Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 28 FIGHTING THE FIRES OF SATAN

Every morning before the sun rose over the Judean hills, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, who was barely three months into office, routinely slipped out of the bed he shared with his wife, Aliza. In no time he had shaved, showered, and dressed in another of his lightweight suits, which nevertheless would leave him slightly perspiring in the fierce midday heat. A consolation, he told an aide, was that it was nowhere near as unbearable as the temperature inside the tanks he had sent across the border to fight in south Lebanon. By 5 A.M. each day Olmert was reading the overnight intelligence summary left for him on a table. No more than two foolscap pages long, the document had been prepared by Meir Dagan and faxed to Olmert. It consisted of little more than bullet points listing the latest number of overnight rocket attacks on Israel’s northern cities, the current body count, the number of injured, the number of missions flown by Israeli air force jets, the assessment from Mossad stations around the world of the criticism of Israel, and the mounting demand for a ceasefire.

In those first weeks of July after the war had started, the summary could only have brought little comfort to the man whom Efraim Halevy had dismissed as “just happening to be in the right place when he could make or break his career.” Already his domestic critics were asking if Olmert’s limited experience of military tactics meant he was the wrong man to lead the war to a successful conclusion for Israel. As July drew to a close and the first body bags with IDF soldiers were brought back for burial, the war showed all the signs of becoming a widespread conflagration. It had all seemed a long way from only two weeks before when President George W. Bush had pronounced at the G-8 summit in Saint Petersburg on July 16, four days into the conflict, that “this is a moment of clarification. It is now clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East and that Iran and Syria are the root causes of instability in the region.” Two days later calls came from several governments for the United States to lead the negotiations to end the fighting. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted that any ceasefire was not possible “until the conditions are conducive.” She never explained what “conducive” meant, brushing aside media requests to do so.

Ehud Olmert had been told by Meir Dagan that Mossad’s intelligence from Washington was that the Bush administration believed that a swift war against Hezbollah would serve as a prelude to the eagerly anticipated preemptive attack that the president and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were still convinced was their solution to “why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” In the meantime, Mossad agents had uncovered another reason. Al-Qaeda had asked an estimated million-plus jihadists to fight alongside Hezbollah. By mid-July the agents were reporting that from the snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan to the scorching deserts of Saudi Arabia, the call to join the “Holy War” was being answered.

In Washington, however, Olmert knew he could continue to have the support of an impressive number of organizations and individuals who included a number of influential Christian evangelicals — preachers like Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, and Marion “Pat” Robertson — as well as Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, who had been majority leaders in the House of Representatives. They were all united in a common belief that Israel’s existence was the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy and was “God’s will.” In their support of Israel, they could count on the support of powerful neo-conservative gentiles like John Bolton, now America’s ambassador to the United Nations; Robert Bartley, the former editor of the highly respected Wall Street Journal; William John Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador. Between them they had established that in Congress, Israel would remain virtually free of criticism. No nation in the Middle East had gone to war knowing it had such powerful backing.

This must have been a comfort to Ehud Olmert as he was driven in his armor-plated car from his official residence in a Tel Aviv suburb for his first appointment of the day with his generals.

Once hostilities had started, critics — especially those in Europe — found themselves under familiar attack for condemning Israel. The specter of anti-Semitism, never far from the surface, was given a fresh outing. Most of it came from Muslims in Germany and France, which has the largest Muslim population of any European nation. The attacks portrayed Israel in Nazi-like terms, ignoring the incident when a French Jew was murdered in France before the fighting broke out in Lebanon and tens of thousands of demonstrators had filled the city streets to condemn anti-Semitism. Even Jacques René Chirac and Dominique de Villepin had attended the victim’s funeral service to show their solidarity. The attacks in the Arab press had predictably been more inflammatory. From Tehran to Cairo they had been united in calling Israel’s actions “war crimes.” Equally predictable, the powerful pro-Israeli elements in the America media had sprung to its defense. One commentator saw it as “a two-word message to be delivered to other hostile regimes: you’re next.” In case there was any doubt who “next” should be, a radio pundit said: “It is time to turn the screws on Syria.” It was described as “terror friendly” by the New York Daily News, and “a serious threat to the United States” in The New Republic.

The reality was that the Bush administration was now divided over attacking the Damascus regime. While Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were in favor, both the new head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, and Condoleezza Rice strongly opposed the idea. Hayden pointed out that Syria continued to provide the CIA with important intelligence about al-Qaeda — the “back door channel” had been created when George Tenet had met with Syrian intelligence chiefs after 9/11. The CIA had been given secret access to Mohammed Haydar Zammar who had been identified as one of the recruiters of the hijackers that had flown their planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Hayden had argued that to attack Syria, either directly or to allow Israel to act as Washington’s surrogate, would almost certainly end Damascus’s cooperation. Dr. Rice had reminded the president that Syria posed no direct threat to the United States and that an attack would encourage it to foment trouble in neighboring Iraq. “Before any dealings with Syria, it would be sensible to finish our work in Iraq,” she was reported as saying to an aide.

Now, on that July morning as Ehud Olmert was driven from his home for his first early morning meeting with his generals, he was fully aware of how much Washington depended on his promise to destroy Hezbollah and its heavily defended interlocked web of bunkers in south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley. Mission reports on the relentless bombing raids conducted by the Israeli Air Force were being routed to the American embassy in Tel Aviv and then on to the Pentagon where they were further analyzed. While the State Department saw the bombing campaign as a means to reinforce their encouragement of the Lebanese government to deal more firmly with Hezbollah — a forlorn hope — the Pentagon strategists saw the round-the-clock aerial assault on Hezbollah redoubts as what one former Pentagon official told the author “was a test run for Iran.” The official had added, “the only real on-the-ground intelligence we have was from Mossad’s undercover agents in Iran. While it confirmed much of what we suspected, and had helped us to devise a proper bombing strategy against Iran’s nuclear facilities, we still needed to know how it would play out. The air attacks on south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley provided such an opportunity.”

A hint of that had surfaced when Shabtai Shavit, a former Mossad director and, in 2006, a national security adviser to the Knesset said, “we do what we think is best for us, and it happens to meet America’s requirements. That’s just part of a relationship between two friends.” This would explain why a small team of U.S. Air Force strategists had been in Israel for weeks and had held several meetings with Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, who during his time in the Israeli Air Force had helped to prepare the attack plan for an aerial assault on Iran. It was that plan which had been used to launch the air assault on south Lebanon. The effect would once more form the core of the morning meeting in Israel’s war room.

The size of a Hezbollah rocket crater — forty by twenty feet — the war room was deep inside the Kirya, the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Israeli Defense Forces. It was accessed by swipe cards whose codes were as closely guarded as the life-or-death decisions made within the featureless concrete building. Tacked to the olive-green walls were maps and charts showing the progress in the war: the number of IDF air strikes and their targets, bombardment by Israeli warships of the towns and villages around the port city of Tyre, ground advances by the crack Galilee, and Nahal divisions into south Lebanon. On a separate chart were the latest figures of rockets launched against northern Israel and the precise location where each Katyusha BM-24 and Fajr-3 rocket had landed. Another chart listed the armaments Hezbollah still possessed, but had not yet fully used. The Fajr-5 rocket with its range of 55 miles and the deadliest of them all: the Zelzal-2 Iranian missile with a range of 150 miles. It brought Tel Aviv and the Kirya within its range.

Against one wall were a bank of screens. They brought into the war room unedited footage from IDF cameramen on the frontline: advancing with troops into Arab villages, perched on mine-sweeping bulldozers clearing the way for tanks, or on the hull of the tanks as they ground their way forward, firing as they advanced.

In the center of the room was a conference table made from cedar wood from Galilee. There were twenty chairs around the table. With the sun already high over the Judean hills, they were all occupied by 6:25 A.M. each morning by the men who would direct the war against Hezbollah. The fanaticism and ruthlessness of their opponents had surprised them. Their faces showed the strain of long days and shortened hours of often disturbed sleep. They knew before they left the room each morning they would make more life-or-death decisions which, when they were implemented, would draw further harsh criticism from not only around the world, but from within Israel.

