Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 5 GIDEON’S NUCLEAR SWORD

In the darkness of a Tel Aviv cinema in 1945, Rafi Eitan had watched the birth of the nuclear age over Hiroshima. While all around him young soldiers whistled and cheered at the newsreel footage of the devastated Japanese city, he had only two thoughts. Would Israel ever possess such a weapon? Suppose her Arab neighbors obtained one first?

From time to time down the years the questions had surfaced in his mind. If Egypt had had a nuclear bomb, it would have won the Suez War and there would have been no Six Day War or Yom Kippur War. Israel would have been a nuclear desert. With a nuclear weapon, Israel would be invincible.

In those days, for an operative whose work was primarily concerned with killing terrorists, such strategic questions were only of academic interest and answering them was the province of others. However, when he took command of LAKAM, he began to seriously consider the matter. He now only had one question: Could he help to provide Israel with a nuclear shield?

Reading long into the night, fueled by the forty vitamin capsules he swallowed each day, he discovered how Israel’s politicians and scientists had initially been divided over “going nuclear.” In the files were details of angry exchanges within cabinet meetings, the bitter monologues of scientists, and always the overpowering voice of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion cutting through the anguish, protests, and long-winded arguments.

Trouble had begun in 1956, when France had sent a twenty-four-megawatt reactor to Israel. Ben-Gurion announced its purpose was to provide a “pumping station” to turn the desert into an “agricultural paradise by desalinating a billion cubic gallons of seawater annually.” The claim promptly led to the resignation of six of the seven members of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, protesting the reactor was actually intended to be the precursor of “political adventurism which will unite the world against us.” Israel’s leading military strategists supported them. Yigal Allon, a hero of the War of Independence, roundly condemned the “nuclear option”; Yitzhak Rabin, who would soon become the IDF chief of staff, was equally vocal in his protest. Even Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s leading hawk, vehemently opposed a nuclear arsenal. “We have the best conventional forces in the region.”

Ignoring all opposition, Ben-Gurion gave the order for the reactor to be sited in the Negev Desert, close to the bleak, sand-blown settlement at Dimona. Once a staging post on the camel caravan route between Cairo and Jerusalem, Dimona had long become a place time had passed by. Few maps marked its position in the desert south of Tel Aviv. But from now on no mapmaker would be allowed to pinpoint the location of Israel’s first faltering steps into the nuclear age.

Dimona’s silver dome — beneath which was the reactor — rose above the desert heat. Kirya le Mehekar Gariny, Dimona’s Hebrew name, employed over 2,500 scientists and technicians. They worked within the most fortified plant on earth. The sand around the perimeter fences was continuously checked for signs of intruders. Pilots knew that any aircraft flying within a five-mile air exclusion zone could be shot down. Engineers had bulldozed an eighty-foot-deep chamber to house the reactor, part of an underground complex known as Machon Two. At its core was the separating/reprocessing plant that had been labeled “textile machinery” when shipped from France.

By itself the reactor could not provide Israel with a nuclear bomb. To produce one required fissionable material, uranium or plutonium. The handful of nuclear powers had agreed among themselves never to provide as much as a gram of either substance to all those outside their exclusive “club.” Imposing though it was, the reactor at Dimona was little more than a showpiece until it received fissionable materials.

Three months after the reactor had been installed, a small nuclear material processing company opened for business in a converted World War II steel plant in the unappealing town of Apollo, Pennsylvania. The company was called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, Numec. Its chief executive was Dr. Salman Shapiro.

On LAKAM’s computer database of prominent American Jews with a scientific background, Shapiro was also listed as a prominent fund-raiser for Israel. Rafi Eitan knew he had found a potential answer to how to provide the Dimona reactor with fissionable material. He ordered a full check made into the background of Shapiro and every member of the plant staff. The investigation was entrusted to the katsa in Washington.

The inquiry launched, Rafi Eitan continued to immerse himself in a story that had switched from the desert heat of Dimona to the cool corridors of the White House.

Among the data the Washington katsa had sent was a copy of a memo written on February 20, 1962, by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to Shapiro, bluntly warning that the company’s “failure to comply with security regulations may be punishable as provided by law, including the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and by the espionage laws.”

