Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Now, two years after Xu’s revelation, intelligence services were bracing themselves to confront this latest weapon of choice for terrorists.

  Mossad established that the two British suicide bombers had smuggled their explosive in from Jordan. It had arrived there from Pakistan, whose intelligence service has had long and close links to China’s.

  Mossad agents already knew that in the months before the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, it was from Pakistan that Osama bin Laden made three separate visits to Beijing. Each time he was accompanied by China’s ambassador to that country and the head of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, PIS.

  He had gone to organize a defense contract for the Taliban worth $1 billion.

  “We now believe that during those visits he was appraised of the progress with the new explosives,” a senior Mossad source in Tel Aviv told the author. He agreed that there “is a very strong possibility” al-Qaeda had been provided with a quantity of the explosive—a tiny portion of which had been given to the two British suicide bombers. This takes terrorism into a new dimension.

  It was a judgment that was never far from Dagan’s thoughts as he continued to lead Mossad into the new millennium.

  The failure to locate Saddam or discover if he was dead had irritated Ariel Sharon, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush. On the surface, they said it did not matter, that Saddam was no longer a threat. But few believed that Bush, in particular, would want to write closure to the war until he was able to announce that his much vaunted need for a regime change in Iraq had been completed with the actual death of Saddam.

  But soon it was not the disappearance of a tyrant that came to haunt George Bush and Tony Blair. It was the failure to locate any WMD. Bush ordered in hundreds of CIA agents and scientists to find WMD. They searched and they searched. In London, Tony Blair insisted the weapons were there, that he had been told of eight hundred sites that had still not been checked in the deserts of Iraq.

  Increasingly, however, the truth seemed otherwise. Britain’s former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who had resigned over the war, and Claire Short, a former cabinet minister in the Blair government, both said Blair had lied to Parliament and to the people of Britain when he said that WMD existed.

  By June 2003, Blair was fighting for his credibility and his political future. In Washington, Congress announced there would be a public hearing into the matter. Nobody seriously believed all the truth would finally emerge. But for the moment, there was talk of a scandal that could balloon into another Watergate. Commentators remembered that Bush’s own father had won the first Iraqi war, but lost the presidency to Bill Clinton shortly afterward.

  In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan kept Mossad clear of the deepening crises in London and Washington. When calls came from the CIA and MI6 for any assistance he could give, he stuck to the same story: Mossad would go on looking. No more, no less.

  In December 2003, the hunt for Saddam finally ended. He was captured, ironically, because of the demands of the one woman he still trusted: Samira Shahbander, the second of his four wives.

  On December 11, she had called Saddam from an Internet café in Baalbek, near Beirut; she and Saddam’s only surviving son, Ali, had lived under assumed names in Lebanon after leaving Baghdad some months before the war started.

  Samira, whose curly blond hair came from the same French hair product company that provided Saddam with his hair dye, was the married woman who first became his mistress and then his wife.

  At the start of their courtship, Samira was married to an Iraqi air force pilot. Saddam simply kidnapped him and said he would be set free only if he agreed to divorce Samira. The husband agreed. In return, he was made head of Iraqi Airways—and given a choice from one of Saddam’s cast-off mistresses.

  Married, Samira became Saddam’s favorite, though he took two more wives and scores of mistresses.

  The marriage was cemented by the birth of Ali. The child’s arrival deepened the hatred of Saddam’s elder sons, Uday and Qusay, toward Samira. But by December, both were dead after a shoot-out with U.S. Special Forces.

  Earlier, in March 2003, with the coalition forces closing in on Baghdad, Saddam had arranged for Samira and Ali to flee to Lebanon. With her she took $5 million in cash and a trunk of gold bars from the vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq.

  She told friends she was going first to France and then to Moscow, claiming Saddam had been secretly promised by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, that he would give her sanctuary. Instead, she went to a prearranged hideout, a villa in the Beirut suburbs.

  It was there that Mossad discovered her in November 2003. Meir Dagan sent a team of surveillance specialists from the service’s yaholomin unit to follow Samira’s every move.

  They discovered that the Lebanese government had provided her and Ali with Lebanese passports and new identities. Samira was given the name “Hadija.” But Ali, who has the same deep-set eyes as his father, insisted he would keep the family name of Hussein.

  The Mossad team noted that Samira had transferred most of her money out of Lebanon to a Credit Suisse bank account in Geneva. In the past, the bank had been a repository for some of Saddam’s own fortune.

  Early in December 2003, Samira cashed in her gold bars for U.S. dollars with a Beirut money dealer. Then she started to call Saddam.

  Supported by Israeli air force surveillance aircraft, the yaholomin discovered that the calls were being made from inside Syria, which borders on Iraq. “The calls were affectionate. It was clear there was a close relationship still between them,” said a high-ranking Mossad source in Tel Aviv after Saddam had been captured. That one of the most reviled tyrants in the world—a man who had personally ordered the terrible torture of many thousands, including women and children—could speak of love, both fascinated and repelled the Mossad team.

  But along with endearments the listeners also heard, through their electronic equipment, that Samira wanted more money.

  Time and again, in further calls in December—each made to a different number the yaholomin team pinpointed as going to an area in the desolate sands of the Wadi al-Myrah, which is close to the Syrian border with Iraq—Samira repeated her request for money.

  The daughter of a wealthy, aristocratic Baghdad family, Samira had never lost her taste for the good life. During their marriage, Saddam had showered her with gifts, including two palaces.

  The Israelis knew that across the border in Iraq, U.S. Special Forces were roaming up and down the border looking for Saddam. Other Israeli agents on the Syrian side of the border had heard radio chatter between the units—known as U.S. Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force 121—as they also set about trying to track down Saddam. The force comprised members of Delta Force, the U.S. Rangers, Britain’s SAS and Special Boat Service, and the Australian SAS. “For political reasons, we had not been formally invited to join the party,” a source close to Meir Dagan said to the author.

  Mossad—not for the first time—decided to keep to itself the information it was gleaning from the surveillance of Samira.

  Then, on Thursday, December 11, 2003, the yaholomin team picked up a conversation between Samira and the man they were now certain was Saddam. He told her he would meet her close to the Syrian border. Details of the meeting were enough to prompt the Israelis finally to alert Washington. As Samira prepared to drive to her assignation, she received a second call. The meeting had been canceled. The call did not come from Saddam.

  By then, it later emerged, he was inside his eight-foot-deep hole on the outskirts of Tikrit, his birthplace in Iraq. Samira and Ali heard the news of his capture on the radio. She burst into tears. Ali’s reaction is not known.

  In Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts—like those of all the major intelligence services—were poring over the video footage that showed the likeness of Saddam the world had never seen before. And as part of their work, the Mossad analysts began to ask intriguing questions. Who were the two unidentified men armed with AK-47 rifles w
ho stood guard over the hole? Were they there to protect Saddam—or kill him if he tried to escape? Why did Saddam not use his pistol to commit suicide—and become the martyr he had long boasted he would be? Was it cowardice that stopped him—or was he expecting to make a deal? Would he reveal the truth not only about weapons of mass destruction, but also about his deal with Russia and China, whose secret support had encouraged him to continue to confront the United States?

  His hiding hole had only one opening. It was blocked. He could not have escaped from the hole. Was it in effect a prison? Was he being held there as part of a trade? What use was to be made of the $750,000 in $100 bills found on him? Was that intended for Samira? Or was it a payment for someone who would help him escape? Why did he have no communications equipment? Not even a cell phone was found on him. Did all this indicate that the remnants of his own followers had come to regard him as a spent force, and that they were ready to trade him in for their own freedom? That may explain why he was so talkative and cooperative when his captors dug him out, bringing to an end his thirty-five-year reign of terror in such a dramatic manner.

  The answers to those questions formed part of the interrogation that Saddam Hussein was about to undergo.

  Hours after he emerged from his hole, Saddam came under the combined scrutiny of U.S. and British intelligence service psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and psychoanalysts. They are known as “the specialists.” They studied the video footage of Saddam’s medical examination. The search inside his mouth was not only to obtain a DNA swab, but to see if Saddam had a suicide tablet secreted in a back tooth. None was found.

  This, the specialists concluded, was further proof that Saddam was not a suicide risk. Nevertheless, he was dressed in a one-piece orange suit. It had fiber buttons that would dissolve if he tried to swallow them. The suit cloth was too strong for tearing to form a makeshift noose to hang himself. His feet were encased in soft fiber shoes that could not be broken.

  His cell was constantly monitored by cameras and guards. His every move was noted and used to assess his ability to withstand the interrogation he now faced. In the esoteric language of the specialists, Saddam had not “allowed the loss of his personal boundary to effect his collective ego.”

  Saddam was no longer the man on the video showing his capture: then he had been bowed down with despair, suddenly aged beyond his sixty-six years, a haunted look in his eyes. The specialists concluded he then felt “stupid” at being caught. That would explain his “compulsive talking” to his soldier captors. It was to disguise his near-paralyzing fear at being dragged out of his hole. “He may well have expected to be shot on the spot,” the specialists have told the interrogators.

  Subsequently, he had undergone a marked psychological shift. His arrogance returned. His eyes were no longer dull or his lips slack from confinement in his hole. There was a swagger about him. All this had helped his interrogators plan how to break him. His interrogation center was rocketproof and guarded by elite U.S. Special Forces. It had a medical facility with doctors constantly on duty.

  In the hope of triggering some response, Tariq Aziz, the former deputy Iraqi prime minister, was taken to see Saddam. Aziz was in a prison camp outside Baghdad airport. He was flown by helicopter to confront Saddam and urge him to talk. Instead, Saddam exploded, calling Aziz a traitor.

  By the time interrogators began to question Saddam, his links with the outside world had been totally severed. He had no idea of time or date. There was no such thing as day or night in his world. The normal patterns of waking and sleeping and mealtimes were deliberately disrupted. There would be no physical torture. But he began to receive what was called “the full coercive treatment.” The interrogators did not underestimate their challenge.

  “Saddam presents a unique challenge. He is a man who saw himself as morally, spiritually, and intellectually superior to the Western world. Coercive treatment would include sitting for hours with a hood over his head to increase his isolation. All the time, the questions would be designed to increase anger in his mind about being betrayed. For someone like Saddam, betrayal would be hard to cope with. Being confronted with Tariq Aziz was part of that. The interrogators would have told Saddam that Aziz was looking out for number one. Saddam could do the same by revealing what he knew—which is a great deal,” said Michael Koubi, the interrogator who for years Mossad had used.

  “Nothing will rattle Saddam more than knowing facts he believed over years were no longer valid. It will assault his sense of importance and he will think more about lying because he could be caught out,” Koubi said to the author. “Part of the interrogation will be to see how Saddam answers in his own language. In Arabic certain words can have very different meanings. If he chooses to use one that is not correct, his interrogators will show they know the right meaning,” added Koubi.

  After each interrogation—which could last for many hours, with the questions coming and going—Saddam would be assessed by the specialists. They were looking to see how he responded to certain questions. Was he lying? Covering up? Did those eye blinks caught on camera indicate sudden fear? Or was it arrogance or even indifference?

  Koubi lives today in Ashkelon, near the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. He knew exactly how the interrogators and their support team of specialists were working on Saddam.

  “The first thing the interrogators did was to establish their superiority over Saddam. To remove his belief in his self-control. At every stage, they were looking for his weak points. Those would include playing on Saddam’s loss of power and the indifference to his family’s fate. The interrogators would lie to him. They would force him to keep eye contact as they pressed their questions. When he would try to look away, as he was bound to do, they would continue to stare at him silently. Saddam would not be used to this. It would be unnerving for him to experience such treatment,” said Koubi.

  From time to time, the interrogators asked questions they knew Saddam could not answer. What was going on in Washington and London in the run-up to the Iraqi war? Where was he on a certain date? When he could not answer, he would be accused of covering up.

  “After a while, a question will be slipped in that he can answer. If the interrogators have done their groundwork properly, he will be glad to answer it. Then the questions will move to other questions they want him to answer,” said Koubi.

  “Another means to break him would be to offer simple inducements. If Saddam answered a series of questions, he would be promised uninterrupted sleep. And possibly a change in his carefully monitored diet. But always the promises would not be quite kept. And followed by more promises that if he continued to cooperate, they would be fulfilled,” explained Koubi.

  In January 2004, he was visited by an International Red Cross team of doctors. They pronounced he was being fairly treated.

  The deadly mind games would continue until the interrogators and specialists were satisfied that no more could be wrung out of Saddam Hussein. Then he would be left to his fate. More, he would know by then, he could not expect.

  Meanwhile, Mossad had joined other intelligence services in the hunt for Saddam’s missing fortune. By January 2004, Meir Dagan’s team of financially trained agents, some of whom had worked in the City of London and Wall Street before joining the service, had established that the Queen of England’s banker, Coutts of London, was one of eighteen British banks Saddam Hussein had used to hide his $40 billion fortune over the 1980s.

  The bulk of that money was stolen by him from the central bank of Iraq, transferred to banks in the Middle East, and then deposited under false names in the London banks. Later, the money was transferred to banks in Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and Bulgaria.

  “Any transfer coming from a London bank was assumed to be legitimate,” said Christopher Story, a former financial adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher at the time Saddam was salting away his fortune. Story, the quintessential English gentleman in his pin-striped Savile Row suits and
customized shoes, is a recognized authority on the financial duplicity of the Iraqi leader, and his once close relationship with the major banks of the world. A clippedvoiced Englishman, Story edits a respected financial banking journal, the International Currency Review. Its subscribers include the World Bank, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, and the Bank of England.

  Story has amassed documentation showing that Robert Maxwell, the disgraced tycoon who once owned the London Daily Mirror newspaper group, arranged for billions of dollars to be laundered through Bulgarian banks to the Bank of New York. It was then owned by Edmund Safra, known as “financier to the mafia.” He died in a mysterious fire in his Monaco penthouse in 1999. Maxwell was killed by Mossad agents when he threatened to reveal Israel’s intelligence secrets.

  “If Saddam gives up all the names of those who helped him, it would cause panic greater than any Wall Street crash. Many still hold high office today. It is impossible that they did not know what was going on with Saddam. He was moving out huge sums of money right up until the eve of war,” said Story.