POTUS took a seat in their midst and began to outline the theft from the Siberia laboratory. She was still speaking when the television screens on the desks came alive. A masked man said he represented New Jihad, a group affiliated to al-Qaeda, and claimed responsibility for the theft of the virus. It would be used against the enemies of Islam.
The screens went blank and the stunned listeners looked at each other in disbelief. The ringing of their telephones broke the silence. The calls brought news that the first cases of smallpox had already been reported in the Netherlands; in Rotterdam over eight hundred people had become infected with the virola, which had been spread through the air ducts in the city’s subways. Some victims were already displaying rashlike spots on their skin and lesions in their mouths, a sign victims were at their most infectious. Similar cases were being reported in Istanbul. Turkish doctors saw that papules, the rashlike dots of the disease, had begun to turn into pustules. This usually occurs on the fifth or sixth day. A few infected saliva droplets on the breath would bring a victim close to death.
The next report came from Frankfurt International Airport, where passengers were showing difficulty in eating and swallowing. Some of the travelers had flown in from Munich from where the first reports of the presence of smallpox in Germany had come: a family had manifested the symptoms after arriving from Turkey. By noon, two hours after the first telephone calls, the number of cases had risen to 3,320. Most were in Europe, but in the early afternoon reports came of infected passengers from Mexico arriving at Los Angeles International Airport.
Meantime, anti-Muslim riots had broken out in Rotterdam, and panic-driven Poles along their country’s border with Germany had fought with border patrols trying to stop them entering the Federal Republic. Poland’s stockpile of smallpox vaccine was able to protect only some 5 percent of its population. The Federal Republic was only one of a handful of countries with sufficient stocks to vaccinate its entire population. The others were the United States, Great Britain, France, and Holland. The U.S. government had stopped mass vaccination of its population twenty years previously, when it was decided the risk of side effects from the vaccine outweighed the possibility of catching the disease. The death from side effects was calculated at 100 per 100 million vaccinated.
Five hours into the outbreak, just as in the wake of 9/11, the United States closed its borders. But it was too late. On Wall Street trading came to a halt, as it did in London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, and all the other financial centers around the world. It was the onset of global economic collapse.
As the crisis unfolded, so did the decisions. An appeal from Turkey—a NATO ally and a moderate Muslim country—for the United States to provide vaccine was rejected.
“The United States feels unappreciated now because of world condemnation of our position in Iraq. A lot of Americans are asking why should we help countries who do not support us,” said POTUS.
The British prime minister reminded his fellow leaders that “the harsh economic climate following the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a brain drain of former laboratory scientists who had worked in the country’s bioweapons programs. Leaving in droves, some made their way to Syria, Iran, and North Korea. The result is what we’re confronting here.”
By early afternoon, POTUS and the other world leaders had received projections on how the smallpox would spread. Within a month, there would be hundreds of thousands of deaths. Within a year the global number would have reached tens of millions. The computer projection showed that neither the medieval Black Death, the bubonic plague that had come close to destroying Europe, nor the influenza pandemic of 1918 would match the pandemic created by the smallpox disaster of 2005.
It was only then that POTUS looked around to her fellow leaders and spoke. “Gentlemen, we all know now what we face. We should all thank God this has not happened.” There were murmurs of agreement from those present.
The events unfolded in that Washington ballroom, titled “Atlantic Storm,” were designed by the world’s leading experts on bioterrorism. Former prime ministers and senior diplomats represented other countries. For five intense hours they had tried to cope with one emergency report after the other. Increasingly, their efforts to stop the spread of smallpox had faltered. Albright told her fellow “world leaders” that “the crisis we have failed to successfully cope with will face us, if not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow. But it will come …”
When Meir Dagan read her words, he echoed them. Then he and Porter Goss wrote a document that was circulated to European intelligence chiefs. Titled “The Future of Bioweapons,” it concluded: “Al-Qaeda will soon be in a position to create artificially engineered biological agents which can spread disease on an unparalleled scale. The same science which is taught in universities can now be adapted to create the world’s most frightening weapons. We must be aware that al-Qaeda is investing in postgraduate Muslim students on our campuses in the same way it invested in sending the 9/11 pilots to our flying schools.”
