Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Shortly before the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004, MI6 informed Mossad that the expansion could result in an influx of terrorists into Britain whose prime targets would be the Jewish business community. London Station failed to find any evidence to support this.

  In May 2004, Dagan had sensed a sea of change happening in Langley, and he was determined that Mossad would benefit from it. He already knew Porter Goss’s reputation from his eight years as the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, during which he had openly declared the CIA had become too “gunshy” after the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa. Dagan had been further won over when Goss had publicly said he was not against assassinations. “I believe it is a concept most Americans are fairly comfortable with. If you have exhausted all other avenues then the possibility of lethal force is well understood,” he had said after President Bush had nominated him to be the CIA’s next director. His words had found considerable support among conservatives at a time when Osama bin Laden’s freedom remained a major threat to America.

  From their first meeting the two spy chiefs had formed an immediate bond. Goss had listened as Dagan had explained how he had inherited a Mossad where morale was low and its reputation seriously damaged, and how he revitalized it by the simple expedient of being a hands-on director. Since coming to office Dagan had made close to fifty trips overseas. Goss had spoken about his own stint with the CIA in the 1960s, the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with a poisoned cigar or a booby-trapped seashell when the Cuban leader went diving. Goss explained that ill health had finally made him give up a career with the Directorate of Operations that was responsible for all spying missions. He had entered politics, winning a seat for the Republicans in Florida. But he had never lost touch with the global intelligence world. In London, Paris, and other European capitals, he had kept alive a network that would serve him well in his new post.

  As a practical step in their alliance, Goss and Dagan sent their spies into the badlands of Kazakstan, to the mountains of Kashmir, to the seaports of the Horn of Africa, into the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia, and reinforced their presence in Saudi Arabia.

  The Kingdom’s increasing volatility continued to provide a fertile recruiting ground for the jihadists and the seemingly unlimited funds available to finance them. Split by a power struggle, the seventy-nine-year-old King Fahd clinging to life (he would finally die in August 2005) and many of the royal family’s five thousand princes living in fear of the fundamentalist groups sprouting in their midst, had provided them with billions of petrodollars in the hope they would be spared in any insurrection by the country’s radicals. The most extreme spoke of the day when Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi, would bring the royal family to its knees in much the way the Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to Iran in triumph. Already bin Laden had fulminated that shariah law was not being implemented strictly enough in the Kingdom.

  Supported by the Bush administration, the House of Saud had finally begun to crack down hard on the fundamentalists. Shoot-outs between the security forces and fundamentalists became routine. Captured jihadists were beheaded, and their heads displayed on spikes in public squares around the country. The displays had only increased the violence. In 2004, over 150 foreigners, agents of the security forces, and terrorists, had died.

  While the CIA worked closely with the Saudi secret service to locate the fundamentalists, Mossad’s role was different. With Saudi Arabia having no Jewish economic interests to attack within its borders, Mossad agents were concerned with tracking jihadists coming out of the country and heading toward Israel. All too often before reaching its borders, they met their deaths at the hands of Mossad’s most feared unit, kidon, its assassination squad.

  Among the first decisions Meir Dagan had made was to increase its number from forty-eight to sixty; eight of them were women. All kidon had graduated from the Mossad training school at Herseliya before undergoing specialist training at an army facility in the Negev Desert. On graduating, their average age was still in their midtwenties. They regularly underwent the same physical checks as a front-line pilot in the Israeli air force. Between them kidon were fluent in Arabic and the major European languages, English, Spanish, and French. Some had acquired a proficiency in Chinese.

  In the $100 billion global intelligence industry, which engaged over a million people, kidon was regarded with respect. With an unpublished budget and no accounting for how it was spent, kidon was also the envy of other secret services. Only the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS) had a similar freedom to kill.

  In the past three years Dagan had sent kidon to seek out all those who had been condemned at a meeting he chaired in his office. The assassins had done so in countries across the Middle East, in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, striking in places where the souks and alleys had no names; in each case a killing had been swift and unexpected, using anything from a single bullet to the nape of the neck, to garrotting with a cheese-cutting wire or a knife thrust into the larynx. Kidon had also used nerve agents and a poisoner’s arsenal of substances specially prepared for them. There were many ways of killing, and kidon knew them all.

  To perfect their skill they watched some of Israel’s leading forensic pathologists in Tel Aviv’s Institute of Forensic Medical Research at work so as to better understand how to make an assassination appear to be an accident. They learned how a small blemish or a pinprick on a victim’s skin would be a giveaway. Watching the pathologists cutting and dissecting a corpse, kidon were encouraged to ask questions. How had a pathologist decided exactly how a corpse had been murdered? What attempts had been made to disguise the method of killing? What was the significance of some small mark on the skin or damage to an internal organ the pathologist had discovered that had led him to a final conclusion? Later, back at their base, kidon would be closely questioned by an instructor on what they had seen and how it could be used for their own purposes. It was rare that a member of the unit failed the grilling, which would mean coming off the active duty roster for a spell of further intensive study of the pathologists at work.

