Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Then, in April 1997, Rafi Eitan’s name began to surface in connection with a Mossad spy in Washington whom the FBI identified and code-named “Mega.”

  His own well-placed source within Mossad had told Rafi Eitan that the FBI had begun to explore the role Mega could have had in the way Jonathan Pollard had been run. Had Mega been the source for some of the ultrasecret material Pollard had passed on? The FBI had recently reinterviewed Pollard in prison and he had admitted that even his high security clearance had not been enough to obtain some of the documents his handler, the funereal Yagur, had requested. The FBI knew such documents had a special code word through which they had to be accessed, which changed frequently, sometimes even on a daily basis. Yet Yagur had seemed to know the code within a matter of hours to give to Pollard. Had Mega provided it? Was Mega the second Israeli spy in Washington the FBI had long suspected? How close had he been to Rafi Eitan?

  These were the dangerous questions now being asked in Washington that could shatter the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv.

  After the FBI had identified him as the puppet master behind Pollard, Rafi Eitan had accepted that his time in Israeli intelligence was finally over. He had looked forward to ending his days facing no greater risk than being scorched from the blowtorch he wielded when forming his sculptures.

  Instinctively he knew that events in Washington posed a threat not only to him—a CIA snatch squad could try to grab him as he came and went from Cuba and bring him to Washington for questioning, and there was no way of telling what would happen then; but the discovery of Mega’s existence would also be exercising minds in the upper echelons of the Israeli intelligence community’s Va’adat Rashei Hasherutim—the Committee of the Heads of Service whose primary function is to coordinate all intelligence and security activities at home and abroad.

  But even they knew nothing about who Mega was. All they had been told was that he was highly placed in the Clinton administration. Whether the president had inherited him from the Bush government was another carefully guarded secret. Only the incumbent Mossad memune knew how long Mega had been in place.

  The committee members did, however, know that the FBI’s counterintelligence division finally believed that the lack of action against Mossad was due to the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington, and the reluctance of successive administrations to confront it. Once more that lobby could be called upon to dampen the firestorm building since Mega had first been discovered by the FBI. On February 16, 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) had provided the FBI with an intercept of a late-night telephone conversation from the Israeli embassy between a Mossad intelligence officer identified only as Dov, and his superior in Tel Aviv, whose name had not been revealed during the short conversation.

  Dov had asked “for guidance” as to whether he “should go to Mega” for a copy of a letter written by Warren Christopher, then secretary of state, to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. The letter contained a set of assurances given to Arafat by Christopher on January 16 about the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron. Dov was instructed by the voice in Tel Aviv “to forget the letter. This is not something we use Mega for.”

  The brief conversation had been the first clue the FBI had of the importance of Mega. The code name had not been heard before in its around-the-clock surveillance of the Israeli embassy and its diplomats. Using state-of-the-art computers, the FBI narrowed the urgent search for the identity of Mega to someone who either worked there or had access to a senior official employed by the National Security Council, the body that advises the president on intelligence and defense-related matters. Its office is in the White House, and its members include the vice president and the secretaries of state and defense. The director of Central Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff serve in an advisory role. The permanent staff is headed by the president’s national security adviser.

  How the Israeli embassy had learned its secure communications channel with Tel Aviv had been breached still remained as closely guarded as the identity of Mega. Like all Israeli missions, the Washington embassy was constantly updated with more sophisticated systems for encryption and burst transmissions: a significant portion of this equipment has been adapted from stolen U.S. blueprints.

  On February 27, 1997, a pleasant spring morning in Tel Aviv, the members of the Committee of the Heads of Services drove from their various offices around the city along the broad road called Rehov Shaul Hamaleku to a guarded gate in a high blank wall tipped with barbed wire. All that could be seen of what lay behind the wall were the roofs of buildings. Rising above them was a massive concrete tower visible all over Tel Aviv. At various heights were unsightly clusters of electronic antennae. The tower was the centerpiece of the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces. The complex is known as the Kirya, which simply means “place.”

  At a little before 11:00 A.M., the intelligence chiefs used their swipe cards to access a building near the tower. Like most Israeli government offices, the conference room they entered was shabby.

  The meeting was chaired by Danny Yatom, who had recently been appointed as Mossad’s latest chief by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Yatom had a reputation as a hard-liner, very much in keeping with Netanyahu. The Tel Aviv rumor mills had it that the new Mossad chief had “baby-sat” the embattled prime minister when Netanyahu’s colorful private life threatened his career. The men around the cedarwood conference table listened attentively as Yatom outlined the strategy to be adopted should the “situation” with Mega become a full-blown crisis.

