Mossad had become alarmed when Pakistan had developed its nuclear capability, which Musharraf had lauded as “our equaliser, which serves as a restraining influence on India.” In Washington, Israel’s fear that Pakistan had a weapon that could threaten the Jewish state was downplayed. A large number of officers in Pakistan’s intelligence services were not only members of the country’s radical religious groups but were also strong supporters of al-Qaeda. Would that terror group one day be able to acquire the means to make at least a “dirty bomb” or even obtain a fully fledged nuclear weapon? It was a question constantly debated within Mossad and which had once more brought Jamal on a long journey through icy ravines and past mountains shrouded in cloud to keep his appointment. Waiting for him was his informer, Horaj. The payment Horaj received each time he met Jamal may also have been a contributing factor to have brought him once more to this bleak vastness close to the roof of the world.
This was a land where Alexander the Great had lost an entire division one winter and, centuries later, where the Russians had fought, and lost, their war against the Mujahideen tribesmen of Afghanistan. And here, against a mountain peak cloaked permanently in snow and deep fissures splitting the rocks, American Special Forces had lost some of their finest in their search for Osama bin Laden.
The most advanced technology in the world had been mobilized in that hunt. A hyperspectral satellite, the first of its kind, was geopositioned in the deep black of space, its hundreds of narrow wavelength bands designed to reflect energy from objects on the ground to detect specific terrain such as rock, vegetation, buildings, caves, and any human presence. Another satellite used the “spectral fingerprints” to take mono photos, each with a resolution of ten centimeters per pixel. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) transmitted images at night in the often atrocious weather conditions of the area. Drones—unmanned aircraft—had constantly imaged an area the size of California every twenty-four hours from a cruising height of sixty-five thousand feet. Closer to ground, Predators—other radio-controlled unmanned aircraft—flying at heights of one hundred to twenty-five thousand feet had relayed data to where the Special Forces waited beside their helicopters, each fitted with “whispering technology,” which made their approach virtually silent. They were armed with AGM-130 missiles that could be radar directed into the mouths of tunnels where bin Laden could be hiding. But the targets had been few and far between, and none of them had been the serpent’s den of the most wanted man in the world.
Now in the spring of 2005, America’s wonder weapons had gone to search elsewhere. Their departure had brought a wry smile from Meir Dagan when he had observed that technology still could not outsmart human intelligence. There is a saying in Mossad that information was only as good as its source. Jamal believed in Horaj he had the best. Jamal was not only fluent in Pakistan’s official language, Urdu, but in several of the local dialects. But like all else about the two men, the dialect they conversed in was cloaked in the essential secrecy upon which their lives depended. Horaj’s ethnic group—whether he was a Punjabi, a Sindhi, a Pushtu, a Baluchi, or a Muhajir—was known only to Jamal and his case officer in the Directorate of Operations. All other personal details, such as his age and marital status, were similarly restricted. Most protected of all was where Horaj worked and the level of access he had to information valuable to Israel. Consequently, none of his reports ever ended up in the Mossad archive’s file on the individual whose actions had once more brought the two men to their clandestine meeting.
The man was Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Physically unremarkable, his lack of size was compensated with a winning smile for any woman who caught his eye—and many did—and matched by an overbearing arrogance toward those who dared to challenge him. He had easy access to Pakistan’s leaders; lesser politicians spoke his name with awe. Those who refused to do his bidding found themselves banned from his inner circle; former prime minister Benazir Bhutto admitted that during her term of office even she was not allowed to visit Khan’s research laboratories. It was there, in July 1976, he had used his years of research in Germany, Belgium, and Holland to understand the techniques for producing the enriched uranium needed to make a nuclear bomb. Eight years before, after neighboring India had tested its own nuclear bomb, Khan had been put in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear program.
Mossad discovered that during his time in Holland on the staff of the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (FDO), Khan had access to the nearby URENCO uranium enrichment plant at Almemo. Established in 1970 by Britain, West Germany, and Holland, it provided a supply of enriched uranium for European nuclear reactors. To do so it used highly classified centrifuge technology to separate fissionable uranium-235 from U-238, spinning a mixture of the two isotopes at up to one hundred thousand revolutions a minute. Mossad established that successfully mastering the complexity of this technology had enabled Khan to create Pakistan’s own nuclear arsenal in the utmost secrecy. After doing so, the country’s newspapers front-paged his boast: “Our detractors who told the U.S. that Pakistan could never produce the bomb now know we have done it.” For adoring millions of Pakistanis he became a revered figure, the genius who had provided a means to stop any preemptive strike by India.
Khan had remained a magical figure like no other in Pakistan, perhaps like no person in the Muslim world they had read about in their newspapers or heard of on radio or television. Fawned upon by the rich and famous, he was invited to sail on their luxury yachts on the French Riviera, flying there in their private jets.
