Sowan smiled noncommittally. Mossad welcomed anything that undermined Arafat’s position. He also brought up a matter of more immediate personal concern, finding a best man for his wedding. Mustapha immediately offered himself for the role. They embraced each other in Arab fashion. That may well have been the moment when Ismail Sowan wished he could somehow remove himself from the clutches of Mossad.
In Tel Aviv, Nahum Admoni had begun to wonder how long it would be before MI5 discovered the truth about the eight forged British passports left in the telephone booth in Germany in July 1986. Shimon Peres, no admirer of Mossad, was, in the closing months of his coalition government, asking pointed questions. The prime minister was saying the debacle would ruin Israel’s relationship with the Thatcher government; that it was better to make a clean breast of the matter, in keeping with the well-known Peres sentiment, “The sooner said, the sooner mended.”
Admoni opposed the idea. It could lead to MI5 and the Special Branch beginning an investigation into just what else Mossad was doing in Britain. That could result in Ismail Sowan being expelled; he had proven to be a mine of useful information. Further, to admit the truth about the passports would be to reveal a piece of incompetent bungling by Mossad.
The passports had been intended for the Israeli embassy in Bonn. The job of couriering them from Tel Aviv had been given to a bodel who was new to the job and had never been to Bonn before. He had driven around the city for a while, not wishing to ask directions for fear of drawing attention to himself. Finally he had used the pay phone to call the embassy. An official had berated him for his tardiness. Either through panic or sheer carelessness, the bodel had left the carrier bag in the phone booth. Arriving at the embassy he realized his mistake but, even more panic-stricken, he couldn’t remember exactly the location of the street from where he had made the call. Accompanied by the embassy’s furious head of security, they had finally found the phone box. The bag was gone. The bodel had been posted to the Negev. But the problem of the passports had continued to trouble Admoni. The Foreign Office, through Britain’s Tel Aviv ambassador, was raising the matter with the Israeli government.
One of the passports had been intended for Sowan’s use to enable him to travel more easily between London and Tel Aviv; a British passport meant he would be subjected to fewer checks by immigration at Heathrow than with his Canadian one.
In the time Sowan had been in London, he had made occasional trips to Israel to visit his family; it was part of his cover to do so. To them he was still a PLO activist. He played the role so convincingly that his elder brother, Ibrahim, finally warned him the Israelis would arrest him. He jokingly suggested Ismail should preempt matters by offering to work for the Organization. Ismail pretended to be horrified at the idea and returned to London to continue his work.
Soon matters were taking an unexpected turn. Sowan’s new wife had urged her husband to accept a post as a researcher at Humberside College in Hull. For her it would mean more money to supplement his office work for the PLO. She knew nothing of her husband’s relationship with Mossad, or the six hundred pounds it paid him every month. For Ismail the move to Hull could be an opportunity to escape the ever-increasing demands of his Mossad controller.
Like many an informer who had taken the Mossad shekel, Ismail Sowan had become badly frightened by the risks he faced. After performing his duties as best man, Mustapha had become even friendlier. He regularly dropped in to see Ismail and his wife, bringing gifts from the Middle East for the couple. Over dinner, Mustapha told stories of how he had dealt with the latest enemy of the PLO. Over the months, he boasted of killing several “traitors to the cause.” Sowan had sat mesmerized, hoping “my heart beat wasn’t thumping too loud.” He was becoming equally frightened after his meetings with Samara; the katsa was asking him to access the PLO office computer and photocopy sensitive documents; he was also to try to arrange to go on “holiday” with Mustapha to Cyprus, where a kidon team would be waiting. So far, Sowan had managed to come up with excuses—he was never able to be alone in the computer room, or the pressure of his studies meant he had to forgo holidays—but he had sensed a growing threat behind Samara’s demands. In Hull, he hoped he would be in less contact with both Mustapha and Samara, and be allowed to have an academic life without further pressures. Mossad had very different plans for him.
