Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  No one would ever establish how the disks were subsequently found behind the photocopier. Was there a Mossad or CSIS agent inside Los Alamos? Late in November 2002, a meeting was held at Los Alamos to discuss the possibility. Gathered in a conference room in X-Division was George Tenet, then director general of the CIA; Britain’s current MI6 chief, Dearlove; Director Freeh of the FBI (soon to lose his job); and Los Alamos security chief, Eugene Habinger. There was a consensus the theft had changed, almost certainly for the foreseeable future, the close intelligence links between Washington and London with Israel.

  The sheer cold professionalism of the operation had placed CSIS, in Mossad’s mind, as the one service it could rate as an equal. But in the past, the CIA had also worked with the Chinese. In 1984, William Casey, then head of the CIA, had secretly met Qiao Shi and persuaded him to act against the Triads who controlled over 60 percent of New York’s heroin market. Every major American city had its Triad godfather, through whom an increasing amount of cocaine from Colombia and the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia was marketed by dealers whose lineage went back to the opium dens of the 1800s. Casey had proposed a joint intelligence operation to combat the traffickers who had also started to target students on China’s campuses. Mossad had monitored a meeting in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong between senior CSIS officers and a team from the CIA, FBI, and the DEA in January 1985. It was another striking example of the hidden links and interdependencies between intelligence services.

  CSIS had helped to produce some spectacular results in the drug war, including the now celebrated Golden Aquarium case in San Francisco. A million pounds of heroin had been discovered wrapped in cellophane and condoms inside fish imported from Asia. American federal agents had taken the credit for the bust. Privately they admitted they could not have succeeded without the CSIS team who had trailed the consignment across the Pacific. Later, after the Los Alamos theft, Qiao Shi had handed over to Mossad valuable information it possessed about the Triads. With an estimated million members scattered worldwide, the Triads were the largest drug traffickers on earth.

  CHAPTER 22

  OLD ENEMIES, NEW THREATS

  In the three years since Meir Dagan had stood on a table in Mossad’s canteen on September 11, 2001, and had punched a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand and told his staff that, metaphorically, he expected them to eat the brains of their enemies, the number and actions of those enemies had dramatically increased.

  Suicide bombers continued to strike; some were little more than children. The supply of martyrs appeared to be inexhaustible.

  Fissionable materials had been stolen from stockpiles in the former Soviet Union; scientists at the European Transuranium Institute and Karsruhe in Germany, responsible for tracking all such material, had traced a small quantity of uranium-235 to the Paris apartment of three criminals known to broker arms deals with terror groups like al-Qaeda. The uranium was of weapons-grade quality. Two of the men—Sergei Salfati and Yves Ekwella—were traveling on Cameroon passports. The third, Raymond Loeb, possessed South African documents. The material came from a nuclear storage site at Chelyanbisk-70, sited deep in the Ural Mountains. Tipped off by Mossad, French police had arrested the criminals.

  Mossad had traced the route along which the uranium had been transported across the Ukraine, through Poland and Germany to Paris by employees of Semion Yokovich Mogilevich. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had positioned himself to traffic not only in humans and arms but fissionable material as well. As with the site in the Urals, it had disappeared from other poorly guarded locations.

  President Vladimir Putin had spoken darkly of a “new network of terror against which our forces are increasingly hard-pressed to overcome.”

  In Afghanistan and the near-lawless northern provinces of Pakistan, thousands of jihadists—holy war warriors—were being trained for what they were promised would be the endgame, the elimination of Israel from the face of the earth. Some of the graduates had returned to their homes in places like the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the souks of Egypt, the Yemen, and, farther afield, the cities of Britain. All made no secret of their readiness to die in jihad, holy war, to perfect their newfound skills anywhere that could damage the financial and economic structure of Israel.