A great deal of criticism had been directed against Ehud Olmert from an increasingly bewildered public who had begun to ask what was being gained from a war where the number of Israeli dead rose by the day and tens of thousands cowered in bomb shelters and protected rooms in the north of the country. Hezbollah, far from being crippled, appeared to have a limitless supply of rockets and anti-tank missiles that had destroyed the pride of the IDF army — its latest American-built tanks.

Every morning Israeli Army Radio carried the anguished words to the people that the prime minister had promised to teach Hezbollah a lesson it would never forget — and from which it would never again threaten Israel. And it was not only Hezbollah who would be dealt with. Hamas had continued to attack the Jewish state, creating an effective war on two fronts. Olmert in one of his regular broadcasts had promised the day of reckoning would also soon be upon Hamas. But there were a growing number of Israelis who felt the prime minister not only looked increasingly tired, but sounded ever more uncertain. That would have been noted by his waiting generals in the war room.

Pinned to one wall was a blow-up of an Israeli newspaper editorial: “If Israel fails in this war, it will be impossible to continue to live in the Middle East. What is it about us, the Jews, the few and persecuted? We are not hesitating, apologizing, or relenting. The Jewish state will no longer be trampled underfoot.”

By 6:30 A.M. the last cup of coffee had been cleared from the table. Olmert opened proceedings with a political update on the view from Washington. He did not have to remind his listeners there was now only a limited time left to crush Hezbollah. On that July morning Ehud Olmert returned to a question raised previously in the war room. Where did the “hawk of hawks”—U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — stand? Could his virtual silence be no more than a reminder of Rumsfeld’s age, that for him this was just another war in a career that dated back to Vietnam in 1975, where Rumsfeld had been a junior White House aide as American troops had withdrawn? Washington’s Israeli ambassador had been reassuring — his latest enquiries showed “Rummy remained as enthusiastic as ever over what Israel was doing,” Olmert assured the battle-hardened men around the table.

Olmert’s preamble done, he handed over the meeting to Meir Dagan who sat across the table from the prime minister. He, too, had news from Washington. While there was no evident split within the Bush administration, his station chief in the capital had picked up that Condoleezza Rice had modified her position over whether it was not yet “conducive” to formally intervene in the conflict. The Mossad man had learned from his own sources within the State Department that Rice had redefined her role to that “of a mediator waiting to intervene.” It was still too early for her to resume her shuttle diplomacy, but she hoped that day was coming soon. In Dagan’s judgment this could be interpreted as the secretary of state, for the moment, continuing to take a back seat in the crisis while the neo-conservatives around Bush maintained their position of all-out support for military action. It was the latest steps in that action which preoccupied air force chiefs Major General Elyezer Shkedy, Commander of the Israeli Air Force, and Major General David Ben Ba’ashat, Commander of the Israeli Navy. Sitting around the table were the other men charged with running the war. Lieutenant General Dan Halutz as Chief of Staff sat next to Olmert. He was the highest ranking officer in the room and the Minister of Defense had, since 1976, held overall command of the IDF. He was represented by Colonel Yaakov Toran, Director General of the Ministry. Olmert’s cabinet was also asked to approve all military policies and operations. In reality, this was done by the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, but the decisions taken in the war room had so far not been challenged — and were unlikely to be.

Next to Halutz sat his deputy, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, and Amos Yedlin, Director of Military Intelligence. Others around the table included the three key field commanders, Major General Yair Naveh of Central Command, Major General Yoav Gallant of the Southern Command with responsibility for watching over the Sinai, and Major General “Udi” Adam who was the northern field commander at the cutting edge of the conflict with daily responsibility for running the war in south Lebanon. Toughened by years of fighting, the three officers gave their reports in the clipped language of seasoned military briefers. Another important member of the gathering was Major General Avichi Mendelblit, the IDF’s Military Advocate General. Among his many responsibilities was to ensure that the air attacks would avoid being labeled as war crimes. Brigadier General Moshe Lipel, the IDF’s Financial Adviser, was present to give the daily cost of running the war. Down to the last tank-shell fired and the sticks of bombs dropped, all was accounted for.

Miri Regev, the articulate chief spokesman for the IDF from 2002–2007, sat down-table. He would later be responsible for trying to convince an increasingly skeptical world that Israel had no alternative but to continue to strike hard. Others around the table guarded their anonymity. They included the head of Special Forces, whose recent commando raid deep into the Beka’a Valley had echoes of the raid on Entebbe. Then it was to rescue civilians held by another terror group. The Beka’a raid came after Dagan’s deep-cover agents in the valley reported that the two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, were hiding there. Neither the soldiers nor Nasrallah were found.

Every morning, in his precise tones, Meir Dagan updated those around the table on the hunt for both the soldiers and Nasrallah. For ninety minutes the daily briefing on the next steps to be taken ranged from providing targets for the advance into south Lebanon by the IDF’s six brigades to identifying renewed air strikes to be made on the Beirut suburbs. Then came what Meir Dagan has called “the wider picture.” Would Syria once more increase Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal? Fifteen hundred had been fired so far, another fifteen hundred destroyed. That left ten thousand. What would be the next step that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could take? His palace at Ladekye, outside Damascus, had already been buzzed by Israeli warplanes. It was Dagan’s idea. He called it “a little warning.” And Iran — what would President Ahmadinejad do? The wiry, gaunt-faced, heavily bearded president had once more said, “We will wipe Israel from the face of the earth.” An idle boast or a serious threat? Meir Dagan’s answers to those troubling questions would remain — at least for the moment — inside the war room. By 8:00 A.M. the men around the table had left to carry out their daily orders. The first the world would learn about them would be on the news bulletins.

Two thousand miles to the west of the Kirya war room, the analysts in Britain’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), continued to explore the latest ramifications of Operation Overt, the multi-national terrorist operation. Their suspicions had hardened when the FBI sent MI5 an urgent bulletin — copied to all the other intelligence services engaged in the operation — that suicide bombers had been recruited to hijack transatlantic aircraft by smuggling individual explosive ingredients past airport security and then assembling them as bombs on board. The FBI warning (a copy of which the author has seen) was entitled: “Possible Hijacking Tactic for Using Aircraft as Weapons.” In part it read: “Components of improvised explosive devices can be smuggled onto an aircraft, concealed in either clothing or personal carry-on items such as shampoo and medicine bottles, and assembled on board. To avoid cases of suspicious passenger activity, this will most likely take place in an aircraft’s lavatory.”

Another piece of information had come from an al-Qaeda Web site believed to be operating out of Yemen. Though protected by a secret password, it had been interdicted by GCHQ specialists and had yielded valuable clues. It gave detailed instructions on how to create new types of miniature bombs by using the flash mechanism on a digital camera as an electronic detonator. Various ways of powering the detonator were suggested, including personal music players. What focused the attention of the analysts was that the instructions were written in English as well as Arabic. This raised the strong possibility that the planned attack would require the services of the two cells under surveillance by Operation Overt.

Then, a few days later, a third GCHQ intercept came from another al-Qaeda Web site, this one in Uzbekistan. It discussed the qualities of using an explosive it called “The Mother of Satan” and indicated it had been tried out by Hezbollah. Mossad’s London station chief confirmed the explosive was made from triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and was made from combining four ingredients: two harmless domestic liquids, hair bleach, and nail varnish remover. The Web site promised that “when care is taken to mix the ingredients, the result will be a powerful explosion similar to that produced by a military grenade.” TATP had been the choice of explosive used by suicide bombers in the July 7, 2005, attacks on London. TATP could be carried on board in containers such as bottles of soft drinks or even a feeding bottle for a baby. The two chemicals to create TATP would normally have to be mixed at low temperatures to make the explosive more stable. But for a suicide bomber this would not be necessary. The only problem the terrorists would face would be to ensure the mixture was sufficiently solid before it became a lethal explosive, otherwise it would be difficult to detonate as shown by the failure of the second London suicide attacks on July 21, 2005.

