By December 2005, CTIC employed over one thousand people: field officers, analysts, translators, and liaison officers with foreign intelligence services. Their closest relationship remained with Mossad: its own katsas in Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Afghanistan constantly provided updates of the movements of terrorist suspects on the CTIC list. The decision as to who would be rendered was made by CTIC in conjunction with CIA director Porter Goss.
The decision on how rendition would be carried out had been fine-tuned. CTIC officers were now stationed in twenty-two countries around the globe to handle the arrests and transportation of suspects. They were usually arrested by the local security service and held in solitary confinement until they could be flown out to a designated “black site”—the CTIC description of the interrogation centers. The decision as to which site a suspect should be sent was made by the senior CTIC officer on the spot.
“If a strong psychological interrogation with some physical force is required, a detainee is flown to Jordan. If a suspect is to be interrogated in between periods of strong physical force, he is sent to Egypt. For the most severe of torture for information, he is sent to Uzbekistan, where he is killed after he can reveal no more,” a senior Mossad officer told the author.
Craig Murray, then a British ambassador in Uzbekistan, wrote in a memo to Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary, in November 2004 (a copy of which the author has seen): “The CIA chief in this country acknowledged to me that torture of those rendered includes the boiling in vats of prisoners.” Murray was relieved of his post, labeled as “mentally unstable,” and finally dismissed from the diplomatic service. By December 2005, he had become one of the first to publicly reveal details of the rendition process. As a result he said he was threatened by Britain’s security services.
But the flights continued with CTIC’s aircraft crisscrossing the world. The Gulfstream V had now been joined by a C-130 Hercules, a Casa Turboprop, a Gulfstream, and a Boeing 737. All were painted white and bore no markings. Some were also leased from the Premier Executive Transport Service. When contacted by the author, it declined to discuss the planes or the purpose for which they were used. A glimpse of what happened on board the aircraft came from two intelligence sources—one in London, the other in Washington.
“The prisoners are shackled to their seats and are gagged and often drugged during their flights. CTIC officers travel with them to their interrogation country. The flight manifests contain no details of who they are. At a refueling stop, the aircraft window blinds are drawn. No local official is allowed on board. Fuel is paid for by a credit card the pilot carries. It is billed to CTIC,” the London source told the author. The Washington source added: “In countries like Uzbekistan, Soviet-trained interrogators carry out the torturing. They have a list of ‘information targets’ to obtain. The answers are passed to the resident CTIC officer. He sends it to Washington.”
From there the information was distributed within the U.S. intelligence community and sent to selected foreign intelligence services, including Mossad. In Tel Aviv it was carefully tested against other material gathered by the service’s own network of agents and informers.
By late 2005, the “torture flights” (the description was coined by Amnesty International) had flown hundreds of suspects to the secret black sites far beyond the public eye and the U.S. justice system. In December, Swiss intelligence—a small but well-respected spying organization—intercepted a fax sent by Ahmed Abdul Gheit, Egypt’s foreign minister, to its London Embassy’s intelligence chief. The minister wanted to know the fate of twenty-three detainees rendered from Afghanistan to a black site on Romania’s Black Sea coast. Swiss intelligence, whose relationship with Mossad is close, sent a copy of the fax to Tel Aviv, where the authenticity of the fax was quickly established. In it the minister had referred to “similar interrogation centres in Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia, and in Bulgaria.”
By late December 2005, the torture flights had made more than two hundred flights in and out of Britain and close to four hundred through German airspace. Other flights had passed through Spanish airports and Shannon, Ireland’s international airport. The logs kept by air traffic controllers in those countries listed more than seven hundred flights of CTIC aircraft. One of those who survived a flight was Kuwait-born Khaled al-Masri, who had become a German citizen. He had gone on holiday to Macedonia in 2003 when the local police took him off a bus and held him for three weeks in a windowless cell. One night he had been taken to Skopje airport and handed over to CTIC officers. Al-Masri claims this is what happened to him then.
