The plane took off in good flying conditions. On board were the pilot, a copilot, and their three passengers. One hundred miles into the flight, the Cessna suddenly developed engine trouble and moments later crashed, killing Nir and the pilot. Stanton was seriously injured, the copilot and Huntado less so. By the time the first rescuer, Pedro Cruchet, arrived on the scene, Huntado had disappeared—another of those figures never to be seen again. How exactly Cruchet came to be first on the scene was yet another twist. He claimed to work for Nucal—but the company’s plant was a considerable distance away. He could not explain why he had been so close to the crash site. Asked by police to prove his identity, he pleaded he had lost his ID at a bullfight. It turned out Cruchet was an Argentinian living in Mexico illegally. By the time that had been established he, too, had vanished. At the crash site, Cruchet had recovered and identified Nir’s body, and he had accompanied Stanton to the hospital. He was with her when a local reporter called seeking further details.
Joel Bainerman, the publisher of the Israeli political intelligence digest, would claim: “A young woman indicated Cruchet was present. When she went to get him, another woman appeared at the door and told the journalist that Cruchet wasn’t there and that she had never heard of him. The second woman reiterated that Stanton’s presence on the Cessna was purely a coincidence and that she had no connection with ‘the Israeli.’ She refused to identify herself other than to say she was in Mexico as a tourist from Argentina.”
Stanton added to the mystery. She told crash investigators, according to Israeli journalist Ran Edelist in 1997: “While injured and shocked, she saw Amiram Nir a few meters away, waving and comforting her in a normal voice. ‘Everything will be okay. Help is on the way!’ She was twice assured in the days following that Nir was alive.”
Nir’s body was flown back to Israel for burial. Over one thousand mourners attended his funeral and, in his eulogy, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin spoke of Nir’s “mission to as-yet-unrevealed destinations on secret assignments and of secrets which he kept locked in his heart.”
Had Amiram Nir been murdered to make sure he never revealed those secrets? Was it even Nir’s body in the coffin? Or had he been killed before the crash? And if so, by whom? In Tel Aviv and Washington, a blanket of silence continues to greet all such questions.
Two days after the crash, Ari Ben-Menashe emerged from a post office in downtown Santiago, Chile. He was accompanied by two of the bodyguards he now felt it important to have to protect him. Suddenly:
“The window I was walking past shattered. Then something smashed into the metal custom-built briefcase I was carrying. The two bodyguards and I dived to the floor, realizing someone was shooting at us.”
Stanton was the next to believe her life was in danger. According to Edelist, his intelligence contacts had told him she “became a recluse, underwent plastic surgery, and changed her appearance.”
Increasingly, Mossad believed the CIA had murdered Nir. According to Ari Ben-Menashe, “Israeli intelligence has always believed it was a well-executed CIA operation. Nir’s death ensured there would be no embarrassment for Reagan and Bush at the trial of Oliver North.”
Support for this theory came from a U.S. Navy commander who had accompanied Nir to Tehran on the fruiterer’s mission to free the Beirut hostages. The commander’s story revolved around his claim that Nir had met with George Bush, then vice president, on July 29, 1986, at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, to brief him about the ongoing sale of U.S. arms via Israel to Iran. According to the writer Joel Bainerman, “Nir was secretly taping the entire conversation. And this provided him with evidence linking Bush to the arms-for-hostages deal. At the meeting were McKee and Gannon, who would die in the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie.”
Bainerman would describe a visit the commander had made to CIA headquarters in Langley where he had met Oliver North some months before the colonel faced trial. In the writer’s words, the commander asked North “what had happened to Nir. North told him that Nir was killed because he threatened to go public with the recording of the Jerusalem meeting.”
Journalists who have tried to question North on the matter have been brushed aside. Bush’s aides have over the years maintained a similar attitude: anything the former president of the United States has to say on Irangate has already been stated.
In late July 1991, the home of Nir’s widow, Judy, was burgled. His recordings and documents were the only items stolen. Police said the break-in was “highly professional.” Judy Nir said she was certain the stolen material contained “information that would attack certain people.” She refused to be drawn beyond that. The material has never been recovered. The question of who stole it has remained unanswered.
For the next four years, Shabtai Shavit continued to run Mossad, making every effort to keep it out of the headlines and free of the attention of the mythmakers as it continued to pursue its information gathering.
Away from the public gaze, the old jockeying for power within the Israeli intelligence community had lost none of its energy. Politicians who still sat on the oversight subcommittee on intelligence remembered how Shavit had bested them after the Gulf War. Memories are as long in Israel as anywhere else, and the whispering campaign against Shavit had continued: his focus was too narrow; the back channel to the CIA was barely ajar; he wasn’t good at delegating; he was too aloof from the rank and file, among whom morale was falling.
Shabtai Shavit chose to ignore the warning signs. Suddenly, on a pleasant spring morning in 1996, he was summoned to the office of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and told he was being replaced. Shavit made no attempt to argue; he had seen enough of Netanyahu to know that would be pointless. He had only asked one question: Who was his successor?
Netanyahu had replied: Danny Yatom. The day of the Prussian had arrived for Mossad.
CHAPTER 17
BUNGLEGATE
Dawn was breaking on Thursday, January 16, 1998, when the government car pulled away from the white-painted house in an exclusive suburb close to the electrified fence marking the border between Israel and Jordan. In one of those twists of history that abound in Israel, the house stood on grounds where the spies of Gideon, the great Jewish warrior, had prepared their intelligence-gathering missions to enable the Israelis to defeat overwhelmingly superior forces. Now, Danny Yatom was setting off to finalize an operation that could save his career.
Beginning with the debacle on the streets of Amman in July 1997, when a kidon team failed to assassinate the Hamas leader Khalid Meshal, the past seven months had been, Yatom had told friends, “like living on the edge of the block waiting for the ax to fall.”
His executioner-in-waiting was Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Their once-close friendship had soured to the point where not a day passed without snipers in the prime minister’s office targeting the Mossad chief with the same whisper: It was only a matter of time before he was sacked. Other men would have resigned. But not Yatom. Proud and imperious, he was prepared to stand on his record. There were so many successful operations he had ordered that no outsider knew about. “It’s only the failures that get publicly dumped on my doorstep,” he had bitterly told his friends.
They, together with his family, had seen the strain in him: the sleepless nights; the sudden, unexpected bursts of anger, quickly extinguished; the restless pacing; the long silences; all the outward signs of a man under huge strain.
Two years into the job, he still faced pressures no other Mossad director had. Consequently, his own staff were increasingly demoralized, and he could no longer count on their loyalty. The media were circling, sensing he was wounded, but holding back, waiting to see when the one man Yatom had trusted, but no longer, would finally wield the ax. So far Benyamin Netanyahu had only kept an icy distance.
But on this cold February morning, Yatom knew his time was running out. That was why he needed the operation he had nurtured these past weeks to work. It would show the prime minister his spymaster had not lo
st his skills. But none of this showed on Yatom’s face; despite all he had endured, he kept his emotions under lock and key. Seated in a corner of the backseat of the Peugeot, in repose Yatom looked genuinely intimidating in black leather bomber jacket, open-neck shirt, and gray pants. It was how he usually dressed for work; clothes had never interested him.
His receding hair, steel-framed glasses, and thin lips went well with his nickname—the Prussian. He knew he still commanded by something close to fear. Beside him on the seat were the morning newspapers: for once there had been no speculation about his future.
The Peugeot made its swift way down through the hills toward Tel Aviv, the sun reflecting off the burnished bodywork; morning and evening the chauffeur polished the vehicle to mirror perfection. The Peugeot had bulletproof windows, armor-plated coachwork, and anti-mine flooring. Only the official car of the prime minister had similar protection.
Benyamin Netanyahu had Yatom confirmed in the post of director general of Mossad within minutes of Shabtai Shavit’s going. In Yatom’s first weeks in office, he had spent at least one evening a week with the prime minister. They had sat over cold beers and olives and put the world to rights, and remembered the times when Yatom had commanded “Bibi” in an IDF commando unit. Afterward Netanyahu had gone on to become Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and then, during the Gulf War, a self-styled expert on international terrorism, even broadcasting with a gas mask over his face in case a Scud should fall nearby. Yatom, for his part, had said how much he relished the role of the outsider who had been given the most important post in the country’s intelligence community: the quintessential career soldier, he had served as military attaché to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Yatom and Netanyahu had seemed inseparable until two embarrassments had left a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. There had been the bungled affair in Amman. The operation had been ordered by Netanyahu. When the attack failed and Mossad had been caught in the spotlight of the world’s media, the prime minister blamed Yatom for the debacle. He had taken the criticism without flinching; privately he had told friends that Netanyahu had “the courage of other people’s convictions.”
A second and, in many ways, a graver embarrassment surfaced. In October 1997, a senior Mossad officer, Yehuda Gil, was discovered to have invented, for the past twenty years, top secret reports from a nonexistent “agent” in Damascus. Gil had drawn substantial sums from Mossad’s slush fund to pay the man, pocketing the money for himself. The scam had only come to light when a Mossad analyst studying the “agent’s” latest report that Syria was about to attack Israel had become suspicious. Gil had been confronted by Yatom and made a full confession.
Netanyahu had pounced. In a stormy meeting in the prime minister’s office, Yatom had been brutally questioned over the way he ran Mossad. Netanyahu had brushed aside the argument that Gil had successfully carried off his deception under four previous directors. Yatom should have known, Netanyahu had shouted. It was another foul-up. Staff in the prime minister’s office could not recall such a dressing-down. The details had been leaked to the media, causing further embarrassment to Yatom.
How different it had been when he had come into office and his name had been splashed across the world’s media. Reporters had called him a safe pair of hands and there had been speculation that he would assume the mantle of the great spymasters of yesteryear—Amit, Hofi, and Admoni—and once more rekindle the fire Shabtai Shavit had deliberately damped down.
The proof was not long in coming. Despite the Oslo accord giving the PLO a homeland—the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—Yatom had increased the number of Arab agents to spy on Yasser Arafat. He had ordered Mossad programmers to develop new software to hack into PLO computers, and create electronic “microbes” to destroy, should the need arise, its communication systems. He had asked scientists in research and development to focus on “infowar” weapons that could insert black propaganda into enemy broadcasting systems. He wanted Mossad to be part of the brave new world where the weapons of the future would be in keyboards that shut down an enemy’s ability to mobilize its military forces.
Yatom had returned to Mossad’s old stomping ground, Africa: in May 1997, the service had provided important intelligence that had helped rebel forces to topple President Mobutu of Zaire, who for so long had dominated central Africa. Mossad also increased its ties with Nelson Mandela’s security service, helping it to target white extremists, many of whom it had previously worked with. Yatom also increased the budget and strength of the special Mossad unit, Al, responsible for stealing the latest U.S. scientific research.
At fifty-one years of age, there was something unstoppable about Danny Yatom; tireless and ruthless, he had the chutzpah of a street fighter. That was typified by his response to the discovery by the FBI in January 1997 of Mega—the high-level Mossad deep-penetration agent within the Clinton administration. He had told the Committee of the Heads of Services, whose role included preparing a fallback position in the event of an operational failure, all that needed to be done was to make sure that the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States countered demands from Arab organizations that the hunt for Mega must be pursued as vigorously as the FBI dealt with spies from other countries. Jewish dinner guests at the White House dinner table—Hollywood stars, attorneys, editors—all lost no opportunity to remind the president of the damage an ill-conceived manhunt would produce—even more if one of his own staff was arrested. In a presidency already besieged by scandal, that could be an opening that could finally destroy Clinton. Six months later, on July 4, 1997, Independence Day in the United States, Yatom had learned that the FBI had quietly downgraded its hunt for Mega.
Then two months later had come the disaster on the streets in Amman, swiftly followed by the scandal of the agent-who-never-was. Danny Yatom had begun to seek a new operation that would reestablish his authority. Now, on that January morning in 1998, he was on his way to put the finishing touches in place.
Planning for the operation had begun a month before, when an Arab informer in southern Lebanon had met his Mossad controller and told him that Abdullah Zein had made a brief visit to Beirut to meet with Hezbollah leaders in the city. Afterward Zein had driven south to see his parents in the small town of Ruman. The occasion had been one for celebration: Zein had not been home for a year. He had shown his relatives photographs of his young Italian wife and their apartment in Europe.
The controller had steeled himself not to rush the informer; the Arab way was to give his information in all its fine detail: how Zein had left his parents’ home the next day laden with Arab delicacies and gifts for his wife, how Hezbollah had escorted him all the way to Beirut Airport to catch the flight back to Switzerland.
Was that Zein’s final destination? the controller had finally asked. Yes, Bern, in Switzerland. And that was where Zein lived? The informer thought so, but could not be certain.
Nevertheless, it was Mossad’s first positive news about Zein since he had left Lebanon to organize Hezbollah’s fund-raising activities among wealthy Shiite Muslims in Europe. Their money, along with that from Iran, funneled through its embassy in Bonn, paid for Hezbollah’s war of attrition against Israel. In the past year, Zein had been variously reported as operating from Paris, Madrid, and Berlin. But each time Yatom had sent someone to check, there had been no trace of the slim thirty-two-year-old with a taste for snappy Italian-cut suits and customized shoes.
Yatom had dispatched a katsa to Bern from Brussels, where Mossad had recently transferred its control center for European operators from Paris. The katsa had spent two fruitless days in Bern searching for Zein. He decided to extend his inquiries. He drove south to Liebefeld, a pleasant dormitory town. The katsa had last passed through its streets five years before, on his way out of Switzerland after being part of a team that had destroyed metal vats in a bioengineering company near Zurich; the vats were designed to manufacture bacteria and had been ordered by Iran. The team had destroyed the vats with ex
plosive devices. The company had canceled all its contracts with Iran.
In Liebefeld, the katsa had shown that good intelligence work often depended on patient footwork. He had walked the streets, looking for anyone who could be from the Middle East. He had checked the phone book for a listing for Zein. He had telephoned house-leasing agencies to see if they had rented or sold a property to anyone of that name. He had called the local hospitals and clinics to see if a patient of that name had been admitted. Each time he had said he was a relative. With still nothing to show for a day’s work, the katsa had decided to make another sweep of the town, this time in his car.
He had driven for some time through the streets when he spotted a dark-skinned man, wrapped against the night cold, driving a Volvo in the opposite direction. There had been only the briefest of glimpses, but the katsa was convinced that the driver was Zein. By the time the katsa had found an intersection to turn his car, the Volvo had disappeared. Next evening, the katsa was back, this time parked in a position to follow. Shortly afterward, the Volvo appeared. The katsa fell in behind. A mile later, the Volvo parked outside an apartment block and the driver emerged and entered the building, 27 Wabersackerstrasse. The katsa had no doubt the man was Abdullah Zein.
The katsa followed Zein into the apartment block. Beyond the plate-glass door was a small lobby with mailboxes. One of them identified the owner of a third-floor apartment as “Zein.” A door off the lobby led to a basement service area. The katsa opened the door and went down to the basement. Fixed to a wall was a junction box for all the telephones in the building. Moments later he was back in his rental car.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 39