Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Dagan reached the ranch, built on the ruins of a Palestinian village and covering two thousand acres. As usual Sharon was waiting for his intelligence chief before sitting down to eat a meal prepared by his daughter-in-law, Inbal. The relationship between the two men had always been close, united by their common background of having fought in Lebanon. Then, Sharon had been as trim as Dagan had remained, but the prime minister, at 280 pounds, was now massively overweight for his five-foot-seven-inch height. To discuss the plan for the Iran attack, they sat in the ranch’s spacious lounge. Afterward they had sipped coffee while Sharon reminisced; his eyes, restless and hard when he was younger, had now taken on an old man’s softness, but his memory was as sharp as ever. He recalled in detail how he had captured a fortified zone in the Sinai by dropping paratroopers from helicopters, a tactic still studied in military academies in the U.S. and Britain. And how in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Mossad had been caught off guard, he had virtually single-handedly turned certain defeat into a brilliant victory. Dagan, as usual, listened intently as Sharon went on to explain how he had helped form the Likud Party after Labor had refused to accept him—and how he now intended to make Kadima live up to its name. He had spoken of his dislike for Netanyahu for his fierce opposition to the evacuation of the Jewish settlements. As the evening wore on, old friends dropped in to wish Sharon well for the next day’s surgery. He told one, Reuven Adler, that he was worried about the general anaesthetic. Adler had joked, “What’s the matter, Arik, you have turned into a coward all of a sudden?” When it came time for Dagan to leave, he noticed that Sharon looked more tired and pensive.

  Shortly after Dagan had left, Sharon complained to his other son, Gilad, that he felt unwell and had some difficulty in focusing and had a strange feeling in the left side of his body. Soon he was finding difficulty in speaking at all. Schlomo Segev, Sharon’s personal physician who was at the ranch, was summoned. By then Gilad had called one of the paramedics on standby duty with an ambulance and the head of Sharon’s bodyguards. Gilad said his father should be moved to the nearest hospital, twenty minutes away. Segev overrode them, insisting the prime minister had suffered a major second stroke and should be taken directly to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The journey took fifty-five minutes, during which Sharon’s condition worsened. In the ambulance he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage caused by the rupture of an artery wall.

  After seven hours of surgery, doctors put Sharon into a deep coma and onto a life-support machine. Meir Dagan was among those told that Ariel Sharon had suffered irreparable brain damage. He would never again make his mark on Israel’s future. Mossad, whom Sharon admired, would never again have a political leader who had given it unprecedented freedom to operate. Emblematic of the gaping void left in Israeli politics by the loss of Sharon’s leadership was the huge chair in the adjoining conference room to Dagan’s office. It was where Ariel Sharon liked to sit when he came calling. Dagan told his senior aides that whoever rose to the daunting task of replacing Sharon would never sit in that chair. He had the piece of furniture removed.

  In Gaza and beyond, extremists clamored for his death. From his mountain fastness in the Tora Bora range that divides North Pakistan from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden called upon all Muslims to pray for Sharon’s death to “be long and painful and that he should not die like our hero Azhari Husin, who went to Paradise like a true martyr.”

  CHAPTER 26

  MISCALCULATIONS

  Mossad’s role in the elimination of Azhari Husin was not publicly acknowledged in the congratulations from countries where his suicide bombers had left a trail of death and destruction. It was ever so: compliments remained between intelligence services involved in a joint operation, along with commiserations over one that failed or led to loss of life. Rafi Eitan, the former director of operations for Mossad, once said to the author: “Herograms have no place in our business. We just do our job. If it works, fine. If not, we make sure it works next time.” Many of the still-unsung operations in which he and his successors have participated will remain forever secret; the only clue to their loss in lives are the growing number of names carved into the sandstone memorial at Glilot (see chapter 3, “Engravings of Glilot,” p. 69).

  “Gathering secret intelligence is not only dangerous, but a very imprecise art,” Eitan once said. It is also very expensive. By 2004 the United States was spending $40 billion annually on acquiring it, Israel a small percentage of that; for both countries costs will inevitably rise in the coming years. But in Washington, Tel Aviv, and London, in all those nations with substantial intelligence services, information is power and the cost of obtaining it worthwhile.

