Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Only their commanding officer, Major General Danny Yatom, knew the route they would fly to the border with Iraq. Yatom had been a member of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Israel’s Green Berets, who in 1972 had successfully stormed a hijacked Belgium airliner at Tel Aviv airport. Other commandos in the operation included Benyamin Netanyahu. The friendship with Israel’s future prime minister would lead to Yatom later being given command of Mossad, a position that would also end his relationship with Netanyahu. But that was all in the future.

  On that December morning, while Shalom continued to peer out over the rim of the wadi, he had no inkling that the long and dangerous journey that had brought him deep into hostile territory had been decided in a conference room in the Kirya, the Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv.

  As well as Yatom, present had been Amnon Shahak, the head of Aman, military intelligence, and Shabtai Shavit. They had convened to discuss the latest information from a deep-penetration informer inside Iran’s terrorist network in Europe. The person—only Shavit knew if the informer was a man or a woman—was known by the letter “I.” All that Shahak and Yatom would have deduced was that the informer must have access to the fortified complex on the third floor of the Iranian embassy in Bonn, Germany. The complex contained six offices and a communications room. The entire area had been reinforced to withstand a bomb blast and it was permanently manned by twenty Revolutionary Guards, whose task it was to coordinate Iran’s terrorist activities in western Europe. They had recently tried to ship a ton of Semtex and electronic detonators out of Lebanon into Spain. The shipment was to replace explosives for a number of pro-Iranian terrorist groups in European countries. On a tip-off from Mossad, Spanish customs had boarded the ship as it sailed into territorial waters.

  But by the summer of 1990, Iran was also providing through the Bonn embassy huge cash disbursements to increase the influence of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in Europe. The amounts involved were all the more surprising given that Iran had been economically crippled by its eight-year war with Iraq, which had ended in a cease-fire in 1988.

  But on that November day in the Kirya’s guarded conference room, it was not a new threat from Iran that the double agent had discovered. It was one from Iraq. “I” had obtained a copy of a detailed Iraqi battle plan stolen by Iran’s own secret intelligence service from Baghdad military headquarters outlining how Scud missiles would be used to launch chemical and biological weapons against Iran, Kuwait, and Israel.

  Uppermost in the mind of each man in the conference room was one question: Could the information be trusted? “I” had proven to be sound in all the previous data he had provided. But, important though the information had been, it paled against what “I” had now sent. Yet was the battle plan part of a plot by Iranian intelligence to drive Israel into launching a preemptive attack against Iraq? Had “I” been unmasked and was he being used by Iran?

  Trying to answer that question was also fraught with risk. It would need time to brief a katsa to make contact with “I.” It might be weeks before that was possible; bringing an informer out of deep cover was a slow and delicate process. And if “I” proved to have remained loyal, his safety could have still been jeopardized. Yet, the consequences of acting on the Iraqi document without checking could be calamitous for Israel. A preemptive strike would certainly lead to an Iraqi retaliation—and could destroy the coalition being laboriously cobbled together in Washington to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. Many of its Arab members were likely to support Iraq against Israel.

  The only way to discover the truth about the stolen battle plan had been to send Shalom into Iraq. Skimming above the desert, his helicopter had flown across a strip of Jordan in the deep black of night. Coated with stealth paint, its engine noise muffled, the Sikorsky was virtually undetectable to even the most sophisticated Jordanian radars. Flying on silent mode so that its rotor blades made almost no sound, the helicopter had reached its dropping point at the Iraqi border.

  Shalom had disappeared into the night. Despite all his training, nothing had quite prepared him for that moment: he was on his own; to survive he had to respect his surroundings. A desert was like no other place on earth for surprises. A sandstorm could appear in moments, changing the landscape, burying him alive. One kind of sky meant one thing, another something quite different. He would do his own weather forecasting; he would have to do everything by himself and learn to let his ears adjust to the silence, to remember that the silence of the desert was like no other. And always he must remember that his first mistake could be his last.

  Three days after leaving the helicopter, on that cold December dawn, Shalom lay prostrate in the Iraqi wadi. Beneath his hupta he wore goggles; their lenses gave the dark landscape a crepuscular definition. The only weapon Shalom carried was one the Sarami would expect to find on him: a hunting knife. He had been taught to kill with that in a number of ways. Whether he would bother to use it against a superior force, he did not know—any more than whether he could turn it on himself. Or simply commit suicide with the lethal pill he carried. Since Eli Cohen’s torture and death, a katsa operating in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Syria had been given the right to kill himself rather than fall into the hands of barbaric interrogators. Meanwhile, Shalom continued to watch and wait.

  The nomads in their camps half a mile away beyond the wadi had begun to recite their first prayers of the day. Already the bark of their dogs carried faintly on the wind, but the animals would not venture beyond the camp until the sun was above the horizon: behavioral patterns were among the first lessons Shalom had learned in desert survival.

  According to the information he had been given at his briefing, the convoy should appear between the encampment and the hills to his left. To an untutored eye, the track they would travel over was invisible. To Shalom it was as clear as a well-signposted road: the tiny rumplings of sand were created by desert moles burrowing between vehicle tracks.

