The details of all these acts were on the screens in the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre in London. At 10:30 on a warm Sunday night in August, the red light on the senior duty officer’s desk blinked. The caller was Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5. Moments earlier she had been told that four months of a patient and top-secret investigation by MI5, MI6, the CIA, Mossad, and Pakistan’s intelligence service was about to reach its climax. John Scarlett, the head of MI6, had just received a “flash” encrypted e-mail from a field agent in Karachi. Pakistan intelligence had confirmed that al-Qaeda was about to launch a series of attacks on British and American transatlantic flights from Heathrow. It was the moment the greatest terrorist threat Britain had ever faced brought JTAC to “full operational mode.” In rapid succession, Tony Blair was alerted. He contacted President Bush. By then key officials in Cobra, the government crisis team, were being briefed. So was Sir Ian Blair, Britain’s top policeman. Airline chiefs and other authorities, including the director of security for the Channel Tunnel, were also alerted. All the heads of foreign intelligence were told. By then the Anacapa charts were filling, the center’s plasma screens were alive with data, and the phones blinking furiously. Over the next six days, into and out of the work stations—each equipped with state-of-the-art communications systems—information flowed. Intelligence—once only shared with the CIA, French, and German security services—was exchanged with other services. The question all urgently needed to answer was: had they picked up even “a whisper in the wind” of when the plot to destroy the airliners would happen? From Rome came the first hint. SIMSI, the Italian secret service, said they had a large number of terror suspects under surveillance. One had admitted the attack would come “very soon.”
Porton Down’s experts were called upon to decide what kind of liquid explosive would be used. Around the clock, surveillance reports continued to come to the work stations. In between long days and nights, men and women catnapped in a nearby dormitory in the basement. One report was from an MI5 undercover team near a house in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Other teams reported from south London and Birmingham. GCHQ specialists analyzed phone intercepts from suspect houses. In communities where the suspects lived, MI5 had set up other sophisticated surveillance sites. Some of the suspects had become assimilated into British society, but had made regular trips to relatives in Pakistan and elsewhere. Pakistan’s intelligence service had provided JTAC with details. The suspects were known as “Trojans,” JTAC-speak for those who may have been recruited to become home-grown terrorists. Their cell phones were bugged. Their every movement noted. Radio waves bounced off windowpanes to monitor conversations in a room they occupied. The latest technology filtered through thousands of e-mails. The surveillance teams’ information was studied by a JTAC lawyer to ensure their findings would be admissible in court.
Seventy-two hours later sufficient information had been gathered for arrests to go ahead. Twenty-two people were taken into custody. They included a convert to Islam and a seventeen-year-old youth. But in JTAC the work continued to establish the full extent of the plot. Scotland Yard predicted it could possibly be a year before the suspects were brought to trial.
In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan received a thank you call from Eliza Manningham-Buller. At the end she said, “We may not have caught them all, but it’s a start.” For the intelligence chief it was a good result to justify what Mossad tries to do.
In September 2006, the arrival once more of the first cooling breezes was a time to which the Jews of Israel and the Muslims of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip would look forward. A time when Jewish mothers prepared borscht, beetroot soup, and young lovers walked down the Cardo, the covered street in the Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem and, nearby, the Muslim faithful worshipped within the cool of Haram al-Sharif, the enclosure in the Muslim quarter of Old Jerusalem, which contained the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site of the Islamic world. This, too, all went on as it had for many centuries, rituals as ancient as wearing the Tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, and the checkered Arab headdress.
But now there were other matters to preoccupy the people of the Holy Land. In Gaza the fighting continued with guerrilla attacks by Hamas and counter assaults by Israel. The Israeli Air Force launched precision-bombing raids across the Strip. Shin Bet, the internal security force, rounded up more legally-elected members of the Hamas-dominated parliament on the grounds they belonged to an organization whose military wing was responsible for the continued kidnappings, rocket attacks, and suicide bombers.
In Israel, the fallout from the war in Lebanon continued and calls came every day for the resignation of those deemed to be responsible for the country’s failure. Early on in the conflict, Dan Halutz, after his air force had destroyed fifty-four Hezbollah rocket launchers, had announced “we have won the war.” Now, on the streets of Israeli cities, the words were publicly mocked as it gradually became clear after five weeks of fighting the last of the optimism had evaporated, and with it, the invincible reputation of the Israeli armed forces. Instead of celebrations, which had greeted other victories, the air was filled with anger over poor training of the soldiers and outdated equipment. Despite individual acts of bravery, some of the men of the IDF had been pushed to the point of mutiny. A humiliated Halutz wrote a contrite letter to all his soldiers in which he admitted “there were mistakes and these will be corrected.” But as the days of September passed, it became far from clear whether the fifty-eight-year-old fighter pilot, who had flown with distinction in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, would survive. A poll revealed that 54 percent wanted Halutz to resign.
