Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Shortly afterward came the first clue for Mossad analysts that there was a shift of power in the upper echelons of al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan the CIA had intercepted a letter to be hand-couriered from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the long-time deputy to bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s long-time strategist, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose ruthless bombing campaign in Iraq had brought a $25 million bounty on his head, posted by the United States. A copy of the letter was sent to Mossad to study. Its analysts were surprised: while the usual flowery Arabic remained, there was a sharpness to the tone over the deaths of many hundreds of Shias who had died in suicide bombings launched by al-Zarqawi. Zawahiri questioned “the wisdom of such a policy by you. Such action is not acceptable to our Shia supporters and will do nothing to achieve our aims. I have personally tasted the bitterness of American brutality when my family was killed in a bombing attack in Afghanistan. Despite that I say to you: we are in a battle and more than half of that battle is fought in the media. What you are doing is killing our Shia brothers and it will not help us win that battle.”

  Days later al-Zarqawi delivered his response. On a cold night in Amman, his suicide bombers lit the sky over the Jordanian capital with massive explosions that seriously damaged three hotels and a nightclub, which in the tourist season would be filled with foreign visitors. But on that night, the majority of the ninety-six dead and scores of wounded were Arabs, including a number of Shia families who had traveled over the border from Iraq to holiday after Ramadan.

  The atrocity was seen by Mossad analysts as evidence al-Zarqawi was making a grim presentation to the al-Qaeda membership that he was their leader in waiting.

  CHAPTER 25

  CONFRONTING THE DRAGON

  In the fading daylight of an October afternoon in 2005, an Israeli air force plane landed at a high security airport near Beijing. The flight had been specially arranged for Meir Dagan, the sole passenger on board. Only Prime Minister Sharon and members of the Committee of the Heads of Service knew the purpose of his long journey across Asia.

  The Mossad station chief in Moscow had obtained evidence that former members of the Russian armed forces had supplied rocket technology to North Korea, enabling the pariah state to build missiles capable of striking not only Israel but all the capitals of Europe. Even more worrying was that the Pyongyang regime had secretly passed on the technology to Iran, immensely boosting its already formidable military capability. In the past month North Korea’s state-owned Chongchengang Arms Corporation, which had brokered the deal with the Russians, had sent tanker planes to Iran loaded with liquid propellant needed to drive the rockets. Each missile was designed to carry a 1.2-ton payload, more than sufficient to reduce Tel Aviv to a wasteland. One of the rockets, the Taep’o-dong 2, could reach America’s West Coast when launched in the Pacific from one of the Soviet SSN-6 submarines Moscow had sold to North Korea in 2003.

  Even more disturbing was a later report from a Mossad undercover agent stationed in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The city had long been a haven for spies from all over the world, who were on the constant lookout for refugees from the north who could provide inside information or, more important, who had worked in the secret military programs of North Korea. For weeks the agent had been cultivating a defector who had worked as a production manager at Factory 395 near the town of Jaijin in the far northeast of the country. He had not only provided details of the missile guidance systems being produced but also information about the scores of other factories in the regime’s industry to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. All told, over two hundred thousand people were employed in producing nuclear materials, and chemical and biological weapons. The defector revealed that at Factory 395, its missile guidance systems were capable of delivering warheads filled with chemical and biological agents. His duties had included buying electronic equipment made in a factory outside Nagasaki. Its salesmen regularly traveled to Factory 395. Their names had been passed to Mossad’s Asia Desk and in turn to its station in Tokyo: the possibility of recruiting a salesman as an informer was an enticing one.

  The defector had described the all-too-familiar story of the regime’s oppression: dawn roundups, families set to spy on each other, starvation and abuses of power by those who were favored by the regime. The slightest indiscretion was severely punished. Men had been shot after defacing one of the portraits of the country’s leader, which adorned every public place. Women had been taken by the police to their barracks and gang-raped. Some had committed suicide afterward. The names of some of those who had been brutalized and those of their torturers, along with the places where the brutality had occurred, had been recalled by the defector. At the factory he had witnessed a woman being roasted in an electric oven and a man being beaten to death with steel rods. Both had been caught trying to smuggle out food from the factory kitchen.

