Whether Meir Dagan’s meeting with Qiao Shi took place in the compound would remain unknown, just as what was agreed between them. But twenty-four hours after his plane had landed it was in the air again heading back to Israel.
A few days later Mossad was among a number of Western intelligence services that discovered North Korea was weaponizing the bird flu virus. It added to the mounting concern that was already sweeping the world as the prospect grew of a repetition of the 1918 influenza pandemic that had killed 50 million. Then, as now, there was no ready vaccine to inoculate entire populations. Warnings from intelligence services said that in aerosol form the weaponized virus would be undetectable at border crossings, making it an ideal weapon for terrorists. In Washington, the Bush administration gave briefings classified “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” to members of Congress and the Senate, during which CIA Director Porter Goss and John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence, revealed details of the terrorist threat.
The outbreak had originated in Asia and the intelligence chiefs explained it would be relatively easy for North Korean agents to obtain birds infected with the H5N1 strain from which the virus could be weaponized. Biopreperat’s former director, Dr. Ken Alibek, who had defected from Russia and was now a senior adviser to the Bush administration on biodefense, said to the author, “The threat of a weaponized bird flu virus cannot be overemphasized. It would be the most terrible weapon in the hands of a terrorist. An aerosolized bird flu would be impossible to detect from one spread naturally by infected birds. But the lab-produced virus would be far more lethal and could be directed at specific targets.”
Peter Openshaw, professor of virology at Imperial College, London, said, “It would be more terrifying than engineered smallpox. That would be relatively easy to contain because there is an existing vaccine.” Hugh Pennington, professor of microbiology at Aberdeen University in Scotland, said North Korea’s molecular biologists “could mix the bird flu virus with other flu viruses, making it easier to spread from personal contact.”
Were the reports that North Korea was weaponizing bird flu an indication the regime had dismissed any approach by China to stop arming Iran? Had Qiao Shi simply politely listened to Dagan and done nothing? Or had he agreed with the old men of Zhongnanhai that it would not be in their own interest to put pressure on their unstable neighbor?
The one certainty was that a warhead filled with weaponized virus and launched against Tel Aviv would have disastrous consequences. But it was now not only the possibility of a weaponized bird flu virus that threatened Israel and the world beyond its borders. This one came from six nuclear scientists who had worked in the Pakistan nuclear industry and had left the country.
Mossad had discovered their activities before they had left Pakistan after having worked closely with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Islamic bomb and the godfather of nuclear proliferation. Their technical experience included the complex disciplines needed to use centrifuges to produce enriched uranium, the precursor for a nuclear bomb.
Their skills had been enhanced by South African nuclear experts secretly employed in Pakistan’s nuclear program at the Khan Research Laboratories. South Africa’s own space-age program had been dismantled after America had threatened trade sanctions in 1993. Overnight President Nelson Mandela had canceled his dream of putting an astronaut into space. And along with billions of rands being wasted, hundreds of highly skilled men and women found themselves out of work.
But the more talented did not have to wait long for offers. The first came from Dimona, Israel’s nuclear facility. Its relationship with the South African program had prospered from the time Dimona know-how had fine-tuned South Africa’s first intermediate-range missile, the Arniston, a carbon copy of Israel’s own Jericho II rocket. A decade of close collaboration had finally ended in 1992, again with pressure from the United States. But the ties between the scientists had remained.
To those who had worked at Kempton Park, a facility outside Johannesburg developing high-resolution camera systems for satellites; at Somerset West, in the bushland of Eastern Cape, where rocket motors had been designed; at the systems engineering facility at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, came attractive offers. No longer would they need to live in a country with the highest murder rate in the world and plagued with corruption scandals. In Israel they would earn salaries in a hard currency of their choice that far exceeded what they had previously earned. In no time they had begun to sell their homes near the missile test sites in Kwa/Zula/ Natal and in the former nature reserve near Cape Town, and had flown north on the regular El Al flight to Tel Aviv, joining others from the nuclear warheads manufacturing plant out on the veldt beyond the country’s capital, Pretoria. With all expenses paid and a substantial down payment in their bank accounts, they had settled into their new lives in the palm-fringed settlements that had been created for them in the Negev Desert. They found themselves working alongside a number of Russians who had also been headhunted after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The recruiters from Pakistan had also been busy. Working with even more discretion than the Israelis had shown, they had offered other disaffected scientists salaries at even higher levels than those from Dimona. With them came the promise of a lifestyle in Pakistan that would match those the scientists had enjoyed during the high days of apartheid: servants they had to let go after the collapse of South Africa’s space-age program would once more be plentiful in Pakistan, along with sundowners, the evening ritual of cocktails at sunset that had been an integral part of their South African life. They would live in homes even more lavish than those on the Cape; their children would be educated in private schools whose teachers came from the great universities of England, France, and the United States, and their private medical facilities would be staffed with the best doctors. Along with generous holidays, their income would be tax-free and deposited in any bank of their choice anywhere in the world. The offers were eagerly accepted and flights out of Johannesburg to Islamabad were filled with the scientists and their families.