But there was still no timeframe for the attack Operation Overt was monitoring, only that it would most likely originate with flights taking off from Heathrow, London, heading for the United States. As July drew to a bloody close in south Lebanon and Israel, Eliza Manningham-Buller reminded the hunters that “we will not stop them all — but we will have a damned good try.”

By the first week of August 2006, the war had become a grim parade of military funerals and television interviews with grieving families. With each death the unease within Israel deepened over the conduct of the fighting. Retired military experts — known as “the armchair brigade” among Ehud Olmert’s aides — called for an increase in ground forces and bombing raids on Hezbollah’s rocket launchers and for the razing of villages where Hezbollah was suspected of hiding. This had already led to tragedy roundly condemned around the world when Israeli bombs destroyed an apartment block in the south Lebanon city of Cana, killing some fifty women and children. Journalists had reminded readers that Cana was where Jesus had changed water into wine “and now the water of Cana is red with the blood of the innocent,” wrote one reporter. And for the first time since hostilities started, Mossad came under criticism. Why hadn’t its agents located the bunkers and tunnels which, over the past six years, Hezbollah had been using to stockpile rockets supplied by Syria and Iran? The question had led to angry discussions in the Knesset. But there was no response from Meir Dagan. It had been left to Shabtai Shavit to defend his old service, pointing out that the public perception of intelligence gathering does not take into account the “bigger picture below the surface.”

An example of this came on August 3, 2006, when Dagan received a message from an agent in Balbeck, the historic city in the Beka’a Valley that Hezbollah had turned into a stronghold. The message said that Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, would be traveling overnight to meet with Saad bin Laden, the eldest son of Osama bin Laden and his appointed successor. Days before another Mossad agent in Damascus had reported that the scion of the al-Qaeda leader was in the city and had held meetings with Syrian intelligence officers. That night Israeli Black Hawk helicopters swept IDF commandos ninety miles into Lebanon. With them were several Arab-speaking Mossad officers. While the commandos hunted for their human targets, the officers headed for the Hezbollah-operated hospital in the center of Balbeck. They found it deserted; patients, doctors, and nurses had all fled. Using a floor plan provided by a Mossad informer, the team found what they had come for: computers. One was in the medical records office. Another in a consultant’s suite. A third in a nurse’s station. The computers were unplugged and rushed to a waiting helicopter. Two hours later the disks were being studied in Mossad’s Tel Aviv headquarters.

Some information on the disks set out details of Hezbollah “sleeper cells” in Britain. By the time the commandos returned to their base to report they had not found Nasrallah or Saad bin Laden, details of the cells had been transmitted to London. They found their place on the Anacapa wall charts inside the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was once more back in Tel Aviv, flying in on Air Force One. The Boeing 747-200B was not a particular aircraft, but the call sign for any of the small fleet of aircraft reserved for the president or his senior aides. In all there were seven in the fleet. The aircraft Dr. Rice was using comprised a crew of twenty-six to pilot and look after her needs and seventeen secret agents to protect her on the ground.

The Air Force One fleet had undergone a $50 million upgrade since 9/11 to enable the president to rule the United States from the air. The chaos surrounding his movements after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was a painful reminder of communications shortcomings.

Dr. Rice’s aircraft had a mobile command center with encrypted communication links with all of the national security networks in the United States. The state-of-the-art telephone system had a total of eighty-five separate lines and scrambled handsets. Plasma screens positioned around the aircraft showed, in real time, the live satellite news channels. The plane’s extensive defense system was intended to detect and deflect any missile attacks. Secretary of State Rice had an executive suite behind the flight deck that included a stateroom, which was a duplicate of her Washington office. Behind it was a dressing room, toilet, and shower that only she was allowed to use. Her own bedroom was wood paneled with a queen-sized bed. The suite also had a dining room. On board were two galleys, each capable of providing meals for two hundred passengers; the larders stocked with enough supplies for two thousand meals. The non-stop flight from Washington had cost $40,243 an hour. At the back of the plane sat her officials and carefully vetted members of the press.

Known as the “Warrior Princess” to her staff, but never to her face, Dr. Rice brought with her an alarm clock that played the opening bars of a Mozart symphony and she kept her watch on Eastern Standard Time. The two pieces were gifts from President Bush, visible signs of the esteem in which he held her. At 5 A.M. EST she awoke and spent the next hour working out on the weights and a rowing machine installed in the suite at her request. Physical fitness was an important part of her life; it had given Dr. Rice the figure of a catwalk model and the stride of an athlete. At some time during the flight she had used her phone — code-named POTUS (for President of the United States) — to call President Bush; they spoke several times each day. Fifty-two years old, Dr. Rice was the most powerful person in his administration. Its other members knew she was perhaps one step away from her ultimate ambition of becoming the first woman to be President of the United States, and the first African American to hold the office.

The Mossad profile revealed that if Dr. Rice had a weakness, “it is shoes. She is known to have splashed out on eight pairs of Ferragamos and regularly sends her personal shopper into Washington fashion boutiques to see what’s new from Paris, Milan, or London.” The profile had contained other personal details — how as a student she had her hair curls ironed out and “has taken to wearing her hair in a style that suggests a headmistress at a Swiss finishing school.” It described her upbringing in the mid-fifties in the then still segregated deep South, how her parents had christened her after the Italian musical term Condoleezza—“with sweetness.” How she had taken piano lessons at the age of three and learned Spanish and French until she became fluent. When she was eight years old, her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, was torn apart by Civil Rights agitation and a bomb planted by a white extremist had exploded in her local Baptist school, killing four black girls, one of whom was her closest friend. Her father, John, patrolled the city streets with a shotgun to keep white racists at bay.

Afterward the family moved to Colorado where Condoleezza was enrolled in an integrated Catholic school. In her teens she learned Russian and at college wrote her dissertation on the Czechoslovak Army. Her most notable achievement came when she became provost of one of America’s top universities, Stanford. She was the youngest to do so at the age of thirty-eight and the first African American to hold the post. Her next climb up the ladder came when the then secretary of state, George Shultz, nominated her to the board of the oil giant, Chevron. One of its million-barrel oil tankers was first named after her. That tanker still sails the high seas even in the most turbulent weather. "

The Mossad profile pointed out that “turbulence has continued to surround Dr. Rice”—not least because of the surprise caused when George Bush asked her to join his presidential campaign in 1998. They quickly bonded through their common zeal for physical fitness. “She gave him a pedometer to check how many steps he took during his coast-to-coast campaign. Their faith also plays an important role in their association; both are devout Sunday church-goers.” Bush made no secret of his dependency on her. “She explains the subtleties of foreign policy in a way I understand,” he once said. When Bush took over the presidency in January 2001, he made her his national security adviser. Dick Cheney tried to block the appointment. She dealt with his opposition in a closed-door meeting. Since then the “Warrior Princess”—a nickname given to her by Donald Rumsfeld — has translated the president’s impulses into foreign policy. Never married, she relaxes by “playing her Steinway grand piano and watching American football on television,” revealed the profile.

It also explained why she had two mirrors in her offices to check the back of her hair was in place down to the last brush stroke. “If she is having a ‘bad hair day,’ it is like a weather vane warning.” There had been many of those times: her confrontation with Germany and France over the war with Iraq; her determination to maintain Spain’s resolve to support the war. All this made her an admired figure in Israel.

