Moshe Feinstein had returned to Israel with important information from The Salesman. His ID card allowed him to bypass airport formalities and quickly reach the waiting car and driver. On the windscreen was a sticker bearing the motto of the Israel Tourist Office: two men carrying grapes and a pitcher, a reminder of the time Moses had sent Caleb and his men to seek the Promised Land and to find out if its people possessed poisons or disease-spreading germs that could be used with devastating effect on the Jews who had already endured much on their flight from Pharaoh’s Egypt. Caleb had returned with news that the land, which later became Israel, “flowed with milk and honey.” It was a running joke in Mossad that this was the first—and best—intelligence the country had received.
Thirty minutes later the car arrived at the gates of the Kirya, the headquarters of the Israeli Defense Forces. A sentry checked IDs, a hydraulic barrier was raised, and the car drove a short distance to halt before a featureless concrete building. Inside was the spartan conference room where the Committee of the Heads of Services met. With them was the director of military intelligence, Brigadier General Moshe Ya’alon. Within Israel he was a legend, a former paratrooper in the elite Saynet Maktal, the equivalent of Britain’s SAS, who had served in all those trouble spots in the Middle East where the streets and souks often had no names and where it was kill-or-be-killed. Beside him sat Meir Dagan.
Even allowing for the flat, emotionless tone in which Mossad encouraged its officers to deliver their reports, the men around the conference table could only have been galvanized when Moshe Feinstein revealed what The Salesman had told him. Abdul Qadeer Khan had secretly traveled to Riyadh and had met with Abdullah. The purpose of the meeting had been to activate the ultrasecret agreement on nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, which was designed to provide the House of Saud with nuclear weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil. Mossad had already discovered—through the network of informers its agent, Jamal, ran across Asia—that the pact also called for Pakistan to respond to any nuclear attack from Iran by launching its own nuclear arsenal. The pact had been signed during Abdullah’s visit to Islamabad in 2003. Mossad’s analysts had dismissed the promise to assist Saudi Arabia in such an event as little more than window dressing.
But the presence of Khan in Riyadh had heightened Israel’s fear that if Saudi Arabia developed a nuclear weapons capability, its missiles posed a serious threat to the Jewish state.
Moshe Feinstein’s briefing brought the possibility that much closer. The Salesman had told him that Saudi C-130 military transporters had started to make regular flights from their Dharan military base. It was from there that America had launched its first Iraqi war aerial onslaught on Iraq; the base was totally under the control of Riyadh after U.S. forces had now been pulled out of the country. The giant aircraft made round trips to Lahore and Karachi that had started after Khan’s visit. The Salesman had discovered the aircraft returned with payloads of materials that had come from Pakistan’s uranium enrichment factory at Kahuta.
Some of The Salesman’s information dovetailed with what Mossad knew. In 1987, Saudi Arabia had bought CSS-2 missiles from China. Though their range brought Israel within reach, they were capable only of carrying conventional warheads and would prove no match for Israel’s high-tech defenses. Saudi Arabia’s first serious attempt to enter the nuclear arena was in 1990 when the House of Saud secretly transferred to Saddam Hussein $5 billion to build them a nuclear bomb. The transfer of the money was handled by Tiny Rowland, the London financier who was Saddam’s bagman, hiding his massive fortune in banks around the world; it has remained undiscovered to this day (see chapter 19, “After Saddam,” pp. 397–402). The bomb was never built, and the deal had surfaced only when Mohammed Khilevi, the first secretary at the Saudi mission to the United Nations, had defected in July 1994, taking with him over ten thousand documents that detailed the House of Saud’s attempt to become a nuclear power. The International Atomic Energy Agency sent inspectors to the country to examine its nuclear facilities. They decided the kingdom had neither the technical capability nor the skilled manpower to handle a nuclear weapon.
Nevertheless the discovery of Riyadh’s intentions had created international alarm, especially in Israel. This increased as evidence emerged of Saudi Arabia’s support for jihadist causes in Kashmir, Uzbekistan, and Chechnya that were linked to bin Laden. It was the Saudi link with Kashmir that Mossad had focused on; Riyadh supported the Kashmir insurgents by funneling the funds through Pakistan; tens of millions of dollars were laundered through Islamabad’s central bank. Vast sums were sent by the same route to support the Taliban in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden, already lionized in Riyadh for his fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, remained a heroic figure in the desert kingdom. Too late the House of Saud realized he was its mortal enemy. The September 11 attacks against the United States made the king and his thousands of princes realize the extent of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. With the American withdrawal of its protective military shield, the House of Saud found itself urgently needing a nuclear arsenal. Pakistan, still one of the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism, had the capability of providing the weapons. It became the first port of call for the frightened rulers of the kingdom. The arrival of Abdul Qadeer Khan in Riyadh was further proof of Pakistan’s readiness to satisfy their demands in return for unlimited oil at a bargain price.
Tel Aviv saw the real danger from a Saudi-Pakistan pact was that the House of Saud could be tempted to try and buy peace for itself by providing al-Qaeda with nuclear weapons.
