The Fist of God

But despite that, Terry Martin did.

Chapter 7

The tobacconist’s son was frightened, and so was his father.

“For pity’s sake, tell them what you know, my son,” he begged the boy.

The two-man delegation from the Kuwait Resistance Committee had been perfectly polite when they introduced themselves to the tobacconist, but were quite insistent that they wished his son to be frank and truthful with them.

The shopkeeper, though he knew the visitors had given him pseudonyms instead of their real names, had enough wit to realize he was talking to powerful and influential members of his own people.

Worse, it had come as a total surprise to him to learn that his son was involved in active resistance at all.

Worst of all, he had just learned that his offspring was not even with the official Kuwaiti resistance but had been seen tossing a bomb under an Iraqi truck at the behest of some strange bandit of whom he had never heard. It was enough to give any father a heart attack.

The four of them sat in the drawing room of the tobacconist’s comfortable house in Keifan while one of the visitors explained that they had nothing against the Bedou but simply wished to contact him so that they could collaborate.

So the boy explained what had happened from the moment his friend had been pulled down behind a pile of rubble at the moment he was about to fire at a speeding Iraqi truck. The men listened in silence, only the questioner occasionally interjecting with another query. It was the one who said nothing, the one in dark glasses, who was Abu Fouad.

The questioner was particularly interested in the house where the group met with the Bedou. The boy gave the address, then added:

“I do not think there is much point in going there. He is extremely watchful. One of us went there once to try and talk to him, but the place was locked. We do not think he lives there, but he knew we had been there. He told us never to do that again. If it ever happened, he said, he would break contact, and we would never see him again.”

Sitting in his corner, Abu Fouad nodded in approval. Unlike the others, he was a trained soldier, and he thought he recognized the hand of another trained man.

“When will you meet him next?” he asked quietly.

There was a possibility that the boy could pass a message, an invitation to a parley.

“Nowadays, he contacts one of us. The contacted one brings the rest. It may take some time.”

The two Kuwaitis left. They had descriptions of two vehicles: a battered pickup apparently in the disguise of a market gardener bringing his fruit into town from the countryside, and a powerful four-wheel-drive for journeys into the desert.

Abu Fouad ran the numbers of both vehicles past a friend in the Ministry of Transportation, but the trace ran out. Both numbers were fictional. The only other lead was through the identity cards that the man would have to carry to pass those ubiquitous Iraqi roadblocks and checkpoints.

Through his committee he contacted a civil servant in the Interior Ministry. He was lucky. The man recalled running off a phony identity card for a market gardener from Jahra. It was a favor he had done for the millionaire Ahmed Al-Khalifa six weeks earlier.

Abu Fouad was elated and intrigued. The merchant was an influential and respected figure in the movement. But it had always been thought that he was strictly confined to the financial, noncombatant side of things. What on earth was he doing as the patron of the mysterious and lethal Bedou?

South of the Kuwaiti border, the incoming tide of American weaponry rolled on. As the last week of September slid by, General Norman Schwarzkopf, buried in the rabbit warren of secret chambers two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry on Old Airport Road in Riyadh, finally realized that he had enough strength at last to declare Saudi Arabia safe from Iraqi attack.

In the air, General Charles “Chuck” Horner had built an umbrella of constantly patrolling steel, a fast-moving and amply provisioned armada of air-superiority fighters, ground-attack fighter-bombers, air-to-air refueling tankers, heavy bombers, and tank-busting Thunderbolts, enough to destroy the incoming Iraqis on the ground and in the air.

He had airborne technology that could and did cover by radar every square inch of Iraq, that could sense every movement of heavy metal rolling on the roads, moving through the desert, or trying to take to the air, that could listen to every Iraqi conversation on the airwaves and pinpoint any source of heat.

On the ground, Norman Schwarzkopf knew he now had enough mechanized units, light and heavy armor, artillery, and infantry to receive any Iraqi column, hold it, surround it, and liquidate it.

In the last week of September, in conditions of such total secrecy that not even its Allies were told, the United States made its plans to move from defensive role to offensive. The assault on Iraq was planned, even though the United Nations mandate was still limited to securing the safety of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and only that.

But he also had problems. One was that the number of Iraqi troops, guns, and tanks deployed against him was double the number when he had arrived in Riyadh six weeks earlier. Another problem was that he would need double the amount of Coalition forces to liberate Kuwait than that needed to secure Saudi Arabia.

Norman Schwarzkopf was a man who took George Patton’s dictum very seriously: One dead American or Brit or Frenchie or any other Coalition soldier or airman was one too many. Before he would go in, he would want two things: twice the amount of force he presently had, and an air assault guaranteed to “degrade” by fifty percent the strength of the Iraqi forces arrayed north of the border.

That meant more time, more equipment, more stores, more guns, more tanks, more troops, more airplanes, more fuel, more food, and a lot more money. Then he told the stunned armchair Napoleons on Capitol Hill that if they wanted a victory, they had better let him have it all.

Actually, it was the more urbane Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who passed the message on, but he softened the language a bit. Politicians love to play the games of soldiers, but they hate to be addressed in the language of soldiers.

So the planning in that last week of September was utterly secret. As it turned out, it was just as well. The United Nations, leaking peace plans at every seam, would wait until November 29 before giving the go-ahead to the Coalition to use all necessary force to evict Iraq from Kuwait unless she quit by January 15. Had planning started at the end of November, it could never have been completed in time.

Ahmed Al-Khalifa was deeply embarrassed. He knew Abu Fouad, of course, who and what he was. Further, he sympathized with his request. But he had given his word, he explained, and he could not go back on it.

Not even to his fellow-Kuwaiti and fellow-resister did he reveal that the Bedou was in fact a British officer. But he did agree to leave a message for the Bedou in a place he knew the man would find it sooner or later.

The following morning he left a letter, with his personal recommendation urging the Bedou to agree to meet Abu Fouad, under the marble tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery.

There were six soldiers in the group, headed by a sergeant, and when the Bedou came around the corner, they were as surprised as he.

Mike Martin had parked his small truck in the lock-up garage and was making his way across the city on foot toward the villa he had chosen for that night. He was tired, and unusually, his alertness was blunted.

When he saw the Iraqis and knew they had seen him, he cursed himself. In his job, men can die for a moment’s lack of alertness.

It was well after curfew, and though he was quite used to moving through the city when it was deserted of law-abiding citizens and only the Iraqi patrols were on the prowl, he made a point of moving through the ill-lit side streets, across the darkened patches of waste ground, and down the black alleys, just as the Iraqis made a point of sticking to the main highways and intersections. That way, they never troubled each other.

But following Hassan Rahmani’s return to Baghdad and his vitriolic report on the uselessness of the Popular Army, some changes were taking place. The Green Berets of the Iraqi Special Forces had begun to appear.

Though not classed with the elite Republican Guard, the Green Berets were at least more disciplined than the rabble of conscripts called the Popular Army. It was six of these who stood quietly by their truck at a road junction where normally there would have been no Iraqis.

Martin just had time to lean heavily on the stick he carried with him and adopt the posture of an old man. It was a good posture, for in the Arab culture the old are given respect or at least, compassion.

“Hey, you,” shouted the sergeant. “Come over here.”

There were four assault rifles trained on the lone figure in the checkered keffiyeh. The old man paused, then hobbled forward.

“What are you doing out at this hour, Bedou?”

“Just an old man trying to get to his home before the curfew, sayidi,” the man whined.

“It’s past the hour of curfew, fool! Two hours past.”

The old man shook his head in bewilderment.

“I didn’t know, sayidi. I have no watch.”

In the Middle East watches are not indispensable, just highly prized, a sign of prosperity. Iraqi soldiers arriving in Kuwait soon acquired them—they just took them. But the word Bedouin comes from bidun, meaning “without.”

The sergeant grunted. The excuse was possible.

“Papers,” he said.

The old man used his spare hand to pat his soiled robe.

“I seem to have lost them,” he pleaded.

“Frisk him,” said the sergeant. One of the soldiers moved forward. The hand grenade strapped to the inside of Martin’s left thigh felt like one of the watermelons from his truck.

“Don’t you touch my balls,” said the old Bedou sharply. The soldier stopped. One in the back let out a giggle. The sergeant tried to keep a straight face.

“Well, go on, Zuhair. Frisk him.”

The young soldier Zuhair hesitated, embarrassed. He knew the joke was on him.

“Only my wife is allowed to touch my balls,” said the Bedou. Two of the soldiers let out a guffaw and lowered their rifles. The rest did the same. Zuhair still held back.

“Mind you, it doesn’t do her any good. I’m long past that sort of thing,” said the old man.

It was too much. The patrol roared with laughter. Even the sergeant grinned.

“All right, old man. On your way. And don’t stay out again after dark.”

The Bedou limped off to the corner of the street, scratching under his clothes. At the corner he turned. The grenade, priming arm sticking clumsily out to one side, skittered across the cobbles and came to rest against the toe-cap of Zuhair. All six stared at it. Then it went off. It was the end of the six soldiers. It was also the end of September.

That night, far away in Tel Aviv, General Kobi Dror of the Mossad sat in his office in the Hadar Dafna building, taking a late-night drink after work with an old friend and colleague, Shlomo Gershon, always known as Sami.

Sami Gershon was head of the Mossad’s Combatants or Komemiute Division, the section responsible for running illegal agents, the dangerous cutting edge of espionage. He had been one of the other two present when his chief had lied to Chip Barber.

“You don’t think we should have told them?” Gershon asked, because the subject had come up again.

Dror swirled his beer in the bottle and took a swig. “Screw them,” he growled. “Let them recruit their own bloody assets.”

As a teenage soldier in the spring of 1967, Dror had crouched under his Patton tank in the desert and waited while four Arab states prepared to settle accounts with Israel once and for all. He still recalled how the outside world had confined itself to muttering, “Tut tut.”

With the rest of his crew, commanded by a twenty-year-old, he had been one of those under Israel Tal who had punched a hole straight through the Mitla Pass and driven the Egyptian Army back to the Suez Canal.

And he recalled how, when Israel had destroyed four armies and four air forces in six days, the same Western media that had wrung its hands at his country’s impending obliteration in May had accused Israel of bully-boy tactics by winning.

From then on, Kobi Dror’s philosophy had been made: Screw them all.

He was a sabra, born and raised in Israel, and had none of the breadth of vision nor forbearance of people like David Ben-Gurion.

His political loyalty lay with the far-right Likud Party, with Menachem Begin, who had been in the Irgun, and Itzhak Shamir, formerly of the Stern Gang.

Once, sitting at the back of a classroom, listening to one of his staff lecture the new recruits, he had heard the man use the phrase “friendly intelligence agencies.” He had risen and taken over the class.

“There is no such thing as a friend of Israel, except maybe a diaspora Jew,” he told them. “The world is divided into two: our enemies and neutrals. Our enemies we know how to deal with. As for neutrals, take everything, give nothing. Smile at them, slap them on the back, drink with them, flatter them, thank them for their tipoffs, and tell them nothing.”

“Well, Kobi, let’s hope they never find out,” said Gershon.

“How can they? There’s only eight of us who know. And we’re all in the Office.”

It must have been the beer. He was overlooking someone.

In the spring of 1988 a British businessman called Stuart Harris was attending an industrial fair in Baghdad. He was sales director of a company in Nottingham that made and sold road-grading equipment.

The fair was under the auspices of the Iraqi Ministry of Transport.

Like almost all Westerners, he had been staying at the Rashid Hotel on Yafa Street, which had been built mainly for foreigners and was always under surveillance.

On the third day of the exhibition, Harris had returned to his room to find a plain envelope pushed under his door. It had no name on it, just his room number, and the number was correct.

Inside was a single sheet of paper and another completely plain envelope of the airmail type. The slip of paper said in English and in block capitals: “On your return to London pass this envelope unopened to Norman at the Israeli embassy.”

That was all. Stuart Harris had been panic-stricken, terrified. He knew the reputation of Iraq, of its dreaded Secret Police. Whatever was in the plain envelope could get him arrested, tortured, even killed.

To his credit, he kept cool, sat down, and tried to work things out.

Why him? for example. There were scores of British businessmen in Baghdad. Why pick Stuart Harris? They could not know he was Jewish, that his father had arrived in England in 1935 from Germany as Samuel Horowitz, could they?

Though he would never find out, there had been a conversation two days earlier in the fairground canteen between two functionaries of the Iraqi Transportation Ministry. One had told the other of his visit to the Nottingham works the previous autumn; how Harris had been his host on the first and second days, then disappeared for a day, then come back. He—the Iraqi—had asked if Harris was ill. It was a colleague who had laughed and told him Harris had been off for Yom Kippur.

The two Iraqi civil servants thought nothing more of it, but someone at the next booth did. He reported the conversation to his superior. The senior man appeared to take no notice but later became quite thoughtful and ran a check on Mr. Stuart Harris of Nottingham, establishing his room number at the Rashid.

Harris sat and wondered what on earth to do. Even if, he reasoned, the anonymous sender of the letter had discovered he was Jewish, there was one thing they could not have known. No way. By an extraordinary coincidence, Stuart Harris was a sayan.

The Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, founded in 1951 on the order of Ben-Gurion himself, is known outside its own walls as the Mossad, Hebrew for “Institute.” Inside its walls it is never, ever called that, but always “the Office.” Among the leading intelligence agencies of the world, it is by far the smallest. In terms of on-the-payroll staff, it is tiny. The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, has about 25,000 employees on its staff, and that excludes all the outstations. At its peak the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible like the CIA and Mossad for foreign intelligence-gathering, had 15,000 case officers around the world, some three thousand based at the Yazenevo headquarters.

The Mossad has only between 1,200 and 1,500 employees at any time and fewer than forty case officers, called katsas.

That it can operate on such a slim budget and tiny staff and secure the “product” that it does depends on two factors. One is its ability to tap into the Israeli population at will—a population still amazingly cosmopolitan and containing a bewildering variety of talents, languages, and geographical origins.

The other factor is an international network of helpers or assistants, in Hebrew sayanim. These are diaspora Jews (they must be wholly Jewish on both sides) who, although probably loyal to the country in which they reside, will also sympathize with the State of Israel.