Now, on that July day in 2006, as the giant aircraft made its long journey to Israel, Mossad’s station chief in Washington had sent Meir Dagan the latest denials by both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice that they intended to run in the 2008 presidential campaign. Of more immediate interest to the Mossad chief were the details of a most secret plan Dr. Rice had reluctantly helped to create with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. The plan was the underlying reason for her visit. On the surface it was to once more explore the prospects of a ceasefire. In reality it was to discover if the Israeli Air Force attacks on Hezbollah had been so successful they could serve as a blueprint for an attack on Iran. Dr. Rice had initially been nervous about launching such an assault. Did she now feel the same? Meir Dagan had become convinced — and told Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as much — that the secretary of state was not merely nervous, but had started, according to the Mossad station chief in Washington, to “agitate inside the administration” to be allowed to go to Syria to try and persuade President Bashar al-Assad to order Hezbollah to stop its onslaught. But a Mossad agent in Damascus had, shortly before the 747 aircraft touched down at Ben Gurion airport, discovered that President al-Assad refused to meet her.

A further indication of President Bush’s hard-line thinking had come from Richard Armitage, who had been deputy secretary of state in Bush’s first term. Armitage had described Hezbollah as “maybe the A-team of terrorists. Israel’s campaign on Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. If the most dominant military force in the region, the Israeli Defense Force, cannot pacify a country like Lebanon, you should think carefully about taking the template to Iran with its population of seventy million. The only effect that the Israeli bombing has achieved is to unite the Muslim world against the Israelis.”

Condoleezza Rice had come to explore again what she thought, according to one source, “could be a solution. It was to form a Sunni-Arab coalition with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt that would win the support of Britain and Europe to unite and bring pressure on the Shia mullahs in Iran.” But to achieve that, the source acknowledged, would require the removal of Hezbollah as a threat to Israel. Dr. Rice knew the hope of such plan for a coalition of what she called “like-minded Arab states” had been dented when the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saudi al-Faisal, had come to Washington early in the war and told President Bush to “intervene immediately to end this conflict.” Predictably, Bush had demurred.

All these issues formed a backdrop to Dr. Rice’s discussions in Israel. Those who attended, including Meir Dagan, listened intently to a woman who combined elegance — her weekly hairdo in her apartment in Washington’s Watergate Center cost $500—with a steely determination. “Her smile never quite reached her eyes. We remembered that when, for instance, it came to push and shove between Blair and Rice, Bush always chose her view. With Blair now a lame-duck prime minister, her mood was that he didn’t really matter anymore,” recalled one of those who attended the meetings.

While those discussions went on, so did the war. The dead and the dying, the homeless and the bereaved in northern Israel and up through southern Lebanon to the suburbs of Beirut continued to grow. And elsewhere, other developments required Meir Dagan to shift the focus of Mossad’s attention.

A Mossad undercover agent in Tehran had established that the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA), the extreme Irish terror group, was providing Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard with expertise on how to make ultra-sophisticated roadside bombs. The agent tracked the Irish bomb-makers to three factories in the Lavizn suburb in northern Tehran. Adapted to be fired from anti-tank missiles, the bombs were made from concave steel or copperplate. When fired, they traveled at two thousand meters per second and could penetrate ten centimeters of armor at a distance of one hundred meters. The missiles had already destroyed several Israeli tanks in Lebanon.

Earlier in 2006 the six-man CIRA team had traveled from Dublin to Frankfurt and onward to Damascus. From there they were brought in an Iranian military aircraft to Tehran. The bomb-makers had been recruited to provide expertise in how to make and disguise infrared triggering devices. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the success of roadside bombs had left dozens of British soldiers dead or injured. The bombs were also used to topple buildings and bring terror to the streets of Belfast and other cities in the province.

The weapons were attached to explosively formed projectiles (EFPs). Since June, EFP weapons have been transported out of Iran into Iraq and Damascus, Syria. From there they were smuggled down into the Beka’a Valley. In Tehran the CIRA team was divided between the three ordinance factories that were working around the clock mass-producing the sophisticated roadside bombs. This was not the first time that CIRA had sold its bomb-making experience to a terror group. Four years ago, three of its members went to Colombia to train that country’s terror group, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Colombian intelligence, on a tip from Mossad, arrested the trio. They were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in a Bogota court, but escaped with the help of the terror group and eventually were smuggled back to Ireland. Despite attempts by the Colombian government to have them extradited to serve out their sentences, the Dublin government refused to return them to Colombia.

The membership of the CIRA was estimated by Mossad at “no more than two hundred.” More certain was that they had never recognized the terms of the Good Friday Agreement that finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. Since the ratification of the protocol, the IRA has been selling its expertise to other groups associated with al-Qaeda.

“The Islamic terrorists are well financed and expanding their operations. But they lack the skills of the CIRA. Its members have become ‘guns for hire.’ Following the ceasefire in Northern Ireland they are out of work and in need of money,” a Mossad analyst told the author.

Mossad also learned that the CIRA members had met with members of a South African terror group called People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD). The meetings took place in a favorite holiday resort for Irish tourists, Sotto Grande, near Malaga in southern Spain. PAGAD wanted to recruit them to come to South Africa to work in their terror camps in the hinterland beyond Durban. PAGAD was originally formed in 1995 to rid the streets of South Africa of drug dealers, but its ideology changed due to the strong influence of the million-plus Muslims in the country. In the past year, intelligence services like Mossad and MI6 have established that PAGAD had strong links to the Tehran regime. Meetings with the regime have taken place in Beirut and Damascus.

A Mossad analyst on South African terror groups told the author: “Since the bombings in London last year, PAGAD has become more militant. No country is safe from the global terror network that is growing, it is highly organized and extends across the world. Its patron and ultimate beneficiary is Iran.”

That July in London, Nathan learned that the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Christopher Kelly, the microbiologist who had been Britain’s foremost expert on biological and chemical warfare, had been reopened three years after his body had been found in an area of woodlands near his home in Oxfordshire. An inquest pronounced the scientist had taken his own life shortly after he was identified as passing classified information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the BBC. The weapons had proven to be nonexistent. But as Operation Overt continued to move forward, Mossad found itself feeding into what would eventually turn out to be the biggest intelligence operation ever mounted in post-war Britain, whose focus had narrowed down to the possibility that two Islamic terror cells in London had been working on bombs made from liquid explosives.

Against this background two members of parliament announced they wanted a new inquiry into Dr. Kelly’s death. One was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, Norman Baker, who revealed that for the past six months he had been investigating the Kelly death and had concluded there was “strong evidence he had not committed suicide but may have been murdered.” Another Member of Parliament, Andrew MacKinlay, a Labour member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, had tabled questions to the Defense Secretary, Des Browne, about the connections between Dr. Kelly and Wouter Basson, who had run a team of scientists in apartheid South Africa whose work allegedly had included attempts to produce a drug that would affect black fertility and darken the skin of white spies so they could infiltrate anti-apartheid groups.

In April 2002, Basson, a heart specialist once the personal physician of the former South African leader, P. W. Botha, had been cleared by a court in Pretoria on forty-six charges. They included fraud, drug-trafficking, and eight counts of murder committed when he had been in charge of Project Coast, the country’s secret apartheid-era germ warfare program. After the verdict, Dr. Basson had been smuggled out of the court by South African intelligence agents. The judge had earlier ruled that cases involving alleged assassinations of apartheid opponents outside South Africa were beyond his jurisdiction. During the trial, Wouter Basson had revealed that the South African government had given him “unlimited power and money to devise defenses against chemical or germ attacks on the country.”

Now, in July 2006, MI5 had begun to investigate whether those defenses had included using the expertise of Dr. Kelly and two other sinister figures in the secret world of biological warfare. One was a Mormon gynecologist, Dr. Larry Ford. Attached to the University of California campus in Los Angeles, Ford had a secret life none of his patients suspected. He had built up a close relationship with Wouter Basson and, through him, established contacts with the biowarfare scientists of North Korea — and Dr. Kelly. The two men had met in a safe house Basson had rented for such meetings. It was at number one, Fair-cloth Farm Cottage, Watersplash, near Ascot, Berkshire. There, MI5 now believed, Dr. Kelly and Dr. Ford regularly met until the gynecologist committed suicide in 2000 at his home in Irvine, California. When police dealing with the case opened Dr. Ford’s refrigerator, they found bottles containing cultures of cholera, botulism, and typhoid fever. All three toxins were among those Dr. Kelly had been working with during his time as head of the microbiology department at Porton Down, the chemical warfare research establishment in England. Had he provided them to Dr. Ford? If so, why? Did Ford or Basson intend to pass them on to North Korea? These were some of the questions for which MI5 wanted answers.