The threat increased Rafi Eitan’s feeling he may have found a way into the U.S. nuclear industry. Numec appeared to be a company not only with poor security, but also lax bookkeeping and a management that left a great deal to be desired by America’s nuclear watchdog. Those very deficiencies made the company an attractive target.

The son of an Orthodox rabbi, Salman Shapiro’s brilliance had already carried him far. At Johns Hopkins University he had obtained his doctorate in chemistry by the age of twenty-eight. His capacity for hard work had seen him become an important member of the nuclear research and development laboratory at Westinghouse; the corporation was contracted to the United States Navy to develop submarine reactors. Checks on Shapiro’s personal background revealed some of his relatives had been Holocaust victims and Shapiro, in “his typical discreet way,” had provided several million dollars for the Technion Institute in Haifa that offered tuition in science and engineering.

In 1957 Shapiro had left Westinghouse and set up Numec. It had twenty-five stockholders, all openly sympathetic to Israel. Shapiro found himself head of a small company in an aggressive cutthroat industry. Nevertheless, Numec had won a number of contracts to recover enriched uranium, a process that usually led to the loss of a quantity of uranium during the salvage operation. There was no way of telling how great or when the loss had taken place. The revelation made Rafi Eitan pop his vitamins with even more satisfaction.

He continued to read how the already uneasy relationship between Israel and the United States over the desire of the Jewish state to become a nuclear power increased when Ben-Gurion traveled to Washington in 1960. At a series of meetings with State Department officials, he was bluntly told that for Israel to possess nuclear weapons would affect the balance of power in the Middle East. In February 1961, President John F. Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion suggesting that Dimona should be regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Alarmed, Ben-Gurion flew to New York to meet with Kennedy at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The Israeli leader was “very worried” about what he saw as “relentless American pressures.” But Kennedy was firm: there had to be an inspection. Ben-Gurion gave in with what little grace he could muster. He returned home convinced “a Catholic in the White House is bad news for Israel.” The prime minister turned to the one man in Washington he could trust, Abraham Feinberg, a Zionist supporter of Israel’s nuclear aspirations.

At one level, the native New Yorker was the most important Jewish fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. Feinberg made no secret of why he had raised many millions: every dollar was to ensure the party backed Israel in Congress. He had also discreetly provided many more additional millions of dollars to create Dimona. The money came in cashier’s checks to the Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv, thus avoiding the accountability of the Israeli foreign exchange controls. Ben-Gurion told Feinberg to “sort out the boy. Make the putz understand the reality of life.”

Feinberg’s method was straightforward political pressure — the kind that had already infuriated Kennedy when he was running for office. Then, Feinberg had bluntly told him: “We are willing to pay your bills if you will let us have control of your Middle East policy.” Kennedy had promised to “give Israel every possible break.” Feinberg had agreed to provide an initial campaign contribution of five hundred thousand dollars—“with more to come.”

Now he used the same direct approach: if President Kennedy continued to insist on an inspection of Dimona, he should “not count on Jewish financial support in the next political election.” Powerful support came from an unexpected source. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Robert S. McNamara, told Kennedy he could “understand why Israel wants a nuclear bomb.”

Nevertheless, Kennedy was resolute and Israel was forced to accept an inspection. The president did at the last minute grant two concessions. In return for access to Dimona, the United States would sell Israel Hawk surface-to-air missiles, then the most advanced defensive weapon in the world. And the inspection need not be carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but by an American-only team — that would have to schedule its visit weeks in advance.

Rafi Eitan relished the detailed account of how the Israelis had duped the American inspectors.

A bogus control center was built over the real one at Dimona, complete with fake control panels and computer-lined gauges that gave a credible impression of measuring the output of a reactor engaged in an irrigation scheme to turn the Negev into lush pastureland. The area containing the “heavy” water smuggled from France and Norway was placed off-limits to the inspectors “for safety reasons.” The sheer volume of heavy water would have been proof the reactor was being readied for a very different purpose.

When the Americans arrived, the Israelis were relieved to discover not one spoke Hebrew. It further lessened any possibility of the inspectors uncovering the true intention for Dimona.

The stage was set for Rafi Eitan.

Gaining access to the Numec plant was relatively easy. Israel’s embassy in Washington requested permission from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission “for a team of our scientists to visit the facility to better understand the concerns expressed by your inspectors on the reprocessing of nuclear waste.” The request was granted, even though the FBI was now running a full-scale surveillance operation to discover whether Shapiro had been recruited as an Israeli spy.

