Against this background, Poggi explained to Eli, there could be no question of John Paul establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. Until he did, Eli reiterated, there could be no question of the pope being allowed to visit the Holy Land.
Yet it was a measure of the bridge building they were engaged upon that both men agreed the issue was not dead.
On April 13, 1986, John Paul did something no other pontiff had done. He entered the Synagogue of Rome on Lungotevere dei Cenci, where he was embraced by the city’s chief rabbi. Each dressed in their regalia, the two men walked side by side through the silent congregation to the teva, the platform from where the Torah is read.
In the back of the congregation sat Eli, who had played his part in bringing about this historic moment. Yet it still did not achieve what Israel wanted—papal diplomatic recognition.
That would only finally come in December 1993, when, despite the continuing objections of the Secretariat hard-liners, diplomatic ties were established.
By then, Nahum Admoni was no longer Mossad’s chief. His successor, Shabtai Shavit, continued the delicate process of trying to bring Mossad closer to the Vatican. Part of that maneuvering was to show the pope that both Israel and the PLO at long last had a genuine interest in reaching a settlement, and recognized the common threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Pope John Paul bore the physical scars of the truth of that.
Meanwhile, Mossad had been busy on a continent where the Vatican pinned so many hopes for the future—Africa. From there the Holy See one day expected to see emerge the Church’s first black pope. But it was there that Mossad had already shown itself the past master at the black art of playing off one intelligence service against another to secure its own position.
CHAPTER 13
AFRICAN CONNECTIONS
A few blocks from Nairobi’s venerable Norfolk Hotel, the Oasis Club had long been a favorite among Kenya’s business community. They could drink all night in its gloomy interior and take a bar girl to one of the rooms out back after checking her current medical certificate confirmed she was free of venereal disease.
Since 1964, the club had also received other visitors, Chinese in safari suits, slab-faced Russians, and men whose nationality could have been of any country around the Mediterranean basin. They were not there for the cold beer or what the club advertised as “the hottest girls in all-Africa.” These men worked for intelligence services fighting to gain a foothold in central Africa, where once only Britain’s MI6 had secretly operated. The newcomers represented the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Soviet KGB, and Mossad. Each service had its own agenda, playing one off against the other. No one had become better at this than Mossad.
All told, there were a dozen katsas scattered along the equator, operating from Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean to Freetown on the shore of the Atlantic. Possessing an impressive number of false passports, young and superbly fit, the operatives, as well as all their normal skills, had acquired the basics of field medicine and surgery to enable them to survive in the bush, where predatory lions and leopards roamed, as well as hostile tribesmen.
Mossad’s African adventure had begun shortly after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 and started to export his revolution. His first success began when his surrogate, John Okello, a self-styled “field marshal,” was plucked out of the jungle by a Castro recruiter, given a short course in guerrilla warfare in Havana, and told to go and seize the small island of Zanzibar off the East African coast. His sheer height and bulk—he was three hundred pounds—terrified the island’s small police force into submission. Okello’s ragtag army stamped their brutal authority on a population whose only weapons were the primitive tools they used to harvest the spices that made Zanzibar world famous. The island became Castro’s launchpad for penetrating the African mainland. There was a Chinese ethnic population in the port of Dar es Salaam, and their reports home about what was happening came to the notice of the Beijing government. Realizing the opportunity the embryonic revolution offered for China to gain a greater hold on the continent, the CSIS was ordered to establish itself in the region and to provide all possible support for the revolutionaries.
Meantime, Castro had set up a full-scale operation to Cubanize the now burgeoning black liberation movement. The focus was the port of Casablanca on the West African coast. Shiploads of Cuban weapons arrived and on the return voyages to Havana the boats were filled with guerrilla trainees from all over central Africa. Soon the CSIS was helping to select them.
The prospect of thousands of trained and well-armed revolutionaries being within a few hours’ striking distance of Israel was alarming to its politicians and intelligence services. But to provoke this guerrilla army when they had offered no direct threat could lead to a confrontation Israel did not want. With its hands already full fighting off the threat from Arab terrorists, to become embroiled in direct action against black revolutionaries was to be avoided. Meir Amit ordered his katsas in Africa to keep a close watch but not to become actively involved.