Since October 1989, Dr. Kelly had also established contact with another sinister figure in the world of germ warfare. He was Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, the former top scientist in the Soviet Union’s biowarfare program, Biopreparat. In one of those classic spy novel moments, the fifty-three-year-old Russian microbiologist had strolled out of a drug industry fair in Paris. Telling his colleagues he was going to buy souvenirs for his wife and children back home in St. Petersburg, Pasechnik had instead hailed a taxi to the British Embassy in the city. He had been brought by MI6 agents on the next EuroStar train to London. Dr. Kelly was appointed “to open the Pandora’s Box of biological secrets the Soviet Union had kept concealed from the world,” he later admitted to the author. Assisting Dr. Kelly was Dr. Christopher Davis, a member of the Ministry of Defense Intelligence staff. Over weeks of questioning Dr. Pasechnik revealed, among much else, how the Soviet Union had planned to spread the plague — the medieval Black Death — across Europe.

Later, Dr. Kelly, now a close friend of the Russian scientist, helped him to start Regma Biotechnologies Company and became a regular visitor to the company’s offices in Wiltshire, England. It was in Porton Down, Britain’s secret biodefense establishment. He also arranged for Pasechnik to have his own office and laboratory in the same building where Dr. Kelly worked at Porton Down. On November 21, 2001, Dr. Pasechnik left his office at Regma Biotechnologies. Staff later remembered he seemed happy and in good health. At home he cooked dinner, washed up, and went to sleep. He was found dead in bed the next day. Initially police said the death was “inexplicable.” The coroner, however, accepted the pathologist’s report that Pasechnik had died from a stroke. No details of the autopsy were made public. No reporter covered the coroner’s inquest. The funeral, which normally would have attracted media attention given who Pasechnik was, went unreported. A full month later the briefest announcement of his death was released by Dr. Christopher Davis, by then retired from the Ministry of Defense and living outside Washington, DC.

By July 2006, Nathan learned that MI5 had discovered Dr. Kelly had assisted Mossad on a number of occasions and that in his diary there was an indication he planned to contact the Mossad London station chief shortly before his death. There was no mention of the reason why and Nathan had set up an appointment. But had he learned that the MI5 inquiries included seeking answers as to whether the suicides of both Dr. Kelly and Dr. Ford were merely a coincidence — or something more sinister? Were all Dr. Kelly’s contacts with Mossad fully authorized — and if so, by whom? Who had given Dr. Kelly clearance to help Dr. Pasechnik to set up his company? And had the Russian’s death really been from a cerebral stroke — or had it been induced by some other method? It was no secret the Russians and other intelligence services had created fast-acting drugs that could mimic a stroke or heart attack — and leave no trace.

Nathan had been told to maintain a watching brief on developments. There was no more that Meir Dagan would, or could, do.

On August 11, 2006, the UN Security Council finally agreed to the text of a Lebanese ceasefire resolution. Even as the details were being sent to Tel Aviv, in the Israeli Defense Forces war room the men around the table were about to launch a full scale land offensive into Lebanon using thirty-thousand troops and massive air strikes. Their target to reach the Litani River had finally been approved by Prime Minister Olmert. Then, despite furious criticism from his military chiefs around the table, Olmert had decided to wait and see for himself what the exact wording of the UN resolution contained. The generals had accused him of wavering and said that, no matter what the resolution said, this was the time to strike a decisive blow against Hezbollah. Olmert caved in. The IDF would launch its massive assault, bombard Beirut and other cities in south Lebanon, and send its soldiers deep into Hezbollah-held territory.

Within hours, an air armada of fifty-five helicopters, hugging the hills of southern Lebanon for protection, dropped paratroopers near the Litani River. Simultaneously an aerial bombardment fired twenty missiles into the Beirut suburbs. Hezbollah shot down an Israeli transport aircraft killing all five crew members including the woman copilot. They were among twenty-four IDF soldiers to die on that day. The IDF claimed it had killed forty Hezbollah fighters during that period. But over 250 rockets had rained down on northern Israel.

In the war room in the Kirya, the arguments carried on as to whether the UN resolution met Israel’s requirements. It called for Hezbollah “to cease all its attacks” while ordering Israel to end “only its offensive operations.” Chief of Staff General Dan Halutz insisted after the ceasefire his forces should be allowed to remain in their present positions in south Lebanon. It was finally agreed that Ehud Olmert could issue the briefest of statements that his government would accept the UN resolution.

Meir Dagan left the meeting knowing that Olmert failed to achieve his two reasons for launching the war: to crush Hezbollah and recover the two captured soldiers, Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Both had been the reasons given for Israel to go to war. The Mossad chief believed the two captured Israeli soldiers had been moved to the Beka’a Valley and he began to make preparations for another raid into the area. It would not be until 2008 that their bodies would be returned to Israel by Syria in exchange for the release of two hundred Hezbollah prisoners from Israeli jails. In the next few days his agents, accompanied by IDF commandos, once more flew to the Beka’a Valley. After a fierce hand-to-hand battle with Hezbollah fighters, the Israelis withdrew having failed to find the two soldiers. It was also a predictable paradox of the thirty-four days of war that the fire fight would come after both sides had theoretically agreed to halt hostilities. The truth was, Meir Dagan told his senior staff at their weekly meeting, no one had won the war.

The biggest loser was Lebanon. Over one thousand of its people had been killed, fifteen thousand homes and other buildings had been destroyed, tourism and the economy had been decimated. Tourism had generated 15 percent of the Lebanese national economy and the economy had shrunk by 3 percent. Mossad analysts said it would require $2.5 billion to rebuild the country. Israel had lost 144 lives and hundreds more were injured. Israel had also spent $1.6 billion waging the war — equalling 1 percent of its GDP. It’s all important tourist industry had fallen by 50 percent — and would remain like that for some time. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had both suffered a humiliating defeat in accepting Olmert’s insistence at the outset of hostilities that it would be a short conflict. And, even when that had looked unlikely, they had still done nothing to halt the fighting. Their stance had reinforced the view in the Muslim world that Britain and the United States would always side with Israel.

As Israeli troops trudged back from Lebanon, many of them were bitter and angry. They spoke of how they had gone to war in the stifling summer heat without even sufficient water to drink and how they had to take canteens from the bodies of dead Hezbollah fighters. By the time they reached Israel, many signed a petition claiming incompetence “at all levels” in the way the war was run. Others pitched tents outside government buildings in Jerusalem to protest, charging that Ehud Olmert and his security advisers provided incoherent leadership and must be held accountable. It was a view shared by the Mossad analysts. On the top floor of Mossad headquarters there was also anger that Ehud Olmert had asked an old friend, Ofer Dekel, a former head of Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, to try and open discussions with Hezbollah to return the two captured soldiers. Meir Dagan told his senior staff that it was too soon to contemplate such a move.

In the streets of Israel’s cities the anger grew. Brigadier Yossi Hyman, the senior paratrooper’s officer, accused the IDF of “the sin of arrogance,” while expressing his own regret that he had not better prepared his own soldiers for war. A group of reservists sent a devastating indictment of IDF commanders to the country’s defense minister, Amir Peretz. The document accused IDF officers of “chronic indecisiveness and displaying under-preparation, insincerity, and an inability to make rational decisions.” Never before had there been such an attack on Israel’s military elite.