There are two thousand sayanim in London alone, five thousand in the rest of Britain, and ten times that number in the United States. They are never brought into operations, just asked for favors. And they must be convinced that the help they are asked to give is not for an operation against their country of birth or adoption. Conflicting loyalties are not allowed. But they enable operational costs to be cut by a factor of up to ten.

For example: A Mossad team arrives in London to mount an operation against a Palestinian undercover squad. They need a car. A used car sayan is asked to leave a legitimate secondhand car at a certain place with the keys under the mat. It is returned later, after the operation.

The sayan never knows what it was used for; his books say it was out to a possible customer on approval.

The same team needs a “front.” A property-owning sayan lends an empty shop, and a confectionery sayan stocks it with sweets and chocolates. They need a mail drop; a real estate sayan lends the keys to a vacant office on his roster.

Stuart Harris had been on vacation at the Israeli resort of Eilat when, at the bar of the Red Rock, he fell into conversation with a pleasant young Israeli who spoke excellent English. At a later conversation, the Israeli brought a friend, an older man, who quietly elicited from Harris where his feelings toward Israel lay. By the end of the vacation, Harris had agreed that, if there was ever anything he could do ...

At the end of the vacation Harris went home as advised and got on with his life. For two years he waited for the call, but no call ever came. However, a friendly visitor kept periodically in touch—one of the more tiresome jobs of katsas on foreign assignment is to keep tabs on the sayanim on their list.

So Stuart Harris sat in a wave of rising panic in the hotel room in Baghdad and wondered what to do. The letter could well be a provocation—he would be intercepted at the airport trying to smuggle it out. Slip it into someone else’s bag? He did not feel he could do that.

And how would he recover it in London?

Finally, he calmed down, worked out a plan, and did it exactly right.

He burned the outer envelope and the note in an ashtray, crushed the embers, and flushed them down the toilet. Then he hid the plain envelope under the spare blanket on the shelf above the wardrobe, having first wiped it clean.

If his room were raided, he would simply swear he had never needed the blanket, never climbed to the top shelf, and the letter must have been left by a previous occupant.

In a stationery shop he bought a stout manila envelope, an adhesive label, and sealing tape; from a post office, enough stamps to send a magazine from Baghdad to London. He abstracted a promotional magazine extolling the virtues of Iraq from the trade fair and even had the empty envelope stamped with the exhibition logo.

On the last day, just before leaving for the airport with his two colleagues, he retired to his room. He slipped the letter into the magazine and sealed them in the envelope. He addressed it to an uncle in Long Eaton and stuck on the label and the stamps. In the lobby, he knew, was a mailbox, and the next pickup was in four hours. Even if the envelope were steamed open by goons, he reasoned, he would be over the Alps in a British airliner.

It is said that luck favors the brave or the foolish or both. The lobby was under surveillance by men from the AMAM, watching to see if any departing foreigner was approached by an Iraqi trying to slip him something. Harris carried his envelope under his jacket and beneath his left armpit. A man behind a newspaper in the corner was watching, but a trolley of baggage rolled between them as Harris dropped the envelope into the mailbox. When the watcher saw him again, Harris was at the desk handing in his key.

The brochure arrived at his uncle’s house a week later. Harris had known his uncle was away on vacation, and as he had a key in case of fire or burglary, he used it to slip in and retrieve his package. Then he took it down to the Israeli embassy in London and asked to see his contact. He was shown into a room and told to wait.

A middle-aged man entered and asked his name and why he wanted to see “Norman.” Harris explained, took the airmail envelope from his pocket, and laid it on the table. The Israeli diplomat went pale, asked him to wait again, and left.

The embassy building at 2 Palace Green is a handsome structure, but its classical lines give no indication of the wealth of fortifications and technology that conceals the Mossad London Station in the basement.

It was from this underground fortress that a younger man was summoned urgently. Harris waited and waited.

Though he did not know it, he was being studied through a one-way mirror as he sat there with the envelope on the table in front of him. He was also being photographed, while records were checked to ensure he really was a sayan and not a Palestinian terrorist. When the photograph of Stuart Harris of Nottingham from the files checked with the man behind the one-way mirror, the young katsa finally entered the room.

He smiled, introduced himself as Rafi, and invited Harris to start his story at the very beginning, right back in Eilat. So Harris told him.

Rafi knew all about Eilat (he had just read the entire file), but he needed to check. When the narrative reached Baghdad, he became interested. He had few queries at first, allowing Harris to narrate in his own time. Then the questions came, many of them, until Harris had relived all he had done in Baghdad several times. Rafi took no notes; the whole thing was being recorded. Finally he used a wall phone to have a muttered conversation in Hebrew with a senior colleague next door.

His last act was to thank Stuart Harris profusely, congratulate him on his courage and cool head, exhort him never to mention the entire incident to anyone, and wish him safe journey back home. Then Harris was shown out.

A man with antiblast helmet, flak-jacket, and gloves took the letter away. It was photographed and X-rayed. The Israeli embassy had already lost one man to a letter bomb, and it did not intend to lose another.

Finally the letter was opened. It contained two sheets of onionskin airmail paper covered in script. In Arabic. Rafi did not speak Arabic, let alone read it. Neither did anyone else in the London station, at least not well enough to read spidery Arabic handwriting. Rafi sent a copious and heavily encrypted radio report to Tel Aviv, then wrote an even fuller account in the formal and uniform style called NAKA in the Mossad. The letter and the report went into the diplomatic bag and caught the evening flight by El Al from Heathrow to Ben-Gurion.

A dispatch rider with an armed escort met the courier right off the plane and took the canvas bag destined for the big building on King Saul Boulevard, where, just after the breakfast hour, it found itself in front of the head of the Iraq Desk, a very able young katsa called David Sharon.

He did speak and read Arabic, and what he read in those two onionskin pages of letter left him with the same sensation he had felt the first time he threw himself out of an airplane over the Negev Desert while training with the Paras.

Using his own typewriter, avoiding both secretary and word processor, he typed out a literal translation of the letter in Hebrew. Then he took them both, plus Rafi’s report as to how the Mossad had come by the letter, to his immediate chief, the Director of the Middle East Division.

What the letter said, in effect, was that the writer was a high-ranking functionary in the topmost councils of the Iraqi regime and that he was prepared to work for Israel for money—but only for money.

There was a bit more, and a post-office-box address at Baghdad’s principal post office for a reply, but that was the gist of it.

That evening, there was a high-level meeting in Kobi Dror’s private office. Present were he and Sami Gershon, head of the Combatants.

Also Eitan Hadar, David Sharon’s immediate superior as Director of the Middle East Division, to whom he had taken the Baghdad letter that morning. Sharon himself was summoned.

From the outset, Gershon was dismissive.

“It’s a phony,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a blatant, clumsy, obvious attempt at entrapment. Kobi, I’m not sending any of my men in there to check it out. It would be sending the man to his death. I wouldn’t even send an oter to Baghdad to try and make contact.”

An oter is an Arab used by the Mossad to establish preliminary contact with a fellow Arab, a low-level go-between and a lot more expendable than a full-fledged Israeli katsa.

Gershon’s view seemed to prevail. The letter was a madness, apparently an attempt to lure a senior katsa to Baghdad for arrest, torture, public trial, and public execution. Finally, Dror turned to David Sharon.

“Well, David, you have a tongue. What do you think?”

Sharon nodded regretfully.

“I think Sami almost certainly has to be right. Sending a good man in there would be crazy.”

Eitan Hadar shot him a warning look. Between divisions, there was the usual rivalry. No need to hand victory to Gershon’s Combatants Division on a plate.

“Ninety-nine percent of the chances say it has to be a trap,” said Sharon.

“Only ninety-nine?” asked Dror teasingly. “And the one percent, my young friend?”

“Oh, just a foolish idea,” Sharon said. “It just occurred to me, the one percent might say that out of the blue, we have a new Penkovsky.”

There was dead silence. The word hung in the air like an open challenge. Gershon expelled his breath in a long hiss. Kobi Dror stared at his Iraq Desk chief. Sharon looked at his fingertips.

In espionage there are only four ways of recruiting an agent for infiltration into the high councils of a target country.

The first is far and away the most difficult: to use one of your own nationals, one trained to an extraordinary degree to pass for a national of the target country right in the heart of that target. It is almost impossible, unless the infiltrator was born and raised in the target country and can be eased back in, with a cover story to explain his absence. Even then, he will have to wait years to rise to useful office with access to secrets—a sleeper for up to ten years.

Yet once, Israel had been the master of this technique. This was because, when Israel was young, Jews poured in who had been raised all over the world. There were Jews who could pass as Moroccans,

Algerians, Libyans, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Yemenis. This was apart from all those coming in from Russia, Poland, Western Europe, and North and South America.

The most successful of these had been Elie Cohen, born and raised in Syria. He was slipped back into Damascus as a Syrian who had been away for years and had now returned. With his new Syrian name, Cohen became an intimate of high-ranking politicians, civil servants, and generals who spoke freely to their endlessly generous host at his sumptuous parties. Everything they said, including the entire Syrian battle plan, went back to Tel Aviv just in time for the Six-Day War.

Cohen was exposed, tortured, and publicly hanged in Revolution Square in Damascus. Such infiltrations are extremely dangerous and very rare.

But as the years passed, the original immigrant Israelis became old; their sabra children did not study Arabic and could not attempt what Elie Cohen had done. This was why, by 1990, the Mossad had far less brilliant Arabists than one might imagine.

But there was a second reason. Penetration of Arab secrets is easier to accomplish in Europe or the United States. If an Arab state is buying an American fighter, the details can more easily be stolen, and at a lot less risk, in America. If an Arab high-up seems susceptible to an approach, why not make it while he is visiting the fleshpots of Europe?

That is why, by 1990, the vast bulk of Mossad operations were conducted in low-risk Europe and America rather than in the high-risk Arab states.

The king of all the infiltrators, however, was Marcus Wolf, who for years had run the East German intelligence net. He had one great advantage—an East German could pass for a West German.

During his time “Mischa” Wolf infiltrated scores and scores of his agents into West Germany. One of them became the personal private secretary of Chancellor Willy Brandt himself. Wolf’s speciality was the prim, dowdy, little spinster secretary who rose to become indispensable to her West German minister-employer—and who could copy every document that crossed her desk for transmission back to East Berlin.

The second method of infiltration is to use a national of the aggressor agency, posing as someone coming from a third nation. The target country knows that the infiltrator is a foreigner but is persuaded he is a friendly, sympathetic foreigner.

The Mossad again did this brilliantly with a man called Ze’ev Gur Arieh. He was born Wolfgang Lotz in Mannheim, Germany, in 1921.

Wolfgang was six feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, uncircumcised, and yet Jewish. He came to Israel as a boy, was raised there, took his Hebrew name, fought with the underground Haganah, and went on to become a major in the Israeli Army. Then the Mossad took him in hand.

He was sent back to Germany for two years to perfect his native German and “prosper” with Mossad money. Then, with a new gentile German wife, he emigrated to Cairo and set up a riding school.

It was a great success. Egyptian staff officers loved to relax with their horses, attended by the champagne-serving Wolfgang, a good right-wing, anti-Semitic German in whom they could confide. And confide they did. Everything they said went back to Tel Aviv. Lotz was eventually caught, was lucky not to be hanged, and after the Six-Day War was exchanged for Egyptian prisoners.

But an even more successful impostor was a German of an earlier generation. Before the Second World War, Richard Sorge had been a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, speaking Japanese and with high contacts in Hideki Tojo’s government. That government approved of

Hider and assumed Sorge was a loyal Nazi—he certainly said he was.

It never occurred to Tokyo that Sorge was not a German Nazi. In fact, he was a German Communist in the service of Moscow. For years he laid the war plans of the Tojo regime open for Moscow to study. His great coup was his last. In 1941, Hitler’s armies stood before Moscow.

Stalin needed to know urgently: Would Japan mount an invasion of the USSR from her Manchurian bases? Sorge found out; the answer was no. Stalin could transfer forty thousand Mongol troops from the east to Moscow. The Asiatic cannon fodder held the Germans at bay for a few more weeks, until winter came and Moscow was saved.

Not so Sorge; he was unmasked and hanged. But before he died, his information probably changed history.

The most common method of securing an agent in the target country is the third: simply to recruit a man who is already “in place.”

Recruitment can be tediously slow or surprisingly fast. To this end, talent spotters patrol the diplomatic community looking for a senior functionary of the other side who may appear disenchanted, resentful, dissatisfied, bitter, or in any way susceptible to recruitment.

Delegations visiting foreign parts are studied to see if someone can be taken aside, given a fine old time, and approached for a change of loyalty. When the talent spotter has tabbed a “possible,” the recruiters move in, usually starting with a casual friendship that becomes deeper and warmer. Eventually, the “friend” suggests his pal might do him a small favor; a minor and inconsequential piece of information is needed.

Once the trap is sprung, there is no going back, and the more ruthless the regime the new recruit is serving, the less likely he will confess all and throw himself on that regime’s nonexistent mercy.

The motives for being so recruited to serve another country vary. The recruit may be in debt, in a bitter marriage, passed over for promotion, revolted by his own regime, or simply lust for a new life and plenty of money. He may be recruited through his own weaknesses, sexual or homosexual, or simply by sweet talk and flattery.

Quite a few Soviets, like Penkovsky and Gordievsky, changed sides for genuine reasons of conscience, but most spies who turn on their own country do so because they share a quite monstrous vanity, a conviction that they are truly important in the scheme of things.

But the weirdest of all the recruitments is called the “walk-in.” As the phrase implies, the recruit simply walks in, unexpected and unannounced, and offers his services.

The reaction of the agency so approached is always one of extreme skepticism—surely this must be a “plant” by the other side. Thus when, in 1960, a tall Russian approached the Americans in Moscow, declared he was a full colonel of the Soviet military intelligence arm, the GRU, and offered to spy for the West, he was rejected.

Bewildered, the man approached the British, who gave him a try. Oleg Penkovsky turned out to be one of the most amazing agents ever. In his brief thirty-month career he turned over 5,500 documents to the Anglo-American operation that ran him, and every one of them was in the secret or top secret category. During the Cuban missile crisis, the world never realized that President Kennedy knew the full hand of cards that Nikita Khrushchev had to play, like a poker player with a mirror behind his opponent’s back. The mirror was Penkovsky.

