Six Mossad agents were dispatched to Rome. They included a bat leveyha, a woman, and two technicians from Mossad yahalomin, its communications unit.
Working out of a Mossad safe house near the Pantheon, the team set up surveillance on Ocalan’s apartment close to the Vatican. The woman agent was briefed to try and make contact with him. She followed the well-established guidelines that had been used by another Mossad female agent to entice Mordechai Vanunu to his doom in this same city over a decade before. But a plan to do the same with Ocalan failed when the Kurdish leader suddenly left Italy.
The Mossad team began to scour the Mediterranean basin for him: Spain, Portugal, Tunis, Morocco, Syria. Ocalan had been to all those countries—only to move on when refused sanctuary. On February 2, 1999, the Kurdish leader was discovered trying to enter Holland. The Dutch government refused him permission to do so. A Dutch security officer at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport informed the head of the local Mossad station that Ocalan had caught a KLM flight to Nairobi. His Mossad pursuers set off for the Kenyan capital, arriving on Thursday morning, February 5.
Kenya and Israel had developed over the years a close “understanding” on intelligence matters. As part of Mossad’s “safari” in Central Africa it had exposed to the Kenyans the activities of other foreign spy networks. In return, Kenya continued to grant Mossad “special status,” allowing it to maintain a safe house in the city and providing ready access to Kenya’s small but efficient security service.
The Mossad team soon located Ocalan in the Greek embassy compound in Nairobi. From time to time Kurds—whom the team assumed were his bodyguards—came and went from the compound. Every night the head of the Mossad team reported to Tel Aviv. The order was the same: Watch—do nothing. Then the order dramatically changed. By “all means available,” Abdullah Ocalan was to be removed from the embassy compound and flown to Turkey.
The order was Halevy’s.
Luck played into the team’s hands. One of the Kurds came out of the embassy and drove to a bar close to the venerable Norfolk Hotel. In what is a classic Mossad tactic, one of the team “came alongside” the Kurd. With his dark skin and fluent Kurdish patois, the agent passed himself off as a Kurd working in Nairobi. He learned that Ocalan was getting restless. His latest application for political asylum in South Africa had received no response. Other African countries had been similarly loath to grant the Kurdish leader an entry visa.
Mossad’s eavesdropping team were using their equipment to monitor all communications in and out of the compound. It was clear that Greece would also refuse Ocalan sanctuary.
The Mossad agent who had met the Kurd in the bar made his move.
He telephoned the Kurd in the embassy compound and asked for “an urgent meeting.” Once more they met in the bar. The agent told the Kurd that Ocalan’s life was in danger if he remained in the compound. His only hope was to return to join his fellow Kurds, not in Turkey, but in northern Iraq. In its mountain vastness, Ocalan would be safe and could regroup for another day. The plan was something that Ocalan had actually begun to consider—and had been overheard doing so by the Mossad surveillance team. The agent persuaded the Kurd to return to the embassy and try and persuade Ocalan to come out and discuss the proposal.
Simply—and lethally—the trap was set. It was now only a matter of waiting to see how long Ocalan could hold but from taking the bait.
Based on its intercepts of radio traffic from the Greek Foreign Ministry to the compound, the Mossad team knew it was only a matter of days before Ocalan’s increasingly reluctant hosts would show him the door. In an “eyes only for ambassador” message, Greek prime minister Costas Simitis had said that Ocalan’s continued presence in the compound would trigger “a political and possibly military confrontation” in Greece.
Next morning a Falcon-900 executive jet landed at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport. The pilot said he had come to collect a group of businessmen flying to a conference in Athens.
What happened then is still a matter of intense debate. Ocalan’s German lawyer later claimed that “based on a misrepresentation of the situation by the Kenyan authorities,” Ocalan was “effectively dragged out of the compound.” But the Kenyan government and the Greek Embassy in Nairobi strongly denied the charge. The Greeks insisted that the Kurdish leader left the compound against the advice of his hosts.