The katsa had one final piece of information. The Salesman had identified the six Pakistani nuclear scientists who had vanished after being named in the America Hiroshima documents from photographs Mossad had obtained and had shown him.
It was then that the scientists had moved from Mossad’s Detain List to the separate and very secret one it kept for those it was tasked to assassinate.
Rules for an assassination had not changed. Each execution had to be approved by a committee chaired by the incumbent prime minister and was of a person, the evidence showed, who posed a clear and present danger to the state of Israel and who could not be brought to trial because he or she was protected within the borders of one of Israel’s enemies. Among them were Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, and the numerous Islamic republics of the former Soviet Bloc. In Mossad’s eye view, the need for kidon had increased with the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in all its guises: Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Solidarity Front, Palestinian Liberation Front, the terrorists of the Philippines; all were pledged to destroy the Jewish State. The kidon had killed in all those places, employing the many skills acquired through their extensive training under the precise guidelines they had learned and that had remained in force since Meir Amit, the most innovative and ruthless director general of Mossad before Meir Dagan had taken over, had written out the rules in his bold handwriting: “There will be no killing of heads of state however extreme they are. They will be dealt with politically. There will be no killing of a terrorist’s family unless they are also proven to be implicated in terrorism. Each execution must be legally sanctioned by the prime minister of the day. It is therefore the ultimate judicial sanction of the state and the executioner is no different from a legally appointed hangman or any other lawfully appointed executioner of the state.”
Part of what Amit once likened to a “theology of death” (to the author) is based on an eighty-page manual written in 1953 by a scientist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who at the time was head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division. The manual has remained to this day in the midrasa, the Mossad training school, and is used as part of the two-year course for its agents. From them came the kidon. Rafi Eitan, a former Mossad operation chief, told the author, “Only a handful show the requirements; a total coldness once committed, and afterwards no regrets.”
Those requirements were imbued in the team who had begun to devise ways to assassinate the six Pakistani scientists the Stat
e of Israel had decided must die. Kidon assembled profiles of the scientists with the help of the Asia Desk, with information from The Salesman provided to Moshe Feinstein, from Jamal’s informers in Pakistan and elsewhere. Ari Ben-Menashe articulated to the author: “They were getting to know their targets; background, family, and friends, any connection that could be useful. How they reacted in a situation; what pushes their buttons. Only then could an operational plan be constructed. They would study every inch of the country where they worked, its geography and climate. They would study videotapes, travel brochures, local newspapers. Their methodology was anchored in their well-honed ability to separate fact from conjecture and the plans they created were governed by the golden rule that facts could not always wait for certainty.”
Late in October 2005, The Salesman gave Moshe Feinstein the news that the six scientists had flown from Riyadh to Tehran, a week after North Korea had delivered liquid propellant to power Iran’s Shahab-3 rocket with its range of eight hundred miles and a capability of delivering a warhead that would obliterate Tel Aviv. On Tuesday, October 25, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a Tehran conference called “The World Without Zionism.” It was the last week of Ramadan, the time of prayer. Five months before, he had replaced a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, who had advocated international dialogue and improving Iran’s relationship with the West. With words reminiscent of Hitler, Ahmadinejad said, “Israel and the Jews must be wiped off the map. Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”
In the kirya Israel’s three nuclear submarines and their arsenal of missiles with nuclear warheads were brought to a level one stage below launch as they kept silent watch on the seabed in the Strait of Hormuz opposite the Iranian Coast.
On November 2, 2005, a Mossad-inspired operation was moving to a climax in the Indonesian tropical city of Batu. A month had passed since a katsa in Delhi, the Indian capital, had learned that Azhari Husin, al-Qaeda’s most experienced bomb maker, who had already been identified by Mossad as the mastermind behind the July bombers in London, had been in Delhi shortly before bombs had ripped through the city’s Pahargani District. The attack was later earmarked as the work of an al-Qaeda group in Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Soldiers of Fortune. Over sixty people had died and over a hundred were seriously injured. Mossad’s offer to help Indian intelligence track Husin was swiftly accepted.
For three weeks the search yielded no trace of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Then a sayanim on East Java, part of the Indonesian archipelago, told his katsa controller that a number of men had rented a house in a suburb of Batu, and two of them bore a resemblance to newspaper photographs of the terrorists suspected of being behind the previous month’s attack on a restaurant in Bali in which twenty-three people had died. Within hours the katsa arrived in Batu. The newspaper photographs were of Azhari Husin and the leader of another militant group, Jamaah Islamiah, called Noordin Mohammed Top, a ruthless killer cast from the same pitiless mold as Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. The sayanim reported that Top had left Batu the previous evening.
Working through a well-established rule that ensured Mossad’s presence remained unknown, the katsa informed his station chief at the Israeli Embassy in Dehli. The Indian Foreign Ministry was told. From there a call went to its counterpart in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. Within an hour of the first call, a full-scale operation was underway in Batu. Led by Indonesia’s elite antiterrorist unit, snipers were posted on neighboring roofs and a pitched battle began. From within the house, hand grenades were hurled and gunfire raked the street as the unit stormed the house. As they entered, Husin reached for the detonator on the explosive belt he was wearing, but was stopped from doing so when a police officer shot him in the chest and legs. But there was no time to stop another terrorist from detonating his own belt. The blast knocked the roof off the house. Azhari Husin ended his life like most of his victims, amid the devastation of a suicide bombing.