The arrival of the KGB on the scene changed all that. The Russians brought an offer would-be terrorists could not refuse: the opportunity to be trained at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. There they would receive the wisdom of the KGB’s best instructors in guerrilla tactics and how to exploit them under the guise of helping the dispossessed, powerless, and unelectable in democratic states. To help sell the idea, the KGB brought along some of the most successful graduates of Patrice Lumumba: Arab terrorists.
Meir Amit reinforced his African katsas with kidons. His new orders were to disrupt by all means possible the relations between the Russians and their African hosts and between the KGB and the CSIS; to kill Arab activists when the opportunity arose; and to foster relations with black African revolutionaries by promising them that Israel would assist their movements to progress beyond guerrilla tactics and allow their organizations to achieve political legitimacy. All Israel wanted in return was a guarantee it would not be attacked by these movements.
The Oasis Club had become part of the battle for the hearts and minds of African revolutionaries. The nights were filled with long discussions of how, without publicity, terrorism was a weapon firing only blanks, and of the need to never lose sight of the ultimate goal: freedom and independence. Within the club’s stifling atmosphere plots were hatched, deals made, targets identified for execution or destruction. Some victims would be ambushed driving on a dirt road, others killed in their beds. One day it would be a KGB agent, the next a CSIS spy. Each side blamed the other for what Mossad had done.
Back at the Oasis, the nights would continue as before, with new plans being made around the bamboo tables, with the rain rolling off the hills and beating on the tin roof. There was no need to whisper, but old habits died hard.
Meir Amit had briefed his agents on all he had learned of the CSIS. The service had a tradition of espionage extending back over 2,500 years. For centuries it had been a creature of the ruling emperor spying on his subjects. But with the arrival of first Mao and then Deng Xiaoping, China’s intelligence gathering, like so much else in the country, had taken a new direction. The CSIS began to expand its networks across the Pacific into the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and finally Africa.
These networks were used for more than espionage purposes: they were major routes for drug running and money laundering. With about half the world’s opium grown on the doorstep of the People’s Republic, in the Golden Triangle—Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar—the CSIS worked alongside Triad gangs to smuggle drugs into the West. Given Hong Kong’s position as one of the world’s major centers for money laundering, the CSIS had a perfect cover for concealing China’s profits from drug trafficking. That money helped to finance its operations in Africa. Those were, since 1964, ultimately under the control of the CSIS’s director general, Qiao Shi. A tall, stooped man with a taste for French cognac and Cuban cigars, he was a chief with hundreds of spies and a budget for bribery and blackmail rivaled on
ly by that of the KGB. The labor camps of central China were filled with those who had dared challenge Qiao. Mossad’s psycho-profile described a man whose entire career consisted of adroit, low-key moves.
CSIS activities in Africa were under the local command of Colonel Kao Ling, already a legendary figure in the service, having made his reputation in Nepal and India with his subversive tactics. Based in Zanzibar, Kao Ling had a lavish lifestyle and a succession of nubile young African women as mistresses. He moved across central Africa like a predator, disappearing for weeks at a time. His visits to Nairobi became occasions for wild parties at the Oasis. Sweet-smelling smoke from bundles of joss sticks filled the club. Delicacies imported directly from China were served. The African whores were dressed up in cheongsams; there were indoor fireworks and cabarets flown in from Hong Kong.
Guerrillas who had returned from Cuba were feted before disappearing into the African bush to wage war. One of them had a party trick of drinking a glass of the human blood he drained from executed enemies he had killed.
Meantime, Kao Ling was expanding his operations not only across the width of Africa, but also northward toward Ethiopia, South Yemen, and Egypt. He provided its terrorists with substantial sums of money to launch attacks on Israel. The CSIS regarded Israel as a pawn in the hands of Washington and a legitimate target for what Kao Ling called “my freedom fighters.”