  Israel would deliver a strongly worded protest that its Washington embassy’s diplomatic status had been violated by the bugging—a move that would undoubtedly cause embarrassment to the Clinton administration. Next, sayanim connected to the U.S. media should be instructed to plant stories that Mega was an incorrect decoding of the Hebrew slang Elga, which had long been Mossad-speak for the CIA. Further, the word Mega was part of one well-known to U.S. intelligence. Megawatt was a code name it had until recently used jointly with Mossad to describe shared intelligence. For good measure sayanim should add that another word, Kilowatt, was used for commonly shared terrorist data.

  But, for the moment, nothing would be done, Yatom concluded.

  In March 1997, on receipt of information from Mossad’s katsa in Washington, Yatom took action. He sent a yahalomin team to Washington to follow-up on the katsa’s report that President Clinton was repeatedly indulging in phone-sex calls with a a former White House aide, Monica Lewinsky. He was making the calls from the Oval Office to her apartment in the Watergate complex. Knowing that the White House was totally protected by electronic counter-measures, the yahalomin team focused on Lewinsky’s apartment. They began to intercept explicit phone calls from the president to Lewinsky. The recordings were couriered by diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv.

  On March 27, Clinton once more invited Lewinsky to the Oval Office and revealed he believed a foreign embassy was taping their conversations. He did not give her any more details, but shortly afterwards the affair ended.

  In Tel Aviv, Mossad’s strategies pondered how to use the highly embarrassing taped conversations; they were the stuff of blackmail—though no one suggested any attempt should be made to blackmail the president of the United States. Some, however, saw the recordings as a potent weapon to be used if Israel found itself with its back to the wall in the Middle East and unable to count on Clinton’s support.

  There was common consensus that the FBI must also be aware of the conversations between Clinton and Lewinsky. Some strategists urged Yatom to use “the back-door channel” with Washington and let the FBI know Mossad was aware of the president’s phone calls: it would be a not-very-subtle way of telling the agency to back off in their continuing hunt for Mega. Other analysts urged a wait-and-see policy, arguing that the information would remain explosive whenever it was released. That view prevailed.

  In September 1998, the Starr report was published
and Yatom had left office. The report contained a short reference to Clinton warning Lewinsky back in March 1997 that his phone was being bugged by a foreign embassy. Starr had not pursued the matter when Lewinsky had given her testimony before the grand jury about her affair with Clinton. However, the FBI could only have seen the revelations as further evidence of their inability to unmask Mega.

  Six months later, March 5th 1999, the New York Post published in a cover story the revelations in the original edition of this book. The Post story began: “Israel blackmailed President Clinton with phone-tapped tapes of his steamy sex talks with Monica Lewinsky, a blockbuster new book charges. The price Clinton paid for the silence of the Mossad spy agency was calling off an FBI hunt for a top-level Israeli mole.”

  Within hours of this complete distortion of the facts in the book (which I had carefully checked with sources in Israel), the Post’s version had appeared in thousands of newspapers around the world.

  The essential point of my story, that public prosecutor Kenneth Starr had not fully pursued his impeachment investigation into Clinton, was lost. Starr had noted in his report that on March 29, 1997: “He (Clinton) told her (Lewinsky) that he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was taping his telephones. If anyone ever asked about their phone sex, she should say that they knew that their calls were being monitored all day long, and the phone sex was a put-on.”

  The president’s words most strongly indicated he was aware that he had become a potential target for blackmail. By talking to Lewinsky over a public phone network—there is no evidence he had attempted to secure the phone in her apartment—the president had indeed left himself open to interception by foreign eavesdroppers and, even more so, to the powerful microwave vacuum cleaners of the National Security Agency. Given that any incumbent president routinely gets NSA reports, he would also have known that his calls to Monica could well end up on the Washington rumor mills.

  A sense of the panic my revelations created in the White House can be seen from its briefing to correspondents by Oval Office spokesmen Barry Toiv and David Leavy. There is a shifting-sands feeling about their responses that the official White House transcript has retained.

  Q: Why did the president reportedly tell Monica Lewinsky that he was concerned about his phone conversations being taped?

  TOIV: Well, as you know, other than the president’s testimony in this case, we really haven’t commented on specifics, on other specifics like that and we’re not going to start now.

  Q: When the president heard about this, was he concerned by it, was he shocked by it? What was his reaction, Mr. Toiv?

  TOIV: To be honest, I haven’t gotten the president’s reaction to the book.

  Q: Well, why did he say that to Monica Lewinsky? Why did he warn her?

  TOIV: I’ve already not answered that question. (Laughter). I’m sorry.

  Q: I know you’ve not answered it, but it’s very valid, really.

  TOIV: Well, again, we’re not going to get into commenting on specifics beyond what the president has already testified to.

  Q: I don’t understand why you think it’s legitimate for you not to comment on the president of the United States supposedly saying that he thinks a foreign government is taping his conversations. For you just to say, no comment.

  TOIV: There have been questions about all sorts of comments that have been made or testified to and we have not gone beyond the president’s testimony in discussing these and we’re not going to do that.

