Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad
Page 4
“I have been told by a former senior Israeli intelligence officer that all those services had a vested interest in Diana and Dodi,” Mohamed al-Fayed has insisted.
Mossad’s account of the final moments of the lives of Diana and Dodi begins at 11 :45 P.M. Saturday, August 29, 1997, when Henri Paul was put in charge of the operation to whisk them away from the Ritz Hotel.
Mohamed al-Fayed still remembers vividly the instruction he had telephoned to Paul.
“I told him he must drive carefully, that he must never forget he had the life of the mother of the future king of England and my beloved son in his hands. I trusted him never to forget that. God knows, how I trusted him. God only knows now why I did.”
The next Mossad entry is 11:50 P.M. In the Ritz bar Trevor Rees-Jones, who was there to body-guard Diana and Dodi, was in a huddle with other security men from the hotel staff and Henri Paul, discussing the route he would use.
Paul was very bullish. He said the hotel would provide two Range Rovers to act as decoys for the waiting paparazzi. That would give him enough time to get away. Rees-Jones is reported to have said the plan “sounds good to me.”
00:15 A.M. Sunday, August 30. In the hotel lobby Henri Paul was using his cell phone to mobilize the two decoy vehicles.
00:19 A.M. The two decoy vehicles roared out of the Place Vendome that fronts the Ritz. Paparazzi give chase.
00:20 A.M. At the hotel’s rear entrance Paul arrived with the Mercedes. He was seen by one of the eyewitnesses that Mossad subsequently interviewed as “drumming his fingers nervously on the steering wheel.”
00:21 A.M. At the top of the Rue Cambon, a Mossad agent kept watch. He would later report that “a white Fiat Uno passed the top of the street.”
The Mossad report states that in the car were two intelligence officers from the French security service, DST. The DST—more formally known as the Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory—is the largest and most powerful of France’s intelligence agencies. With several thousand employees, it operates both internally and overseas. Its wide-ranging responsibilities include surveillance of all foreign embassies in Paris and conducting a number of clandestine operations. It reports to the incumbent minister of the interior.
00:22 A.M. The white Fiat Uno passed through traffic lights in the Place de la Concorde. Henri Paul’s Mercedes is forced to temporarily stop at the lights.
00:23 A.M. The Mercedes approaches the Alma tunnel. Henri Paul would most certainly have seen the white Uno ahead of him.
00:24 A.M. The Mercedes, traveling at high speed, passed over the dip at the tunnel entrance. In the back seat Diana and Dodi would have experienced for a split second a sensation not unlike that of a plunging roller-coaster.
Seconds later there came a thunderous noise inside the tunnel. A roaring screeching of metal, a reverberating, crumping sound that seemed to go on and on.
Henri Paul and Dodi were dead. Diana was dying.
Moments later, according to the Mossad report, the white Uno had driven into a side street off the Avenue Montalgne. Waiting there was a pentachnicon, its ramp lowered. The Uno had driven up the ramp. The pentachnicon’s doors had been closed.
Hours later the Uno had been gripped in the claws of the crusher. In moments it had become a piece of crushed metal, devoid of any identification.
There, at the time of writing, the matter rests. Can Tomlinson produce anything new? Could Ben-Menashe have found evidence that would finally satisfy al-Fayed’s belief in a conspiracy? Was Diana really pregnant at the time of her death? Had Mohamed al-Fayed become so blinded by grief mingled with anger that he was ready to make this thesis fit the facts?
These questions will be revisited well into this new century. But they may never be answered fully enough to satisfy Mohamed al-Fayed or convince all those who believe him a dangerously misguided man who is using vast sums of money to nail down a truth that may, just may, be best kept under lock and key by all those directly involved.
Some of Maurice’s colleagues have increasingly felt that the attempt to entrap Henri Paul was additional proof that Mossad has lurched a little further out of control, carrying out reckless international operations without taking into account the potential long-term consequences for itself, for Israel, for peace in the Middle East, and, ultimately, for the relationship with the Jewish state’s oldest and closest ally, the United States of America. Several officers claimed that since Benyamin Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996, matters have worsened.