He had not — and never would be. Rafi Eitan was satisfied that Shapiro was a genuine patriot, a Zionist who believed in the right of Israel to defend itself. Not only was Shapiro privately wealthy from family money and shrewd stock-market investments, his personal fortune had rapidly increased from the very large profits Numec had already made. Equally, unlike Jonathan Pollard, Shapiro was not a traitor; his love of America was manifest. Rafi Eitan knew that to even attempt to recruit him would be counterproductive. Shapiro would have to remain outside the operation beginning to crystallize in Rafi Eitan’s mind.

Nevertheless, some risks were unavoidable. To learn more about Numec, Rafi Eitan had sent two LAKAM operatives to Apollo. They were Avraham Hermoni, whose diplomatic cover at the Israeli embassy in Washington was “scientific counselor,” and Jeryham Kafkafi, a katsa operating in the United States as a freelance science writer.

Both agents toured the reprocessing plant but were not allowed to photograph it. Shapiro pointed out that would be a breach of Atomic Energy Commission regulations. They had found Shapiro welcoming but, in Hermoni’s judgment, “a man run off his feet.”

Rafi Eitan decided the time had come for him to go to Apollo. He put together a group of “inspectors.” These included two scientists from Dimona with specialized knowledge of reprocessing nuclear waste. Another team member was listed as a director of the “Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel.” There was no such post at the campus; the man was a LAKAM security officer whose task would be to try to discover a way of stealing fissionable waste from the plant. Hermoni was included: his job would be to point out the areas of poor security he had discovered during his previous visit. Rafi Eitan was traveling under his own name as a “scientific adviser to the office of the Prime Minister of Israel.”

The delegates were approved by the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and visas were granted. Rafi Eitan had warned the team they could expect to be under FBI surveillance from the time they landed in New York. But, to his surprise, his experienced eyes saw no evidence of that.

The Israelis’ arrival in Apollo coincided with Shapiro’s return from another brainstorming tour of American university campuses, where he had been soliciting scientists who were “friendly” to Israel and would agree to go there and “solve its technical and scientific problems.” He would underwrite all their expenses and make up any deficit in their salaries.

Rafi Eitan and his team’s stay in Apollo was low-key. They took rooms in a motel and spent most of their time at the Numec plant learning the intricacies of converting highly enriched uranium from gaseous uranium hexafluoride. Shapiro explained that Atomic Energy Commission rules meant that Numec would have to pay penalties for any enriched material not accounted for, scaled at $10 a gram, $4,500 a pound.

Rafi Eitan and his spies left Apollo as quietly as they had come.

What followed can only be deduced from FBI reports, and even they leave tantalizing questions as to how much Salman Shapiro may have suspected was behind Rafi Eitan’s visit. An FBI report stated that a month after the Israelis had returned home, Numec became a partner with the Israeli government in a business involving what was described as “the pasteurization of food and the sterilization of medical samples by irradiation.”

Another FBI report complained that “with a warning notice posted on each container that it contained radioactive material, no one would open or examine them — and no one was prepared to let us do so.”

The reason for the refusal was because the Israeli embassy in Washington had made it clear to the State Department that if any attempt was made to inspect the containers, they would place them under diplomatic immunity. The State Department called the Justice Department and warned of the serious diplomatic consequences that would follow any breach of that immunity. All the thwarted FBI agents could do was watch the containers being loaded on to El Al cargo planes at Idlewild Airport.

Despite his best efforts, the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, John Hadden, said he was unable to “firm up” that the containers were ending up in Dimona. The FBI logged nine shipments in the six months following Rafi Eitan’s visit. They noted that the containers arrived at dusk and left before dawn: all were sheathed with lead, needed to transport enriched uranium, and each container was stamped with a pre-addressed stencil in Hebrew giving Haifa as the final destination. On several occasions, agents saw “stovepipes”—storage containers for enriched uranium — being placed in steel cabinets at the Numec loading dock. Each stovepipe bore a number showing it had come from the company’s high-security vaults. But there was still nothing the FBI could do. An FBI memo spoke of “political pressure from State [Department] not to create a diplomatic incident.”

