Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

Home > Other > Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad > Page 45
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 45

by Gordon Thomas


  Dagan had created a plan that he felt would reduce the threat from suicide bombers. Israel should reduce the stranglehold on Yasser Arafat and ease the blockade on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—after a firm guarantee from the Palestinian authorities that they would deal with the bombers. The plan had gone to the Sharon cabinet, which had rejected it unless Arafat was removed.

  Dagan had bided his time. He well understood that the relationship between Ariel Sharon and Arafat was one of personal hatred: there would be no resolution until Arafat was removed. Dagan’s intelligence acumen suggested that this might well come from within Palestine. One of his tasks since coming to office had been to foment dissatisfaction among its more susceptible groups, promoting the idea that Arafat was the one remaining obstacle on the road to peace. Propaganda, in all its guises, was a weapon Dagan had used in his days as a military commander.

  Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare, the LAP, had created a mythical “Academy of Terrorism” in Gaza City, where suicide bombers were trained. The story received wide coverage. Many other stories followed that piece of propaganda, and their results were often included in the Overnight Intelligence Summary delivered to Ariel Sharon when he awoke. Dictated by Dagan, the summary shaped the thinking of Sharon for his coming day.

  Both men still shared a close relationship and the same ideal for Israel: to ensure that, in Sharon’s words, “this little patch of soil, barren and inhospitable, until we Jews turned it into the powerhouse of the region, will never be taken from us.”

  Over dinner in his home shortly after Dagan had been appointed, the prime minister had shown him a black painted arrowhead in a showcase. It represented the code name—Hetz Shabor—Sharon had chosen for his attack against the Egyptian army in Gaza in the Six Day War. It had been the start of his career as the most ruthless military commander since Moshe Dayan. Then had come the massacre in the two Lebanon refugee camps in which allegedly up to one thousand men, women, and children had been slaughtered on September 17, 1982 while Sharon’s troops did not intervene. Sharon’s career seemed to have ground to a halt. But he had entered the political arena and outsmarted Benyamin Netanyahu—no mean feat—to take charge of the Likud Party. It had been a stepping-stone to the premiership he now held.

  Over that dinner, Sharon had told Dagan he had chosen him to head Mossad because they both were fearless, hard-driving leaders.

  But there was one difference: Sharon was a gambler, ready to take risks, like his visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which had triggered the Second Intifada and paved the way for the suicide bombers to gain strength. Dagan was not a gambler. He calculated every move.

  Weeks into the job, Dagan had taken an El Al flight to London to meet Britain’s two intelligence chiefs, Richard Billing Dearlove, head of MI6, the secret intelligence service, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director of MI5.

  He had studied their backgrounds as thoroughly as when dealing with an enemy. While both the intelligence chiefs were most certainly not that, they did cause him concern. Britain had for years been a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. Both Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who had attempted to destroy an American airliner with explosives packed in his shoes, and Zacharias Moussaoui, identified as the twentieth hijacker of the September 11 attacks, were recruited for their missions in London mosques.

  The capital had become the headquarters for extremist Islamic preachers who, through a network of organizations, were dedicated to sowing pure hatred: hatred of Israel, hatred of America, hatred of the West—hatred of all democracies that valued tolerance and freedom, the very ideal that gave the extremists freedom to operate in Britain.

  Despite protests, Britain had continued to give refuge to Islamic fundamentalists wanted for terrorism in other countries. The governments of France, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as the United States, had all challenged Britain’s refusal to extradite the terrorists. But the British had successfully claimed that to remove them from British protection would result in their “political persecution.”

  The Islamic preachers who had inducted these individuals into terrorism had hired expensive lawyers to fight extradition. Legal maneuvers had tied up cases for years. Khalid al-Fawwaz, wanted in the United States for his role in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, had successfully used the English courts to ensure that he stayed in the country. His legal costs of sixty thousand dollars had been met out of public funds.

