Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  In that first week of July 2005, high summer had come to London, filling the city with optimism. A continuing heatwave had clothed the crowds in pretty dresses and open-necked shirts. Cafés had moved tables outside for al fresco dining. The stock market was still on the rise, and the shops were offering discounts on already bargain prices. The television images from Baghdad had faded from the screens.

  Mossad had been among foreign intelligence services informed by the Home Office that the threat of a terrorist attack on Britain had been downgraded from “severe general” to the third highest alert, “substantial.” That week Scotland Yard’s commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, had briefed his senior staff that MI5 was “quietly confident” the battle against terrorism was under control.

  Nathan had met, and liked, the commissioner. Since he had been appointed the previous January, Blair had started to run London’s police force as a modern corporation based on the latest management techniques. With his calm, measured tones, the stocky uniformed figure, police cap clamped firmly on his head and jaw thrust forward, Blair radiated a bullish certainty. He had set out his stall in much the way Meir Dagan had done when taking over a dispirited Mossad. Blair had told his force of thirty thousand officers and fifteen thousand civilians that he intended to drag them away from what he saw as a sexist, homophobic, and often racist past. He had reminded them that he was a policeman who knew what it was like to extract a corpse from a train crash and had peppered his laying-down-the-rules-first speech to his senior officers with quotations from Voltaire. He raised a smile when he said that on his deathbed the great French thinker, asked to renounce the devil, replied this was not the time to make new enemies. He told the officers he didn’t want them to treat him as their enemy, but he would not tolerate anyone who clung “to the old ways.” From then on he slipped easily into the business jargon of “multitiered policing,” “customer-shaped service,” and “infrastructure connectivity.” He used such unlikely police terms as “encapsulate,” “ex cathedra,” “antithesis,” and “counsel of perfection.”

  Nathan had suspected those words would not sit easily with Meir Dagan’s blunt language, nor the way Blair signed his memos with a gold-tipped fountain pen, nor how he had a Miro painting on his office wall and filled his bookshelf with copies of Tennyson and Yeats.

  Satisfied that London was not at risk from an impending terrorist attack, Blair had ordered fifteen hundred Metropolitan police officers to the Gleneagles summit, where anarchists were among the protesters. The Yard’s antiterrorist squad had also sent almost all its officers to Scotland. MI5 and MI6 had drawn tight its part of the net, which had been cast far and wide to catch terrorists. Not one had been spotted. Even the hunt for the “Raven” had petered out when Mossad said he had come and gone from Britain, disappearing somewhere into Europe. Around Gleneagles the massed ranks of police had overwhelmed protesters. The only moment of tension had come when President George W. Bush fell off his bicycle and grazed his hand.

  Britain’s capital awoke on July 6 to find the city had won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, and driving to work that morning, tuned into the Today program, Nathan heard Commissioner Blair assuring Londoners that “we will cope with any terror threat to the games. Our police force is the envy of the policing world in relation to counterterrorism. We’ve upped our game.”

  That Wednesday afternoon a war game was winding down in JTAC (Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre). Predicting disaster scenarios on their computers was a regular part of the work of the specialists at their interlinked work stations. This one centered on two different types of attack on London. The first scenario predicted that terrorists would fly over the capital in a light plane leased from one of the private airfields to the west of the city and dump VX nerve gas to catch the prevailing wind. The specialists calculated 30 people would die at the point of release and another 250 downwind. The next scenario was based on terrorists spraying pneumonic plague in aerosol form at Heathrow. Not only would several thousand die in the chosen terminal, but the wind could carry the plague into London. The calculated death toll was put at 2 million as all the emergency services would be overwhelmed. To cope with the dead, JTAC had recommended that the London Strategic Disaster Mortuary Working Group, part of the UK Mass Fatalities Working Group, should set up mobile mortuaries on the outskirts of the city to provide “overflow capacity for hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

  That evening Mossad Station in London received its daily report from Tel Aviv that there was no evidence of any increase in “terrorist chatter” involving a threat to the United Kingdom. In MI5 headquarters, overlooking the river Thames in Westminster, the vast, open-plan operations room that stretched along most of one wing was in stand-down mode: its plasma screens were blank, the whiteboards empty, the maps of London streets rolled up, the scores of telephones silent.

  Not one of the police and security services had picked up a hint of the atrocity about to happen.

  On Thursday morning, July 7, Nathan was running a staff meeting in his office at the Israeli Embassy when his MI5 liaison officer telephoned shortly after 9:00 A.M. He did not bother to hide the tension and anger in his voice. There had been three separate attacks on rush-hour trains on London’s subway system and one on its famous double-decker buses. The death toll would be heavy (it turned out to be fifty-five dead and more than two hundred injured). The atrocity bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda suicide attack. The MI5 officer concluded by asking Mossad to provide all possible assistance.