After ten months the shipments abruptly stopped. The FBI could only assume that sufficient quantities of fissionable material had by then reached Dimona. During the agency’s subsequent interviews, Shapiro denied he had supplied Israel with nuclear bomb-making material. The FBI said their check of company records showed there was a discrepancy in the amount of material reprocessed. Shapiro insisted the “most logical explanation” for any “lost” uranium was that it had seeped into the ground or had been “disposed of into the air.” All told, the missing material amounted to one hundred pounds. Shapiro was never charged with any crime.

In the years that followed, Rafi Eitan could be forgiven for thinking how easy it had become to steal fissionable materials after the collapse of the Soviet Union. An incident that took place at Sheremeteyevo Airport in Moscow on August 10, 1994, proved exactly that.

At 12:45 P.M. on that day, Justiano Torres, somberly dressed in a gray business suit bought for this one journey, arrived deliberately late for Lufthansa Flight 3369 to Munich. Physically strong, he still sweated a little under the weight of the new black-leather Delsey suitcase. Torres produced his first-class ticket and smiled at the desk clerk. The smile was captured on a camera secretly installed behind the desk to record his every movement.

Other cameras had secretly filmed him over these past months. Captured on film were his meetings with a disaffected Russian nuclear scientist, Igor Tashanka: their encounters out in the Stalin Hills; their trips on a pleasure steamer on the Moscow River; their dinners at Russian mafia-controlled restaurants; and finally, the meeting where Tashanka passed over the suitcase and in return received an envelope containing $5,000. In every sense, Torres could believe he had struck a wonderful bargain. The suitcase contained fissionable material.

Justiano Torres was a courier for a Colombian drug cartel who had expanded into trafficking in an even deadlier substance. The suitcase contained, in sealed containers, the two hundred grams of plutonium 239 that Tashanka had sold him. It had a street value of $50 million. The plutonium was so lethal that even coming in contact with a microscopic speck would be fatal. The contents of the suitcase were sufficient to make a small nuclear device.

For Uri Saguy, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, the prospect was “every thinking person’s nightmare: a bunch of terrorists with their hands on enough fissionable material to devastate Tel Aviv or any other city. In day-to-day intelligence tasking, dealing with a nuclear threat ranks right at the very top.”

The Israeli intelligence community had long known that terrorists could manufacture a crude nuclear bomb. An American physics graduate student in the 1970s had carried out and described each one of the processes required. His published work caused huge consternation with Mossad.

Doomsday scenarios were postulated. A bomb could arrive in pieces on board a ship, or be smuggled across a land border and assembled in Israel. The weapon would be detonated by remote control unless impossible demands were met. Would the government stand firm? Mossad’s analysts decided that there would be no surrender. This expectation was based on a deep understanding of the terrorist mind at the time: in the 1970s even extreme groups would hesitate to detonate a nuclear bomb because of the political price they would pay. They would become outcasts to even those nations that covertly supported them.

The collapse of Soviet Communism had renewed Mossad’s fears. An arena of new uncertainties had been created; no one could say for certain how the new political dimensions within Russia would develop. Already Mossad had discovered Soviet Scud missiles had been exported for hard currency to several Middle East countries. Soviet technicians had helped Algeria build a nuclear reactor. Russia had a large stockpile of biological weapons, including a super-plague germ that could kill millions of people. Supposing even a small portion of it fell into the hands of terrorists? Even a small jar filled with the bug could decimate Tel Aviv. But above all it was the fear Russia would sell off its nuclear arsenal that was the pressing concern. For Uri Saguy that was a threat “no one could ignore.”

Mossad psychologists drew up psycho-profiles of Russian scientists likely to provide materials and their motives: there were those who would do it purely for cash, others for complex ideological reasons. The list of Soviet facilities from which materials could be stolen was dauntingly large. Mossad’s director general, Shabtai Shavit, sent two katsas to Moscow with special orders to infiltrate the scientific community.

One of them was Lila. Born of Jewish parents in Beirut, she had a degree in physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and worked in Mossad’s scientific intelligence section. She had witnessed the tentative meetings Torres had with Tashanka and how the deal making progressed.

Lila and her colleague had worked closely with Mossad agents in Germany and elsewhere. The trail had led her to Colombia and back into the Middle East. Other Mossad operatives had observed meetings in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. New leads had opened up: Bosnia appeared to be a possible route for smuggling the plutonium 239 to its final destination — Iraq. But, not for the first time, knowing and proving the complicity of the Saddam regime were difficult.

