In Tel Aviv, Mossad’s scientists consulted their own network of researchers at some of the world’s leading science institutes. One recalled how, at the height of America’s intervention in Nicaragua, the idea of creating a genetic bomb had occupied the CIA’s geneticists. They had been ordered to locate what became known in the agency as “the Nicaraguan gene.” Substantial sums of money were spent in obtaining blood samples of Nicaraguans and testing them in the CIA laboratories. No gene specific to Nicaragua was identified. The project was abandoned only to be later resurrected to select a “Cuban-only gene.” This research also came to nothing.
But Dr. Ri’s research showed that creating an ethnic bomb was no longer a fantasy. It had become what the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Joshua Lederberg had called the “monster in our backyard.” Anthropologist John Moore, an acknowledged expert in the threat from an ethnic bomb, had predicted its creation would unleash genetic variations that could produce widespread contagion of the human population with rates of mortality like the fictional Andromeda Strain, sufficient to exterminate the whole species.
By the time Jamal and Horaj had separated after their meeting in the Hindu Kush, the Mossad agent had acquired a photograph of Dr. Ri. It showed he was physically the quintessential Korean, short and stocky with a pleasantly rounded face, eyes set wide apart behind his glasses. With the photo came a curriculum vitae that indicated his importance after graduating from the country’s Hambung University of Chemical Industry, which produced scientists for North Korea’s nuclear, chemical, and biological programs.
During the years that followed, Dr. Ri was transferred from one biotechnology center to another, and from time to time he would have encountered some of the thirty-eight thousand scientists and technicians from the Soviet Union who had been recruited to work in North Korea’s biological warfare program. Others had gone to China, Syria, Libya, and Iran.
In 1999, he was appointed to work at Sogram-ri’s Institute 398. NSA satellite images routinely passed to Mossad showed the compound was a half-mile square area, bordered by heavily patrolled roads. The featureless buildings included a headquarters block, a communications building, barracks, and fuel storage tanks. To one side were living quarters for officers and scientists close to a tunnel entrance. The photo analysts believed it led to the underground complex where Dr. Ri and his team worked.
The Institute was under the overall command of Dr. Yi Yong Su. Intelligence sources had established the fifty-one-year-old geneticist was widely respected and not a little feared by her fellow geneticists. She was known to have a close relationship with Kim Jong Il, who had succeeded his father in 1994 to become the country’s supreme leader.
News that Dr. Ri planned to defect had alerted not only Mossad but the CIA, MI6, and the German, French, and Australian intelligence services. Then, as so often happens in the intelligence world, came a whisper: Dr. Ri was heading for Guangzhou, the port city of Canton Province in South China. With Hong Kong a short distance away, there was an opportunity to smuggle Dr. Ri on to one of the many foreign ships in the harbor. In the early hours of one morning—the day of the week or month would remain unknown—Dr. Ri, wearing a dark blue coverall, had appeared at one of the staff entrances to the Guangdong Hotel. Apart from its many fine facilities, the hotel also houses a number of foreign consulates on the fifteenth floor. Dr. Ri used a swipe card to access the building; how he obtained it would remain unknown. At some point inside the hotel, he was confronted by Chinese Public Security officers. Shortly afterward a police van drove him away from the hotel staff entrance.
In Tel Aviv, the file on Dr. Ri was closed and sent to the registry. Jamal and the other Mossad agents, who had hoped to find and persuade the scientist to work for Israel, were reassigned to other duties. They knew that by the very nature of their work, another “target of opportunity” would inevitably show up.
Early in May 2005, Jamal was tipped off by one of his informers in Rawalpindi that two men in the custody of the Pakistan Intelligence Service had revealed to their interrogators they had been asked to take part in an attack on London’s subway system. The men were identified as Zeesham Hyder Siddiqui, who had been arrested by Pakistani agents in Peshawar, and Naeem Noor Khan, who had been arrested in Lahore.
On Mossad’s computers they were both already listed as members of two of the forty-five extremist groups in Pakistan. Khan belonged to Jundullah, the Army of God; Siddiqui to Karkat-e-Jihad-e-Islami, the Movement for Islamic Jihad. Both groups were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Scant though the details from Jamal were, nevertheless Meir Dagan sent an encrypted message to Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5. The months of frost between Mossad’s and Britain’s intelligence services, caused by MI6’s presence in Gaza to try and broker a deal with Hamas, was returned to normal after Meir Dagan had flown to meet with MI6 director John Scarlett. The two men and Eliza Manningham-Buller met in a private room in the Traveller’s Club over lunch. Details of their discussion would remain secret. But shortly afterward, the MI6 agents left Gaza and Nathan, Mossad’s London Station chief, received details of the interrogation by two MI5 officers who had flown to Pakistan to question Siddiqui and Khan. Both admitted being close associates of two other young British Muslims who had launched a suicide bomb attack on a Tel Aviv nightclub two years before. They had also provided further details about the extent of al-Qaeda’s network throughout Britain’s Muslim community.
CHAPTER 24
WEB OF TERROR
Collecting the daily editions of the city’s newspapers published in Arabic, Urdu, and other Middle East languages remained part of the daily routine for Mossad’s London Station because the capital remained a center for radical Islamists to fulminate against Israel and the West.
After an initial assessment by the London Station analysts, the material was sent by the embassy’s daily diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv. There it was cross-checked for published names against those on the growing list of captured al-Qaeda operatives who had been spirited away by the CIA to secret interrogation centers where the rules of the Geneva Convention and American law did not apply. Sometimes the relatives of the suspected terrorists gave the Arab-language newspapers details of where they had been captured, which helped the Mossad analysts build up a picture of the CIA’s activities. It was doing so not because Mossad disapproved of torture—far from it—but for Israel’s self-protection. For years Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and other human rights organizations had condemned the Jewish state for its harsh interrogation methods and prison conditions. If the day should come when the United States would be forced to support an investigation into Israeli methods of coercive interrogation, then the file Mossad was accumulating would show that it was not alone in such methods.
Central to the CIA operation were two aircraft it had hired from a private company in Massachusetts, Premier Executive Transport Services. One was a fourteen-seater Gulfstream, with registration number N379P, the other a white-painted Boeing 737, with the registration number N313P (the company later declined to discuss the leasing with the author). Mossad had obtained both aircraft’s flight logs detailing the journeys the planes had made to countries with poor human rights records; by October 2005, there had been forty-nine flights to Jordan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Guantánamo Bay. Rob Baer, a former CIA intelligence officer in the Middle East, would later claim (to The Washington Post): “If you want a strong interrogation you send prisoners to Jordan. If you want them to be seriously tortured fly them to Egypt, from where they never return. If you want them to be most severely tortured for information, send them to Uzbekistan.” Craig Murphy, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, was sacked in the autumn of 2004 for leaking a memo he wrote to foreign secretary Jack Straw, in which the diplomat alleged that some of the prisoners sent to Uzbekistan were “boiled alive. Its Soviet-trained interrogators carry out tortures watched by CIA officers stationed in the country, which is regarded as a close ally of the Bush admini
stration.”
An MI6 officer told the author, “I have personal knowledge that the prisoners are shackled to their seats and are often gagged and drugged during their flights.”
Some of the flights had been cleared to overfly Israeli air space from the CIA secret interrogation center in Kabul known as “the Pit.” It was part of a constellation of worldwide secret detention centers that were sometimes as small as shipping containers or as large as the complex at Guantánamo Bay. Majeed Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who represented the families of dozens of what he called “the disappeared,” said (to the author), “No one will ever know how many have gone. But probably many thousands.”
The conditions under which they were incarcerated were identified by the New York–based Human Rights Watch. “They are shackled continuously, intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time, and forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods.”
Mossad had established that some of the techniques used at the secret interrogation centers were based on the notorious MK-ULTRA brainwashing program run by the CIA at the height of the Cold War. The MI6 officer who had witnessed the shackled prisoners on their way to Uzbekistan claimed (to the author) that upon arrival they were subjected to “sensory deprivation for lengthy periods, mock executions, starvation, sexual violence, rape, immersion in water to the point of drowning, beatings, exposure to intense heat or cold, clamping off blood circulation by wire restraints, near strangulation, flesh burning with cigarettes, and the use of a variety of drugs to weaken a prisoner’s resistance.”
Meantime Mossad continued to identify names in Arabic newspapers of terrorists who had been sent to the torture chambers. The daily trawl also gathered up the latest pamphlets extolling as “heroes” the bombers of 9/11 and issued updated lists of addresses for Britain’s synagogues and the homes of their rabbis. “They should be reminded of the crimes Jews had committed against Muslims,” urged the London-based radical group, Al-Muhajiroun. The same kind of reminder was spelled out by another group, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades. It told its growing number of supporters in Britain it had “declared a bloody war against our non-Muslim neighbors. We will rase the cities of Europe to the ground. We will turn them into cities drenched with blood until its leaders withdraw their troops from Iraq.”
Muslim clerics were regularly invited on to the BBC to justify the “martyrdom” of suicide bombers because, as Dr. Yusuf al-Qardawi told the corporation’s current affairs flagship program, Newsnight: “It is an indication of the justice of Allah the Almighty.” Many young British Muslims still carried with them the fatwa Osama bin Laden had issued in February 1998: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the great Mosques of Mecca from their grip and in order for their armies to move out of the lands of Islam.”
With the help of its sayanim network of Jewish volunteers throughout Britain, Mossad’s London Station gathered mounting evidence on the extent of the threat Muslim extremism posed to the United Kingdom. There were now close to five thousand sayanim in Britain in 2005, who acted as “the eyes and ears” Meir Amit had envisaged when he created the network. They were no longer made up of relatives of European Jews who had arrived in the country in the 1930s, refugees from nazism. Now they included Jews from Lebanon, Syria, and, more recently, Iraq and Iran: shopkeepers, landlords, and café owners in Asian communities who provided a steady stream of information.
An Iraqi bookseller in the north London suburb of Wembley had provided proof that Islamic extremists had reached the heart of the Blair government. Ahmad Thomson, a Muslim barrister and a senior member of the Association of Muslim Lawyers, had been appointed to advise the prime minister on how to deal with the matter. Thomson was also the author of a fast-selling book in the Muslim community. Titled The New World Order, it claimed there was “a Zionist plan to shape world events” and predicted that events like 9/11 and the suicide bombings in Israel were “part of the coming confrontation between the muminun (those who accept Islam) and the kaffirun (nonbelievers).” Other Muslim advisers to the government had, before being appointed, described Osama bin Laden as a “holy warrior” and defended suicide bombers as “genuine martyrs.”
Though the Blair government had finally promised that extremist preachers and scholars who promoted terrorism would be deported, those radical imams and teachers continued throughout the summer of 2005 to deliver their diatribes about holy war in their mosques and post inflammatory articles on their Web sites.
Mohammed al-Massari, a middle-aged Saudi militant who had fled that country to Britain and managed to convince the government he faced death if he was returned to the desert kingdom, still used his Web site in June 2005 to show videos of British and American hostages being beheaded in Iraq. He also ran an Internet radio station that called for holy war. Abu Qatada, who had fled to London from Jordan claiming he was being persecuted there for his religious beliefs, had been allowed to remain in Britain. He had repaid his host country by inciting his followers to go to Iraq and kill Coalition troops. Pakistan’s Hizb-a-Tehia, the Party of Liberation, outlawed in its own country, used its London office to recruit young Muslims to go to Afghanistan to be trained to wage war against America. In other Muslim enclaves in the north and west suburbs of London, imams preached their invective as they did in the cities of Leicester, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, and Glasgow; thousands of young, impressionable Muslims, many born in Britain, were being indoctrinated into hatred against their own country.
All this information had been stored on his computer by Nathan. Some of it had come from his MI5 liaison officer at the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) in MI5’s Millbank offices. Opened in 2003 as part of Britain’s role in the war on terrorism, JTAC’s one hundred staff were drawn from all areas of the intelligence community fighting international terrorism. They worked in a brightly lit, windowless room in the basement of the building; its unmarked door was opened only by swipe cards whose codes were changed regularly. From the workstations, equipped with state-of-the-art communications, came and went a continuous flow of information. Sensitive material, once shared only with the CIA, Mossad, and the French and German intelligence services, was now more widely distributed since the attacks on Bali and Madrid. The result had been a surge of high-value intelligence from sources like GROM, Poland’s SAS-trained antiterrorist unit. They provided details about Jamal Zougam, who was implicated in the Madrid rail station bombings and who had planned a Christmas bombing campaign in Warsaw. Spanish intelligence had sent details of Zougam’s visit to London, where he had visited the radical Finsbury Park mosque. It’s imam, Abu Hamza, had preached support for bin Laden and was now fighting extradition to the United States from his prison cell for his role in killing Americans in the Middle East. In 2006, Abu Hamza was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for “promoting and taking part in terrorist activities.” After he has served his sentence, he will be deported to America and will face charges of “complicity in killing U.S. citizens in the Middle East.”
A French intelligence report estimated that as a result of a recruitment drive, al-Qaeda support in the country “stands at over 3 5,000, many of them are converts to Islam. They are organized into military-style units and meet regularly for training in the use of weapons and explosives, combat tactics, and indoctrination. They are controlled from local and district command centers under the al-Qaeda national command.” In a further pooling of information, Germany’s BND reported its estimate that there were, in June 2005, around thirty thousand al-Qaeda sympathizers in the Federal Republic. Nathan had told his liaison officer that Mossad believed the movement’s leaders were based in the port city of Hamburg, from where several of the 9/11 bombers had come.
In June 2005, Nathan and his liaison officer had once more traveled to several cities in the north of England as part of an unprecedent
ed security operation. Twenty of the world’s security services had joined forces to help protect the G8 Summit at Gleneagles in Scotland in July.
Between them they had created a security ring, which included Germany’s border with Poland, to intercept terrorists moving out of the Balkans. Spanish intelligence agents were linked through Britain’s listening posts on Gibraltar and Cyprus to monitor the North African coast, long an established launchpad for al-Qaeda into Europe. SISMI, Italy’s secret service, had deployed scores of agents to watch for terrorists coming out of the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union. French and Dutch intelligence officers were stationed in the Channel ports.
At GCHQ, Britain’s listening post in space, linguists, analysts, and technicians continued to track intercepts, seeking the first sign of a threat. Already its computers had deciphered “chatter” that indicated the Italian anarchists planned to enter Britain ahead of the summit. American satellites, controlled by the NSA base at Menwith Hill in the north of England, watched over an area from the deserts of Iraq in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east.
The DGSE, the French intelligence service charged with protecting President Chirac at the summit, discovered that European anarchists, including the Ya Basta group, had recently met with Class War, a notorious British anarchist group, at Calais. Both groups were known to advocate violent protest. Germany’s BND secret service confirmed that German anarchists had also recently attended “a conference of anarchists” held outside Nottingham in England.
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