Meir Amit decided Mossad should go head-to-head against the CSIS. First it wrecked a Chinese plot to overthrow the pro-West Hastings Banda regime in Malawi. Next it informed the Kenyan authorities about the full extent of the Chinese network in its midst. Later the Nairobi government would show its gratitude by granting overfly rights for Israeli air force planes to carry out their mission to Entebbe. The Oasis Club was closed down and its Chinese patrons put on planes out of the country, loudly protesting they were only businessmen. They were lucky; several CSIS operatives would remain permanently in Africa, killed by Mossad katsas and left out on the savannas for lions and leopards to consume.
The more the Chinese tried to fight back in other African countries, the more ruthless Mossad became. Kidons stalked CSIS operatives wherever they set up shop. In Ghana, a CSIS agent was shot dead as he left a discotheque with his girlfriend. In Mali another died in a car bomb; in Zanzibar, still the jewel in the CSIS crown, a fire consumed an apartment block where CSIS staff lived. On one of his field trips, Kao Ling himself narrowly escaped death when some instinct made him switch cars in Brazzaville in the Congo. The other vehicle exploded minutes later, killing its driver. In Zambia, a CSIS agent was left bound to a tree for lions to consume.
When Kwame Nkrumah, the pro-Chinese ruler of Ghana, was on a state visit to Beijing, Mossad orchestrated the uprising that led to both Nkrumah’s overthrow and the destruction of the CSIS infrastructure in the country.
For three years Mossad waged its deadly war of attrition against the CSIS over the length and breadth of Africa. There was no mercy on either side. When a CSIS hit team ambushed a Mossad katsa in the Congo, they fed him to crocodiles, filming his last moments in the water and sending the footage to the local Mossad station chief. He retaliated by personally firing a rocket into the building from where the CSIS operated. Three Chinese were killed.
Finally, through an intermediary, President Mobutu of Zaire, the CSIS let Mossad know it had no wish to fight anymore; rather, they shared a common interest in stemming Russian influence on the continent. The approach perfectly suited Mossad’s policy toward all superpowers, articulated in Meir Amit’s dictum: “Dividing them helps Israel to survive.”
While the CSIS and Mossad had battled each other, the KGB had taken further steps to take over Castro’s plans to Cubanize Africa. KGB chiefs and the politburo had met in the Kremlin and agreed that Russia would underwrite the entire Cuban economy. The terms were enough to ensure that a nation of seven million people became in hock to the Soviet Union. In return, Castro agreed to accept that Moscow’s brand of Communism rather than Beijing’s was the correct one for Africa. He also agreed to receive five thousand advisers who would “instruct” Cuba’s own security service, the DGI, on how to operate “correctly” in Africa.
The KGB began to work alongside Cubans throughout black Africa. Within six months every act of terrorism in Africa was controlled by the Russians. From the Middle Eastern camps it had set up to train terrorists, the KGB brought the very best to Africa to wage war against the apartheid regime of South Africa. Terrorists from Europe, Latin America, and Asia were also soon providing their expertise in Angola, Mozambique, and countries bordering South Africa.
According to Meir Amit, “Matters were really heating up below the equator.” He realized it could only be a matter of time before these battle-hardened mercenaries would turn their attention to Israel. The offer from the CSIS to collaborate against a common enemy, the KGB and its terrorists, was one the Mossad chief gratefully accepted. The Chinese began to provide details about Arab movements in and out of Africa. Some were killed by the usual Mossad methods of car bombs or explosives placed in hotel rooms. On one occasion, Mossad placed a bomb in the toilet of a mercenary suffering from “Congo stomach,” a particularly unpleasant form of dysentery. The lower half of his body was blown to pieces when he pulled the flush in a Khartoum hotel.
Mossad kept its side of the bargain, tipping off the CSIS that Moscow intended to offer a massive financial aid package to one of the poorest countries on earth, Somalia. Beijing promptly doubled the offer. Next Mossad helped China in Sudan, where Moscow had established a bridgehead through President Nimeri’s military government. But when the dictator refused to become completely dependent on the Russians, the KGB planned a coup. Mossad informed the CSIS, who told Nimeri. He expelled all Russian diplomats and suspended Soviet Bloc aid schemes.