  Dressed in one of his custom-tailored black pin-striped suits, a hand-stitched white shirt, and a striped club tie, Dearlove had sat in his office overlooking the Thames River while Meir Dagan set out his case for why the presence of terrorists in Britain must stop.

  The Mossad chief knew exactly the right tone to strike with one of the grandees of the intelligence world, commanding a staff of 2,000—of whom 175 were field intelligence officers, spies. Dearlove had a salary of £150,000 a year, many times greater than Dagan earned. The head of MI6 also had enviable perks: a car with an armed driver, and membership to several exclusive London clubs.

  Dagan did not begrudge him any of this. He knew Dearlove had earned his perks.

  After graduating from Cambridge, Dearlove joined MI6 in 1964. Four years later he was working undercover in Nairobi. From the Kenyan capital he often traveled to South Africa, making contacts with BOSS, then the South African security service. In 1973 he was posted to Prague as deputy head of the MI6 station. In that position he ran an operation to penetrate the Warsaw Pact. Under his guidance several senior pact spies defected to the West.

  After a stint in Paris he was posted to Geneva, his cover was that he was a diplomat attached to the United Nations. There he made his first serious contacts with Arab intelligence officers from Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

  A year later he turned up in Washington as a senior liaison officer for MI6 with the U.S. intelligence community. In the spring of 1992 he was back in London, charged with the task of supervising MI6’s move from its crumbling headquarters in Century House in the rundown suburb of Lambeth to its postmodern £236 million structure in Vauxhall Cross. It is said that by the time the building was opened, Dearlove had personally checked out every room, tested the menus in the canteen, and slept in the beds in the basement dormitory used by staff during a crisis.

  His trips to Washington were frequent. He had astonished his counterpart at the CIA, George Tenet, by making it clear that he no longer saw the hunt for Osama bin Laden as a top priority for MI6. Privately Dearlove had been heard to say that “capturing bin Laden, dead or alive, is very much Bush seeking a headline.”

  Dagan had warmed to Dearlove when the latter said he was no devotee of the American faith in “Sigint”—satellite signals intelligence. He believed spies on the ground were more valuable and trustworthy, that with human intelligence “you get what they see at close up, not from outer space.” In a world of encrypted e-mail messages and superenhanced satellite imagery, Dagan found something endearing in that judgment. It mirrored his own views.

  Dagan looked forward to his meeting with Eliza Manningham-Buller more than with any other spy chief. The director of MI5 was only the second woman to head the service. With her double chin and a booming laugh, which seemed to come from somewhere in her ample bosom, she was a striking figure.

  At fifty-three, four years younger than Dagan, she also earned a salary far greater than he could ever hope to command; indeed, she earned more than her ultimate political master, Prime Minister Tony Blair.

  Her crystal-shattering voice went with her upper-class pedigree. She was the daughter of a former lord chancellor of England; one of her two sisters was married to a former deputy keeper of the privy purse to the Queen.

  She had attended Oxford, where she’d been known as “Bullying Manner” for her intimidating ways. In 1968, the university’s Dramatic Society pantomime program for Cinderella listed “The Honourable Eliza Manningham-Buller” as the Fairy Godmother. Wearing a headdress of flowers and wit
h her bushy eyebrows trimmed, she came onstage in a puff of smoke. She twirled and, to a startled Cinderella—and audience—she boomed: “We thought you would be surprised. But have no fear. I am your Fairy Godmother, my dear.”

  That night an MI5 recruiter—an Oxford don—suggested that Eliza should give up any plans to take up acting and join MI5. She listened carefully, then consulted her father. He said spying was no career for a lady.

  Eliza promptly joined MI5 as a transcription typist of tapped telephone conversations, mostly those of Soviet Bloc diplomats in London. But soon she displayed a talent for making sense of their guarded talk. She became a counterintelligence officer—a spy catcher.

  “Bullying Manner” became “Formidable Manner.” She rose rapidly through the structured MI5 hierarchy.