A veteran member of the Israeli intelligence community has said: “People are seeing those who work for Mossad are often thugs masquerading as patriots. That is bad for us [and] for morale, and, in the end, will have a bad effect on Mossad’s relationship with other services.”
Another experienced Israeli intelligence officer was equally blunt: “Netanyahu behaves as if Mossad is part of his own version of the Court of King Arthur; something new every day or the knights of his own Round Table get bored. That’s why things have gone very wrong with Mossad. There’s a need to ring the alarm bell before it’s too late.”
The first lesson I learned during a quarter of a century of writing about secret intelligence is that deception and disinformation are its stock-in-trade, along with subversion, corruption, blackmail, and, sometimes, assassination. Agents are trained to lie and to use and abuse friendships. They are the very opposite of the dictum that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.
I first encountered their behavior while investigating many of the great spy scandals of the Cold War: the betrayal of America’s atomic bomb secrets by Klaus Fuchs, and the compromising of Britain’s MI5 and MI6 by Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby. Each made treachery and duplicity his byword. I also was one of the first writers to gain access to the CIA’s obsession with mind control, a preoccupation the Agency was forced to confirm ten years after my book on the subject, Journey into Madness, appeared. Denial is the black art all intelligence services long ago perfected.
Nevertheless, in getting to the truth, I was greatly helped by two professional intelligence officers: Joachim Kraner, my late father-in-law, who ran an MI6 network in Dresden in the post–World War II years, and Bill Buckley, who was station chief of the CIA in Beirut. Physically they were similar: tall, lean, and trim, with chins ready to confront trouble halfway. Their eyes revealed little—except to say if you weren’t part of the answer, you had to be part of the problem. Intellectually formidable, their criticism of the agencies they served at times was astringent.
Both constantly reminded me that a great deal can be heard from what Bill called “murmurs in the mush”: a deadly skirmish fought in an alley with no name; the collective hold-your-breath when an agent or network is blown; a covert operation that could have undone years of overt political bridge building; a snippet of mundane information that completed a particular intelligence jigsaw. Joachim added that “sometimes a few words, casually offered, could often throw a new light on something.”
Proud of being members of what he called “the second oldest profession,” both not only were my friends, but convinced me that secret intelligence is the key to fully understanding international relations, global politics, and diplomacy—and, of course, terrorism. Through them I made contacts in a number of military and civilian intelligence agencies: Germany’s BND and France’s DGSE; the CIA; Canadian and British services.
Joachim died in retirement; Bill was murdered by Islamic fundamentalists who kidnapped him in Beirut and triggered the Western hostage crisis in that city.
I also met members of Israel’s intelligence community who first helped me by filling in the background of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish fanatic who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul in St. Peter’s Square, Rome, in May 1981. Those contacts were arranged by Simon Wiesenthal, the renowned Nazi hunter and an invaluable Mossad “source” for over forty years. Because of his fame and reputation, Wiesenthal still finds doors readily open, especially in Washington.
Despite his customized suit, Casey was a shambling figure. His jowled face was pale and the rims of his eyes were red as we sat in a Washington club; he looked like someone whose ectoplasm was running out after five years of directing the CIA.
Over a Perrier he confirmed the conditions for our meeting. No notes, no tape recordings; anything he said would be purely background. He then produced a sheet of plain paper on which were typed his biographical details. He had been born in New York on March 13, 1913, and graduated from St. John’s University in 1937 with a law degree. Commissioned into the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943, within months he had transferred to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. In 1944 he became chief of the OSS Special Intelligence Branch in Europe. Next came the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission (1971–73); then, in quick succession, he was undersecretary of state for economic affairs (1973–74); president and chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (1974–76); and a member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1976–77). In 1980 he became campaign manager for Ronald Reagan’s successful bid for the presidency. A year later, on January 28, 1981, Reagan appointed him DCI, the thirteenth man to hold the single most powerful office in the U.S. intelligence community.