Over the years, they helped to develop the skills of the six Pakistani nuclear scientists who had discretely slipped out of the country after they had been identified as being involved in what became known in Mossad, MI6, and the CIA as “America’s Hiroshima.” The intention was to smuggle into the United States a nuclear device that would be detonated in Washington. The bomb would be transported in one of the container ships that arrived at American East Coast ports every week. Few were subjected to a full search. Sleeper agents would collect the bomb, packed inside a container, take it to Washington, and detonate it, creating even more deaths and casualties than the September 11 attacks had achieved.
The operation had been devised by Osama bin Laden with an exactness that would have the same terrible synchronicity as the September 11 attacks. The intention was not only to terrorize and appall by the sheer number of victims, but at the same time provide an example of victory won by violence. Politically it was designed as a rallying call for global jihad, worldwide holy war. The leaders of Muslim nations who opposed it would be swept away in what bin Laden had likened to the creation of the new caliphate of which he had long dreamed. He envisaged how, barely a generation after many Muslim countries had won their independence, mostly from Britain, their world would enter a new religious era. Already the first phase was in place in Iran where the 1979 Khomeini revolution had aroused the deprived masses. Next to fall in the aftermath of America’s Hiroshima would be the Saudi royal family, who bin Laden had long accused of betraying their duties as custodians of the holy places of Mecca and Medina.
Details of the plan to detonate a nuclear device in America had emerged with the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden’s military operations chief, in an al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi on March 2, 2003. The arrest was made by Pakistani intelligence agents, allowing President Musharraf to offer further proof to Washington that he remained a staunch supporter
of the war against terrorism. It continued to be less than the full truth. While Pakistan had indeed detained scores of al-Qaeda members, it still sponsored terrorist groups in the disputed state of Kashmir, funding, training, and arming them in their war of attrition against India. The Bush administration continued to regard Pakistan as its powerful ally in the war on terrorism espoused by bin Laden. “Kashmir is a side issue,” a State Department official told the author.
The arrest of Mohammed earned further public gratitude from Washington. No mention would be made of the role played by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces, who had flown the high-value captive to their interrogation compound at the American base at Bagram in Afghanistan. They brought with them over a thousand documents and a hundred hard drives recovered from Mohammed’s safe house in a Karachi back street; he had been betrayed for a thousand U.S. dollars. The documents and disks would later be deemed as “an operational gold mine” and served as the basis for Mohammed’s interrogation.
Manacled and hooded in one of the compound’s railroad freight trucks, subjected to sleep deprivation and long periods of amplified “white noise,” denied air-conditioning during the intense heat of the day and no warmth for the icy cold of the night, injected with drugs to weaken his resistance, coupled with physical violence and threats of summary execution—techniques later exposed by Amnesty International—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began to reveal details of America’s Hiroshima. It called for the detonation of seven tactical nuclear devices in seven cities simultaneously. The cities were New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. Each device would be capable of creating an explosion of ten kilotons. The planning for the multiple explosions was still in its early stages, and the operation would ultimately require smuggling into the United States the nuclear devices in seaborne cargo containers. Every year around 18 thousand container ships arrive at U.S. ports; only a small percentage are thoroughly checked. To check all would require manpower far beyond what is available and would have serious consequences for America’s commerce.
It was at this stage, in May 2003, that Mossad became directly involved.
A set of the captured documents and the first interrogation transcripts had been passed to Mossad as part of the close collaboration established between Porter Goss and Meir Dagan. In return Mossad had provided the CIA with electrifying news. Abdul Qadeer Khan had, in April 2003, met with bin Laden. The scientist had flown to Peshawar in the Northwest Province and had been driven through the towering mountains and across the Pakistan border into the hard, unforgiving, and desolate land of eastern Afghanistan. With Khan had gone one of the six nuclear scientists Mossad had been tracking. His name was Murad Qasim and he was the leading expert in the intricacies of centrifugal technology in the Khan Laboratories.
Now, a month later in mid-May, Qasim was among Khan’s guests at his weekend house overlooking a lake outside Rawalpindi on the north plane of the Punjab. The area was a conservationist paradise.
Posing as fishermen, a Mossad yaholomin team had set up surveillance near the house. Direction mikes had been disguised as rods.
Five years had passed since Khan had successfully detonated Pakistan’s first nuclear bomb at the test site beneath the Baluchistan Desert. In the intervening years he had continued to sell nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. As well as Murad Qasim, Mossad had identified five of his colleagues who had also traveled there; Muhammad Zubair, Bashiruddin Mahmood, Saeed Akhther, Imtaz Baig, and Waheed Nasir. All were senior managers at the Khan Laboratories. On that weekend in May, they completed the guest list at Khan’s retreat by the lake.