  In the past three years MI5 had made several requests for Mossad’s help over suspected plots to attack London’s transport system, which the security service believed had Middle East links. They included poisoning the subway with sarin gas, planting cyanide in its air-conditioning system, placing the deadly poison ricin on the trains. Another plot had centered on exploding a car bomb in the city’s Soho District, a favorite tourist area. Mossad had failed to find any evidence to support the MI5 claims that the plans had originated in the Middle East. Yet shortly before the London bombings, Lord Stevens, taking time out from his investigation into the death of Princess Diana, had publicly insisted MI5 had thwarted the plots. The claim had irritated Mossad.

  Nathan knew that this time the request for help was being made to all foreign intelligence station chiefs in the capital. Within the hour they would have pulled back their own agents from the G8 Summit to help piece together the background on those who had carried out the worst terrorist attack Britain had ever experienced. Mossad would focus its own efforts on the Middle East and Africa, areas where its network of field agents and informers was unrivaled. Their information would be directed through Mossad headquarters for assessment and then routed by encoded e-mail to the London Station. It would receive a further assessment by Nathan and his own agents before being sent on to JTAC. A katsa based in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia on the Horn of Africa, had been briefed to listen out for “chatter” that could link the London bombings with al-Qaeda terrorists who controlled the country through the local warlords. In the past three years more than thirty-five thousand Somalis had been granted asylum in Britain to escape the brutality. One or more of them might have become radicalized by Britain’s imams.

  By early afternoon Mossad Station in Cape Town, South Africa, had learned of a dispute between MI6 and CIA operatives over what to do with a British citizen of Indian descent, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who was under arrest in Zambia for an alleged connection with al-Qaeda. The CIA said he was wanted on an arrest warrant in the United States, which charged him with providing “material support to al-Qaeda and attempting to establish a terror training camp in Bly, Oregon, in 1999.” The CIA had told MI6 they had a “strong supposition” that Aswat had made a number of phone calls to suspected Muslim radicals in Britain shortly before the bombings.

  The CIA wanted Aswat to be collected by its Gulfstream and flown to a torture chamber in Uzbekistan. But while MI6 was ready to support having Aswat legally extradited to
America over the Oregon charges, it would not allow a British citizen to be subjected to brutality. It had also told the CIA that Aswat’s phone calls did not link him to the London bombings.

  While the hunt for the London suicide bombers continued, the relationship within the international intelligence community developed its first crack. The French and German security services told MI5 they had no evidence to support its claim that a senior al-Qaeda operative, identified as “Mustafa,” had traveled halfway across Europe and in and out of England shortly before the bombings. Yet Mustafa had continued to be listed as a “priority target” on the Anacapa charts, the specialist diagrams used in the MI5 operations center to try and build up a coherent picture from the information coming in. Nathan had been asked by his MI5 liaison officer to help establish whether Mustafa could still have been the mastermind behind the suicide bombers. Had he told them which targets to hit? Once more Mossad put out the word among its sayanim across Britain and informers in the Middle East. In the weeks to come the mysterious Mustafa would remain just that—a mystery.

  London had remained in a grip of fear when, on July 21, the city was subjected to a further suicide bomb attack. But this time the operation bore all the signs of amateur bungling: the homemade bombs failed to explode and the bombers were soon identified. Nevertheless hundreds of reports continued to reach Scotland Yard of people acting suspiciously. Each one had been checked and the suspect shown to have behaved, at most, foolishly. The police had warned that people who behaved like this in a time of high tension ran the risk of their behavior “being misunderstood.”

  And such was the case with Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian electrician, on his way by subway to fix a fire alarm in north London. Somewhere walking between his home and the nearby Stockwell underground station he had come to the attention of one of the many antiterrorist police teams on the streets. Each member was aware of the rule they could fire only if they believed a suspect was carrying a bomb. The order of shoot to kill, aiming at the head of a person, would come after a “gold commander” at Scotland Yard had given the order by radio phone to a team commander. The police did not have to shout a warning before they fired; to do so would negate the essential surprise. The rules of engagement were based on those drawn up by Israeli Special Forces to deal with the country’s suicide bombers.

  The unsuspecting de Menezes was tracked through the subway station, down an escalator, and onto the platform, where a train was about to depart. As he boarded, the police team moved. One wrestled de Menezes to the floor. Two others fired a total of seven bullets into his head and body. The details caused a growing public furor as it emerged Scotland Yard had lied in claims that de Menezes was “dressed like a suicide bomber.” He had worn lightweight clothes. Police Commissioner Blair found himself progressively challenged over his statements that attempted to justify the shooting. Within his own police force, he was increasingly subjected to criticism by senior officers, who began to leak details to the media about unhappiness within the ranks over Blair’s leadership. The criticism deepened when the early stages of the investigation into de Menezes’s death showed a failure in communication between the team tracking de Menezes and their controllers at Scotland Yard. It transpired that one of the team had taken an unauthorised toilet break during a key part of the surveillance, and radio links between the team and Scotland Yard had temporarily broken down at a crucial stage. Later came the embarrassing news that Blair had authorized a small payment to be offered to the de Menezes family to help them with funeral expenses. The family rejected the offer.

