A “mule”—a courier—who in return for her cooperation was given a guarantee against prosecution—has told Intel that she had smuggled nuclear materials from the Ukraine across Germany and finally into Holland.
The courier has claimed to Intel that she was met at Amsterdam’s Central Station. Shown photographs, the courier picked out the person. It was a Mossad officer Intel knew was based at Schipol.
In the “old days”—the words are those of Meir Amit—a Mossad operative would never have allowed himself to be so easily identified. Many others within the Israeli intelligence community believe such basic failures in trade craft do not augur well for Mossad as it enters the new millennium.
There has been a change of attitude within Israel that has led to anger and disillusion over Mossad’s operational failures. In those “old days” few Israelis had really minded that Mossad’s successes often depended on subversion, lying, and killing. All that mattered was that Israel survived.
But with peace, of a sort, edging closer to Israel’s borders with its Arab neighbors, increasing questions are being asked about such methods being used in Mossad’s continuing role as shield and sword.
Within Mossad itself there is a stubborn feeling that a great institution can only survive by, in the words of Rafi Eitan, “not giving in to every murmur of a new opinion.” Equally there is also a feeling, articulated by Ari Ben-Menashe, that if Mossad persists in locking itself into yesterday’s goals, it “will be in danger of being smothered, like a medieval knight in his armor left unhorsed and forgotten on the field of battle.”
Behind such evocative words lie some hard truths. Fifty years on, Mossad is no longer seen as a derring-do agency, its deeds burnished bright in the consciousness of Israel. Born in those memorable few years in which Israel built a new world for itself, Mossad was one of the guarantors that world would survive. That guarantee is no longer required.
Ari Ben-Menashe put it as well as anybody: “Israel, and the world, should think of Mossad as they would a dose of preventive medicine—to protect against an illness that could be fatal. You only take the medicine when the illness is threatening. You don’t take it all the time.”
The still unanswered question is whether Mossad will be content to play a role where maturity and moderation must replace the policy of doing hard things for hard reasons.
CHAPTER 18
NEW BEGINNINGS
On September 11, 2002, every available man and woman in Mossad—apart from those overseas—made his or her way through the featureless corridors of their headquarters in midtown Tel Aviv. Outside it was another of those late summer days, a clear blue sky and the temperature in the mid-twenties Celsius. There had been the same kind of weather, a year ago to the day, on the northeastern seaboard of the United States when al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. The unprecedented assault had forever changed the perception of terrorism for Mossad and the world’s other intelligence services, who worked, in 2002, in a $100 billion global industry employing a million people. Mossad’s entire staff now numbered 1,500, an increase of 300 over the last decade.
It was not the first anniversary of what had become known as 9/11 that preoccupied those in Mossad headquarters heading for the staff canteen. The sense of foreboding in some, coupled with a frisson of excitement in others, came from a mixture of hope, expectation, and a fear of disappointment.
The question uppermost in their minds was simple: Was the new head of Mossad they were on their way to meet in the headquarters canteen going to continue to run the service as it had been run under Efraim Halevy? If so, morale would inevitably plunge further and there would be more resignations.
Halevy had finally been eased out by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as memune—Hebrew for “first among equals.” In the four years he had been director general, the tension he had inherited—caused by interservice rivalry and backstabbing that had set field agents against analysts and turned planners into plotters—had increased. Mossad, which once prided itself on unity, had become increasingly fractured.
Could the new man heal the rifts? Could he do what Halevy had spectacularly failed to do: lead Mossad into the new millennium and turn it back into a force with which to be reckoned? The men and women making their way to the canteen on that September day agreed that anyone at the helm must be better than Halevy.
In his four-year tenure, there had been marked physical changes in Halevy. There was a grayness to his skin, and his eyes were often red rimmed, the result of disturbed sleep from calls by a Mossad night-duty officer. The lines around Halevy’s mouth were more deeply etched. Gone was the sprightly stride that had once heralded his approach down Mossad’s corridors, there was now a stiffness in his gait. Sartorially, too, he was no longer the figure he had been: he had lost weight; his jackets hung on him. His voice, still cultured, was without its crispness; his questions were less incisive. Halevy had come to look and sound like a man edging toward retirement. On that September day, he was sixty-six years of age, the oldest director general to have led Mossad.
In many ways the service had become like Halevy. Its forays onto the international stage had been cut back to operations in the cauldron of the Middle East. Senior Mossad officers accompanied Halevy on his regular visits to the CIA at Langley, to MI6 at its new headquarters at Vauxhall Cross in London, and to Pullach in Bavaria, home of Germany’s BND. Visits to other intelligence chiefs were less frequent. But little came from any of these contacts.
The world in the twenty-first century had become far more dangerous and unstable than ever before. While Mossad had contributed to assessing the technological developments terrorists had acquired, it played no significant part in identifying new roles for the global intelligence community on how to counter drugs and economic espionage. Mossad’s contribution had been to argue the need to bring back the traditional spy as a complement to the satellites and other exotic systems. The view was often coolly received.
