Miri Regev, the articulate chief spokesman for the IDF from 2002–2007, sat down-table. He would later be responsible for trying to convince an increasingly skeptical world that Israel had no alternative but to continue to strike hard. Others around the table guarded their anonymity. They included the head of Special Forces, whose recent commando raid deep into the Beka’a Valley had echoes of the raid on Entebbe. Then it was to rescue civilians held by another terror group. The Beka’a raid came after Dagan’s deep-cover agents in the valley reported that the two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, were hiding there. Neither the soldiers nor Nasrallah were found.
Every morning, in his precise tones, Meir Dagan updated those around the table on the hunt for both the soldiers and Nasrallah. For ninety minutes the daily briefing on the next steps to be taken ranged from providing targets for the advance into south Lebanon by the IDF’s six brigades to identifying renewed air strikes to be made on the Beirut suburbs. Then came what Meir Dagan has called “the wider picture.” Would Syria once more increase Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal? Fifteen hundred had been fired so far, another fifteen hundred destroyed. That left ten thousand. What would be the next step that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could take? His palace at Ladekye, outside Damascus, had already been buzzed by Israeli warplanes. It was Dagan’s idea. He called it “a little warning.” And Iran—what would President Ahmadinejad do? The wiry, gaunt-faced, heavily bearded president had once more said, “We will wipe Israel from the face of the earth.” An idle boast or a serious threat? Meir Dagan’s answers to those troubling questions would remain—at least for the moment—inside the war room. By 8:00 A.M. the men around the table had left to carry out their daily orders. The first the world would learn about them would be on the news bulletins.
Two thousand miles to the west of the Kirya war room, the analysts in Britain’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), continued to explore the latest ramifications of Operation Overt, the multi-national terrorist operation. Their suspicions had hardened when the FBI sent MI5 an urgent bulletin—copied to all the other intelligence services engaged in the operation—that suicide bombers had been recruited to hijack transatlantic aircraft by smuggling individual explosive ingredients past airport security and then assembling them as bombs on board. The FBI warning (a copy of which the author has seen) was entitled: “Possible Hijacking Tactic for Using Aircraft as Weapons.” In part it read: “Components of improvised explosive devices can be smuggled onto an aircraft, concealed in either clothing or personal carry-on items such as shampoo and medicine bottles, and assembled on board. To avoid cases of suspicious passenger activity, this will most likely take place in an aircraft’s lavatory.”
Another piece of information had come from an al-Qaeda Web site believed to be operating out of Yemen. Though protected by a secret password, it had been interdicted by GCHQ specialists and had yielded valuable clues. It gave detailed instructions on how to create new types of miniature bombs by using the flash mechanism on a digital camera as an electronic detonator. Various ways of powering the detonator were suggested, including personal music players. What focused the attention of the analysts was that the instructions were written in English as well as Arabic. This raised the strong possibility that the planned attack would require the services of the two cells under surveillance by Operation Overt.
Then, a few days later, a third GCHQ intercept came from another al-Qaeda Web site, this one in Uzbekistan. It discussed the qualities of using an explosive it called “The Mother of Satan” and indicated it had been tried out by Hezbollah. Mossad’s London station chief confirmed the explosive was made from triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and was made from combining four ingredients: two harmless domestic liquids, hair bleach, and nail varnish remover. The Web site promised that “when care is taken to mix the ingredients, the result will be a powerful explosion similar to that produced by a military grenade.” TATP had been the choice of explosive used by suicide bombers in the July 7, 2005, attacks on London. TATP could be carried on board in containers such as bottles of soft drinks or even a feeding bottle for a baby. The two chemicals to create TATP would normally have to be mixed at low temperatures to make the explosive more stable. But for a suicide bomber this would not be necessary. The only problem the terrorists would face would be to ensure the mixture was sufficiently solid before it became a lethal explosive, otherwise it would be difficult to detonate as shown by the failure of the second London suicide attacks on July 21, 2005.
But there was still no timeframe for the attack Operation Overt was monitoring, only that it would most likely originate with flights taking off from Heathrow, London, heading for the United States. As July drew to a bloody close in south Lebanon and Israel, Eliza Manningham-Buller reminded the hunters that “we will not stop them all—but we will have a damned good try.”
By the first week of August 2006, the war had become a grim parade of military funerals and television interviews with grieving families. With each death the unease within Israel deepened over the conduct of the fighting. Retired military experts—known as “the armchair brigade” among Ehud Olmert’s aides—called for an increase in ground forces and bombing raids on Hezbollah’s rocket launchers and for the razing of villages where Hezbollah was suspected of hiding. This had already led to tragedy roundly condemned around the world when Israeli bombs destroyed an apartment block in the south Lebanon city of Cana, killing some fifty women and children. Journalists had reminded readers that Cana was where Jesus had changed water into wine “and now the water of Cana is red with the blood of the innocent,” wrote one reporter. And for the first time since hostilities started, Mossad came under criticism. Why hadn’t its agents located the bunkers and tunnels which, over the past six years, Hezbollah had been using to stockpile rockets supplied by Syria and Iran? The question had led to angry discussions in the Knesset. But there was no response from Meir Dagan. It had been left to Shabtai Shavit to defend his old service, pointing out that the public perception of intelligence gathering does not take into account the “bigger picture below the surface.”