Even though Ehud Olmert had announced he would set up a public inquiry into the conduct of the war, it did little to reduce the national anger Israelis directed at him. Sixty-three percent of the electorate polled said he should resign at once; his defense minister, Amir Peretz, fared even worse: 74 percent demanded he should leave office as soon as possible. Both politicians had been overwhelmingly dominated by Halutz and his dependence on air power, which had brought swift victory in previous conflicts. Mossad analysts, who had been monitoring public attitudes, also saw a consensus forming among IDF veterans that Halutz had failed to understand air power was only there to assist ground forces and could never win a modern-day war. It was a view Meir Dagan had put forward in those early-day meetings in the war room. He had argued, in the calm, cogent matter which had been his hallmark since taking over Mossad, that air power should have been supported by ground forces capable of driving Hezbollah back from the border area. But now the first murmurs had also surfaced in the street as to why the intelligence—always a critical factor in any past war Israel fought—had been so inept. Why had Mossad not discovered well before battle commenced the exact whereabouts of the Hezbollah rocket sites? Why had its agents not pinpointed the fallback positions of the launchers? Why had they not been able to more effectively track the movements of Hassan Nasrallah?
In Lebanon, Hezbollah, while parading through the streets of Beirut in triumph, also had suffered heavy casualties. Those who had survived watched fifty French army engineers come ashore, the vanguard of the seven thousand UN troops promised by the European Union states as peacemakers. The UN had also received offers of soldiers from several Muslim countries, some of which did not even recognize Israel. It did not augur well for the future—particularly as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria again began to make threatening announcements that time “will once more come when we have to retake the Golan Heights by force.”
But the real threat came from Iran. Not only had it been the real beneficiary of the conflict, it had united the Sunnis and the Shias in common agreement to fight the detested infidels. From having its back to the wall only three years before, when the invasion of Iraq had intimidated the ayatollahs next door, Iran had emerged as the influential power in the region’s Muslim world. It had achieved this position by shrewd opportunism and the miscalculations of its enemies. It had either ignored or played
subtle politics against the threats of the UN Security Council to punish it with economic sanctions for consistently refusing to stop producing enriched uranium, a process to make the material for nuclear bombs. In that first week of September, Iran’s contempt continued to be demonstrated when it announced “a new phase” in its heavy water construction, ignoring the opposition of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear inspectorate. Mossad had already discovered the plant had been operational since mid-August. In a memo to Olmert, Meir Dagan reminded the embattled prime minister that India, Pakistan, and North Korea had all opened similar plants to convert uranium into plutonium for bombs.
Mossad analysts believed Iran’s mercurial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was counting on the disunity of the Security Council and the continued support of China and Russia to block any UN sanctions. John Bolton, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, had spoken of imposing them through a “coalition of the willing.” But would they include Jacques René Chirac and Tony Blair? Both were leaders in the twilight of their political power.
In a prophetic memo, a Mossad analyst wrote in late August: “The world must face that Iran is determined to become a nuclear military power. Inevitably that would lead to a nuclear arms race. Syria will feel emboldened to go for ‘the nuclear option.’ Saudi Arabia might well want to do the same. Egypt might also consider ‘going nuclear.’ We would then face a new and most dangerous situation.”
It was against this background that Olmert appointed his air force chief, Major General Elyezer Shkedy, to be overall commander for a new department within the IDF. It was to be called “The Iran Front.” Its task was two-fold. First, to task Mossad in obtaining “all possible intelligence from within Iran by all possible means.” In turn that information would form part of a working battle plan. On Shkedy’s appointment, his first visitor had been Meir Dagan. For several hours, Shkedy, the forty-nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors—whose prized possession was a picture of an Israel F-15 flying over Auschwitz—spelled out his requirements. Dagan asked what was the timeframe. Shkedy replied, “the list of options is becoming shorter. But on present calculations there may be a year before we have to decide.” That decision, of course, would not be finally made in Israel. It would ultimately come from Washington, made by the Pentagon and delivered from the Oval Office by President George W. Bush. He had already told his inner cabinet—Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice—that Israel was “singing from the same hymn sheet as we are. We have no argument about Iran’s intentions. It’s going to do all it can to go nuclear.”
In the meantime in Tehran, Mohammed-Reza Bahonar, the deputy speaker of Iran’s parliament and a staunch ultra-conservative supporter of President Ahmadinejad, warned that Iran would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “if our patience finally runs out with the international community, our country may have to produce nuclear weapons as a defense measure.”
In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan told his own senior staff that “once more the clock is moving closer to midnight.”
