by Oliver North
Looking at his watch, he urged the men to help him get the other two crates into the truck before dark. Once that was done, Dotensk wanted to have enough daylight to go over the area and erase their tracks from the sand.
Finally, all three crates were manhandled into the truck, chained down, and covered with a tarp. The men pushed the forklift sideways against the load to conceal it further, and then began working on the ground. By the time Dotensk was satisfied that their tracks were sufficiently erased from the sand and no one would ever suspect what had been taken from the ruins, it was getting dark.
Dotensk decided to ride with the driver in the cab of the truck back across Iraq, in case his talents and bribe money were needed at some border crossing or checkpoint. Dotensk sent the three others in his own Mercedes. They looked grateful.
Leonid Dotensk was inordinately pleased with finding his great treasure and couldn't wait to show off to General Komulakov.
Just before they left in the gathering gloom, one of the men asked what should be done with the bodies of the four Iraqis they had discovered.
“Leave them there. The vultures and the elements will take care of them.”
Habirah Prison
Near Salman Pak, Iraq
Sunday, 22 March 1998
1755 Hours, Local
Bruno Macklin felt energy course through his body as he lay on the cement slab “cot” in his prison cell. Adrenaline had begun to flow nearly an hour earlier, when an English-speaking guard came by to tell him he was being transferred to another prison, ordering him to be ready to move when he returned.
The SAS captain heard the opening of the iron door at the end of the hallway and the footsteps of the two guards coming to get him. Macklin felt excitement—and not a little nervousness. He stood up in his cell to wait for the men coming toward him.
They stopped at another cell a short distance away. Macklin could hear the door opening and the rustle of someone shuffling into the hallway, followed by the familiar clink of the ankle chains and wrist irons the guards put on each prisoner.
Just as the prisoner and his detail were moving past his cell, one of the guards used a hand transmitter to unlock the steel door to Macklin's cell. The young Iraqi guard, Macklin noticed, was attempting to grow a mustache—and failing at the task. The guard motioned for the British soldier to come out. Macklin had no belongings to take with him—only the ill-fitting prisoner's uniform and sandals he was wearing, just like the emaciated man standing before him. The guards put arm and leg manacles on Macklin and chained him to the other prisoner; neither man spoke as they walked down the hallway that echoed with the sounds of the heavy-booted guards marching ahead of and behind them.
Another guard waited behind the massive wire-mesh glass door at the end of the hallway. One of the two guards showed him a clipboard with a letter of instructions. The man on the other side of the door nodded, opened it, and escorted the group across this anteroom.
Four other prisoners, also in chains, waited by the opposite door. There were no windows in the room, only the other door—the one that opened to the outside. The outside door opened, and the six prisoners were shoved roughly toward an old Soviet-era military truck and made to climb into its cargo bay, a difficult task to accomplish with the chains shackling them all together.
So far so good, Macklin thought as he sat on one of the two wooden benches that ran the length of each side of the truck bed. The driver threaded the hasp of a large padlock through an end of the heavy chain, then snapped the lock onto a steel bracket in the truck bed.
The other guards went back inside the prison while the prison commandant walked around to the passenger side of the truck cab. The youthful driver had counted on one of the other guards accompanying him to share the driving. It was obvious now that he was going to have to do all the driving, and he also seemed a little flustered to have his boss riding with him.
“Sir, you are not going with the prisoners, are you?”
“Yes. These are important prisoners, and I want to make sure there are no problems.” That closed the matter.
Just as the driver started the engine, an officer came running out of the guardhouse and up to the passenger side of the truck. Macklin, who was seated all the way forward on the right side of the vehicle, could hear bits and pieces of Arabic conversation but couldn't make out what was being said over the sound of the engine; then suddenly, the engine stopped, the passenger door slammed, and a moment later the tailgate at the rear of the bed slammed down.
“All right, take the Americans off then,” said the clearly agitated prison commandant, who had dismounted and was once again standing behind the truck in the growing dusk.
The driver unlocked the chain. Four guards clambered aboard and started to remove two of the prisoners, who now had a look of absolute terror on their faces. One of them, the prisoner who had been taken out of his cell just before Macklin, tried to resist.
“No! No...we're supposed to go too! Don't do this to us! Take us with you—”
The protest was cut short by a guard's truncheon against the side of the man's head. The prisoner collapsed onto the steel bed of the old truck, and his unconscious body was dragged head first off the truck and dumped in the dirt. As the four helpless British prisoners watched in horror, the other American knelt beside his inert comrade. Suddenly a phalanx of guards came rushing out and dragged the two men back inside the building. It was all over in a matter of minutes, leaving Macklin and the other three sitting in the truck stunned.
