Earlier in 2006 the six-man CIRA team had traveled from Dublin to Frankfurt and onward to Damascus. From there they were brought in an Iranian military aircraft to Tehran. The bomb-makers had been recruited to provide expertise in how to make and disguise infrared triggering devices. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the success of roadside bombs had left dozens of British soldiers dead or injured. The bombs were also used to topple buildings and bring terror to the streets of Belfast and other cities in the province.
The weapons were attached to explosively formed projectiles (EFPs). Since June, EFP weapons have been transported out of Iran into Iraq and Damascus, Syria. From there they were smuggled down into the Beka’a Valley. In Tehran the CIRA team was divided between the three ordinance factories that were working around the clock mass-producing the sophisticated roadside bombs. This was not the first time that CIRA had sold its bomb-making experience to a terror group. Four years ago, three of its members went to Colombia to train that country’s terror group, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Colombian intelligence, on a tip from Mossad, arrested the trio. They were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in a Bogota court, but escaped with the help of the terror group and eventually were smuggled back to Ireland. Despite attempts by the Colombian government to have them extradited to serve out their sentences, the Dublin government refused to return them to Colombia.
The membership of the CIRA was estimated by Mossad at “no more than two hundred.” More certain was that they had never recognized the terms of the Good Friday Agreement that finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. Since the ratification of the protocol, the IRA has been selling its expertise to other groups associated with al-Qaeda.
“The Islamic terrorists are well financed and expanding their operations. But they lack the skills of the CIRA. Its members have become ‘guns for hire.’ Following the ceasefire in Northern Ireland they are out of work and in need of money,” a Mossad analyst told the author.
Mossad also learned that the CIRA members had met with members of a South African terror group called People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD). The meetings took place in a favorite holiday resort for Irish tourists, Sotto Grande, near Malaga in southern Spain. PAGAD wanted to recruit them to come to South Africa to work in their terror camps in the hinterland beyond Durban. PAGAD was originally formed in 1995 to rid the streets of South Africa of drug dealers, but its ideology changed due to the strong influence of the million-plus Muslims in the country. In the past year, intelligence services like Mossad and MI6 have established that PAGAD had strong links to the Tehran regime. Meetings with the regime have taken place in Beirut and Damascus.
A Mossad analyst on South African terror groups told the author: “Since the bombings in London last year, PAGAD has become more militant. No country is safe from the global terror network that is growing, it is highly organized and extends across the world. Its patron and ultimate beneficiary is Iran.”
That July in London, Nathan learned that the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Christopher Kelly, the microbiologist who had been Britain’s foremost expert on biological and chemical warfare, had been reopened three years after his body had been found in an area of woodlands near his home in Oxfordshire. An inquest pronounced the scientist had taken his own life shortly after he was identified as passing classified information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the BBC. The weapons had proven to be nonexistent. But as Operation Overt continued to move forward, Mossad found itself feeding into what would eventually turn out to be the biggest intelligence operation ever mounted in post-war Britain, whose focus had narrowed down to the possibility that two Islamic terror cells in London had been working on bombs made from liquid explosives.
Against this background two members of parliament announced they wanted a new inquiry into Dr. Kelly’s death. One was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, Norman Baker, who revealed that for the past six months he had been investigating the Kelly death and had concluded there was “strong evidence he had not committed suicide but may have been murdered.” Another Member of Parliament, Andrew MacKinlay, a Labour member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, had tabled questions to the Defense Secretary, Des Browne, about the connections between Dr. Kelly and Wouter Basson, who had run a team of scientists in apartheid South Africa whose work allegedly had included attempts to produce a drug that would affect black fertility and darken the skin of white spies so they could infiltrate anti-apartheid groups.
In April 2002, Basson, a heart specialist once the personal physician of the former South African leader, P. W. Botha, had been cleared by a court in Pretoria on forty-six charges. They included fraud, drug-trafficking, and eight counts of murder committed when he had been in charge of Project Coast, the country’s secret apartheid-era germ warfare program. After the verdict, Dr. Basson had been smuggled out of the court by South African intelligence agents. The judge had earlier ruled that cases involving alleged assassinations of apartheid opponents outside South Africa were beyond his jurisdiction. During the trial, Wouter Basson had revealed that the South African government had given him “unlimited power and money to devise defenses against chemical or germ attacks on the country.”