The Russian took crazy risks, refusing to come out to the West while he had the chance. After the missile crisis he was unmasked by Soviet counterintelligence, tried, and shot.

None of the other three Israelis in Kobi Dror’s room that night in Tel Aviv needed to be told anything about Oleg Penkovsky. In their world,

he was part of legend. The dream hovered in all their minds after Sharon dropped the name. A real, live, gold-plated, twenty-four-carat traitor in Baghdad? Could it be true—could it possibly be true?

Kobi Dror gave Sharon a long, hard look.

“What have you in mind, young man?”

“I was just thinking,” said Sharon with feigned diffidence. “A letter ... no risks to anyone—just a letter ... asking a few questions, difficult questions, things we would like to know. ... He comes up or he doesn’t.”

Dror glanced at Gershon. The man who ran the illegal agents shrugged. “I put men in on the ground,” the gesture seemed to say.

“What do I care about letters?”

“All right, young David. We write him a letter back. We ask him some questions. Then we see. Eitan, you work with David on this. Let me see the letter before it goes.”

Eitan Hadar and David Sharon left together.

“I hope you know what the hell you’re doing,” the head of Middle East muttered to his protégé.

The letter was crafted with extreme care. Several in-house experts worked on it—the Hebrew version at least. Translation would come later.

David Sharon introduced himself by his first name only, right at the start. He thanked the writer for his trouble and assured him the letter had arrived safely at the destination the writer must have intended.

The reply went on to say that the writer could not fail to understand that his letter had aroused great surprise and suspicion both by its source and its method of transmission.

David knew, he said, that the writer was clearly no fool and therefore would realize that “my people” would need to establish some bona fides.

David went on to assure the writer that if his bona fides could be established, his requirement for payment would present no problem, but clearly the product would have to justify the financial rewards that “my people” were prepared to pay. Would the writer therefore be kind enough to seek to answer the questions on the attached sheet?

The full letter was longer and more complicated, but that was the gist of it. Sharon ended by giving the writer a mailing address in Rome for his reply.

The address was actually a discontinued safe house that the Rome station had volunteered at Tel Aviv’s urgent request. From then on, the Rome station would keep an eye on the abandoned address. If Iraqi security agents showed up at it, they would be spotted and the affair aborted.

The list of twenty questions was carefully chosen and after much head-scratching. To eight of the questions Mossad already knew the answers but would not be expected to know. So an attempt to fool Tel Aviv would not work.

Eight more questions concerned developments that could be checked for veracity after they had happened. Four questions were things that Tel Aviv really wanted to know, particularly about the intentions of Saddam Hussein himself.

“Let’s see how high this bastard really goes,” said Kobi Dror when he read the list.

Finally a professor in Tel Aviv University’s Arabic Faculty was called in to phrase the letter in that ornate and flowery style of the written language. Sharon signed it in Arabic with the Arab version of his own name, Daoud.

The text also contained one other point. David would like to give his writer a name, and if the writer in Baghdad did not object, would he mind being known simply as Jericho?

The letter was mailed from the only Arab country where Israel had an embassy—Cairo.

After it had gone, David Sharon went on with his work and waited.

The more he thought it over, the crazier the affair seemed to be. A post-office box, in a country where the counterintelligence net was run by someone as smart as Hassan Rahmani, was horrendously dangerous.

So was writing top secret information “in clear,” and there was no indication that Jericho knew anything about secret writing. Continuing to use the ordinary mail was also out of the question, if this thing developed. However, he reasoned, it probably would not.

But it did. Four weeks later, Jericho’s reply reached Rome and was brought unopened in a blastproof box to Tel Aviv. Extreme precautions were taken. The envelope might be wired to explosives or smeared with a deadly toxin. When the scientists finally declared it clean, it was opened.

To their stunned amazement, Jericho had come up with paydirt. All the eight questions to which the Mossad already knew the answers were completely accurate. Eight more—troop movements, promotions, dismissals, foreign trips by identifiable luminaries of the regime—would have to wait for check-out as and when they occurred, if they ever did. The last four questions Tel Aviv could neither know nor check, but all were utterly feasible.

David Sharon wrote a fast letter back, in a text that would cause no security problems if intercepted: “Dear Uncle, many thanks for your letter which has now arrived. It is wonderful to hear that you are well and in good health. Some among the points you raise will take time, but all being well, I will write again soon. Your loving nephew, Daoud.”

The mood was growing in the Hadar Dafna building that this man Jericho might be serious after all. If that was so, urgent action was needed. An exchange of two letters was one thing; running a deep-cover agent inside a brutal dictatorship was another. There was no way that communication could continue on the basis of in-clear script, public mails, and post-office boxes. They were a recipe for an early disaster.

A case officer would be needed to get into Baghdad, live there, and run Jericho using all the usual tradecraft—secret writing, codes, dead-letter boxes, and a no-intercept means of getting the product out of Baghdad and back to Israel.

“I’m not having it,” Gershon repeated. “I will not put a senior Israeli katsa into Baghdad on a black mission for an extended stay. It’s diplomatic cover, or he doesn’t go.”

“All right, Sami,” said Dror. “Diplomatic cover it is. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

The point of diplomatic cover is that a black agent can be arrested, tortured, hanged—whatever. An accredited diplomat, even in Baghdad, can avoid such unpleasantness; if caught spying, he will merely be declared persona non grata and expelled. It is done all the time.

Several major divisions of the Mossad went into overdrive that summer, especially Research. Gershon could already tell them he had no agent on the staff of any embassy accredited to Baghdad, and his nose was already well out of joint because of it. So the search began to find a diplomat who would suit.

Every foreign embassy in Baghdad was identified. From the capital cities of every country, a list was acquired of all their staff in Baghdad.

No one checked out; no one had ever worked for the Mossad before, who could be reactivated. There was not even one sayan on those lists.

Then a clerk came up with an idea: the United Nations. The world body had one agency based in Baghdad in 1988, the UN Economic Commission for West Asia.

The Mossad has a big penetration of the United Nations in New York, and a staff list was acquired. One name checked out: a young Jewish Chilean diplomat called Alfonso Benz Moncada. He was not a trained agent, but he was a sayan and therefore presumably was prepared to be helpful.

One by one Jericho’s tips came true. The checking process revealed that the Army divisions he had said would be moved were mewed; the promotions he foretold duly happened, and the dismissals took place.

“Either Saddam himself is behind this farrago, or Jericho is betraying his country from asshole to elbow,” was Kobi Dror’s judgment.

David Sharon sent a third letter, also innocently couched. For his second and third missives, the professor had not been needed. The third letter referred to an order by the Baghdad-based client for some very delicate glassware and porcelain. Clearly, said David, a little more patience was needed so that a means of transshipment could be devised that would guarantee the cargoes from accidental disaster.

A Spanish-speaking katsa already based in South America was sent pronto to Santiago and persuaded the parents of Señor Benz to urge their son home immediately on compassionate leave because his mother was seriously ill. It was the father who telephoned his son in Baghdad. The worried son applied for and at once got three weeks’ compassionate leave and flew back to Chile.

He was met not by a sick mother but by an entire team of Mossad training officers who begged him to accede to their request. He discussed the matter with his parents and agreed. The emotional pull of the needs of the Land of Israel, which none of them had ever seen, was strong.

Another sayan in Santiago, without knowing why, lent his summer villa, set in a walled garden outside the city near the sea, and the training team went to work.

It takes two years to train a katsa to run a deep-cover agent in hostile terrain, and that is the minimum. The team had three weeks. They worked sixteen-hour days. They taught the thirty-year-old Chilean secret writing and basic codes, miniature photography and the reduction of photographs to microdots. They took him out on the streets and taught him how to spot a tail. They warned him never to shake a tail, except in an absolute emergency, if carrying deeply incriminating material. They told him that if he even thought he was being followed to abort the rendezvous or the pickup and try again later.

They showed him how to use combustible chemicals stored in a false fountain pen to destroy incriminating evidence in seconds while hiding in any men’s restroom or just around a corner.

They took him out in cars to show him how to spot a car tail, one acting as instructor and the rest of the team as the “hostiles.” They taught him until his ears rang and his eyes ached and he begged for sleep.

Then they taught him about dead-letter boxes or drops—secret compartments where a message may be left or another collected. They showed him how to create one from a recess behind a loose brick in a wall, or under a tombstone, in a crevice in an old tree, or beneath a flagstone.

After three weeks, Alfonso Benz Moncada bade good-bye to his tearful parents and flew back to Baghdad via London. The senior instructor leaned back in his chair at the villa, passed an exhausted hand over his forehead, and told the team:

“If that bugger stays alive and free, I’ll make the pilgrimage to Mecca.”

The team laughed; their leader was a deeply Orthodox Jew. All the time they were teaching Moncada, none of them had known what he was going to do back in Baghdad. It was not their job to know. Neither did the Chilean.

It was during the stopover in London that he was taken to the Heathrow Penta Hotel. There he met Sami Gershon and David Sharon, and they told him.

“Don’t try and identify him,” Gershon warned the young man. “Leave that to us. Just establish the drops and service them. We’ll send you the lists of things we want answered. You won’t understand them—they’ll be in Arabic. We don’t think Jericho speaks much English, if at all. Don’t ever try to translate what we send you. Just put it in one of the you-to-him drops and make the appropriate chalk mark so he knows to go and service the drop.

“When you see his chalk mark, go and service the him-to-you box, and get his answer back.”

In a separate bedroom Alfonso Benz Moncada was given his new luggage. There was a camera that looked like a tourist’s Pentax but took a snap-on cartridge with more than a hundred exposures in it, plus an innocent-looking aluminum strut frame for holding the camera at exactly the right distance above a sheet of paper. The camera was preset for that range.

His toilet kit included combustible chemicals disguised as aftershave, and various invisible inks. The letter-writing wallet held all the treated paper for secret writing. Last, they told him the means for communicating with them, a method they had been setting up while he was training in Chile.

He would write letters concerning his love of chess—he already was a chess fan—to his pen pal Justin Bokomo of Uganda, who worked in the General Secretariat of the UN building in New York. His letters would always go out of Baghdad in the UN diplomatic mail pouch for New York. The replies would also come from Bokomo in New York.

Though Benz Moncada did not know it, there was a Ugandan called Bokomo in New York. There was also a Mossad katsa in the mail room to effect the intercepts.

Bokomo’s letters would have a reverse side that, when treated, would reveal the Mossad’s question list. This was to be photocopied when no one was looking and passed to Jericho in one of the agreed drops.

Jericho’s reply would probably be in spidery Arabic script. Each page was to be photographed ten times, in case of smudging, and the film dispatched to Bokomo.

Back in Baghdad the young Chilean, with his heart in his mouth, established six drops, mainly behind loose bricks in old walls or ruined houses, under flagstones in back alleys, and one under a stone windowsill of a derelict shop.

Each time, he thought he would be surrounded by the dreaded AMAM, but the citizens of Baghdad seemed as courteous as ever and no one took any notice of him as he prowled, apparently a curious foreign tourist, up and down the alleys and side streets of the Old Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the fruit and vegetable market at Kasra, and the old cemeteries—anywhere he could find crumbling old walls and loose flagstones where no one would ever think of looking.

He wrote down the locations of the six drops, three to contain messages from him to Jericho and three for replies from Jericho to him. He also devised six places—walls, gates, shutters—on three of which an innocent chalk mark would alert Jericho that there was a message for him, and three others where Jericho would signal he had a reply ready and sitting in a dead-letter box awaiting collection.

Each chalk mark responded to a different drop. He wrote down the locations of these drops and chalk-mark sites so precisely that Jericho could find them on written description only.

All the time he watched for a tail, either driving or on foot. Just once he was under surveillance, but it was clumsy and routine, for the AMAM seemed to pick occasional days to follow occasional diplomats. The following day there was no tail, so he resumed again.

When he had it all ready, he wrote it down using a typewriter, after having memorized every detail. He destroyed the ribbon, photographed the sheets, destroyed the paperwork, and sent the film to Mr. Bokomo. Via the mail room of the UN building on the East River in New York, the small package came back to David Sharon in Tel Aviv.

The risky part was getting all this information to Jericho. It meant one last letter to that damnable post-office box in Baghdad. Sharon wrote to his “friend” that the papers he needed would be deposited at exactly noon in fourteen days, August 18, 1988, and should be picked up no more than one hour later.

The precise instructions, in Arabic, were with Moncada by the sixteenth. At five to noon on the eighteenth, he entered the post office, was directed to the post box, and dropped the bulky package in. No one stopped or arrested him. An hour later, Jericho unlocked the box and withdrew the package. He too was not stopped or arrested.

With secure contact now established, traffic began to flow. Jericho insisted he would price each consignment of information that Tel Aviv wanted, and if the money was deposited, the information would be sent. He named a very discreet bank in Vienna, the Winkler Bank in the Ballgasse, just off Franzis-kanerplatz, and gave an account number.

Tel Aviv agreed and immediately checked out the bank. It was small, ultradiscreet, and virtually impregnable. It clearly contained a numbered account that matched, because the first transfer of twenty thousand dollars by Tel Aviv into it was not returned to the transferring bank with a query.

The Mossad suggested that Jericho might care to identify himself “for his own protection, in case anything went wrong and his friends to the west could help.” Jericho refused point-blank; he went further. If any attempt was made to survey the drops or close in on him in any way, or if ever the money was not forthcoming, he would shut off immediately.

The Mossad agreed, but tried other ways. Psychoportraits were drawn, his handwriting studied, lists of Iraqi notables drawn up and studied.

All that the back-room boys could guess was that Jericho was middle-aged, of medium education, probably spoke little or hesitant English, and had a military or quasi-military background.

“That gives me half the bloody Iraqi High Command, the top fifty in the Ba’ath Party, and John Doe’s cousin Fred,” growled Kobi Dror.

Alfonso Benz Moncada ran Jericho for two years, and the product was pure gold. It concerned politics, conventional weapons, military progress, changes of command, armaments procurement, rockets, gas, germ warfare, and two attempted coups against Saddam Hussein. Only on Iraq’s nuclear progress was Jericho hesitant. He was asked, of course. It was under deep secrecy and known only to the Iraqi equivalent of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar.