On Friday, March 13, 1987, Mossad’s headquarters on King Saul Boulevard buzzed with the rumor that Admoni was expecting an important visitor. Shortly before noon, the MI6 liaison officer was escorted up to the director general’s ninth-floor office. Their meeting was short. Admoni was told that MI6 was satisfied that the forged passports found in Germany were the work of Mossad. A Special Branch officer who had been involved in the operation recalled in June 1997 how “the man from Six just walked in, said ‘Good morning, ’ declined a cup of tea or coffee, and spelled it out. He then nodded and walked out again. It probably took less than a minute for him to deliver the message.”
In London, the Foreign Office called in the Israeli ambassador and delivered a strong protest accompanied by a demand that such behavior would not happen again. The only small comfort for Admoni was that no one had mentioned Ismail Sowan.
In the early evening of July 22, 1987, Ismail Sowan turned on the BBC early-evening television news in his Hull apartment. He had not heard from Mossad since April, when Bashar Samara had traveled to Hull for a meeting at the city’s railway station and told Sowan to keep a low profile until further notice—unless Mustapha made contact.
Now, the face of the man Mustapha had said deserved to die filled the screen; Naji Al-Ali, the cartoonist, had been shot as he left the offices of Al-Qabas in London. The gunman had fired once and disappeared. The bullet had entered through the cartoonist’s cheek and lodged in his brain. Sowan’s first reaction was that the assailant was not from Mossad or Force 17. Both organizations used the same professional way of killing: several shots in the head and the upper body. This looked like an amateur attack. The TV report said a massive police hunt was under way and that the cartoonist’s colleagues were hinting the attack was because of the unnamed “powerful enemies” Naji had made.
Sowan remembered a previous conversation with Mustapha. He became increasingly certain Yasser Arafat had ordered the shooting. He suddenly wondered if he was the only person Mustapha had confided in about the need for the cartoonist to die. Sowan decided it would be best for him and his wife to fly to Tel Aviv. But even as they packed, there was a knock on the front door. Sowan would recall:
“The man had two suitcases. He said Mustapha needed to hide them urgently. When I said I wanted to know what was inside, he just smiled and told me not to worry. ‘He who asks no questions is told no lies,’ was all he would say. When he was gone, I looked inside the cases. They were full of arms and explosives: enough Semtex to blow up the Tower of London; AK-47s, pistols, detonators, the works.”
Ismail called the special Mossad contact number in London. It had been disconnected. He telephoned the Israeli embassy. He was told that Arie Regev and Jacob Barad were not available. He asked to speak to Bashar Samara. The voice at the other end of the phone asked him to wait. A new voice came on the line. When Ismail gave his name, the voice said, “This is a good time for a holiday in the sun.” The words were a signal for Sowan to travel to Tel Aviv.
There, in the Sheraton Hotel, he met Jacob Barad and Bashar Samara. He explained what he had done after discovering the contents of the suitcase. They told him to wait while they reported to their superiors. Later that night, Samara returned and told Sowan to fly to London on the next plane. When he arrived he would find everything had been taken care of.
Not suspecting what lay ahead, Sowan flew to London on August 4, 1987. He was arrested by armed Special Branch officers at Heathrow and charged with the murder of Naji Al-Ali. When he protested he was a Mossad agent, the officers laughed at him. Sowan had become as expendable as the cartoonist who had died after two weeks clinging to life in hospital. Sowan
would be sacrificed in an attempt to regain favor with the Thatcher government. The presence of the arms cache in Sowan’s apartment would destroy any effort he made to claim he was employed by Mossad. The arms had been brought there by a Mossad sayan.
In London, Arie Regev had turned over to MI5—who passed it on to Scotland Yard—all the “evidence” Mossad had “accumulated” of Sowan’s “involvement” with terrorism. The file detailed how Mossad had tailed Sowan through the Middle East, Europe, and Britain, never able to obtain enough proof until now. The moment the arms cache had been discovered, Mossad decided, “in the name of common security,” to turn in Sowan.