In response to my remark that he appeared to have been a pair of safe hands in a number of posts, Casey sipped more water and mumbled he “didn’t want to get into the personal side of things.”
He put the paper back into his pocket and sat, watchful and waiting for my first question: what could he tell me about Bill Buckley, who, almost two years earlier to the day—on Friday, March 16, 1984—had been kidnapped in Beirut and was now dead. I wanted to know what efforts the CIA had made to try to save Bill’s life. I had spent time in the Middle East, including Israel, trying to piece together the background.
“You speak to Admoni or any of his people?” Casey interrupted.
In 1982, Nahum Admoni had become head of Mossad. On Tel Aviv’s embassy cocktail circuit, he had a hard-nosed reputation. Casey characterized Admoni as “a Jew who’d want to win a pissing contest on a rainy night in Gdansk.” More certain, Admoni had been born in Jerusalem in 1929, the son of middle-class Polish immigrants. Educated at the city’s Rehavia Gymnasium, he developed linguistic skills that had earned him a lieutenant’s stripes as an intelligence officer in the 1948 War of Independence.
“Admoni can listen in half a dozen languages,” was Casey’s judgment.
Later, Admoni had studied international relations at Berkeley and taught the subject at the Mossad training school on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. He’d also worked undercover in Ethiopia, in Paris, and in Washington, where Admoni had linked closely with Casey’s predecessors, Richard Helms and William Colby. These postings had helped hone Admoni into a soft-spoken intelligence bureaucrat who, when he became Mossad’s chief, in Casey’s words, “ran a tight ship. Socially gregarious, he has as keen an eye for women as for what’s best for Israel.”
Casey’s thumbnail sketch was of an operative who, he said, had “climbed through the ranks because of his skills at avoiding his superiors’ ‘corns.’”
His next words came in the same mumbling undertone.
“Nobody can surprise like someone you took to be friendly disposed. By the time we realized Admoni was going to do nothing, Bill Buckley was dead. Remember what it was like at the time over there? There had been the massacre of almost a thousand Palestinians in those two Beirut refugee camps. The Lebanese Christian forces did the killings; the Jews looked on in a kind of reversal of the Bible. Fact is, Admoni was in bed with that thug, Gemayel.”
Bashir Gemayel was head of the Phalangists and later became president of Lebanon.
“We ran Gemayel as well, but I never trusted the bastard. And Admoni worked with Gemayel all the time Buckley was being tortured. We had no idea where exactly in Beirut Bill was held. We asked Admoni to find out. He said no problem. We waited and waited. Sent our best men to Tel Aviv to work with Mossad. We said money was not a problem. Admoni kept saying okay, understood.”
Casey sipped more water, locked in his own time capsule. His next words came out flat, like a jury foreman handing down a verdict.
“Next thing Admoni was selling us a bill of goods that the PLO were behind the kidnapping. We knew the Israelis were always ready to blame Yasser Arafat for anything, and our people did not buy at first. But Admoni was very plausible. He made a good case. By the time we figured it wasn’t Arafat, it was long over for Buckley. What we didn’t know was that Mossad had also been playing real dirty pool—supplying the Hezbollah with arms to kill the Christians while at the same time giving the Christians more guns to kill the Palestinians.”
Casey’s less-than-full glimpse of what the CIA now believed had happened to Bill Buckley—that Mossad had deliberately done nothing to save him in the hope the PLO could be blamed, so frustrating Arafat’s hopes of gaining sympathy in Washington—provided a chilling insight into the relationship between two intelligence services supposedly friendly with each other.
Casey had shown there was another side to the ties between the United States and Israel other than fund-raising and other manifestations of American-Jewish solidarity that has turned the Jewish state into a regional superpower out of a fear of the Arab enemy.