  The Mossad agent’s report had included details of how the Taep’o-dong 2 missile had been modified by North Korean technicians so it could fire the rocket from a land-based transporter. The vehicle had been dismantled and flown to Tehran. With it had gone a warhead designed to carry a biological weapon.

  The details had been sent to Washington. Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, had flown to Moscow to protest to President Vladimir Putin about the situation that had resulted from the initial sale of Russian technology to North Korea. She had met with the cold response to direct her protest to North Korea. Dr. Rice had flown to London and discussed the matter with Prime Minister Tony Blair to see what diplomatic pressure could be jointly exerted by Britain and the United States on Iran. He had favored referring Iran to the United Nations Security Council. John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, had publicly announced that he had evidence that Iran was determined to produce nuclear weapons, which could be used to intimidate the Middle East and Europe and to “possibly supply terrorists” with the missiles. His statement was largely based on the Mossad report from Seoul.

  Its content was later endorsed when Dr. Rice met MI6 director general John Scarlett. He told her the evidence had been “copper-bottomed” by Mossad, and that it was accepted North Korea could have acted only with the full knowledge of China. There was quick agreement that to avert the situation developing into a full-blown crisis, Beijing should be made fully aware of the intelligence Mossad had obtained and asked to exert its considerable influence over North Korea to withdraw its support from Iran. The overt diplomacy that had failed Condoleezza Rice was now about to go covert.

  There were further discussions on how the request should be conveyed. It could be done at ambassador level, but there was no guarantee this would be perceived with sufficient seriousness by Beijing. But neither Dr. Rice nor Britain’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, could jump on the next plane to China; that would create a sense of panic Beijing could well exploit. Yet it was essential to convey to its leaders that North Korea must be stopped and that only Beijing could pressurize a dangerously unstable regime to desist from helping Iran. After hours of consultation by advisers in London and Washington, and finally a secure-line conference call with Tel Aviv to Ariel Sharon, it had been decided that Mossad, who had provided so much of the detail, should once more use its connections with China’s Secret Intelligence Service, CSIS, to convey the seriousness of the situation. “If it is not a full-blown crisis yet, then it will soon be,” said John Bolton.

  It was not the first time Mossad had played such a role. In the past it had paved the way for the diplomatic exchange of Egyptian prisoners captured during the Six Day War; it had organized the bridge building that enabled Israeli diplomats to have working relations with Jordan and Lebanon.

  All of Israel’s political leaders had used Mossad for covert diplomacy. Some, like Yitzak Shamir, Benyamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak, had exaggerated hopes of what Mossad could, or should, achieve; this was largely due to their own past connections with intelligence operations. In Ariel Sharon, Mossad had a political master who had both the temperament and experience to know how to h
andle the service. On more than one occasion he had tasked Meir Dagan to use the “backdoor” connection to the CIA to raise a politically sensitive matter and test the response in Washington before Sharon formally raised it with the White House. It was Dagan who told Porter Goss that Israel would continue to attack Hamas while still trying to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon also well understood that in a high-tech world of intelligence gathering, the human factor remained critical when it came to covert diplomacy. The character of Meir Dagan was perfectly suited to the role and complemented Sharon’s own rumbustious personality that had given him a keen interest in spies and their activities. For the prime minister, it was a natural progression to use Meir Dagan as his own secret diplomat.

  “Our kind of diplomacy is based on contacts with other intelligence services. We tell their spymasters what our foreign service people would like to see happen. We know their intelligence people usually wield strong influence with the governments or regimes they work for. In more cases than not, it works very well. The diplomats get the public credit. We have the private satisfaction of a job well done,” Meir Amit once told the author.

  Setting up Mossad’s latest venture into the dark side of diplomacy was something Meir Dagan had developed over his three years in office. On his personal computer were the updated names, direct-line phone numbers, and encrypted e-mail addresses of intelligence chiefs in over a hundred countries. His contacts also included diplomats, businessmen, and those who operated close to the edge of legality.