To press too hard would be to invite exposure, he reported.

In the autumn of 1989 Jericho told Tel Aviv that Gerry Bull was under suspicion and under surveillance in Brussels by a team from the Iraqi Mukhabarat. The Mossad, who were by then using Bull as another source for progress on Iraq’s rockets program, tried to warn him as subtly as they could. There was no way they would tell him to his face what they knew—it would be tantamount to telling him they had an asset high in Baghdad, and no agency will ever blow away an asset like that.

So the katsa controlling the substantial Brussels station had his men penetrate Bull’s apartment on several occasions through the autumn and winter, leaving oblique messages by rewinding a videotape, changing wineglasses around, leaving a patio window open, even placing a long strand of female hair on his pillow.

The gun scientist became worried all right, but not enough. When Jericho’s message concerning the intent to liquidate Bull came through, it was too late. The hit had been carried out.

Jericho’s information gave the Mossad an almost-complete picture of Iraq in the buildup to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. What he told them about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction confirmed and amplified the pictorial evidence that had been passed over to them by Jonathan Pollard, by then sentenced to life in prison.

Bearing in mind what it knew and what it assumed America must also know, the Mossad waited for America to react. But as the chemical, nuclear, and bacteriological preparations in Iraq progressed, the torpor in the West continued, so Tel Aviv stayed silent.

Two million dollars had passed from the Mossad to the numbered account of Jericho In Vienna by August 1990. He was expensive, but he was good, and Tel Aviv decided he was worth it. Then the invasion of Kuwait took place, and the unforeseen happened. The United Nations, having passed the resolution of August 2 calling on Iraq to withdraw at once, felt it could not continue to support Saddam by maintaining a presence in Baghdad. On August 7, the Economic Commission for West Asia was abruptly closed down, and its diplomats recalled.

Benz Moncada was able to do one last thing before his departure. He left a message in a drop telling Jericho that he was being expelled and contact was now broken. However, he might return, and Jericho should continue to scan the places where the chalk marks were put. Then he left. The young Chilean was extensively debriefed in London until there was nothing left he could tell David Sharon.

Thus Kobi Dror was able to lie to Chip Barber with a straight face. At the time, he was not running an asset in Baghdad. It would be too embarrassing to admit that he had never discovered the traitor’s name and that now he had even lost contact. Still, as Sami Gershon had made plain, if the Americans ever found out ... In hindsight, perhaps he really should have mentioned Jericho.

Chapter 8

Mike Martin visited the tomb of Able Seaman Shepton in the cemetery of Sulaibikhat on the first of October and discovered the plea from Ahmed Al-Khalifa.

He was not particularly surprised. If Abu Fouad had heard of him, he had also heard of the steadily growing and spreading Kuwaiti resistance movement and its shadowy leading light. That they should eventually have to meet was probably inevitable.

In six weeks, the position of the Iraqi occupation forces had changed dramatically. In their invasion they had had a pushover, and they had begun their occupation with a sloppy confidence, assured that their stay in Kuwait would be as effortless as the conquest.

The looting had been easy and profitable, the destruction amusing, and the using of the womenfolk pleasurable. It had been the way of conquerors that went back to the days of Babylon.

Kuwait, after all, had been a fat pigeon ready for the plucking. But in six weeks, the pigeon had begun to peck and scratch. Over a hundred Iraqi soldiers and eight officers had either disappeared or been found dead. The disappearances could not all be explained by desertions. For the first time, the occupation forces were experiencing fear.

Officers no longer traveled in a single staff car but insisted on a truckload of escorting troops. Headquarters buildings had to be guarded night and day, to the point where Iraqi officers had taken to firing over the heads of their sleeping sentries to wake them up.

The nights had become periods of no-go for anything less than a substantial troop movement. The roadblock teams huddled inside their redoubts when darkness fell. And still the mines went off, the vehicles burst into flame or seized up with ruined engines, the grenades were thrown, and the soldiers disappeared with cut throats into sewers or garbage dumps.

The escalating resistance had forced the High Command to replace the Popular Army with the Special Forces, good fighting troops who should have been at the front line in case the Americans came. Early October for Kuwait was not, to echo Churchill’s phrase, the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.

Martin had no means of replying to Al-Khalifa’s message when he read it in the graveyard, so it was not until the following day that he deposited his answer.

He agreed to meet, he said, but on his own terms. To have the advantage of darkness but to avoid the curfew at ten P.M., he called for a meeting at half past seven. He gave exact directions as to where Abu Fouad should park his car and the small grove of trees where he would meet. The place he indicated was in the district of Abrak Kheitan, close to the main highway from the city to the now shattered and unused airport.

Martin knew it to be an area of traditional stone-built houses with flat roofs. On one of those roofs he would be waiting for two hours before the rendezvous to see if the Kuwaiti officer was being followed and if so by whom: his own bodyguards, or the Iraqis. In a hostile environment, the SAS officer was still at large and in combat because he took no chances, none at all.

He knew nothing of Abu Fouad’s concept of security and was not prepared to assume it was brilliant. He established the meeting for the evening of the seventh and left his reply beneath the marble slab.

Ahmed Al-Khalifa retrieved it on the fourth.

Dr. John Hipwell would never have been taken during a casual meeting for a nuclear physicist, let alone one of those scientists who spent his working days behind the massive security of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston designing plutonium warheads for the soon-to-be-fitted Trident missiles.

A passing observer would have assumed he was a bluff Home Counties farmer, more at home leaning wisely over a pen of fat lambs at the local market than supervising the cladding of lethal disks of plutonium in pure gold.

Although the weather was still mild when Hipwell reappeared before the Medusa Committee, he wore, as in August, his square-patterned shirt, wool tie, and tweed jacket. Without waiting to be asked, he used his big red hands to fill and tamp a briar pipe with shag tobacco before starting into his report. Sir Paul Spruce twitched his pointed nose in distaste and gestured for the air conditioning to be raised a notch.

“Well, gentlemen, the good news is that our friend Mr. Saddam Hussein does not have, an atomic bomb at his disposal. Not yet, not by a long chalk,” said Dr. Hipwell, as he disappeared into a cloud of pale blue smoke.

There was a pause while he attended to his personal bonfire. Perhaps, Terry Martin mused, if you risk collecting a lethal dose of plutonium rays every day, the occasional pipe of tobacco does not really matter.

Dr. Hipwell glanced at his notes.

“Iraq has been on the trail of her own nuclear bomb since the mid-1970s, when Saddam Hussein really came to power. It seems to be the man’s obsession. In those years Iraq bought a complete nuclear reactor system from France—which was not bound by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968—for that very purpose.”

He sucked contentedly and tamped the glowing brushfire at the top of his pipe once again. Drifting embers settled onto his notes.

“Forgive me,” said Sir Paul. “Was this reactor for the purpose of generating electricity?”

“Supposed to be,” agreed Hipwell. “Absolute rubbish, of course, and the French knew it. Iraq has the third-largest oil deposits in the world.

They could have had an oil-fired power station for a fraction of the price. No, the point was to fuel the reactor with low-grade uranium, called yellowcake or caramel, that they could persuade people to sell them. After use in a reactor, the end-product is plutonium.”

There were nods around the table. Everyone knew that the British reactor at Sellafield created electricity for the power grid and spewed out the plutonium that went to Hipwell for his warheads.

“So the Israelis went to work,” said Hipwell. “First one of their commando teams blew up the huge turbine at Toulon before it was shipped, setting the project back two years. Then in 1981, when Saddam’s precious Osirak 1 and 2 plants were about to start up, Israeli fighter-bombers swept in and blew the lot to kingdom come. Since then, Saddam has never succeeded in buying another reactor. After a short while, he stopped trying.”

“Why the hell did he do that?” asked Harry Sinclair from his end of the table.

“Because he changed direction,” said Hipwell with a broad smile, like one who has solved a crossword puzzle in record time. “Up until then, he was pursuing the plutonium road. With some success, by the way.

But not enough. Yet—”

“I don’t understand,” said Sir Paul Spruce. “What is the difference between a plutonium-based and a uranium-based atomic bomb?”

“Uranium is simpler,” said the physicist. “Look, there are various radioactive substances that can be used for a chain reaction, but for your simple, basic, effective atom bomb, uranium’s the ticket. That’s what Saddam has been after since 1982—a basic uranium-based bomb.

He hasn’t got there yet, but he’s still trying, and he’ll get there one day.”

Hipwell sat back with a broad beam, as if he had settled the enigma of the Creation. Like most of those around the table, Spruce was still perplexed.

“If he can buy this uranium for his destroyed reactor, why can’t he make a bomb with it?” he asked.

Hipwell pounced upon the question like a farmer on a bargain.

“Different kinds of uranium, my dear man. Funny stuff, uranium. Very rare. From a thousand tons of uranium ore, all you get is a block the size of a cigar box. Yellowcake. It’s called natural uranium, with an isotope number of 238. You can power an industrial reactor with it, but not make a bomb. Not pure enough. For a bomb you need the lighter isotope, uranium-235.”

“Where does that come from?” asked Paxman.

“It’s inside the yellowcake. In that one cigar-box-size block there is enough uranium-235 to stick under one fingernail without discomfort.

The devil is getting the two separated. It’s called isotope separation.

Very difficult, very technical, very expensive, and very slow.”

“But you said Iraq is getting there,” pointed out Sinclair.

“He is, but he’s not there yet,” said Hipwell. “There’s only one viable way of purifying and refining the yellowcake to the required ninety-three percent pure. Years ago, in the Manhattan Project, your chaps tried several methods. They were experimenting, see? Ernest Lawrence tried one way, Robert Oppenheimer tried another. In those days they used both methods in complementary fashion and created enough uranium-235 to make Little Boy.

“After the war the centrifuge method was invented and slowly perfected. Nowadays only this method is used. Basically, you put the feedstock into a thing called a centrifuge, which spins so fast that the whole process has to be done in a vacuum or the bearings would turn to jelly. Slowly the heavier isotopes, the ones you don’t want, are drawn to the outer wall of the centrifuge and bled off. What’s left is a little bit purer than when you started. Just a little bit. You have to do it over and over again, thousands of hours, just to get a wafer of bomb-grade uranium the size of a postage stamp.”

“But he is doing it?” pressed Sir Paul.

“Yep. Been doing it for about a year. These centrifuges ... to save time we link them in series, called cascades. But you need thousands of centrifuges to make up a cascade.”

“If they’ve been going down that road since 1982, why has it taken so long?” asked Terry Martin.

“You don’t go into the hardware store and buy a uranium gas diffusion centrifuge off the shelf,” Hipwell pointed out. “They tried at first but were turned down—the documents show that. Since 1985 they have been buying the component parts to build their own on-site. They got about five hundred tons of basic uranium yellowcake, half of it from Portugal. They bought much of the centrifuge technology from West Germany—”

“I thought Germany had signed a whole range of international agreements limiting the spread of nuclear bomb technology,” protested Paxman.

“Maybe they have. I wouldn’t know about the politics,” said the scientist. “But they got the bits and pieces from all over the place. You need designer lathes, special ultrastrong maraging steel, anticorrosion vessels, special valves, high-temperature furnaces called ‘skull’ furnaces because that’s what they look like, plus vacuum pumps and bellows—this is serious technology we are talking about. Quite a bit, plus the know-how, came from Germany.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Sinclair. “Has Saddam got any isotope separation centrifuges working yet?”

“Yes, one cascade. It’s been functioning for about a year. And another one is coming on stream soon.”

“Do you know where all this stuff is?”

“The centrifuge assembly plant is at a place called Taji—here.” The scientist passed a large aerial photo over to the American and circled a series of industrial buildings.

“The working cascade seems to be underground somewhere not far from the old wrecked French reactor at Tuwaitha, the reactor they called Osirak. I don’t know whether you’ll ever find it with a bomber—it’s certainly underground and camouflaged.”

“And the new cascade?”

“No idea,” said Hipwell. “Could be anywhere.”

“Probably somewhere else,” suggested Terry Martin. “The Iraqis have been practicing duplication and dispersal ever since they put all their eggs in one basket and the Israelis blew the basket away.”

Sinclair grunted.

“How sure are you,” asked Sir Paul, “that Saddam Hussein cannot have his bomb yet?”

“Very,” said the physicist. “It’s a question of time. He hasn’t had long enough. For a basic but usable atomic bomb, he will need thirty to thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium-235. Starting cold a year ago, even assuming the working cascade can function twenty-four hours a day—which it can’t—a spinning program needs at least twelve hours per centrifuge. You need a thousand spins to get from zero percent pure to the required ninety-three percent. That’s five hundred days of spinning. But then there’s cleaning, servicing, maintenance, breakdowns. Even with a thousand centrifuges operating in a cascade now and for the past year, you’d need five years. Bring in another cascade next year—shorten it to three years.”

“So he won’t have his thirty-five kilograms until 1993 at the earliest?” interjected Sinclair.

“No, he can’t.”

“One final question: If he gets the uranium, how much longer to an atomic bomb?”

“Not long. A few weeks. You see, a country undertaking to make its own bomb will have the nuclear engineering side running in parallel.

Bomb engineering is not all that complicated, so long as you know what you are doing. And Jaafar does—he will know how to build one and trigger it. Dammit, we trained him at Harwell. But the point is, on a time-scale alone, Saddam Hussein cannot have enough pure uranium ready yet. Ten kilograms, tops. He’s three years short, minimum.”

Dr. Hipwell was thanked for his weeks of analysis, and the meeting ended.

Sinclair would return to his embassy and write up his copious notes, which would go to the United States in heavy code. There they would be compared with the analyses of the American counterparts—physicists drawn from the laboratories of Sandia, Los Alamos, and principally Lawrence Livermore in California, where for years a secret section called simply Department Z had been monitoring the steady spread of nuclear technology around the world on behalf of the State Department and the Pentagon.

Though Sinclair could not know it, the findings of the British and American teams would confirm each other to a remarkable degree.

Terry Martin and Simon Paxman left the same meeting and wandered across Whitehall in the benign October sunshine.

