In October 2003, with the initial Iraqi war offensive over, O’Brien was asked by Gadhafi to arrange for a team of British weapons experts and intelligence officers from MI6 and the CIA to inspect Libya’s weapons of mass destruction sites. One expert had a close relationship with Mossad. His recall perfectly captured the atmosphere on the trip.
“The Libyans showed us everything. It was a case of: on your right, our famous chemical weapons; on your left, our secret uranium centrifuge ; and tomorrow you’ll see our biological weapons. At the end of our visit it was clear that while Libya had not yet acquired nuclear weapons capability, it was closer to having one than we had realized. It was also working on a variety of delivery systems, including ballistic missiles with a range capable of hitting any major city in Europe. The truth was that Gadhafi posed a far greater threat than Saddam did.”
But with Saddam defeated, the negotiators in London decided to exert pressure on Gadhafi. A team of senior American negotiators from the State Department flew to London. They told Kusa they had “overwhelming” evidence that Libya could not have developed its programs on weapons of mass destruction without the help of Iran and North Korea.
“As a fully paid up member of the ‘axis of evil’ it was made clear to Kusa that Libya remained very much on our target list,” an official who attended the meetings said (to the author).
Nelson Mandela, the retired South African leader, was called upon to deliver a warning to Gadhafi that he must act—or face the consequences. Mandela called Bush and said that Gadhafi was “very serious about making an agreement.”
But still the cautious fencing persisted between Libya and the negotiators. Finally it was made clear to Kusa that time was running out if Gadhafi continued to prevaricate. The deadline was January 1, 2005. The Traveller’s Club meeting was convened.
The key part of the agreement was to be contained in the broadcast Gadhafi would make on Libyan television that evening. The text was sent to Tripoli for endorsement. A copy was faxed to Condoleezza Rice in Washington, whom Bush had asked to oversee the negotiations. She asked for minor changes to wording and emphasis. These were conveyed to Kusa.
The smiling intelligence chief said, “A woman’s prerogative. But these are acceptable. We have a deal.”
The historic announcement was to be made on Libyan television that night. The BBC monitoring unit at Caversham was sent a copy of the text and asked to monitor the broadcast. Shortly after the meeting at the Traveller’s Club broke up, a copy of the text was handed to Nathan. In minutes it was on the desk of Ariel Sharon.
Having read the document, the Israeli prime minister told Dagan that as far as Libya went, Mossad was to maintain its close surveillance on the country. A copy of the document was sent to the third-floor archives and inserted in the Gadhafi psychoprofile. It contained a report that Musa Kusa had been one of the planners behind the bombing of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie in which 270 people had died fifteen years before in the very week that Gadhafi was welcomed back from being a tyrant to a statesman.
In London, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, praised Gadhafi’s “huge statesmanship.”
In Washington, the State Department announced that American companies with contracts on Libyan oilfields due to expire in 2005 were being allowed to open talks in Tripoli to extend their concessions.
In Paris, the French government confirmed that Kusa was still wanted in connection with the 1989 bombing of a French UTA airlines DC-10. But a spokesman admitted that given the spy chief’s diplomatic status, it was “highly unlikely he will ever be questioned.” In the French capital another long-running investigation was on the move again.
Mossad had continued to monitor events about the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. Faced with mounting public disquiet in Britain, the new Royal coroner, Dr. Michael Burgess, had overruled his predecessor’s decision not to hold an inquest. He announced an inquiry, and the investigation would be headed by the former London Metropolitan police chief Lord Stevens. Stevens traveled to Paris to inspect the crash site. Among the media scrum that accompanied his every move was a Dutch-born katsa, Piet, a member of the Mossad Paris Station. Among those he had recruited was a mahuab, a non-Jewish informer, in the Paris police department. She was code-named Monique.
When the critically injured Diana arrived at the Saleptrie Hospital, Monique was on duty in the emergency room to ensure no media entered. Shortly afterward, Diana was pronounced dead. She was draped in a clean gown and taken to a side room. Two nurses washed her body. One would later tell a reporter, “She looked so beautiful as if she was asleep.”
The pathologist, Dominique Lecomte, arrived to find a scene of controlled chaos: “There were people around who you would not find in an operating room,” she said later. They included two senior diplomats from the Paris British Embassy, senior officials from the French Ministry of Justice, and the chief of the Paris police. The diplomats and the French officials stood in separate groups, whispering among themselves. Standing apart from the others was a member of the MI6 team in Paris who had been tracking Diana after her determined campaign against land mines. In London government circles, she had been called “a loose cannon.” He was there to ensure there would be no obstacles to what Professor Lecomte was told “must be the swift transfer of Lady Di’s body back to England. The order comes from high up in London.”
