The best argument against a conspiracy within the Bush administration is the profound incompetence of what followed. The same people who are now making a mess of Iraq and Afghanistan simply do not possess the skills, and deviousness, to stage a complex assault on two narrow towers of steel and glass standing alongside the Hudson River. The truth is that the attacks were the work of desperate men ready to die and with a goal that was clear. It was Osama bin Laden, an engineer of standing, and his brightest pupil, Mohamed Atta, who understood the best way to collapse the World Trade Center was not by targeting the base, but by undermining the upper levels of each structure. But this has all been discounted in the search for something more sinister at the very heart of American democracy. The very real danger is that the conspiracies will encourage the world to take its eye off the reality that the further we are away from the last catastrophic terrorist attack, the closer we are to the next.
As the last quarter of 2007 waxed, in Tel Aviv Meir Dagan briefed General Elyezer Shkedy, the country’s air force chief, on the latest intelligence from his deeper agents inside Iran. Israel’s embattled prime minister had told Shkedy to prepare for a full-scale aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mossad’s former director of operations, Rafi Eitan, now a key member of Olmert’s shaky coalition, had publicly warned the population to update their bomb shelters against an attack from Tehran’s missiles. Israel’s decision to ratchet up its preparations for an air assault came after Tehran had ignored the UN deadline to stop its nuclear enrichment program to create atomic weapons. General Shkedy, the forty-nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors whose office is dominated by a photo of an Israeli F15 flying over Auschwitz, described the concern over Iran as “a serious threat to Israel and the rest of the world. My job is to maximize our capabilities in every respect. Beyond that, the less said the better.” Giora Eiland, Israel’s former national security adviser, added: “Trying to negotiate with Iran is going nowhere. Tehran is now a major threat to Israel. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ready to sacrifice half of his people to eliminate us.”
A special Israeli Defense Force Unit, “Iran Force,” had been created under Shkedy. Several Pentagon strategic bombing specialists were attached to work alongside Israeli military planners. The unit has real-time access to American satellite images taken over Iran’s ten nuclear facilities. Israel’s air force, equipped with the latest American bunker-busting bombs, was the only means the country had to attack Iran. Distance ruled out a ground force assault. Uri Dromi, a former air force colonel, told the author: “Dates and timeframes are under close scrutiny. No formal date has yet been set. But the options for an attack are shortening.” Much would depend on information from Mossad spies in Iran.
In London Nathan, the Mossad station chief, had been fully briefed on an MI5 anti-terrorism operation that had discovered Britain’s first Islamic “school for terror.” It followed the arrests across London of fourteen radical Muslim extremists. They included Abu Abdullah, who was detained after he preached at a London mosque that he would “love to see our jihadists go to Iraq to kill British and American soldiers.” Abdullah had been a regular visitor to the Jameah Islamiyah Faith School. The tall, gothic building stood in fifty-four acres on the edge of a beautiful English village and had long been a brooding presence even in its days as a Roman Catholic seminary. It was to the school that Abu Hamsa, the hook-handed extremist preacher, “brought young Muslims to be indoctrinated in jihad,” confirmed a senior MI5 officer. Hamsa is currently serving seven years for incitement to murder. After he finishes his sentence he will be deported to the United States to face charges of inciting to murder American citizens in Yemen.
The discovery of the school for terror reveals how extensive al-Qaeda’s influence was within Britain’s Muslim community. Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad, said that Britain now had “a secret army of thousands of well-trained guerrilla fighters ready to kill in the name of religion.” Over two hundred MI5 and anti-terrorist officers had surrounded the school at Mark Cross near Crowborough in East Sussex. The raid followed the latest admission by a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay that he had attended a summer training camp at the school. It had been conducted by Abu Hamsa shortly before he was jailed in February 2006. The school was run by Bilal Patel, the school imam. He claimed (to the author) the school “welcomes all groups to enjoy camping in an Islamic environment in our grounds.” Mr. Patel ran the private school “as a charity.” But he admitted he had received donations from wealthy Muslims to buy the property for £800,000 from the previous owners, a ballet school.
