Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  The belief was an insight into his thinking. Another came with his admission he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.” Further evidence of his mind-set came when he spoke of “an axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The phrase had a strong biblical connotation.

  Throughout 2002, for his speeches to Congress and his military commanders, in his folksy weekly radio talks to the nation, and in meetings with world leaders, Bush drew on passages in Graham’s leather-bound gift to reinforce the notion that the War on Terrorism had the total approval of God. Holy war—the jihad of Islamic fundamentalism—had taken on a new meaning.

  President Bush’s insistence that he would conduct a preemptive strike against Iraq was also deeply rooted in the religious faith of the neoconservatives around him.

  Against that background of increasing religious fervor, Mossad monitored Washington’s progress to try to assassinate Saddam Hussein—a move that could head off an all-out war against Iraq.

  In early February 2003, after a telephone conversation between Ariel Sharon and President Bush, Israel’s prime minister told Dagan he had offered to allow Mossad to become directly involved in the assassination of Saddam. Bush had accepted.

  In Tel Aviv, the operation planning followed a well-tried procedure. First, previous attempts to kill Saddam were examined to understand why they had failed. In the past ten years there had been fifteen separate attacks on the Iraqi leader. They had been sponsored by either Mossad or MI6. Their failure was due to inadequate planning, or enlisting Iraqi assassins who had either been discovered by Saddam’s formidable security apparatus, or simply been unable to get close to their target.

  Mossad had made one previous attempt itself, in November 1992. Its agents in Iraq had discovered that Saddam was planning to visit one of his several mistresses, who lived near Tikrit. The agents had learned that Saddam intended to arrive around dusk at the woman’s home. Next day, he would visit a military base close by before flying back to Baghdad. In the estimated fifteen minutes between leaving the woman’s villa and reaching the air base, Saddam could be vulnerable to attack.

  Under the personal control of General Amiram Levine, at the time the deputy director of Mossad, the plan to kill Saddam was approved by Israel’s then prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. Code named Skah Atad, the assassination team trained for weeks in the Negev Desert.

  Details of the operation offer an insight into the thoroughness of the planning. The Mossad kidon team would be supported by forty hand-picked members of Israel’s Special Forces Unit 262—burned into Israel’s memory as the one that in 1976 rescued the hostages from Entebbe airport in Uganda, where they were being held by terrorists who had hijacked their passenger plane.

  Using two Hercules C-130 aircraft, the assassins would fly into Iraq below radar range. On the ground they would divide. The kidon would move to within two hundred meters of the route Saddam would travel from his mistress’s villa to the air base. The main group would wait about six miles away, equipped with a special Mossad-developed radar-controlled missile, code named Midras, Hebrew for “footstep.”

  The kidon team was to target Saddam and open fire on his car. At the same time one of the assassins was to signal the missile team to fire from the precise coordinates the kidon would provide—and destroy the vehicle.

  But Ariel Sharon, then foreign minister, and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai had ordered the operation canceled because the risks of failure were too high.

  Now, almost a decade later, supported by Washington, there was no such hesitation in trying to kill Saddam.

  Each morning as the creeping gray ended and another day began—the moment Saddam Hussein’s mother had taught him was the “first dawn”—a truck drove to one of his palaces, in which the country’s self-appointed president for life would have spent another secure night.

  The truck contained live lobsters, fresh shrimps, and sides of fresh lamb and beef, all fat had been trimmed from the meat. There was a variety of yogurts and cheeses, and a special favorite of Saddam Hussein’s, olives picked from Syria’s Golan Heights. He likes to spit out the pips, “the way I will one day spit out the Israelis from their land,” he once said to his former chief of intelligence, General Wafic Samarai.

  Later, when he fell out of favor, the spymaster had fled for his life, walking for forty hours to escape through the north of Iraq into Turkey. Samarai was lucky. Most of those who crossed Saddam Hussein were killed by methods that surpassed the torture chambers of ancient times. Samarai’s input to the plan to kill Saddam was fed into the Mossad computers.