  The sun was high when the convoy finally appeared: a Scud missile launcher and its support vehicle. It was still about half a mile away when it stopped. Shalom began to photograph and time what he saw.

  It took the Iraqi crew fifteen minutes to launch the Scud. It rose in an arc and disappeared over the horizon. Minutes later the convoy was moving at speed toward the hills. In a few minutes that Scud could have hit Tel Aviv or any other Israeli city if the launch had not been a practice. Shalom then began the long journey back to Tel Aviv.

  Six weeks later, on January 12, 1991, Shalom was among a joint team of Mossad and Aman intelligence officers who sat around the conference table at the United States Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC (its staff called it “jaysock”), at Pope Air Force Base, Georgia. JSOC commanded the Green Berets and the SEALs, and had maintained a close working relationship with Mossad.

  After Shalom had returned from Iraq, Shavit had informed General Earl Stiner, operations commander of JSOC, that Saddam was doing more than posturing. The hard-charging general had a folksy style and a salty language the Israelis liked. But in a war room, his Tennessee drawl swiftly gave way to shrewd decisions. As the nation’s top commando, he knew the value of good intelligence, and his own experience of the Middle East had convinced him Mossad offered the best.

  Since Saddam’s incursion into Kuwait, Stiner had regularly communicated with his Israeli contacts. Some of them went back to 1983, when, as a newly promoted brigadier general, he had been secretly sent by the Pentagon to Beirut to report directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on how far the United States should become embroiled in the Lebanon war.

  Later, he had worked closely with Mossad during the Achille Lauro hijacking, swooping down with his Delta Force commandos on an Italian air force base in Sicily where the hijackers had stopped over in an airliner on their way to freedom out of Egypt. Italian troops had stopped Stiner from capturing the hijackers, and there had nearly been a shoot-out. Thwarted, Stiner had flown in hot pursuit of the airliner in his own military transport,
only abandoning the chase when both planes entered Rome’s airspace and its air traffic controllers threatened to shoot down the Delta Force aircraft for “air piracy.” In 1989 Stiner had been the ground commander for the invasion of Panama, and had been responsible for the swift capture of Manuel Noriega.

  Only Joint Chiefs chairman General Colin Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf, in charge of the coalition forces, knew about Stiner’s relationship with Mossad. While Schwarzkopf battled to create a defensive line along the Saudi border to deal with a thrust out of Kuwait by Iraqi forces, Stiner’s intelligence officers were working closely with Mossad to form resistance movements inside Iraq to try to topple Saddam.

  When Major General Wayne Downing, commander of JSOC, called the meeting to order in the conference room, everyone knew that, as the hours ticked by to the deadline for war set by the United Nations for Tuesday, January 15, 1991, the world was conducting a dialogue with the deaf in Baghdad. Saddam continued to welcome what he predicted would be “the mother of all wars.”

  Downing began by reminding his listeners that Washington still required Israel to remain out of the war. In return there would be long-term political and economic benefits for doing so.

  The immediate response from the Israelis was to produce a set of Shalom’s enlarged photographs of the Scud launch. Then came their questions. Supposing Saddam fitted a nuclear warhead to a Scud? Mossad was satisfied Iraq had already built the facilities needed to manufacture a crude device. It also had the capability to fit chemical or biological warheads to its Scuds. Was Israel supposed to wait for that to happen? What was the coalition force’s plan to deal with the Scuds before they were launched? Did the Americans have any idea just how many Scuds Saddam had?

  One of Downing’s intelligence officers said their “best estimate” was about fifty.

  “We think Saddam has about five times that number, maybe even five hundred in all,” replied Shabtai Shavit.

  The stunned silence in the room was broken by Downing’s question. Could he pinpoint them? Shavit could not be more specific than to suggest the Scuds were sited in the Iraqi western desert and in the east of the country. The Americans agreed with Downing that “that was a lot of desert to hide them in.”

  “Then the sooner you start, the better,” Shavit said, not bothering to conceal his frustration.

  Downing promised to pursue the matter vigorously, and the meeting closed with the repeated reminder that Israel must stay out of the coming conflict—but all the intelligence Mossad and Aman could gather would be welcomed. In the meantime, they could be reassured the United States and its partners would deal with the Scuds. The Israeli team flew home feeling they had gotten the worst end of the deal.

  Shortly after 3:00 A.M. on the morning of January 17, 1991—hours after the start of the Desert Storm conflict—seven Scuds hit Tel Aviv and Haifa, destroying 1,587 buildings and injuring forty-seven civilians.

  Later that morning Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir icily asked over a hot line to Washington how many Israelis had to die before President Bush did something. The short call ended with Bush pleading for restraint and Shamir warning that Israel would not remain much longer on the sideline.

  Shamir had already ordered Israeli jets to patrol the northern airspace with Iraq. Bush immediately promised that if the aircraft were recalled, he would send “in double quick time” two Patriot antimissile batteries “to further defend your cities,” and the coalition forces “will destroy the remaining Scuds in days.”