Professor Lecomte asked for the body to be transferred to a side room adjoining the operating theater so she could conduct an autopsy. That was the moment the first conspiracy theory took root. The hospital had a fully equipped mortuary where an autopsy could have been performed. Had it not been used because transferring her there would delay matters? Alone with the body, Professor Lecomte began her “partial autopsy and partial embalming.” Highly experienced though the pathologist was, even a “partial embalming” required time after she had performed a “partial autopsy.” This would have required Professor Lecomte to remove a number of Diana’s organs—probably including her heart and kidneys. She would also have removed organs from Diana’s pelvic area. This would later further the speculation that Professor Lecomte had removed any evidence that Diana was pregnant. The pathologist then performed the “partial embalming,” which French law requires before a body can leave the country. Even partial embalming is usually left to a mortician trained in the process. Skill is required in correctly diluting the formaldehyde so as not to discolour the skin or leave an unpleasant chemical odor.
In the years following the events in the early hours of that Sunday night, August 31, 1997, Professor Lecomte has refused to explain her crucial role. “The decision to embalm Diana’s body would have tainted any samples taken at the postmortem in London. As a result the issue of pregnancy would have been covered up,” insisted Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Dodi, to the author.
Mossad’s files on the deaths of Diana and Dodi contained detailed information on the role played by the CIA, MI6, MI5, and French intelligence. They answered speculation that Henri Paul was being used by MI6 to keep a discreet eye on Diana as her affair continued to attract world attention and contained details of the thirteen separate bank accounts held by Henri Paul for money he received from French intelligence. The former Israeli intelligence officer, Ari Ben-Menashe, had offered to provide Mohamed al-Fayed with copies of the files, claiming “they are the smoking gun that could reveal the full extent of the intelligence role in the deaths of Dodi and Diana,” he stated to the author. He had asked for £750,000 for the files. Al-Fayed refused.
In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan decided there would be no benefit to Mossad in providing Lord Stevens with access to the service’s files. In that first week of 2005, he then had more important matters on which to focus.
Once more the specter that had haunted Dagan’s predecessors had surfaced. The FBI had reopened its investigation to try and establish the identity of Mega, Mossad’s deep-penetration agent high-level spy in Washington. He had originally been identified as working within the
Clinton administration. But the FBI now believed he had successfully managed to conceal himself to secure a place in the Bush presidency. Like his predecessors, Dagan was probably the only spy chief in Israel who knew the true identity of his prized informer (see chapter 5, “Gideon’s Nuclear Sword,” pp. 100–2).
In the aftermath of George Bush being returned to the White House for another four-year term, FBI director Robert Mueller had briefed National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice—soon to become secretary of state—that Mega was the conduit for how highly sensitive policy documents on Iran had been passed to Israel. Mueller had told Rice that Mega would now be more important than ever for Israel as Bush began to formulate his policy toward the Middle East.
The FBI had already spent more than a year covertly investigating, using the latest electronic surveillance equipment, a Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, who was a senior analyst in a Pentagon office dealing with Middle East affairs. Franklin formerly worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The Defense Department had confirmed the investigation, adding that Franklin worked in the office of defense undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, an influential aide to defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The FBI had publicly said their investigation centered on whether Franklin passed classified U.S. material on Iran to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. The AIPAC is a highly influential Israeli lobby in Washington. Like Franklin, it had been swift to deny “any criminal conduct.” In Israel, Ariel Sharon had taken the unusual step of issuing a similarly worded statement insisting: “Israel does not engage in intelligence activities in the United States.”
Meir Dagan knew better. The United States had remained a prime target for Mossad operations after the 1985 conviction of navy analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of passing secrets to Israel.
The FBI now believed Mossad had been responsible for how America’s nuclear secrets, stored on computer drives, had been stolen from Los Alamos. The drives were each the size of a deck of playing cards and kept in the facility’s most secure, password-protected vault in X-Division, twenty feet below the Mexican mountains.
The theft was discovered after a massive forest fire threatened the area and scientists were ordered to enter the vault to remove the drives. But because of the intensity of the fire, Los Alamos was closed down for ten days, which meant a full-scale search for the drives was launched only after this period. The drives were designed to fit into laptop computers carried by members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) on permanent readiness to fly to the scene of any nuclear incident within the United States. NEST squads would use the highly detailed technical information on the drives to disarm and dismantle nuclear devices. The drives had been checked as all-present in an inventory taken in April 2002.
When the FBI finally arrived on the scene in May that year, their first suspicion was that a terrorist group had carried out the theft. But then, three months later, they discounted this when the drives were found behind a photocopier in another Los Alamos laboratory. In a report to Bill Richardson, the then energy secretary responsible for the lab, and its security chief, Eugene Habinger, the FBI concluded the theft was the work of a highly professional foreign intelligence service “like Mossad.”
Now, three years later, the agency had not changed its view, Mueller told Condoleezza Rice. He also remained certain that somewhere within the Bush administration, Mega was securely entrenched. It was not a comfortable thought for the FBI director.
The Los Alamos theft had been prepared by the director general of CSIS, Qiao Shi. As well as being China’s longest serving and most senior spy master, the eighty-two-year-old Qiao Shi was also chairman of the Chinese National Assembly since 1993 and the security chief of the Chinese Communist Party. It effectively made him overall intelligence supreme of the entire Chinese spying apparatus.