The prison commandant tried to regain his composure. He ordered two of the guards to reshackle the remaining prisoners, one to each corner of the truck bed. When they had done so, the tailgate was once again slammed into place. The commandant resumed his place in the cab of the vehicle. Then the starter ground for a few seconds until the diesel engine caught, and the truck pulled onto the access road leading to the guarded fortress-like doors in front of the prison. They stopped while the commandant explained their trip to the armed guards at the gate and assured them all was in order. Macklin held his breath while the guards poked their rifles past the canvas flap in the back, and then, after counting the prisoners in the truck to make sure that the number corresponded with the corrected manifest handed to them by the commandant, they waved the truck through.
Everyone began to breathe again when the vehicle pulled onto the highway outside of the prison and started heading southwest toward the sunset.
Macklin heard snatches of conversation from the cab: the driver asking for the destination, and the commandant answering. The highway and engine noise made it impossible to get many details, but it sounded to Macklin as if they were headed toward someplace called Al Najaf.
Macklin had been in and out of many prisons during his captivity, but he'd never heard of Al Najaf. He hoped that was a good sign.
Macklin sat hunched against the canvas, giving him a meager shield from the breeze. The air, growing cold now, rustled the SAS commando's hair, and he shivered.
After a few miles, Macklin had gotten the attention of the prisoner shackled across the truck bed from him and said over the noise of the truck and the flapping canvas, “What about the Americans?”
The RAF pilot leaned as far forward as his bonds would allow and said, just loud enough to be heard, “I don't know. They were supposed to be part of the deal. It's a bloody shame…”
Captain Bruno Macklin shivered again. And this time he knew it wasn't from the cold.
TOO MANY SECRETS
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Duvdevan Headquarters
Tel-Nof Air Force Base, Israel
Sunday, 22 March 1998
1820 Hours, Local
At first, Ze'ev Rotem had simply felt confused. Now, he felt betrayed and angry. For the better part of the day, the IDF counter-terror expert had watched as his computer screen repeatedly indicated Peter Newman was no longer anywhere near the big Incirlik NATO Air Base in Turkey. Newman, the liar, had led Rotem to
believe that he was going to stay there, working on a way to rescue their wives.
Rotem knew the transponder wasn't lying. When transponders failed, the signal was simply lost. Instead, it was now plain that Newman had meant to deceive him. The tracking system clearly indicated the American had crossed Iskenderun Bay to Iskenderun, on the coast of Turkey. For the past hour, the computerized tracking program indicated that Newman had not moved from that spot.
Rotem decided to call Newman's special IDF mobile phone for an update to see what the American would tell him. But before he had a chance to place the call, someone knocked at his office door. He looked up as two men came inside and closed the door behind them. He recognized one of the two as Ben Yakib, a Mossad agent, and he guessed the other man was also working for the Israeli intelligence agency.
“Ze'ev, how are you?” Yakib said, extending his hand as Major Rotem stood to greet them. “Meet my associate, David. David, this is Major Ze'ev Rotem of the Duvdevan.”
“I heard about your wife...I'm sorry. What's the latest?”
Rotem briefly gave them a summary of what had taken place and what they were doing to find his wife. Then he asked, “What brings you here, Ben?”
“Mossad has received information that maybe your wife's kidnapping has something to do with one of our operations. Have you heard about the ‘Three Wise Men' operation?”
Rotem shook his head.
“We've gotten some pretty reliable information that Saddam has at least three nuclear weapons that can be made operational very quickly, posing an immediate threat to Israel,” David said. “Apparently they were acquired from an old Soviet stockpile several years ago by his murdered son-in-law, Hussein Kamil.”
Rotem's jaw hung open. “Three? Three nukes? But Kamil's been dead for almost three years. If this information is correct, why haven't we taken them out, like the Osarik reactor in '81?”
“Good question,” Yakib said. “And the answer is simple—we don't know where they are.”
“The good news, at least for now, is that no one else seems to know where they are either, not even the Iraqis,” David said.
“We got tipped to this because there now seems to be an all-out effort on the part of the Iraqis to find the missing weapons—which we believe to be tactical nuclear artillery rounds. We've had a team on this project for several weeks, apparently even before Saddam knew the weapons were in his country. I can't give you any more details about how we found out, but it's only a matter of time before these weapons are found,” Yakib said.
“I don't understand. How does this—”
“Ze'ev, we think that your wife's kidnapping has some sort of connection to the ‘Three Wise Men' operation, but we haven't been able to figure out what it is,” Yakib said. “We were able to learn about the matter because, even before the kidnapping, we had our men in Syria watching the growing cooperation between the PFLP and the Hezbollah. Then suddenly a few days ago, some European guy shows up in Damascus, and the PFLP guys drop everything to help him. As it turns out, he's likely the guy you shot when you raided the safe house in Hamah.”
“Well, if that's the case, I can tell you he's a Russian. But what makes you think there's a link?” said Rotem. “We haven't been able to connect any of the terrorists to Iraq. It looked to us as if they were just gangsters...kidnapping and break-ins were their specialty. The kid napping of my wife and the other woman seemed to be some kind of contract job for the Russian. In fact, I think my wife was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the American woman he wanted...in order to get to her husband.”
