelief the images on the television screen in a corner of his office. The pictures switched from Gaza City to the West Bank, to Nablus and Bethlehem, from Ramallah to East Jerusalem, from one Arab township to another, from villages that were mere dots on the map on Dagan’s wall. Each image offered the same stunning sight of the green flag of Hamas raised in triumph. It fluttered from the minarets of mosques and the rooftops of buildings and moved through the streets in a great surge of green, held aloft by the chanting crowds. Hamas had won a sweeping, historic victory, one that had mocked all the pollsters, the foreign observers, and, most important for Dagan, the analysts of Mossad. How had everyone not foreseen what had happened? How had anyone not understood that Hamas had shown itself on poll day to be a disciplined organization able to turn out the faithful in huge numbers to vote? Why had no one discovered the preparation that had gone into creating the enormous green banners now being hung on public buildings? How had Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, its military wing, marching across the television screen, firing their guns in the air, their usual masks discarded, been so well rehearsed without attracting suspicion? These were questions being asked of Dagan by Israel’s Cabinet ministers. He had no ready answers. Not a man to rush to judgment, he continued to sit and watch, as did all Israel.

One certainty was clear. The peace talks would remain frozen. The reason was in the one statistic that ticker taped across the bottom of the television screens. Hamas had won 132 seats, leaving Fatah to cling to 43, and some of those by the slimmest of majorities, ending more than forty years of its domination of Palestinian life. Dagan would not quarrel with an Israeli radio commentator, who likened the victory to “an earthquake or tsunami.” It had changed for the foreseeable future Israel’s own relationship with the Palestinians and the Arab world beyond its borders. For better or worse? He did not know. He doubted if anyone in Israel could answer the question.

By that Thursday afternoon, Dagan was receiving the first calls from foreign intelligence service chiefs. They wanted to know how Hamas, a terrorist organization that had continuously undercut every step toward peace, a desire sought by moderate Palestinians, had managed to persuade such a majority of them to overwhelmingly vote for Hamas. And having done so, would they ensure that Hamas would now cease to attack Israel and try to create a real Palestinian state that would come to live side by side at peace with its Jewish neighbors?

Dagan gave them all the same response. Hamas would focus initially on issues like education, health, and social affairs: these had been the cornerstone of its election success. But for that it would need funding, including $52 million the Palestinian Authority received from Israel. While Hamas had shown by entering the democratic process that it was already on the road from being an outlawed terrorist organization to a mainstream political force, to give any lasting meaning to its new status it must renounce the mainstay of its previous existence: the destruction of Israel. Until it did so, there could be no meaningful dialogue with Hamas. Dagan had reminded his callers that traditionally it had been Israel’s hard-liners rather than the moderates who had made concessions. Menachem Begin, a terrorist turned peacemaker, had surrendered the Sinai in return for a peace treaty with Egypt. Another Israeli warrior, Yitzak Rabin, had given his own life to try and broker peace with other Arab neighbors; in the end he had been assassinated by an Israeli extremist. More recently Ariel Sharon, once the hero of the Israeli Right, had earned their fury by ending the right of Israeli settlers to occupy Gaza.

Given Hamas’s links to Iran and Syria, Israel would have to consider very carefully how far it could trust Hamas before relaxing its vigilance. And Hamas had swept to power with its pledge to uproot corruption. Yet some of the worst abuses were in the Palestinian security forces. Created by Yasser Arafat, it consisted of a dozen separate agencies that totaled sixty thousand members, a large number to protect a total Palestinian population of less than 4 million in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel had accused the force of failing to prevent attacks on Jewish targets; Hamas had continued to proclaim during the election that the security forces were used by Israel to kill Hamas militants. The truth lay somewhere in the middle. Both Mossad and Shin Bet had its informers inside the security forces. They had been used to pinpoint targets for the Israeli air force to kill. Equally, Hamas supporters in the security forces had helped suicide bombers to be smuggled out of Gaza and the West Bank to strike inside Israel. For the majority of Palestinians, the security forces had done little to halt lawlessness in the territories. Meir Dagan believed the Hamas promise to reform the services and bring to trial its leaders, who had become multimillionaires by siphoning off millions of dollars, intended to improve security, into their numbered bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. He was prepared to use Mossad’s resources to track down those accounts. But not yet. He wanted to see what else Hamas would do.

Mossad’s analysts, who had miscalculated so badly the Hamas victory, were understandably cautious about predicting what the future would hold. Ever since the Oslo Accords, the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships had maintained a dialogue at some level, ranging from intense peace negotiations in 2000 to the limited contacts of the past three years due to the ongoing violence. In none of those contacts had Hamas been involved — except to send its suicide bombers from Gaza and rockets from the West Bank into Israel.

It was not only Hamas’s electoral triumph that the analysts studied; it had come at a time when Israel itself was undergoing a political upheaval. Kadima, the centrist party that Ariel Sharon had created, continued to attract members. Was this in part a sympathy vote for its founder, or was it evidence that Israelis were growing tired of the hard-line Likud Party and the indecisive Labor party? Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet and now a Labor parliamentary candidate for the coming elections in March, had said there could be no further “unilateral withdrawal from the Palestinian territories.” But the acting Labor prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had insisted that if Labor won the next election, in March 2006, he would “relinquish parts of the West Bank and maintain a Jewish majority elsewhere, but I would prefer to do this in agreement with the Palestinians.”

Did this mean he was willing to negotiate with Hamas? He refused to say “at this stage.” But Dagan wondered if this was a piece of political doublespeak. (Kadima brokered a deal with Rafi Eitan and his Pensioners Party with its seven seats. They would join Kadima’s coalition government to ensure Olmert was elected prime minister. Shortly afterward there were attacks on Israel by a suicide bomber followed by rockets. Hamas denied any complicity in the attacks. Dagan told his Monday morning conference, “Life as usual.”)

The one certainty was that the Hamas victory had brought substantial gains by Islamic radicals in Egypt and Lebanon. In his own analysis, Meir Dagan had shown a political clarity that always surprised his people. He had told his senior staff at their Monday morning conference following the election: “There is a huge transition going on across the entire Middle East. It will be many months before we can see beyond the present unpredictability. That is the nature of big historic change. It’s simply the way it is. We must be ready to accommodate it — whatever it brings. But the truth is that neither Israel, the United States, Britain, and the countries of Europe can ignore the popular will of the Palestinian voters. Their turnout was an impressive 78 percent. No other democratic country can claim to have recently achieved such a turnout. We should see it as a sign that democracy may well have taken root. We should take this into account when making decisions. That does not mean rushing to judgment. It means being realistic.”

On May 14, 2006, Britain’s Intelligence Security Committee issued its report on the London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller was cited as saying: “Even with the wisdom of hindsight I doubt whether MI5 could have done much better than it did, given the resources available to us at the time and the other demands placed on us. Neither can we guarantee to stop future attacks.”

While Meir Dagan admired her honesty, he also saw it as the inevitable result of MI5’s failure to recognize the threat posed by Islamic terrorism from the end of the 1990s. It had taken what Dagan termed “the ultimate wake-up call of 9/11 to galvanize American intelligence.” He found it depressing to read Dame Eliza’s judgment that MI5 was still taking the attitude that attacks by Islamic extremists were unavoidable. “It may be realistic, but it also sounds complacent. Intelligence should not be touched by complacency,” he told his aides. They were sentiments that would guide Mossad into the future.