The bomb maker had been high on the list of terrorists to be “rendered” by the CIA Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers (CTIC) at Langley. Originally created in the mid-1990s by the Clinton administration, it had rapidly expanded after the 9/11 attacks to counter the threat of Islamic terrorism and overcome CIA difficulties in obtaining convictions against terrorists. Further expansion followed the end of the war with Iraq when a number of meetings took place in London and Washington, chaired by both countries’ intelligence chiefs, to decide how to best deal with the large number of captured suspected terrorists. Mossad had a seat at the table. Out of those meetings came the creation of a purpose-built interrogation center at the U.S. base at Bagram in the charge of forty CTIC men and women, including doctors trained in the use of psychotropic drugs. Many were familiar with the use of mind-bending chemicals that had been developed for the notorious CIA MK-ULTRA program in the 1960s. Mossad’s own interrogators were given full access to the captives. Intelligence they acquired was shared with CTIC.
Bagram quickly became crowded with captured Taliban and foreign mercenaries. In the first weeks, two died during interrogation and several were left permanently physically incapacitated. But the center was soon overflowing with prisoners. At a meeting in London in April 2002 chaired by John Scarlett at the offices of the Joint Intelligence Committee and attended by CTIC officers and at which Meir Dagan was also an observer, it was decided that Bagram was not able to operate efficiently under such conditions. Even when detainees were transferred on the so-called Guantánamo Express to Cuba, the freight car cells at Bagram quickly filled up with new prisoners. Could another site—possibly several—be found? Scarlett had served in Moscow as an MI6 officer and recalled the existence of interrogation centers throughout the Soviet Union: he said the worst had been those run by the KGB in Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Poland. They could well serve CTIC’s purpose. Scarlett knew two senior officers of Polish military intelligence who had worked with GROM, a specialist Polish intelligence unit in Iraq. They were invited to London to meet senior members of MI6 who had worked in Eastern Europe. George Tenet, now in the dying months of his tenure, sent several senior officials to attend. The Poles confirmed the KGB interrogation centers remained intact and were used by local security services to question criminals.
Because of the considerable distance involved, the only way to transfer high-value al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists from Bagram would be by air. CTIC already had its own aircraft, and its senior officer at the meeting said there would be no problem in arranging overflying and refueling rights in countries like Britain, Germany, and Spain. The Polish officers identified airfields within the old Warsaw Pact that could be used as stopovers; the air base at Tazar in south central Hungary, the Szczytno-Szymany air base in Poland, and the Markuleshti airfield in Moldova. During the Cold War they had all been used for secret operations by Warsaw Pact Special Forces. Interrogations had also been conducted there by the KGB.
The operational plans sufficiently advanced, it was time for them to be politically rubber-stamped. Scarlett informed Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Tenet briefed President Bush. Both quickly endorsed them. Recognizing that Poland would have an important role to play as the refueling point for all flights going to Uzbekistan—selected by CTIC to be the prime interrogation center for the terrorists—it was essential to get the support of Leszek Miller, the country’s soon to be ousted prime minister who had staunchly supported the war on Iraq. He immediately agreed to allow the Szczytno-Szymany base to be used as CTIC’s prime refueling point in Eastern Europe and would inform his cabinet colleagues of his decision. A London intelligence source told the author: “Miller may well have not known the ultimate fate of those who would be secretly flown in and out of his country. But he was also desperately wanting to remain a player in the post–Iraq war coalition.”
The first flight began in May 2002. A Gulfstream V executive jet, registration N379P, landed at Northolt airport, a secure military airfield near London. It had a l
ong history of being a staging post for CIA and MI6 officers en route to secret missions in Europe during the Cold War. Under what the Ministry of Defense later called “standing regulations,” the only details listed of the Gulfstream flight were the names of the pilot and the aircraft owner. No record was made of any passengers on board. The aircraft was registered to Premier Executive Transport Services. Subsequently, the Mail on Sunday, a mass-circulation newspaper in Britain, reported that the company’s directors “appear to exist only on paper. Bryan P. Dyness, Steven E. Kent and Audrey M. Taylor, appear to have no personal details or previous employment history. This is the kind of sterile identity the CIA uses to conceal involvement in clandestine operations.”
On a sunny spring day the Gulfstream V and its unrecorded passengers flew across from Northolt to the Szczytno-Szymany base in northern Poland still blanketed by winter snow. After refueling, the aircraft flew south from there to Uzbekistan. Soon the executive jet was on a regular run, picking up detainees in Jakarta in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bagram. One was the Yemeni microbiologist Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, wanted by CTIC “in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole while the warship was at anchor off Aden.” He was flown to Uzbekistan and his fate remains unknown. Another passenger had been Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian suspect who had worked with the British “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. He was rendered from Jakarta to Egypt. His fate also remains unknown.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 65