Meir Dagan was not alone in recognizing that if Israel was to survive in an Islamic world grown more determined to remove it, it must urgently learn from its mistakes and adapt. There was a growing public demand that Olmert should resign along with some of his generals. Among those who did resign was Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, General Dan Halutz. But the prime minister clung to office. It was only when he found a criminal investigation, alleging he had been involved in corrupt financial deals, did he finally announce he would leave office in October 2008 and fight to clear his name.

As an uneasy truce settled over Lebanon, Operation Overt, to which Mossad was one of half-a-dozen security services making a contribution, began to move to resolution. MI5 was checking all Britain’s universities and technical schools for Middle East students who had come to Britain to study thermochemistry, the science which includes creating liquid explosives. The search also extended to all British firms that had employed foreign students since 9/11. The fear was that any of them could have been recruited by one of the two terror cells now under intense surveillance in London that were now known to MI5 to be linked to al-Qaeda. MI5 were certain the plot centered on destroying transatlantic flights from Heathrow to the United States.

Mossad’s own scientists had already told MI5 the most effective way of smuggling explosive liquids onto an aircraft would be using two stable fluids which could be mixed in an aircraft lavatory to create a powerful bomb. Research by the chemists showed that nitroglycerine hidden inside a tub of hair gel or a shampoo bottle, with a detonator hidden inside a cell phone, would be one effective method. Another was to use two bottles of clear chemicals hidden inside cans of soft drinks or toiletries. A prime candidate for this method would be triacetone triperoxide (TATP) a crystalline white powder. The July 7, 2005, bombers in London had used this method to create the explosions on the city’s underground system. On board an aircraft the two chemicals would be mixed to create TATP.

Ehud Keinan, a member of the Technical Institute in Tel Aviv, whose expertise was invaluable to Mossad, said (to the author):

The Mossad chemists concluded that while it would be difficult to destroy an aircraft with one liquid-based bomb, it could be achieved by combining several bombs on one aircraft and placing them near windows or escape hatches. But even a small device could sever an aircraft’s hydraulic control cables. MI5 chemists had studied the precedents for such attacks on board an aircraft. In June 1985, Sikh militants had obliterated an Air India aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 passengers. Pan Am Flight 103 had been similarly destroyed on December 21, 1998, over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. In 1995, al-Qaeda operatives planned to attack a number of passenger planes over the Pacific Ocean. One aircraft owned by Philippine Airlines was attacked with a nitrocellulose bomb, which killed one passenger and injured ten others. On December 22, 2001, Richard Reid, a British-born follower of Osama bin Laden, tried to destroy American Airlines Flight 63 as it flew from Paris to Miami. He had explosives stuffed in his shoes.

The details of all these acts were on the screens in the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre in London. At 10:30 on a warm Sunday night in August, the red light on the senior duty officer’s desk blinked. The caller was Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5. Moments earlier she had been told that four months of a patient and top-secret investigation by MI5, MI6, the CIA, Mossad, and Pakistan’s intelligence service was about to reach its climax. John Scarlett, the head of MI6, had just received a “flash” encrypted e-mail from a field agent in Karachi. Pakistan intelligence had confirmed that al-Qaeda was about to launch a series of attacks on British and American transatlantic flights from Heathrow. It was the moment the greatest terrorist threat Britain had ever faced brought JTAC to “full operational mode.” In rapid succession, Tony Blair was alerted. He contacted President Bush. By then key officials in Cobra, the government crisis team, were being briefed. So was Sir Ian Blair, Britain’s top policeman. Airline chiefs and other authorities, including the director of security for the Channel Tunnel, were also alerted. All the heads of foreign intelligence were told. By then the Anacapa charts were filling, the center’s plasma screens were alive with data, and the phones blinking furiously. Over the next six days, into and out of the work stations — each equipped with state-of-the-art communications systems — information flowed. Intelligence — once only shared with the CIA, French, and German security services — was exchanged with other services. The question all urgently needed to answer was: had they picked up even “a whisper in the wind” of when the plot to destroy the airliners would happen? From Rome came the first hint. SIMSI, the Italian secret service, said they had a large number of terror suspects under surveillance. One had admitted the attack would come “very soon.”

Porton Down’s experts were called upon to decide what kind of liquid explosive would be used. Around the clock, surveillance reports continued to come to the work stations. In between long days and nights, men and women catnapped in a nearby dormitory in the basement. One report was from an MI5 undercover team near a house in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Other teams reported from south London and Birmingham. GCHQ specialists analyzed phone intercepts from suspect houses. In communities where the suspects lived, MI5 had set up other sophisticated surveillance sites. Some of the suspects had become assimilated into British society, but had made regular trips to relatives in Pakistan and elsewhere. Pakistan’s intelligence service had provided JTAC with details. The suspects were known as “Trojans,” JTAC-speak for those who may have been recruited to become home-grown terrorists. Their cell phones were bugged. Their every movement noted. Radio waves bounced off windowpanes to monitor conversations in a room they occupied. The latest technology filtered through thousands of e-mails. The surveillance teams’ information was studied by a JTAC lawyer to ensure their findings would be admissible in court.

Seventy-two hours later sufficient information had been gathered for arrests to go ahead. Twenty-two people were taken into custody. They included a convert to Islam and a seventeen-year-old youth. But in JTAC the work continued to establish the full extent of the plot. Scotland Yard predicted it could possibly be a year before the suspects were brought to trial.

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan received a thank you call from Eliza Manningham-Buller. At the end she said, “We may not have caught them all, but it’s a start.” For the intelligence chief it was a good result to justify what Mossad tries to do.

In September 2006, the arrival once more of the first cooling breezes was a time to which the Jews of Israel and the Muslims of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip would look forward. A time when Jewish mothers prepared borscht, beetroot soup, and young lovers walked down the Cardo, the covered street in the Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem and, nearby, the Muslim faithful worshipped within the cool of Haram al-Sharif, the enclosure in the Muslim quarter of Old Jerusalem, which contained the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site of the Islamic world. This, too, all went on as it had for many centuries, rituals as ancient as wearing the Tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, and the checkered Arab headdress.

But now there were other matters to preoccupy the people of the Holy Land. In Gaza the fighting continued with guerrilla attacks by Hamas and counter assaults by Israel. The Israeli Air Force launched precision-bombing raids across the Strip. Shin Bet, the internal security force, rounded up more legally-elected members of the Hamas-dominated parliament on the grounds they belonged to an organization whose military wing was responsible for the continued kidnappings, rocket attacks, and suicide bombers.

In Israel, the fallout from the war in Lebanon continued and calls came every day for the resignation of those deemed to be responsible for the country’s failure. Early on in the conflict, Dan Halutz, after his air force had destroyed fifty-four Hezbollah rocket launchers, had announced “we have won the war.” Now, on the streets of Israeli cities, the words were publicly mocked as it gradually became clear after five weeks of fighting the last of the optimism had evaporated, and with it, the invincible reputation of the Israeli armed forces. Instead of celebrations, which had greeted other victories, the air was filled with anger over poor training of the soldiers and outdated equipment. Despite individual acts of bravery, some of the men of the IDF had been pushed to the point of mutiny. A humiliated Halutz wrote a contrite letter to all his soldiers in which he admitted “there were mistakes and these will be corrected.” But as the days of September passed, it became far from clear whether the fifty-eight-year-old fighter pilot, who had flown with distinction in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, would survive. A poll revealed that 54 percent wanted Halutz to resign.

Even though Ehud Olmert had announced he would set up a public inquiry into the conduct of the war, it did little to reduce the national anger Israelis directed at him. Sixty-three percent of the electorate polled said he should resign at once; his defense minister, Amir Peretz, fared even worse: 74 percent demanded he should leave office as soon as possible. Both politicians had been overwhelmingly dominated by Halutz and his dependence on air power, which had brought swift victory in previous conflicts. Mossad analysts, who had been monitoring public attitudes, also saw a consensus forming among IDF veterans that Halutz had failed to understand air power was only there to assist ground forces and could never win a modern-day war. It was a view Meir Dagan had put forward in those early-day meetings in the war room. He had argued, in the calm, cogent matter which had been his hallmark since taking over Mossad, that air power should have been supported by ground forces capable of driving Hezbollah back from the border area. But now the first murmurs had also surfaced in the street as to why the intelligence — always a critical factor in any past war Israel fought — had been so inept. Why had Mossad not discovered well before battle commenced the exact whereabouts of the Hezbollah rocket sites? Why had its agents not pinpointed the fallback positions of the launchers? Why had they not been able to more effectively track the movements of Hassan Nasrallah?