There was no more than a polite response from other intelligence chiefs. The feeling was that once again Mossad and the CIA were combining to raise the level of the terrorist threat. This was particularly felt in London where MI5 and MI6 were still irritated by the constant demands from Israel that Britain should curb the activities of radical Muslim preachers allowed to remain in the country. In mosques in London and elsewhere in Britain they openly preached hatred against Israel and the United States.
On a Monday morning in the first week of March 2005, the heads of Israel’s intelligence community drove down Tel Aviv’s Rehov Shaul Hamaleku and turned into the Kirya, the headquarters of the Israeli Defence Forces. They included the director of Shin Bet, the service responsible for internal security; the heads of Air Force and Naval intelligence; the commander of the Sholdag special forces battalion, and the chief of the Research and Political Center that advised the country’s policy makers on long-term strategy. Meir Dagan, in his capacity as menume, which roughly translates from Hebrew as “first among equals,” chaired the meeting. On the agenda was a subject never far from the minds who had assembled in the conference room: Iran.
Every man could recall the years of tension the Islamic Republic had brought to Israel since 1979. Over the ensuing twenty-six years, its policy had been articulated in a huge banner draped above the main entrance to the foreign ministry in Tehran. It bore the chilling words in Farsi: “Israel Must Burn.”
For all those years Iran had been a terrorist-sponsoring nation, with particularly close ties to Hezbollah. Most of the weapons used by that group came from Iran. It was also currently engaged in undermining the fledgling democracy in Iraq by supporting its growing terrorism. Yet the diplomats of Washington’s State Department and Britain’s Foreign Office still clung to the belief that Iran was in a transition period toward democracy, and that there were moderates in the regime who could be persuaded to enter into an “accommodation” with the West and convince Hezbollah and other terror groups to cease their attacks on Israel. Mossad’s eavesdroppers and informers in Gaza had overheard the MI6 team reiterating the claim.
John Scarlett’s continued refusal to withdraw the team had led to an increasing coldness in Mossad’s relationship with MI6. While important intelligence passed between both services on the usual need-to-know basis, Nathan, the London station chief, no longer took a regular cab ride from the Israeli Embassy in Kensington to the glass-faced building overlooking the river Thames, known as “the wedding cake” for its tiered shape, to share a convivial hour with senior MI6 officers over drinks and sandwiches. The occasions were a chance to get to know the thinking within MI6 on a wide variety of issues, and there were lively discussions on what one MI6 officer had called “the current state of play” in Damascus, Riyadh, and Egypt. In that closed world in the hospitality suite on the fifth floor, what was not said was often as important as what was said. Scarlett had sometimes dropped in on those gatherings to inquire how things were in Tel Aviv.
But for the moment the stand-off with London was of less importance than the reason for the meeting. For the men around the conference table, who had helped Israel to survive war and Intifadas, the high-resolution satellite photographs spread before them told a grim story. The images were of Iran’s nuclear facilities filmed only a week before by Israel’s own satellite. They showed the six prime plants that were scattered across the country. Each facility was buried under thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, hard to penetrate with even the BLU-109 “bunker buster” bombs the United States had recently sold to Israel.
Accompanying the images were reports from Mossad’s deep-penetration agents in the country. Their identities were a closely guarded secret between Dagan and his assistant director on the seventh floor of the headquarters building. One agent had revealed that the Natanz facility in southern Iran was working around the clock to enable its fifty thousand centrifuges to eventually produce huge quantities of enriched uranium in its three heavily fortified underground structures. Another report demonstrated how Russia had provided 150 technicians to upgrade the Bushehr nuclear power plant on the Persian Gulf, severely damaged in Iran’s war with Iraq. A third report described the installation at the Sharif University of Technology of centrifuges capable of running a uranium-enrichment program. Yet another report highlighted the capability of the University of Tehran’s nuclear reactor to come on stream in Iran’s drive to build a nuclear bomb. One agent had pinpointed the entrances to underground facilities in the desert fastness of Yazd Province. The most detailed report described a plant on the outskirts of the ancient city of Esfahan. Sited close to the eastern suburbs, the cluster of modern buildings were near the towering Emam mosque and the magnificent eleventh-century bridge over the Zadaneh Rud River along which the carpet weavers of Esfahan have exported their wares for a millennium.
The men around the conference table saw the area around the uranium conversion facility had been recently reinforced, making it the most heavily guarded of all the facilities. A defense perimeter of antiaircraft guns, razor wire, and thousands of heavily armed soldiers now surrounded the plant hewn into a hill. It was its capability to enrich uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas that was reason enough for Israel’s intelligence community to assemble in the room. The Mossad agent’s report had ended with the revelation that Esfahan’s uranium conversion facility had already produced three tons of UF6 gas. This was sufficient to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear power—which Iran claimed it would be used for—or for the fifty thousand centrifuges at Natanz ninety miles to the northwest to produce a nuclear weapon.
The agent’s report listed other sites where missile production was underway. The largest was Darkhovin, south of the city of Ahvaz. The facility was heavily fortified with two battalions of the Revolutionary Guard. It employed three thousand scientists and engineers. Most of their work was underground building rocket motors. Mu-allimn Kalayeh was sited in the mountains near Qasvin, its uranium enrichment gas centrifuges produced the enriched weapons-grade material for warheads. Saghand was in the remote desert east of Tehran. It employed eight hundred technicians building casings for the rockets. Nekka, near the Caspian Sea, was buried underground; the complex employed over a thousand scientists. Its facilities included a Neutron Source Reactor purchased from North Korea.
A separate report on the table before the intelligence chiefs was from Israel’s own atomic experts. They estimated between fifteen hundred and two thousand centrifuges would create sufficient enriched uranium to manufacture one atomic bomb a year, and that could come as early as 2007, when the Natanz nuclear facility’s centrifuges would all be fully operational.
Dagan revealed that Mossad had discovered Ali Shamkhani, Iran’s defense minister, was in secret discussions with Syria to move eleven Iraqi nuclear scientists from Damascus to Tehran. They had arrived in Syria shortly before the collapse of the Saddam regime, bringing with them CDs of their research on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program. In Syria the scientists had been given new identities and hidden away in a military base north of Damascus. Syria’s president, Bashir Asad, made one stipulation for the transfer to Iran: it must share its nuclear research with Syria. It could provide al-Qaeda with the basis to make a dirty bomb—yet another threat the men around the table had long feared.
Six years before, on April 21, 1999, over a hundred Israeli sailors had checked into small hotels and gasthause in the German port city of Kiel. They wore casual clothes and, when asked, told their hosts they were members of a holiday club. Each was a member of Force 700, created to give Israel a crucial third pillar of its nuclear defense to equal their country’s already powerful land- and air-strike capability.
Thirty-two years before, their predecessors had performed a similar function to smuggle seven gunboats out of Cherbourg, which had been paid for but which the French government of the day had embargoed after Israeli commandoes had destroyed thirteen Lebanese aircraft at Beirut airport—itself a reprisal for a PLO attack on an El Al 707 at Athens airport two days’ previously.
The decision to create Force 700 had come only much later, when Israel had placed an order with the Howaldswerke Deutsche Werft shipyard for three Dolphin-class submarines, among the most modern afloat, each displacing 1,720 tonnes and costing US$300 million apiece. The arrival of the sailors in Kiel on a warm spring day was surrounded with even more secrecy than Operation Noah had used to smuggle the gunboats out of France.
Critical to the Kiel operation had been keeping secret that among the thirty-five Israeli naval officers and ratings for each submarine were five specialist technicians who would be responsible for firing the nuclear weapons each submarine would carry if the order was given. These armaments would be fitted when the boats reached Haifa.
The three Dolphins left Kiel and headed for Haifa where specially prepared pens awaited them. For the next six weeks they were fitted with an adapted version of the Promis software that had been developed by Inslaw, the specialist Washington-based company. The software would allow each submarine to locate and destroy a target up to one thousand miles away. Promis was also programmed to probe defenses around a target and calculate the complex mathematics that would ensure a direct hit. After the software had been installed, each submarine was equipped with twenty-four cruise missiles. Fitted with nuclear warheads, each missile would have a destructive power greater than the Hiroshima bomb. Test firings, using dummy warheads, had been successfully carried out in the Indian Ocean.
Now, on that March day in 2005, the three Dolphins were directed to take up station on the seabed in the Persian Gulf and target Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The matter of if and when to launch a preemptive strike against Iran would require Mossad to make a clear recommendation to prime minister Ariel Sharon. As the air in the Kirya conference room grew heavy with cigarette smoke, everyone knew that, depending on what the response would be, it could destroy President Bush’s Middle East peace plan—already plagued with uncertainties—and trigger a powerful retaliation from Tehran against Israel and Jewish interests around the world. A preemptive strike against Iran could also draw fire from Syria and unleash the various terrorist groups in all-out jihad.
The head of the Research and Political Center raised other considerations. How would America, Britain, and the rest of the world react to such a strike? There were now powerful voices in the United States and Europe who would launch a verbal onslaught against Israel because an attack on Iran would create an environmental catastrophe on a par with the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986. Israel could find itself politically and economically isolated in the world.
But any attack would require a measure of coordination with American forces in the Gulf. Israeli warp
lanes would probably require to overfly Turkey and close to Iraqi airspace, which was under the complete control of the Pentagon. But that would present a further problem with Washington. The Arab world, and probably beyond, would see an air attack as part of a joint effort with the United States. Almost certainly it would be followed by new terrorist strikes on American soil.
Increasingly the feeling among the men in the Kirya conference room was to take all necessary precautions but not recommend a preemptive strike. In the meantime, Meir Dagan would send his already hard-pressed agents back into Kurdish Iraq, long a listening post close to Iran, and send other katsas into a country that had also become an area of mounting concern for the Mossad chief: Pakistan.
CHAPTER 23
THE PAKISTANI NUCLEAR BLACK MARKETEER
The mountain Spring flowers of the Hindu Kush would have briefly blossomed when the Mossad agent met his Pakistani informer. Both were on the front line against terrorism, bound by a common cause. Pakistan had become part of Mossad’s front line against terrorism since the arrival of al-Qaeda as the world’s major terror group. To recruit informers in the country was a priority. Jamal, the code name for the Mossad agent, had encountered Horaj on his first trip to the region in 2001. Jamal had listened carefully to Horaj as Horaj expressed fears that Pakistan would become a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism he was ready to do anything to stop. Initially, Jamal wondered if Horaj’s offer to inform for Israel had really been motivated by a desire to return respectability to his religion, which had been hijacked by the Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden, who he believed had distorted the words of the Prophet to create hatred and fear. But Mossad psychologists had studied Jamal’s background reports on Horaj and decided he could serve a useful role. Conspicuously excluded from the Washington list of states that sponsored terrorism was Pakistan. Indeed, after the September 11 attacks, the country had been regularly praised in the words of Condoleezza Rice as “our important ally in the war on terrorism.” On the speed dial of her secure desk telephone was a button that enabled the secretary of state to reach Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf. Another button was her direct link to President George Bush. Dr. Rice, a fifty-year-old former academic and Soviet specialist, was Bush’s key adviser on foreign affairs and had guided his decision to keep Pakistan on-side, choosing to ignore that since 1989 the country had supported a number of Kashmiri terror groups in their war against India. They had carried out several mass killings on the subcontinent, helped by Pakistani intelligence agents to select targets and provide advance planning, which had included the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 57
