When he awakens, he will brush his teeth in the Arab fashion with a stick of miswak wood. Then he will pray for the strength to destroy his enemies. Like a cancer they consume him, burrowing into his mind, even capable at times of making him weep. Then, real tears will fall down his cheeks, the crying of an unforgiving fanatic who hates with a passion that is awesome. Though they far outnumber him, he continues to outwit their vast electronic and human resources—because the forces arrayed against him cannot agree on a strategy that will capture Osama bin Laden.
In Tel Aviv, a senior Mossad analyst said (to the author), “Part of the problem is the old one of the Americans thinking putting up more satellites and pouring in electronic surveillance equipment is the answer. We have told them that the best solution is human intelligence.”
Rafi Eitan, who masterminded Mossad’s capture of Adolf Eichmann, identified the problem of capturing bin Laden. “There is a need for patience. Satellites can only tell you what is happening now—not what could be happening in the future. That can only come from having men on the ground. The greatest successes Mossad has had are through ‘humint’—human intelligence.”
Long realizing that the United States has the capability to electronically eavesdrop on his discussions, bin Laden writes his orders in a neat hand, then distributes them to trusted aides. They travel to neighboring countries and transmit them from there to bin Laden’s global network of some 2,500 terrorists. It was such an order that led to the Madrid massacre.
In 2003, via an Islamic Web site, bin Laden said, “We don’t consider it a crime if we try to obtain nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Our holy land is occupied by Israeli and American forces. We have the right to defend and liberate our holy land.”
Washington has doubled its bounty for bin Laden’s capture to $50 million. Meir Amit, a former director general of Mossad, has said such a tactic often does not work. “Betrayal for money is a hard thing to induce in someone committed to a terrorist leader. Part of the reason is fear of someone discovering the treachery. Part of the reason is that the leader has picked his men with care. No promise of a bounty will make them think about turning bin Laden in.”
However, in Tel Aviv a former Mossad katsa, Eli Cohen, said (to the author) that a weakness could be bin Laden’s strong family ties to his four wives, seven children, and forty grandchildren. “We know where they live and their movements. If a wife and some of his children were kidnapped it would certainly focus bin Laden’s mind. At minimum they could be held as hostages against him carrying out any further outrage. If he still did, then he should expect ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ policy to exist. In other words, his family would be executed.”
But no one knows if such a threat would be brushed aside by Osama bin Laden with the same indifference with which he treats all human life.
During the summer months of 2004, the world was shocked by the pictures and descriptions of Iraqi prisoners being abused by their U.S. military guards in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail. One of the most unpleasant images was of a naked Iraqi prisoner being held on a lead by a woman soldier. The consensus was that, horrific though the images were, they resulted from a toxic mixture of boredom, sadism, and a warped idea of entertainment by the guards. The Pentagon insisted it did not go beyond that. But action would be taken; severe punishment meted out to the guilty.
The prison commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, was relieved of her post. A damning report, which effectively ended her career in the military, accused her of lack of leadership during her tenure as prison governor.
On July 4, Karpinski hit back. She publicly announced that among the interrogators at Abu Ghraib had been Mossad interrogators. Fluent Arab speakers, they had been given free access to the high-value prisoners.
Karpinski’s claim had political implications that extended far beyond the walls of the prison. The Arab media used her claim to inflame further Muslim opinion. There were allegations that the Mossad interrogators had been responsible for the interrogation of Palestinian detainees in Iraq. Israel vehemently denied this. There was no way of independently confirming the claims. There may never be.
But soon there was an even more compelling moment to focus world attention. It was the appearance of Saddam Hussein in court in Baghdad in July to face an indictment for war crimes including genocide. Gone was the man who had emerged from a hole in the ground. His old arrogance had returned. He refused to recognize the court. He treated the prosecuting judge with indifference and at times, contempt. It was a chilling reminder of who Saddam had once been: a despot, a tyrant who held the fate of his people in his hands. It will be two years before his trial gets under way. In that time Saddam will, away from his court appearances, live the same daily routine.
