Yassin brought the new items to Abbas’s office, even taking the trouble to move the old chair himself, cursing whoever gave “such miserable furniture to such important people.” He put the new chair in place, then put the lamp on the desk, plugged it in, and switched it on.
The lamp was the more important of the two pieces of furniture, because, while the bugs planted in the chair required batteries that would have to be replaced, the lamp could serve as a transmitter for years, powered by a constant supply of electricity direct from the grid. The chair contained two separate energy-saving devices: spring switches that turned the microphones on only when someone was putting weight on them, and a voice activation system, which meant that if someone was sitting on the chair but not talking to anyone, the batteries still would not get used up.
Transmissions from the chair were picked up and relayed to Tel Aviv from the very first day it was placed in Abbas’s office. Mossad director Shavit realized what an achievement this was: Abu Mazen was at the hub of the PLO’s activities, and innumerable people passed through his office, sharing the organization’s most important secrets with him.
Yet, very quickly, another matter emerged, one much more unexpected. The director of the Mossad learned from “the singing chair,” as it was known, that the Israeli government was conducting advanced negotiations with the PLO behind his back.
Rabin had ordered AMAN’s SIGINT Unit 8200 to bring anything they heard about the negotiations directly to him, but he had not done the same with the Mossad.
Shavit angrily confronted Rabin, complaining about the Mossad being left out of the loop. Rabin placated Shavit by saying that it was “a marginal initiative” by Peres, to which he, Rabin, did not ascribe any significance.
Then, as abruptly as they’d begun, the transmissions stopped. Three and a half weeks after the concealed microphones had been planted, the giant antennas at Mossad headquarters quit picking up signals. At first, the Israelis thought there might be a technical problem, but an inspection showed that all the links between the Mossad and Abbas’s office were in good working order, and anyway, it was highly unlikely that both would malfunction at the exact same time. This almost certainly meant that both microphones had been discovered, that Operation Golden Fleece had been blown, and that their prize asset, Adnan Yassin, was in mortal peril. “We couldn’t understand,” a source in the Mossad’s counterterrorism division said, “how it was possible, how it could be, that so short a time after we managed to put the equipment in place, it was discovered, together with the agent who did it.”
It was Jibril Rajoub who detected the presence of the equipment, with the assistance of the local intelligence agency. Rajoub said, “Our people in Oslo sensed that the Israelis were seeing through them, that they knew exactly what they were going to say next, and what positions to take. This aroused the suspicion of eavesdropping, and that’s why we went to scan Abu Mazen’s office.”
However, most Mossad operatives involved in Golden Fleece had a very different explanation: Their own people had betrayed them. According to this theory, which is unprovable but is supported by some serious circumstantial evidence, one of the Israeli negotiators in Oslo saw the reports on the intelligence gathered during the operation and distributed to the prime minister and the heads of the intelligence community. He grasped that the source of the intelligence was some kind of eavesdropping device in Abu Mazen’s office or a tap on one of his communication lines. He then tipped the Palestinians off, knowing that they would immediately locate the devices and dismantle them. Once that happened, Israeli intelligence would have no way of knowing what was happening at the talks, which would mean none of the hardliners could leak the details to the media and ruin the negotiations. In other words, an Israeli diplomat betrayed Israeli intelligence to prevent Israeli intelligence from sabotaging Israeli diplomacy. The fact that a valuable asset would likely be killed was beside the point.
Yassin was arrested and tortured until he confessed everything: how he’d been recruited, the information he’d provided, how his greed had turned him against his own people. Arafat, stunned that such a trusted aide had been arrested, went to see Yassin in his cell at the Fatah interrogation facility to hear the story for himself. It was a foregone conclusion that Yassin would be executed. He was undeniably a traitor, and he’d been deeply involved in the killing of Bseiso.