Mossad knew there was another darker, and for Israel, far more dangerous side to Abdul Qadeer Khan. During one of his European jaunts, a Mossad agent had managed to gain entry to Khan’s hotel suite and accessed his briefcase. Using a matchbox-sized camera, the agent had photographed documents that provided the first concrete evidence that Khan had recently bought five thousand specialized magnets from a government company in Beijing. The magnets were to speed up the process of uranium enrichment. Other documents showed that Khan had also made contact with other aspirant nuclear states, notably North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. In his book-lined office was a report from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Khan liked to show visitors the passage he had highlighted: “A 10-kiloton bomb is smuggled into Manhattan and explodes at Grand Central. Some half-a-million people are killed and the United States suffers $1 trillion in direct economic damage.” Khan would snap shut the book and replace it without comment on its shelf, no doubt secure in the knowledge he had created for Pakistan the weapon to achieve such a horrific scenario. Khan was the flawed genius, not only motivated by personal greed but also driven by a religious fanaticism and a contempt for Western values. As the Khan Research Laboratories became a mecca to which the scientists of third world nations came to seek his services for helping them acquire skills in the black art of nuclear bomb making, he had become rich and powerful. He had also become a target for Mossad’s kidon. The unit had begun the slow, meticulous process of ascertaining all information its assassins needed when devising the most effective way of killing him.
Mossad had already dealt with one foreign scientist who had been identified as a threat, Gerald Bull. He had created, for Saddam Hussein, a supergun capable of launching nuclear warheads directly from Iraq into Israel. On March 20, 1990, three kidon had executed Bull on the doorstep of his luxury apartment in Brussels (see chapter 6, “Avengers,” pp. 119–21). However, assassinating Khan was more complex. He was a national hero and the repercussions would extend beyond any direct retaliation against Israel. While Washington had imposed sanctions on both Pakistan and India for conducting nuclear tests, the United States wanted to maintain its support against the steady expansion of China; it would condemn Israel for the assassination. Nevertheless, kidon were asked to prepare a number of “options”—the detailed research that would be the prelude to any killing of Khan. Ari Ben-Menashe, who had tasked kidon to prepare “options” during his time with Mossa
d, said (to the author): “What they were doing was essential to their kind of operation. Their baseline is getting to know their target, his or her habits and style. How he or she reacts to a situation, what pushes his or her buttons. Only then could they construct an operational plan.”
Footage of Khan’s appearances on television and on cinema newsreels had been studied along with his endless newspaper interviews and magazine profiles. The names of his close associates were noted—fellow scientists in the nuclear program, secretive background men who worked directly with him. His journeys around Pakistan, Asia, and to Europe were carefully charted; how he liked his favorite seat when flying with Pakistan Airways—3A in First Class—and that his accommodation choices in Europe’s capitals were usually presidential suites. It was there that he had met diplomats from China, Iran, and Iraq. Many of these hotel suites were already on kidon computers so that if it were required to bug them it would be possible to do so. Details of his sexual preferences were investigated. Did he have a liking for a particular kind of woman? Could any of the companions he had been seen with in public be open to blackmail?
The profile of Abdul Khan had been painstakingly built from a wide range of sources. Part of that planning included the recruiting of Horaj. He and Jamal had met again after that momentous day, February 4, 2004, when Khan had sat in a television studio in Islamabad, faced the camera and made one of the most astonishing confessions in the long history of treachery.
“I am solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear weapons material,” he intoned.
Before a stunned nation could adjust to the revelation, Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, dressed in commando fatigues—he had been an army general—took Khan’s place and announced that though “I was shocked by these revelations,” he would nevertheless pardon Khan, whom he called “my hero,” because of all his services to Pakistan. The excuse was less than the truth. Mossad knew that Musharraf could not afford to bring Khan to trial.
While the kidon continued preparing the ground for any decision to assassinate Khan, Meir Dagan and his analysts saw the scientist’s confession and the equally extraordinary response by Musharraf as evidence of a massive cover-up to hide the full extent of Pakistan’s complicity in nuclear proliferation. It was a cover-up buttressed by cynical political maneuvring. It had started when Pakistan won over China by supporting its border dispute with India. This led to a deepening relationship between Islamabad and Beijing. In the region’s political jigsaw of alliances, it brought North Korea, an old ally of China, into friendly contact with Pakistan. At first it was only cultural and exploratory visits by diplomats. But in Islamabad, Khan was watching and waiting; his finely tuned political nose told him it would not be long before the way was open for nuclear deal making.
China had also been nurturing its relationship with Iran. It began in October 1984 when the first planeload of nuclear components had landed in Tehran. Since then Beijing had provided three subcritical and zero-rated reactors and an electromagnetic isotope separation machine used in the process of creating enriched uranium. An 80-kilowatt thermal research reactor had followed. Each shipment had been monitored by Mossad’s deep-cover agents in Iran.
Meantime Saddam Hussein, in the midst of his eight-year war with Iran, had turned to India for help to kick-start his nuclear arsenal. To encourage Delhi, he had publicly endorsed India’s nuclear testing, and Iraq began to receive equipment to create a small amount of enriched uranium. It was all done in great secrecy, with the equipment described as “agricultural components.” Mossad set out to expose what was happening. It dusted down a copy of a long-forgotten treaty of nuclear cooperation Iran had signed with India in 1974. The document was fed to the Iranian media. The revelation caused the furor in Tehran Mossad had intended.
