The arrival of his latest video in November 2004 had caused a frisson of excitement among the Mossad analysts. It had been made in a television studio with good quality sound and lighting. He had been filmed against a silk drape; its yellow color was known to be that of his favourite Afghan flower. But it was bin Laden himself who intrigued the analysts. His robes were no longer those of the mountain man but those worn by wealthy city dwellers. His stick and the Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder—props he had always displayed on previous videos—had gone. His beard was neatly trimmed, his eyes clear, his skin healthy. He no longer looked the sick man of his previous videos. When he spoke, his delivery was calm and measured. In earlier videos his mumbling and hesitations had been marked. The latest video suggested he had received professional voice coaching. When he spoke, it was directly into the camera.
The Mossad analysts wondered if the video had been made either in Pakistan or even possibly in one of the northwest provinces of China, where several million Muslims lived in uneasy communion with the Beijing regime. Untold thousands were al-Qaeda supporters and worked in gangs smuggling humans or narcotics into the West. The analysts concluded that one of those gangs had been entrusted to bring the video to Al-Jazeera. As usual, the station publicly insisted it had no idea how the tape came into its hands.
But on that Spring day in 2005, Jamal had met Horaj, not to receive further confirmation that, despite its angry denials, China was offering shelter to bin Laden, but to discover more about a secret underground route along which defectors from China and North Korea made their perilous way to freedom in the West. Of special interest to Mossad was the North Korean scientist who had been working on genetic weapons.
Since March 1984, when Saddam Hussein’s pilots had dropped 100-liter canisters of biological agents on the Kurdish population in the township of Halanja, killing five thousand in minutes, the threat of a biowarfare attack on Israel had become a priority for Mossad.
Russian-speaking agents had tracked down scientists who had once worked for the secret Department 12 of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Their work had been responsible for biological espionage, the planning and preparation of biological terrorism, and all-out biological war. The United States, Britain, and Israel had been among Department 12’s prime targets. Its biologists had successfully genetically weaponized in their Moscow laboratories some of the world’s most dangerous viruses: Ebola, anthrax, smallpox, and baculavius. They had also been working on genes responsible for specific sex, race, and other anthropological features. Another weapon being researched included a toxin that would result in the corruption of human mental processes, induce uncontrollable fear, and lead to death. Substances had also been created to specifically poison reservoirs, food stocks, and pharmaceutical factories; and other Department 12 scientists had been developing sophisticated airborne delivery systems for the Plague, the medieval Black Death, and the equally deadly botulinium. The Mossad agents discovered that when the Soviet Union collapsed, a number of the scientists were recruited to work in North Korea and China.
Links were also found between these countries and genetic weapons research, which had been carried out in the apartheid regime of South Africa; its Project Coast was specifically intended to create an ethnic bomb. The project’s leader, Wouter Basson, was a gifted, totally ruthless, and amoral scientist whose ability to develop biological weapons had made him, in the later words of Archbishop Tutu, “the Devil’s disciple working in the most diabolical aspect of apartheid.” Using front companies that claimed to be conducting bona fide research, Project Coast gathered scientific information from around the world. Some of it came into a small, rented cottage near Ascot in Berkshire, England. Number 1 Faircloth Farm Cottage, Watersplash, was an unlikely address to receive germ warfare material from, among others, the scientists of North Korea. But for them—as isolated as South Africa was from the global scientific community in the days of apartheid—the cottage provided a means of exchanging data, one that escaped the surveillance of MI5. Later, scientists from Project Coast visited Iraq and Libya, and finally Iran.
At first the ayatollahs had refused to keep producing biological weapons as they were contrary to Islamic doctrine, a truth that Mossad’s propagandists skillfully promoted across the Middle East. But after Iraq’s massacre of the Kurds, the Tehran regime reversed the Koran teaching and the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, voted unanimously that biological and chemical weapons should be mass produced. The document the South African scientists had left behind on their visit to Tehran were dusted down by the newly formed Quds Force—in the Arabic language Quds is Jerusalem—which was entrusted in providing Iran with a frontline capability until it had its nuclear arsenal. The South African blueprints ensured the work progressed rapidly.
Among the Project Coast documents was one (seen by the author) that claimed: “The key to creating a successful ethnic bomb lies in isolating the small but critical differences in the human genetic code. That difference consists of no more than 0.1 percent. But this minute amount, which accounts for 3 million letters of the genome code, makes it possible for a comparison between one individual and another. This also makes it possible to identify the differences between large ethnic groups. These differences make them exploitable as a military weapon.” Project Coast’s aim had been to isolate the DNA of certain genes so they could be attacked by deadly microorganisms its scientists were creating in their laboratories. Like Department 12, they also called it an “ethnic bomb,” and it was designed to incapacitate, and even kill, the South African Black population. The work was still in its infancy when the apartheid regime collapsed.