Now, in July 2006, MI5 had begun to investigate whether those defenses had included using the expertise of Dr. Kelly and two other sinister figures in the secret world of biological warfare. One was a Mormon gynecologist, Dr. Larry Ford. Attached to the University of California campus in Los Angeles, Ford had a secret life none of his patients suspected. He had built up a close relationship with Wouter Basson and, through him, established contacts with the biowarfare scientists of North Korea—and Dr. Kelly. The two men had met in a safe house Basson had rented for such meetings. It was at number one, Fair-cloth Farm Cottage, Watersplash, near Ascot, Berkshire. There, MI5 now believed, Dr. Kelly and Dr. Ford regularly met until the gynecologist committed suicide in 2000 at his home in Irvine, California. When police dealing with the case opened Dr. Ford’s refrigerator, they found bottles containing cultures of cholera, botulism, and typhoid fever. All three toxins were among those Dr. Kelly had been working with during his time as head of the microbiology department at Porton Down, the chemical warfare research establishment in England. Had he provided them to Dr. Ford? If so, why? Did Ford or Basson intend to pass them on to North Korea? These were some of the questions for which MI5 wanted answers.
Since October 1989, Dr. Kelly had also established contact with another sinister figure in the world of germ warfare. He was Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, the former top scientist in the Soviet Union’s biowarfare program, Biopreparat. In one of those classic spy novel moments, the fifty-three-year-old Russian microbiologist had strolled out of a drug industry fair in Paris. Telling his colleagues he was going to buy souvenirs for his wife and children back home in St. Petersburg, Pasechnik had instead hailed a taxi to the British Embassy in the city. He had been brought by MI6 agents on the next EuroStar train to London. Dr. Kelly was appointed “to open the Pandora’s Box of biological secrets the Soviet Union had kept concealed from the world,” he later admitted to the author. Assisting Dr. Kelly was Dr. Christopher Davis, a member of the Ministry of Defense Intelligence staff. Over weeks of questioning Dr. Pasechnik revealed, among much else, how the Soviet Union had planned to spread the plague—the medieval Black Death—across Europe.
Later, Dr. Kelly, now a close friend of the Russian scientist, helped him to start Regma Biotechnologies Company and became a regular visitor to the company’s offices in Wiltshire, England. It was in Porton Down, Britain’s secret biodefense establishment. He also arranged for Pasechnik to have his own office and laboratory in the same building where Dr. Kelly worked at Porton Down. On November 21, 2001, Dr. Pasechnik left his office at Regma Biotechnologies. Staff later remembered he seemed happy and in good health. At home he cooked dinner, washed up, and went to sleep. He was found dead in bed the next day. Initially police said the death was �
��inexplicable.” The coroner, however, accepted the pathologist’s report that Pasechnik had died from a stroke. No details of the autopsy were made public. No reporter covered the coroner’s inquest. The funeral, which normally would have attracted media attention given who Pasechnik was, went unreported. A full month later the briefest announcement of his death was released by Dr. Christopher Davis, by then retired from the Ministry of Defense and living outside Washington, DC.
By July 2006, Nathan learned that MI5 had discovered Dr. Kelly had assisted Mossad on a number of occasions and that in his diary there was an indication he planned to contact the Mossad London station chief shortly before his death. There was no mention of the reason why and Nathan had set up an appointment. But had he learned that the MI5 inquiries included seeking answers as to whether the suicides of both Dr. Kelly and Dr. Ford were merely a coincidence—or something more sinister? Were all Dr. Kelly’s contacts with Mossad fully authorized—and if so, by whom? Who had given Dr. Kelly clearance to help Dr. Pasechnik to set up his company? And had the Russian’s death really been from a cerebral stroke—or had it been induced by some other method? It was no secret the Russians and other intelligence services had created fast-acting drugs that could mimic a stroke or heart attack—and leave no trace.