The decision to do so was a grim reminder of Mossad’s unwritten law of expediency. A great deal of time and money had been invested by the service in training and supporting Sowan in the field. But when the time came, all that counted for nothing when weighed against the greater need for Mossad to cover its own tracks in Britain. Sowan would be the sacrificial victim, served up to the British as an example of the kind of terrorist Mossad was always warning about. There would be a loss, of course: Sowan had done a good enough job—even if he had failed to deliver all that was asked of him. But the arms cache had been too good an opportunity to miss. It would wreck the PLO’s relationship with the Thatcher government and allow Israel to present Yasser Arafat as the double-dealing terrorist Mossad still said he was. And there would always be another Ismail Sowan ready to be seduced by men in Israel who reveled in broken promises.
For a full week Mossad relaxed, convinced that whatever Sowan told his British interrogators could be shrugged off.
But Admoni had not counted on Sowan’s desperate efforts to stay out of jail. He gave Special Branch interrogators detailed descriptions of his controllers as well as everything he had been taught by Mossad. The police gradually realized Ismail could be telling the truth. The MI6 liaison officer in Tel Aviv was recalled. He questioned Sowan. Everything he said about Mossad’s headquarters and its methods fit what the officer knew. The full extent of Mossad’s role began to unravel.
Regev, Barad, and Samara were expelled from Britain. The Israeli embassy in London issued a defiant statement: “We regret that Her Majesty’s Government saw fit to take measures of the kind adopted. Israel did not act against British interests. The struggle against terrorism was its one and only motive.”
Telling the truth did not save Ismail Sowan. In June 1988, he was sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment for possessing firearms on behalf of a terrorist organization.
Five years after the expulsion of the three katsas, which had effectively closed down Mossad’s station in Britain, the service was back. By 1998, five katsas worked out of the Israeli embassy in Kensington, liaising with MI5 and the Special Branch in targeting Iranian factions in Britain.
Three years previously, in December 1994, Ismail Sowan had been released from Full Sutton Prison, handed back his Jordanian passport, and deported on a plane to Amman. The last anyone saw of him was walking out of the airport carrying the suitcase Mossad had given him all those years ago when he had traveled to London. But its false bottom had been removed.
From the desert kingdom he had a ringside seat at the gathering storm in the Persian Gulf, which was preceded by a change of watch commander on the Mossad bridge. Nahum Admoni’s eight years at the helm finally ended on the eve of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Into his place stepped Shabtai Shavit, who inherited a series of failures: the Pollard affair, Irangate, and, of course, those blank, forged British passports found in that Frankfurt phone box, which had heralded the end of Admoni’s tenure. But, for his successor, beyond Jordan more than a sandstorm blew. Saddam Hussein had finally decided the time had come to take on the world.
CHAPTER 16
SPIES IN THE SAND
On December 2, 1990, well to the south of Baghdad, a figure in the dirty robes of a desert dweller lay motionless just below the lip of a wadi. It was dawn and the sand ice-cold; during the night the temperature had dropped to well below zero. The man’s head was covered with a sheep’s wool hupta, a hat that identified him as a tribesman of the Sarami, the oldest of the Islamic Sufi sects, who roamed the vast Iraqi desert and whose fanaticism was matched by a code of honor unequaled by other tribes’. But the man’s loyalty lay some six hundred miles to the west, in Israel; he was a katsa.
His clothes came from a Mossad storeroom where garments from all over the world were kept and regularly updated. Most were obtained by sayanim and delivered to local Israeli embassies and sent on to Tel Aviv in diplomatic bags. Other garments were brought out of hostile Arab countries by pro-Israeli visitors. A few were actually made by the wardrobe mistress who presided over the storeroom. Over the years she and her small team of seamstresses had developed a reputation for detail, even using the right sewing cotton for adjustments.
The katsa’s code name—Shalom—came from a list of aliases kept on file in the Operations Division; Rafi Eitan had introduced the idea of a list after the Eichmann operation. Shalom Weiss had been one of the best forgers in Mossad before he had joined the team to help capture Adolf Eichmann. Shalom Weiss had died of cancer in 1963 but his name lived on and had been used on several occasions by katsas. Only a handful of senior IDF officers, Shabtai Shavit, and Shalom’s own section head knew why he was in the desert.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, an action that became the precursor to the eventual Gulf War. Iraq’s move against Kuwait had been a spectacular intelligence failure for all the West’s services; not one had anticipated it would happen. Mossad had tried to verify reports that Saddam had actually stockpiled chemical weapons at secret sites south of Baghdad, which would place the weapons well within range not only of Kuwait City but also cities in Israel.
Within Mossad there remained doubt as to whether Iraq possessed the rockets needed to fire the warheads. Gerald Bull had been removed from the scene, and his supergun, after its initial testing, according to U.S. satellite surveillance, was now in bits. Shavit’s analysts suggested that even if Saddam possessed the warheads, there was no certainty they were actually filled with chemicals; he had done that kind of posturing before.
Shabtai Shavit, displaying the caution of a new man in charge, had said that on what he had been told, to raise the alarm could only create needless panic. Shalom had been given the mission to discover the truth. He had carried out several previous operations in Iraq, once going into Baghdad, where he had posed as a Jordanian businessman. In Baghdad there had been sayanim who could have helped him. But here, in the vast, empty desert, he had to depend on his own resources—and the skills his instructors had once more tested.
Shalom had undergone survival training in the Negev Desert, mastering “memory training,” how to recognize the target even in a sandstorm; and “self-image protection,” how to blend in with his surroundings. He wore his garments day and night to give them a lived-in look. He spent a full day on the shooting range, demonstrating instinctive and rapid-aim firing for close-quarter combat. An hour was spent with a pharmacist learning when to use his emergency medicine in the desert; a morning was devoted to memorizing the maps that would lead him across the sands.
To all his instructors he was identified only by a number; they neither demeaned him nor offered praise. They gave Shalom no clue as to how he was doing; they were like robots. Part of each day was given over to testing his sheer physical stamina with a forced march in the fierce noon heat, carrying a rucksack weighted with rocks. He was constantly on the clock, but no one told him if he was meeting his times. Another test was to haul him out of an ongoing exercise to get his responses to such questions as: “A Bedouin child spots you: do you kill her to preserve your mission?” “You are about to be taken prisoner. Do you surrender or kill yourself?” “You come across a wounded Israeli soldier who has been on another mission: do you stop to help or leave him, knowing he will certainly die?” Shalom’s answers were not intended to be definitive: the questions were designed
as another way to test his ability to decide under pressure. How long did he take to respond? Was he flustered or confident in making it?
He ate only the food he would live on in the desert: concentrates that he mixed with the brackish water he could expect to find at watering places in the sand. He had attended a one-to-one class with a Mossad psychiatrist on handling stress and how to relax. The doctor also wanted to make sure Shalom still thought for himself, so that he could draw on the right amount of resourcefulness and ruthlessness for the unpredictable situations he would encounter in the field. Aptitude tests determined his present emotional stability and his self-confidence. He was assessed to see if he had developed signs of becoming a “lone wolf,” a worrying trait that had ended other promising careers for katsas.
A dialect coach sat with him for hours, listening to him repeat the Sufis’ patois. Already fluent in Farsi and Arabic, Shalom quickly grasped the dialect of the tribesmen. Every night he was driven to a different part of the Negev to sleep. Burrowing into the ground, he would rest for a short while, never more than dozing, then move to another place to avoid the instructors he knew were hunting him. Discovery would almost certainly mean his mission would be either postponed for further training, or assigned to another katsa.
Shalom had escaped detection. On the evening of November 25, 1990, he had boarded a CH-536 Sikorsky helicopter of the Israel Defense Forces Central Regional command.
Its crew had also been separately trained for the mission. In another area of the Negev base, they had practiced low-level weaving through an aerial obstacle course in the dark. Turbines had blasted the chopper with sand so that they could improve their techniques for flying through the unstable air currents of the Iraqi desert. The pilot had continuously stayed as close to the ground as he could without crashing. In another exercise, instructors had straddled the landing struts, firing weapons at target silhouettes, while the pilot kept his machine steady. In between, the crew had studied their flight path.
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