The FBI had asked the State Department to have the United States embassy in Israel run a check. It reported that no “University of Jerusalem” existed. The nearest was the city’s Hebrew University, and it had no record of the “students.” The Bezalei Academy was genuine. But the dates of birth, passport numbers, and in some cases military registration numbers of the “art students” were not listed on the academy’s enrollment list, or lists of those who had attended up to ten years before. While this information was being obtained, FBI agents in Washington had traced the cell phones the mysterious “students” were carrying. All had been purchased by an Israeli diplomat in Washington who had now returned to Israel.
The news caused consternation in FBI headquarters. Robert Mueller, then the bureau’s director, called for a meeting with George Tenet. Uppermost in their minds was whether they were facing another spying operation by Mossad. But would an agency that had made its name for unrivaled planning and stealth have mounted one that, on the surface at least, was so amateurish?
Tenet placed a call to Halevy, who denied that any operation was going on.
He was lying. The operation had been his brainchild. Stung by the refusal—and this was months before the September 11 attacks—to take heed of Mossad’s warnings that al-Qaeda was a growing threat within the United States, Halevy had decided to test how vigilant were American defenses. Students from their final year at the Mossad training school on the outskirts of Tel Aviv had been selected to go to America. It would not be the first time that Mossad had used its students for this purpose; it gave them valuable field experience, and anything they acquired could be useful to Mossad.
Halevy had chosen to run the operation with only a few Mossad staff involved. Again, it was not uncommon for a director general to do this. But what made it unusual was that the preplanning and cover stories were a disaster waiting to happen. Just as at Lillehammer and on the streets of Amman—both debacles that had cost Halevy’s predecessors their jobs—there was an element of recklessness about what the “art students” had been briefed to do that baffled the FBI. Surely, Mossad could not have slipped so far, to be running something like this?
As the FBI began its investigation, the inevitable happened: the news leaked. Soon a number of reporters were trying to pin down the story. Much of their initial reporting was wide of the mark. The “art students” were described as “Middle Easterners” and “speaking Arabic.” They were identified as members of an unnamed terrorist group.
Then the Fox News channel entered the arena. It assigned a hardworking reporter, Carl Cameron, to the story. He picked up the first hint that this could be a Mossad-generated operation.
That provoked an immediate response from the vast and powerful Jewish lobby in Washington, whose tentacles reach out across America. The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a leading political lobby, able to penetrate Congress, the intelligence community, and the White House. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) has equally powerful connections. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) are strident watchdogs over what the media publish about Israeli affairs.
The moment Cameron went on air on the Fox network to announce he had uncovered “a possible espionage and surveillance operation by Israelis against al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S.,” the combined resources of the Jewish lobby directed their fire against him.
But even as they launched their first volley, Cameron was saying in a second report that “many of the Israelis had failed polygraph tests when asked about their alleged surveillance activities in the United States.”
In Paris, Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, reported that “a vast Israeli spy network had been dismantled in the United States, the largest operation of its kind since 1985 when Jonathan Pollard was caught selling top secrets to Mossad.”
With renewed ferocity, the Jewish lobby set to work.
The Israeli embassy predictably reiterated what it said to all such allegations: “No American official or intelligence agency has complained to us about this. The story is nonsense. Israel does not spy on the United States.”
The Israel lobby excoriated Carl Cameron for his exposé. Representatives of JINSA, the ADL, and CAMERA argued that the Fox report “cited only unnamed sources and provided no direct evidence.” CAMERA’s associate director, Alex Safian, said “it was having ‘conversations’ with representatives of Fox News regarding Cameron’s piece.”
Safian also questioned Cameron’s “motives” in running the story. “I think Fox has always been fair to Israel in its reporting. I think it’s just Cameron who has something, personally, about Israel. He was brought up in the Middle East. Maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe he’s very sympathetic to the Arab side. One could ask.” The implication was that Carl Cameron was a bigot; Safian would later make the same allegation about the entire editorial staff at Le Monde.
“I’m speechless,” said Cameron when he heard of Safian’s statement. “I spent several years in Iran growing up because my father was an archaeologist there. That makes me anti-Israel?” Cameron, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, had never before been attacked for “biased” coverage.
Michael Lind, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation—a think tank—and former executive editor of The National Interest, a journal, said: “Among foreign service officers, law enforcement, and military, there is an impression that you can’t mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an Arabist.”
While the attacks on Cameron and Le Monde were at full throttle, the “art students” were quietly deported to Israel for what the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service called “routine visa violations.”
No mainstream media outlet asked why the CIA, through its National Counterintelligence Executive, had been involved. Or why the FBI had established that the “students” had visited no fewer than thirty-six Defense Department facilities.
Finally, as the “students” were flying out on El Al back to Tel Aviv, all traces of Cameron’s reporting vanished from the Fox News Internet site. In its place ran a note. “This story no longer exists.” A CIA spokesman said: “We’ve closed the book on it.”