  They were often financed by state-sponsored terrorism, either because of a shared ideology (Hezbollah and Iran), or calculated realpolitik (Hamas and Syria). Israel had worked tirelessly through the United Nations to get sponsors of terrorism to be stopped by sanctions or even military action. Mossad’s department of psychological warfare had spun the story that Israel was ready to launch a preemptive strike should the ayatollahs continue to support Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. The threat created fear among the Iranian population, even though its military tacticians briefed the country’s rulers that geographically the Jewish state was sufficiently far away not to pose a serious and sustained threat. In the case of Libya it had played a background role in persuading Gadhafi that his interests would prosper by avoiding being the bagman for a number of terror groups.

  Along with every major Western intelligence service, al-Qaeda remained on top of Mossad’s own threat list. Early on in Meir Dagan’s tenure, two names had emerged to stand beside Osama bin Laden in the cause of Islamic extremism. One was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who increasingly performed the role as al-Qaeda’s chief television propagandist. The Egyptian medical doctor, who had trained in London and Paris, had made over six video and audio broadcasts in 2005, earning himself the adulation of the Arab world as the organization’s intellectual guiding force. Mossad analysts had postulated that bin Laden nowadays reserved his own appearances for major occasions, such as addressing the American people four days before the U.S. election, where he had sat at a desk like a newsreader and promised further attacks if Bush was reelected; and after the Madrid commuter train attacks that killed two hundred and injured almost two thousand, when he had repeated the warning. The other member of this trinity of evil was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian ill-educated peasant responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Iraq. Before he had reached the age of thirty, he had beheaded a dozen Iraqis and foreigners and posted videos of their murders on Islamic Web sites around the world. He, too, had promised that the day would come when he would join bin Laden’s son, Saad, at the head of a triumphal march into Jerusalem.

  Now in the first weeks of 2005, it was not only terrorists that Meir Dagan found himself confronting. He had begun to have doubts about the new MI6 director-general, Sir John Scarlett. The roots of these reservations lay in what Dagan knew was seriously inaccurate MI6 intelligence that had led to the politicizing of information about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It had confirmed Dagan’s view that John Scarlett had a tendency to “shoot from the hip.” Certainly for the crew-cropped Mossad chief with a liking for open-necked shirts, Scarlett was radically different as the quintessential English spymaster in his customized suits from Gieves, the Saville Row tailor, and hand-stitched cotton shirts, along with his buff-coloured security files each bearing the red cross of Saint George. Over dinner at the Traveller’s Club, Scarlett would display a taste for expensive claret and his gourmet’s appetite for fine food. After his thirty-two years as an intelligence officer in Moscow, Kenya, and Paris, Scarlett had become chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) that monitored Britain’s other intelligence services and reported directly to Tony Blair in Downing Street. It was a widely held view that Blair had exercised his prime minister’s prerogative to appoint Scarlett to take over MI6. His appointment had brought Scarlett a knighthood to go with his CMG and OBE. It had also continued his close relationship with Blair, and Dagan was not the only foreign intelligence chief who sensed that Downing Street’s hand could be detected in decisions made by Scarlett. It went against Dagan’s own firm belief that an intelligence service should be independent of political influence.

  Dagan’s concern over this had turned to anger when Sca
rlett, with prime minister Tony Blair’s approval, secretly sent a team of officers to Gaza to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas, led by an experienced Middle East veteran intelligence officer, Alistair Cooke. For Dagan, the arrival of an uninvited foreign intelligence service on his doorstep contravened what he saw as a long-standing arrangement over the rules of cooperation. When Dagan had confronted Scarlett, he was reminded that MI6 had a long history of entering into negotiations with outlawed terror groups, notably the IRA in the 1980s, and that dialogue had ultimately led to the armed struggle in Northern Ireland giving way to political negotiation.