That was why Torres was being allowed to fly on an unsuspecting commercial airliner with a lethal cargo. The decision to do so had been carefully weighed by the heads of Russian and German intelligence. They had concluded that the risk of the plutonium detonating was “infinitesimal.” Permission for Torres to travel had been given by both their respective governments to see if Torres would lead them to the end user for the material. Israel had not been consulted on the matter. The operation was officially only a German-Russian one. In the past, Mossad, on more than one occasion, had been a silent partner where other agencies had claimed the credit.

From her vantage point overlooking the airport departure gates on that August morning, “Lila” knew her role in this case was over. A Mossad agent — code-named Adler — was already positioned in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in midtown Munich, where Torres was to make his handover. Another agent — Mort — was at the Munich airport awaiting the arrival of Flight 3369.

A third agent—“Ib”—sat two seats back from Torres as the plane headed west on its three-hour flight. Across the aisle from Torres sat Viktor Sidorenko, Russian deputy minister for atomic energy. His responsibilities included protecting his country’s nuclear arsenal. Russia now had around 130 tons of weapons-grade plutonium, enough to make sixteen thousand atom bombs, each twice the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

Sidorenko had received a number of disturbing reports that detailed lax controls and low morale among the staff of hundreds of Russian institutes and research centers with access to radioactive substances. A few months before, a worker at a nuclear plant in the Urals had been arrested with radioactive uranium pellets in a plastic bag. Over five kilos of uranium had been squirreled away by workmen at another plant near Minsk and hidden in their homes. The thefts had only come to light when a kilo was sold for twenty bottles of vodka. Sidorenko was traveling to Germany to assure Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government that cases like this would never happen again; the Germans were threatening sanctions.

At 5:45 P.M., exactly on time, Flight 3369 landed at Munich’s Franz Josef Strauss Airport and taxied to its terminal C stand. Minister Sidorenko was the first to deplane. He was whisked away by a waiting car and driven to a high-security area. There he was told that Tashanka had just been arrested in Moscow.

Torres entered the arrivals area. The presence of heavily armed German police would not have surprised him. Munich had always made a show of its security after the Olympic Games massacre of Israeli athletes. Torres made a telephone call to the Excelsior Hotel, and was connected to room 23. Waiting there was a Spaniard, Javier Arratibel, whose passport described him as an “industrialist.” In fact, he was the broker for the plutonium. He called a man he knew only as Julio-O.

The calls had been monitored by German intelligence officers. As Torres strolled to the luggage carousel to collect his suitcase, he was observed from a nearby office by Munich police superintendent Wolfgang Stoephasios and the senior intelligence officer.

Torres picked up his suitcase and walked toward the Nothing to Declare exit. Ib and Mort followed. They could do no more. They had no power of arrest here. Stoephasios emerged from his office. It was the signal for action.

In moments Torres was surrounded and bundled away. The suitcase was taken to a room. Inside waited a white-suited figure with a Geiger counter. With him were bomb-disposal experts. They used a portable X-ray machine to see if the case was wired with explosives. It was not. Neither was there a telltale clicking from the Geiger to indicate a leak of fissionable material. The suitcase was opened. Inside, wrapped in heavy plastic, were the containers of plutonium 239. They were removed and placed in bomb-blast boxes and carried to a waiting armored truck. From there they were taken to Germany’s atomic energy complex.

In the Excelsior Hotel, Arratibel was arrested. But the next link in the chain, Julio-O, had slipped across the border into Hungary. The Hungarian police said they would look for him. But no one was holding his breath in Munich. Hungary was known to be one of the entry points to the West for Russian smugglers.

The Mossad men informed Tel Aviv what had happened.

In Tel Aviv, Mossad’s director general, Shabtai Shavit, saw the outcome as another small victory in the endless battle against nuclear terrorism. But he was not alone in wondering how many other suitcases had slipped through, how soon before there would be a nuclear explosion unless impossible demands were met.