“I was taken to a room at the airport and injected with drugs. I was then put on an aircraft, it was a Gulfstream I think. On the flight I was told that I was going to a special place where no one would find me. I still have no real idea where it was. But after a long flight I was hooded and driven to a prison. I found myself among prisoners from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. I was there for five months, regularly beaten, and told to confess I was a terrorist. Then one day I was dragged from my cell, put inside a closed truck, and driven to a plane. It was the same one that had brought me there. After a flight, I was taken from the plane. An American told me that a mistake had been made. He put me in a car with more Americans. They drove for a while, told me to get out, and drove off. I found out I was in Albania. I made my way back to Germany.”
He reported his story to the police in Frankfurt. The details were passed on to the kriminalamt, the country’s equivalent of the FBI. Al-Masri was interviewed by two agents. Satisfied, they informed the Bundesamt Fur Verfassungschatz, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It contacted the CIA station chief in Berlin. He sent a report to Langley. He was told, according to a German police file on the case, there “was a mistake, a confusion of names.” The German interior minister, Otto Schily, on a visit to Washington, raised the matter with Condoleezza Rice. She offered him the same response. Officially the matter ended. Al-Masri’s attempts to obtain compensation have failed at the time of this writing and he has been told there is no point in pursuing it.
In Tel Aviv, senior members of Mossad began to view rendition as an embarrassing sideshow that was obstructing the CIA’s real work and was unable to provide reliable intelligence. A veteran Mossad katsa said (to the author), “The danger with the torture flights is that they provide invaluable propaganda for our enemies. Where does harsh interrogation cross the borderline into torture? We are not averse to harsh questioning, but we draw the line at methods that allow prisoners to be severely beaten, sexually assaulted, and given repeated electric shocks and threats to their families. It is not that we are squeamish, but practical. That kind of interrogation does not produce credible intelligence.”
But the torture flights continued in the closing days of 2005. At the time of this writing there were no plans to stop them. An intelligence source in Washington told the author, “They will continue as long as Bush’s war on terrorism.”
More certain, the flights were illegal and broke every United Nations convention against torture.
As New Year’s Day, 2006, dawned over Tel Aviv, Mossad’s specialists—its psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and psychoanalysts—continued to evaluate the mind-set of Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For weeks, often working from dawn until midnight seven days a week, they had studied his speeches and watched videos of his public appearances to get a fix on his personality and the world he had come from.
Born in a village in the shadow of the Alborz, the fourth of seven children, he was a year old when his father, Ahmed, had moved the family to Tehran to work as a blacksmith. The specialists had pondered how much the poverty that had plagued his formative years had influenced his future career and shaped his radical views. The youth who had ranked 130th in the nation’s university entrance exam, sat by three thousand students, had become a committed campus activist during the reign of the shah and had gone underground from the regime’s dreaded
Savak security service. After the shah was deposed Ahmadinejad had welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini as the country’s new ruler.
The wiry, gaunt-faced, heavily bearded youth with piercing coal black eyes became a familiar figure at Tehran’s University of Science and Technology (IUST) recruiting for his student organization, the Office for Strengthening. It became world famous when it held hostage American diplomats in their Tehran Embassy in 1979 for 444 days. Ahmadinejad displayed unusual political skills in exploiting the situation to humiliate the United States. In 2006, Ahmadinejad became the focus of intense speculation when a photograph was published that claimed to identify him as the ringleader of the hostage takers and that he had personally ill-treated their captives. The CIA established there was no truth in the allegation. Long before then, he’d obtained a doctorate in engineering, joined the Revolutionary Guards, and saw action in the Iran-Iraq War. In quick succession he became vice governor of the remote province Maku and then governor of the more important Ardabil Province. The mayor’s office in Tehran was his next goal, and he was elected in 2003 with a 12 percent turnout. He canceled many reforms introduced by his predecessor, emphasized the need for religious piety, and courted popularity by setting up soup kitchens for the city’s poor. It was the platform for his campaign to become president, offering “jobs for all and oil money on your tables.” The incumbent president, seventy-year-old Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was swept from power. The world watched and hoped that the forty-nine-year-old Ahmadinejad would continue the dialogue with the West over its fears that Iran’s quest for nuclear power was really a cover for producing nuclear weapons. Rafsanjani had indicated he was prepared to give the guarantees Washington and London sought and which Israel insisted on. But the first hint that the new president would not be so malleable came when he told a Tehran rally in October 2005 that he would “develop the most powerful of forces to give us everlasting power and peace—nuclear power.”