“Yes, we know that,” David said. “But our intelligence indicates that even that was a case of ‘wrong place and time.' The Russian didn't want the American woman or her husband because of any ties to Iraq. I don't think that the Russian or those PFLP terrorists even knew about the Iraqi nuclear weapons. No, we think something else was going on.
“We read your report about how this man Newman has been living here three years under Irish cover identity as John Clancy, because he was accused of being a wanted IRA terrorist named Gilbert Duncan,” David said. “Frankly, we were skeptical and, after checking, we found that there really is no Irish terrorist named Gilbert Duncan. In fact, the name and photograph appeared out of nowhere in a UN report and then the Interpol BOLO notice in March of '95.”
“So that made us wonder, who is this fellow, Clancy/Newman—and what is he doing here?” Yakib said. The two Mossad men looked at Rotem, and the silence widened uncomfortably.
“He's an American Marine,” Rotem said, finally.
“How do you know?” Yakib said.
“Ben, come on! How many years have we known each other? He told me. That's how I know. And then the Deputy Minister of Defense told me to let him help us get back our wives. Apparently he's some prétége of the general in charge of the American Central Command.”
“What else do you know about Newman?” David asked.
“Well, according to him, he was the commander of that UN assassination fiasco in Iraq back in March of'95. And, again according to him, the guy who set him up and compromised that mission is the same guy I shot a few days ago—a former KGB officer.”
Yakib nodded and looked at David. “That fits,” David said. “The Russian is probably Dimitri Komulakov, a former KGB general who served until June of '95 as a Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations. Mossad has a rather extensive file on him. Your U.S. Marine has good reason to dislike the man. But even your American friend probably doesn't know that the Russian may also have been the one who was behind the sale of the three weapons to Iraq in the first place, through one of his associates from Ukraine.”
Rotem's eyes widened. “You mean that the Russian kidnapped the women in order to get Newman to find those nukes for him?”
David shook his head. “We don't think so. In fact, the subject never even came up when they were in Hamah. They talked about a different assignment...”
Rotem looked at the younger Mossad agent. “You had an eavesdropping device planted at the PFLP safe house when Newman was there?”
Neither man answered, but Yakib returned to the original subject. “The Russian wanted Newman for a different job—and we're on top of it—but we can't talk about it. We also know Newman is working with the American military. They were the ones who contacted him a few weeks ago to go look for those nuclear weapons.”
Major Rotem was astonished at how much the Mossad knew. “Incredible...”
“We think that's why he left Incirlik this afternoon, headed for Syria. We believe he's going into Iraq to meet with either the CIA or the Kurdish resistance to get information on possible hiding places for the weapons.”
“And you've been tracking him, too?” the dumbfounded Israeli major asked.
“Yes.”
“Why have you told me all this?”
“Because we need to get closer to this American. At first we thought of removing him from the scene because he could complicate our own efforts to find the weapons. But then we figured, if we could assure a cooperative association, it might be useful to have him involved. Do you think you can gain his trust and have him keep you informed on his progress?”
“I don't know...I can try. How much can I tell him? If I'm going to get him to trust me, he'll have to be included in some of this or he won't let me in.”
“Well, don't let him know we're getting intelligence from a source with access to American information,” David said.
“I don't want to have anything to do with spying on the Americans. We've had enough problems with them over the Pollard matter. We don't need another mess like that.”
“Don't worry, Major,” David said, “our source isn't an American.”
Rotem shook his head, still doubtful. “Assuming I can gain the trust of this Marine, what can I tell him?”
“You can tell Newman about our eavesdropping when the Russian had him in the PFLP house in Hamah. And you can tell him about our own se
arches for the weapons. You can even let him know that the Russian may have been implicated in the original deal with Hussein Kamil. I think the American can be trusted with those secrets. He wouldn't want that information to be leaked either,” Yakib said.
“I can't believe this. The whole situation is bizarre. Do you think Mossad or the American can find those weapons before Saddam discovers them?”
“We'd better,” David said. “Because if we don't, and Saddam or one of his sons finds them first, we may have to take the most severe preemptive measures.”
Rotem's mouth dropped again. “The Jericho Sanction...,” he muttered, almost to himself.
“What do you know about that?” David asked sharply.
“Before I joined the Duvdevan, I was a strategic planner for the National Defense Committee.”
“I thought strategic planners were barred from serving in units where they stood the risk of capture,” David said.
“Most are, but an exception was made for me in deference to the way my father was killed.”
The two men from Mossad knew the story; they decided not to press the matter.
Ze'ev was uncertain how much the two men from Mossad knew about the Jericho Sanction, so he did not elaborate. If they understood, it would not have to be explained. And the way that David had asked the question led Ze'ev to believe the two of them knew precisely what he was talking about. Rotem was beginning to feel a sense of real dread, not for himself, not even for his wife—but for his country.