  Q: That’s because you’ve said it’s unseemly and it’s about sex. This is about the national security of the United States and the president supposedly saying that a foreign government is taping his conversations. And you’re just going to say sorry, no comment?

  TOIV: I am not going to go beyond what he has already testified to.

  Q: You’re not denying it. You’re not denying it.

  LEAVY: Obviously, we’re not aware of a mole at the White House. But it’s the long-standing practice for people who speak at this podium to refer calls to the appropriate authorities who undertake these types of investigations.

  Q: Was there any attempt by the president to intervene in any kind of investigation or search for a mole?

  LEAVY: No. There is no basis in that allegation whatsoever.

  Q: Well, there is a basis for it. There is a sworn testimony that Lewinsky gave that attributes to the president a comment that a foreign embassy was taping—

  LEAVY: And Barry just answered that question.

  Q: His answer was that he is not going to comment on it. That’s not much of an answer. With all due respect.

  LEAVY: Let me say two things—noted.

  TOIV: I wouldn’t go beyond my comments.

  LEAVY: Yes, I’m definitely not going to add to Barry’s comments. But let me just say this. We take all the necessary precautions to secure the president’s communications. There is absolutely no basis for the allegation in the book.

  Q: Are you getting that from CIA or FBI, or are you getting it out of just an automatic reflex?

  LEAVY: You can take that as authoritative.

  Q: I understand that you would have his communications secure. However, if he picks up the phone and calls some ordinary citizen at 2:30 A.M. in the morning at their apartment, what’s to say that that person’s phone couldn’t be tapped? Does your security system prevent that?

  LEAVY: There is some very serious allegations in this book, and what I am saying is that there is absolutely no basis for the allegation. So I have to leave it at that.

  Not one serious newspaper made any attempt to follow up those revealing responses.

  It turned out that Mossad was not the only organization that had taped the sex phone calls. The Republican senator for Arizona, Jon Kyl, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, told his local newspaper The Arizona Republic that, “a U.S. intelligence agency may have taped telephone conversations between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. There are different agencies in the government that make it their business to tape certain things for certain reasons, and it was one of those agencies.”

  Kyl refused to identify to the newspaper who the agency or agencies were: “That’s something I absolutely can’t get into in any greater detail.” Of his sources he said, “By virtue of who they are, they have credibility. You can assume that they are people who at some period in time have been in the employ of the federal government.” He went on to compare the existence of the tapes to the “smoking-gun” evidence in the Watergate scandal.

  These explosive allegations from a respected politician were never pursued into the public domain.

  According to at least one well-placed Israeli intelligence source, Rafi Eitan had received a phone call from Yatom reinforcing the need to stay well clear of the United States for the foreseeable future.

  Rafi Eitan did not need to be told how ironic it would be if he fell victim to the very technique that had made him a legend—the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. Even worse would be to be quietly killed by one of the methods that had burnished his reputation among men who saw assassination as part of the job.

  CHAPTER 6

  AVENGERS

  On a warm afternoon in mid-October 1995, a technician of Mossad’s internal security division, Autahat Paylut Medienit (APM), used a hand-operated scanner to check an apartment off Pinsker Street in downtown Tel Aviv for bugging devices. The apartment was one of several safe houses Mossad owned around the city. The search was an indication of the sensitivity of the meeting shortly to take place there. Satisfied the apartment was electronically clean, he left.

  The apartment’s furniture could have come from a garage sale; nothing seemed to match. A few cheaply framed pictures hung on the walls, views of the Israel tourists liked to visit. Each room had its own separate unlisted telephone. In the kitchen, instead of domestic appliances, were a computer and modem, a shredder, a fax, and, where an oven would be, a safe.

  Usually the safe
houses were dormitories for trainees from the Mossad school for spies on the outskirts of the city while they learned street craft: how to tail someone or themselves avoid surveillance; how to set up a dead-letter box, or exchange information concealed inside a newspaper. Day and night the streets of Tel Aviv were their proving ground under the watchful eye of instructors. Back in the safe houses, the lessons continued: how to brief a katsa going to a target country; how to write special-ink letters or use a computer to create information capable of being transmitted in very short bursts on specified frequencies.

  An important part of the seemingly endless hours of training was how to form relationships with innocent, unsuspecting people. Yaakov Cohen, who worked for twenty-five years as a katsa under deep cover around the world, believed one reason for his success was lessons learned in those lectures:

  “Everyone and anyone became a tool. I could lie to them because truth was not part of my relationship with them. All that mattered was using them for Israel’s benefit. From the very beginning, I learned a philosophy: Do what was right for Mossad and for Israel.”

  Those who could not live by that credo found themselves swiftly dismissed from the service. For David Kimche, regarded as one of Mossad’s best operatives: