MI5, who would jointly coordinate the multinational security operation with MI6, were already hunting for an Italian terrorist nicknamed “The Raven” who was believed to have entered Britain and was known to have links to an al-Qaeda cell in Bologna, Italy, a well-known hotbed for terrorists. Details about him were discovered in a raid by Italian agents that led to the arrest of eighty anarchists who had been planning to go to Gleneagles. The CIA had assigned two hundred agents and state-of-the-art electronic equipment to protect President Bush. Russia’s three intelligence services, the GRU, the FCS, and the SVR, had provided MI5 with identikits of Chechnyan terrorists who could attempt an attack on the summit. The FCS, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, had warned JTAC (Joint Terrorism Analysis Center) that it should not discount a suicide bomber attacking during the summit.
Trying to avert that possibility had taken Nathan once more into the Muslim enclaves in the north of England. Not only did Mossad have its sayanim there, but it had also built up a network of informers within the Muslim communities. Mostly young, they risked their own lives and those of their families by providing information. They, too, had been alerted to watch for any signs that a suicide bomber attack was being planned.
In London, as part of the preparations for the G8 Summit, Mossad had already circulated a document to the police and security services on how Mossad had learned to identify a suicide bomber. In part the document read:
A suicide bomber will be young, at most in his late twenties. While he will usually be a male, remember there are an increasing number of female bombers. A bomber will either be carrying a rucksack filled with explosives or a bag, similarly equipped. A person about to undertake something so high risk will be perspiring. Look at hands; are they perspiring? Look at the eyes. Are they furtive? Does the person constantly look around? Are they making an obvious attempt not to make eye contact? A suicide bomber will usually wear a baseball cap or other headgear that will hide the face from close-circuit television. If the bomb is in a bag, the bomber may constantly check it, especially on public transport. Look at physical shape. Average-sized legs usually mean an average-sized body. But if the person is bulkier than their legs, neck, or face suggest, that could be suspicious. Do not in any circumstances challenge the suspect. If you shout ‘it’s a bomb!’, you will most likely panic the bomber into detonating it. And remember: a suicide bomber has to live somewhere. His or her behaviour may have aroused suspicion in his community. Good intelligence will likely mean you have someone in that community to alert you. But also remember there is no precise science to spot a bomber. It depends on past experience and luck.
Mossad was not alone in its penetration of Muslim communities. MI5 had set up sophisticated surveillance sites in areas where Asian communities had become assimilated into British society, where the young held steady employment and made regular trips to see aunts and uncles in Pakistan and other places, where young men were never publicly seen mixing with angry militants after Friday prayers. These were the men that MI5 watched for. On those trips to Pakistan some had made contacts with al-Qaeda. Known as “Trojans,” they had been recruited to become home-grown terrorists. Their cell phones were bugged, their conversations recorded and analyzed, their movements filmed, and their contacts subject to the same deep surveillance. Radio waves were bounced off windowpanes to monitor conversations in a room; the latest technology was used to screen e-mails and search for incriminating files on Web sites. Each MI5 surveillance unit had a lawyer from JTAC attached to it who oversaw the surveillance to ensure any evidence would be admissible in a court. The arrests had numbered few.
In part, this was because Islamic groups have been quick to embrace new information technology to achieve their goals. The Internet’s full potential in the Arab world was first realized at the onset of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000. The most successful Web site was Electronic Intifada, dubbed by Yasser Arafat “as our weapon of mass destruction.” Its founding members were based in the Netherlands, Canada, Chicago, and Leicester in the English midlands. From there they waged asymmetric warfare using the latest technology to spread their message of hate across cyberspace.
Like MI5, Mossad’s London Station collected the biweekly online magazine for all jihadists and, since 2001, a quarterly version for women mujahideen. The same Web sites were monitored by diplomats at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. There was one significant difference. Mossad stations had staff able to instantly read what the Web site said; no such capability existed among those diplomats. They merely transmitted the material on to the State Department or the CIA. Their already hard-pressed translators and analysts played what one translator called “pick and choose” from the daily input of foreign language material. He told the author: “Lookit, not much has changed since the week before 9/11 when Mossad picked up a phone call from bin Laden to his mother—yes, his mother, for Chrissake!—that he couldn’t come to her birthday party because he was too busy. The message was passed up the line to middle management at the CIA. It was deemed to be too vague to act upon.”
From his contacts with sayanim and informers in Leeds, where Jews and Muslims lived cheek-to-jowl, Nathan had learned radicals had started to write messages on Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail accounts—but not sending them. Instead they left them stored in the “draft” folders of the accounts. Unsent, they could not be intercepted. However, any other radical who knew an account password could log on from anywhere in the world and read a message.
An informer had provided Nathan with a password. But there was nothing on the site to indicate an impending suicide bomber attack, or any form of assault, on the Gleneagles summit.