One thing is certain.
The executive jet took off from Nairobi with Ocalan on board. As the aircraft cleared Kenyan air space the questions began:
Had the Mossad team followed its normal practice and injected Ocalan with an incapacitating drug as he stepped out of the compound? Had they snatched him off the street—as another team had snatched Adolf Eichmann all those years ago in Buenos Aires? Had Kenya turned a blind eye to an action that broke all international laws?
Hours after Ocalan had been incarcerated in a Turkish jail, an exultant Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit appeared on television to speak of an “intelligence triumph … a brilliant surveillance operation conducted in Nairobi over a twelve-day period.” He made no mention of Mossad. He was sticking to the rules.
For Efraim Halevy the success of the operation was measured against the loss of a spy network in Iraq that had depended so much on Kurdish support. He was not the first Mossad chief to wonder if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhyahu’s readiness to place Mossad in the role of “gun for hire” would have long-term repercussions in the wider business of intelligence gathering.
The success of the operation was undoubtedly muted by another fiasco that Halevy had inherited.
On October 5, 1992, an El Al cargo jet had plunged into an apartment block near Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport, killing forty-three persons and injuring dozens. Since then hundreds of people living in the area had fallen ill. Despite a relentless campaign to conceal that the aircraft had been carrying lethal chemicals—including the components to produce Sarin, the deadly nerve agent—the facts had emerged, drawing unwelcome attention to a secret research center in the suburbs of Tel Aviv where scientists had, among much else, produced a range of chemical and biological weapons for Mossad’s kidon unit.
Twelve miles southeast of downtown Tel Aviv is the Institute for Biological Research. The plant is at the cutting edge of Israel’s multilayered defense system. Within its laboratories and workshops are manufactured a wide range of chemical and biological weapons. The Institute’s chemists—some of whom once worked for the Soviet KGB or East German Stasi intelligence service—created the poison used to try and kill Khaled Meshal, the leader of the Hamas Islamic fundamentalist group.
The Institute’s current research programs include developing a range of pathogens which would be, according to a secret CIA report for William Cohen, U.S. defense secretary, “ethnic-specific.” The CIA report claims that Israeli scientists are “trying to exploit medical advances by identifying distinctive genes carried by some Arabs to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.”
The report concludes that, “still at the early stages, the intention is to exploit the way viruses and certain bacteria can alter the DNA inside their host’s living cells.” The Institute research mimics work conducted by South African scientists during the apartheid era to create a “pigmentation weapon that will target only black people.”
The research was abandoned when Nelson Mandela came to power but at least two of the scientists who worked in the program in South Africa later moved to Israel.
The idea of the Jewish State conducting such research has triggered alarm bells—not least because of the disturbing parallel with genetic experiments conducted by the Nazis. Dedi Zucker, a member of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, is on record as saying, “We cannot be allowed to create such weapons.”
It was the raw materials for such weapons that the El Al jet was carrying on that October night in 1992 in its 114 tons of cargo that also included Sidewinder missiles and electronics. Most lethal of all were twelve barrels of DMMP, a component of Sarin gas. The chemicals had been bo
ught from Solkatronic, the New Jersey-based chemical manufacturer. The company has steadfastly insisted that it had been told by Israel that the chemicals were “to be used for testing gas masks.” No such testing is carried out at the Institute for Biological Research.
Founded in 1952 in a small concrete bunker, today the Institute sprawls over ten acres. The fruit trees have long gone, replaced by a high concrete wall topped with sensors. Armed guards patrol the perimeter. Long ago the Institute disappeared from public scrutiny. Its exact address in the suburbs of Nes Ziona has been removed from the Tel Aviv telephone book. Its location is erased from all maps of the area. No aircraft is allowed to overfly the area.
