by Michael Ross
I’ll never know how much of this was talk. I was a (fake) journalist after all, so no doubt most or all of these people were just trying to spin me. But I do think that I got a few balls rolling. In any case, after I’d spoken to everyone I could think of over the course of five days, I returned to Israel and wrote up my reports.
Whether I impeded the Kuntsevich-Syria commercial relationship is impossible to say. If I had to guess, I’d say my efforts had little effect. In any case, whether through Kuntsevich or not, the Syrians did eventually manage to build Scud-Cs equipped with chemical warheads. (In 2004, the Mossad’s DG, Meir Dagan, announced in an address to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization council that Syria had adapted Sarin and VX nerve agents to Scud warheads and aerial bombs.) When you’re dealing with a rogue state such as Syria that has absolutely dedicated itself to procuring weapons of mass destruction, it really is only a matter of time. This is why counter-proliferation missions are so frustrating: you’re just trying to delay the inevitable.
General Kuntsevich died on April 3, 2002. The details of his demise are sketchy, but according to one uncorroborated report, he died on a plane departing from Syria, where he’d just delivered stolen precursors for Novichok, a Russian-made agent several times more deadly than conventional nerve gases.
As things turned out, the Kuntsevich affair wasn’t my last foray into the field of counter-proliferation. Shortly after returning from my “journalism” assignment in Europe, the CP department came knocking again with a similar request.
This time, the villain was an Indian missile scientist whom I’ll call Mr. Gupta, from the Research Center Imarat near Hyderabad. Imarat is the site of a secret military base where India conducts all its missile research, development, and testing in the fields of conventional and nonconventional weapons. Gupta, my colleagues had learned, was trying to sell the technology behind India’s Prithvi short-range ballistic missile to Libya. The Prithvi (Sanskrit for “earth”) is not particularly sophisticated by Western standards. But its ability to carry nonconventional warheads (including nukes) meant Israel was eager to keep it out of Muammar al-Gaddafi’s arsenal.
The good news here was that India was (and remains) an Israeli ally. Moreover, New Delhi kept a tighter rein on its military scientists than Moscow did. And so we were fairly confident that when the Indian government found out what Gupta was doing, they’d shut him down in short order.
At the time the counter-proliferation department called me about the project, I happened to be traveling on other business in Asia, with an itinerary that would take me through Hong Kong and Mumbai. My plan was to reprise my role as globe-trotting journalist. I’d do my preliminary phone calls from Hong Kong, and then follow those up with more calls from inside India. I was an obvious choice for the job; not only was I in the area, I’d done a similar operation against General Kuntsevich and could conduct myself under foreign cover with relative ease. One thing about the Mossad, the number of missions versus the number of operational employees that can carry them out is disproportionately on the side of the number of missions.
Since I was on Israeli diplomatic documents during this trip, I didn’t bother with a front company. To protect my identity, I instead used the low-tech method of simply placing all my calls from public telephones in hotel lobbies. As I’d discovered during my training in Tel Aviv, hotel lobbies are to spies what ports are to fisherman. As long as you’re dressed smartly, order a drink occasionally, and exhibit the look of someone doing legitimate business, the world will leave you alone.
There was just one freak complication: this was in the middle of the 1999 Kosovo war, and NATO planes had just bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade thanks to faulty CIA intelligence and an inexperienced target-spotting team. Gangs of stick-wielding youths, whipped into a fervour by official Chinese government propaganda, were roaming the streets of Hong Kong looking for anyone who bore a resemblance to an American. With my North American accent and demeanor, I certainly fit the bill.
I holed up in the Peninsula Hotel and started to make calls. Adopting my journalist alter ego, I started with the Indian Defense Ministry and worked my way up to the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Law and Justice until I finished off with the prime minister’s office. Apparently, my schtick was quite convincing: I managed to speak directly to the Indian PM’s press secretary, and was almost granted an interview with the PM himself.
Once I was satisfied that I’d hit all the necessary departments, I put down the receiver and thought about getting some fresh air. By this time, it was late evening in Hong Kong. Surely the mob had called it a day, I thought. And so I set out in search of one of those Hong Kong watering holes where English-speaking expats endlessly reminisce about the days of British rule.
I trudged my way through Kowloon on foot. After a few blocks, I turned a corner and saw a clutch of goons chanting their slogans into the night air. The placards were in Chinese, so I couldn’t understand them. But when they pointed at me and bellowed, I got the gist. I turned around and started to jog in the other direction. When the crowd followed, my jog became a dead sprint.
Fortunately, I’m pretty quick on my feet—I ran track and played short forward on my high school basketball team. My pursuers followed me back to the Peninsula but, even in their hot-headed state, didn’t dare enter a fancy hotel for the purposes of bludgeoning one of the guests. As they turned back, I stood in the lobby drenched with sweat and panting as if I’d just run a steeplechase.
The next afternoon, I caught my flight to Mumbai, a city so crowded it makes Hong Kong look desolate. From a hotel, I made follow-up calls to the same officials I’d spoken to from Hong Kong. In each case, I inquired whether there’d been any follow-up about Mr. Gupta and his missiles.
Sadly, there wasn’t much to report. The Indians seemed interested in the issue, but not so much that they would short-circuit their famously convoluted bureaucracy. I did have the assurance of a senior counsel at the Ministry of Law and Justice that Mr. Gupta would be investigated, but that was as far as I got. I called my desk officer back at HQ and had her relay an interim report to Eran and Tomer. I was ready to come home.