Before we parted, Casey had a final thought: “A nation creates the intelligence community it needs. America relies on technical expertise because we are concerned to discover, rather than secretly rule. The Israelis operate differently. Mossad, in particular, equates its actions with the country’s survival.”
This attitude has long made Mossad immune to close scrutiny. But, in two years of research for this book, a series of mistakes—scandals in some cases—has forced the service into Israel’s public consciousness. Questions have been asked, and, if the answers are rarely volunteered, gaps have begun to appear in the protective body armor Mossad has worn against that outside world.
I spoke to more than a hundred persons either directly employed by, or working indirectly for, Israeli and other intelligence services. The interviews were spread over two and a half years. Many of the key people in Mossad agreed to be taped. Those recordings run to eighty hours and are transcribed to some 5,800 pages. There are also some fifteen foolscap notebooks filled with contemporaneous notes. This material will, as with previous books of mine, find their place in the research section of a university library. Several of those I spoke to urged I should focus on recent events; the past should only be used to illustrate events that are relevant to Mossad’s role at the cutting edge of the current frontiers of espionage and intelligence gathering. Many interviews were with participants who had not been questioned before; often no amount of probing could produce a comfortingly simple explanation for the way they or others behaved. Many were surprisingly frank, though not all agreed to be fully identified. In the case of serving Mossad personnel, they are prevented by Israeli law from voluntarily allowing their names to be published. Some of the non-Israeli sources asked, and received, a guarantee of anonymity.
On the organization charts newspapers try to piece together and publish, many sources remain among the empty spaces. They still take their anonymity seriously and some wish to be known in these pages by an alias or only a first name: it does not make their testimony less valid. Their personal motives for breaking silence may be many: a need to secure their own place in history; a desire to justify their actions ; the anecdotage of old men; even perhaps expiation. The same can be said for those who agreed to be identified.
Perhaps the best motive of all that drove them to break silence was a real an
d genuine fear that an organization they had served with pride was increasingly endangered from within—and that the only way to save it was to reveal what it had achieved in the past and what it is doing today. To understand both requires knowing how and why it was created.
CHAPTER 2
BEFORE THE BEGINNING
Since dawn, the faithful had come to the most sacred wall in the world, the only remaining relic of Herod the Great’s Second Temple in Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall. The young and the old, the lean and the fat, the bearded and the halding: all had made their way through the narrow streets or from outside the city walls.
Office clerks walked alongside shepherds from the hills beyond Jerusalem; newly bar mitzvahed youths proudly marched with men in the winter of their years. Teachers from the city’s religious shuls were shoulder to shoulder with shopkeepers who had made the journey from a distance away, from Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the villages around the Sea of Galilee.
Uniformly dressed in black, each carried a prayer book and stood before the towering wall to recite portions of scripture.
Down the centuries, Jews had done that. But this Friday Sabbath in September 1929 was different. Rabbis had urged as many men as possible to be united in public prayer and to show their determination to their right to do so. It was intended not only as an expression of their faith, but also as a visible symbol of their Zionism—and a reminder to the Arab population, who vastly outnumbered them, that they would not be cowed.
For months there had been persistent rumors that the Muslim population were once more becoming increasingly angry over what they saw as Zionist expansion. These fears had started with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and its commitment to a formal Jewish homeland in Palestine. To Arabs who lived there and could trace their ancestry back to the Prophet, this was an outrage. Land that they had farmed for many centuries would be threatened, perhaps even taken from them by the Zionists and their British protectors, who had arrived at the end of the Great War to place Palestine under a Mandate. The British had ruled as they did in other parts of the empire, trying to please both sides. It was a recipe for disaster. Tensions between Jews and Arabs had increased. There had been skirmishes and bloodletting, often over where the Jews wanted to build their synagogues and religious shuls. But the Jews were stubbornly determined to exercise their “prayer rights” at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. For them it was part of the core of their faith.