  “Gaza is not Belfast,” Dagan had said before ending the conversation. For him this signaled a low point in Mossad’s working relationship with MI6. Not for the first time, he had been heard to say the English had never quite come to terms with not being spymasters to the world. It was a view he shared with Carlo de Stefano, director of Italy’s antiterrorism unit; Manolo Navarette, the head of Guardia Civil Intelligence in Spain; and Porter Goss, who had replaced George Tenet as director of the CIA. Goss was no pushover. He was cut in the same no-holds-barred mold as Dagan, saying publicly that Tenet had ignored the agency’s “hard core mission, and that it must return to the ‘good old days of human intelligence’ when information was gathered not by computers and satellites and other sophisticated eavesdropping, but by planting our agents within or behind enemy lines.” Goss suddenly resigned in May 2006, after a turf battle with John Negroponte, the politically shrewd new director of national intelligence, a post created by President Bush to oversee intelligence gathering after 9/11. Goss was already unpopular with senior managers at the CIA, having forced half a dozen to resign. A high-ranking CIA officer told the author, “When Goss quit, there was more champagne drunk than on New Year’s Eve.”

  Dagan’s chagrin had increased over what he had learned about MI6’s involvement in the critical intelligence that had clinched the case for Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush going to war with Iraq. The intelligence service had produced what it insisted was “conclusive proof” that vast quantities of yellowcake, the iron ore from which enriched uranium is extracted, had been secretly shipped from the impoverished West African country of Niger. The evidence had hinged on documents MI6 insisted it had obtained from “a trusted source.” Dagan knew it would be unthinkable to reveal such a high-value contact, providing that was who he or she was. Apart from MI6, no one else had seen the documents and there was a mounting suspicion they were not all that MI6 claimed. But if nothing else, Meir Dagan had come to the conclusion that the insistence of John Scarlett to continue to defend the veracity of the documents raised questions about his judgment.

  The saga of how that happened would turn out to be a classic dirty tricks operation culminating in October 2005 with Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, being indicted on perjury charges and Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser to President Bush, facing investigation by a grand jury. Their role centered in the unmasking of a CIA field officer, Valerie Plame, the wife of a former U.S. ambassador to Niger, Joseph Wilson. It is a criminal offense in America to identify an active secret agent. Mossad’s role in the fiasco would remain untold until these pages.

  The story had properly begun in the summer of 2004 with a former employee of SISMI, the Italian equivalent of the CIA. A year before he, “Giancomo” Martino, had resigned from the service to set himself up as an “intelligence analyst.” In no time in Rome, a city well-stocked with journalists and spies, he became a source for, among others, Mossad’s station, which was housed in a building near the Vatican.

  In the world of spies and reporters eager for news, Giancomo was a useful contact able to peer through the keyhole of Italy’s security apparatus. The tanned, bespectacled sixty-year-old, with a liking for sand-colored suits and whose English was spoken with an American twang, had from time to time provided snippets of information that, if not exactly earth-shattering, were nevertheless often intriguing. His most recent offering had been photocopies of SISMI documents that showed the agency had been involved in the notorious case of Roberto Calvi (see chapter 20, “God’s Banker … ,” pp. 413–20). The former head of Banco Ambrosiano had close contacts with the Vatican Bank, whose activities were of abiding interest to Mossad. Calvi had been found hanging beneath Blackfriar’s Bridge in London in 1989. The documents Giancomo produced showed three senior SISMI officers had been closely involved with Calvi before his death.

  On that summer day in Rome, Giancomo met his Mossad contact, Sammy-O (in the intelligence world aliases are often on a first-name basis, a piece of tradecraft used by most services). But as they sipped drinks in an open-air restaurant, it was not the murky connections between finance and intelligence that Giancomo had to divulge. The seventeen pages he had stored on his laptop came from a time when the CIA and MI6 had been tasked by their political masters to discover evidence that would bolster the claim in Washington that Saddam Hussein had obtained yellowcake ore from Niger. The rock was not only a key material in the process of producing enriched uranium but was also crucial to the Bush/Blair justification for going to war. Sammy-O’s initial study of the documents showed some of them were encrypted, an indication they could be genuine. But there were also spelling mistakes and inconsistencies with dates. Were these the documents George W. Bush and Tony Blair had used to help recruit support for the invasion of Iraq? Giancomo had shrugged, a favourite gesture when he did not wish to commit himself.

  Sammy-O had asked Giancomo to explain the spelling mistakes. The informer had again shrugged. Where had the documents originated? Giancomo had replied, according to the agent’s later report submitted to Tel Aviv, that a contact in SISMI had introduced him to a woman official at the Niger Embassy in Rome. After some discussion she had handed the documents over. Sammy-O had the usual questions: Who else had seen them? Why had the woman done that? What deal did Giancomo have with her? Giancomo had refused to answer. The documents indicated the yellowcake ore had been secretly sold to Iraq. They appeared to reinforce the claims of Bush and Blair that they had been right to go to war.

  Niger’s yellowcake came from two mines controlled by a French company, who operated within strict international laws governing the export of the ore. One document indicated the ore had come from “unofficial workings” whose product was sold on the black market. It was that market into which Saddam had supposedly tapped. Sammy-O had a final question: How much did Giancomo want for the documents? Fifty thousand Swiss francs was the instant response. The silence that followed was broken by Giancomo.

  “The documents are forgeries. They were created by SISMI for the CIA and MI6 to support the claim of Blair and Bush that Saddam Hussein had obtained the ore. Don’t you see what that means?”

  Sammy-O saw. The forgeries had been the ones which MI6 had insisted were genuine and which Tony Blair and George Bush had used to defend going to war with Iraq. The documents reinforced the claim of the former ambassador to Niger, Joseph Wilson, who had been sent there by Bush in 2002 to check on their authenticity and had reported back that no yellowcake had gone to Iraq. President Bush had rejected his report and gone to war. When the initial conflict ended, Wilson had finally gone public on his findings and found himself discredited in a campaign orchestrated by Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, which had included them revealing the identity of Wilson’s CIA secret agent wife, Valerie Plame.

  What transpired under the café awning between Sammy-O and Giancomo came down to this: Mossad had paid the asking price for the forgeries. For the moment they would be used as a teaching tool at the service’s training school, an example of an operation to seriously embarrass two world leaders. Who had asked SISMI to plant the fake documents would remain unknown, but Mossad knew that in the past the Italian service had bugged the country’s presidential palace and the papal library as a favor to the CIA. And that agency had long fallen out with its Washington masters over the White House deliberately misrepresenting the truth a
bout Saddam’s nonexistent arsenal. Mossad believed Langley had set out to seriously embarrass the Bush administration, who had sidestepped the CIA’s own intelligence-gathering apparatus before the Iraq war and after the conflict had condemned the agency for not providing sufficient intelligence. Using SISMI—and not for the first time—the CIA could expect its complicity to have remained undiscovered. That had happened before in black operations in Latin America. What the CIA had not calculated was Giancomo’s greed for a sale. He knew that Mossad would pay for the documents, whether they were genuine or forgeries, once it realized they were the ones upon which Blair and Bush had largely based their case for going to war. Giancomo’s refusal to say who else had seen them was a strong clue he had sold them to the MI6 station in Rome. All else had flowed from that.

  As well as MI6’s continued insistence the forged documents were genuine, there were other claims that concerned Mossad’s view of the way the service was operating under Scarlett. He had claimed another “high-value source” had provided “good evidence” in the run-up to war that Saddam Hussein had portable chemical labs roaming in Iraq deserts ready to launch warheads with chemical and biological agents. The then U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell had endorsed the claim in his eve-of-war address to the United Nations, citing the source as MI6. Later, Mossad’s deep-cover agents had established no mobile labs ever existed.

  A senior Mossad analyst recalled (to the author): “MI6 was serving up, at best, speculation, at worst, baseless information as fact. It was the constant promise, underwritten by Scarlett, that the details were well sourced which made them acceptable. Only later, after the war was over, did we see that much of the data from London was often no better than the stuff the ‘spy’ in ‘Our Man In Havana’ dreamed up. He used drawings of a vacuum cleaner to support his reports. MI6 produced toy mobile labs for Powell to display before the United Nations.”