Shortly afterward, Halevy’s tenure at Mossad came to an end.
There was one other legacy Efraim Halevy would take into retirement: his decision to revisit the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. After reading the Mossad file on the incident, he had asked Maurice, the agent who had been involved in trying to recruit Henri Paul—the driver of the car in which the young lovers had died—to prepare a new record of the couple’s last day together.
Had it been mere curiosity on Halevy’s part? There were rumors that he had met Diana during his time as Israel’s ambassador to the European Community. If so, he would not be the first diplomat to come under her spell. But more likely is that Halevy wanted to ensure that there was no new evidence to support the claims that Mossad had been indirectly involved in the deaths.
Maurice, now a desk man at headquarters, had prepared a detailed account of the last day in the life of Diana and Dodi.
Those who have read the account say it does flesh out the detail in the original Mossad report. Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Dodi, is described as a man with a continuing obsession that Diana was pregnant and that she was the object of surveillance by the CIA, MI6, and French intelligence from the moment she and Dodi flew into Paris. There are transcripts of various phone calls, including one from Diana’s former Scotland Yard bodyguard, warning her to “be careful.” The evening of August 30, 1997, which the couple spent together in Paris, is carefully time-tabled. Next comes a similar recounting of how, in the first moments of Sunday, August 31, the couple rushed from the Ritz Hotel to try to reach Dodi’s apartment a short drive away. Then Maurice had focused on the white Uno. It had been parked close to the Ritz. Other photographers say it belonged to th
e paparazzo James Anderson. He had made taking photos of Diana his speciality. It had earned him a fortune. But it has been established Anderson was not present on the night in question.
Maurice described the white Uno in hot pursuit of the Mercedes, Henri Paul at the wheel, Diana and Dodi in the back, as the two cars raced neck and neck into the place de L’Alma underpass, where Diana and Dodi met their deaths.
Later a car of the same make, but recently painted blue, was found in a Paris garage. When the paint was scratched, the car was white underneath. The police did not pursue the matter. Did they already suspect this was not the vehicle they were searching for? If so, why did they not visit the car-crusher facility in the Paris suburb where another white Fiat Uno, hours after the fatal crash, had been reduced to a block of unidentifiable metal? Did they also realize that would be a waste of time?
Maurice noted in his report: “Almost four hours after the crash, James Anderson suddenly flew to Corsica. There was no known professional reason for him to do so. There was no one famous on Corsica to photograph at the time. In May 2000, a burned-out car was found in woodland near Nantes in France. The driver was still inside the car. DNA tests showed the body was that of James Anderson.”
And there lies the last mystery, one that will now perhaps never be resolved. Had Anderson gone to Corsica to collect a substantial fee for loaning his white Uno? But to whom? Mossad certainly had no interest in pursuing Diana or Dodi. Could it have been another secret service? Anderson was reputed to have connections to both French and British intelligence. Even if that was true, it is still an unacceptable leap—as Mohamed al-Fayed made—to suggest that Anderson’s car had been “borrowed and used to force Henri Paul to lose control over the Mercedes.”
But the questions do not stop. Why was the police investigation into Anderson’s death so perfunctory? Why had the police neither attempted to find out why he had gone to Corsica nor conducted a detailed investigation into his bank accounts? Like all wealthy men, Anderson kept a number of accounts around Europe. But none of these were checked to see if he had deposited a substantial amount after his trip to Corsica.
More intriguing is the possibility that it was Anderson’s death that had concerned Halevy. Had someone in the past tried to recruit him for Mossad? While there may well have been nothing on a Mossad file, it was still a possibility that a katsa on an operation had come across the photographer and tried to use him.
Whatever Efraim Halevy had thought of all this he had kept to himself. He was that sort of man. His inability to share some secrets may well have contributed to his downfall. He had arrived quietly in Mossad. He left the same way.
Now, on that eleventh day of September 2002, the staff of Mossad waited for his successor to arrive in the canteen to address them. No one knew what to expect. The tension, one man recalled, was “a living thing.”
Meir Dagan waited in the corridor until he was sure there was total silence in the canteen. Long ago, when he had been a military commander briefing his troops, he had learned the importance of making an entrance. Now the tenth memune to take charge of Mossad, he was equally determined to stamp his authority from the outset. Since his appointment, he had studied staff files. He had a prodigious memory, and a face once seen was not forgotten.
At fifty-seven years of age, his own face was a road map of all the recent wars Israel had fought. He had himself crushed the first Intifada in Gaza in 1991. He had led his men from the front in the Yom Kippur War. In Lebanon, he had fought with distinction. In all these places, he had displayed the same regimen to awaken from a combat veteran’s light sleep, take a cold shower, and eat a daily breakfast of natural yogurt, toast spread with honey, and strong black coffee. Blunt, proud, and imperious, he was prepared to stand on his record.
