by Nathan Ronen
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure where you’re going with this…” Yuli stammered, flustered.
“We’re going to get the bad guys off the streets and cause some chaos that will get all the cockroaches out of the holes where they’ve been hiding so far,” Tal smiled. “At least the ones whose names we know. They might be terrorists or innocent people, patsies or unknowing proxies, but the very fact that they’re being arrested will cause plenty of unease within the terrorist planning apparatus.”
Yuli finally smiled in comprehension. He signaled the twins to take on this assignment. Their hacking system, with the special algorithm they had developed, worked for precisely seventeen seconds before cracking the digital defense array protecting 15 million different passwords saved within the database. Their fingers, as slender as pianists’, typed to access the database of forms, and then, like a holy relic, the form stating ‘Arrest Warrant’ appeared on the glowing screen.
Yahli and Nina Lev, computer prodigies, fraternal twins who were inseparable, smiled at each other with immense pleasure.
“You know, you’re kind of a genius,” Nina told her brother. He, of course, hurried to agree with her with a narcissism reserved for the young, who knew they were much smarter than average.
“But we don’t have the names of the people we want to be arrested,” Yahli complained.
“You’ll get them soon,” Masha Kramer said. “And then you can prepare the warrants and feed them into the system.”
The attendees in the command post had no idea that the Lev twins were Dark Net stars appearing under strange aliases taken from Japanese anime and other animated movies. She was Pokémon Yogista, while he was Dusty Crophopper. They were an unusual duo within the social fabric of Digital Fortress employees, attracting attention due to their hipster clothing.
The moment they received the list of names from Masha, they typed in numbers and letters with manic speed, resulting in an incomprehensible green list that appeared on the black screen. They responded with peals of laughter, gazing into each other’s eyes with immense joy, as if they were the only smart people in a world of dreary mediocrity.
“By the time the cops have any idea who’s playing who within this bureaucratic chaos, these suspects will be neutralized, at least for a few days, and no one will know who’s responsible,” Nina said with satisfaction.
“What do you think? What offense should we list to give the cops the motivation to arrest them?” Yahli asked his sister, his eyes glinting.
“How about rape?” Nina suggested. “That’s always effective, especially with policewomen.”
“No, no, let’s go for terrorism and posing a risk to national security,” her brother said. “That’s always a good item, and it really freaks out the local police, who’ll show up in the mosque area with a massive force.”
“Great idea!” Nina typed, preparing the blank arrest warrants and adding a false file number. “What if we add a note in red stating that they’re armed and dangerous?” she smiled with near-sadistic pleasure.
“That’s the best combo. Almost like making a list of Christmas gifts. Add ‘suspicion of assaulting an officer,’” Yahli smirked at her.
“Ooooh, you’re good!” Nina was enthused. “That’s an excellent motivator for cops.”
Nina finished filling out and preparing the blank arrest warrants. Among the judges’ photos, she found one with a dignified, severe face and copied his name off the list. She then added a digital signature to the arrest warrant they could use once they had the suspects’ names.
Yuli observed them, charmed.
Once Nina was done, she raised her hand, and her twin brother gave her a high five like two players on the basketball court. Their contribution to the operation was complete. They were ready for their next challenge.
“There’s one more little thing,” Arik said, turning to Yuli. “As part of what’s termed the Secure City Program, the Metropolitan Police has set up cameras that are partially concealed within streetlights in all the central throughways, creating a security network throughout the city. If you can manage to hack this system and take control of it, you can ask it to search for certain faces or license plates and it will issue an alert. If you connect it to the Spartacus or Big Head system, I believe we can direct the system to issue the alerts solely to us, so that we’ll know where our surveillance targets are without the Brits being aware of it. Upload the faces into our facial recognition system. Maybe we can pick up some interesting characters roaming in areas the British usually stay away from. I want Spartacus’s algorithms, along with the information we’re gleaning from the British Secure City project, to interface with the Big Head AI system for a Big Data analysis.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Yuli promised him, looking to his pair of computer whizzes, who immediately began to tap at their computers.
“I heard that in addition to the facial recognition program, you’ve also equipped the Spartacus system with a motion recognition feature. Is that true?” Arik inquired.
“We sure did,” Yuli confirmed. “Every person moves in a different way. You can change a person’s facial features through surgery, which misleads most people. But the way someone walks or moves his or her hands in conversation doesn’t change. Therefore, the system manages to locate people by cross-referencing their body language as well.”
Etty Levkovich was thrilled by such new technologies. “Wow!” she said. “That’s such a different world than the one I knew when I joined the Mossad.”
“But all these advantages also come with a painful complication,” Yuli noted. “When IDF first established its satellite unit, as well as its drone array as part of its visual intelligence system, we thought that seeing was better than hearing, and that now we would have a three-dimensional intelligence array. We didn’t realize it would create an issue of excess information, what we call Big Data. The entire immense collection of data we produce from HUMINT, ELINT and VISINT69 is fed into the central database called ‘the Pool,’ creating a major overload. On average, we receive 9 million items of information a day. You need a massive professional workforce to process this information, understand it, distribute it, and form connections and deductions in order to construct an intelligence array of the kind we’re trying to create here with the Big Head system.”