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, while parading through the streets of Beirut in triumph, also had suffered heavy casualties. Those who had survived watched fifty French army engineers come ashore, the vanguard of the seven thousand UN troops promised by the European Union states as peacemakers. The UN had also received offers of soldiers from several Muslim countries, some of which did not even recognize Israel. It did not augur well for the future — particularly as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria again began to make threatening announcements that time “will once more come when we have to retake the Golan Heights by force.”

But the real threat came from Iran. Not only had it been the real beneficiary of the conflict, it had united the Sunnis and the Shias in common agreement to fight the detested infidels. From having its back to the wall only three years before, when the invasion of Iraq had intimidated the ayatollahs next door, Iran had emerged as the influential power in the region’s Muslim world. It had achieved this position by shrewd opportunism and the miscalculations of its enemies. It had either ignored or played subtle politics against the threats of the UN Security Council to punish it with economic sanctions for consistently refusing to stop producing enriched uranium, a process to make the material for nuclear bombs. In that first week of September, Iran’s contempt continued to be demonstrated when it announced “a new phase” in its heavy water construction, ignoring the opposition of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear inspectorate. Mossad had already discovered the plant had been operational since mid-August. In a memo to Olmert, Meir Dagan reminded the embattled prime minister that India, Pakistan, and North Korea had all opened similar plants to convert uranium into plutonium for bombs.

Mossad analysts believed Iran’s mercurial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was counting on the disunity of the Security Council and the continued support of China and Russia to block any UN sanctions. John Bolton, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, had spoken of imposing them through a “coalition of the willing.” But would they include Jacques René Chirac and Tony Blair? Both were leaders in the twilight of their political power.

In a prophetic memo, a Mossad analyst wrote in late August: “The world must face that Iran is determined to become a nuclear military power. Inevitably that would lead to a nuclear arms race. Syria will feel emboldened to go for ‘the nuclear option.’ Saudi Arabia might well want to do the same. Egypt might also consider ‘going nuclear.’ We would then face a new and most dangerous situation.”

It was against this background that Olmert appointed his air force chief, Major General Elyezer Shkedy, to be overall commander for a new department within the IDF. It was to be called “The Iran Front.” Its task was two-fold. First, to task Mossad in obtaining “all possible intelligence from within Iran by all possible means.” In turn that information would form part of a working battle plan. On Shkedy’s appointment, his first visitor had been Meir Dagan. For several hours, Shkedy, the forty-nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors — whose prized possession was a picture of an Israel F-15 flying over Auschwitz — spelled out his requirements. Dagan asked what was the timeframe. Shkedy replied, “the list of options is becoming shorter. But on present calculations there may be a year before we have to decide.” That decision, of course, would not be finally made in Israel. It would ultimately come from Washington, made by the Pentagon and delivered from the Oval Office by President George W. Bush. He had already told his inner cabinet — Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice — that Israel was “singing from the same hymn sheet as we are. We have no argument about Iran’s intentions. It’s going to do all it can to go nuclear.”

In the meantime in Tehran, Mohammed-Reza Bahonar, the deputy speaker of Iran’s parliament and a staunch ultra-conservative supporter of President Ahmadinejad, warned that Iran would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “if our patience finally runs out with the international community, our country may have to produce nuclear weapons as a defense measure.”

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan told his own senior staff that “once more the clock is moving closer to midnight.”

In London another clock had stopped, at least for the moment: the long-awaited report into the death of Princess Diana nine years before had gone into limbo. The Royal Coroner, Dr. Michael Burgess, who knew the contents of the report by Lord Stevens, had astonishingly resigned, deciding he was “too busy” to preside over the most significant and high-profile case of his or any coroner’s life. In a letter to interested parties, including Prince Charles and Mohamed al-Fayed, the mild-mannered Burgess had written about “my heavy and constant workload.” As the ninth anniversary of Dodi al-Fayed and the Princess’s death were marked by the annual surge of visitors to the midnight car crash location in Paris, the questions continued to be asked and the speculation was rampant. Had Dr. Burgess refused to continue because there was pressure upon him to declare the crash had been nothing more than a tragic accident? Or had he resigned because he would not discount that murder had been committed — and that powerful figures in the intelligence world and in Britain’s Royal Family had exerted their combined influence to dismiss any suspicion of foul play? More certain is that if there was finally to be an inquest it would require months of searching for a replacement for the sixty-year-old Burgess. By August 2006, it had appeared that Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, had been unable to find one. Lord Stevens, who had headed the inquiry into the two deaths, knew that any new coroner would have to read a massive dossier to familiarize himself with its myriad contents numbering ten thousand pages. That would take many months. The experienced Stevens knew that the moment any fresh legal figure examined the results of his team’s two-and-a-half-year investigation he would be “bound to want supplementary inquiries to be made.” That would, one of his handpicked detectives told the author, “add another year or even more to our work.” Privately Lord Stevens has told friends that the inquiry “could go on for years.”

In September 2006, a date for when the inquest might take place was put at the earliest 2007, possibly 2008. Even then, asked the conspiracy theorists, would everything be disclosed? How “routine” had Diana’s “partial embalming” been? Why didn’t the National Security Agency in Washington release their surveillance tapes of Diana and Dodi it had made in the last weeks of their lives? Did the tapes add anything of value to the investigation? Even if the couple had clipped on their seatbelts as the Mercedes hurtled them to their deaths, would that have saved their lives? Was Diana pregnant? Her close friend, Rosa Monckton, had told the Stevens investigators that on August 20, 1997, when she said good-bye to Diana eleven days before her death, Diana’s menstrual cycle had started. But even then the questions had been asked. How long was her menstrual bleeding? Had she been able to bear a child by the time her menstrual cycle stopped? And finally, what had the investigators discovered about the role of the intelligence service — not least Mossad?

In one of those surprise statements, which had become a hallmark of the Blair government, it was announced after the ninth anniversary of Diana’s death that a replacement for the Royal Coroner had been found. She was Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, a retired High Court judge. She had agreed to come out of retirement to preside over the inquest into Diana’s death. An indication of the formidable reading task she faced came when Lord Stevens announced his detectives had so far taken 1,500 witness statements, many more than the previous figure.

On the day of the Butler-Sloss appointment, Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, published his latest revelations about her death. It included a confidential police report about the items recovered from the crash scene. The inventory was prepared by Captain Christophe Boucharin of the Paris Criminal Brigade, marked BC № 288/97. It listed fourteen personal effects, including a pair of black Versace shoes size 40, a Ralph Lauren belt, a Motorola mobile phone, a Jaeger-Lecoultre gold watch, a Bulgari seed-pearl bracelet held at each end with diamond-encrusted drags, and a gold ring. In a footnote Captain Boucharin wrote: “The funeral directors took responsibility for all the artifacts. They put the bracelet on Diana’s right wrist and the ring on her right finger.” Burrell wrote that “she had agreed on my advice when she received the ring from Dodi to wear the ring on her right hand as a friendship ring — not on her left hand denoting an engagement.”

The position of the ring would contradict Mohamed al-Fayed’s persistent claim that his son and Diana were engaged to be married. The veracity of this would be one of the many factors that Baroness Butler-Sloss would have to consider when she eventually presided over the inquest.

In Tel Aviv the latest developments were carefully filed in the Mossad library. Meir Dagan had made his decision about not involving Mossad in the investigation. He had heard nothing to change his mind.