  Kidon routinely drove out to the Institute for Biological Research at Nez Ziona to consult with its scientists in their secure laboratories where they tested the efficacy of chemical and biological weapons prepared in labs in Iran, North Korea, and China. Some of the Institute’s Jewish chemists had once worked for the KGB and the East German Stasi intelligence service. When these collapsed at the end of the Cold War, the scientists were recruited by Mossad.

  In a conference room reserved for the purpose, chemists and assassins would sit and discuss the merits and drawbacks of what was available for a specific assassination. Would the killing be at night or day? Some lethal pathogens did not work so well in daylight. Would an assassination be in an open or a closed space? Nerve gas often responded very differently in either situation. Would an aerosol be more effective than an injection? Where should either be aimed at the body? Behind an ear, the back of a hand, a jab into a calf or thigh? The questions required careful answers. A kidon’s life could depend on them.

  The choice of location was also important. Some nerve agents smelled of new-mown grass, others of spring flowers. To use them in desert surroundings would risk raising suspicion. Sometimes, however, it was important to leave evidence that kidon had struck to raise fear in others.

  More recently, the desert tracks out of Saudi Arabia had been littered with the bodies of dead jihadists who had set off to wage terrorism against Israel—and had encountered kidon.

  Mossad’s African safari had been a high mark of its foreign adventures in the 1970s. The classic example of how Meir Amit had put together a textbook operation was part of the curriculum at the Mossad training school. When he came into office, he had studied how a very secret and deadly war had been successfully waged against the KGB and China’s CSIS. Both intelligence services had been training African r
evolutionaries to mount guerrilla attacks against Western interests from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

  The prospect of thousands of well-trained and armed fighters within a few hours’ striking distance of Israel had alarmed the country’s politicians. Meir Amit had sent every available katsa—field officers—and kidon to Central Africa. For three years they waged a pitiless battle of attrition against Russian and Chinese agents. Katsas were killed with the same brutality. Their names were later engraved on one of the sandstone walls of the brain-shaped memorial at Glilot that commemorated Mossad’s dead. In 2005 they numbered ninety-one.

  Now this figure could increase as Dagan sent his agents into the jungles of Venezuela, the mountains of Colombia, the back streets of Mexico, the Amazon, and down into Chile and Argentina; in all those countries al-Qaeda was fomenting hatred against Israel. Once more the terror organization was helped by the CSIS Second Intelligence Department of the People’s Liberation Army general staff.

  Both organizations had established a strong presence in El Salvador—part of their overall campaign to make Latin America both a powerful new player on the continent for China and to provide al-Qaeda with an operational presence that presented an increasing threat to Jewish interests in the region. San Salvador banks—including offshoots of Israeli, British, and U.S. financial institutions—became a routine stopover for the huge sums of money being laundered by both CSIS and al-Qaeda on cash-washing journeys around the world. These profits from drug running supplemented deals al-Qaeda had made with the drug cartels of Colombia.

  Katsas and kidon, supported by CIA and DAS agents, ran a “kill or be killed” campaign in the dense jungles of Venezuela to stop al-Qaeda moving massive quantities of cocaine out of the country into the United States, Europe, and Israel. The dead of al-Qaeda were left to rot in the jungle, a warning to others. The bodies of the agents were airlifted out for burial in their homelands. In Israel there was no official acknowledgement where they had been or what they had done. Only the work of the stonemason at Glilot offered a clue as he carved each name with pride.

  In al-Qaeda hideouts in the jungle, evidence had been found that over three thousand American-based companies, many in the high-tech industry, had been penetrated by the organization buying stocks. U.S. Treasury officials calculated that in 2004 the terror group had invested over a billion U.S. dollars. The shares had been acquired through investment brokerages in Asia, Malta, and Poland, payment having first been processed through banks in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. FBI director Robert Mueller had assigned 167 senior agents to try and unravel the complicated financial structure that now gave al-Qaeda a growing presence in the global financial markets.

  David Szady, the FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, had called the situation “a most grave and present danger. It could undermine the national security and economic advantage of the United States” (to the author).

  At the center of al-Qaeda’s money-laundering activities was the software program, Promis, developed by the Washington-based specialist company, Inslaw, and subsequently obtained by Israel. A copy of the software had later found its way into the hands of Osama bin Laden. It had originally been stolen from the FBI by Robert Hannsen, a long-time KGB spy in the agency. He had passed it on to the KGB, and its agents had then sold it to bin Laden.

  While in Washington, al-Qaeda’s tangled financial web was slowly being untangled, in Latin America Mossad had established how the terror group’s operatives entered the continent through Honduras and Venezuela. The CSIS had high-speed trawlers based in Cuba capable of running the terrorists across the Caribbean to the virtually unguarded coastline of both countries.