An example of this came on August 3, 2006, when Dagan received a message from an agent in Balbeck, the historic city in the Beka’a Valley that Hezbollah had turned into a stronghold. The message said that Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, would be traveling overnight to meet with Saad bin Laden, the eldest son of Osama bin Laden and his appointed successor. Days before another Mossad agent in Damascus had reported that the scion of the al-Qaeda leader was in the city and had held meetings with Syrian intelligence officers. That night Israeli Black Hawk helicopters swept IDF commandos ninety miles into Lebanon. With them were several Arab-speaking Mossad officers. While the commandos hunted for their human targets, the officers headed for the Hezbollah-operated hospital in the center of Balbeck. They found it deserted; patients, doctors, and nurses had all fled. Using a floor plan provided by a Mossad informer, the team found what they had come for: computers. One was in the medical records office. Another in a consultant’s suite. A third in a nurse’s station. The computers were unplugged and rushed to a waiting helicopter. Two hours later the disks were being studied in Mossad’s Tel Aviv headquarters.
Some information on the disks set out details of Hezbollah “sleeper cells” in Britain. By the time the commandos returned to their base to report they had not found Nasrallah or Saad bin Laden, details of the cells had been transmitted to London. They found their place on the Anacapa wall charts inside the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was once more back in Tel Aviv, flying in on Air Force One. The Boeing 747-200B was not a particular aircraft, but the call sign for any of the small fleet of aircraft reserved for the president or his senior aides. In all there were seven in the fleet. The aircraft Dr. Rice was using comprised a crew of twenty-six to pilot and look after her needs and seventeen secret agents to protect her on the ground.
The Air Force One fleet had undergone a $50 million upgrade since 9/11 to enable the president to rule the United States from the air. The chaos surrounding his movements after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was a painful reminder of communications shortcomings.
Dr. Rice’s aircraft had a mobile command center with encrypted communication links with all of the national security networks in the United States. The state-of-the-art telephone system had a total of eighty-five separate lines and scrambled handsets. Plasma screens positioned around the aircraft showed, in real time, the live satellite news channels. The plane’s extensive defense system was intended to detect and deflect any missile attacks. Secretary of State Rice had an executive suite behind the flight deck that included a stateroom, which was a duplicate of her Washington office. Behind it was a dressing room, toilet, and shower that only she was allowed to use. Her own bedroom was wood paneled with a queen-sized bed. The suite also had a dining room. On board were two galleys, each capable of providing meals for two hundred passengers; the larders stocked with enough supplies for two thousand meals. The non-stop flight from Washington had cost $40,243 an hour. At the back of the plane sat her officials and carefully vetted members of the press.
Known as the “Warrior Princess” to her staff, but never to her face, Dr. Rice brought with her an alarm clock that played the opening bars of a Mozart symphony and she kept her watch on Eastern Standard Time. The two pieces were gifts from President Bush, visible signs of the esteem in which he held her. At 5 A.M. EST she awoke and spent the next hour working out on the weights and a rowing machine installed in the suite at her request. Physical fitness was an important part of her life; it had given Dr. Rice the figure of a catwalk model and the stride of an athlete. At some time during the flight she had used her phone—code-named POTUS (for President of the United States)—to call President Bush; they spoke several times each day. Fifty-two years old, Dr. Rice was the most powerful person in his administration. Its other members knew she was perhaps one step away from her ultimate ambition of becoming the first woman to be President of the United States, and the first African American to hold the office.
The Mossad profile revealed that if Dr. Rice had a weakness, “it is shoes. She is known to have splashed out on eight pairs of Ferragamos and regularly sends her personal shopper into Washington fashion boutiques to see what’s new from Paris, Milan, or London.” The profile had contained other personal details—how as a student she had her hair curls ironed out and “has taken to wearing her hair in a style that suggests a headmistress at a Swiss finishing school.” It described her upbringing in the mid-fifties in the then still segregated deep South, how her parents had christened her after the Italian musical term Condoleezza—“with sweetness.” How she had taken piano lessons at the age of three and learned Spanish and French until she became fluent. When she was eight years old, her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, was torn apart by Civil Rights agitation and a bomb planted by a white extremist had exploded in her local Baptist school, killing four black girls, one of whom was her closest friend. Her father, John, patrolled the city streets with a shotgun to keep white racists at bay.