“Quite a relief,” said Paxman. “Old Hipwell was quite adamant.

Apparently the Americans agree entirely. That bastard is nowhere near his atom bomb yet. One less nightmare to worry about.”

They parted at the corner, Paxman to cross the Thames toward Century House, Martin to cross Trafalgar Square and head up St. Martin’s Lane toward Gower Street.

Establishing what Iraq had, or even probably had, was one thing.

Finding out precisely where it was situated was another. The photography went on and on. The KH-11s and KH-12s drifted across the heavens in endless sequence, photographing what they saw on the Iraqi land beneath them.

By October, another device had entered the skies, a new American reconnaissance plane so secret that Capitol Hill did not know about it.

Code-named Aurora, it flew on the fringes of inner space, reaching speeds of Mach 8, almost five thousand miles per hour, riding its own fireball—the ramjet effect—far beyond Iraqi radar or interceptor missiles. Not even the technology of the dying USSR could spot Aurora, which had replaced the legendary SR-71 Blackbird.

Ironically, while the Blackbird was being eased out of commission, another even more aged “old faithful” was plying its trade above Iraq that autumn. Almost forty years old, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, the U-2 was still flying and still taking pictures. It was back in 1960 that Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over Sverdlovsk, Siberia, and it was the U-2 that had spotted the first Soviet missiles being deployed in Cuba in the summer of 1962, even though it was Oleg Penkovsky who had identified them as offensive and not defensive weapons, thus blowing away Khrushchev’s phony protests and sowing the seeds of his own eventual destruction.

The U-2 of 1990 had been reequipped as a “listener” rather than a “watcher” and redesignated TR-1, though it still did photography.

All this information, from the professors and scientists, analysts and interpreters, the trackers and the watchers, the interviewers and researchers, built up a picture of Iraq through the autumn of 1990, and a frightening picture it became.

From a thousand sources the information finally was channeled into a single and very secret room two floors below the Saudi Air Force headquarters on Old Airport Road. The room, down the street from where the military brass sat in conference and discussed their unauthorized (by the United Nations) plans for the invasion of Iraq, was called simply “the Black Hole.”

It was in the Black Hole that American and British targeters, drawn from all three services and of all ranks from private to general, pinpointed the sites that would have to be destroyed. Finally, they would make up General Chuck Horner’s air-war map. It contained eventually seven hundred targets. Six hundred were military—in the sense of being command centers, bridges, airfields, arsenals, ammunition dumps, missile sites, and troop concentrations. The other hundred were targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction—research facilities, assembly plants, chemical labs, storage depots.

The gas centrifuge manufacturing line at Taji was listed, as was the approximate, assumed, position of the centrifuge cascade underground somewhere in the Tuwaitha complex.

But the water-bottling plant at Tarmiya was not there, nor was Al Qubai. No one knew about them.

A copy of the comprehensive report by Harry Sinclair in London joined other reports emanating from various parts of the United States and abroad. Finally, a synthesis of all these in-depth analyses found its way to a very small and very discreet State Department think tank, known only to a restricted group in Washington as the Political Intelligence and Analysis Group. The PIAG is a sort of analytical hothouse for foreign affairs and produces reports that are absolutely not for public consumption. Indeed, the unit answers only to the Secretary of State, at that time James Baker.

Two days later, Mike Martin lay flat on a roof that gave him a commanding view of the section of Abrak Kheitan where he had set up his rendezvous with Abu Fouad.

At almost exactly the appointed hour, he watched a single car leave the King Faisal Highway leading to the airport and pull into a side street.

The car cruised slowly down the street, away from the bright lights of the highway and the occasional traffic, and into darkness.

He saw the outline stop at the place he had described in his message to Al-Khalifa. Two people got out, a man and a woman. They looked around, checked that no other car had followed them off the highway, and slowly walked on, toward the place where a grove of trees covered a vacant lot.

Abu Fouad and the woman had been told to wait up to half an hour. If the Bedou had not shown up, they were to abort and go home. They actually waited forty minutes before returning to the car. Both were frustrated.

“He must have been detained,” said Abu Fouad to his companion. “An Iraqi patrol, perhaps. Who knows? Anyway, damn. I’ll have to start again.”

“I think you’re crazy to trust him,” said the woman. “You have no idea who he is.”

They spoke softly, the Kuwaiti resistance leader looking up and down the street to ensure no Iraqi soldiers had appeared while he was away.

“He’s successful and cunning, and he works like a professional. That’s all I need to know. I would like to collaborate with him, if he’s willing.”

“Then I have nothing against that.”

The woman uttered a short scream. Abu Fouad jerked in his seat.

“Don’t turn round. Let’s just talk,” said the voice from the back seat.

In his rearview mirror the Kuwaiti saw the dim outline of a Bedouin keffiyeh and caught the odor of one who lives rough. He let out his breath in a long exhalation.

“You move quietly, Bedou.”

“No need to make a noise, Abu Fouad. It attracts Iraqis. I don’t like that, except when I am ready.”

Abu Fouad’s teeth flashed under his black moustache.

“Very well. Now we have found each other. Let us talk. By the way, why hide in the car?”

“If this meeting had been a trap for me, your first words when you got back into the car would have been different.”

“Self-incriminating—”

“Of course.”

“And then?”

“You would be dead.”

“Understood.”

“Who is your companion? I made no mention of companions.”

“You set up the rendezvous. It was I who had to trust you also. She is a trusted colleague. Asrar Qabandi.”

“Very well. Greetings, Miss Qabandi. What do you want to talk about?”

“Guns, Bedou. Kalashnikov machine pistols, modern hand grenades, Semtex-H. My people could do so much more with that sort of thing.”

“Your people are being caught, Abu Fouad. Ten were surrounded in the same house by an entire company of Iraqi infantry under AMAM

leadership. All shot. All youngsters.”

Abu Fouad was silent. It had been a major disaster.

“Nine,” he said at last. “The tenth played dead and crept away later.

He is injured, and we are taking care of him. It was he who told us.”

“What?”

“That they were betrayed. If he had died, we would not have known.”

“Ah, betrayal. Always the danger in any resistance movement. And the traitor?”

“We know him, of course. We thought we could trust him.”

“But he is guilty?”

“It seems so.”

“Only seems?”

Abu Fouad sighed.

“The survivor swears that only the eleventh man knew of the meeting, and the address. But it could be there was a leak somewhere else, or one of them was tailed. ...”

“Then he must be tested, this suspect. And if guilty, punished. Miss Qabandi, would you leave us for a while, please.”

The young woman glanced at Abu Fouad, who nodded. She left the car and walked back to the grove of trees. The Bedou told Abu Fouad carefully and in detail what he wanted him to do.

“I will not be leaving the house until seven o’clock,” he finished. “So under no circumstances must you make the phone call until half past seven. Understood?”

The Bedou slipped out of the car and disappeared among the dark alleys running between the houses. Abu Fouad drove up the street and picked up Miss Qabandi. Together they drove home.

The Bedou never saw the woman again. Before the liberation of Kuwait, Asrar Qabandi was caught by the AMAM, rigorously tortured, gang-raped, shot, and decapitated. Before she died, she never said a thing.

Terry Martin was on the phone to Simon Paxman, who was still inundated with work and could have done without the interruption. It was only because he had taken a liking to the fussy professor of Arabic studies that Paxman took the call.

“I know I’m being a bother, but do you have any contacts at GCHQ?”

“Yes, of course,” said Paxman. “In the Arabic Service, mainly. Know the Director of it, come to that.”

“Could you possibly give him a call and ask if he’d see me?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so. What have you in mind?”

“It’s the stuff coming out of Iraq these days. I’ve studied all Saddam’s speeches, of course, and watched the announcements about hostages and human shields and seen their ghastly attempts at PR on the television. But I’d like to see if there’s anything else being picked up, stuff that hasn’t been cleared by their Propaganda Ministry.”

“Well, that’s what GCHQ does,” admitted Paxman. “I don’t see why not. If you’ve been sitting in with the Medusa people, you’ve got the clearance. I’ll give him a call.”

That afternoon, by appointment, Terry Martin drove west to Gloucestershire and presented himself at the well-guarded gate of the sprawl of buildings and antennae that constitute the third main arm of British intelligence alongside MI-6 and MI-5, the Government Communications Headquarters.

The Director of the Arabic Service was Sean Plummer, under whom worked that same Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested Mike Martin’s Arabic in the Chelsea restaurant eleven weeks earlier, though neither Terry Martin nor Plummer knew that.

The Director had agreed to see Martin in the midst of a busy day because, as a fellow Arabist, he had heard of the young scholar of the SOAS and admired his original research on the Abassid Caliphate.

“Now, what can I do for you?” he asked when they were both seated with a glass of mint tea, a luxury Plummer permitted himself to escape the miseries of institution coffee. Martin explained that he was surprised at the paucity of the intercepts he had been shown corning out of Iraq. Plummer’s eyes lit up.

“You’re right, of course. As you know, our Arab friends lend to chatter like magpies on open circuits. The last couple of years, the interceptable traffic has slumped. Now, either the whole national character has changed, or—”

“Buried cables,” said Martin.

“Precisely. Apparently Saddam and his boys have buried over forty-five thousand miles of fiber-optic communication cables. That’s what they’re talking on. For me, it’s an absolute bastard. How can I keep giving the spooks in London another round of Baghdad weather reports and Mother Hussein’s bloody laundry lists?”

It was his manner of speaking, Martin realized. Plummer’s service delivered a lot more than that.

“They still talk of course—ministers, civil servants, generals—right down to chitchat between tank commanders on the Saudi border. But the serious, top-secret phone calls are off the air. Never used to be.

What do you want to see?”

For the next four hours, Terry Martin ran his eye over a range of intercepts. Radio broadcasts were too obvious; he was looking for something in an inadvertent phone call, a slip of the tongue, a mistake.

Finally he closed the files of digests.

“Would you,” he asked, “just keep an eye open for anything really odd, anything that just doesn’t make sense?”

Mike Martin was beginning to think he should one day write a tourist’s guide to the flat roofs of Kuwait City. He seemed to have spent an impressive amount of time lying on one of them surveying the area beneath him. On the other hand, they did make superb places for LUPs, or lying-up positions.

He had been on this particular one for almost two days, surveying the house whose address he had given to Abu Fouad. It was one of the six he had been lent by Ahmed Al-Khalifa, and one he would now never use again.

Although it was two days since he had given the address to Abu Fouad and nothing was supposed to happen until tonight, October 9, he had still watched, night and day, living off a handful of bread and fruit.

If Iraqi soldiers arrived before seven-thirty on the evening of the ninth, he would know who had betrayed him—Abu Fouad himself. He glanced at his watch. Seven-thirty. The Kuwaiti colonel should be making his call about now, as instructed.

Across the city, Abu Fouad was indeed lifting the phone. He dialed a number, which was answered on the third ring.

“Salah?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“We have never met, but I have heard many good things about you—that you are loyal and brave, one of us. People know me as Abu Fouad.”

There was a gasp at the end of the phone.

“I need your help, Salah. Can we, the movement, count on you?”

“Oh, yes, Abu Fouad. Please tell me what it is you want.”

“Not I personally, but a friend. He is wounded and sick. I know you are a pharmacist. You must at once take medications to him—bandages, antibiotics, pain-killers. Have you heard of the one they call the Bedou?”

“Yes, of course. But do you mean to say you know him?”

“Never mind, but we have been working together for weeks. He is hugely important to us.”

“I will go downstairs to the shop right now and select the things he needs, and take them to him. Where do I find him?”

“He is holed up in a house in Shuwaikh and cannot move. Take pencil and paper.”

Abu Fouad dictated the address he had been given. At the other end of the phone it was noted.

“I will drive over at once, Abu Fouad. You can trust me,” said Salah the pharmacist.

“You are a good man. You will be rewarded.”

Abu Fouad hung up. The Bedou had said he would phone at dawn if nothing happened, and the pharmacist would be in the clear.

Mike Martin saw, rather than heard, the first truck just before half past eight. It was rolling on its own momentum, the engine off to make no sound, and it trundled past the intersection of the street before coming to a halt a few yards farther on and just out of sight. Martin nodded in approval.

The second truck did the same a few moments later. From each vehicle, twenty men descended quietly, Green Berets who knew what they were doing. The men moved in a column up the street, headed by an officer who grasped a civilian. The man’s white dish-dash glimmered in the half-darkness. With all the street names ripped down, the soldiers had needed a civilian guide to find this road. But the house numbers were still up.

The civilian stopped at a house, studied the number plate, and pointed.

The captain in charge had a hurried, whispered conversation with his sergeant, who took fifteen men down a side alley to cover the back.

Followed by the remaining soldiers, the captain tried the steel door to the small garden. It opened. The men surged through.

Inside the garden the captain could see that a low light burned in an upstairs room. Much of the ground floor was taken up by the garage, which was empty. At the front door all pretense of stealth vanished.

The captain tried the handle, found it was locked, and gestured to a soldier behind him. The man fired a brief burst from his automatic rifle at the lock in the wooden setting, and the door swung open.

With the captain leading, the Green Berets rushed in. Some went for the darkened ground-floor rooms; the captain and the rest went straight up for the master bedroom.

From the landing the captain could see the interior of the low-lit bedroom, the armchair with its back to the door, and the checkered keffiyeh peeping out over the top. He did not fire. Colonel Sabaawi of the AMAM had been specific: This one he wanted alive for questioning. As he rushed forward, the young officer did not feel the snag of the nylon fishing line against his shins.

He heard his own men bursting in through the back and others pounding up the stairs. He saw the slumped form in the soiled white robe, filled out by cushions, and the big watermelon wrapped in the keffiyeh. His face contorted with anger, and he had the time to snarl an insult at the trembling pharmacist who stood in the doorway.

Five pounds of Semtex-H may not sound like much, and it does not look very large. The houses of that neighborhood are built of stone and concrete, which was what saved the surrounding residences, some of which were occupied by Kuwaitis, from more than superficial damage.

But the house in which the soldiers stood virtually disappeared. Tiles from its roof were later found several hundred yards away.