  When China’s president, Hu Jinto, had visited Cuba in late 2005, he had agreed to provide Castro with the latest signals intelligence and electronic-warfare facilities. The complex was near Bejucal, twenty miles south of Havana. At the other end of the island, Chinese technicians had installed a surveillance system capable of eavesdropping on classified U.S. military communications by intercepting satellite signals. The presence of these powerful monitoring posts enabled China to conduct electronic surveillance of the southern United States and across Central America. They gave al-Qaeda cells on the continent vital foreknowledge of moves by Mossad and the CIA to attack them.

  In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan had told senior staff that he shared Porter Goss’s frustration that there could be no preemptive strike against the Cuban sites.

  “The memory of the Bay of Pigs fiasco still haunts Washington,” Dagan was quoted as telling his staff.

  On an afternoon in early February 2005, when even the air pollution was bearable, a Mossad agent, code named “Manuel,” had arrived in Mexico City’s international airport. He had flown from Florida on a Spanish passport; his base was in the city, a safe house in a neighborhood settled mostly by Jews who had retired.

  In the past weeks he had visited the Bogotá headquarters of DAS, Colombia’s intelligence service, and the security services of Peru, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic. His hosts had described the extent of al-Qaeda’s penetration of their countries. In Colombia, it had held meetings with FARC, the country’s terror group, and with Shining Path, the Peruvian anarchists. Before he left, DAS had given Manuel copious documents showing how hard it was trying to cope with the terrorism al-Qaeda had brought within their borders and which they had little firsthand knowledge about. Manuel had promised he would arrange for key members of their security forces to come to Israel and receive firsthand briefing.

  Mossad had been doing that for years in third world countries. It was another way to have its own contacts on the inside and work through them to fight terrorism.

  In Mexico, Manuel was not yet certain he would find suitable contacts. Its law-enforcement agencies, especially its police, had a deserved reputation for bribery and corruption. Officers were involved in drug smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, and killings. But most alarming of all were the links between al-Qaeda and the country’s Popular Revolutionary Army, EPR. They had been discovered in documents during antiterrorist operations by the CIA in Pakistan to try and locate Osama bin Laden. Copies had been passed on to Mossad at the instigation of Porter Goss. As well as confirming al-Qaeda ties with the substantial student population of Muslims on Dominica and the large number of Arabs living on Peru’s border with Chile, the documents revealed that EPR had a key role in helping al-Qaeda operatives enter the United States through the busiest land crossing in the world, Tijuana.

  Mossad analysts believed the documents were authored by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leading strategist. His psychoprofile in the Mossad archives included the observation that his few pleasures included watching videos of the attacks of 9/11. Since then he was reported to have made several visits to Latin America.

  Manuel was eager to know if Mexico’s Center for Investigation and National Security, CISEN, could provide further evidence of this. He would be unlucky. Its director, Eduardo Medina, insisted his service had no reason to believe al-Qaeda had any presence in Mexico. “Purely media speculation,” he had said.

  Next day Manuel caught a plane back to Florida. He had found no one in Mexican intelligence he would recommend should be invited to Israel. When he had made his report, he would then fly to Washington on a very different assignment.

  At 10:00 a.m. EST, on a biting cold winter day, January 14, 2005, a war game chaired by POTUS—White House speak for the president of the United States—stand-in Madeleine Albright entered a hotel ballroom in midtown Washington, D.C., to preside over a summit of world leader stand-ins. They had convened in the expectation that they would discuss how best to handle the greatest natural disaster in modern history, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the death toll of which had climbed to over one hundred thousand and would eventually reach beyond three hundred thousand.

  Instead, Manuel was among a select number of official observers invited to see how another and even more dangerous crisis would be handled. It posed a threat t
hat successive Mossad directors, like intelligence chiefs everywhere, feared more than any other attack. What was about to be unveiled in the ballroom was a threat virtually impossible to detect in its creation or launch.

  The CIA had learned that a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda had stolen a small quantity of smallpox virus from a biocontainment laboratory in Siberia. The lab was one of two places in the world where the virola was contained under stringent World Health Organization (WHO) protocols. The other was the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. The Siberian facility had a security system built by the Bechtel Group and paid for by the U.S. government to protect freezers containing 120 different smallpox samples. The CIA had still not established how the theft had happened or where the virus had been taken.

  The president had been briefed that the virus was one of the most deadly diseases on earth; in the twentieth century alone it had killed 300 million people. It was not until 1980 that WHO announced smallpox had been eradicated. Now on that January morning, POTUS had summoned her fellow leaders to tell them it was once more a threat.

  They sat in a U-shaped area of desks on which were phones, computers, and TV screens. Each desk bore a name: Prime Minister of United Kingdom; President of France; Chancellor of Federal Republic of Germany; Prime Minister of Canada; Prime Minister of Poland; President of European Commission; Prime Minister of Sweden; Director General of World Health Organization.