In London another clock had stopped, at least for the moment: the long-awaited report into the death of Princess Diana nine years before had gone into limbo. The Royal Coroner, Dr. Michael Burgess, who knew the contents of the report by Lord Stevens, had astonishingly resigned, deciding he was “too busy” to preside over the most significant and high-profile case of his or any coroner’s life. In a letter to interested parties, including Prince Charles and Mohamed al-Fayed, the mild-mannered Burgess had written about “my heavy and constant workload.” As the ninth anniversary of Dodi al-Fayed and the Princess’s death were marked by the annual surge of visitors to the midnight car crash location in Paris, the questions continued to be asked and the speculation was rampant. Had Dr. Burgess refused to continue because there was pressure upon him to declare the crash had been nothing more than a tragic accident? Or had he resigned because he would not discount that murder had been committed—and that powerful figures in the intelligence world and in Britain’s Royal Family had exerted their combined influence to dismiss any suspicion of foul play? More certain is that if there was finally to be an inquest it would require months of searching for a replacement for the sixty-year-old Burgess. By August 2006, it had appeared that Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, had been unable to find one. Lord Stevens, who had headed the inquiry into the two deaths, knew that any new coroner would have to read a massive dossier to familiarize himself with its myriad contents numbering ten thousand pages. That would take many months. The experienced Stevens knew that the moment any fresh legal figure examined the results of his team’s two-and-a-half-year investigation he would be “bound to want supplementary inquiries to be made.” That would, one of his handpicked detectives told the author, “add another year or even more to our work.” Privately Lord Stevens has told friends that the inquiry “could go on for years.”
In September 2006, a date for when the inquest might take place was put at the earliest 2007, possibly 2008. Even then, asked the conspiracy theorists, would everything be disclosed? How “routine” had Diana’s “partial embalming” been? Why didn’t the National Security Agency in Washington release their surveillance tapes of Diana and Dodi it had made in the last weeks of their lives? Did the tapes add anything of value to the investigation? Even if the couple had clipped on their seatbelts as the Mercedes hurtled them to their deaths, would that have saved their lives? Was Diana pregnant? Her close friend, Rosa Monckton, had told the Stevens investigators that on August 20, 1997, when she said good-bye to Diana eleven days before her death, Diana’s menstrual cycle had started. But even then the questions had been asked. How long was her menstrual bleeding? Had she been able to bear a child by the time her menstrual cycle stopped? And finally, what had the investigators discovered about the role of the intelligence service—not least Mossad?
In one of those surprise statements, which had become a hallmark of the Blair government, it was announced after the ninth anniversary of Diana’s death that a replacement for the Royal Coroner had been found. She was Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, a retired High Court judge. She had agreed to come out of retirement to preside over the inquest into Diana’s death. An indication of the formidable reading task she faced came when Lord Stevens announced his detectives had so far taken 1,500 witness statements, many more than the previous figure.
On the day of the Butler-Sloss appointment, Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, published his latest revelations about her death. It included a confidential police report about the items recovered from the crash scene. The inventory was prepared by Captain Christophe Boucharin of the Paris Criminal Brigade, marked BC No 288/97. It listed fourteen personal effects, including a pair of black Versace shoes size 40, a Ralph Lauren belt, a Motorola mobile phone, a Jaeger-Lecoultre gold watch, a Bulgari seed-pearl bracelet held at each end with diamond-encrusted drags, and a gold ring. In a footnote Captain Boucharin wrote: “The funeral directors took responsibility for all the artifacts. They put the bracelet on Diana’s right wrist and the ring on her right finger.” Burrell wrote that “she had agreed on my advice when she received the ring from Dodi to wear the ring on her right hand as a friendship ring—not on her left hand denoting an engagement.”
The position of the ring would contradict Mohamed al-Fayed’s persistent claim that his son and Diana were engaged to be married. The veracity of this would be one of the many factors that Baroness Butler-Sloss would have to consider when she eventually presided over the inquest.
In Tel Aviv the latest developments were carefully filed in the Mossad library. Meir Dagan had made his decision about not involving Mossad in the investigation. He had heard nothing to change his mind.
Being driven to his appointment through Washington in a government car, Meir Dagan saw that across the Potomac the memorial stones as usual stood proudly in ranks on the slopes of Arlington Cemetery. The graveyard was so different from the smooth sandstone, brain-shaped monument at Glilot, north of Tel Aviv, a
nd its engravings of the dead of Mossad. Ahead, the Washington Monument’s long shadow gave the last reading of the day before fading into darkness. Along the sidewalk people still pounded along as the lights blinked out in the buildings and flags dropped down poles to be swiftly gathered up. If there was a time he had to come to Washington, Meir Dagan preferred September. Until then the summer would be without a breeze and the atmosphere filled with fumes and ozone, often covering the city with a haze. Visitors said it was the result of car exhaust smoke and the swampy location. Cynical locals knew better, claiming it was a noxious mixture of wasted breath and oxidized hopes that turned to poison when the sun broke through. The cause, of course, was government.
It was its secret side, the CIA, which had once more brought the Mossad chief to Washington. He had arrived at the time for Washington’s powerful pretenders to lock away their documents and to ignore, until the morning, the telephone calls they had not returned. Those without a future headed home to their families. The ambitious, the Mossad chief knew, had further duties. A late drink at an embassy and later still, dinner with friends and enemies, a time when a secret could be quietly shared or a reputation tarnished.
Before leaving Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan had learned that Rafi Eitan, once Mossad’s director of operations and now the Pensioners’ Minister in the coalition that Ehud Olmert hoped would allow him to continue governing, had called for the readying of bomb shelters and reinforced rooms to be established in advance of a possible conflict with Iran. Eitan, once so secretive, had become adept at sound-bites on television.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 76