  This would be Dagan’s second visit to China. Eighteen months before he had been a member of a delegation that had included General Amos Yaron, the director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, and a team of the country’s top armaments salesmen. They had come to develop ties that had already produced for Israel over $4 billion in sales of arms and military equipment. Much of it had originally been sent to Israel by the United States, and when Washington had finally objected to Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) selling an early warning system, AWACS, Israel had reluctantly paid $350 million compensation to cancel the deal. Diplomatic relations between Beijing and Tel Aviv, established in 1992, had become virtually frozen.

  In Asia House in downtown Tel Aviv, the directors of IAI were furious after the years spent making Israel’s arms industry its main export. They had brokered deals not only with China but South Africa and the nations of Latin America. IAI had become a home for former Mossad directors Zvi Zamir, Yitzhak Hofi, and Danny Yatom. Amos Manor, the first head of Shin Bet, the country’s equivalent to the FBI, also had his office in IAI. It was a standing joke among them that the “big question is whether the state owns IAI or whether IAI owns the state of Israel.” The corporation’s unique position included being the only one in Israel that had total tax relief on all its income.

  Dagan knew that when the time came for him to give up being the Mossad chief, he too would be offered a comfortable desk at IAA. How he performed on this mission to Beijing would be carefully watched.

  For the previous sales trip to Beijing, the Israeli delegation had brought with them a number of enticing new weapons, many developed from their American originals. Among them was the latest version of Promis, the software program that could track the movements of literally untold numbers of people anywhere in the world (see chapter 10, “A Dangerous Liaison,” pp. 195–202). China had been among the 142 countries to buy the software whose undetectable “trapdoor” had been installed by Israel’s top programmers, enabling Mossad to monitor all those who used it. The new version could do that even better.

  On that first visit, Dagan had seen that technology had become something China could not get enough of; more was spent on this than on food. Nowhere was it more evident than in surveillance. Ultrasonic detectors sensitive to noise or motion, electronic invisible beams that activated hidden cameras and silent alarms, bugging and debugging devices: Israel had the best and found a ready market in China. Some of the equipment the sales team had brought included gadgets developed by Mossad, such as voice analysers that would monitor the tension in a person making a telephone call. IAI had created a new radar that emitted electromagnetic energy pulses that bounced off an enemy aircraft and betrayed its shape and size. Other Israeli companies had found a ready market for the kind of surveillance equipment that had become an integral part of the urban Chinese infrastructure: electronic monitors analyzed every minute of the working day, checked on performance rates, even toilet breaks and personal activities. Meir Dagan had seen that no building in Beijing appeared able to operate without its quota of Israeli microchips that constantly fed the banks of computers by which the government kept track of its citizens from birth to death.

  At the banquets where the delegation had been feted, speaker after speaker had spoken of the Asian Century, that by the year 2005, of the thirteen cities with world populations in excess of 10 million, seven would be around the Pacific Rim. China’s predicted economic growth of 8 percent a year would allow it to create the world’s largest cybercity; its reserve of currency, by 2010, would exceed that of Japan; by that year one in ten of all corporations around the Pacific Rim would be under the virtual control of its Chinese investors; by the year 2015, countries like Thailand and the Philippines would be under the economic management of China. All this would be achieved, a banquet speaker had enthused, by China’s ability to export technology it had bought from Israel. The irony was not lost on the guests.

  At one banquet Meir Dagan had been introduced to Qiao Shi, once China’s supreme intelligence chief. At over six feet, he was unusually tall for a Chinese man. Qiao’s stoop, it was rumored, was from a childhood illness that had kept him bedridden for long periods during which he had pored over the written Chinese language. By the age of six he had mastered its radicals, strokes, phonetics, and recensions. The discipline of learning was good training for his future as China’s spymaster, and he had become the longest-serving intelligence chief in the world. In their brief encounter, Meir Dagan had found Qiao polite yet distant, but ready to raise his glass of French cognac to toast the Israeli delegation and offer them Cuban cigars.