A senior MI5 officer said: “We have long feared that Britain has become a sanctuary for terrorists from the battlegrounds of Chechnya, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. They pose as asylum seekers. What we are now discovering is a nightmare scenario coming true.” He revealed that al-Qaeda has developed a one-week basic jihad training course to be taught at “foundation camps set up in rural UK locations.” The course is available through al-Qaeda Web sites. A British government report published last May revealed their number was “somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand.” The report also said there were an estimated 16,000 people in the United Kingdom who “are supportive of al-Qaeda.”
The news didn’t surprise Meir Dagan. He had long felt that in one of their meetings, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, had shown commendable reality when she had said: “We can catch some of them, but not all of them.”
The early morning sun caught the rust-stained hull of the 1,700-ton cargo ship as it slowly steamed into the busy Mediterranean port of Tartus in Syria on September 3, 2007. From its mast flew the flag of South Korea and the stern plate identified the al-Hamed as being registered in Inchon, one of the country’s major ports.
Watching the ship maneuvering into its berth from a distance was a man with the swarthy skin of a Kurd or one of the marsh Arabs of Iraq. He was fluent in both their languages as well as some of the dialects of Afghanistan. He was, in fact, a Turkish-born Jew who had eschewed the life of a carpet seller in the family business in Istanbul to go to Israel, serve in its army as a translator, and finally achieve his life’s ambition to work in Mossad. Fifteen years later, he was recognized as one of its most brilliant operatives. In that time, he had operated in a dozen countries under as many aliases, using his linguistic skills and chameleon-like characteristics to observe and be absorbed into whichever community he had been sent.
Now, for the moment, he was code-named “Kamal” with a perfectly faked Iranian passport in his pocket. Meir Dagan had stressed to him the importance of his mission: to confirm the role of al-Hamed in the dangerous relationship, which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad had formed with North Korea.
Kamal had known before he left Tel Aviv the ship had sailed from Namp’o, a North Korean port in the high security area south of the capital, Pyongyang. An NSA satellite image had shown it steaming out into the Yellow Sea on a journey, which had taken it across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic and through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, and finally into Tartus harbor. At some stage of its voyage, it had re-flagged itself at sea and the crew had painted on the stern plate the port of registration as Inchon. The newness of their work was still apparent against the drab gray of the rest of the hull.
Through a contact in the Tartus harbormaster’s office, Kamal had managed to check the al-Hamed’s manifest and all day had watched trucks being loaded with the cement it listed. Then, as the sun began to set, military trucks arrived at the dockside and from the ship’s hold cranes lifted crates covered in heavy tarpaulin, which soldiers guided into the trucks. Using a high-resolution camera no bigger than the palm of his hand, Kamal photographed the transfer. When he finished, he pressed a button on the camera to transmit the images to a receiving station inside the Israeli border with Lebanon. In an hour, they were in Mossad headquarters.
Kamal knew then his trip had achieved all Meir Dagan
had hoped. Though he could not see inside the crates, the spy intuitively knew the steel-cased containers were holding weapons-grade plutonium, the element which had fueled the American atomic attack that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. In his mission briefing, Kamal had been told by Professor Uzi Even, who had helped to create Israel’s own nuclear facility at Dimona, that the plutonium would, in its raw form, be easily transported as nuggets in lead protective drums and the shaping and casting of the material would be done in Syria.
On that warm September day almost fifty-two years after Nagasaki had been destroyed, sufficient plutonium had been delivered to Syria to devastate an entire country, its neighbor, Israel.
Shortly before noon on September 4, 2007, a number of cars drove past the concert hall of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv and entered the heavily guarded headquarters of Major General Eliezer Shkedy, the country’s air force commander. As a fighter pilot he had won a deserved reputation for daredevil tactics coupled with a cool analytical mind. His speciality had been flying dangerously close to the ground, maneuvering past peaks and rocky outcrops, then hurtling skyward to ten thousand feet, nearing the speed of sound, before diving on the target, his weapon system switched on, his eyes flitting between the coordinates projected on his hood screen to the bombsight and the target. Weapons released, he would turn radically, the screech from the strain on the airframe like a banshee wail, and he would once more hurtle skyward. From dive attack to his second climb, it would take him only seconds.