Since then every word Ahmadinejad had spoken, every diplomatic move he had made, every escalating threat against Israel he had delivered in the harsh tones of his mountain village dialect had been carefully studied by the Mossad specialists. His biography provided a useful means for them to explore what drove Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Part of it certainly was shrewd realpolitik, designed to win approval at home and to spread fear abroad. He understood the power of Iran’s oil resources on the global market and its rising price. He also saw America had been weakened by the insurgency in Iraq. He was equally as much an Islamic fanatic as Osama bin Laden and had latched on to the appeal for Muslim fundamentalists of demanding the elimination of Israel and being a Holocaust denier. In all this Ahmadinejad was not an original thinker; many of his ideas came from radical Islamic scholars who had long advocated jihad against Israel and the West. Ahmadinejad continued to use the Koran to reach out to pious Muslims yet maintained his appeal to Iran’s militant youth. To them he emphasized the religious authority for all he said, none more so than invoking a lethal “Prophet’s Tradition” against all Jews and their motherland.
Increasingly the specialists saw an issue of major concern was whether Ahmadinejad would realize his idea of Armageddon across the Middle East—and possibly soon. On that New Year’s Day they knew whether Israel would be forced to launch a preemptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would depend on their analysis.
Plans had been finalized. Fifty Alsatian dogs would spearhead the attack on Natanz, the nuclear bomb-making complex ninety miles northeast of Tehran. The animals would be fitted with body belts of armor-piercing explosives able to penetrate the entrance to underground laboratories where Mossad’s deep-cover agents had established thousands of centrifuges—the crucial device essential to produce weapons-grade uranium—were working around the clock. The dogs had been trained at an exact replica of the Natanz site constructed in the Negev Desert. Their handlers were part of the elite Oketz unit. The body belts would be detonated by remote control by their handlers. They had practiced mounting low-level helicopter attacks on the dummy site. Providing covering fire for any attack would be the Sholdag force modeled on the SAS. They would be supported by Israel’s Air Force 69 Squadron, based at the Herzerim air base in the Negev. Over the New Year its pilots continued training for the long-haul flight to Iran and back without refueling. Each £60 million plane was equipped with the latest weaponry, including the “over the horizon” Promis software that could pinpoint a target forty miles away. The Dolphin submarines remained hidden in the depths of the Gulf of Oman. Their twenty missiles each would support the air attack.
While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continued to threaten Israel would be “wiped from the map,” Meir Dagan chaired a “crisis meeting” in the Kirya in early January to study the latest satellite pictures from Israel’s own spy in the sky. The images showed the completed construction of a large new underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Accompanying the images were new reports from Mossad deep-penetration agents in Iran and other Arab capitals. The meeting had been asked to assess the fallout from a preemptive strike against Iran. It was accepted that a wave of terrorism would follow. Hezbollah would launch rockets from Lebanon. Arab nations would publicly condemn. But Mossad chief Dagan said his intelligence predicted that Arab nations, while publicly condemning, would be “relieved that Iran’s fangs had been drawn.” The meeting was told that two more Chinese air force transport aircraft landed at a military airfield near Natanz and unloaded crates of the state-of-the-art centrifuge known as P-2. It is designed to interconnect 164 centrifuges to form a “cascade.” Gas is spun at high speed in a cascade to weaponize uranium 235 to the same capability as the Hiroshima bomb. Both China and North Korea in the past have provided Iran with nuclear-weapons technology. Pakistan’s maverick scientist, A. Q. Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb,” later sold designs and nuclear components to Iran and other rogue states.
