Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  As 2005 drew to a close, the war on terrorism had not achieved many of its targets. While Saddam had been captured, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda remained a potent threat. Mossad’s analysts had concluded that capturing or killing bin Laden would do nothing to eliminate al-Qaeda; it had a well-defined command structure ready to replace him, and the organization itself was increasingly focused on spreading its ideology to inspire others and imitate what had been achieved on September 11, 2001. Madrid, London, Bali, and Amman were all signposts on the road to further massacres. The analysts estimated al-Qaeda was now entrenched in sixty countries, truly a hydra-headed monster.

  No one could have said what the effect would have been from the power play between Ayman al-Zawahiri, a fanatic with a scholar’s beguiling mind, and the clinically insane Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Both grasped the importance of using the Internet as a virtual base from which to proselytize and provide instruction. It meant that al-Qaeda training camps could attract jihadists who had already acquired the essential hatred of the United States, Britain, and, above all, Israel. The time recruits needed to be in the camps could be shortened, reducing the risk of them being caught in an air strike or a ground assault. Ironically, al-Zarqawi would be killed by a carefully planned air attack by the United States in Iraq in 2006.

  Increasingly, state-sponsored terrorism had flourished and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Countries like Syria, North Korea, and Iran had calculated the risk of punishments they could face—and concluded they were worth the risk. In Damascus, Pyongyang, and Tehran the collective view was that not even the United States would contemplate starting a global war by launching a nuclear bomb against those states; neither would Israel, for all its posturing with nuclear submarines posted in the Gulf of Oman, be likely to launch a preemptive strike. So Islamic radicalism continued to grow, its sponsors knowing they would face, at most, no more than conventional military strikes. Sanctions, as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had demonstrated, did not work.

  Al-Qaeda had also recognized that terrorism was war by another name, but was not treated as acts of war. Pakistan could arm Kashmiri terrorists to attack the Indian Parliament in 2001; Iranian-trained Saudis blew up the U.S. military base at Khobar in 1996; and Syrian-born members of Hamas bombed Israeli buses as they had done for years: yet none of these actions were treated as acts of war to be declared on the sponsoring states.

  The danger of terrorism, as Meir Dagan had regularly lectured new members of Mossad, was its cost effectiveness. It cost little to produce a suicide bomber. One attack can create havoc, forcing a government to use its resources—manpower and technology—to try and capture the terrorists. A Mossad analyst had once calculated (for the author) that “one terrorist cost as much as a hundred expensively trained men to catch or capture him or her.”

  Into this already complex situation there was the ever-expanding role of the Chinese secret service, CSIS. China has a tradition of espionage that reaches back over twenty-five hundred years. But never had its activities been more far-reaching than today.

  Since the theft of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos, CSIS had continued to expand its activities in the United States. Many of China’s accredited diplomats in its Washington embassy, various consulates, and trade missions throughout the United States were either full-time intelligence officers or directly linked to the service. The FBI estimated that in 2005 the number of CSIS agents and informers was larger than any other foreign intelligence service operating within the country. Since Los Alamos they had between them obtained, either by theft or deception, an estimated $35 million worth of secrets, mostly from technology companies working in or for the defense industry. FBI Director Robert Mueller, had ordered that all the firms be briefed on improving their security and that organizers of technology conferences, which had always attracted Chinese scientists, were instructed on “how to recognize a possible CSIS agent.” Universities were asked to provide details of courses “and other interests” of the thirty thousand Chinese students on their campuses after the FBI established that CSIS had paid for an increasing number to study in America; many were attending postgraduate courses at universities like UCLA, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. After graduating, often in computer or science-related subjects, they had applied for jobs at companies with sensitive defense contracts. A former senior FBI officer, Ted Gunderson, who had worked on counterterrorism out of the Los Angeles field office, told the author: “The students are taught how to steal, photocopy, and return valuable blueprints and secret contracts and smuggle them out past the security guards. The material is often on microfilm inserted into a tooth cavity or swallowed to be excreted later in one of the many safe houses CSIS has around the country.”

  Meir Dagan’s now-close relationship with Porter Goss enabled the backdoor channel to be used to provide details of what Mossad knew about CSIS activities in the United States. Both intelligence chiefs knew much of the material was too politically sensitive to pass on to the White House or the State Department until there was absolute proof of espionage.

  In October 2005, a Los Angeles–based katsa informed Tel Aviv that a CSIS spy ring in California was about to courier to China disks containing ultrasecret details about U.S. weapons systems, which had been encrypted and hidden behind tracks of music CDs and the latest movie releases. A Mossad sayanim who worked for the same high-security defense contractor, Power Paragon, in Anaheim, California, which employed a member of the spy ring, Chi Mak, had become suspicious and informed his katsa. The sayanim was told to keep watch. In weeks, he had provided sufficient details for the katsa to alert Tel Aviv.