For the past week Shkedy had prepared for an unprecedented operation, which would require those tactics to be carried out by pilots he had hand-picked because their flying skills matched his own. But they would be flying not the F-16 fighter plane he had once commanded, but Israel’s latest jet, the F-151. Flying at almost twice the speed of sound and capable of delivering a five-hundred-pound bunker-busting bomb, it was the most formidable fighter plane in the Israeli Air Force.
For weeks the pilots had practiced the flesh-flattening G-force of right-angle turns, diving and evading, to hit a small circle, the IP (initial point), carrying out bombing runs at an angled dive of thirty degrees. They had practiced all this in the pitch black of night in the Negev Desert. At first many of the dummy bombs had fallen wide of the IP, but soon they were landing inside, a number scoring the required bullseye. Shkedy called them “my Top Guns”—though they were far removed from the Hollywood version of Top Gun pilots. His fliers were sober-sided, led quiet lives, rarely partied, and had trained day and night for when they would finally be given the order to fly tactical strikes against Iran. Those attacks, they had been told, would take place at dawn or dusk. But all they knew so far about the mission they were spending weeks training for was that it would take place in the dead of night. No one had yet told them when or where, and they were content it should remain so. Curiosity was not one of their traits.
While F-151 twin afterburners glowed over the desolate night landscape and the pilots dropped their dummy bombs, which exploded white phosphorous smoke on the ground’s IP to determine the accuracy of the drops, in Shkedy’s Tel Aviv complex his staff studied the approach to the target and discussed the precautions each F-151 must take from the moment its pilot pressed the red button on the control stick to release his bomb. The time they would spend over the actual target, TOT, would have to be between two and four seconds. In that period with its bomb released, an F-151 would sink dangerously toward the ground, giving the pilot a second to fire his afterburner to climb and avoid the “frag pattern,” the deadly metal fragments of spent explosive, which would follow the detonation. A bomb’s shrapnel would rise to three thousand feet in seven seconds and unless the aircraft was clear of the target area, it could be blown up and other pilots already at various stages of their bomb runs would fly into a curtain of lethal fragments, which could destroy them. To avoid this, each pilot would have to endure body-crushing pressure of eight Gs while negotiating a radical ninety degree turn away from the IP after bombing and climb to thirty thousand feet from the target zone to avoid ground missiles.
To calculate the precise distance from take-off to target and the exact angle for the attack, the planners pored over computer graphs, satellite images, and physics tables to check and re-check figures. The targeters calculated that because the bombs would pierce the target roof before exploding inside, the roof would momentarily serve as a shield, reducing the frag pattern by between 30 and 40 percent. To help further protect the lead aircraft over the target, it would have its laser-guided bomb fitted with a delay fuse, providing a precious two-second lead time before the detonation.
Given the distance to the target, it was clear the F-151s would each have to carry two external fuel tanks, one under each wing. Filled with five hundred gallons of fuel, each tank added three thousand pounds to the aircraft weight. That required further complex calculations to be made: the exact point at which the bombing dive would start and the altitude at which the ordnance would be dropped.
In late August, while the al-Hamed was entering the Strait of Gibraltar, General Shkedy flew to the base of the sixty-ninth squadron in the Negev; the squadron was the Air Force’s frontline air assault force trained to attack Iran. Waiting for Shkedy in the airfield briefing room were the five pilots whom he had selected to carry out the raid. With an average age of twenty-six, many came from families who were Holocaust survivors, like Shkedy himself.
For him the pilots had a kind of nobility to their youth; behind their relaxed and open manner was steel. Once before, he had flown to speak to them at the start of their special training and had begun by saying they had been selected for an air-to-ground mission, military speak for bombing a ground target. He had looked into their faces, glad to see they showed no emotion. No one had looked at the huge wall map of the Middle East. Nevertheless he anticipated each would be creating in his mind the potential mission profile: a low level flight to the target, then a high level return very possibly into headwinds. It could be Iran. But they had not asked him then and they did not do so on that late August morning when Shkedy once more met them in the briefing room.