The Bedou had not waited around to watch his handiwork. He was already two streets away, shuffling along, minding his own business, when he heard the muffled boom, like a door being slammed, then the one-second hollow silence, then the crash of masonry.

Three things happened the following day, all after dark. In Kuwait, the Bedou had his second meeting with Abu Fouad. This time, the Kuwaiti came alone to the rendezvous, in the shadow of a deep arched doorway only two hundred yards from the Sheraton, which had been taken over by dozens of senior Iraqi officers.

“You heard, Abu Fouad?”

“Of course. The whole city is buzzing. They lost over twenty men and the rest injured.” He sighed. “There will be more random reprisals.”

“You wish to stop now?”

“No. We cannot. But how much longer must we suffer?”

“The Americans and the British will come. One day.”

“Allah make it soon. Was Salah with them?”

“He brought them. There was only one civilian. You told no one else?”

“No, just him. It must have been him. He has the lives of nine young men on his head. He will not see Paradise.”

“So. What more do you want of me?”

“I do not ask who you are or where you come from. As a trained Army officer, I know you cannot be just a simple Bedou camel-drover from the desert. You have supplies of explosives, guns, ammunition, grenades. My people could also do much with these things.”

“And your offer?”

“Join with us and bring your supplies. Or stay on your own but share your supplies. I am not here to threaten, only to ask. But if you want to help our resistance, this is the way to do it.”

Mike Martin thought for a while. After eight weeks he had half his supplies left, still buried in the desert or scattered through the two villas he used not for living but for storage. Of his other four houses, one was destroyed and the other, where he had met with his pupils, compromised. He could hand over his stores and ask for more by night drop—risky but feasible, so long as his messages to Riyadh were not being intercepted, which he could not know. Or he could make another camel trip across the border and return with two more panniers. Even that would not be easy—there were now sixteen divisions of Iraqis ranged along that border, three times the number when he had entered.

It was time to contact Riyadh again and ask for instructions. In the meanwhile, he would give Abu Fouad almost everything he had. There was more south of the border; he would just have to get it through somehow.

“Where do you want it delivered?” he asked.

“We have a warehouse in Shuwaikh Port. It is quite secure. It stores fish. The owner is one of us.”

“In six days,” said Martin.

They agreed on the time and the place where a trusted aide of Abu Fouad would meet the Bedou and guide him the rest of the journey to the warehouse. Martin described the vehicle he would be driving and the way he would look.

That same night, but two hours earlier because of the time difference,

Terry Martin sat in a quiet restaurant not far from his apartment and twirled a glass of wine in one hand. The guest he awaited entered a few minutes later, an elderly man with gray hair, glasses, and a spotted bow tie. He looked round inquiringly.

“Moshe, over here.”

The Israeli bustled over to where Terry Martin had risen, and greeted him effusively.

“Terry, my dear boy, how are you?”

“Better for seeing you, Moshe. Couldn’t let you pass through London without at least a dinner and a chance to chat.”

The Israeli was old enough to be Martin’s father, but their friendship was based on common interest. Both were academics and avid students of ancient Middle Eastern Arab civilizations, their cultures, art, and languages.

Professor Moshe Hadari went back a long way. As a young man, he had excavated much of the Holy Land with Yigael Yadin, himself both a professor and an Army general. Hadari’s great regret was that, as an Israeli, much of the Middle East was forbidden to him, even for scholarship. Still, in his field he was one of the best, and that field being a small one, it was inevitable that the two scholars should meet at some seminar, as they had ten years earlier.

It was a good dinner, and the talk flowed over the latest research, the newest tiny fresh perceptions of the way life had been in the kingdoms of the Middle East ten centuries earlier.

Terry Martin knew he was bound by the Official Secrets Act, so his recent activities on assignment for Century House were not for discussion. But over coffee their conversation came quite naturally around to the crisis in the Gulf and the chances of a war.

“Do you think he will pull out of Kuwait, Terry?” the professor asked.

Martin shook his head. “No, he can’t, unless he is given a clearly marked road, concessions he can use to justify withdrawal. To go naked, he falls.”

Hadari sighed.

“So much waste,” he said. “All my life, so much waste. All that money, enough to make the Middle East a paradise on earth. All that talent, all those young lives. And for what? Terry, if war comes, will the British fight with the Americans?”

“Of course. We’ve already sent the Seventh Armoured Brigade, and I believe the Fourth Armoured will follow. That makes a division, apart from the fighters and the warships. Don’t worry about it. This is one Mid-East war in which Israel not only may, but must, sit on her thumbs.”

“Yes, I know,” said the Israeli gloomily. “But many more young men will have to die.”

Martin leaned forward and patted his friend on the arm.

“Look, Moshe, the man has got to be stopped. Sooner or later. Israel of all countries must know how far he has got with his weapons of mass destruction. In a sense, we have just been finding out the true scale of what he has.”

“But our people have been helping, of course. We are probably his principal target.”

“Yes, in target analysis,” said Martin. “Our principal problem is in hard, on-the-spot intelligence. We simply don’t have top-level intelligence coming to us out of Baghdad. Not the British, not the Americans, and not even your people either.”

Twenty minutes later the dinner ended, and Terry Martin saw Professor Hadari into a taxi to take him back to his hotel.

About the hour of midnight, three triangulation stations were implanted in Kuwait on the orders of Hassan Rahmani in Baghdad.

They were radio dishes designed to track the source of a radio-wave emission and take a compass bearing on it. One was a fixed station, mounted on the roof of a tall building in the district of Ardiya, on the extreme southern outskirts of Kuwait City. Its dish faced toward the desert.

The other two were mobile stations, large vans with the dishes on the roof, an in-built generator for the electrical power, and a darkened interior where the scanners could sit at their consoles and trawl the airwaves for the transmitter they sought, which they had been told would probably send from somewhere out in the desert between the city and the Saudi border.

One of these vans was outside Jahra, well to the west of its colleague in Ardiya, and the third was down the coast, in the grounds of the Al Adan hospital, where the law student’s sister had been raped in the first days of the invasions. The Al Adan tracker could get a full cross-bearing on those reported by the scanners farther north, pinning the source of the transmission down to a square a few hundred yards across.

At Ahmadi air base, where once Khaled Al-Khalifa had flown his Skyhawk, a Soviet-built Hind helicopter gunship waited on twenty-four-hour standby. The crew of the Hind was from the Air Force, a concession Rahmani had had to squeeze out of the general commanding it. The radio-tracking crews were from Rahmani’s own Counterintelligence wing, drafted in from Baghdad and the best he had.

Professor Hadari spent a sleepless night. Something his friend had told him worried him deeply. He regarded himself as a completely loyal Israeli, born of an old Sephardic family who had emigrated just after the turn of the century along with men like Ben-Yehuda and Ben-Gurion. He himself had been born outside Jaffa, when it was still a bustling port of Palestinian Arabs, and he had learned Arabic as a small boy.

He had raised two sons and seen one of them die in a miserable ambush in South Lebanon. He was grandfather to five small children.

Who should tell him that he did not love his country?

But there was something wrong. If war came, many young men might die, as his Ze’ev had died, even if they were British and Americans and French. Was this the time for Kobi Dror to show vindictive, small-power chauvinism?

He rose early, settled his bill, packed, and ordered a taxi for the airport.

Before he left the hotel, he hovered for a while by the bank of phones in the lobby, then changed his mind.

Halfway to the airport, he ordered his cab driver to divert off the M4 and find a phone booth. Grumbling at the time and trouble this would take, the driver did so, eventually finding one on a corner in Chiswick.

Hadari was in luck. It was Hilary who answered the phone at the Bayswater flat.

“Hold on,” he said, “he’s halfway out the door.”

Terry Martin came on the line.

“It’s Moshe. Terry, I don’t have much time. Tell your people the Institute does have a high source inside Baghdad. Tell them to ask what happened to Jericho. Good-bye, my friend.”

“Moshe, one moment. Are you sure? How do you know?”

“It doesn’t matter. You never heard this from me. Goodbye.”

The phone went dead. In Chiswick the elderly scholar climbed back into his taxi and proceeded to Heathrow. He was trembling at the enormity of what he had done. And how could he tell Terry Martin that it was he, the professor of Arabic from Tel Aviv University, who had crafted that first reply to Jericho in Baghdad?

Terry Martin’s call found Simon Paxman at his desk at Century House just after ten.

“Lunch? Sorry, I can’t. Hell of a day. Tomorrow perhaps,” said Paxman.

“Too late. It’s urgent, Simon.”

Paxman sighed. No doubt his tame academic had come up with some fresh interpretation of a phrase in an Iraqi broadcast that was supposed to change the meaning of life.

“Still can’t make lunch. Major conference here, in-house. Look, a quick drink. The Hole-in-the-Wall, it’s a pub underneath Waterloo Bridge, quite close to here. Say twelve o’clock? I can give you half an hour, Terry.”

“More than enough. See you,” said Martin.

Just after noon, they sat over beers in the alehouse above which the trains of the Southern Region rumbled to Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. Martin, without revealing his source, narrated what he had been told that morning.

“Bloody hell,” whispered Paxman. There were people in the next booth. “Who told you?”

“Can’t say.”

“Well, you must.”

“Look, he went out on a limb. I gave my word. He’s an academic and senior. That’s all.”

Paxman thought. Academic, and mixing with Terry Martin. Certainly another Arabist. Could have been on assignment with the Mossad.

Whatever, the information had to go back to Century and without delay. He thanked Martin, left his beer, and scuttled back down the road to Century.

Because of the lunchtime conference, Steve Laing had not left the building. Paxman drew him aside and told him. Laing took it straight to the Chief himself.

Sir Colin, who was never given to overstatement, pronounced General Kobi Dror to be a most tiresome fellow, forsook his lunch, ordered something to be brought to his desk, and retired to the top floor. There he put in a personal call on an extremely secure line to Judge William Webster, Director of the CIA.

It was only half past eight in Washington, but the Judge was a man who liked to rise with the dawn, and he was at his desk to take the call.

He asked his British colleague a couple of questions about the source of the information, grunted at the lack of one, but agreed it was something that could not be let slide.

Webster told his Deputy Director (Operations) Bill Stewart, who exploded with rage, and then had a half-hour conference with Chip Barber, head of Operations for the Middle East Division. Barber was even angrier, for he was the man who had sat facing General Dror in the bright room on the top of a hill outside Herzlia and had, apparently, been told a lie.

Between them, they worked out what they wanted done, and took the idea back to the Director.

In midafternoon William Webster had a conference with Brent

Scowcroft, Chairman of the National Security Council, and he took the matter to President Bush. Webster had asked for what he wanted and was given full authority to go ahead.

The cooperation of Secretary of State James Baker was sought, and he gave it immediately. That night, the State Department sent an urgent request to Tel Aviv, which was presented to its recipient the following morning, only three hours away due to the time gap.

The Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel at that time was Benjamin Netanyahu, a handsome, elegant, silver-haired diplomat and the brother of that Jonathan Netanyahu who was the only Israeli killed during the raid on Idi Amin’s Entebbe airport, in which Israeli commandos rescued the passengers of a French airliner hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists.

Benjamin Netanyahu had been born a third-generation sabra and partly educated in the United States. Because of his fluency and articulateness and his passionate nationalism, he was a member of Itzhak Shamir’s Likud government and often Israel’s persuasive spokesman in interviews with the Western media.

He arrived at Washington Dulles two days later, on October 14, somewhat perplexed by the urgency of the State Department’s invitation that he fly to the United States for discussions of considerable importance.

He was even more perplexed when two hours of private talks with Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger revealed no more than a comprehensive overview of developments in the Middle East since August 2. He finished the talks thoroughly frustrated, then faced a late-night plane back to Israel.

It was as he was leaving the State Department that an aide slipped an expensive vellum card into his hand. The card was headed with a personal crest, and the writer, in elegant cursive script, asked him not to leave Washington without coining to the writer’s house for a short visit, to discuss a matter of some urgency “to both our countries and all our people.”

He knew the signature, knew the man, and knew the power and wealth of the hand that wrote it. The writer’s limousine was at the door. The Israeli minister made a decision and ordered his secretary to return to the embassy for both sets of luggage and to rendezvous with him at a house in Georgetown two hours later. From there they would proceed to Dulles. Then he entered the limousine.

He had never been to the house before, but it was as he would have expected, a handsome building at the better end of M Street, not three hundred yards from the campus of Georgetown University. He was shown into a paneled library with pictures and books of superlative rarity and taste. A few moments later his host entered, advancing over the Kashan rug with hand outstretched.

“My dear Bibi, how kind of you to spare the time.”

Saul Nathanson was both banker and financier, professions that had made him extremely wealthy, but his true fortune was hinted at rather than declared, and the man himself was far too cultivated to dwell upon it. The Van Dykes and Breughels on his walls were not copies, and his donations to charity, including some in the State of Israel, were legendary.

Like the Israeli minister, he was elegant and gray-haired, but unlike the slightly younger man, he was tailored by Savile Row, London, and his silk shirts were from Sulka.

He showed his guest to one of a pair of leather club chairs before the log fire, and an English butler entered with a bottle and two wineglasses on a silver tray.

“Something I thought you might enjoy, my friend, while we chat.”

The butler poured two Lalique glasses of the red wine, and the Israeli sipped. Nathanson raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“Superb, of course,” said Netanyahu. Château Mouton Rothschild ’61 is not easy to come by and not to be gulped. The butler left the bottle within reach and withdrew.

Saul Nathanson was far too subtle to barge into the meat of what he wanted to say. Conversational hors d’oeuvres were served first. Then the Middle East.

“There’s going to be a war, you know,” he said sadly.

“I have no doubt about it,” agreed Netanyahu.

“Before it is over many young Americans may well be dead, fine young men who do not deserve to die. We must all do what we can to keep that number as low as humanly possible, wouldn’t you say? More wine?”

“I could not agree more.”

What on earth was the man driving at? Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister genuinely had no idea.

“Saddam,” said Nathanson, staring at the fire, “is a menace. He must be stopped. He is probably more of a menace to Israel than to any other neighboring state.”

“We have been saying that for years. But when we bombed his nuclear reactor, America condemned us.”

Nathanson made a dismissive gesture with one hand.