Having set the two bastions of Communism at each other’s throat while at the same time, as Meir Amit later put it, “working our way into the African woodwork,” Mossad turned its attention to the one intelligence service in Africa it had come to look upon as a friend: the Bureau of State Security, BOSS, the most feared arm of South Africa’s security apparatus. BOSS matched Mossad in blackmail, sabotage, forgery, kidnapping, prisoner interrogation, psychological warfare, and assassinations. Like Mossad, BOSS had a free hand in how it dealt with its opponents. The two services quickly became bedfellows. Often operating in tandem, they moved through Africa, enjoined by a secret “understanding” between Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, and the Pretoria regime.
The first result had been the export of uranium ore to Dimona. The shipments were carried on commercial El Al flights from Johannesburg to Tel Aviv, and listed on manifests as agricultural machinery. South African scientists traveled to Dimona and were the only outsiders who knew the true purpose of the facility. When South Africa tested a crude nuclear device on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, Israeli scientists were present to monitor the blast. In 1972, Ezer Weizman, then a senior official in the Israeli defense ministry, met Prime Minister P. W. Botha in Pretoria to ratify a further “understanding.” If either country was attacked and required military assistance, the other would come to its aid. Israel supplied the South African army with substantial quantities of U.S.-manufactured arms and in return was granted permission to test the first nuclear devices produced by Dimona at the site in the Indian Ocean.
By then, Mossad had deepened its own relationship with BOSS. While never able to wean the bureau’s agents from their brutish methods of interrogation, Mossad instructors introduced them to a range of other methods that had worked in Lebanon and elsewhere: sleep deprivation; hooding; forcing a suspect to stand at a wall for long periods; squeezing genitals; a variety of mental torture ranging from threats to mock executions. Mossad katsas traveled with BOSS units into neighboring black African countries on sabotage missions. Kidons showed the South Africans how to carry out killings that left no embarrassing trails. When Mossad offered to locate African National Congress (ANC) leaders living in
exile in Britain and Europe for BOSS to kill, the bureau welcomed the idea. The Pretoria government finally vetoed the proposal, fearing it would lose what support it had among die-hard Conservative politicians in London.
Both Mossad and BOSS were driven by an obsessive belief that Africa was lurching leftward toward a revolution that would eventually engulf both their countries. To avoid that happening, any method was permissible. Feeding off each other’s fears, both services gave no quarter and shared a self-perpetuating concept that only they knew how to deal with the enemy. Between them, BOSS and Mossad became the two most feared foreign intelligence services in Africa.
This alliance did not sit well with Washington. The CIA feared it could affect its own efforts to maintain a hold on the black continent. The decolonization of Africa in the early 1960s had produced a new interest in Africa within the Agency—and a huge increase in its clandestine activities. An African division was formed, and by 1963, CIA stations had been established in every African nation.
One of the first to serve in Africa was Bill Buckley, later to be kidnapped and murdered by Hezbollah terrorists in Beirut. Buckley would recall, shortly before his capture, “These were really crazy times in Africa with everybody jockeying for position. We were late to the party, and the Mossad looked at us as if we were gate-crashers.”
In Washington, the State Department made discreet but determined efforts to reduce Israeli influence in Africa. It leaked details of how several hundred Jews from South Africa had flown north to help Israel during the Suez War. Twenty black African nations broke off diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. Among them was Nigeria. The severance could have been a severe blow to Israel: Nigeria provided over 60 percent of Israel’s oil supplies in return for arms that had originally been supplied by the United States to Israel. Despite the diplomatic breach, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir agreed to continue secretly arming Nigeria in return for the continued flow of oil. To Buckley it was a “prime example of realpolitik.” Another was how Mossad set about shoring up its longtime partner BOSS. In the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Mossad found a substantial quantity of documents revealing close links between the PLO and the ANC, long BOSS’s bête noire. The incriminating material was turned over to the bureau, enabling its agents to arrest and torture hundreds of ANC members.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 30