  Now, eighteen months later on that October day in 2005, Dagan had come as an emissary to pass on the request to Qiao that Beijing must intervene to stop North Korea from arming Iran, an action that could not only precipitate a regional war but also might lead to a global conflict.

  Their meeting came under the well-honed rule of Total Deniability. There would be no record kept of the secure-line phone calls to set up the meeting or its purpose. The flight plan and the passenger manifest were classified. Only Porter Goss and John Scarlett knew the purpose of the trip. Senior diplomats at the State Department in Washington and the Foreign Office in London had deliberately been kept out of the loop so that they could truthfully deny any knowledge of the mission.

  Dagan had familiarized himself with Mossad’s profile of Qiao Shi and the ultimate control he had over the activities of five spying organizations: ILD, the International Liaison Department, was engaged in covert activities primarily directed against the United States; MID, the Military Intelligence Department, targeted the military capabilities of America, Great Britain, and other member states of the European Union; MSS, the Ministry of State Security, handled all counterintelligence within China; STD, the Special Technical Department of the Ministry of State Security, who had helped carry out the theft from Los Alamos, also collated all signals traffic from Chinese embassies overseas; and NCNA, a news service reporting on Chinese affairs and also a cover for CSIS spies abroad.

  CSIS had its own buildings in Beijing. Counterintelligence was housed in a four-story structure on West Qiananmen Street; foreign intelligence operated from a modern building near the city’s main railway station. But the major activities of the several thousand men and women CSIS employed were coordinated from inside the compound at Zhongnanhai, where the Chinese leadership lived and worked. Next to the prime minister’s office was a single-story, squarely bu
ilt building with the traditional curved, red-tiled roof and a paved area containing a helicopter pad and parking space for cars. The building’s roof was festooned with aerials. An American satellite’s photograph revealed the building had an inner courtyard with an ornamental pond and a landscaped miniature garden. Qiao Shi’s private office was the only one with direct access to the courtyard.

  It was from there that he ran intelligence networks that extended across the Pacific into the United States and Europe, into the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Japan. At his command was an army of spies and informers and an unrivaled budget to maintain them.

  His entire career had been based on adroit, low-key moves, climbing up through one ministry’s bureaucracy to another. His command of languages—he spoke French, Japanese, and Korean—had brought him to the Foreign Ministry. As a diplomat he had traveled widely before being recalled to a senior position in the Ministry. In 1980, he had been appointed by Deng Xiaoping as head of state security. Deng had died, but Qiao’s power remained undimmed: he knew all the secrets, the peccadillos, and other personal shortcomings of the old men of Zhongnanhai, the last survivors of the Long March of 1934 when they had made an unforgettable two-year journey of six thousand miles across mountain ranges and provinces larger than most European nations; it had been not only a strategic military retreat from the terrible reality of brother killing brother but a major migration leading to eventual nationhood for a new China.

  One of the first decisions of Mao Tse-tung after he proclaimed the birth of the Communist state on October 1, 1949, was to create a leadership compound in the lea of the Forbidden City from where the emperors had ruled for seven hundred years. Qiao Shi had helped to turn it into one of the most fortified areas on earth. There were guard posts in the most unexpected places: cut into the trunks of trees with each niche just large enough for a man, or concealed within shrubbery. Sensors, tripwires, and body-heat-sensing cameras proliferated. No aircraft was permitted to overfly, and only helicopters, ferrying the old men to and from their summer palaces in the hills to the west of the city, came and went. In the compound they lived along the eastern shore of the lake in the center of the compound. Many of the homes were palaces, often with thirty or more bedrooms, magnificent salons, and indoor swimming pools. Furnished with artefacts removed from the Forbidden City, each mansion had its retinue of servants and guards who lived on the north side of the lake in several barracks screened by vegetation. There were over a hundred varieties of trees and shrubs planted around the compound as a reminder of those the old men had seen on the Long March. The lake itself was filled with carp. Mao had initially ordered a hundred thousand; over the years the number had increased, some said to several million. More certain was that the water was dark with their feces, and a team of gardeners were employed to constantly remove it. The few foreigners who had been admitted to Zhongnanhai had said there was an unpleasant smell from the lake.