Afterward the family moved to Colorado where Condoleezza was enrolled in an integrated Catholic school. In her teens she learned Russian and at college wrote her dissertation on the Czechoslovak Army. Her most notable achievement came when she became provost of one of America’s top universities, Stanford. She was the youngest to do so at the age of thirty-eight and the first African American to hold the post. Her next climb up the ladder came when the then secretary of state, George Shultz, nominated her to the board of the oil giant, Chevron. One of its million-barrel oil tankers was first named after her. That tanker still sails the high seas even in the most turbulent weather. "
The Mossad profile pointed out that “turbulence has continued to surround Dr. Rice”—not least because of the surprise caused when George Bush asked her to join his presidential campaign in 1998. They quickly bonded through their common zeal for physical fitness. “She gave him a pedometer to check how many steps he took during his coast-to-coast campaign. Their faith also plays an important role in their association; both are devout Sunday church-goers.” Bush made no secret of his dependency on her. “She explains the subtleties of foreign policy in a way I understand,” he once said. When Bush took over the presidency in January 2001, he made her his national security adviser. Dick Cheney tried to block the appointment. She dealt with his opposition in a closed-door meeting. Since then the “Warrior Princess”—a nickname given to her by Donald Rumsfeld—has translated the president’s impulses into foreign policy. Never married, she relaxes by “playing her Steinway grand piano and watching American football on television,” revealed the profile.
It also explained why she had two mirrors in her offices to check the back of her hair was in place down to the last brush stroke. “If she is having a ‘bad hair day,’ it is like a weather vane warning.” There had been many of those times: her confrontation with Germany and France over the war with Iraq; her determination to maintain Spain’s resolve to support the war. All this made her an admired figure in Israel.
Now, on that July day in 2006, as the giant aircraft made its long journey to Israel, Mossad’s station chief in Washington had sent Meir Dagan the latest denials by both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice that they intended to run in the 2008 presidential campaign. Of more immediate interest to the Mossad chief were the details of a most secret plan Dr. Rice had reluctantly helped to create with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. The plan was the underlying reason for her visit. On the surface it was to once more explore the prospects of a ceasefire. In reality it was to discover if the Israeli Air Force attacks on Hezbollah had been so successful they could serve as a blueprint for an attack on Iran. Dr. Rice had initially been nervous about launching such an assault. Did she now feel the same? Meir Dagan had become convinced—and told Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as much—that the secretary of state was not merely nervous, but had started, according to the Mossad station chief in Washington, to “agitate inside the administration” to be allowed to go to Syria to try and persuade President Bashar al-Assad to order Hezbollah to stop its onslaught. But a Mossad agent in Damascus had, shortly before the 747 aircraft touched down at Ben Gurion airport, discovered that President al-Assad refused to meet her.
A further indication of President Bush’s hard-line thinking had come from Richard Armitage, who had been deputy secretary of state in Bush’s first term. Armitage had described Hezbollah as “maybe the A-team of terrorists. Israel’s campaign on Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. If the most dominant military force in the region, the Israeli Defense Force, cannot pacify a country like Lebanon, you should think carefully about taking the template to Iran with its population of seventy million. The only effect that the Israeli bombing has achieved is to unite the Muslim world against the Israelis.”
Condoleezza Rice had come to explore again what she thought, according to one source, “could be a solution. It was to form a Sunni-Arab coalition with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt that would win the support of Britain and Europe to unite and bring pressure on the Shia mullahs in Iran.” But to achieve that, the source acknowledged, would require the removal of Hezbollah as a threat to Israel. Dr. Rice knew the hope of such plan for a coalition of what she called “like-minded Arab states” had been dented when the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saudi al-Faisal, had come to Washington early in the war and told President Bush to “intervene immediately to end this conflict.” Predictably, Bush had demurred.
All these issues formed a backdrop to Dr. Rice’s discussions in Israel. Those who attended, including Meir Dagan, listened intently to a woman who combined elegance—her weekly hairdo in her apartment in Washington’s Watergate Center cost $500—with a steely determination. “Her smile never quite reached her e
yes. We remembered that when, for instance, it came to push and shove between Blair and Rice, Bush always chose her view. With Blair now a lame-duck prime minister, her mood was that he didn’t really matter anymore,” recalled one of those who attended the meetings.
While those discussions went on, so did the war. The dead and the dying, the homeless and the bereaved in northern Israel and up through southern Lebanon to the suburbs of Beirut continued to grow. And elsewhere, other developments required Meir Dagan to shift the focus of Mossad’s attention.
A Mossad undercover agent in Tehran had established that the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA), the extreme Irish terror group, was providing Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard with expertise on how to make ultra-sophisticated roadside bombs. The agent tracked the Irish bomb-makers to three factories in the Lavizn suburb in northern Tehran. Adapted to be fired from anti-tank missiles, the bombs were made from concave steel or copperplate. When fired, they traveled at two thousand meters per second and could penetrate ten centimeters of armor at a distance of one hundred meters. The missiles had already destroyed several Israeli tanks in Lebanon.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 74