Nathan had been told to maintain a watching brief on developments. There was no more that Meir Dagan would, or could, do.
On August 11, 2006, the UN Security Council finally agreed to the text of a Lebanese ceasefire resolution. Even as the details were being sent to Tel Aviv, in the Israeli Defense Forces war room the men around the table were about to launch a full scale land offensive into Lebanon using thirty-thousand troops and massive air strikes. Their target to reach the Litani River had finally been approved by Prime Minister Olmert. Then, despite furious criticism from his military chiefs around the table, Olmert had decided to wait and see for himself what the exact wording of the UN resolution contained. The generals had accused him of wavering and said that, no matter what the resolution said, this was the time to strike a decisive blow against Hezbollah. Olmert caved in. The IDF would launch its massive assault, bombard Beirut and other cities in south Lebanon, and send its soldiers deep into Hezbollah-held territory.
Within hours, an air armada of fifty-five helicopters, hugging the hills of southern Lebanon for protection, dropped paratroopers near the Litani River. Simultaneously an aerial bombardment fired twenty missiles into the Beirut suburbs. Hezbollah shot down an Israeli transport aircraft killing all five crew members including the woman copilot. They were among twenty-four IDF soldiers to die on that day. The IDF claimed it had killed forty Hezbollah fighters during that period. But over 250 rockets had rained down on northern Israel.
In the war room in the Kirya, the arguments carried on as to whether the UN resolution met Israel’s requirements. It called for Hezbollah “to cease all its attacks” while ordering Israel to end “only its offensive operations.” Chief of Staff General Dan Halutz insisted after the ceasefire his forces should be allowed to remain in their present positions in south Lebanon. It was finally agreed that Ehud Olmert could issue the briefest of statements that his government would accept the UN resolution.
Meir Dagan left the meeting knowing that Olmert failed to achieve his two reasons for launching the war: to crush Hezbollah and recover the two captured soldiers, Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Both had been the reasons given for Israel to go to war. The Mossad chief believed the two captured Israeli soldiers had been moved to the Beka’a Valley and he began to make preparations for another raid into the area. It would not be until 2008 that their bodies would be returned to Israel by Syria in exchange for the release of two hundred Hezbollah prisoners from Israeli jails. In the next few days his agents, accompanied by IDF commandos, once more flew to the Beka’a Valley. After a fierce hand-to-hand battle with Hezbollah fighters, the Israelis withdrew having failed to find the two soldiers. It was also a predictable paradox of the thirty-four days of war that the fire fight would come after both sides had theoretically agreed to halt hostilities. The truth was, Meir Dagan told his senior staff at their weekly meeting, no one had won the war.
The biggest loser was Lebanon. Over one thousand of its people had been killed, fifteen thousand homes and other buildings had been destroyed, tourism and the economy had been decimated. Tourism had generated 15 percent of the Lebanese national economy and the economy had shrunk by 3 percent. Mossad analysts said it would require $2.5 billion to rebuild the country. Israel had lost 144 lives and hundreds more were injured. Israel had also spent $1.6 billion waging the war—equalling 1 percent of its GDP. It’s all important tourist industry had fallen by 50 percent—and would remain like that for some time. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had both suffered a humiliating defeat in accepting Olmert’s insistence at the outset of hostilities that it would be a short conflict. And, even when that had looked unlikely, they had still done nothing to halt the fighting. Their stance had reinforced the view in the Muslim world that Britain and the United States would always side with Israel.
As Israeli troops trudged back from Lebanon, many of them were bitter and angry. They spoke of how they had gone to war in the stifling summer heat without even sufficient water to drink and how they had to take canteens from the bodies of dead Hezbollah fighters. By the time they reached Israel, many signed a petition claiming incompetence “at all levels” in the way the war was run. Others pitched tents outside government buildings in Jerusalem to protest, charging that Ehud Olmert and his security advisers provided incoherent leadership and must be held accountable. It was a view shared by the Mossad analysts. On the top floor of Mossad headquarters there was also anger that Ehud Olmert had asked an old friend, Ofer Dekel, a former head of Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, to try and open discussions with Hezbollah to return the two captured soldiers. Meir Dagan told his senior staff that it was too soon to contemplate such a move.