Then, on September 11, 2001, the world and the global intelligence community were shocked into a new reality after the most deadly terrorist attack ever known. Yet, stunning as it was, the events of that day had been long in the making: the assault was the climax of the most sophisticated and horrifying scheme masterminded by Osama bin Laden and his jihad group, al-Qaeda.
In the countless millions of words written in newspapers and the accumulating library of books on the subject, one question has remained, until now, unanswered: How much did Mossad know beforehand of the events leading up to the destruction of the Twin Towers and the partial toppling of the Pentagon?
A year after the attacks, only a handful of the most senior Mossad officers from the Operations floor in the Mossad headquarters building knew the answers—and then, not all of them.
From the day bin Laden’s suicide bombers partly destroyed the World Trade Center in 1993, Mossad had placed him at the top of its own list of most wanted terrorists. Its deep-cover field agents in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan had all picked up “whispers in the wind” that bin Laden was planning “something big,” said one report. Another spoke of a “strong rumour bin Laden is planning a Hiroshima type attack.” Still another revealed a flight simulator being used in an al-Qaeda training camp near Kabul. Then came the even more alarming news that bin Laden had been trying to obtain chemical and nuclear weapons.
While Mossad analysts tried, in the words of one (to this author), to “connect the dots,” the reports were also passed on through the long-established back channel to the CIA. The Pentagon was asked to evaluate the threat of an air strike. One of its analysts, Marvin Cetron, wrote, “Coming down the Potomac, you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House.”
A full three years before the September attacks, a commission chaired by Vice President Al Gore had produced a report that urged substantially more spending on airport security. Other reports, again based on input from Mossad, followed. All
were ignored, first by the Clinton White House and then by Clinton’s successor, President George W. Bush. When he protested, Marvin Cetron was told by a Pentagon official. “Look, we can’t manage a crisis until it is a crisis.” There was a feeling in Washington that Mossad was once more crying wolf, that it had a vested interest in promoting Islamic fundamentalism as a threat because it feared its terrorists and wanted to persuade the United States that it also faced a similar threat.
By the time Efraim Halevy had come into office, dutifully read the files on terrorism threats, and seen the reaction to Mossad’s warnings, he had decided that, in the words of one of his senior officers, “there was no point in pushing against a bolted door.”
In Washington, the impending debacle of intelligence ignored had led, not for the first time, to a rupture between the FBI and the CIA. Both agencies had concrete evidence that al-Qaeda was an increasing threat: one of its operatives had been stopped at the last moment from flying a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Credible intelligence had emerged at Langley that bin Laden was planning to launch an air strike against the economic summit in Italy earlier in 2001. But the sense of paralysis and denial, compounded by the growing turf war between the FBI and the CIA, had continued to hold the U.S. intelligence community in its grip.
It would take the events of September 11 to break that hold.
In the aftermath, senior officers at both agencies were publicly attacked for their lack of counterterrorism policies and their failure of coordination and cooperation. There emerged a picture of recalcitrant intelligence bureaucracies, too concerned with issues of political expediency to take risks. The CIA, in particular, had failed to grasp the importance of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the crucial role played by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. From its training camps, thousands of terrorists had graduated to leave their mark on the world stage. First came the destruction in 1998 of the American embassy in Nairobe, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in which 213 died. Then followed the attack on the American destroyer the USS Cole in the port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Both were very public preludes to the September 11 attacks.
After September 11, among the hundreds of questions dominating Washington’s collective soul-searching, were: Why had the CIA not had more spies on the ground in Africa and the Middle East? Why had it depended too much on electronic surveillance? And why had it not relied upon what Paul Bremer, the counterterrorism chief for President Reagan, had called “third-country intelligence”?
Everyone knew he meant Mossad.
Since then, Halevy had been bombarded with calls from CIA director George Tenet, himself facing intense criticism. Tenet wanted to know how much more Mossad had known about the impending attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Halevy, in his careful, diplomatic way, had pointed out to Tenet that Mossad had sent several warnings in the weeks prior to September that an attack was coming. Halevy had then cited “credible chatter” Mossad agents had picked up in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. But under mounting pressure from Congress and the White House, Tenet had furiously persisted in challenging Halevy. How much had Mossad known?
A serving Mossad officer later described the “hot line from Langley” as superheated. Sometimes there were a dozen calls a day from Tenet. And then there was all the secure-line high-speed signals traffic. There had never been anything like it. Washington was shocked that a bearded man operating out of a cave somewhere in the Middle East had “done more damage to American prestige than Pearl Harbor.”
In a tense phone call, one which, though he did not know it, would trigger his own downfall, Halevy had snapped at Tenet. Where was your electronic surveillance?
America’s National Security Agency is the most secretive and powerful such service in the world. From Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, it casts an electronic ear over the globe. Its supercomputers hum around the clock, hoping to intercept or identify communications between terrorists. Suspects, names, key words, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses are all sucked up by NSA satellites—either circling or geopositioned around the earth—and downloaded to the computers. There the data are coded into “watch lists,” then fed into the system that takes the lists on secure lines throughout the U.S. intelligence community.