Being driven to his appointment through Washington in a government car, Meir Dagan saw that across the Potomac the memorial stones as usual stood proudly in ranks on the slopes of Arlington Cemetery. The graveyard was so different from the smooth sandstone, brain-shaped monument at Glilot, north of Tel Aviv, and its engravings of the dead of Mossad. Ahead, the Washington Monument’s long shadow gave the last reading of the day before fading into darkness. Along the sidewalk people still pounded along as the lights blinked out in the buildings and flags dropped down poles to be swiftly gathered up. If there was a time he had to come to Washington, Meir Dagan preferred September. Until then the summer would be without a breeze and the atmosphere filled with fumes and ozone, often covering the city with a haze. Visitors said it was the result of car exhaust smoke and the swampy location. Cynical locals knew better, claiming it was a noxious mixture of wasted breath and oxidized hopes that turned to poison when the sun broke through. The cause, of course, was government.

It was its secret side, the CIA, which had once more brought the Mossad chief to Washington. He had arrived at the time for Washington’s powerful pretenders to lock away their documents and to ignore, until the morning, the telephone calls they had not returned. Those without a future headed home to their families. The ambitious, the Mossad chief knew, had further duties. A late drink at an embassy and later still, dinner with friends and enemies, a time when a secret could be quietly shared or a reputation tarnished.

Before leaving Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan had learned that Rafi Eitan, once Mossad’s director of operations and now the Pensioners’ Minister in the coalition that Ehud Olmert hoped would allow him to continue governing, had called for the readying of bomb shelters and reinforced rooms to be established in advance of a possible conflict with Iran. Eitan, once so secretive, had become adept at sound-bites on television.

Staging through London, Dagan learned that MI5 had discovered al-Qaeda had supplied its estimated 2,000 sleeper agents in Britain with what Eliza Manningham-Buller described as “the most sophisticated terror manual ever found in this country.” The document gave information on how to create liquid explosions far more powerful than those planned to be used to destroy ten passenger planes over the Atlantic in August 2006. The precise steps to produce the bombs were set out in chilling detail on an al-Qaeda DVD. On one part of the disk were instructions that mimicked the style of a cookbook — only its pages provided recipes for unparalleled carnage. An example shown to the author reads:

Sidney Alford, chairman of Alford Technologies, a leading British explosives company, said (to the author): “Everyone in the business knows that nitromethane is an explosive, but many people, including some in the police and security services, have yet to cotton on to that.” And in Tel Aviv, Ehud Keinan, a world-ranking authority on liquid explosives whose expertise was prized by Mossad, confirmed that the details discovered on the al-Qaeda DVD were “of major importance in the fight against terrorism. It is very easy to produce such explosives once the know-how is explained. The raw materials are readily available in unlimited quantities on any main street.”

Meir Dagan learned the DVD was discovered during the climax of an MI5 surveillance operation that had begun in Dublin, Ireland, and ended on the road to Chester in the north of England when intelligence officers swooped on a 2000-reg Lancia, which had come from Dublin on the car ferry to Holyhead in North Wales. At the wheel of the vehicle was a middle-aged English woman who had driven to the Welsh port from the Midlands. Beside her sat an Algerian-born man, also middle-aged, who has lived in a fashionable Dublin suburb. Both have been under surveillance as part of Operation Overt, which led to the arrests of twenty-four terrorists in March 2007. The couple and their car were driven to an MI5 safe house near London. Waiting were senior interrogation officers. While they questioned the couple in separate rooms, MI5 forensic experts conducted a search of the car. It was then that the DVD was found.

Dagan also learned that MI5 officers had reopened the case of another Algerian terrorist who had lived for four years in Lucan, another Dublin suburb. In December 2005 he was convicted under the name of Abbas Boutrab for conspiracy to blow up aircraft and sentenced to six years at Belfast Crown Court. However, it subsequently emerged that Boutrab was not his real name — but one of nine different aliases on passports found in an al-Qaeda safe house in Ireland.

The Republic had increasingly become a concern for Mossad since it had emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 that al-Qaeda had infiltrated the thriving Muslim community in Dublin. Ireland’s small security service had gratefully accepted help from Mossad, MI5, and European intelligence services to mount various surveillance operations and GCHQ, Britain’s “spy in the sky” had monitored the e-mails and phone calls of suspects. One result had been to thwart the plan of Abu Hamsa, the radical cleric, to seek political asylum in Ireland before he could be arrested on an extradition warrant to face terrorist-related charges in the United States. Hamsa was now in Belmarsh, one of Britain’s high-security prisons, serving a sentence for his involvement in terrorism. Hamsa believed, wrongly, that the long history of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, in successfully opposing extradition from the United States of IRA suspects to face trial in Northern Ireland would ensure he would not be extradited to America. He was counting on the Dublin government facing legal problems; like other European countries, Ireland has strict laws about extradition. In 2008, the Irish government had still refused to return the three Continuity IRA members to Colombia. They continue to live quite close to the Irish border with Northern Ireland.

In the past year al-Qaeda had started an intensive recruitment drive among Ireland’s young Muslims to become jihadists. MI5 agents had established that one-and-a-half tons of ammonium-based nitrate fertilizer, which had been found in London, had been smuggled into Britain from Ireland. If it exploded, it could have killed more than had died in the Madrid train massacre. The agents had discovered that every year 150,000 tons of the lethal material were shipped annually from Russia and there were few controls at any of the Republic’s docks as to who collected it. An MI5 agent had then established that a terrorist could buy half-a-ton of the fertilizer at any of the Republic’s agricultural merchants. The fertilizer had lain in plastic sacks in the yard the agent visited. To weaponize it, all a terrorist had to do was separate the potash from the ammonium nitrate then douse the nitrate with domestic fuel oil and add a detonator.

The deep concern this had caused was reinforced (to the author) by Northern Ireland’s leading anti-terrorist chief, Detective Superintendent Andy Sproule of the Serious and Organized Crimes Unit: “There are increasingly large amounts of this fertilizer coming into Ireland and it is not even what it claims to be. The levels of ammonium nitrate are too high and it is dangerous.” The ban in Northern Ireland since 1996 to stop it being sold to the IRA has led to a dramatic increase in the import figures of the deadly fertilizer into the Republic. It arrives in container ships from Russian plants near the Ural Mountains. Before 2001 the Republic had imported hardly any artificial fertilizer containing high levels of potash and ammonium nitrate. Sensing a market opening, the Irish Fertilizer Manufacturers Association (IFMA) began to import the Russian fertilizer. In 2003 the amount was 120,000 tons. A year later it reached 150,000 tons. The figure continued to grow.

It was one matter Meir Dagan could raise with General Michael Hayden, who had been appointed to replace Tenet in 2006. Their meeting in Washington would be their first face-to-face encounter. The agenda would include the ongoing roundup by Hezbollah’s security service of informers in the Beka’a Valley and south Lebanon, several of whom had risked their lives and those of their families by identifying for Mossad the locations of missiles. Hassan Nasrallah had made the capture of the informers a priority. For discussion would also be the failure of Israeli intelligence to locate and capture the Hezbollah leader and his senior aides.

The two spy chiefs would also update each other on the identity of a mysterious name — Rakan Ben Williams. Was he who he claimed to be, an American convert to Islam? Al-Qaeda now claimed to have hundreds of such members. Or was it a codename for a cell or even a group? In London, MI5 analysts were trying to discover if the name fit one of the men arrested in Operation Overt. In the meantime, “Williams” had continued to utilize the Internet for his threats. Each was signed as “Al-Qaeda undercover soldier in the USA.” But the style suggested the writer could be a woman. Or it might simply have been a hoaxer of either sex. Long ago, Meir Dagan had realized counter-terrorism was plagued with often well-constructed nonsense. But no matter how outlandish it appeared, it had to be tracked down. At the Mossad training school, instructors reminded students that from the moment man established himself as a new species unique among all animals, it was the moment when he first used his primitive language to lie; the world became his to create and destroy. It would be ever so.