  While the sixty-five-year-old Saddam still slept, perhaps in the arms of another young girl selected by his Republican Guards to satisfy his voracious sexual needs, the truck was unloaded.

  In each palace were stationed scientists from the country’s nuclear arms program. They worked in a restricted area in the basement of a palace. Access to it was only through swipe cards, whose codes changed every day. In the basement was a suite housing a powerful hospital-style X-ray machine. The scientists X-rayed each item of food. They were looking for any sign of whether it had been poisoned or exposed to previous radiation.

  When nothing suspicious was detected, the food passed on to further checks. Chefs took a small portion: a morsel of lobster or fish, a sliver of meat, a nibble of cheese, a small spoonful of yogurt. Food that needed cooking was prepared. Then all the items were tastefully arranged for the waiting tasters. They were selected from some of the untold legions of prisoners in Iraq’s jails.

  Watched by members of Al Himaya, Saddam’s personal bodyguards, each prisoner swallowed and displayed his open mouth to the bodyguards. The tasters were then observed for an hour to ensure they had not been poisoned. Next they were taken to a lab to have blood drawn. This was tested to make sure there was no trace of radiation in what they had digested. The prisoners were then taken to a courtyard in the palace and shot—usually with a single bullet to the back of the head.

  The gunshots were a signal for Saddam Hussein that his breakfast, and the other meals he would eat during the day, were safe to consume.

  This chilling ritual was one of many that governed his life.

  Whichever woman shared his bed overnight was dismissed. Her fate, like those of so many others forced to sleep with him, was a matter of conjecture. Alone, Saddam made his way to his private swimming pool. For him a number of laps was an important exercise to strengthen his spinal cord. Some years before he had undergone surgery for a slipped disk. He swam naked, watched only by his bodyguards. From them there were no secrets about his physical infirmities. He had a limp, in public he would walk only a few steps before pausing. For a man so muscular in uniform, he had a belt of fatty tissue around his lower abdomen.

  Swim over, there was another essential ritual to the start of his day. His barber, who traveled everywhere with him, arrived to trim Saddam’s mustache and touch up the black dye in his hair. The chemicals used in the process came from Paris, each bottle had been tested to ensure it contained no lethal agent. His hair uniformly tinted to hide any trace of gray, his nails were then buffed and manicured with a colorless polish.

  Then his personal dresser took over. Saddam’s uniform was custom-made, cut to emphasize the musculature of his body. His biceps and strong thighs were the result of those early teenage years when he went camel racing. His jacket was tailored to disguise the spreading waistline he had failed to halt despite periods of strict dieting.

  These vanities were in a man who was irritated by the way his wife of forty years, Sajida, allowed her hennaed hair to be less than perfect and whose body was matronly.

  His physical needs attended to, Saddam Hussein was ready for another day. No one could deny his capacity for work. A twelve- to fourteen-hour day of meetings was not unusual. At the end of each session he would take a small nap in a room adjoining the office. Thirty minutes later he could be back at the top of a conference table ready to plunge himself into a new round of discussions.


  Each meeting began the same way. Saddam studied an executive summary of the reports that had been prepared. Sometimes he would ask to see the full report for closer examination. No one around the table knew which report would be chosen for scrutiny. If the summary did not match the full report, he would closely question the writers of both. He then displayed a harsh, inquisitorial manner. He was a natural bully.

  Every few hours—wherever he was—his closest aides knew they must arrange for him to be near water a fountain, an indoor waterfall, a flowing stream. Water is a symbol of wealth and power in the desert land of Iraq. In Saddam’s personal milieu—his social relations, the customs and culture in which he was raised—water is a prerequisite. In all his personal offices—no one knows how many there were scattered around Baghdad and beyond—there was always the sound of cascading water on a background disc.