In the first week of July 2005, Nathan began each day began by listening to the BBC Radio-4 program Today as he drove to work. The program had long established itself as required listening for London’s politicians, foreign diplomats, the mandarins of Whitehall, and the capital’s intelligence community. All were expecting another clash with the Blair government and the BBC over the continuing fallout from its role in the Iraqi war. Though the initial war with Iraq had ended, the issue of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction had remained at the center of a political maelstrom that had threatened the governments of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush. At the core of the increasingly bitter storm was the original Today claim on air that Tony Blair had approved of the “sexing-up” of a dossier stating that Saddam had the capability of launching weapons of mass destruction against the West, the reason Blair had given for joining Bush in the war against Iraq. Dr. David Kelly had been publicly identified on the program as the scientist who had given one of its reporters evidence that the dossier had been “sexed up.”
Dr. Kelly worked for the British government. He was a world-ranking expert on biological weapons at Britain’s Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down and head of its Microbiology Department. In the still largely secret world of how to combat the threat from biological weapons, Dr. Kelly became the voice of unchallengeable authority regularly consulted by officers on the counterproliferation desks in the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defense, MI5 and MI6, and Mossad. For over a decade he had confronted the deceits, lies, and trickery of Saddam’s biological weapons program. Into his office, room 2/35 in the Ministry of Defense Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat in Whitehall, came daily e-mails and phone calls asking for his help.
Nathan had met him after Dr. Kelly had taken part in a joint Canadian /Mossad operation to interdict biological materials being shipped to Iraq from Montreal. Later, Nathan had accompanied the scientist to the Institute of Biological Research in Tel Aviv, one of the few outsiders allowed such a visit. When the second war against Iraq ended in 2003, Dr. Kelly returned to Baghdad. He had been told by the CIA and MI6 there were shells and missiles with warheads capable of delivering huge quantities of germs that had been secretly developed between the wars. He had found no such weapons. He had been urged by his superiors to go an
d look again. Still he had found nothing. The pressure continued. No one suspected the inner gyroscope that balanced Dr. Kelly’s decision making had begun to slip out of kilter. Nathan had followed every twist and turn in the very public humiliation of Dr. Kelly that had followed his failure to find weapons of mass destruction: his appearance before a House of Commons Intelligence Oversight Committee, the leaking of his name as the source for the Today story that the government had “sexed up” its dossier, his subsequent hounding by the media. Finally, it had all become too much for Dr. Kelly.
At two thirty on the afternoon of Thursday, July 17, 2003, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Young sat down before his secure computer and began to create a highly restricted file. Across the top of his screen he typed a code name: Operation Mason. Beneath it he added: Not for Release. Police Operational Information. Below that he added the figures: 14.30 and 17.07.03, indicating the file had been opened at two thirty p.m. on Thursday, July 17, 2003. Young’s file had been created after a morning of tense discussions in various government offices in Whitehall. In his pastel-painted office suite in the Joint Intelligence Committee location, John Scarlett, its chairman for the past two years, had taken his share of the calls. Scarlett had a well-attuned nose for trouble and must have sensed Dr. Kelly’s responses before the parliamentary committee and the continuing government row with the BBC were becoming a serious problem.
Scarlett had played a key part in producing the controversial dossier. In doing so, he had discarded the carefully judged input of Dr. Kelly in the early drafts. The original intelligence had come from MI6 and was approved by its then director general Sir Richard Dearlove before it had electronically made its way through the intelligence community, passing across the desk of the Defence Intelligence staff. None of them had supported Dr. Kelly’s original assertion that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. He had become the lonely voice who had finally decided to speak to the BBC. What else could Kelly do, would he do? And say? These were the questions troubling Scarlett.
Dr. Kelly had received phone calls his wife, Janice Kelly, was certain came from MI6. She remembered her husband taking some calls behind the closed door of his study, fitted out with seven laptops and his high-security computer on his desks installed by MI5 along with his direct high-security line to Porton Down. It later emerged that when he had left the house, he received two more calls on his cell phone as he walked. The identity of the callers would never be traced.
Dr. Kelly’s body was found in a woodland the next day. Two separate police teams gave different locations for where and how his corpse was positioned. By then, officers from the MI5 Technical Assessment Centre had removed from Dr. Kelly’s study all his electronic equipment. The data on them would remain secret. However, three eminent British medical specialists took the highly unusual step of publicly saying Dr. Kelly could never have committed suicide based on the published forensic details. Their conclusions raised disturbing questions. What could account for the lack of blood from the small wrist slash? What part, if any, had the small number of painkillers he had swallowed played? Could the answers be linked to Dr. Kelly’s own prediction made to a friend that he “would not be surprised if my body isn’t one day found in the woods”?
There were a number of reasons for Mossad to pay more than a passing interest to those words. Dr. Kelly had triggered an unprecedented crisis for the Blair government after publicly questioning the validity of the now notorious “sexed-up” dossier. “Preposterous though it seems to outsiders, taking out a troublemaker is not unknown in the dark side of secret intelligence. Mossad does it with its kidon. Other services have their hit men available, contract killers who cannot be traced,” claimed Ari Ben-Menashe (to the author).