“That’s great, isn’t it?” Levkovich was having a hard time understanding the problem.
“Hypothetically, it is.” Yuli’s tone was reserved. “The problem is always the human factor. Unlike robots, there’s a problem with people. We act according to paradigms or thought patterns, comfort zones, stigmas, ego, emotional issues, and especially preconceptions, which prevent us from thinking in a clean manner unaffected by foreign considerations. The Big Head system is supposed to neutralize all of that, but ultimately, decisions are made by people.”
“People, that’s enough talking. Let’s get to work,” Arik concluded impatiently. “I’m leaving operation management in the hands of Tal Ronen.”
He looked at Iman’s photo, which had been affixed to the corkboard by Masha Kramer. The composite sketch staring back at him was that of ‘the mad bomber’: a slim man with piercing eyes and a red beard, wearing a turban. Arik had no doubt that these days, he looked nothing like this. He touched the photo with his finger and thought to himself, You can run, but you won’t be able to hide from me forever.
“Tal, I suggest I’ll be your eyes on the ground. I’m going down to the command post vehicle. I’ll cruise London a bit with a few techs in our mobile tactical HQ, ‘the Sea Eagle.’ Do I have your okay?”
Tal confirmed the plan with a smile. He knew Arik well, although Arik had not been the one to appoint him after the early retirement of his predecessor, Yonatan Arieli. He was, however, his commander and mentor within the Mossad. Arik departed from the war room in order to provide the ‘acting commander’ with proper autonom
y.
Right now, everything depends on three factors, Arik thought to himself as he took the elevator down to the building’s basement. Surprise, speed, and the strength of the blow we deal to the terrorists. On the other hand, he knew that a speedy approach meant that the smallest mistake might become a lethal event. He had always relied on his life experience and composure.
Arik himself had always been a rebellious type who had a problem with authority. He was stubborn and opinionated. He was aware of the fact that he must step down in favor of the head of Caesarea. He thought back to a saying by the late former prime minister Lolik Kenan, for whom he had once served as national security advisor: “Managing means doing things right, while leading means doing the right things.”
He intended to let Tal Ronen manage things on his own. He himself would only verify from afar that they were doing the right things.
* * *
69Intelligence obtained through people/agents, electronic signals, and satellite photos or observations, respectively.
Chapter 47
The Iranian Embassy in London
The Iranian Embassy in London was located at 16 Prince’s Gate Street, a small street near Hyde Park, close to the Ethiopian Embassy as well as several others. Some distance away, not far from the Albert Memorial, was the Iranian Consulate building. On the other side of the street was the Israeli Embassy in London, situated quite near to Kensington Palace, home to the British heir to the throne and his family.
Arik decided to position the mobile command post, whose exterior sported Al Jazeera news channel stickers in Arabic and English, on the small street across from the Iranian Embassy. Several Crew 2 members would be sent to the nearby park and would distract the Iranian Embassy’s suspicious security guards by pretending to film a movie about British monuments. Arik himself was sitting on an elevated armchair, surrounded by technicians and security personnel, watching the monitors showing footage of his entire surroundings.
Arik was highly pleased with the tactical HQ vehicle, whose design had won the Israel Defense Award. It had been developed in Israel by the security industries and was a mobile, operational command post with advanced encrypted transmission and signal monitoring capabilities. It was also capable of electronic warfare with the ability to block any device’s transmission or reception capacity within a range of miles. On the roof, stood a biometric facial recognition system. The Morpho 3D Face Reader was capable of photographing facial features and comparing them to the computerized database within ‘the Pool’ at the Office in Tel Aviv. During operational activity, the command post had the option of deploying a fleet of tiny ‘beetle’ drones, each two inches long. The drones were equipped with cameras that had amazing resolution and were linked and controlled via IOT70 technology in order to provide an aerial perspective on a scene where a real-time chase was taking place. The vehicle could also deploy a multirotor drone equipped with a thermal camera whose proprietary software colored the hottest areas within the field of vision in infrared. It thus enabled easy identification of animals and people, even in total darkness and weather conditions such as fog or drizzle. In order to reduce employed personnel and operators, the deployment process was autonomous, and the devices could be controlled via computer.
In the intelligence world, planning, details, tracking, collecting and accumulating evidence are all-important. You could relax and observe for a long enough time and with sufficient attention in order to understand what was required. The name of the game is patience. Arik was essentially an impatient person but remembered his father telling him when he was a child: “Wait patiently, and time will endow you with gifts.”
A young child of ten or so, wearing linen clothes and a large Muslim skullcap on his head, caught Arik’s attention. The boy disembarked from a van onto the sidewalk across from the embassy then crossed the road toward its entrance.
“Zoom in on the kid,” Arik requested. “What’s he holding in his hand?”