Only Dimona in the Negev Desert is surrounded by more secrecy. In the classified directory of the Israeli Defense Force, the Institute is only listed as “providing services to the defense Ministry.” Like Dimona, many of the Institute’s research and development laboratories are concealed deep underground. Housed there are the biochemists and genetic scientists with their bottled agents of death: toxins that can create crippling food poisoning and lead to death; the even more virulent Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis and anthrax.
In other laboratories, reached through air locks, scientists work with a variety of nerve agents: choking agents, blood agents, blister agents. These include Tabun, virtually odorless and invisible when dispensed in aerosol or vapor form. Soman, the last of the Nazi nerve gases to be discovered, is also invisible in vapor form but has a slightly fruity odor. The range of blister agents include chlorine, phosgene, and diphosgene which smells of new-mown grass. The blood agents include those with a cyanide base. The blister agents are based upon those first used in World War I.
Outwardly featureless, with few windows in its dun-colored concrete walls, the Institute’s interior has state-of-the-art security. Code words and visual identification control access to each area. Guards patrol the corridors. Bombproof sliding doors can only be opened by swipe-cards whose codes are changed every day.
All employees undergo health checks every month. All have been subject to intense screening. Their families have also undergone similar checks.
Within the Institute is a special department that creates lethal toxin weapons for the use of Mossad to carry out its state-approved mandate to kill without trial the enemies of Israel. Over the years at least six workers at the plant have died but the cause of their deaths is protected by Israel’s strict military censorship.
The first crack in that security curtain has come from a former Mossad officer, Victor Ostrovsky. He claims that “we all knew that a prisoner brought to the Institute would never get out alive. PLO infiltrators were used as guinea pigs. They could make sure the weapons the scientists were developing worked properly and make them even more efficient.”
Israel has so far issued no denial of these allegations.
The start of the NATO spring offensive against Serbia in 1999 gave Halevy an opportunity for Mossad to provide an intelligence input to the nineteen countries that formed the Alliance. Mossad had long-established contacts in the region—out of real concern that the Balkans could eventually become a Muslim enclave, so providing a back door from which to launch terrorist attacks against Israel. It gave Halevy a welcome opportunity to visit NATO headquarters in Brussels and meet his counterparts. He traveled to Washington to see the CIA. Back home he worked a long day, often not taking a day off from one week to the next. In that respect he reminded people of Meir Amit.
In the spring of 1999, Mossad’s old bete noir, Victor Ostrovsky, surfaced to irritate the service. Carefully leaked reports from the team acting for two Libyans finally charged with the Lockerbie bombing said that Ostrovsky would give evidence for the defense. Given that the former katsa had left Mossad well before the incident, it was hard to see what he would have to contribute. Nevertheless, the sight of Ostrovsky in the witness box in the specially convened court in the Hague had, according to one senior Mossad source, deeply angered Halevy. He believed that an “understanding” had developed between Ostrovsky and his former employers that he would do nothing more to embarrass the agency in return for being allowed to live an unfettered life. For a while Halevy considered if there was any legal action he could take to stop Ostrovsky; in the end he was advised there was none.
In any event, by the time Ostrovsky appears in court, if he does, Halevy would have retired.
To achieve all he must do before he leaves the service would continue to be a huge test of Halevy’s physical and mental stamina. Aman and Shin Bet had seized upon the trouble in Mossad to boost their own position to be first among equals. Yet no one had suggested that Mossad should not retain its role as Israel’s secret eye on the world. Without its skills Israel might well find itself defeated by its enemies in the next century. Iran, Iraq, and Syria were all developing technology that needed to be closely monitored.
In the beginning, the operational style of Mossad had been to do what must be done, but do it secretly. In one of his one-to-one meetings with a staffer, Halevy had said he would like to see the Israeli intelligence community become a united family once more, “with Mossad the uncle no one talks about.”
Only time would tell whether that is an unsupportable dream or whether, as many observers fear, the further Mossad is from its last public humiliation, the closer it is to the next.