Every morning at 4:30—an hour the many millions of Iraqis terrorized for years by Saddam Hussein call “the true dawn”—he will awaken. In the distance he will hear the call of the muezzins to prayer. But Saddam is only a lip-service follower. He will not prostrate himself toward Mecca—even though an arrow on the wall of his bedroom indicates the direction. Next door is his dayroom. The floor is covered with a carpet from his palace. It is the only visible reminder of his past.
For a moment he will blink owlishly in the bright wire-covered bedroom ceiling lights. Above the door, out of reach, is a security camera that provides a wide-angle view of the fifteen-by-fifteen foot room. It has a chair over which is draped the Arab robe he has taken to wearing. In a nearby control room, a bank of monitor screens and computers record his every movement, his occasional mumblings, his angry glares at the camera. Sometimes he shouts for the lights to be turned off. They never are.
Saddam is treated with the same vicelike grip that exists for any inmate on death row in America. Officially now under the legal authority of the new Iraqi interim government, he is in reality still a prisoner of the United States. But he has already won one tonsorial battle. His captors wanted to shave off his beard.
“Saddam convinced them his beard is a sign of mourning for his two sons. Tradition demands he must go unshaven for at least a year. Yasser Arafat, an old friend of Saddam’s, maintains a close beard out of mourning for the Palestinian people,” said Alice Baya’a, an expert on Saddam’s life.
But they will control his every movement outside the time he meets with his defense team for his appearances in court. They will watch over him until the moment he is sentenced. But that would be at least two years away (it would finally open in 2006). Saddam also plans to delay matters by calling as witnesses presidents and prime ministers. The names of George Bush, Tony Blair, and Vladimir Putin appear on the list he has given his Iraqi prosecutors.
By July 2004, six hundred lawyers had already offered to defend him. For them it was a golden opportunity to showcase their talents. Twenty were selected by his family. None have been allowed to visit him in captivity—let alone enter his monastic quarters.
His iron bed is bolted to the floor. The bedding is standard U.S. military prison issue, a long way from the years Saddam slept between silk sheets purchased from Harrods of London. His pillows then were filled with the finest of feathers from rare birds shot by his guards in the marshlands of southern Iraq.
Saddam’s quarters are in a storeroom. Once his retinue of servants used it to keep vats of fragrant oils for perfuming Saddam’s bathwater. Other vats were reserved for masseuses to knead his body. Now his toiletries consist of a weekly bar of supermarket soap, a sponge, and a tube of toothpaste. But he has returned to the days of his childhood for his oral hygiene. He brushes his teeth in the Arab fashion with a stick of miswak, a hardwood.
In an alcove in his bathroom is a ceiling shower and a European-style toilet bolted across the original hole over which his servants once squatted. A metal washbasin and two towels complete the facilities. Like any cheap hotel, the towels are changed once a week. The toilet paper is the kind sold in any Baghdad marketplace.
When his breakfast arrives—his staple
diet is yogurt, toast, and weak tea served on the same cheap plates his guards eat off—the guards treat him with respect. They call him “President Saddam,” the only title he will respond to. While he uses airline-style plastic cutlery to eat with, they stand watch at the door. The guards are unarmed—a precaution in the unlikely event Saddam would attempt to grab a weapon. A high-ranking British intelligence officer who has firsthand knowledge of Saddam’s conditions said (to the author): “The psychiatrists have ruled out that Saddam has suicidal tendencies. But he can be highly temperamental and abusive. And he can be very confrontational if his demands are not met.”
Those demands have included international law books. There were growing signs that Saddam, like Slobadan Milosovich, plans to star in his own defense.
“He is consumed by the idea he can cause huge damage to President Bush and Tony Blair. When he talks about them, his eyes mist over and he hates them with a passion which is awesome,” said the British intelligence officer.