The camera on the mobile command post’s roof rose upon its silent telescope and zoomed in on the boy. He was holding a twenty-inch-by-twenty-inch wicker basket with two brown pigeons inside it. A brawny man emerged from the embassy and took the basket from the boy. He gave him several coins, and the boy returned to the commercial van, which immediately took off.
“I want to know everything we can about the owners of that vehicle. Relay the information to Etty Levkovich in the war room,” Arik said.
Less than an hour later, Arik saw a figure on the embassy roof launching the brown pigeons.
“Zoom in on the roof!” he yelled. The tech next to him typed rapidly on the keyboard and Arik gazed, as if mesmerized, at a familiar figure holding a brown pigeon in his hand. It was Colonel Rizkawi, commander of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security’s bureau in the Iranian Embassy in London.
“Zoom in some more!” Arik yelled. “This time on the pigeon!”
He noticed a small aluminum tube tied to the pigeon’s leg. Arik realized Colonel Rizkawi was informing Iman al-Uzbeki of the site of their next meeting. He had to get his hands on that note.
“Try to chase the pigeon with the multirotor drone,” he instructed the technician. “I want to know where it’s flying. I believe that’s where Iman al-Uzbeki or one of his people is. That’ll give us a lead.”
Drone technology had advanced amazingly in recent years. Some of the drones were so quiet that they could hover three feet above the head of an object of pursuit and remain unnoticed. Some of them were so small, the resolution of their cameras so precise, that they could be smuggled into an apartment through a crack in the window using a control device the size of a pack of cigarette.
A sophisticated drone, camouflaged as a large crow, its GPS system embedded with a camera weighing twenty grams, rose soundlessly from the roof of the Sea Eagle. It began to chase the carrier pigeon, which was flying east, but to no avail.
The pigeon flew back to its home dovecot at a speed of more than sixty miles per hour, passing between buildings and making use of its natural navigational capabilities. It was too much for the drone, whose speed and range of flight were limited. There was also a problem with flying drones in London’s aerial space. It was simply against the law.
“I’m sorry, but we lost the drone. It got tangled in high-voltage wires, dropped and shattered,” the technician said, and Arik cursed in disappointment.
“Signal it to self-destruct,” Arik commanded.
The phone rang; Masha Kramer was on the line.
“I’ve checked the records for new employees at London mosques,” she reported, “and compared their entries into and exits from the UK to MI5 data. Something strange is going on here. I’ve noted a new assistant to the imam of a mosque in Whitechapel. The name he provided doesn’t match any man by that name who arrived in London during the last year. Furthermore, checking with Indian intelligence databases regarding the Pakistani Ministry of Interior reveals that this is the name of someone who passed away years ago. Comparing the image to British facial identification software reveals a resemblance of 85 percent to Iman al-Uzbeki’s features, the way he looked a year ago.”
“Did you check the photo using our facial recognition software?”
“Not yet,” she replied. “He might have had plastic surgery. I’m relaying the information to Israel.”
Arik called Tal Ronen and asked him to send a team to the mosque in East London. “Send your ‘Monkey Team’ to discreetly break in,” he suggested. “We should look into what’s going on there.”
He then instructed the mobile command post crew to take off. After an hour of nightmarish driving through heavy traffic, they parked on Whitechapel Road in front of the large mosque in East London. The streets were full of schoolgirls who were leaving the Maryam Centre of Islamic Studies. All of them were dressed in a gray abaya and a white hijab, in accordance with Muslim tradition. The more religiou
s among them also wore black gloves on their hands.
“Fly a concealed drone with a thermal FLIR71 camera over the mosque and the lawn around it,” Arik requested.
Software for the camera had been developed at the Volcani Center Agricultural Research Organization in order to provide a bird’s eye view on desert plants that were being irrigated and compare them to plants that were not being drip-irrigated. The software could distinguish between different soil types and check which areas were being irrigated correctly. As a bonus feature, it enabled detecting any digging in the ground and sand excavation, indicating underground activity, as well as where the digging had been concealed by good-quality artificial turf, which, to the naked eye, looked exactly like real grass.
The drone rose and the crew gazed at the monitor. It was showing different colors of ground temperature, various kinds of grass, and in the middle, right under the artificial turf, what appeared to be a hidden steel door, most likely a secret entrance to a basement or an emergency escape hatch. Arik also noticed a gardening service van. However, the employees were not carrying out any sort of gardening work or planting flowers but merely loading large bags of sand onto the van and covering the excavation site with patches of artificial turf. The removal of large bags of sand from the mosque left no room for doubt that they were hiding something.
* * *
70The Internet of things (IOT) is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical, and digital machines that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without human interaction. This system is creating increasing automation in many areas by combining several pertinent technologies including the internet, wireless internet, cloud computing, embedded systems, and micro-electro-mechanical systems. Affordable connectivity resulting from the introduction of G4 cellular communication, based on LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology, has also contributed to the development of IOT technology.