  The details were passed by Meir Dagan to Porter Goss down the backdoor channel. A major FBI operation was mounted. On October 27, the day before Chi Mak was to fly out of Los Angeles with his wife, Rebecca, along with two other members of the spy ring—Chi Mak’s brother, Tai Wang Mak, and his wife, Fuk Heung Li—the two couples were arrested at Chi Mak’s home in Downey, California.

  Federal officers discovered what one FBI agent, James E. Gaylord, described as “a house full of secrets.” They would turn out to be the most damaging espionage operation against the United States since the theft at Los Alamos. Hundreds of thousands of documents and computer printouts were found in Chi Mak’s home. Both he and his wife were naturalized American citizens who had arrived in the United States in May 2001. The CSIS spy ring was already in place. But Chi Mak set about upgrading its activities. He obtained a job as an engineer with Power Paragon. It gave him access to highly classified weapons systems, including blueprints of the new Virginia-class submarines and the Aegis battle-management systems, which are the core of U.S. Navy destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers. Chi Mak, an electronics engineer with what the FBI called “advanced computer skills,” had stolen material that would give China superiority if the United States went to the defense of Taiwan in any conflict with the Beijing regime.

  Neighbors described Chi Mak and his wife as “polite but reserved” and “regular folk who lived quiet lives.” Short of calling them “pillars of our society,” they fitted the standard profiles of deep-cover agents, no different from the untold numbers who toiled every day in the dark and always dangerous world of secret intelligence. For them it was over. But how long before the next spy scandal came? When it did, Meir Dagan was determined it would not be Mossad caught pillaging secrets.

  Arriving at work at his usual hour of 6:30 on the morning of Tuesday, January 24, 2006, Meir Dagan found on his desk the report he had eagerly awaited from Mossad’s Research and Development Department. Its scientists, programmers, and technicians had finally succeeded in creating a new range of gadgets that would ensure the service remained at the forefront of intelligence gathering. Each item had been field-tested across Europe by katsas. In Paris and Brussels they had tried out the EDLB, the updated electronic dead letter box, which used a state-of-the-art miniaturized computer system so that an agent could exchange information with other field agents or his contr
oller at Mossad headquarters. Built into the EDLB was an encryptor that R & D programmers believed even the code breakers of the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service—acknowledged to be the best in the world—could not break. With it came a specially adapted mobile phone the size of a cigarette packet. Known as an “infinity device,” it could hack into any cell phone, making it activate itself without triggering its display light. The device had been tested outside the European Union headquarters in Brussels, providing an eavesdropping conduit over a twenty-four-hour period and automatically transmitting, on the hour, every conversation it had downloaded. Another gadget known as “keystroke” was designed by the R & D team to be inserted into a target computer to download everything stored on its hard drive. This had been tested out on a dating agency in Madrid. Yet another device code-named “Tempest” was designed to scan all the computers in a building to discover the level of electronic protection each one had. The test site chosen was an unsuspecting Siemens Building in Munich. The R & D report indicated that Tempest had “provided a satisfactory result.” Undoubtedly the greatest triumph had been creating a surveillance device known as “Smart Dust.” These were ant-sized sensors that could be scattered in hostile territory—hidden in dust, grass, or soil—and their microdot microphones would pick up data transmitted to an EDLB designed to store several megabytes of information, which would then be automatically transferred to Mossad headquarters. The life of a sensor was a month before they would self-destruct.

  Among the first to be equipped with this arsenal of gadgets were Mossad field agents in the Balkans, where al-Qaeda had set up a network that ran from Bosnia in the north down to Albania and where, under cover of mosques, Islamic fund-raising organizations and information centers operated. In the mountains behind the Adriatic Sea were the staging camps for jihadists from England, France, Spain, and Italy to be assessed before continuing their long journey east to Afghanistan, traveling along one of the many well-established heroin-smuggling trails. Later, their training completed in the mountains of Afghanistan—where bin Laden and his senior aides remained hidden—the jihadists made their way back across Iran into northern Turkey, through the south of Bulgaria, across Macedonia, and back into Albania. From there they either crossed the Adriatic into Italy or traveled north through Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and into Austria. From there they made their way back home. Mossad called them “Trojan Horses,” the silent, watchful, suicide bombers, the explosives makers, the terrorists trained in urban warfare ready to strike at the heart of Europe. Their prime target, Meir Dagan had told his katsas, were always going to be Jewish institutions—banks, synagogues, schools, and any organization in which Jews had invested. Then would come the American and British institutions. But those owned or partly controlled by Jews would be the first.