“Nonsense, of course, all cosmetic nonsense for the face of things. We both know that, and we both know better. I have a son serving in the Gulf.”

“I didn’t know. May he return safely.”

Nathanson was genuinely touched.

“Thank you, Bibi, thank you. I pray so every day. My firstborn, my only son. I just feel that ... at this point in time ... cooperation between us all must be without stint.”

“Unarguable.” The Israeli had the uncomfortable feeling that bad news was coming.

“To keep the casualties down, you see. That’s why I ask for your help, Bibi, to keep the casualties down. We are on the same side, are we not? I am an American and a Jew.”

The order of precedence in which he had used the words hung in the air.

“And I am an Israeli and a Jew,” murmured Netanyahu. He too had his order of precedence. The financier was in no way fazed.

“Precisely. But because of your education here, you will understand how—well, how shall I phrase it?—emotional Americans can sometimes be. May I be blunt?”

A welcome relief, thought the Israeli.

“If anything were done that could in some small way keep the number of casualties down, even by a handful, both I and my fellow-countrymen would be eternally grateful to whoever had contributed that anything.”

The other half of the sentiment remained unsaid, but Netanyahu was far too experienced a diplomat to miss it. And if anything were done or not done that might increase those casualties, America’s memory would be long and her revenge unpleasant.

“What is it you want from me?” he asked.

Saul Nathanson sipped his wine and gazed at the flickering logs.

“Apparently, there is a man in Baghdad. Code name—Jericho. ...”

When he had finished, it was a thoughtful Deputy Foreign Minister who sped out to Dulles to catch the flight home.

Chapter 9

The roadblock that got him was at the corner of Mohammed Ibn Kassem Street and the Fourth Ring Road. When he saw it in the distance, Mike Martin was tempted to hang a U-turn and head back the way he had come.

But there were Iraqi soldiers stationed down the road on each side at the approaches to the checkpoint, apparently just for that purpose, and it would have been crazy to try and outrun their rifle fire at the slow speed necessary for a U-turn. He had no choice but to drive on, joining the end of the line of vehicles waiting for check-through.

As usual, driving through Kuwait City, he had tried to avoid the major roads where roadblocks were likely to be set up, but crossing any of the six Ring Roads that envelop Kuwait City in a series of concentric bands could only be done at a major junction.

He had also hoped, by driving in the middle of the morning, to be lost in the jumble of traffic or to find the Iraqis sheltering from the heat.

But mid-October had cooled the weather and the green-bereted Special Forces were proving a far cry from the useless Popular Army. So he sat at the wheel of the white Volvo station wagon and waited.

It had still been black and deepest night when he had driven the off-road far out into the desert to the south and dug up the remainder of his explosives, guns, and ammunition, the equipment he had promised to Abu Fouad. It had been before dawn when he made the transfer at the lockup garage in the back streets of Firdous from the jeep to the station wagon.

Between the transfer from vehicle to vehicle and the moment when he judged the sun to be high enough and hot enough to send the Iraqis to seek shelter in the shade, he had even managed a two-hour nap at the wheel of the car inside the garage. Then he had driven the station wagon out and put the jeep inside the garage, aware that such a prized vehicle would soon be confiscated.

Finally he had scrubbed his face and hands and changed his clothes, swapping the stained and desert-soiled robes of the Bedou tribesman for the clean white dish-dash of the Kuwaiti doctor.

The cars in front of him inched forward toward the Iraqi infantry grouped around the concrete-filled barrels up ahead. In some cases the soldiers simply glanced at the driver’s identity card and waved him on; in other cases the car was pulled to one side for a search. Usually, it was those vehicles that carried some kind of cargo that were ordered to the curb.

He was uncomfortably aware of the two big wooden trunks behind him on the floor of the cargo area, whose contents were enough to ensure his instant arrest and hand-over to the tender mercies of the AMAM.

Finally the last car ahead of him surged away, and he pulled up to the barrels. The sergeant in charge did not bother to ask for identity papers. Seeing the big boxes in the rear of the Volvo, the soldier waved the station wagon to the side of the road and shouted an order to his colleagues who waited there.

An olive-drab uniform appeared at the driver’s side window, which Martin had already rolled down. The uniform bent, and a stubbled face appeared in the open window.

“Out,” said the soldier. Martin got out and straightened up. He smiled politely. A sergeant with a hard, pockmarked face walked up. The private soldier wandered round to the rear door and peered in at the boxes.

“Papers,” said the sergeant. He studied the ID card that Martin offered, and his glance flickered from the blurred face behind the plastic to the one standing in front of him. If he saw any difference between the British officer facing him and the store clerk of the Al-Khalifa Trading Corporation whose portrait had been used for the card, he gave no sign.

The identity card had been dated as issued a year earlier, and in a year a man can decide to shave his beard.

“You are a doctor?”

“Yes, Sergeant. I work at the hospital.”

“Where?”

“On the Jahra road.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the Amiri hospital, in Dasman.”

The sergeant was clearly not of great education, and within his culture a doctor rated as a man of considerable learning and stature. He grunted and walked to the back of the station wagon.

“Open,” he said.

Martin unlocked the rear door, and it swung up above their heads. The sergeant stared at the two trunks.

“What are these?”

“Samples, Sergeant. They are needed by the research laboratory at the Amiri.”

“Open.”

Martin withdrew several small brass keys from the pocket of his dish-dash. The boxes were of the cabin-trunk or portmanteau type, purchased from a luggage store, and each had two brass locks.

“You know these trunks are refrigerated?” said Martin conversationally, as he fiddled with the keys.

“Refrigerated?” The sergeant was mystified by the word.

“Yes, Sergeant. The interiors are cold. They keep the cultures at a constant low temperature. That guarantees that they remain inert. I’m afraid if I open up, the cold air will escape and they will become very active. Better stand back.”

At the phrase “stand back,” the sergeant scowled and unslung his carbine, pointing it at Martin, suspecting the boxes must contain some kind of weapon.

“What do you mean?” he snarled. Martin shrugged apologetically.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t prevent it. The germs will just escape into the air around us.”

“Germs—what germs?” The sergeant was confused and angry, as much with his own ignorance as with the doctor’s manner.

“Didn’t I say where I worked?” he asked mildly.

“Yes, at the hospital.”

“True. The isolation hospital. These are full of smallpox and cholera samples for analysis.”

This time the sergeant did jump back, a clear two feet. The marks on his face were no accident—as a child he had nearly died of smallpox.

“Get that stuff out of here, damn you!”

Martin apologized again, closed the rear door, slid behind the wheel, and drove away. An hour later, he was guided into the fish warehouse in Shuwaikh Port and handed over his cargo to Abu Fouad.

United States Department of State

Washington, D.C. 20520

October 16, 1990

MEMORANDUM TO: James Baker

FROM: Political Intelligence and Analysis Group SUBJECT: Destruction of Iraqi War Machine CLASSIFICATION: EYES ONLY

In the ten weeks since the invasion by Iraq of the Emirate of Kuwait, the most rigorous investigation has been undertaken, both by ourselves and our British allies, of the precise size, nature, and state of preparation of the war machine presently at the disposal of President Saddam Hussein.

Critics will doubtless say, with the usual benefit of hindsight, that such an analysis should have been accomplished prior to this date. Be that as it may, the findings of the various analyses are now before us, and they present a very disturbing picture.

The conventional forces of Iraq alone, with its standing army of a million and a quarter men, its guns, tanks, rocket batteries, and modern air force, combine to make Iraq far and away the most powerful military force in the Middle East.

Two years ago, it was estimated that if the effect of the war with Iran had been to reduce the Iranian war machine to the point where it could no longer realistically threaten its neighbors, the damage inflicted by Iran on the Iraqi war machine was of similar importance.

It is now clear that, in the case of Iran, the severe purchasing embargo deliberately created by ourselves and our British colleagues has caused the situation to remain much the same.

In the case of Iraq, however, the two intervening years have been filled by a rearmament program of appalling vigor.

You will recall, Mr. Secretary, that Western policy in the Gulf area and indeed the entire Middle East has long been based upon the concept of balance: the notion that stability and therefore the status quo can only be maintained if no nation in the area is permitted to acquire such power as to threaten into submission all its neighbors and thus establish dominance.

On the conventional warfare front alone, it is now clear that Iraq has acquired such a power and now bids to create such dominance.

But this report is even more concerned with another aspect of Iraqi preparations: the establishment of an awesome stock of weapons of mass destruction, coupled with continuing plans for even more, and their appropriate international, and possibly intercontinental, delivery systems.

In short, unless the utter destruction of these weapons, those still in development, and their delivery systems is accomplished, the immediate future demonstrates a catastrophic prospect.

Within three years, according to studies presented to the Medusa Committee and with which the British completely concur, Iraq will possess its own atomic bomb and the ability to launch it anywhere within a two-thousand-kilometer radius of Baghdad.

To this prospect must be added that of thousands of tons of deadly poison gas and a bacteriological war potential involving anthrax, tularemia, and possibly bubonic and pneumonic plague.

Were Iraq ruled by a benign and reasonable regime, the prospect would still be daunting. The reality is that Iraq is ruled solely by President Saddam Hussein, who is clearly in the grip of two identifiable psychiatric conditions: megalomania and paranoia.

Within three years, failing preventive action, Iraq will be able to dominate by threat alone all the territory from the north coast of Turkey to the Gulf of Aden, from the seas off Haifa to the mountains of Kandahar.

The effect of these revelations must be to change Western policy radically. The destruction of the Iraqi war machine and particularly the weapons of mass destruction must now become the overriding aim of Western policy. The liberation of Kuwait has now become irrelevant, serving only as a justification.

The desired aim can be frustrated only by a unilateral withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait, and every effort must be made to ensure that this does not happen.

U.S. policy, in alliance with our British allies, must therefore be dedicated to four goals:

1. Insofar as it is possible, covertly to present provocations and arguments to Saddam Hussein aimed at causing him to refuse to pull out of Kuwait.

2. To reject any compromise he may offer in exchange for leaving Kuwait, thus removing the justification for our planned invasion and the destruction of his war machine.

3. To urge the United Nations to pass without further procrastination the long-delayed Security Council Resolution

678, authorizing the Coalition Allies to begin the air war as soon as they are ready.

4. To appear to welcome but in fact to frustrate any peace plan that might enable Iraq to escape unscathed from her present dilemma. Clearly the UN Secretary-General, Paris, and Moscow are the principal dangers here, likely to propose at any time some naive scheme capable of preventing what must be done. The public, of course, will continue to be assured of the opposite.

Respectfully submitted,

PIAG

“Itzhak, we really have to go along with them on this one.”

The Prime Minister of Israel seemed, as always, dwarfed by the big swivel chair and the desk in front of it, as his Deputy Foreign Minister confronted him in the premier’s fortified private office beneath the Knesset in Jerusalem. The two Uzi-toting paratroopers outside the heavy, steel-lined timber door could hear nothing of what went on inside.

Itzhak Shamir glowered across the desk, his short legs swinging free above the carpet, although there was a specially fitted footrest if he needed it. His lined, pugnacious face beneath the grizzled gray hair made him seem even more like some northern troll.

His Deputy Foreign Minister was different from the Prime Minister in every way: tall where the national leader was short, well-tailored where Shamir was rumpled, urbane where he was choleric. Yet they got along extremely well, sharing the same uncompromising vision of their country and of Palestinians, so that the Russian-born Prime Minister had had no hesitation in picking and promoting the cosmopolitan diplomat.

Benjamin Netanyahu had made his case well. Israel needed America: her goodwill, which had once been automatically guaranteed by the power of the Jewish lobby but was now under siege on Capitol Hill and in the American media; her donations, her weaponry, her veto in the Security Council. That was an awful lot to jeopardize for one alleged Iraqi agent being run by Kobi Dror from down there in Tel Aviv.

“Let them have this Jericho, whoever he is,” urged Netanyahu. “If he helps them destroy Saddam Hussein, the better for us.”

The Prime Minister grunted, nodded, and reached for his intercom.

“Get on to General Dror, and tell him I need to see him here in my office,” he told his private secretary. “No, not when he’s free. Now.”

Four hours later, Kobi Dror left his Prime Minister’s office. He was seething. Indeed, he told himself as his car swung down the hill out of Jerusalem and onto the broad highway back to Tel Aviv, he did not recall when he had been so angry.

To be told by your own Prime Minister that you were wrong was bad enough. To be told he was a stupid asshole was something he could have done without.

Normally he took pleasure in looking at the pine forests where, during the siege of Jerusalem when the highway of today had been a rutted track, his father and others had battled to punch a hole through the Palestinian lines and relieve the city. But not today.

Back in his office, he summoned Sami Gershon and told him the news.

“How the hell did the Americans know?” he shouted. “Who leaked?”

“No one inside the Office,” Gershon said with finality. “What about that professor? I see he’s just got back from London.”

“Damned traitor,” snarled Dror. “I’ll break him.”

“The Brits probably got him drunk,” suggested Gershon. “Boasting in his cups. Leave it, Kobi. The damage is done. What have we got to do?”

“Tell them everything about Jericho,” snapped Dror. “I won’t do it.

Send Sharon. Let him do it. The meeting’s in London, where the leak took place.”

Gershon thought it over and grinned.

“What’s so funny?” asked Dror.

“Just this. We can’t contact Jericho anymore. Just let them try. We still don’t know who the bastard is. Let them find out. With any luck, they’ll make a camel’s ass out of it.”

Dror thought it over, and eventually a sly smile spread across his face.

“Send Sharon tonight,” he said. “Then we launch another project. I’ve had it in my mind for some time. We’ll call it Operation Joshua.”

“Why?” asked Gershon, perplexed.

“Don’t you remember exactly what Joshua did to Jericho?”

The London meeting was deemed important enough for Bill Stewart, Langley’s Deputy Director (Operations) to cross the Atlantic personally, accompanied by Chip Barber of the Middle East Division.

They stayed at one of the Company’s safe houses, an apartment not far from the embassy in Grosvenor Square, and had dinner with a Deputy Director of the SIS and Steve Laing. The Deputy Director was for protocol, given Stewart’s rank; he would be replaced at the debriefing of David Sharon by Simon Paxman, who was in charge of Iraq.