In theory, everyone who had needed to know would have been aware of who was out there posing a real and present danger to the United States. But the reality had been different.
Few know exactly what NSA costs to run, but it is widely reported to be more than several billion dollars a year. Its massive, powerful data crushers are part of the ECHELON surveillance system, which sifts tens of billions of snippets of information, daily, matching them up.
The one drawback with the system is that it still has language difficulties: it cannot recognize the dialects and patois of some of the eighteen languages of the Middle East and the even greater number in India and Pakistan. Some of the material obtained from there has to be scrutinized by old-fashioned methods—linguists trained to interpret what is being said and, equally important, what might have been left out. In the end, the lists depend on being accurate.
Efraim Halevy knew that was the weakness in the American system: any list was only as good as the analysts who put a person’s name on it. And that, he had politely told Tenet in that phone call, was where the Americans had failed.
Tenet was furious. He was wedded to the wonders of electronic surveillance. For him, it was the ultimate billion-dollar instrument of superpower espionage. The sentinels in space, the high-tech spy satellites with exotic-sounding names like Argus, Magnum, and Keyhole, were how Washington—and in many ways Tenet himself as the head of its intelligence community—kept track of the rest of the world. On his own visits to Israel, he had shown Halevy how, out in the icy blackness of outer space, a satellite pointed down on Yasser Arafat’s headquarters on the West Bank had picked up his conversations. Halevy, so the story went, had smiled politely. But what had Arafat been saying that justified the expense of all that surveillance? Tenet had shrugged.
Halevy had studied the satellite photo for a moment longer, noting the date. Then he had asked one of his analysts to fetch a report on the same day. It was a detailed account from a Mossad katsa of what Arafat had said when the satellite had passed overhead. Halevy had murmured that that was the point of human intelligence. A spy on the ground could judge a conversation in its setting, obtain the finer details that are lost to even the most sophisticated electronic surveillance.
At his next meeting with President George W. Bush, the CIA chief had complained that “the old man in Tel Aviv is outta touch.” Bush had discussed the matter with Condoleezza Rice, his closest adviser. She said she would speak to Dick Clarke, who had been President Clinton’s counterterrorism “czar.” Few people in Washington had worked for longer in the field.
The son of a Boston chocolate factory worker, Clarke was a survivor of the American politico-military establishment. For successive administrations, from President Reagan onward, he had become a source of endless advice. He saw himself as a defender of American values.
Despite his enemies, people listened to him. Privately they may have mocked the way Clarke strove to look like the latest incumbent in the White House—he had even dyed his hair silver when Clinton was in office, so they said—but he was the man who knew the standing of every intelligence chief in the West, and of many in China and Arab countries. He told Rice that Halevy was “past his sell-by date.” She told Bush. He called Sharon. It was only a matter of time before Israel’s prime minister would find a reason to send Halevy into retirement.
The men and women making their way through Mossad’s corridors knew, if not all, then part of this. Some of their colleagues had already left Mossad, either resigning or being driven out by a feeling that there was no real future in the organization. For them it was no longer enough to create situations that sought to draw fact out of surmise, to spend their days applying the art of informed conje
cture and dealing in the middle range of probability. Others had stayed on in the hope that one day things would change—that there would, for instance, be no repetition of an operation for which Efraim Halevy would forever be remembered in these corridors.
On May 9, 2001, two young men drove up to the guard post at Volk Field in Wisconsin, one of several air bases the Air National Guard maintains across the country. Volk Field has another claim of interest. Within its perimeter is a small aeronautical museum. Every year from spring until September, a steady stream of visitors comes to inspect the display of aircraft.
The guard asked the men for their IDs, and was surprised when they produced Israeli passports. He could not recall visitors coming from so far. They explained they were “art students” at the “University of Jerusalem.”
As with all visitors, the guard noted down their names—Gal Kantor and Tsvi Watermann—then directed them to the museum. Ten minutes later a military police patrol caught them taking photographs of parked fighter planes. The men were arrested but pleaded that they had not known they were committing an offense. The base duty security officer released them with a warning. His report of the incident made its way through the Wisconsin military command structure and on to the Pentagon.
From there it was sent to the FBI. On that May day, the bureau had already received twenty-seven other reports involving Israeli “art students.” The reports came from as far apart as Los Angeles and Miami, Denver and Dallas, Seattle and New Orleans.
The details were remarkable in their consistency. Two “art students” in St Louis had been caught “diagramming the inside of a Drug Enforcement Agency building.” In another federal building in Dallas, another pair had been stopped doing the same thing. In several cities, other “art students” had shown up at the homes of senior federal officials—men with unlisted addresses, known as “black addresses” in the U.S. intelligence community. In other cities—Phoenix and San Diego were two—the “students” had been found in possession of photographs of federal agents and their unmarked cars. All the reports said that the students had given their address as the “University of Jerusalem” or the “Bezalei Academy of Arts” in the city.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 42