  Meantime, the death of the young electrician continued to fuel a huge outcry in Britain’s media. Human rights organizations had seized upon the shooting to mount a campaign against police methods and demand a reassessment of its shoot-to-kill policy. In March 2006, Blair found himself mired in a new controversy. He admitted that he had secretly bugged his conversation with Britain’s attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. They had been discussing telephone surveillance and the bugging of suspects at the time. The revelation brought new demands he should resign, the fifth call to do so since the death of de Menezes. He had brushed all those aside. But over the shooting he had one firm supporter. Nathan had told his MI5 liaison officer, “Those policemen thought they were acting in the best interests of everybody on the information they were given. Mistakes do happen.”

  In Tel Aviv for Meir Dagan one death had to be weighed against the loss of life suicide bombers had already carried out, not only in London and Israel, but all around the world. The one certainty, he had told his staff, was the further away the last attack, the closer was the next one.

  In the early hours of the first Saturday in October 2005, the duty officer on the Asia Desk in Mossad headquarters received a “Flash” e-mail from the katsa based in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. It brought news that al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers had struck again on the popular holiday resort of Bali, killing and injuring over fifty people. In 2002, other bombers had destroyed nightclubs on the island, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. The message ended with the chilling words: “All indications are this is the work of Husin.”

  The forty-eight-year-old graduate engineer from Reading University in England had been personally recruited by Osama bin Laden to become the organization’s master bomber. As well as the previous Bali bombing, the Malaysian-born Azhari Husin had organized suicide bomb attacks on the American-owned Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and the Australian Embassy in the city in 2004. Thirty people had died in the attacks and over a hundred were injured.

  A few days before, Mossad had finally confirmed the MI5 claim that the mysterious “Mustafa” had been Husin, who had planned and recruited volunteers for the London bombings. Meir Dagan had told Eliza Manningham-Buller that Husin had traveled to London before the attacks, using one of the many passports known to be in his possession and traveling under one of his disguises. He may even have been in the capital when the attacks occurred: one of his trademarks was to observe the effects of the destruction for which he was responsible. He had been spotted at previous locations each time escaping in the confusion to return to one of his hideouts, which Mossad believed were in the Toba Kakar range of mountains separating Pakistan’s Northwest frontier from the equally inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan.

  America’s National Security Agency geopositioned a satellite over an area that extended from Murgha and Khanozai, small towns in the foothills of the Toba Kakar range. Pakistani troops, supported by U.S. Special Forces and Britain’s SAS, began to prepare for another foray into the region. In the early hours of October 8, the entire region was devastated by an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale. Millions of tons of rock and rubble buried the area. The Mossad analysts, who had been closely monitoring the area, decided that if Husin was buried beneath the debris it was unlikely his body would be found.

  Then came reports that not only galvanized the analysts in Tel Aviv but also those in every major intelligence service; Osama bin Laden could be among the dead. Informers had told their intelligence controllers that he had been seen in the devastated area. One report said his face looked thinner. Could that be an indication his kidney condition had worsened? In recent weeks, Mossad had discovered that bin Laden had received from China a portable kidney dialysis machine. Drones, unmanned aircraft launched by U.S. Special Forces to overfly the search area, reported that all power supplies had been destroyed. In Islamabad, President Pervez Musharraf agreed to a CIA request to keep rescue teams looking for earthquake survivors from entering the search area for bin Laden and Husin. In Washington bin Laden watchers joined the speculation. Bruce Hoffman at the RAND Corporation, a think tank with good connections in the U.S. intelligence community, said that if bin Laden had survived he could have made his way back into Afghanistan. Milt Beardman, a CIA officer with hands-on experience of the search area, added: “If bin Laden is dead the world will never know. We just have to wait until somebody drags out his body, does
the DNA checks, and says ‘this is bin Laden.’ My bet is that it won’t happen.”

  Nevertheless the speculation continued. Donald Rumsfeld, the feisty U.S. secretary of Defence, said it was now almost a year since bin Laden had made his last public appearance, and he could be dead; Nature’s justice. “No longer the face of al Qaeda,” Rumsfeld had mused. Certainly on the jihadist Web sites Mossad analysts noticed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Iraq, was increasingly labeled as a prime mover in the dream of restoring the Islamic caliphate.

  On one of the Web sites appeared a chilling document titled: The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad and the Way to Enrich Uranium. Its eighty pages contained detailed instructions on how to “look for radium, an effective alternative to uranium and available on the market.” Matti Steinberg, one of Mossad’s experts on al-Qaeda’s search for a nuclear weapon, said the manual was “dangerously impressive.” While the author described himself as “Layth al-Islam,” the Lion of Islam, it was to whom he had dedicated the manual that raised doubt that bin Laden was dead. “A gift to the commander of the jihad fighters, Sheikh Osama bin Laden, for the sake of jihad for the sake of Allah.”

  On October 18, a deep-cover Mossad agent in Tehran recorded a conversation between bin Laden’s oldest son, Saad, and his siblings Mohammed and Othman. The three men were living in secure compounds in the city suburbs from where they ran terrorist operations rather than languishing under house arrest as the Iran government claimed. In the conversation, Saad reported he had spoken that day to his father, who wanted his sons to know he was alive and well. The recording was made ten days after the earthquake had struck.