A few miles away from where Shavit pondered such questions, Rafi Eitan, the man who had masterminded what the FBI and CIA still believed had been the theft of nuclear material from the Numec reprocessing plant at Apollo, continued to spend his free time carving yet more sculptures from scrap materials. Outwardly he was at peace with the world. Both the Pollard and Apollo operations had faded from memory; when pressed, he said he could not recall the first names of either Pollard or Shapiro. LAKAM had officially been closed down. Rafi Eitan insisted that his work nowadays was very different from what he had done before: he was a director of a small shipping company in Havana where he also had an interest in a company manufacturing agricultural pesticides. He claimed a close relationship with Fidel Castro, “which probably does not please the Americans.” He had never set foot in the United States since his trip to Apollo. He said he had no desire to, not least because he suspected he might still be asked “a lot of questions” about Jonathan Pollard and what exactly had happened following his visit to Apollo.

Then, in April 1997, Rafi Eitan’s name began to surface in connection with a Mossad spy in Washington whom the FBI identified and code-named “Mega.”

His own well-placed source within Mossad had told Rafi Eitan that the FBI had begun to explore the role Mega could have had in the way Jonathan Pollard had been run. Had Mega been the source for some of the ultrasecret material Pollard had passed on? The FBI had recently reinterviewed Pollard in prison and he had admitted that even his high security clearance had not been enough to obtain some of the documents his handler, the funereal Yagur, had requested. The FBI knew such documents had a special code word through which they had to be accessed, which changed frequently, sometimes even on a daily basis. Yet Yagur had seemed to know the code within a matter of hours to give to Pollard. Had Mega provided it? Was Mega the second Israeli spy in Washington the FBI had long suspected? How close had he been to Rafi Eitan?

These were the dangerous questions now being asked in Washington that could shatter the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv.

After the FBI had identified him as the puppet master behind Pollard, Rafi Eitan had accepted that his time in Israeli intelligence was finally over. He had looked forward to ending his days facing no greater risk than being scorched from the blowtorch he wielded when forming his sculptures.

Instinctively he knew that events in Washington posed a threat not only to him — a CIA snatch squad could try to grab him as he came and went from Cuba and bring him to Washington for questioning, and there was no way of telling what would happen then; but the discovery of Mega’s existence would also be exercising minds in the upper echelons of the Israeli intelligence community’s Va’adat Rashei Hasherutim — the Committee of the Heads of Service whose primary function is to coordinate all intelligence and security activities at home and abroad.

But even they knew nothing about who Mega was. All they had been told was that he was highly placed in the Clinton administration. Whether the president had inherited him from the Bush government was another carefully guarded secret. Only the incumbent Mossad memune knew how long Mega had been in place.

The committee members did, however, know that the FBI’s counterintelligence division finally believed that the lack of action against Mossad was due to the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington, and the reluctance of successive administrations to confront it. Once more that lobby could be called upon to dampen the firestorm building since Mega had first been discovered by the FBI. On February 16, 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) had provided the FBI with an intercept of a late-night telephone conversation from the Israeli embassy between a Mossad intelligence officer identified only as Dov, and his superior in Tel Aviv, whose name had not been revealed during the short conversation.

Dov had asked “for guidance” as to whether he “should go to Mega” for a copy of a letter written by Warren Christopher, then secretary of state, to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. The letter contained a set of assurances given to Arafat by Christopher on January 16 about the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron. Dov was instructed by the voice in Tel Aviv “to forget the letter. This is not something we use Mega for.”

The brief conversation had been the first clue the FBI had of the importance of Mega. The code name had not been heard before in its around-the-clock surveillance of the Israeli embassy and its diplomats. Using state-of-the-art computers, the FBI narrowed the urgent search for the identity of Mega to someone who either worked there or had access to a senior official employed by the National Security Council, the body that advises the president on intelligence and defense-related matters. Its office is in the White House, and its members include the vice president and the secretaries of state and defense. The director of Central Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff serve in an advisory role. The permanent staff is headed by the president’s national security adviser.

How the Israeli embassy had learned its secure communications channel with Tel Aviv had been breached still remained as closely guarded as the identity of Mega. Like all Israeli missions, the Washington embassy was constantly updated with more sophisticated systems for encryption and burst transmissions: a significant portion of this equipment has been adapted from stolen U.S. blueprints.

On February 27, 1997, a pleasant spring morning in Tel Aviv, the members of the Committee of the Heads of Services drove from their various offices around the city along the broad road called Rehov Shaul Hamaleku to a guarded gate in a high blank wall tipped with barbed wire. All that could be seen of what lay behind the wall were the roofs of buildings. Rising above them was a massive concrete tower visible all over Tel Aviv. At various heights were unsightly clusters of electronic antennae. The tower was the centerpiece of the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces. The complex is known as the Kirya, which simply means “place.”