  Missiles continued to fall on Israel. On January 22, one landed in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. Ninety-six civilians were injured, several seriously; three died of heart attacks. The sound of the explosions carried to Mossad headquarters. In the Kirya, Amnon Shahak called a direct line number to the National Military Command Center on the second floor of the Pentagon. His call was even shorter than Shamir’s; the gist was: Do something or Israel will.

  Hours later, Downing and his commandos were on their way to Saudi Arabia. Waiting for them in the tiny Iraqi border village of Ar Ar was Shalom. He was dressed in British army fatigues. He never explained, and no one asked, how he had gotten them. The news he brought was electrifying. He could confirm there were four Scud launchers less than thirty minutes’ flying time away.

  “Let’s go!” Downing said. “Let’s go fry some butts!”

  Chinooks helicoptered the team into the Iraqi desert, together with their specially adapted Land Rover to operate in a terrain that mostly resembled a moonscape. In an hour, they had located the Scud launchers. Over a secure radio the commando leader called up U.S. fighter-bombers armed with cluster munitions and thousand-pound bombs. A hovering Black Hawk helicopter videoed the kills.

  Hours later a copy of the tape was being viewed by Shamir in his office in Tel Aviv.

  In another telephone call from Bush, the prime minister conceded he had seen enough to keep Israel out of the war. Neither man mentioned the role Mossad had played.

  In the remaining days of the Iraqi war, the Scuds killed or injured almost 500 people—including 128 Americans dead or wounded from a missile that landed in Saudi Arabia; over 4,000 Israelis were left homeless.

  The aftermath of the Iraqi war saw Mossad and Aman under fierce attack during secret sessions of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Oversight Intelligence Subcommittee. Both services were roundly condemned for failing to predict the invasion of Kuwait or to provide “sufficient warning” of the Iraqi threat. Leaks from within the committee room spoke of slanging matches involving Amnon Shahak, head of Aman, and Shabtai Shavit, and committee members. After one clash, the Mossad chief had come close to resigning. But all was not lost for the embattled Shavit.

  Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare, LAP, usually called upon to spread disinformation and blacken the character of Israel’s enemies with foreign journalists, focused its skills on the local media. Favored reporters were called and told it was not a question of there having been too little intelligence, it was a matter of the Israeli public having grown accustomed to being spoiled for choice in that area.

  Familiar truths were trundled out by LAP: no other country proportionate to its size and population analyzed or used as much intelligence as did Israel; no service could match Mossad in understanding the mind-set and intentions of the country’s enemies, or equal its record for frustrating the plans of those who had plagued Israel for almost fifty years. It was rousing stuff and found ready space in a media only too grateful to be given “inside track” information.

  A rush of articles appeared reminding readers that, despite defense cuts introduced shortly before the Iraqi war, Mossad had continued to manfully battle on in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. People had been able to read between the lines: Mossad was being hampered because the politicians had mishandled the defense budget. It was a familiar theme, and always guaranteed to work. To a still badly frightened population recovering from the Scud attacks, claims that a lack of funding lay at the root of what they had suffered turned criticism away from Mossad back onto the politicians. Money suddenly became available. Israel, so long dependent on U.S. satellite data, put its own spy satellite program on the fast track. The first priority was to launch a military satellite to specifically monitor Iraq. A new antimissile missile, the Hetz, was put into mass production. Several Patriot batteries were ordered from the United States.

  The intelligence subcommittee wilted in the face of the barrage of pro-Mossad publicity. Shavit emerged triumphant—and set about reaffirming Mossad’s position. Deep-penetration katsas in Iraq were ordered to try to discover how much of Saddam’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons had survived allied bombardment.

  They discovered that Iraq still possessed quantities of anthrax, smallpox, the Ebola virus, and chemical nerve agents capable of killing not only every man, woman, and child in Israel, but a sizable proportion of the entire population on earth.

  The question that faced Shabtai, the other heads o
f the Israeli intelligence communities, and Israel’s politicians was deciding whether to make public the information. To do so would certainly create fear and panic in Israel, and could provoke other widespread negative effects. The country’s tourist industry had been virtually wiped out by the Iraqi war; the Israeli economy was close to rock bottom and new foreign investment was slow in coming. To reveal that Israel was still in range of deadly weapons would hardly attract tourists or money into the country.

  Further, the breakup of the Gulf War coalition, whose Arab members had never been less than cool to waging war against fellow Arabs, had resulted in growing sympathy for the undoubted plight of Iraqis. The evidence of mass destruction caused by coalition bombing and the continued suffering of innocent civilians had stoked up powerful emotions elsewhere in the Middle East, and renewed Arab enmity against Israel. Moreover, if Tel Aviv were to publish details of Iraq’s still-intact chemical and biological weapons, it would be seen in those pro-Arab Western countries as an attempt by Israel to persuade the United States and Britain to stage new assaults on Iraq.

  The issue of going public about Saddam’s arsenal was also influenced by the carefully orchestrated secret discussions to bring an end to hostilities between the PLO and Israel. By 1992, these discussions had moved to Norway, and were progressing well, though it would be a full year before an agreement was reached and publicly ratified in October 1993, when Yasser Arafat shook hands with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, under the benevolent smile of President Clinton. For each man it was a diplomatic triumph.