Alarmed, the ayatollahs turned to China for assistance. But by then Beijing was already engaged, with the same secrecy it armed Iran, in providing Iraq with missiles to help Saddam fulfill his dream of reshaping the Middle East in his image and creating mayhem for the world’s economic and political security. Beijing, ever ready to assist the rogue states, suggested the ayatollahs should invite Abdul Qadeer Khan to visit Tehran. Arrangements were quickly made. Khan was issued a false passport and papers describing him as a carpet salesman. In reality he was a carpetbagger, a scientist, with his country’s blessing, off to market its most precious secrets for money.
He returned weeks later, cast by his hosts as the godfather of their nuclear hopes and with a substantial sum of money in a Swiss bank account. No doubt having enjoyed the favors bestowed by the ayatollahs, Khan had looked for other nations he could similarly service. To do so he enlisted the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Service intelligence agency, ISI, the most powerful of the country’s security apparatus. The service already had a large number of officers who were anti-Semitic, and Khan’s verbal attacks on Israel made him a welcome guest in their midst. They readily devised the documentation needed for the scientist to carry out nuclear-technology transfers.
After Tehran, the tireless Khan’s next port of call was to the closed world of North Korea. He did so on the back of Pakistan’s deal for Pyongyang to supply a range of conventional military equipment. In return Khan agreed to provide blueprints and state-of-the-art P1 centrifuges for the country’s nuclear program. What began as a deal based on North Korea’s need for hard currency and Pakistan’s requirement for conventional army equipment soon developed into a barter arrangement.
“One of Khan’s blueprints appeared to be worth a container filled with North Korean field artillery,” a Mossad analyst said (to the author).
Khan’s activities had gained Pakistan increased influence as the Muslim world’s first nuclear power; this was demonstrated by continued vast sums paid directly into Khan’s bank accounts. By the time he had made his confessions on television, Mossad calculated he had acquired over $10 million. It made him one of the wealthiest men in Pakistan.
All these details had been passed by Mossad to the CIA at the time George Tenet was on the verge of resigning. But there was no sign the Bush administration had ever warned Musharraf to stop Khan’s activities. Or an explanation why, eventually, Washington had only finally delivered a mild response to Khan’s television admission. Indeed, Musharraf’s pardon had earned praise from Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state. Poker-faced, he said, “Pakistan’s president is the right man in the right place.”
Armitage’s words were seen as further evidence that Washington’s hunt for Osama bin Laden had become, said a Mossad officer with years of experience in counterterrorism (to the author), “that most dangerous of all in intelligence, a hunt driven by an obsession that overrides all else. For Bush, nailing bin Laden had become personal from 9/11. He would continue to sanction huge sums, men, and materials to capture him. Anyone who could help do that could ask for anything. Musharraf was in that category.”
The president had seized power in a coup d’état in 1999. Despite the country’s large Muslim majority, many of whom were fundamentalists, when 9/11 happened Musharraf offered unwavering support for Bush’s war on terrorism. It was a huge gamble for a president who by then was already finding it hard to hold on to power. He had survived three assassination attempts and daily found himself confronting not only the country’s religious leaders over their entrenched anti-American views but also the army and the ISI for his support in the war on terrorism. For many of them bin Laden was a folk hero. As he flitted through the mountains bordering Afghanistan with the peaks of the Northwest Frontier, always one step ahead of the U.S. Special Forces hunting him, he received help from members of the ISI.
At the time Khan was making his confession on television, the Special Forces near the northern provinces of Pakistan had once more picked up bin Laden’s trail. The sightings were sent to the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on to the CIA, and finally to the Pentagon and State Department. Everyone recognized that this was
a sensitive time. Only a week before, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Musharraf had said he would not allow American troops to search for bin Laden inside Pakistan. Washington had gritted its teeth and said nothing.
Mossad’s station in the capital had pieced together the understanding of what had transpired behind the scenes. Washington would not pressurize Musharraf to bring Khan for trial over nuclear arms trafficking. Instead, it would remain focused on Pakistan’s continued support for the war on terrorism. In return the Pakistan army and the ISI would hunt for bin Laden inside the country. U.S. Special Forces would be allowed to participate but only under Pakistani command. It was a recipe for mutual suspicion in the field; and after four weeks, not surprisingly with no trace of bin Laden, the search was abandoned.
Bin Laden had issued several tapes since he had first exulted over the destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The Mossad specialists—psychiatrists, psychologists, and behavioural scientists—determined that bin Laden continued to sound like a man who had created his own reality. Their conclusion (seen by the author) was: “At the core of his thinking is death. From his manner and his speech patterns, death is now an integral part of his life. It is not rage that drives him. There is a deeper and all-animating and all-emerging force. His voice is not simply that of the classic street demagogue. It displays what can be called ‘the evil of the truly evil.’ Hitler and Stalin possessed the same vocal traits. He is driven by masked violence. This allows him to operate in a completely detached manner against all those he does not accept have a right to live.”
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 58