  It was Saddam’s obsession with personal violence that was the most terrifying side to his multifaceted personality. He had become obsessed with the dynamics of creating pain, spending countless hours reviewing the videos of those he had tortured and then executed. The methods of killing ranged from a victim being buried alive, to a specialty Saddam learned from the Taliban: a long nail was driven through a victim’s ear into his brain. His torture chambers were reputed to contain effigies made of wood and iron in which a victim was confined. The hollow effigies contained spikes positioned so as to penetrate the victim’s body. Strangulation and being buried alive in the desert were fates reserved for those for whom he had decided hanging was too quick.

  Saddam’s fixation with torture was passed on to his sons when they were still in their preteens. Uday and Qusay were both taken on weekly visits to witness torture and executions in Baghdad prisons.

  Yet despite the carapace of evil that surrounded him, Saddam had also been known to weep openly after having condemned a friend, a relative, even his two sons-in-law to death. During the 1979 purge of the Baath Party that gave him power, he stood at the lectern and wept openly as he condemned party members. As each man was taken to his death, the conference hall echoed with his amplified sobbing, picked up by the microphones on the podium. It was a macabre piece of theater.

  All these personality traits, and more, had been studied by Mossad before a plan of how to assassinate Saddam Hussein was prepared.

  Once more the operation revolved around Saddam’s insatiable sexual appetite. A Mossad katsa in Baghdad had learned that a new mistress—the wife of a general Saddam had recently had executed for disobeying an order—had been installed in a villa on the bank of the Euphrates River. Saddam had taken to swimming in the river with his bodyguards before visiting her.

  The plan was based on one that the CIA had once used to try to kill Fidel Castro. On that occasion, seashells were rigged with explosives and deposited on the seabed off Cuba, the spot was one where Castro liked to go diving. That operation failed because the CIA had not taken into account that strong sea currents would carry the shells out of the area.

  The river would present no such problem. The explosives were designed to be detonated by Saddam and his bodyguards surging through the water.

  With days to go before the plan was to be implemented, the Baghdad katsa sent a coded short-burst transmission to Tel Aviv that the mistress had committed suicide.

  Two days later, the second Iraqi war started. Mossad agents in Iraq’s western desert, Baghdad, and Basra provided important intelligence that enabled U.S. and British aircraft to launch devastating air attacks. Thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured.

  In the run-up to hostilities, Dagan had experienced a familiar pressure. Tenet had started to call several times a day to inquire whether Mossad was able to confirm that Iraq possessed WMD.

  Dagan had replied the way he always did: Not yet, but we are still looking. Indeed, the search had become a priority for his deep-cover katsas in Iraq. They had worked independently of the United Nations weapons inspectors, who had had a similar lack of success—much to the barely concealed disappointment of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. The UN Security Council had become a forum for their frustration. Both leaders were now committed to the claim that they had to go to war to protect the world against WMD.

  But in Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts told Dagan that no matter how the CIA and Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee ( JIC) presented the evidence, there was no “smoking gun” proof that Saddam did have WMD. Nevertheless, Ariel Sharon, committed to Washington’s claims, mobilized Israel’s civilian population: gas masks were widely distributed; a warning of an impending chemical or biological attack was repeated over the radio. The precautions were widely reported in the United States and Britain, creating a mood that WMD were about to be launched. Propaganda fed fear, fear created more propaganda.

  There was talk of a preemptive WMD strike against Israel; or Cyprus, where Britain had a sizable force; or the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. Navy had gathered in strength; or Kuwait, the launch point for the assault on Iraq. With every rumor the fear increased.

  But nothing happened. Not a single rocket containing so much as one spore of a nerve agent or a drop of chemical poison was launched. In the history of warfare, there had never been such an anticlimax.

  Twenty days after the war started the fighting was over. But another war, in many ways more deadly, had begun. Inside Iraq, a potent mixture of religious hatred, oil, and greed had started to ignite. In the south of the country, the Shias of the marsh Arabs began to lay their claim to be a powerful voice in planning Iraq’s future. They had suffered much. Their demands, uttered from the minarets of their mosques, were reinforced by the mullahs of Tehran. They traveled to the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. The first of many confrontations with American forces took place. There was more bloodshed.