Soon after, in Oslo, a Palestinian delegate fumed about the Yassin arrest and the Bseiso killing. He asked one of the Israelis what he knew. “I know nothing about this story,” said the Israeli, who truly was not party to any intelligence secrets but understood what had happened from the little he had heard from Peres and Beilin. “But let’s all drink to that being the last assassination.” He added one last word in Arabic. Inshallah. God willing.
The delegates around the table—four Palestinians, three Israeli Jews, and two Norwegians—all lifted their glasses. The atmosphere was optimistic. The negotiations had lasted six months so far and had generated historic letters of mutual recognition between the two nations—from Rabin to Arafat, and from Arafat to Rabin. These letters would evolve into a series of agreements that became known as the Oslo Accords. At the first stage, the accords begat the autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA), which was to rule over most of the territory populated by Palestinians. The Palestinians undertook to stop the Intifada and to renounce terrorism.
The bloody conflict in the Middle East seemed as if it might finally come to a peaceful end. Yasser Arafat and most of the PLO and Fatah leaders left Tunis and took up residence in the autonomous occupied PA territories.
Even Adnan Yassin appeared to benefit from the newfound cooperation. The Oslo Accords engendered security coordination committees, with delegates from the military and intelligence apparatuses of both sides. For the first time, top Mossad and Shin Bet officials were meeting with men who, a few short months earlier, had been their targets for either espionage or assassination. The meetings were held in the Palestinian territories or in hotels in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. The two sides overcame their initial suspicions through lighthearted mutual teasing about the past—who had succeeded in tricking whom, whether the Palestinians had conducted operations the Israelis didn’t know about, where and when the Israelis had foiled Palestinian plans.
The Israelis took advantage of this genial atmosphere to request clemency for Yassin. “We raised it as a plea for a goodwill gesture in return for the thousands of Palestinian prisoners that Israel had undertaken to release as part of the deal,” said one of the Mossad participants in the committee meetings.
The pressure, and the atmosphere, worked.
In the end, Yassin was not executed, but only sentenced to fifteen years in prison. It was a lenient sentence, all things considered. In the summer of 1993, it seemed Yassin would live to see a lasting peace in the Middle East. Inshallah.
ON THE NIGHT OF April 6, 1979, outside a shipping hangar on the waterfront, a pair of headlights poked through the darkness, casting two cones of yellow-white on the pavement, widening as the car came closer. It was a Fiat 127 sedan, the engine sputtering and clanking, then stalling two hundred yards from the front gate.
The two French guards outside the hangar—at La Seyne-sur-Mer, just west of Toulon on France’s Mediterranean coast—eyed the car warily. The hangar belonged to the CNIM Group, which specialized in manufacturing large-scale, complex components for ships and nuclear reactors. There were always two guards on duty—three shifts a day, eight hours each, all of them boring.
The guards took a few steps toward the fence as the doors opened. Two women got out. Pretty girls, the guards thought. But the women seemed confused, almost angry, as they tottered toward the gate.
“Pouvez-vous nous aider?” one of them asked from the other side of the fence. Can you help us? They were British tourists, she said, out for a night on the Riviera, but their lousy car kept breaking down. She smiled. A flirt. Ma
ybe later, she said, the guards could join them at one of the bars.
The guards gathered some tools, opened the gate, walked toward the car. They were smiling.
Behind them, five Bayonet operatives hustled over the fence, quickly and noiselessly, a maneuver they’d practiced endlessly at a military base on Israel’s southern coast. Just as quietly, they forced their way into the hangar. Inside, they attached five powerful explosives to two enormous cylinders. They set timers on the detonators, then slipped back out, over the fence, and into the night.
They’d needed less than five minutes to get in and out.
On the street in front of the hangar, the guards managed to get the car started. It had been surprisingly easy. Then the women—both Israeli operatives—promised to meet them later and drove off.
At the same time, some distance away, a man and a woman holding hands walked along slowly. They seemed preoccupied with their romance. The man, his hair slicked back, looked a little like Humphrey Bogart. He peered over the woman’s shoulder and saw the car starting up and driving off. The couple turned around, and a few streets away, they got into a car and also drove off. They were Mike Harari, Caesarea’s boss, and Tamara, a female Mossad operative.
Thirty minutes later, the hangar exploded. Flames ripped into the night sky and lit up the waterfront in orange and red. Firefighters extinguished the blaze before the building was completely destroyed, but everything inside was badly damaged, including some carefully crafted machines that it had taken more than two years to manufacture. Fully assembled with the rest of the components, they would make a seventy-megawatt nuclear reactor, large enough that it was known as an Osiris-class reactor.
Osiris is the ancient Egyptian god of the afterlife, the underworld, and the dead. The French were selling it to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, who saw himself as the modern embodiment of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who destroyed the Kingdom of Israel.
A few hours after the bombing, a spokesman for Groupe des Écologistes Français telephoned a newspaper to claim responsibility. But no one, certainly not French intelligence, believed him. Everyone assumed that it was the Israelis, because they had the most pressing motive.
—
WHILE MANY OF ISRAEL’S defense and intelligence assets were bogged down in the bloody muck of Lebanon, existential threats to the tiny nation continued to haunt the Mossad. Chief among them was Iraq, a country ruled by an unhinged butcher with a long-standing ambition to become the next Saladin. One of the IDF’s nightmare scenarios was a massive Iraqi army joining up with the Jordanians to create a menacing eastern front.
Israeli forces had been covertly involved in Iraq since the 1960s, when the oppressed Kurdish minority rebelled against the Baghdad regime. The country supplied arms to the Kurds, and IDF soldiers and Mossad personnel trained fighters in commando warfare. The idea, according to Meir Amit, who ran the Mossad then, was “to create a Middle East in which we would be able to act against our enemies on several fronts simultaneously.” To put it more simply, Iraq was a declared enemy of Israel, and the Kurds were an enemy of Baghdad—the enemy of my enemy is my friend. At the same time, such alliances—for example, with the shah of Iran and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, two states that bordered Israel’s hostile Arab neighbors—allowed the Mossad to establish listening posts and other intelligence assets inside otherwise unfriendly countries.
Starting in 1969, Israeli advisers, among them explosives expert Natan Rotberg, began hearing about the man the Kurds called “the Butcher of Baghdad.” Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti had been part of the Baathist coup that had taken power the year before, and he was appointed vice chairman of Iraq’s Revolutionary Council—second in command of the new regime and in charge of the armed forces and intelligence services. He ordered bombs dropped on civilians, choked off food supplies to starve dissident populations, and set up a network of torture chambers in which he often did the torturing himself.
The Kurds asked the Israelis to help them kill Saddam—Rotberg even prepared a booby-trapped Koran for the task, the same tactic he had used to assassinate the chief of Egyptian intelligence in 1956. But PM Golda Meir refused to sign the Red Page. She feared that the Kurds would not keep Israel’s involvement a secret and that her government would get embroiled in an international scandal with the Russians and the Americans, both of whom were wooing Saddam assiduously at that time. Earlier, Meir had also dismissed the notion of assassinating Egypt’s Nasser, for fear that killing him would legitimize attempts on her life and those of her ministers.
Left alive, Saddam, as ruthless as he was ambitious, took over the Baath Party and, thus, Iraq. By 1971, when he was thirty-four years old, Saddam had removed all of his serious rivals in the regime and had assumed power in all but name, leaving the president, Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr, as nothing more than a figurehead. (He would finally push out al-Bakr completely in 1979.) He saw himself as a historic figure, a pan-Arab leader who would make Iraq a regional power, the leading force in the Arab world and the equal of Iran.
Saddam thought that Jews were “a mixture of the garbage and leftovers of various nations,” and he wanted to redraw the whole of the Middle East, erasing Israel entirely. The Iraqis made no secret of this. “The existence of an artificial Zionist entity symbolizes the negation of the Arabs’ historical right to existence and is a slight to their honor,” the Baath Party newspaper Al-Jumhuriya wrote in March 1974. “This bellicose entity is nothing but a terrible cancer that dangerously spreads beyond its borders. We must fight Zionism…in every possible way. Arab Jerusalem awaits the Arab Salah al-Din [Saladin] who will redeem it from the pollution with which Zionism has stained our holy places.”
The clear implication was that Saddam Hussein would be the modern version of Saladin and drive the infidels out of Palestine.
But Saddam realized that Iraq would never be a credible power without a formidable arsenal. The only way to conquer the Middle East was to have the ability to destroy it. Saddam wanted nuclear weapons.
In 1973, the dictator brought Iraq’s nuclear program—ostensibly a peaceful civilian enterprise—under his direct control and began investing “budgets of billions, practically unlimited,” in the words of Amatzia Baram, a prominent biographer of Saddam, into developing reactors that eventually could produce an atomic arsenal. Ideally, a dictator already known for bombing his own people and hell-bent on becoming a nuclear menace would be shunned by civilized nations. But geopolitics is a complicated business: Several Western powers, including the United States but most notably France, wanted to exert their own influence in the Middle East. And what’s not complicated is merely crass: Saddam was throwing around a lot of money.
—
FRANCE AND ISRAEL HAD a long and complicated history that was reaching its low point in the 1970s. The relationship had been rife with hostility and distrust ever since de Gaulle had turned on the Jewish nation in the sixties. To the French, the possibility that Iraq represented a mortal threat to the nation of Israel seemed, at most, a manageable concern.
President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his prime minister, Jacques Chirac, orchestrated a number of deals with Iraq in the first half of the seventies. The most significant was the sale of two nuclear reactors: one very small one-hundred-kilowatt reactor, designated Isis-class, and a larger forty-megawatt Osiris reactor, which was expandable to seventy megawatts. The Iraqis combined the name of the reactor with the name of their country, calling it Osirak.
Although Iraq’s stated intention was to use the reactor for research purposes, the French knew that a reactor of that size would almost certainly end up being used to process fuel for nuclear weapons. The reactor’s core held twelve kilograms of 93 percent enriched uranium—enough to make an atom bomb—so if the French kept their promise to replace spent fuel rods, the Iraqis would be able to simply convert some of them into material for use in nuclear arms.
The Iraqis admitted as much: “The search for technology with military potential is a response to Israel’s nuclear armament,” Saddam declared in an interview on September 8, 1975, just before he visited Paris to sign more deals. “The Franco-Iraqi agreement is the first Arab step toward gaining nuclear arms, even if our declared goal in building the reactor is not the manufacture of atom bombs.” But it takes years and very specific expertise to build atomic bombs. Any legitimate threat, the French seemed to assume, could be dealt with when and if it arose.
The Iraqis paid very generously. Some seven billion francs ($2 billion at the time) were transferred directly to France. The French also received favorable terms and a price reduction on their import of Iraqi oil.
A number of French companies were connected to the vast project, and joint management was set up to run things in Paris and Baghdad. Not far from the construction site, luxurious living quarters were constructed for two thousand French engineers and technicians.
Israel could not stand idly by. A joint Mossad/AMAN/Foreign Ministry team, dubbed “New Era,” was set up “to make a special, concentrated effort to zero in on Iraq’s intention to obtain nuclear weapons,” in the words of Nahum Admoni, then the deputy director of the Mossad, who headed the team.
Under the guise of European businessmen or NATO European military officers, Junction case officers approached Iraqis working in France who they believed might potentially become informants. One scientist, whose son had cancer and was receiving inferior treatment in Iraq, traded secrets for better medical care. He believed that Yehuda Gil, Israel’s top recruiter, was the deputy CEO of a European firm concerned with nuclear safety.
But that was a one-time success. Saddam had frightened all those involved in the project into silence with a video of Iraqi cabinet ministers executing other officials. “It was a terrifying tape,” said Khidir Hamza, one of the directors of Iraq’s nuclear program. “He was sending a message that if he’s unhappy with you for any reason, you are dead.”
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