Mossad discovered one colorful figure who had also worked with South Africa and North Korea, a Mormon gynecologist, Dr. Larry Ford, based on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. With his cultivated bedside manner, casual clothes, and hightop basketball shoes, none of his patients suspected he was a villain from the pages of the thrillers he kept in his waiting room bookcase. Dr. Ford had built up a close relationship with Wouter Basson and, through him, had established contacts with the equally sinister scientists of North Korea. Not one of his patients suspected Dr. Ford regularly carried deadly toxins in his baggage on flights to South Africa. The mystery of where he had obtained them, who had authorized their transportation out of the United States, and the identity of the end user were also secrets Dr. Ford would carry to his grave. In the spring of 2000, he had committed suicide. When the police dealing with the case opened Dr. Ford’s refrigerator in his home in Irvine, California, they found sufficient vials to poison, in the words of one officer, “pretty well the whole of the state. We knew then we were not dealing with some routine suicide.” There were bottles containing cultures of cholera, botulism, and typhoid fever. It would remain an unresolved mystery how they got there.
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Mossad had been allowed to interrogate Dr. Rihad Taha, the notorious “Dr. Germ” who directed Saddam Hussein’s biowarfare program. Her total willingness to conduct terminal experiments on humans and her eagerness to find new ways to weaponize germs into even more effective armaments had made the slim, mousy-haired biologist a firm favorite with the Iraqi dictator. The daughter of one of the country’s ruling Baath families, she had acquired her skills at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She had gone there in 1979, arriving at Heathrow Airport on a First Class ticket with Iraqi Airlines from Baghdad. In her suitcases were designer suits from Paris. Taha took a $150 taxi to the campus. No one thought this was remarkable; foreign students were renowned free spenders. She had enrolled to study crop diseases. She was twenty-three years old, with an unattractive way of chewing flower stalks, a habit that had already turned her teeth yellow. While students found her arrogant, tutors were impressed by Taha’s dedication and were sympathetic when her end-of-term results were disappointing. No one suspected this was a deliberate ploy to ensure she would remain at the university to continue her degree course.
The idea had been that of her Iraqi intelligence controller based at the Iraqi Embassy in London and enabled her continued access to restricted papers on germ warfare, some of which came from Porton Down, Britain’s own center for biowarfare research. The documents showed her how to weaponize anthrax, botulism, and other toxins. She learned how deadly germs could be sprayed in shopping malls and bomblets of pathogens distributed over a sports arena. All this could be achieved by using little more than the equipment in a school science lab. When Taha returned to Iraq in 1984, she had a degree in microbiology and joined a small team of other British-trained Iraqi graduates to spearhead Saddam’s biological program. After she became its director in 1986, she abandoned her designer suits for the battle fatigues Saddam favored and hennaed her hair to the color of the Euphrates, which flowed past her mansion home. She set up her laboratories in the Al-Hasan ibn al-Hatham Institute outside Baghdad. It was there she started to kill her victims, the methods including how to inject babies with lethal doses of diarrhea. The babies were taken from women prisoners.
In the summer of 2004, Dr. Taha attempted to barter her freedom for the lives of American, British, and Irish hostages held by a fanatical Islamic terror group in Iraq. When the deal was rejected by the United States, the hostages were beheaded by the group’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In Tel Aviv, the Committee of the Heads of Services had met that year under Meir Dagan’s chairmanship and agreed that after Iran the most serious threat posed to Israel by bioterrorism was from North Korea. The regime continued to threaten Israel with destruction by providing Iran with rockets capable of delivering warheads filled with germs. Mossad had established that a week before the meeting, the Pyongyang regime had been about to ship a container of warheads to Tehran. Using Mossad’s “backdoor” channel with the CIA, Meir Dagan had asked Porter Goss to persuade the White House to ask the Beijing regime to halt the transfer. A phone call from Condoleezza Rice had produced the required result. But in Tel Aviv the intervention was seen as doing little to stop the deadly and illegal traffic between the two pariah states.
The meeting ended with the request that Dagan should send a small team of agents to South Korea to discover what was happening across the border with its northern neighbor. One of its members was Jamal. Under cover of being an Iranian businessman trading in artefacts, he had established a network of informers across South Asia. One had been Horaj, who had provided the first details of what became known in Mossad as New Exodus, the secret route refugees used to escape from the harsh regime of North Korea. For them it had become the equivalent to the biblical Exodus.
The route had a long and colorful history. Originally created by the CIA at the end of the Korean War, it had been used to smuggle its own agents and high-value informers out of North Korea and China. The informers were moved from one safe house to another and escorted by guides through China’s towns and villages to the borders of Cambodia, Laos, and Hong Kong, and who received little or no payment for this dangerous work. One guide probably spoke for many when he told his CIA controller, “I do this for democracy.”
A journey could take weeks, even months. A CIA officer involved in running the operation recalled (to the author): “It was like traveling on a railway where you never knew when the signal would turn from green to red. Then everything shut down until there was another green light.”