That came a step closer when, in June 1999, Mossad learned it could be asked to move its European headquarters in Holland following highly embarrassing claims that it has been secretly buying plutonium and other nuclear materials from the Russian Mafia. The allegation had been made by Intel, a small but formidable division of Dutch intelligence.
Intel’s investigation had been run out of a deep bunker—ironically built to shelter the Dutch Royal Family in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on Amsterdam. The bunker is near the city’s Central Railway Station. Intel had established the terminus was journey’s end for some of the nuclear materials stolen from Russian weapons labs such as Chelyabinsk-70 in the Ural Mountains and Arzamas-16 in Nizhnii Novgorod, formerly Gorky.
Senior Mossad officers had insisted to Intel that precisely because the deadly materials were stolen, their agents purchased them from the Russian Mafia. It was the only way to stop the material being sold to Islamic and other terror groups.
While conceding that the Mossad claim was plausible, Intel investigators had become convinced that the nuclear materials had also been secretly shipped out of Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport to Israel to boost the country’s own nuclear weapons manufacturing plant at Dimona. Already stockpiled there were, by 1999, an estimated 200 nuclear weapons.
That Mossad had been trafficking with the Russian Mafia rekindled a nuclear nightmare that has never quite gone away. While the chilling Cold War doctrine of MAD—mutually assured destruction—had gone, in its place has come a more dangerous scenario where nuclear know-how and materials are on sale. It is capitalism, Wild East style, in which organized crime syndicates and corrupt government officials work in league to create new markets for nuclear materials—a bazaar with some of the world’s most dangerous weapons on offer.
Much of the work of tracing the origins of stolen nuclear material is done at the European Trans-Uranium Institute (ETUI) in Karlsruhe, Germany. There, scientists use state-of-the-art equipment to track whether stolen materials have come from a military or civilian source. But they concede “it’s like trying to catch a thief who has never been fingerprinted.”
To head off undoubtedly awkward questions should Mossad’s own fingerprints be found, Halevy made a secret visit to Holland in early June to explain to Intel Mossad’s role. Dutch intelligence remained unconvinced.
Halevy returned to Israel to tell its new prime minister, Ehud Barak, that Mossad should be prepared to move its European headquarters in the El Al complex at Schipol Airport.
Mossad had been based there for the past six years. From second-floor offices in the complex—known at Schipol as “Little Israel”—
eighteen Mossad officers have run European operations. According to one Mossad source, Halevy’s position was clear: Better Mossad moves than be kicked out of Holland, a fate it suffered in Britain under the Thatcher government.
It was Mossad’s decision to run its own operations within a host country without telling Britain that had led to a souring of relations with London. Ironically. If Mossad left Schipol, it may be to return to Britain. Under the uncritical approval of Prime Minister Tony Blair—Halevy is said to have told Barak—Mossad would find a ready welcome. Blair believes a strong Mossad presence would benefit MI5’s efforts to keep track of the many groups from the Middle East who are now based in London.
A deciding factor in a move to Britain would be whether El Al, the Israeli national carrier, also moved its hub from Schipol to Heathrow. Given El Al’s thriving cargo business, the boost to Heathrow would be considerable.
Intel had established that the link between Mossad and the airline is an integral part of the traffic in nuclear materials.
The Dutch agency insists that Mossad would never have begun the dangerous business of buying nuclear materials unless those materials could be safely and secretly transported to Israel.
Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison, now director of Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs, has observed that “a criminal or terrorist group could even ship a weapon into the United States in places small and light enough to be sent through the postal service.”
Implicit in those words is the fact that a highly efficient organization like Mossad, supported by the vast resources Israel puts at its disposal, would have little or no difficulty in smuggling nuclear materials out of Schipol.
Intel’s suspicion about such smuggling was first aroused when it was tipped off that the El Al cargo freighter that crashed shortly after take-off from Schipol in October 1992 was carrying chemicals.
Since then the agency has gathered what an Intel source describes as “at minimum strong circumstantial evidence” that Mossad has also shipped nuclear materials regularly through Schipol.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 41