Each day follows the same pattern. Saddam has a noonday lunch—Arab-style food cooked by an Iraqi specially recruited by the Coalition. There is a food taster who samples every dish before it is brought to Saddam. Drinking water comes from sealed bottles—part of consignments flown in from the United States for its troops.
Twice a day, after lunch and late afternoon, Saddam is taken out to a small courtyard to exercise. He often wears a T-shirt and a pair of military shorts—far from the days he had customized underwear of the finest Egyptian cotton. Those were bought by the box load from a New York store. In a corner of the yard is a water tap. The first thing Saddam does is to turn on the tap. The sound of flowing water has always been a reminder for him that, in a land parched by nature, he could always command water. In his palaces there were magnificent tumbling waterfalls and the sound of water was pumped into his office. As he paces the courtyard, the water is a mere trickle. When his exercise time is up, the tap is turned off.
As the sky darkens into deep ebony, Saddam prepares for his night. His dinner will be fruit—dates and olives are a must on his menu—along with soup, possibly chicken and rice. The diet has led to Saddam shedding his potbelly. His shaggy salt-and-pepper beard is trimmed once a week, enhancing his sharp, penetrating eyes. After supper he will return to his law books, trying to fashion a defense for what the world thinks was indefensible. When his trial opened in January 2006, Saddam made good use of his studies, ranting at the trial judge and challenging court rulings.
Like his predecessors, Meir Dagan had come to accept the reality that intelligence is only occasionally successful and that the agency’s best work is ignored, never makes it to the public domain. Coupled with this was the daily routine of giving unwelcome news to Mossad’s political masters.
Increasingly, the sheer volume of intelligence reports meant politicians often had little time to digest what was being said. Dagan continued the system whereby only a few people—usually senior members of Sharon’s cabinet—had access to all the intelligence information. It was not unique to Mossad; the CIA, Germany’s BND, and even the two services Dagan most admired, MI6 and MI5, were careful about what they allowed to go beyond their own closed doors. All too often, the inquisitive media had increasingly ensured that no significant facts or operations could be kept totally secret for long.
Dagan continued to resist the way other agencies employed more specialists, being called in to operate satellites and other technological intelligence. He still believed technology alone could not unravel secret plans. He was committed to show in the first decade of the twenty-first century that the number of good spies was in inverse proportion to the size of Mossad’s support apparatus.
For him, Mossad’s spies were more important than any piece of technology. He relished the thought that Mossad still remained a mysterious organization, where a small number of extraordinary individuals, armed with great courage, could achieve extraordinary results. That, for him, and his men and women, was a comforting assurance as they prepared to face the rapidly changing and frightening world ahead.
In the last week of October 2004, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who had once publicly embraced Saddam Hussein and brought upon himself further fury from Israel, sat down for dinner in his compound in Ramallah on the West Bank. For the past three years he had been confined to shell-pocked buildings on the orders of Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. The decision to isolate him was in the hope that Arafat would call off the suicide bombers and the terror they had inflicted across Israel. Sharon felt Arafat had only paid lip service to stop the killing and mutilation.
Surrounded by Israeli tanks and his every word listened to by the surveillance experts of Mossad, Arafat’s influence on peace in the Middle East remained strong. World leaders, like President Jacques Chirac of France, still telephoned him. His following among millions of radicals across the Arab world was constant. Sharon had said again publicly that until Yasser Arafat was removed from power there could be no lasting peace.
His own life had been a testimony to his ultimate failure to become president of a Palestinian state. He had seen his people demoralised by high unemployment through his failure to compromise, especially over the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees, a concession that would have sounded the knell of the Israeli state. His intransigeance was matched by his autocratic style of governing, highlighted by increasing sycophancy and corruption.
Now thinner and physically frailer than when he had first swept onto the world stage at the United Nations thirty years before as leader of his people, Yasser Arafat was now in his seventy-fifth year and, to ordinary Israelis, still a terrorist godfather whose complete annihilation of their state was a burning aim. To other previous U.S. administrations he was a Nobel Prize winner and the only Palestinian to do business with. To the Bush White House, he was a pariah.