David Sharon flew in from Tel Aviv under another name and was met by a katsa from the Israeli embassy in Palace Green. The British counterintelligence service MI-5—which does not like foreign agents, even friendly ones, playing games at the port of entry—had been alerted by SIS and spotted the waiting katsa from the embassy. As soon as he greeted the new arrival, “Mr. Eliyahu,” off the Tel Aviv flight, the MI-S group moved in, warmly welcoming Mr. Sharon to London, and offering every facility to make his stay pleasant.

The two angry Israelis were escorted to their car, waved away from the concourse entrance, and then followed sedately into central London.

The massed bands of the Brigade of Guards could not have done a better job.

The debriefing of David Sharon began the following morning, and it took the whole day and half the night. The SIS elected to use one of their own safe houses, a well-protected and efficiently “wired” apartment in South Kensington.

It was (and still is) a large and spacious place, of which the dining room served as the site for the conference. One of the bedrooms housed the banks of tape recorders, and two technicians who recorded every word spoken. A trim young woman brought over from Century commandeered the kitchen and masterminded a convoy of trays of coffee and sandwiches to the six men grouped around the dining table.

Two fit-looking men in the lobby downstairs spent the day pretending to mend the perfectly functioning elevator, while in fact ensuring that none but the other known inhabitants of the building got above the ground-floor level.

At the dining table were David Sharon and the katsa from the London embassy, who was a declared agent anyway; the two Americans, Stewart and Barber from Langley; and the two SIS men, Laing and Paxman.

At the Americans’ bidding, Sharon started at the beginning of the tale and told it the way it had happened.

“A mercenary? A walk-in mercenary?” queried Stewart at one point.

“You’re not putting me on?”

“My instructions are to be absolutely frank,” said Sharon. “That was the way it happened.”

The Americans had nothing against a mercenary. Indeed, it was an advantage. Among all the motives for betraying one’s country, money is the simplest and easiest for the recruiter agency. With a mercenary one knows where one is. There are no tortured feelings of regret, no angst of self-disgust, no fragile ego to be massaged and flattered, no ruffled feathers to be smoothed. A mercenary in the intelligence world is like a whore. No tiresome candle-lit dinners and sweet nothings are necessary. A fistful of dollars on the dressing table will do nicely.

Sharon described the frantic search for someone who could live inside Baghdad under diplomatic cover on extended stay, and the Hobson’s-choice selection of Alfonso Benz Moncada, his intensive training in Santiago, and his reinfiltration to run Jericho for two years.

“Hang on,” said Stewart. “This amateur ran Jericho for two years?

Made seventy collections from the drops and got away with it?”

“Yep. On my life,” said Sharon.

“What do you figure, Steve?”

Laing shrugged. “Beginner’s luck. Wouldn’t have liked to try it in East Berlin or Moscow.”

“Right,” said Stewart. “And he never got tailed to a drop? Never compromised?”

“No,” said Sharon. “He was tailed a few times, but always in a sporadic and clumsy way. Going from his home to the Economic Commission building or back, and once when he was heading for a drop. But he saw them and aborted.”

“Just supposing,” said Laing, “he actually was tailed to a drop by a real team of watchers. Rahmani’s Counterintelligence boys stake out the drop and roll up Jericho himself. Under persuasion, Jericho has to cooperate. ...”

“Then the product would have gone down in value,” said Sharon. “But Jericho really was doing a lot of damage. Rahmani wouldn’t have allowed that to go on. We’d have seen a public trial and hanging of Jericho, and Moncada would have been expelled, if lucky.

“It seems the trackers were AMAM people, even though foreigners are supposed to be Rahmani’s turf. Whatever, they were as clumsy as usual. Moncada spotted them without trouble. You know how the AMAM is always trying to move into counterintelligence work.”

The listeners nodded. Interdepartmental rivalry was nothing new—it happened in their own countries.

When Sharon reached the point where Moncada was abruptly withdrawn from Iraq, Bill Stewart let out an expletive.

“You mean he’s switched off, out of contact? Are you telling us Jericho is on the loose with no controller?”

“That’s the point,” said Sharon patiently. He turned to Chip Barber.

“When General Dror said he was running no agent in Baghdad, he meant it. The Mossad was convinced that Jericho, as an ongoing operation, was belly-up.”

Barber shot the young katsa a look that said, “Pull the other leg, son.

It’s got bells on.”

“We want to reestablish contact,” said Laing smoothly. “How?”

Sharon laid out all six of the locations of the dead-letter boxes. During his two years Moncada had changed two of them; in one case because a location was bulldozed for redevelopment, in another because a derelict shop was refurbished and reoccupied. But the six functioning drops and the six places where the alerting chalk marks had to be placed were the up-to-date ones that had come from his final briefing after his expulsion.

The exact location of these drops and of the sites for the chalk marks were noted to the inch.

“Maybe we could get a friendly diplomat to approach him at a function, tell him he’s back in action and the money’s better,”

suggested Barber. “Get around all this crap under bricks and flagstones.”

“No,” said Sharon. “It’s the drops, or you can’t contact him.”

“Why?” asked Stewart.

“You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I swear it’s true. We never found out who he is.”

The four Western agents stared at Sharon for several minutes.

“You never identified him?” asked Stewart slowly.

“No. We tried. We asked him to identify himself for his own protection. He refused, threatened to shut off if we persisted. We did handwriting analyses, psychoportraits. We cross-indexed the information he could produce and the stuff he couldn’t get at. We ended up with a list of thirty, maybe forty men, all around Saddam Hussein, all within the Revolutionary Command Council, the Army High Command, or the senior ranks of the Ba’ath Party.

“Never could get closer than that. Twice we slipped a technical term in English into our demands. Each time they came back with a query. It seems he only speaks no or very limited English. But that could be a blind. He could be fluent, but if we knew that, it would narrow the field to two or three. So he always writes in script, in Arabic.”

Stewart grunted, convinced. “Sounds like Deep Throat.”

“Surely Woodward and Bernstein identified Deep Throat?” suggested Paxman.

“So they claim, but I doubt it,” said Stewart. “I figure the guy stayed in deep shadow, like Jericho.”

Darkness had long fallen by the time the four of them finally let an exhausted David Sharon go back to his embassy. If there was anything more he could have told them, they were not going to get it out of him.

But Steve Laing was certain that this time the Mossad had come clean.

Bill Stewart had told him of the level of the pressure that had been exercised in Washington.

The two British and two American intelligence officers, tired of sandwiches and coffee, adjourned to a restaurant half a mile away. Bill Stewart, who had an ulcer that twelve hours of sandwiches and high stress had not improved, toyed with a plate of smoked salmon.

“It’s a bastard, Steve. It’s a real four-eyed bastard. Like the Mossad, we’ll have to try and find an accredited diplomat already trained in all the tradecraft and get him to work for us. Pay him if we have to.

Langley’s prepared to spend a lot of money on this. Jericho’s information could save us a lot of lives when the fighting starts.”

“So who does that leave us?” said Barber. “Half the embassies in Baghdad are closed down already. The rest must be under heavy surveillance. The Irish, Swiss, Swedes, Finns?”

“The neutrals won’t play ball,” said Laing. “And I doubt they’ve got a trained agent posted to Baghdad on their own account. Forget Third World embassies—it means starting a whole recruiting and training program.”

“We don’t have the time, Steve. This is urgent. We can’t go down the same road the Israelis went. Three weeks is crazy. It might have worked then, but Baghdad is on a war footing now. Things have to be much tighter in there. Starting cold, I’d want a minimum three months to give a diplomat the tradecraft.”

Stewart nodded agreement.

“Failing that, someone with legitimate access. Some businessmen are still going in and out, especially the Germans. We could produce a convincing German, or a Japanese.”

“The trouble is, they’re short-stay chappies. Ideally, one wants someone to mother-hen this Jericho for the next—what? Four months.

What about a journalist?” suggested Laing.

Paxman shook his head. “I’ve been talking with them all when they come out; being journalists, they get total surveillance. Snooping around back alleys won’t work for a foreign correspondent—they all have a minder from the AMAM with them, all the time. Besides, don’t forget that outside an accredited diplomat, we’re talking about a black operation. Anyone want to dwell on what happens to an agent falling into Omar Khatib’s hands?”

The four men at the table had heard of the brutal reputation of Khatib, head of the AMAM, nicknamed Al-Mu’azib, “the Tormentor.”

“Risks just may have to be taken,” observed Barber.

“I was referring more to acceptance,” Paxman pointed out. “What businessman or reporter would ever agree, knowing what would be in store if he were caught? I’d prefer the KGB to the AMAM.”

Bill Stewart put down his fork in frustration and called for another glass of milk.

“Well, that’s it then—short of finding a trained agent who can pass for an Iraqi.”

Paxman shot a glance at Steve Laing, who thought for a moment and slowly nodded.

“We’ve got a guy who can,” said Paxman.

“A tame Arab? So has the Mossad, so have we,” said Stewart, “but not at this level. Message-carriers, gofers. This is high-risk, high-value.”

“No, a Brit, a major in the SAS.”

Stewart paused, his milk glass halfway to his mouth. Barber put down his knife and fork and ceased chewing his steak.

“Speaking Arabic is one thing. Passing for an Iraqi inside Iraq is a whole different ball game,” said Stewart.

“He’s dark-skinned, black-haired, brown-eyed, but he’s a hundred percent British. He was born and raised there. He can pass for one.”

“And he’s fully trained in covert operations?” asked Barber. “Shit, where the hell is he?”

“Actually, he’s in Kuwait at the moment,” said Laing.

“Damn. You mean he’s stuck in there, holed up?”

“No. He seems to be moving about quite freely.”

“So if he can get out, what the hell’s he doing?”

“Killing Iraqis, actually.”

Stewart thought it over and nodded slowly.

“Big balls,” he murmured. “Can you get him out of there? We’d like to borrow him.”

“I suppose so, next time he comes on the radio. We would have to run him, though. And share the product.”

Stewart nodded again.

“I guess so. You guys brought us Jericho. It’s a deal. I’ll clear it with the Judge.”

Paxman rose and wiped his mouth.

“I’d better go tell Riyadh,” he said.

Mike Martin was a man accustomed to making his own luck, but his life was saved that October by a fluke.

He was due to make a radio call to the designated SIS house in the outskirts of Riyadh during the night of the nineteenth, the same night the four senior intelligence officers from the CIA and Century House were dining in South Kensington.

Had he done so, he would have been off the air, due to the two-hour time difference, before Simon Paxman could return to Century House and alert Riyadh that he was wanted.

Worse, he would have been on the air for five to ten minutes, discussing with Riyadh ways of securing a resupply of arms and explosives.

In fact, he was in the lockup garage where he kept his jeep just before midnight, only to discover that the vehicle had a flat tire.

Cursing, he spent an hour with the jeep jacked-up, struggling to remove the wheel nuts, which had been almost cemented into place by a mixture of grease and desert sand. At a quarter to one he rolled out of the garage, and within half a mile he noticed that even his spare tire had developed a slow leak.

There was nothing for it but to return to the garage and abandon the radio call to Riyadh.

It took two days to have both tires repaired, and it was not until the night of the twenty-first that he found himself deep in the desert, far to the south of the city, turning his small satellite dish in the direction of the Saudi capital many hundreds of miles away, using the Send button to transmit a series of quick blips to indicate it was he who was calling and that he was about to come on the air.

His radio was basic, a ten-channel fixed-crystal set, with one channel designated for each day of the month in rotation. On the twenty-first, he was using channel one. Having identified himself, he switched to Receive and waited. Within seconds a low voice replied:

“Rocky Mountain, Black Bear, read you five.”

The codes identifying both Riyadh and Martin corresponded with the date and the channel, just in case someone hostile tried to muscle in on the waveband.

Martin went to Send and spoke several sentences.

On the outskirts of Kuwait City to the north, a young Iraqi technician was alerted by a pulsing light on the console he was monitoring in the commandeered apartment on top of a residential building. One of his sweepers had caught the transmission and locked on.

“Captain,” he called urgently. An officer from Hassan Rahmani’s Counterintelligence signals section strode over to the console. The light still pulsed, and the technician was easing a dial to secure a bearing.

“Someone has just come on the air.”

“Where?”

“Out in the desert, sir.”

The technician listened through his earphones as his direction-finders stabilized on the source of the transmission.

“Electronically scrambled transmission, sir.”

“That has to be him. The boss was right. What’s the bearing?”

The officer was reaching for the telephone to alert his other two monitoring units, the trailer trucks parked at Jahra and the Al Adan hospital down near the coast.

“Two-oh-two degrees compass.”

Two-oh-two degrees was twenty-two degrees west of due south, and there was absolutely nothing out in that direction but the Kuwaiti desert, which ran all the way to join the Saudi desert at the border.

“Frequency?” barked the officer as the Jahra trailer came on the line.

The tracker gave it to him, a rare channel down in the very-low-frequency range.

“Lieutenant,” he called over his shoulder, “get on to Ahmadi air base.

Tell them to get that helicopter airborne. We’ve got a fix.”

Far away in the desert, Martin finished what he had to say and switched to Receive to get the answer from Riyadh. It was not what he had expected. He himself had spoken for only fifteen seconds.

“Rocky Mountain, Black Bear, return to the cave. I say again, return to the cave. Top urgent. Over and out.”

The Iraqi captain gave the frequency to both his other monitoring stations. In Jahra and the hospital grounds other technicians rolled their source-tracers to the indicated frequency, and above their heads four-foot-diameter dishes swung from side to side. The one on the coast covered the area from Kuwait’s northern border with Iraq down to the border with Saudi Arabia. The Jahra scanners swept east to west, from the sea in the east to the Iraqi deserts in the west.

Between the three of them, they could triangulate a fix to within a hundred yards and give a heading and distance to the Hind helicopter and its ten armed soldiers.

“Still there?” asked the captain.

The technician scanned the circular screen in front of him, calibrated around its edge with the points of the compass. The center of the dish represented the point where he sat. Seconds earlier, there had been a glittering line across the screen, running from the center to compass heading 202. Now the screen was blank. It would only light up when the man out there transmitted again.

“No, sir. He’s gone off the air. Probably listening to the reply.”

“He’ll come back,” said the captain.