The battle-hardened hero of past wars had earned his reputation in Arab capitals as a man to be feared, one who would not hesitate to venture into those alleys that often have no names with no more than a handgun in his pocket. Twice he had been wounded in action; on some days, when the twinge in his knee became too severe, he walked with the help of a walking stick. He disliked doing so; he had an antipathy to any sign of weakness in himself or others. On that September day he had no stick.
In his spare time he was a student of military history and the intelligence lessons to be learned from battles lost and won.
Few knew he was also an accomplished landscape painter (he had already earmarked a corner of his office where he would set up his easel to produce one of his watercolors). Like everything else about him, this fact remained part of his private world. A man of few friends and with a happy domestic life, he came to Mossad with only one aim: to make it the intelligence service it had once been.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had taken him out of military command to do so. The two men had been friends from their days together fighting the PLO in Lebanon. Dagan had made an impression in that political quagmire by showing his skill at morale building. That, Sharon had said, was now a priority in Mossad. He had chosen Dagan because in many ways he was cast from the same steely mold as perhaps the greatest leader Mossad had ever had, Meir Amit.
Satisfied that the sense of expectation in the canteen had built sufficiently, Dagan entered the room. Making his way rapidly past the silent staff to the center, he used a chair as a step to stand on a table. For a long moment, he stared down at the faces looking up at him. Then he spoke.
“In Lebanon I witnessed the aftermath of a family feud. A local patriarch’s head had been split open, his brain on the floor. Around him lay his wife and some of his children. All dead. Before I could do anything, one of the patriarch’s sons scooped up a handful of the patriarch’s brain and swallowed it. That is how they do things in family feuds in that place. Eat the brain. Swallow its power.”
He paused, letting the impact of his words have their full effect.
“I don’t want any of you to have your brains eaten. You eat their brains.” Dagan emphasized his point by punching a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand.
His words could only have held his listeners in thrall, even though what he said may also have sent a shudder through some of them. Others in the canteen had killed enemies of Israel who could not be brought to trial because they were protected deep within the boundaries of Arab neighbors.
Underpinning Dagan’s words was a clear guarantee that from now on he would sanction any operation against those who would “eat their brains.” In turn, he would protect Mossad with every means he knew—legal or illegal. That meant he would effectively allow his agents to use proscribed nerve toxins, dumdum bullets, and methods of killing that even the mafia, the former KGB, or China’s secret service rarely used. But he was also implicitly reminding them that he would not hesitate to expose them to torture and certain death at the hands of their enemies. No wonder he held them in thrall.
Some of them who had recently graduated from the training school might well have remembered the words long ago articulated by Meir Amit, and which formed part of the schooling lectures on assassination: “Mossad is like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal injection. Your actions are all endorsed by the State of Israel. When you kill, you are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day.”
Once more Dagan spoke. “I am here to tell you that the old days are back. The dice are ready to roll.”
Then he told them about himself. How he was born on a train between Russia and Poland. That he spoke several languages. That he operated on the premise that action could not wait for certainty. He finished with a final punch of his fist into his palm.
It had been a bravura performance. As he jumped down from the table and walked from the canteen, applause followed him all the way to the door.
The time swiftly came when Meir Dagan would show what he meant by eating their enemies’ brains. In Mombasa in East Africa, an explosive-laden land cruiser had driven into the recept
ion area of the island’s Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in October 2002. Fifteen people were killed and eighty seriously injured. At almost the same time, two shoulder-fired missiles had nearly downed an Israeli passenger plane bringing tourists back to Tel Aviv from Kenya. Two hundred seventy-five people on board had barely missed a Lockerbie-style death.
Meir Dagan immediately decided that the attacks had been the work of al-Qaeda and that the missiles had come from Iraq’s arsenal. Confirmation of this had come from his own deep-cover agents in Baghdad and from the CIA and MI6.
Within hours, Dagan had assembled a team to go to Mombasa. All had local language skills. They could pass for Arabs or for Asian traders on the island. His men not only dressed the part, they looked the part. Their prime task in Mombasa was to find and kill the men behind the three suicide bombers, who had gone to their deaths laughing as they plunged their vehicle into the hotel.
The team would carry a small laboratory of poisons, sealed in vials until the moment came to strike. They had long- and short-bladed knives. Piano wire to strangle. Explosives no bigger than a throat lozenge capable of blowing off a person’s head. They would take an arsenal of guns: short-barreled pistols, sniper rifles with a killing range of a mile. Each agent carried several passports to enable him to cross borders in different guises.
And so they flew south in their own plane to Mombasa. Mossad agents from Lagos, Nigeria—from where Israel gets the bulk of its oil—were there to support the team from Tel Aviv. Other katsas from South Africa, Rome, Malta, and Cyprus had sped through Africa into the fierce heat of Mombasa.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 43