In the month preceding the Los Almos operation, Qiao Shi had seen his power as vice-minister and overall co-coordinator of China’s security services eroded in a series of internal struggles within the Politburo. Finally he was, effectively, demoted to be head of the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service’s foreign intelligence branch. “The reason he was given was that the country’s need in global intelligence gathering required more than one man to head up those requirements,” a source told the author.
Qiao Shi was told that operations in place under his directions would remain his to control. He remained in post till June 2006.
The entire Los Alamos operation was given “total deniability” status by both Washington and Tel Aviv. The author was told in July 2006 by a former Canadian diplomat with knowledge of the operation “that publicity would have seriously damaged ongoing trade relations between both countries!”
Under Qiao Shi’s direction, the Los Alamos theft had been prepared and carried out by PLA-2, the Second Intelligence Department of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff. Its multifunctions include tasking military attachés at Chinese embassies abroad and organizing clandestine operations. For months he had planned it in his office inside Zhonganhai, the government compound where the Chinese leadership lived in splendid isolation. As part of that planning, Qiao Shi had called upon CSIS’s long-standing relationship with Mossad, which went back to their original collaboration in Africa (see chapter 13, “African Connections,” pp. 250–2). For Mossad the chance to learn some of the secrets at Los Alamos was too good an opportunity to pass up. Mossad arranged for a team of LAKAM programmers and surveillance experts from its own yaholomin unit to travel to Beijing. They became part of the team that would electronically rob Los Alamos.
The fine-tuning of the operation had been placed in the hands of Wang Tomgye at the Science and Technology Department in the monolithic Ministry of Defense headquarters in Beijing’s Dencheng District. In all, a hundred experts had been brought in to carry out the unprecedented heist. Many were experts in the difficult art of undetected computer hacking. Some of them had learned their skills while working for various companies in California’s Silicon Valley. One by one they had been recalled to Beijing to take up their specialist work for the robbery.
The date was set for May 5, 2004. The target was the high security vault in what was itself Los Alamos’s most secret facility. X-Division was a network of cramped offices on the third floor of the main laboratory building. Guarded by coded swipe cards whose entry numbers changed every day, the most sensitive of X-Division’s data was stored in a strong room that had every device known to U.S. security experts. It was claimed to be more secure than Fort Knox’s gold repositories. Inside the vault was a fireproof bag that could be opened only by using a special password. Inside that were the computer drives. Each disk contained detailed technical information, including how to dismantle the bomb designs created by rogue states like North Korea. They would provide anyone who obtained them with a massive advantage in knowing the nuclear secrets that the United States possessed.
Chinese and Israeli technicians had devised a hacking system that could electronically penetrate all the X-Division defenses. A replica of the Los Alamos vault was specially built in the basement of the Science and Technology Department. Inside the vault’s steel walls was placed a fireproof bag. Inside the bag were put hard drives containing nonsecret information. The task of the hackers was to remove the information without revealing they had done so. They were to do so not from somewhere in Beijing, but at a considerable distance from the Chinese capital. The hackers were dispatched to Shanghai, several hundred miles away. They set to work. When the vault was later opened, there was no evidence the fireproof bag had been penetrated. The team of hackers returned to the basement. With them they brought true copies of the information electronically lifted from the hard drives stored in the bag.
The Chinese planners had worked on the premise that from time to time the hard drives in Los Alamos would be removed from their fireproof bag and placed in a computer they were certain would be inside the X-Division vault. This would either be done to
check for a piece of information or to make sure the disks were in perfect working order. In Shanghai, the hackers had waited several days for the disks in the replica vault to be removed and inserted in a computer nearby.
The Chinese and Israeli team had also worked on the premise that at Los Alamos there was a good chance the hard drives would be left in the computer in an emergency. To create one, CSIS agents would light a brushfire that, given the prevailing wind direction, would sweep toward Los Alamos.
The next test took place in the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippine Islands. This time the hacking team was on board a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine of the blue-water fleet of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy. The submarine rose close to the surface, and the hackers went about their business. Once more they succeeded in electronically penetrating the replica vault in the Beijing basement. They returned to report their success to Qiao Shi.
Everything was ready. The team of hackers arrived in Puerto Penasco at the upper reaches of Mexico’s Golfo de California. They were supplied with fishing equipment and boxes of tackle. Their journey to the port had been a long one. From Hong Kong they had flown into Mexico City and then driven to Puerto Penasco. Waiting for them was their rented fishing boat. Hidden on board, placed there by a CSIS agent in Mexico, was their equipment for hacking. They set to sea, ostensibly on a fishing trip.
With Los Alamos evacuated as the brushfire threatened to engulf the facility, the team set to work. Using the coordinates they had been provided with, the hackers had homed in on the X-Division vault at Los Alamos. Just as they had waited in Shanghai for the right moment, so they had electronically lifted all the data from the hard drive disks in the fireproof bag. A week later, the team was back in Beijing.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 54