  Taller than most of her colleagues, she had an imperious way of looking down her Roman empress nose when someone annoyed her. Rebuke delivered, she strode off down one of the cheerless corridors of MI5 “like a man o’war in full sail,” one colleague said. She had worked in Washington, and in those other postings where the streets have no names. She headed the MI5 team that investigated the Lockerbie disaster and spearheaded MI5’s undercover war against the IRA.

  In 1997 she became deputy director general of the service. Three years later, she ran MI5.

  For both his hosts, Meir Dagan had the same uncompromising message: London had become a paradise for terrorists, a city that allowed a terrorist to live in a democracy and be able to destroy what the word meant. Because their prime target was still Israel, this had to stop. Dagan said it politely. But he said it firmly.

  He understood, he added, the difficulty Britain faced. It was home to 1.8 million Muslims, the great majority of whom were law-abiding, peaceful citizens. He knew Britain had strong trading ties with Arab nations. But he also understood that extreme Islamic groups had been able to operate deep within the closed Muslim community of Britain. He was ready to put Mossad at the disposal of MI5 and MI6. For that to work he would require permission to increase the number of his agents operating in Britain. Since 1987 the number had been curtailed, after the Thatcher government had complained about Mossad’s methods.

  Both Dearlove and Manningham-Buller swiftly agreed. Within days, the Mossad agents arrived in London. With them they brought a list of Muslim radicals they feared were preparing to strike at Israeli targets. The Mossad team made it clear that they would operate on their own. And they would deal with any threat to Israel as forcefully as they always had. They could make an assassination look like an accident—or let it serve as a warning to others by not bothering to hide what they had done.

  And now, in January 2003, it was an assassination that Meir Dagan knew also preoccupied President George W. Bush and his aides. It was how best to kill Saddam Hussein.

  As the drumbeat of impending war with Iraq beat ever louder in Washington, President George W. Bush let it be known to his closest advisers that he was prepared to lift the ban on the CIA assassinating Saddam Hussein. The restraint on the agency killing any leader had been in force since the CIA’s inglorious bungling of its attempts to murder Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, in the 1970s. The Executive Order was never officially waived, but on the first days of the new year, in the seasonal cold weather of the American capital, the neoconservatives who surrounded the president—men and women who for the most part had advised Bush’s father when he had been president—exchanged toasts that Saddam could soon be dead.

  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued that the United States had the legal right to assassinate anyone who had been involved “either directly or planning” the September 11 attacks. Saddam had, Rumsfeld claimed, “another strike” against him because he was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Though Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA director George Tenet and his analysts insisted there was no firm evidence that Saddam was linked to the September attacks or that he had WMDs, Rumsfeld insisted his own sources told a different story.

  Mossad’s resident katsa at the Israeli embassy in Washington had discovered that Rumsfeld’s main source was Ahmad Chalabi, who had helped to found the Iraqi National Congress, the self-styled “Iraqi government in waiting” to replace a deposed Saddam.

  The floridly handsome Chalabi had been a Mossad informer in Iraq after Saddam seized power in 1979. Chalabi had moved to neighboring Jordan, where he set up the Petra Bank. For a while it had served as a conduit for Mossad to fund black operations in the Middle East. But in 1979 the bank collapsed, owing hundreds of millions of dollars to depositors.

  Mossad had managed to withdraw its own modest deposits before the crash. Shortly afterward, the head of Jordan’s central bank, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, had accused Chalabi of switching $70 million of the bank’s funds into his own Swiss bank accounts.

  Chalabi had arrived in Washington at the time George H. W. Bush had been elected as president. Until the first Iraqi war, following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Chalabi had seemed to be no more than another of those Middle East lobbyists, in a city filled with them, trying to promote their own interests. But the war changed all that. Using his imposing-sounding Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi found himself readily being welcomed by Bush’s neoconservatives. They included future vice president Dick Cheney and future deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Through them, he was introduced to Donald Rumsfeld. Common ground was established in their belief Saddam was a menace to peace not only in the Middle East, but possibly the entire world.