Like their host, Khan’s guests were confirmed al-Qaeda supporters. Bashiruddin Mahmood, in addition, had held a meeting with bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, in Kandahr,Afghanistan, earlier in the year. On his way back to Pakistan he had been briefly detained by U.S. forces in the town. Mahmood had claimed diplomatic immunity and insisted he was in the country on an “agricultural visit.” Faced with documents supporting his claim, he had been allowed to fly back to Islamabad. After being prompted by the CIA to interview him, Pakistan intelligence officers were astonished when Mahmood admitted he had indeed met the terrorists, who had asked him to devise a radiological bomb. It would be constructed from nuclear material wrapped in conventional high explosives, which bin Laden had obtained from a former Soviet Union nuclear site in Uzbekistan. Mahmood had insisted he had refused the request. The Pakistani government informed Washington that Mahmood was above suspicion. No mention was made of his meeting with bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
Now the eavesdropping Mossad team heard Mahmood tell Khan and his guests that his own contacts in Pakistan Intelligence had warned him that the CIA knew about their own role in America’s Hiroshima after their names had surfaced in the documents discovered with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s capture. Mossad’s long-rooted suspicions had been confirmed: Mahmood had gone to Kandahr not to discuss with bin Laden the making of a relatively simple “dirty bomb” but to pledge the services of himself and the five other scientists around Khan’s table.
Next day, even as Meir Dagan was sending Porter Goss details of what the yaholomin unit had recorded, all six scientists had left Pakistan. Khan subsequently resolutely denied any knowledge of his staff being involved in the plot to launch nuclear strikes against America.
Their names had gone onto the Detain Lists of a number of security services. But like others with terrorist links, the scientists had vanished like proverbial thieves in the night. A year would pass before Mossad once more picked up their trail. They were in Saudi Arabia.
Almost a year after Abdul Qadeer Khan had made his televised confession of being a nuclear weapons black marketeer, a commercial flight from Cyprus landed at Tel Aviv airport. Among its passengers was Moshe Feinstein (a pseudonym). He was a Mossad katsa and its expert on nuclear proliferation. In Nicosia he had met with a member of Saudi Arabia’s large foreign community. After months of careful cultivation and detailed checks into his background and that of his family, the foreigner had been recruited as a sayanim and given the code name of “The Salesman,” a nod toward his business acumen. Meetings would be arranged through The Salesman placing a notice in the Lonely Hearts section of a London newspaper available in Riyadh. Two days after it appeared, Moshe would fly to keep the appointment.
The Salesman had developed strong connections with the House of Saud, exploiting the fact that its administration was highly personalized, often being no more than functionaries surrounding one individual, usually a prince of the kingdom. It was The Salesman’s ability to target those key individuals that had made him important to Mossad. In an early briefing, The Salesman had explained to Moshe that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revolved around Prince Saud al-Faisal; and no decision, however inconsequential, could be made without his approval. Other ministries were similarly run. The Salesman had summed up the situation as “if you give them a list of more than one item, they often don’t get to the second. Negligence and incompetence are bywords.” In November 2008, five years after the lakeside meeting, Waheed Nasir chose to deny the Mossad report that he had been present or had gone to Iran.
His tantalizing glimpses into the closed world of the kingdom came during his regular trips to Europe and vacations on Cyprus to escape the ferocious high temperature of summer in Riyadh. A contact in the Ministry of Information had revealed details of the increasing anti-Americanism in the country (in 2005, a regime-approved poll showed that 97 percent of the population held a negative view of the United States). Even more disturbing was the growing extent of the penetration of al-Qaeda into Saudi Arabia and how the ruling family had tried to avoid attacks on its members by allowing them to pay substantial sums to the organization—providing the money was used only to attack targets outside the country. The Salesman had provided details of how Saudi petrodollars had financed the September 11 massacre and the attack on the USS Cole. The Salesman’s evidence enabled Dore Gold, a former
Israeli ambassador with close ties to Mossad, to publicly warn: “Saudi Arabia is paying a ransom to be left alone. It does not care who else suffers. It will reap what it is sowing.”
Within the House of Saud, a power struggle had persisted after the death of King Fahd and the appointment of Abdullah to rule over the desert kingdom. He was a half brother of a powerful faction within the royal family. It was comprised of Prince Sultan, the defense minister; Prince Nayef, the interior minister; Prince Turki, director of intelligence and now ambassador to the Court at St. James; and Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh. They were known as the Sudairi after their mother, Hassa bint Ahmad al-Sudairi, the favorite wife of King Ibn Saud, the founder of the kingdom. Abdullah, their half brother, since coming to power had antagonized the Sudairi by his constant rebukes for their profligate spending habits, which were also a cause of smouldering public resentment. This had led to a groundswell of religious fervor among the population, half of whom were under the age of eighteen. This had been compounded by the country’s oil income fluctuations, leading to a decline in living standards. It had been a fertile breeding ground for al-Qaeda to exploit.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 64