  Britain in 2005 had a £2 billion annual intelligence budget, half of it devoted to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham in Gloustershire. Costing £1.2 billion to build, contractors spent £50,000 of that to provide stainless-steel handrails to avoid marking by staff with rings on their fingers. Two electric trains circle the building’s basement carrying boxes of files and sandwiches to the desks of its seven thousand staff on four floors. Shaped like a giant doughnut, the building has an inner courtyard the size of the Albert Hall. Eightinch-thick black cladding is fitted to all the outer walls.

  Its high-security computers handle strategic intelligence, the most important element of all modern intelligence gathering; it enables Britain’s government and their advisers—civil servants, diplomats, and military chiefs—to be kept fully briefed on other countries and their future plans. Tactical intelligence, second, focuses on a potential enemy’s battle plans, monitoring its training exercises to discern methods likely to be deployed in war. The third element is counterespionage, in Britain called “the defence of the realm.” It focuses on uncovering foreign spying activities.

  Mossad’s brief includes all three elements, but it shares discoveries with “friendly” services on its long-established policy articulated to the author by its former director general David Kimche as “Israel, first, last—and always.”

  However, GCHQ maintains a “nothing held back” relationship with the most powerful intelligence-gathering organization on earth, whose activities are rooted in the deep black of space. From there America’s National Security Agency (NSA) uses its armada of satellites to spy on the globe. The threat of terrorism has increased NSA’s power; fresh targets are added to its electronic shopping lists by the CIA and other members of the U.S. intelligence community.

  NSA cost more than $4 billion to run in 2005, employed twenty-seven thousand full-time experts, analysts, and technicians, plus a team of shredders to dispose of forty tons of paper a day; it also could call upon a hundred thousand U.S. servicemen and civilians scattered around the world. Part of its budget is spent on running highly secret listening posts in Britain: at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, Edzell in Scotland, Brawdy in Wales, and, the largest of all, at Menwith Hill near Harrogate in the north of England. All are linked to GCHQ and its own monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia. It ensures nowhere is beyond surveillance.

  Behind NSA’s double-chain fence, topped by barbed wire interwoven with electric strands, its acres of computers vacuum the entire electromagnetic global spectrum, homing in on a dictionary of key words in scores of languages. Nothing politically, economically, or militarily significant in a telephone call, a conversation in the office of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, in a fax or an e-mail, escapes NSA’s attention. While the UN headquarters in New York is sovereign territory and placing a bug there is illegal under international law, it is routinely done by NSA and GCHQ to spy on hostile countries and those deemed to be friendly to the United States and Britain; the latter are spied upon mainly for commercial reasons or to give London and Washington an edge on diplomatic negotiations. NATO allies are also under regular surveillance at the UN, and Mossad keeps a yaholomin unit in New York to spy on Arab and other missions.

  The material finds its way through the electronic c
orridors of the intelligence community in Washington and London, and on to Tel Aviv. In turn, Mossad reveals intelligence to NSA and GCHQ on a need-to-know basis. Master copies of NSA data are stored in temperature-controlled vaults underground. Somewhere among the library of secrets are the 1,015 intercepts of surveillance it admits to carrying out on Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed in the weeks before their deaths in Paris. In 2005, NSA continued to resist all attempts by Dodi’s father, Mohammed, to obtain copies of the intercepts, insisting they contained material of “national importance.”

  In the run-up to the war with Iraq, both agencies combined to provide their political masters—ultimately President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair—with sensitive private conversations of at least one leader who had steadfastly pledged his support for the war.

  On February 9, 2003, Sir Richard Dearlove, then the dapper, soft-spoken director general of Britain’s MI6, had by early afternoon made several telephone calls about a surveillance operation to be mounted against Spain’s prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s ambassador at the United Nations, and senior officers at the Foreign Ministry in Madrid. Code named Condor, the operation was marked “Beyond Secret,” the highest classification MI6 shared with GCHQ and NSA.

  Dearlove had spoken to George Tenet, the director of the CIA. Each had a high regard for the other; they were professionals at the top of the increasingly murky world intelligence gathering had become in the run-up to the war with Iraq. It was a world where, in the memorable words of Britain’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, “no one could surprise like a friend.”

  Deeply embattled over the coming war with Iraq, Tony Blair had secretly agreed for Aznar, a man he called a “trusted friend,” to be spied upon. Britain and America—Blair and Bush—wanted to be absolutely certain that their Spanish ally in the imminent conflict remained as steadfast in his commitment behind the scenes as Aznar did in public. Over 95 percent of Spaniards either opposed going to war or were lukewarm about the idea. “There was an air of crisis, verging on panic in both Downing Street and the White House,” recalled George Galloway, a maverick Labour MP—and later founder of the Respect Party—and regarded by Blair as a leader of the antiwar movement growing in Britain. “For Aznar to crack under pressure would be a disaster.”

  The first man Dearlove spoke to on that February day was John Scarlett. Tall, ramrod straight, with a domed head, the former MI6 spy was the then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee—the invisible footbridge over which crossed all MI6 intelligence for Downing Street. Scarlett’s position as the overall monitor of Britain’s intelligence services gave him a seat in Blair’s Cabinet (later he would replace Dearlove as MI6 chief, a job Scarlett had long coveted). But as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, his main task was to know what was happening in Iraq, to know what could be known about Saddam Hussein, and to predict what would happen as war drew closer. That included knowing, from January 2003, the real intentions of allies like Aznar.

  In the previous two months, MI6, the CIA, and NSA had also been involved in bugging UN secretary general Kofi Annan and Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector. Those operations finally surfaced when Clare Short, a former cabinet minister in the Blair government, claimed in February 2004 in Parliament that she knew “secret transcripts had been made of Annan’s conversations by MI6 over the looming war with Iraq.” In the aftermath of Clare Short’s revelations that Kofi Annan had been spied upon, Inocencio Arias, Spain’s ambassador to the UN, said: “Everybody spies on everybody. And when there’s a big crisis, big countries spy a lot. If your mission is not bugged, then you’re really worth nothing.” Details of how and why Aznar was bugged had remained secret until now revealed in this book.

  In the weeks before the war, Blair had described Aznar as one of his “most frequent and trusted telephone callers,” Alastair Campbell, the strategy director in Downing Street, would recall. Aznar knew and accepted that his regular calls to Blair were listened into and a shorthand note taken. But he would never have expected—not for a moment—that his private briefings to his own aides were about to be spied upon on the orders of the prime minister.

  Campbell, an astute judge of character, was among those in Downing Street genuinely puzzled at Blair’s close relationship to the Spanish prime minister. “Aznar was a man on the European right and it was as hard to explain his closeness to Tony Blair as it was the prime minister’s closeness to George Bush,” Campbell would later confide to Peter Stothard, the former editor of The Times.

  The fact was that Blair and Aznar were united over how weak their domestic support was for going to war with Iraq. Aznar’s calls to Blair were taken in the prime minister’s Downing Street den. It was a cosy room dominated by a small desk, on which stood a large framed portrait of Nelson Mandela, a hero of Blair’s. Next to it was a telephone. But the ringing came from an extension placed on a small table in the far corner of the room. It was where the note taker sat. The room was closed off from the rest of Downing Street by tall blue-leather doors. Blair always greeted Aznar with affection, saying, “Hullo Jose Maria.” It was Blair at his telephonic best, transmitting his accomplished skills in making a person he was talking to feel like the only person who matters. In these conversations Blair tried to convey his messianic view of the importance of removing Saddam Hussein; speaking of creating a United Nations being freed from its present helpless torpor; how the removal of the dictator would serve as a warning to other extremist nations that terror would be met with massive force. It would also be a message to Palestinians and Israelis that the present conditions of instability in the Middle East must cease.

  Across the river Thames on that February day, Dearlove had continued to make his own calls. Aznar now commanded less than 5 percent of the Spanish electorate to support his decision to back Britain and the United States in going to war with Iraq. “That’s even less than the number of those who think Elvis Presley is still alive,” Blair had joked to Alastair Campbell after another call from Madrid. It was that low electoral percentage that lay behind Dearlove’s phone calls. Would Spain’s prime minister remain committed to the ever-louder drumbeat of war, or would he waver and undergo a mind change that could wreck the military plans being finalized in London and Washington to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein? The only way to find the answer was to bug Spain’s ambassador to the United Nations, its key Foreign Ministry officials in Madrid, and the discussions Aznar had with them.