  In the north of Iraq, the Kurds prepared to grab their moment of independence. That brought them ever closer to conflict with Turkey, which saw an independent Kurdish nation as unacceptable. In central Iraq, the other tribes wanted their views taken into account in the formation of a new Iraq. Saddam’s once all-powerful Baath Party could not be ignored. Just as in postwar Germany it had turned out to be impossible to eradicate the Nazi Party completely from the country’s bureaucracy, so it turned out to be with Baathism. The party was embedded into the very structure of what Iraq had been, was, and could become. It ran the police, the civil service, the utilities. To sack and arrest every party member was impossible; they were the only hope to get Iraq moving again.

  Inevitably, Iraq had descended into lawlessness, which by May 2003 had turned out to be even more frightening than even Saddam’s reign of terror.

  Meantime, the search for the tyrant had become a manhunt once more led by Mossad. Its analysts had created a scenario that owed something to Saddam’s own liking for theatrical gesture.

  The analysts suggested that Saddam had washed out the expensive black dye from his hair and shaved off his mustache, and was dressed as a peasant. His most likely way out of Baghdad had been through the vast, forbidding, empty spaces of Iraq’s eastern desert, this was the ancient contraband route from Afghanistan that first the silk traders and then the drug dealers had used.

  In those first postwar weeks, the route had become the favorite one for Iraqis who feared for their lives now that the regime had fallen.

  Was Saddam really among them? No one knew. But the feeling grew that he was heading for the mountains of northern Iran. There were suggestions—never supported by real evidence—that from there he would disappear into the hands of two powerful friends he had counted on before, Russia and China. While both officially denied they would grant Saddam sanctuary, Moscow’s and Beijing’s records of support for Saddam were long. To have Saddam now in their hands would certainly ensure that he would never reveal all the details of the secret deals he had made with both.

  To discover his whereabouts, Mossad agents were supported by American spy satellites. Their multicameras produced thousands of close-up images an
d scooped up even more separate conversations every minute from refugees across the sands. But there was still the old problem of analyzing and interpreting the data. The American intelligence community was still pitifully short of translators. But the hunt went on.

  Then, in May 2003, Meir Dagan switched many of the katsas trying to track Saddam onto a more important threat for Israel. Despite the vigilance of Shin Bet, two British-born radical bombers had launched a suicide attack on a Tel Aviv club; three were killed and fifty injured. The explosive they used had overcome the most stringent of airport and airline security checks. It was more lethal than Semtex; it could be smuggled undetected from one country to another, from one terrorist cell to another. For the eighty terror groups listed on Mossad’s computers, the weapon had once more tipped the scales in favor of the terrorists.

  After a week of intensive investigation by chemists in Israel’s center for weapons research in a suburb of Tel Aviv, its lethal qualities and country of origin had been discovered. The revelation sent a collective shock wave through the global intelligence community. The Israeli experts concluded that the explosive had been manufactured in the weapons research laboratories of ZDF, one of China’s leading military defense contractors.

  The first hint China was working on a new type of explosive had come in March 2001, when a top-ranking Chinese defector, Senior Colonel Xu Junping of the People’s Liberation Army and one of the nation’s leading military strategists, had defected to the United States, where he was personally questioned by CIA director George Tenet. So important was the debriefing that President Bush had authorized Condoleezza Rice to sit in.

  Xu detailed the work that was being done to create the explosives in the ZDF laboratories situated some forty miles to the west of Beijing. He also revealed how China had secretly been helping rogue states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Most critical of all, he outlined China’s contacts with terror groups through its powerful intelligence services, the Military Intelligence Department (MID) and its Science and Technology Department (STD). Employing some five thousand field agents and defense analysts, both agencies operate globally. They are supported by satellite surveillance and state-of-the-art equipment. Xu told the CIA that part of the work of the two services was to maintain contact with terror groups not only in the Middle East, but also in the Philippines, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. But what astonished the CIA was Xu’s revelations of Chinese intelligence contacts in Colombia with FARC, in Spain with ETA, and in Peru with Shining Path.