In the streets of Israel’s cities the anger grew. Brigadier Yossi Hyman, the senior paratrooper’s officer, accused the IDF of “the sin of arrogance,” while expressing his own regret that he had not better prepared his own soldiers for war. A group of reservists sent a devastating indictment of IDF commanders to the country’s defense minister, Amir Peretz. The document accused IDF officers of “chronic indecisiveness and displaying under-preparation, insincerity, and an inability to make rational decisions.” Never before had there been such an attack on Israel’s military elite.
Meir Dagan was not alone in recognizing that if Israel was to survive in an Islamic world grown more determined to remove it, it must urgently learn from its mistakes and adapt. There was a growing public demand that Olmert should resign along with some of his generals. Among those who did resign was Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, General Dan Halutz. But the prime minister clung to office. It was only when he found a criminal investigation, alleging he had been involved in corrupt financial deals, did he finally announce he would leave office in October 2008 and fight to clear his name.
As an uneasy truce settled over Lebanon, Operation Overt, to which Mossad was one of half-a-dozen security services making a contribution, began to move to resolution. MI5 was checking all Britain’s universities and technical schools for Middle East students who had come to Britain to study thermochemistry, the science which includes creating liquid explosives. The search also extended to all British firms that had employed foreign students since 9/11. The fear was that any of them could have been recruited by one of the two terror cells now under intense surveillance in London that were now known to MI5 to be linked to al-Qaeda. MI5 were certain the plot centered on destroying transatlantic flights from Heathrow to the United States.
Mossad’s own scientists had already told MI5 the most effective way of smuggling explosive liquids onto an aircraft would be using two stable fluids which could be mixed in an aircraft lavatory to create a powerful bomb. Research by the chemists showed t
hat nitroglycerine hidden inside a tub of hair gel or a shampoo bottle, with a detonator hidden inside a cell phone, would be one effective method. Another was to use two bottles of clear chemicals hidden inside cans of soft drinks or toiletries. A prime candidate for this method would be triacetone triperoxide (TATP) a crystalline white powder. The July 7, 2005, bombers in London had used this method to create the explosions on the city’s underground system. On board an aircraft the two chemicals would be mixed to create TATP.
Ehud Keinan, a member of the Technical Institute in Tel Aviv, whose expertise was invaluable to Mossad, said (to the author):
There are a number of ways to make liquid explosives. My guess is that terrorists would use one based on the peroxide family. This is because it is relatively easy to initiate such explosives. There is no need for a detonator and a booster. A burning cigarette or a match would be enough to set them off. The basic materials to achieve this are readily available in unlimited quantities in hardware stores, pharmacies, agricultural suppliers, and supermarkets. Sadly, most airports are not yet equipped with the appropriate means to detect those explosives. The truth is that there is no efficient way to stop a suicide bomber who carries a peroxide-based explosive on his body or in his carry-on luggage.
The Mossad chemists concluded that while it would be difficult to destroy an aircraft with one liquid-based bomb, it could be achieved by combining several bombs on one aircraft and placing them near windows or escape hatches. But even a small device could sever an aircraft’s hydraulic control cables. MI5 chemists had studied the precedents for such attacks on board an aircraft. In June 1985, Sikh militants had obliterated an Air India aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 passengers. Pan Am Flight 103 had been similarly destroyed on December 21, 1998, over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. In 1995, al-Qaeda operatives planned to attack a number of passenger planes over the Pacific Ocean. One aircraft owned by Philippine Airlines was attacked with a nitrocellulose bomb, which killed one passenger and injured ten others. On December 22, 2001, Richard Reid, a British-born follower of Osama bin Laden, tried to destroy American Airlines Flight 63 as it flew from Paris to Miami. He had explosives stuffed in his shoes.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 75