There were persistent reports that Dr. Kelly had been targeted by Saddam Hussein’s hit squads while he had been in Iraq probing the country’s arsenal. His own MI5 contacts had warned him he was at risk. There were other possible threats to his safety. His work in unscrambling the Soviet Union’s secret biological arsenal had angered many of its scientists when he refused to help them come to Britain to work. MI5 had warned Dr. Kelly that some of the scientists had maintained close contacts with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, which currently had thirty agents working out of the Russian Embassy. Dr. Kelly had been provided with a list of all the number plates of their cars. Only a week before his death, a Land Rover—bearing the diplomatic number plate prefix 248D, assigned to all Russian diplomatic vehicles—had been spotted less than twenty miles from Southmoor, the village where Dr. Kelly lived.
Meir Dagan had asked Nathan to prepare a report on the scientist’s death. The London Station chief updated himself on the background to Dr. Kelly’s death after he had been found on Harrowdown Hill, a beauty spot near his home. The technicians at the Tactical Assessment Center had deconstructed the computer disks recovered from Dr. Kelly’s study, and calls to and from his cell phone found on his body had been analyzed. While most dealt with his daily workload at the Ministry of Defense and Porton Down, personal details had also emerged. They included two job offers he was considering to work in the private sector in America.
One offer was from the Washington-based company, Hadron Advanced Biosystems. It was run by a Soviet defector, Kamovtjan Alibekov, who had been the top scientist in that country’s biowarfare program and the inventor of the world’s most powerful genetically engineered anthrax. He had found a home in America’s biodefense industry and changed his name to Ken Alibek. His company had close ties to the Pentagon and the CIA and described itself as “specializing in the development of technical solutions for the U.S. intelligence community.” The other company was Regman Biotechnologies, one that Dr. Kelly had helped to set up in Britain. At the time of his death, the company had a contract with the U.S. Navy to “develop a diagnostic and therapeutic treatment for anthrax.” It stated its prime function was to “research powerful alternatives to antibiotics.” Both companies had offered Dr. Kelly remuneration double his present salary, sufficient to pay for private medical treatment that Janice urgently needed and for which there was a lengthy waiting list on Britain’s National Health Service.
Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxfordshire coroner, concluded Dr. Kelly committed suicide by cutting his left wrist with a blunt penknife he used as a gardening tool. He had also ingested twenty-eight coproxamol tablets, a painkiller for arthritis. Dr. Kelly did not suffer from the condition. They would have been hard to swallow without water or crunching them with his teeth. A bizarre twist came when, an hour after his body was found, Dr. Kelly’s dental records went missing from the local surgery. His dentist reported this to the police. Two days later the records reappeared in the surgery. Dr. Nicholas Hunt, the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, was sufficiently alarmed to ask the police to conduct a DNA test to “make sure the body was really Dr. Kelly’s.” The pathologist noted that there were “several superficial scratches on the wrist and one deep wound that had severed the ulnar artery but not the radial artery.” He concluded this had led to a fatal hemorrhage.
The three experienced medical specialists, who had already questioned whether Dr. Kelly had committed suicide, again challenged the conclusion: Dr. David Halpin, a consultant in trauma injuries; Dr. Stephen Frost, a radiologist; and Dr. Martin Birstingi, a vascular surgeon, all said that in their combined clinical experience—numbering some fifty years—they had never come across a case where somebody had died from cutting their ulnar artery. “To die from hemorrhage Dr. Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood,” stated Dr. Halpin. Dr. Frost said, “It is unlikely from the stated injury Dr. Kelly would have lost more than a pint of blood.” In Dr. Berstingi’s opinion, “When the ulnar artery is cut, there is a rapid fall in blood pressure and after a few further minutes the artery stops bleeding.” None of these experts were asked to testify at the inquest.
Piece by piece Nathan had collected and analyzed the testimony of those involved in the scientist’s death. He uncove
red details of Dr. Kelly’s hitherto unsuspected links to the biowarfare program of South Africa’s apartheid regime—and that in the week before his death the scientist had been told he would be questioned by MI5 over bringing the program’s head, Dr. Wouter Basson, to Porton Down. With all the other pressure he was facing, had the prospect of a grilling by security service interrogators finally been the last straw? Could his death possibly have any connection with the madcap schemes of Basson? Had he been killed to be silenced, another victim of the “dark side of intelligence” that Ari Ben-Menashe had identified? The questions would remain unanswered until Michael Shrimpton, a lawyer who has briefed the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on national security issues made a bid to end the mystery.
He claimed to the London Sunday Express that “Dr. Kelly was most likely murdered by a team of assassins from the French DGSE security service and his body dressed up to look like a suicide. Within forty-eight hours of the Kelly death, I was contacted by a British intelligence officer who told me he had been murdered. Neither MI5 nor MI6 were involved and both services are unhappy over what happened. It is my opinion that well-placed persons in Whitehall considered Kelly to be a threat to the survival of the government and used a team from outside the country to take out Kelly. My information is that the French used Iraqi intelligence killers to carry out the killing.” Shrimpton produced no copper-bottomed evidence to support his claim. But they formed part of Nathan’s report, which, in turn, would become part of the curriculum at the Mossad training school.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 61