  Incredibly, Chalabi began to see intelligence reports provided by the Pentagon on Saddam that had been prepared by the CIA and the National Security Agency. At first he confined himself to expressing that some of the intelligence did not fit what his small organization knew from inside Iraq. Gradually those expressions, often made directly to Rumsfeld, became more critical. Chalabi felt the CIA, in particular, was out of touch because it had no agents on the ground in Iraq.

  In the late summer of 2002, in the run-up to the first anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Rumsfeld ordered the formation of a special secret unit in the Pentagon to “reexamine” information provided by Chalabi and to “reassess” ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda and Iraq’s development of WMD.

  Ahmad Chalabi, a discredited banker accused of looting his own vaults, had become a prime source for Rumsfeld. CIA chief Tenet, a man who jealously guarded his turf, was furious—to the point that in August 2002 he had threatened to resign. Cheney had poured balm on very troubled waters, and Tenet had stayed in office. But using his own backdoor connections to MI6 director Richard Dearlove, Tenet had briefed the MI6 chief on Chalabi’s continued involvement in the upper echelon of the Bush administration.

  When he took over Mossad, Dagan had quickly picked up on Chalabi’s bizarre role as Rumsfeld’s source. From the Mossad file on the banker, it was clear that Chalabi had provided only low-grade intelligence when he had spied for them in Iraq. Now, over a decade since he had left Baghdad, it was unlikely the banker had any real connections within Saddam’s regime.

  Not for the first time Mossad analysts wondered how matters of importance were being conducted within the Bush administration.

  Dagan’s own trips to Washington, obligatory for any new director, had filled in the gaps in the reports from the katsa in the Israeli embassy in the capital. In meetings with members of the administration—men like Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, and Elliot Abrams, in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council—Dagan had encountered advocates of what they called “muscular democracy.” They peppered their conversations with Arabic words like jihad and phrases like Allah akbar wallilahi’l-hamd. They knew what they meant: “holy war” and “Allah is great to whom we give praise.” What baffled them, they told Dagan, was that they could not understand how God could endorse such a terrible massacre as had occurred on September 11.

  Dagan was uncomfortable in religious discussion; his faith, like much else in his li
fe, was a private matter. He had tactfully sidestepped the question. Nevertheless, he later told colleagues in Tel Aviv, he was fascinated by the way religion assumed such an importance in the Bush administration.

  When President Bush returned to the White House four days after the attacks of September 11, he received a welcome visitor. The evangelist Billy Graham, a longtime friend of the Bush family, had sat with the understandably shaken president and spoken for a long time about the evil of terrorism and the Bible’s “righteous wrath” to destroy it.

  A scripture passage struck a chord with the president: “Thus saith the Lord. Because the Philistines have dealt by revenge, and have taken vengeance with a despiteful heart; therefore thus saith the Lord God: Behold I will stretch out my hand upon the Philistines. And they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”

  The words of the prophet Ezekiel became a leitmotif for George W. Bush, the rallying call for all he would say and do in the months to come for his “War on Terrorism”: the justification for his attack on Afghanistan, for his forthcoming war against Iraq. The Iraqi dictator was his Philistine.

  Ezekiel, that biblical man of iron, had infused Bush with a similar strength.

  At the end of the meeting, Graham gave Bush a pocket-sized Bible. The evangelist had taken the time to annotate it, using a marker to highlight all the scripture passages that reinforced the right to use “righteous wrath.”

  Bush, like Bill Clinton and other past presidents, was not short of Bibles. He had grown up in what he liked to call “God-fearing country”—that great swath of the southern states known as the Bible Belt. No shack, house, or stately mansion is without its Bible. On the Bush Texas ranch, and in his office when he had been state governor, a Bible stood on a table close to the furled flag of the United States. Equipped with the Bible Billy Graham had presented to him, the president had no doubt that God was on his side as he launched his Global War on Terrorism.

 

‹ Prev