  By the end of that cold February 9 day in London, the decision to bug Aznar had been taken. Those directly involved were Sir Richard Dearlove, George Tenet, John Scarlett, and the directors of GCHQ and NSA. The green light to do so had come from Downing Street after a lengthy conversation between Bush and Blair the previous day.

  The decision to mount Operation Condor came when Frank Koza, a senior analyst in NSA, had sent his counterpart in GCHQ an e-mail asking for a surveillance “surge” against key members of the UN Security Council. Koza asked for “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policy makers an edge.” His request was marked “Top Secret/COMINT/XI.” The “XI” coding signified the request must never be declassified. It must stay Top Secret. However, a copy of the message somehow later found its way to GCHQ translator Katherine Gun. She passed it to an intermediary, who gave it to the British journalist Yvonne Ridley, who had achieved fame after being freed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and became a strong supporter of the antiwar movement. She, in turn, passed the memo to a journalist on London’s Observer. Gun was arrested under Britain’s Official Secrets Act; later, the case was dropped.

  On that February day, the focus in GCHQ, NSA, MI6, and the CIA was spying on Aznar. The operation would be run out of Menwith Hill using NSA’s ECHELON system’s program called the Dictionary: its computers can target specific telephone numbers, words, and voiceprints, and includes “Tempest,” which deciphers individual voices from laser beams directed at windows to read vibrations generated by p
eople speaking. A segment of Aznar’s voice was fed into the Dictionary computers, which were programmed to track every word Aznar and his key officials spoke in relation to Iraq anywhere in the world. Information obtained was downloaded to the Menwith Hill computers. Interlinked banks of computers decoded and analyzed the data and fed it down a secure line to GCHQ, where the material was turned into transcripts marked “Highly Classified.” These were then sent to John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. From there they were hand carried the short distance to Downing Street in buff-coloured files each with the bold Cross of Saint George on their covers, an open indication of Scarlett’s patriotism. To reach Blair, the intelligence supremo had to frequently step over the toys of Leo, the prime minister’s youngest son, who often used the floor of Downing Street as a playground. Copies were sent via NSA to George Bush. For both politicians they became the prime source for judging the mood of Aznar and his officials. After the war it emerged that Aznar had remained consistent in his support. It would cost him his post as prime minister in Spain’s next election.

  In the closing weeks of 2005, Meir Dagan opened a staff meeting with what Sergei Kondrashov, a retired KGB chief of counterintelligence, had said, that if the KGB had been forced to chose between what a Russian mole in the U.S. administration reported and a subscription to The New York Times, he would believe the newspaper any day. Dagan reminded them that until Porter Goss became the CIA director, the agency evaluated intelligence reports on a simple scale: ABCD for the reliability of the source and 1234 for how accurate the information was. A1 meant the source was unchallengeable and the information unquestioningly true. B2 indicated the source was good, and the intelligence was very probably true. Category D4 meant the source was totally unreliable and the information demonstrably false. Dagan had paused and said that Goss had spoken to a number of his deputy directors who admitted they had rarely seen A1 and only a small number of D4s. The great majority of reports crossing their desks were designated C3—the source had been reliable in the past and so his information was possibly true. Dagan had looked around the conference table and said that logically this meant a usually reliable source was sometimes also unreliable and the information described as possibly true could just as well be untrue. He reminded them that for Mossad good intelligence was always required to contain the caveat as Saint Paul glimpsed heaven—“through a glass, darkly.” It was an indication of how Mossad must continue to face threats as the world became a global village and the demands made on an intelligence service grew daily. Gone were the clear divisions between the Soviet Union and the West. Terrorism, international money laundering, ruthless dictators, and ethnic conflicts had all changed the traditional role of spying and counterintelligence. In the desperate hunt for information to combat the new targets, intelligence services had been forced to operate in unfamiliar areas.