The route out of China was a torturous one, often doubling back, and involved traveling by road, river, and train. Several of those who set out never reached safety; the risk of betrayal was a constant threat. China’s Public Security spies and its formidable secret intelligence service were a fearsome duo. No one knows how many CIA agents or informers were captured and never heard of again. Eventually the Exodus route ceased to operate. Then during the 1990s, once more shocking accounts of the depravity of the North Korean regime began to emerge. Defectors all told the same story of a nation living increasingly in near starvation, of torture, and forced labor. Most horrifying of all were the reports of inhuman experiments on prisoners from relatives who managed to cross the 880-mile-long border into China. But those who had fled found little relief there. It had an estimated 5 million of its own prisoners in camps as grim as the gulags of North Korea. When caught, asylum seekers were swiftly transported back across the border to an inevitable fate of interrogation, torture, and death.
To save them, two remarkable human rights activists reopened the old CIA route. Their Mossad profiles paint ennobling pictures.
Douglas Shin and Norbert Vollersten were both in their late forties and came from very different cultural backgrounds. Shin was a Korean-American church pastor who had been ordained after a career as a businessman and filmmaker, and he lived in a Los Angeles suburb as pastor of his church. He had the Asian’s mannerisms of being polite and diffident; only when he spoke of the gross abuses of North Korea or its people was he aroused to quiet passion. Then his words filled with religious metaphors; the pain and anger in his eyes was there for all to see. There was about him then a sense that if you were not part of the answer he wanted, you were part of his many problems in rescuing people from the terror of Kim Jong Il’s regime. He was one of the two “station masters” for New Exodus. The other was Vollersten.
A tallish, stocky man, broad across the shoulders, Vollersten looked and, at times, sounded like one of the hippy protestors who had taken to the streets against Vietnam and, later, the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Some people called him “a little crazy”; others said the world needed more men like him. Vollersten accepted their plaudits the way he dealt with his detractors: with that same slow smile, the flick of a hairstyle rooted in a bygone generation. “It made him disarming even when he would continue to argue his point until there was no point left to argue,” his Mossad file noted.
Vollersten’s student life in Düsseldorf had encompassed politics and journalism until he became a medical doctor, married, and fathered four sons. But on the eve of a new millennium all that was soon to change. He argued with the German health authorities how community care should be run. Ignored, he organized his patients to publicly demonstrate—the first time a doctor had done this in Germany. He was again ignored. He organized more patient marches. His Medical Association in the conservative city of Goettingen disowned him. Finally his wife divorced him, claiming he was “crazy.” With his long blond hair and full moustache, he looked like an aging rock star. Finally he joined an organization called “German Emergency Doctors”; it sent physicians anywhere there was a need for humanitarian aid. Vollersten was offered either the baking Sahara of South Sudan or North Korea. He read several travel guidebooks about Sudan. But there was not one available for North Korea. He decided that was where he should go.
Shin had come from South Korea to California as a twenty year-old. But the knowledge of what was happening in North Korea had followed him, and by the time he became a pastor, all he had read and heard made a decisive impact on him. He began to lay down the tracks for what became New Exodus and plugged into other human rights organizations around the world.
Meantime, in North Korea, Vollersten had repeatedly encountered the terrified silence of patients asked about their lives. Leaving North Korea at the end of his contract, he mounted a ferocious campaign against the regime. He sought out North Korean refugees and retold their stories to anyone who would listen: journalists, politicians, other human rights workers. He traveled around Asia, lecturing, appealing; there was about him, he would admit, the angry passion of someone whose eyes had been opened. His battle cry of “inform, provoke, and mobilise” became his rallying call. He and Shin became two voices united in common cause to promote the plight of all those trapped in North Korea or who had fled their homeland into the hostile environment of China. New Exodus became the focus of all they wanted to achieve. By 2004, over three hundred thousand had traveled its length.
Along the invisible railway “platforms”—safe houses in China’s cities, farms in its countrysid
e, boats on its rivers—waited the intelligence agents and their informers. As usual, Jamal and the other Mossad agents worked alone. It was their way. Their brief was simple: to locate any defector who could provide the latest information about North Korea and its work on developing weapons of mass destruction. Then the spies and their informers all became united in common cause: to locate Dr. Ri Che-Woo. He was undoubtedly the most important escapee to be traveling along New Exodus.
Dr. Ri was a microbiologist and director of a project more secret than all the other secret projects in a country where secrecy itself was instilled from birth. Just as Department 12 and Project Coast had sought to create their ethnic bombs, Dr. Ri was employed at Institute 398, located at Sogram-ri in the south of Pyongyang Province to develop a similar weapon, this one designed to strike the white populations on earth. A sign of the institute’s importance was being ring fenced by three battalions of troops. The first hint about Dr. Ri’s work had come from a defector. Over the following months, details emerged from more defectors suggesting that Dr. Ri and his 250 geneticists could be further advanced than the South Africans and Russians had been. Now, many more months later, Horaj had sought a meeting with Jamal, bringing information that Mossad, like other intelligence services, had eagerly awaited. Dr. Ri was somewhere along the New Exodus route trying to make his perilous way to freedom. Norbert Vollersten had learned Dr. Ri was carrying a dossier detailing human experiments used in North Korea’s biological program. Western intelligence agents watched the moves of the CSIS and the country’s Public Security as they tried to locate Dr. Ri. But amid a population of 1.3 billion people who were used to being constantly spied upon, the microbiologist had vanished into the air faster than the spent fireworks at Chinese New Year celebrations.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 59