  He had dispatched his finest operatives to interdict and kill the jihadists ideally as they made their way to Afghanistan or on their return journey. Those who survived were hunted down as they made their way north back into Europe. Those who still managed to avoid death were brought to the notice of other security services. By 2006, Mossad had provided the Dutch security service, Algemene Inlichtingen–en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD), the names of fifty jihadists who had arrived back in Holland in the past three years. In Belgium, Mossad had helped its intelligence service to uncover an al-Qaeda cell whose members had survived the long journey back from Afghanistan. In the cell’s apartment in Brussels were discovered expertly forged passports and an al-Qaeda textbook on how to assemble a bomb. But once more Mossad had been frustrated to see that the much-vaunted security cooperation between Europe’s own security services was not as close as its political leaders maintained. French intelligence continued to argue in 2006 that Holland was failing to extradite terrorist suspects wanted in France. The Dutch had rejected the accusation.

  The suspects were members of Taqfir wal Hijra. Its founders had fled from Egypt to Algeria. There the organization had been absorbed into al-Qaeda. In 2003, it had arrived in The Hague. Operating in highly secret cells, its members set about recruiting jihadists to travel to Afghanistan for training. The bodies of those who did not return home lay along the trail to and from Afghanistan. As usual, Mossad arranged for their obituaries to appear in local Arab newspapers. Sometimes their families received flowers and a condolence card before a jihadist was killed. The gesture was designed to create panic among jihadists.

  One who had escaped was Lionel Dumont, a native Frenchman from Roubaix, an industrial town in the north of France. In his early teens he had converted to Islam and later spent his military service with the French army in Somalia. The brutality of many of his fellow soldiers toward the Muslim population had a powerful and lasting effect on Dumont. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, he went to Bosnia to fight with al-Qaeda–sponsored Mujahideen.

  It was a time when Osama bin Laden was looking for new places to defeat the infidel. Almost simultaneously with the fighting in Bosnia, the conflict in Chechnya erupted. Then Albania provided another battlefield for al-Qaeda; chaos and anarchy already prevailed in the country, making it a fertile ground for arms traffickers and other terrorist-linked groups. Al-Qaeda welded them into a powerful force; unlimited funding was provided, along with humanitarian aid. Albania became a springboard into neighboring Kosovo. Dumont was among some five hundred Mujahideen smuggled into the Albanian capital of Tirana. The operation was led by Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. After a kill-or-be-killed conflict against government forces, the Mujahedeen swept on into Macedonia. Again money and aid won over impoverished villagers. In the end it would be NATO that drove them out. But by then al-Qaeda had scooped up hundreds more recruits. Many went to Afghanistan for specialist training.

  When an uneasy peace came to the region, Dumont returned to Roubaix and formed his own group, which he trained and led to conduct a number of terrorist attacks. The French police tried, but failed, to arrest him, and Dumont fled to Bosnia. There he became a senior member of the rapidly expanding al-Qaeda organization. Finally captured, he escaped from prison and was spirited along the trail to Afghanistan. Twice Mossad katsas almost killed him before he reached the safety of the mountain fastness where al-Qaeda had its camps along the Afghanistan border with Pakistan. In January 2006, Mossad believed Dumont was still there, supervising the training of other French-born jihadists. The gadgets Mossad’s R & D department had created would be used to track and kill them.

  The budget of hundreds of millions of dollars to create the surveillance arsenal had been approved by Ariel Sharon. But on that morning of January 24, Meir Dagan knew that the one Israeli politician he revered above all others would never recover from the massive stroke that had left Sharon in an ever-deepening coma, paralyzed, and kept alive by a life-support system in his Jerusalem hospital. His medical team had indicated they could do no more. As often as he could Dagan had visited the seventh-floor suite where his old friend lay at death’s door. Each time Dagan stood in the doorway, his sharply intelligent eyes watching Sharon’s heartbeats continuing to move across the monitor positioned near the bed, the blips on the screen pulsing, reducing the old man’s grasp on life to an endless trace. Sharon’s family would be there, grouped around the bed, quiet, the emotions aroused by approaching death seeming to settle even more over them. Dagan could detect the sorrow, despair, and helplessness of the family and the barely concealed resignation of the doctors and nurses. He had wondered if Sharon sensed their presence. More certain was the family gathered around the bed were caught in some deep, primitive, and instinctive ritual, staring silently at the motionless figure, almost as if no words could communicate their inner feelings. Dagan well understood that; in his life as a soldier and head of Mossad, he had seen the effect of death on others many times.

  He knew that the medical equipment surrounding Sharon, machines that clicked and pinged, would provide some confirmation for the family that all was not yet lost; that active measures were still being taken to keep the inevitable
at bay. Close to the bed was a red-painted surgical trolley. This was the crash cart, the ultimate emergency aid with drugs to stimulate cardiac output, sponges, needles, tourniquets, probes, catheters, airway tubes, an aspirator, and a defibrillator capable of delivering through its paddles a powerful electric shock to start Sharon’s heart if it stopped. The decision to resuscitate would come only when that moment arrived. Dagan had told aides that if it were his choice, he would not revive his friend to exist in a vegetative state.