Staging through London, Dagan learned that MI5 had discovered al-Qaeda had supplied its estimated 2,000 sleeper agents in Britain with what Eliza Manningham-Buller described as “the most sophisticated terror manual ever found in this country.” The document gave information on how to create liquid explosions far more powerful than those planned to be used to destroy ten passenger planes over the Atlantic in August 2006. The precise steps to produce the bombs were set out in chilling detail on an al-Qaeda DVD. On one part of the disk were instructions that mimicked the style of a cookbook—only its pages provided recipes for unparalleled carnage. An example shown to the author reads:
First obtain the raw ingredients. Where possible, always shop in supermarkets to avoid the staff remembering your visit. An ideal base liquid is nitromethane. This is used to propel the engine of a model aircraft. It should be mixed with a suitable sensitizing chemical. Gloves must be worn at all times when mixing the chemicals so as to avoid generating heat which could produce a premature explosion. The mixing should also be done in a cool room. The final result will be a crystalline white powder. The technical name for this is triacetone triperoxide. The powder can be suitably concealed in containers in common use.
Sidney Alford, chairman of Alford Technologies, a leading British explosives company, said (to the author): “Everyone in the business knows that nitromethane is an explosive, but many people, including some in the police and security services, have yet to cotton on to that.” And in Tel Aviv, Ehud Keinan, a world-ranking authority on liquid explosives whose expertise was prized by Mossad, confirmed that the details discovered on the al-Qaeda DVD were “of major importance in the fight against terrorism. It is very easy to produce such explosives once the know-how is explained. The raw materials are readily available in unlimited quantities on any main street.”
Meir Dagan learned the DVD was discovered during the climax of an MI5 surveillance operation that had begun in Dublin, Ireland, and ended on the road to Chester in the north of England when intelligence officers swooped on a 2000-reg Lancia, which had come from Dublin on the car ferry to Holyhead in North Wales. At the wheel of the vehicle was a middle-aged English woman who had driven to the Welsh port from the Midlands. Beside her sat an Algerian-born man, also middle-aged, who has lived in a fashionable Dublin suburb. Both have been under surveillance as part of Operation Overt, which led to the arrests of twenty-four terrorists in March 2007. The couple and their car were driven to an MI5 safe house near London. Waiting were senior interrogation officers. While they questioned the couple in separate rooms, MI5 forensic experts conducted a search of the car. It was then that the DVD was found.
Dagan also learned that MI5 officers had reopened the case of another Algerian terrorist who had lived for four years in Lucan, another Dublin suburb. In December 2005 he was convicted under the name of Abbas Boutrab for conspiracy to blow up aircraft and sentenced to six years at Belfast Crown Court. However, it subsequently emerged that Boutrab was not his real name—but one of nine different aliases on passports found in an al-Qaeda safe house in Ireland.
The Republic had increasingly become a concern for Mossad since it had emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 that al-Qaeda had infiltrated the thriving Muslim community in Dublin. Ireland’s small security service had gratefully accepted help from Mossad, MI5, and European intelligence services to mount various surveillance operations and GCHQ, Britain’s “spy in the sky” had monitored the e-mails and phone calls of suspects. One result had been to thwart the plan of Abu Hamsa, the radical cleric, to seek political asylum in Ireland before he could be arrested on an extradition warrant to face terrorist-related charges in the United States. Hamsa was now in Belmarsh, one of Britain’s high-security prisons, serving a sentence for his involvement in terrorism. Hamsa believed, wrongly, that the long history of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, in successfully opposing extradition from the United States of IRA suspects to face trial in Northern Ireland would ensure he would not be extradited to America. He was counting on the Dublin government facing legal problems; like other European countries, Ireland has strict laws about extradition. In 2008, the Irish government had still refused to return the three Continuity IRA members to Colombia. They continue to live quite close to the Irish border with Northern Ireland.
In the past year al-Qaeda had started an intensive recruitment drive among Ireland’s young Muslims to become jihadists. MI5 agents had established that one-and-a-half tons of ammonium-based nitrate fertilizer, which had been found in London, had been smuggled into Britain from Ireland. If it exploded, it could have killed more than had died in the Madrid train massacre. The agents had discovered that every year 150,000 tons of the lethal material were shipped annually from Russia and there were few controls at any of the Republic’s docks as to who collected it. An MI5 agent had then established that a terrorist could buy half-a-ton of the fertilizer at any of the Republic’s agricultural merchants. The fertilizer had lain in plastic sacks in the yard the agent visited. To weaponize it, all a terrorist had to do was separate the potash from the ammonium nitrate then douse the nitrate with domestic fuel oil and add a detonator.
The deep concern this had caused was reinforced (to the author) by Northern Ireland’s leading anti-terrorist chief, Detective Superintendent Andy Sproule of the Serious and Organized Crimes Unit: “There are increasingly large amounts of this fertilizer coming into Ireland and it is not even what it claims to be. The levels of ammonium nitrate are too high and it is dangerous.” The ban in Northern Ireland since 1996 to stop it being sold to the IRA has led to a dramatic increase in the import figures of the deadly fertilizer into the Republic. It arrives in container ships from Russian plants near the Ural Mountains. Before 2001 the Republic had imported hardly any artificial fertilizer containing high levels of potash and ammonium nitrate. Sensing a market opening, the Irish Fertilizer Manufacturers Association (IFMA) began to import the Russian fertilizer. In 2003 the amount was 120,000 tons. A year later it reached 150,000 tons. The figure continued to grow.
It was one matter Meir Dagan could raise with General Michael Hayden, who had been appointed to replace Tenet in 2006. Their meeting in Washington would be their first face-to-face encounter. The agenda would include the ongoing roundup by Hezbollah’s security service of informers in the Beka’a Valley and south Lebanon, several of whom had risked their lives and those of their families by identifying for Mossad the locations of missiles. Hassan Nasrallah had made the capture of the informers a priority. For discussion would also be the failure of Israeli intelligence to locate and capture the Hezbollah leader and his senior aides.
The two spy chiefs would also update each other on the identity of a mysterious name—Rakan Ben Williams. Was he who he claimed to be, an American convert to Islam? Al-Qaeda now claimed to have hundreds of such members. Or was it a codename for a cell or even a group? In London, MI5 analysts were trying to discover if the name fit one of the men arrested in Operation Overt. In the meantime, “Williams” had continued to utilize the Internet for his threats. Each was signed as “Al-Qaeda undercover soldier in the USA.” But the style suggested the writer could be a woman. Or it might simply have been a hoaxer of either sex. Long ago, Meir Dagan had realized counter-terrorism was plagued with often well-constructed nonsense. But no matter how outlandish it appeared, it had to be tracked down. At the Mossad training school, instructors reminded students that from the moment man established himself as a new species unique among all animals, it was the moment when he first used his primitive language to lie; the world became his to create and destroy. It would be ever so.
CHAPTER 29
FOR THE MOMENT …
Mossad, like other intelligence services around the world, braced itself for the fifth anniversary on September 11, and the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Since the discovery of the London-based plot to bring down ten American and British airliners over the Atlantic, the intelligence analysts had listened closely to what one called “
the whispers in the wind” for the first hint that the fifth anniversary would be marked by another massive atrocity. The analysts of Mossad focused on the latest threat al-Qaeda had issued—that it would soon strike against Israel with a ferocity never seen before. The Jewish state was still reeling from its failure to defeat Hezbollah and the increased fighting in the Gaza Strip. The threat from Tehran continued. Islam, the giver of many lasting benefits to mankind and the proud possessor of a thrilling history, had been transformed into a rabid form of Islamism by its devotees who called for the elimination of all those who opposed them. “Death to the infidel” had become a call, which closed anti-West rallies across the Muslim world.
The trumpet call followed those seventy-one minutes which began at 8:46 A.M. on September 11, 2001, in the blue sky over New York. That was the moment when American Flight 11 gouged into the North Tower, and ended at 9:57 A.M. when the doomed passengers on United Flight 93 tried, but failed, to regain control over their plane before it crashed into the Pennsylvania soil. After 9/11 the calumny took root, nurtured by the new freedom of the Internet and ironically supported by the words of then U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld: “We know what we know; we know there are things we do not know; and there are things we know we know we don’t know.” That classic Rumsfeldism—which had actually referred to the need for a regime change in Iraq—was seized upon by the extremists as proof America had something to hide over 9/11.
The official 9/11 Commission said there was no evidence that office equipment in the towers had been “pulverized down to the last computer microchip.” Lee Hamilton, the former vice chairman of the Commission, felt compelled to say (to the author): “A lot of people I have encountered believe the U.S. government was involved. Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course the evidence does not lead that way at all.”
So why is it that many millions of people in the United States and Europe continue to embrace the accusation of a vast conspiracy? Is it possible—as a Mossad psychologist told the author—that what he called “the reality of terror” had become “dulled by the constant replaying of the television images so people saw it subconsciously as another kind of computer-generated game?”
The apologists for al-Qaeda filled the airwaves across the Arab world with claims that the 9/11 attacks had been a gigantic conspiracy by the Bush administration as an excuse to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006, five years after they had first surfaced while smoke from the Twin Towers rose from the world’s largest funeral pyre, those claims had been given a new legitimacy. Seventy-five American academics, who called themselves Scholars For Truth, claimed things were not as officially presented. Some go so for as to speculate that a shadowy group of neo-conservatives, many of them embedded in the Bush administration, knew of the attack in advance and conspired with the CIA to topple the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the hope such unprecedented attacks would gain overwhelming support for a U.S.-led war in the Middle East. The last time such an attack had aroused the collective fury of Americans had been Pearl Harbor, when Japan had launched its assault on the U.S. fleet. The decision to do this had been to give Tokyo a clear geopolitical advantage in the Pacific and paved the way for an attack on the United States. That dream had finally died in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, sixty-one years later, the Scholars For Truth—professors, lecturers, and academics of all kinds—claimed the decision to secretly launch 9/11 was also rooted in geopolitics, its objective to give the Bush administration control over the oil fields of Iraq.
A founder and leader of the group, Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at the Brigham Young University in Utah has said: “There is the clear possibility of thermite-based arson and demolition. The planes seen crashing into the Twin Towers were just a distraction. We don’t believe that nineteen hijackers and a few others in a cave with bin Laden pulled this off acting alone. We challenge this official theory and, by God, we’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
His case, presented with all the scholarly language of academia, has given some credence to the hundreds of books and tens of thousands of Web pages devoted to 9/11 that argue the Bush administration had encouraged the attacks. Central to the argument is Professor Jones’s thesis that there is no official explanation for the speed with which the Twin Towers collapsed; each had taken 10 seconds for the 1,400-foot towers to topple; the other building in the complex, a 47-story structure, had taken only 7 seconds to do so, of that there is no dispute. But for the Scholars For Truth this was a phenomenon that contravened “the physical law of conservation of momentum and offers no credible explanation of how the towers fell at near terminal velocity into their own footprint. For some reason ninety percent of the building material was converted into ‘flour,’ creating a massive volume of sub-one-hundred-fifty-micron dust across southern Manhattan. By comparison with the destruction of other high-rise buildings, which have also spontaneously collapsed, either through mudslides or earthquakes, they fell to the side, largely intact or reduced to only large pieces of rubble and minimal dust amounts. The physical energy required to collapse the World Trade Center buildings and pulverize all office contents including computer chips to their basic elements clearly indicates a quantity of energy far beyond the gravitational energy potential of each tower; this is further evidence that the weight of a tower is insufficient to produce the energy required to pulverize its contents to such an extent.”
A poll conducted by Ohio University revealed that one-third of the American public believed the federal government assisted in the World Trade Center attacks or took no action to stop them. The poll offered one clue as to why millions accepted this. The pollsters found that the people most likely to believe “are those who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly read, watch, or listen to ‘mainstream’ media. Alone before a computer, linked to their cyber friends as their only company, they can easily begin to accept all sorts of bizarre notions, especially when trying to make sense of an event as grotesque as the collapse of two skyscrapers,” reported the London Daily Telegraph , two days after the fifth anniversary.
So who is Professor Jones, who many see as an exposer of what would be undoubtedly the world’s greatest conspiracy—one that left the news that Princess Diana’s inquest was to open in January 2007 as little more than a passing footnote? The soft-spoken professor is the same man who is also convinced that Jesus wandered through ancient Mexico around AD 600, paying calls on various Mayan villagers and has published “evidence that the Mayans are well aware of the resurrected Lord” centuries before the Spanish priests brought them the good news. Professor Jones has also, for the past ten years, promoted in Third World countries a solar funnel cooker based on the highly disputed scientific theory of cold fusion. But despite this colorful background for a physics professor, Professor Jones has gathered like-minded academics to support his claim of a 9/11 conspiracy. However, in checking the author found that many of the Scholars For Truth are not scientists with proven expertise in relevant fields like aviation, air defense, air traffic control, civil engineering, firefighting, metallurgy, and geology—all essential skills to come to an informed conclusion about how the Twin Towers were felled. Many are academics who have devoted a great deal of their careers tilting at various windmills. Professor James H. Fetzer, who teaches in Minnesota and is head of a splinter group, is convinced that President John F. Kennedy was killed by several shooters and that the moon landing in 1969 was likely a hoax. More recently he has been quoted as urging that Americans “arm themselves and lend support to a military coup that will replace the Bush government with a new regime.”
Just as the Holocaust has increasingly attracted its deniers, so the tragedy of 9/11 is indeed so shocking and incomprehensible that it has attracted a growing number of people to reject the simple truth: that al-Qaeda had announced its coming, weeks before—and that the clear warnings from Mossad had been largely discounted. In Tel Aviv a senior Mossad analyst told the aut
hor in September 2006:
The Bush administration has given groups like the Scholars For Truth credibility by doing so much of its work in secret and by giving the public so many fake stories. A good example is that President Bush finally admitted in September, nine months after he had solemnly denied it, terrorist suspects were being secretly held in interrogation centers outside the jurisdiction of the United States. The result is the paranoia of groups like the Scholars For Truth are fed by the arrogance of those around President Bush.
More certain is that those members of the Bush administration in power on that September 11, 2001, overreacted to the destruction. The official exaggeration began with the initial reports of casualties being estimates as high as twenty thousand. The number, thankfully, would turn out to be under three thousand. In the weeks after 9/11 dozens of innocent “terrorist suspects” were imprisoned without charge. The administration did nothing to deny rumors that Iraq was preparing to launch an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein became the new Hitler. President Bush, like his father, was cast in the role of the fighter pilot ready to lead his nation to victory against the evil forces of al-Qaeda. No wonder the president readily admitted that the Hollywood movie Independence Day was one he never tired of watching.
A Mossad analyst, a veteran of many years of cool and careful judgments, said to the author:
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 77