Mossad chief Dagan told the defense chiefs at the Kirya meeting: “Our latest intelligence shows that scientists at Natanz have begun to produce weaponized uranium. That means our original estimate that Iran would go nuclear in five years has been cut in half. We are at three minutes to midnight.” In May 2006, Dagan cut the estimate to possibly a year—one minute from midnight. Against this background the Mossad specialists continued their analysis of a man who had emerged from the shadows of Iranian politics to become a major threat to world peace. Increasingly Ahmadinejad appeared to believe he had a sense of divine mission. He had told his people he felt “the hand of God” continued to guide him after he had first threatened Israel. In December 2005, when an aircraft crashed in Tehran, killing 108 people, the president had thanked the dead “for they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow.” He daily expressed his devotion to the Mahdi, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, who would return to lead the Muslim world to freedom. All streams of Islam believe in a divine savior whose return would be preceded by cosmic chaos and widespread war. The vision is similar to the Christian version of Apocalypse. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed the Mahdi would return in his own lifetime and that he had been given the task of creating chaos to hasten his arrival. He had opened the New Year with another virulent threat to destroy Israel and had exulted at the renewed fears across the world his words had generated. Was that why he had even welcomed a conflict with Israel and the United States—because he saw it as the launchpad for the Mahdi to appear? These were the questions the specialists studied but could as yet find no conclusive answers for.
As the meeting in the Kirya conference room came to an end, Meir Dagan reminded the others around the table of some of the last words Ariel Sharon had spoken before he had been rushed to hospital with a stroke: “Israel cannot, and will not, allow a nuclear-equipped Iran.” Then the Mossad chief had left the room to update himself on the medical drama that had cast a great shadow over Israel’s hopes for the New Year.
On January 4, with the setting sun low over the Judean Hills, Meir Dagan drove into the Negev Desert past the
first of the guard posts which protected the perimeter of Ariel Sharon’s most prized personal possessions, his Sycamore ranch. Blending into the barren landscape, the building reflected its owner, strong and seemingly indestructible. On the seat beside Dagan was his briefcase containing the latest reports of Shaul Mofas, the soft-spoken minister of defense, and the abrasive General Dan Halutz, the chief of staff of the armed forces. Between them they had approved ten prime targets for any preemptive strike against Iran. Mofas had written: “Iran is now the greatest challenge facing us.” The decision to launch an attack would be taken by the Committee of the Heads of Services. Dagan would provide the latest intelligence. There would be consultations with Benyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, a former prime minister who had resigned from the Likud Party only to take over as its leader when Ariel Sharon had quit in December to form his own party, Kadima (Forward). His move had broken the mold of Israel’s two-party system, Likud and Labor, to establish a powerful new force. A number of key Likud politicians had joined him, among them Shimon Peres, another former prime minister. While Israelis struggled to absorb the upheaval, Sharon suffered a ministroke, but in days he was back at his desk and, at the age of seventy-seven, was still working a twelve-hour day. It would be his final decision to attack Iran.
As Dagan drove toward the ranch, he knew the next time he would see the prime minister after this meeting would be following recovery from an operation to repair a small hole in his heart, which had been discovered when he was being treated for his stroke. Alongside the plans for a strike on Iran was Mossad’s assessment of Hamas ending its “truce” of attacks on Israel. It came at a time when Sharon was still considering whether to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to vote in elections due later in the month; all the signs were that Hamas would make a good showing. But Dagan knew there were also personal troubles Sharon had to cope with. His son, Omri, had been forced to resign from the Knesset over a finance scandal that had led to criminal charges against him. The previous night’s television news carried a report that the net was closing on a police investigation into $3 million secretly donated by an Austrian tycoon to help the prime minister repay expenses from his last election.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 66