Standing before a plasma screen, he used a remote control to illuminate it. For the first time the pilots saw the target; a complex deep inside Syria almost one hundred miles northeast of Damascus. He explained there was “good and sufficient intelligence” to destroy the complex, which the Syrians were using to build nuclear bombs. He waited for the flicker of response then continued. Under the cover of being an agricultural research center, the complex was already engaged in extracting uranium from phosphates. Soon it would have weapons-enriched plutonium coming from North Korea. He told them the Israeli satellite Ofek-7, which had been launched only two months before, had been geo-positioned to watch the activities at the complex near the small Syrian city of Dayr az-Zawr. He indicated its position on the screen. No bombs must fall on civilians.
Shkedy then turned to the route in and out of the target area. The aircraft would fly up along the Syrian coast and enter its airspace at the last moment north at the port town of Samadogi and then follow the border with Turkey. At the point where the River Euphrates began its long journey south into Iraq, the attack force would swing south to the Syrian desert town of ar-Raqqah beyond which they would begin the bombing run. The way out would be a high-altitude straight run between the Syrian towns of Hims and Hamah to the Mediterranean. Over the coast of Lebanon they would turn south and return to base. The total mission time would be eighty minutes. In the event of an emergency, navy rescue launches would be positioned off the Syrian coast.
He ended the briefing by saying the attack would be in the early hours of the morning and would take place “soon.” For a moment longer the air force commander looked at the small group of pilots. Perhaps sensing their one concern, he added that every step would be taken to ensure Syria’s vaunted air defenses would be jammed. He did not say how and no one asked. It was a mark of the trust and resp
ect they had for General Eliezer Shkedy.
The genesis for the operation ensued three years prior when a massive explosion on a North Korean freight train heading for the port of Namp’o occurred on April 22, 2004. Mossad agents had learned that in a compartment adjoining a sealed wagon were a dozen Syrian nuclear technicians who had worked in the Iranian nuclear program at Natanz, near Tehran, and had arrived in North Korea to collect the fissionable material stored in the wagon. The technicians died in the train explosion, and their bodies were flown home in lead-encased coffins aboard a Syrian military plane. By then a wide area around the explosion site had been cordoned off and scores of North Korean soldiers in anti-contamination suits had spent days recovering wreckage and spraying the entire area. Mossad analysts suspected they were recovering some of the estimated fifty-five kilos of weapons-grade plutonium North Korea possessed. Since the explosion—its cause never established—the intelligence service had tracked Syrian military officers and scientists on a dozen trips to Pyongyang where they met with high-ranking officials in the regime. The most recent meeting was shortly before the al-Hamed had left Namp’o.
It was Kamal’s report and photographic evidence of the arrival and unloading of the ship that was the focus of the meeting in General Shkedy’s headquarters on September 4, 2007. The air force commander’s briefing room was dominated by large plasma screens on two walls. One contained a blow-up of the ship and the covered crates being off-loaded and driven away. A second screen showed the town of Dayr az-Zawr. A third screen displayed a satellite image of a large square building surrounded by several smaller ones and a security fence. The area was identified by the word: “Target.”
Seated around the conference table with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were the other key players in the operation, codenamed “Sunburst.” For Olmert, it was further proof of his powers of survival. A year ago he had been close to being driven out of office after the debacle of the war in Lebanon when he was vilified as the most incompetent leader Israel had ever had. He had fought back, appointing Ehud Barak as his new defense minister and Tzipi Livni as foreign minister. Both now flanked him at the table giving Olmert the political support he needed for “Sunburst.” Beside them sat Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and now leader of the Likud Party. Like Barak, Netanyahu was experienced in the complexities of “black” operations. Barak had been a leader in Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s elite commando force who bore the same motto as Britain’s SAS: “Who Dares Wins.” Netanyahu had approved several Mossad missions while in office.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 78