But he sensed that soon, with the return of George W. Bush for another four-year term, Israel might finally decide to remove him. For twenty years he had been telling his doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, “They will do something.”
“‘They,’ was Mossad; ‘something’ was to kill him,” Dr. al-Kurdi said (to the author).
On October 26 Arafat sat down for dinner. He began with a cream-based soup, the recipe for which he claimed had been handed down to him by his mother. Then came a fried piece of Saint Peter’s fish from the lake of Galilee and named after the catch the apostle Peter was reputed to have made before Jesus converted him. All the fish bones had been carefully removed before Arafat ate. Next Arafat consumed roast chicken, hummus, bread, tomatoes, and a green salad. The ingredients were, as usual, from the local market in Ramallah. The food was set out on the long table in Arafat’s workroom. There was also a nonalcoholic drink. Arafat had insisted it be prepared from homeopathic potions and herbs.
“He secretly chose them himself. The drink smelled awful. It made people unwell just sniffing it. But Arafat swallowed it as if it was champagne,” Dr. al-Kurdi would tell Al-Jazeera Television.
The drink was based on homeopathic ingredients not available to the souks of Ramallah. But they could be obtained in one of the upmarket alternative medicine outlets in Tel Aviv. Within hours Arafat was complaining of severe stomach pains. Dr. al-Kurdi diagnosed gastric flu. But when the prescription medicine did not help, the physician decided Arafat had a blood disorder, “perhaps one of the many types of leukemia.” But again the symptoms did not confirm that. Just a few hours later, more expert medical aid was on the way to Ramallah. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt dispatched his personal medical team, including a cancer specialist. King Abdullah of Jordan also sent the best doctor available in Amman. Both teams recommended that the increasingly ill Arafat, whose symptoms could not be firmly diagnosed, be sent to Europe. President Chirac was contacted. He said the Percy Military Hospital outside Paris would make its own renowned specialists available to treat Arafat.
On October 29 the still-conscious Arafat was helicoptered out of the Ramallah compo
und. But by then the Arab world was already asking one question. Had Mossad’s chemists obtained a sample of the contents of Arafat’s homeopathic concoction? Had Meir Dagan done what his predecessors had resisted—out of the understandable fear of escalating the suicide bomber attacks—and taken charge of an audacious operation to assassinate Yasser Arafat?
Even as Arafat’s plane was heading toward Paris, Dr. al-Kurdi added his medical guess to the souk rumors. He said, “Poisoning is a strong possibility.” The other Arab doctors who had seen Arafat hinted darkly that they also did not rule out poisoning. In Paris, Arafat’s wife, Suha, compounded the intrigue by saying she alone would reveal details of his medical condition—but only when she received “guarantees of my own personal position” regarding the whereabouts of $2 billion of Palestinian Authority funds, which the International Monetary Fund, having carried out an audit in 2003, said were still missing. A deal would later be made in which the Palestinian Authority agreed to pay her $2 million a year for the rest of her life “in recognition of her importance to the Palestinian movement and in her husband’s life.” She had, in fact, not seen him for four years before she visited his bedside at the Percy Military Hospital. She had traveled from her large suite at the deluxe Hotel Le Bristol in Paris; Arafat had also bequeathed her a magnificent villa on the city’s elegant rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
But by the time the deal was cemented, the medical mystery of Arafat’s condition had deepened. He was variously reported as having liver failure, kidney failure, that he was brain dead, semiconscious, or unconscious. His French doctors refused to provide any details of scans, biopsies, or blood tests, which would have shown the condition of his vital organs. The information that dribbled out of the hospital came from Arafat’s Palestinian aides. Apart from Dr. al-Kurdi, none of them were qualified and had been denied further access to al-Kurdi’s long-time patient. Arafat’s aides announced on November 4 that Arafat was on a life-support system. Then abruptly the hospital spokesman said its doctors had found no trace of poisoning “having conducted two tests for a substance.” He would not say what substance Arafat had been tested for.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 51