At a little before 11:00 A.M., the intelligence chiefs used their swipe cards to access a building near the tower. Like most Israeli government offices, the conference room they entered was shabby.

The meeting was chaired by Danny Yatom, who had recently been appointed as Mossad’s latest chief by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Yatom had a reputation as a hard-liner, very much in keeping with Netanyahu. The Tel Aviv rumor mills had it that the new Mossad chief had “baby-sat” the embattled prime minister when Netanyahu’s colorful private life threatened his career. The men around the cedarwood conference table listened attentively as Yatom outlined the strategy to be adopted should the “situation” with Mega become a full-blown crisis.

Israel would deliver a strongly worded protest that its Washington embassy’s diplomatic status had been violated by the bugging — a move that would undoubtedly cause embarrassment to the Clinton administration. Next, sayanim connected to the U.S. media should be instructed to plant stories that Mega was an incorrect decoding of the Hebrew slang Elga, which had long been Mossad-speak for the CIA. Further, the word Mega was part of one well-known to U.S. intelligence. Megawatt was a code name it had until recently used jointly with Mossad to describe shared intelligence. For good measure sayanim should add that another word, Kilowatt, was used for commonly shared terrorist data.

But, for the moment, nothing would be done, Yatom concluded.

In March 1997, on receipt of information from Mossad’s katsa in Washington, Yatom took action. He sent a yahalomin team to Washington to follow-up on the katsa’s report that President Clinton was repeatedly indulging in phone-sex calls with a a former White House aide, Monica Lewinsky. He was making the calls from the Oval Office to her apartment in the Watergate complex. Knowing that the White House was totally protected by electronic counter-measures, the yahalomin team focused on Lewinsky’s apartment. They began to intercept explicit phone calls from the president to Lewinsky. The recordings were couriered by diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv.

On March 27, Clinton once more invited Lewinsky to the Oval Office and revealed he believed a foreign embassy was taping their conversations. He did not give her any more details, but shortly afterwards the affair ended.

In Tel Aviv, Mossad’s strategies pondered how to use the highly embarrassing taped conversations; they were the stuff of blackmail — though no one suggested any attempt should be made to blackmail the president of the United States. Some, however, saw the recordings as a potent weapon to be used if Israel found itself with its back to the wall in the Middle East and unable to count on Clinton’s support.

There was common consensus that the FBI must also be aware of the conversations between Clinton and Lewinsky. Some strategists urged Yatom to use “the back-door channel” with Washington and let the FBI know Mossad was aware of the president’s phone calls: it would be a not-very-subtle way of telling the agency to back off in their continuing hunt for Mega. Other analysts urged a wait-and-see policy, arguing that the information would remain explosive whenever it was released. That view prevailed.

In September 1998, the Starr report was published and Yatom had left office. The report contained a short reference to Clinton warning Lewinsky back in March 1997 that his phone was being bugged by a foreign embassy. Starr had not pursued the matter when Lewinsky had given her testimony before the grand jury about her affair with Clinton. However, the FBI could only have seen the revelations as further evidence of their inability to unmask Mega.

Six months later, March 5th 1999, the New York Post published in a cover story the revelations in the original edition of this book. The Post story began: “Israel blackmailed President Clinton with phone-tapped tapes of his steamy sex talks with Monica Lewinsky, a blockbuster new book charges. The price Clinton paid for the silence of the Mossad spy agency was calling off an FBI hunt for a top-level Israeli mole.”

Within hours of this complete distortion of the facts in the book (which I had carefully checked with sources in Israel), the Post’s version had appeared in thousands of newspapers around the world.

The essential point of my story, that public prosecutor Kenneth Starr had not fully pursued his impeachment investigation into Clinton, was lost. Starr had noted in his report that on March 29, 1997: “He (Clinton) told her (Lewinsky) that he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was taping his telephones. If anyone ever asked about their phone sex, she should say that they knew that their calls were being monitored all day long, and the phone sex was a put-on.”

The president’s words most strongly indicated he was aware that he had become a potential target for blackmail. By talking to Lewinsky over a public phone network — there is no evidence he had attempted to secure the phone in her apartment — the president had indeed left himself open to interception by foreign eavesdroppers and, even more so, to the powerful microwave vacuum cleaners of the National Security Agency. Given that any incumbent president routinely gets NSA reports, he would also have known that his calls to Monica could well end up on the Washington rumor mills.

A sense of the panic my revelations created in the White House can be seen from its briefing to correspondents by Oval Office spokesmen Barry Toiv and David Leavy. There is a shifting-sands feeling about their responses that the official White House transcript has retained.

Q: Why did the president reportedly tell Monica Lewinsky that he was concerned about his phone conversations being taped? TOIV: Well, as you know, other than the president’s testimony in this case, we really haven’t commented on specifics, on other specifics like that and we’re not going to start now. Q: When the president heard about this, was he concerned by it, was he shocked by it? What was his reaction, Mr. Toiv? TOIV: To be honest, I haven’t gotten the president’s reaction to the book. Q: Well, why did he say that to Monica Lewinsky? Why did he warn her? TOIV: I’ve already not answered that question. (Laughter). I’m sorry. Q: I know you’ve not answered it, but it’s very valid, really. TOIV: Well, again, we’re not going to get into commenting on specifics beyond what the president has already testified to. Q: I don’t understand why you think it’s legitimate for you not to comment on the president of the United States supposedly saying that he thinks a foreign government is taping his conversations. For you just to say, no comment. TOIV: There have been questions about all sorts of comments that have been made or testified to and we have not gone beyond the president’s testimony in discussing these and we’re not going to do that. Q: That’s because you’ve said it’s unseemly and it’s about sex. This is about the national security of the United States and the president supposedly saying that a foreign government is taping his conversations. And you’re just going to say sorry, no comment? TOIV: I am not going to go beyond what he has already testified to. Q: You’re not denying it. You’re not denying it. LEAVY: Obviously, we’re not aware of a mole at the White House. But it’s the long-standing practice for people who speak at this podium to refer calls to the appropriate authorities who undertake these types of investigations. Q: Was there any attempt by the president to intervene in any kind of investigation or search for a mole? LEAVY: No. There is no basis in that allegation whatsoever. Q: Well, there is a basis for it. There is a sworn testimony that Lewinsky gave that attributes to the president a comment that a foreign embassy was taping— LEAVY: And Barry just answered that question. Q: His answer was that he is not going to comment on it. That’s not much of an answer. With all due respect. LEAVY: Let me say two things — noted. TOIV: I wouldn’t go beyond my comments. LEAVY: Yes, I’m definitely not going to add to Barry’s comments. But let me just say this. We take all the necessary precautions to secure the president’s communications. There is absolutely no basis for the allegation in the book. Q: Are you getting that from CIA or FBI, or are you getting it out of just an automatic reflex? LEAVY: You can take that as authoritative. Q: I understand that you would have his communications secure. However, if he picks up the phone and calls some ordinary citizen at 2:30 A.M. in the morning at their apartment, what’s to say that that person’s phone couldn’t be tapped? Does your security system prevent that? LEAVY: There is some very serious allegations in this book, and what I am saying is that there is absolutely no basis for the allegation. So I have to leave it at that.

Not one serious newspaper made any attempt to follow up those revealing responses.

It turned out that Mossad was not the only organization that had taped the sex phone calls. The Republican senator for Arizona, Jon Kyl, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, told his local newspaper The Arizona Republic that, “a U.S. intelligence agency may have taped telephone conversations between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. There are different agencies in the government that make it their business to tape certain things for certain reasons, and it was one of those agencies.”

Kyl refused to identify to the newspaper who the agency or agencies were: “That’s something I absolutely can’t get into in any greater detail.” Of his sources he said, “By virtue of who they are, they have credibility. You can assume that they are people who at some period in time have been in the employ of the federal government.” He went on to compare the existence of the tapes to the “smoking-gun” evidence in the Watergate scandal.

These explosive allegations from a respected politician were never pursued into the public domain.

According to at least one well-placed Israeli intelligence source, Rafi Eitan had received a phone call from Yatom reinforcing the need to stay well clear of the United States for the foreseeable future.

Rafi Eitan did not need to be told how ironic it would be if he fell victim to the very technique that had made him a legend — the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. Even worse would be to be quietly killed by one of the methods that had burnished his reputation among men who saw assassination as part of the job.