Of the two missions, I think I was more successful with the hapless Mr. Gupta. Once I was back in Israel, I managed to get the Indian press involved, and they duly ran some editorials about the need to monitor India’s military exports—more out of fear that they’d end up in Pakistan than anything else. We also shared some of the details with the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center, which in turn used the intelligence to pressure their own contacts in the Indian government. In fact, the CIA stated in its 2002 unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions that “India was among the countries supplying assistance to Libya’s ballistic missile program.” After being tarred with the same brush used on Gupta, the Indian government likely took a closer look at its missile scientists and the goings-on near Hyderabad.
In any case, this one has a happy ending: Gaddafi never did get his missiles. Score one for the good guys.
19
A PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE
If heaven’s for clean people then it must be vacant.
MATTHEW GOOD
Not long after my globe-trotting efforts to help put out the Mossad’s counter-proliferation department’s brush fires, I found myself back roaming my patch in Africa and Southeast Asia. We had recently discovered evidence that the Iranians were using locally based Hezbollah agents to collect operational intelligence on Israeli and Western targets in Singapore and Thailand for terrorist attacks. For a supposed Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah is very active in Southeast Asia; its agents had infiltrated the region in the 1980s, setting up shop in Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Korea, and even in Lakemba, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Hezbollah was known to be procuring weapons and dual-use technology, and recruiting locals to carry out terrorist a
ttacks in Israel and Australia—in some cases, going so far as to marry into local Muslim families.
The group tried to blow up the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, in the spring of 1994, using the same truck-bombing modus operandi that achieved such devastating results against the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983. (The Thai attack failed when the truck carrying the explosives got into a traffic accident.) The next year, a Hezbollah source in Manila helped the Mossad unearth a plot to attack the U.S. and Israeli embassies, as well as Singapore’s tiny Jewish community. Through information from the Manila source, I was able to determine that the Chesed-El Synagogue was one of their primary targets. Singapore has a Jewish population of about three hundred people and virtually no history of anti-Semitism. The discovery that Iran would stoop so low as to blow up a ninety-year-old synagogue, presumably with praying men, women, and children inside, helped to ignite a cascading anger in me that began with a spark and picked up momentum with each passing week. Iran, and in particular its intelligence services, were really beginning to piss me off.
In an unrelated operation, Hezbollah didn’t restrict itself to going after the Jews. Its agents also carried out a casing operation on Singapore’s coastline and harbor as part of a plot to sink visiting U.S. naval vessels. As with all things connected to Hezbollah, regional security services didn’t have to dig deep to find links to Hezbollah’s benefactors in Iran.
Iran hasn’t always been Israel’s sworn foe. Under the Shah, the country was an Israeli ally and oil supplier. The two nations shared intelligence, and Israel helped train Iran’s armed forces. That relationship ended with the Shah’s ouster in 1979, and Iran’s subsequent transformation into a Shiite Islamist dictatorship. The country’s new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for the “eradication” of the Jewish state, and gave Yasser Arafat’s men the keys to Israel’s mission in Tehran.
Twenty-six years later, Iran’s ongoing efforts to develop nuclear missiles represent the most serious strategic threat on Israel’s horizon. In December 2001, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani hinted ominously at the motives behind his country’s atomic research program. “The use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground,” he declared, according to Iranian news accounts. Any Israeli reprisal, on the other hand, would “only damage the world of Islam.”
In the meantime, Tehran supports Palestinian terrorism, and attacks Israel through its own terrorist proxies, most notably Hezbollah. Hezbollah is controlled primarily through Tehran’s elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the nation’s leading intelligence service, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The IRGC also acts as Iran’s chief ideological enforcer, executing dissidents and torturing political opponents, at home and abroad. Since 1979, the Revolutionary Guards have become embedded in the nation’s power structure. Numerous IRGC thugs have gone on to Cabinet positions, including the country’s current Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iran’s influence extends indirectly to al-Qaeda and its affiliated regional terror networks as well. Analysts typically place great emphasis on the fact that Hezbollah is a Shiite group, while al-Qaeda subscribes to the puritanical, Saudi-based Sunni creed known as Wahabism. But the truth is that Islamist terrorists of whatever denomination tend to co-operate at the working level, and leave the religious arguments for the imams. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda—they all have some degree of contact. In Gaza, for instance, Hezbollah has trained local Sunni terrorists in the methods used to destroy Israeli tanks with massive, shape-charged explosives buried under roads. In the early 1990s, Osama bin Laden himself met Hezbollah’s terrorist mastermind, Imad Mughniyeh. All this explains why the Mossad continued to focus so many of its assets on Iran and its shadowy minions.
In my case, however, there was something else at play—a visceral contempt for Tehran’s mullahs that felt a lot like a personal vendetta. Even now, when I think of Iran’s despots, I think of Israeli Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Ron Arad.
In 1986, Arad was flying over Lebanon when a malfunctioning bomb damaged his F-4 Phantom. He bailed out near the town of Sidon, and was captured by Amal, an Iranian-backed Shiite militia. In the last photo released by the group, he is seen sporting a heavy beard and wearing a T-shirt incongruously emblazoned with the words “Victoria to Maui Sailing Race.”
At the time, Arad was a twenty-eight-year-old newlywed with a baby daughter and was studying engineering at the prestigious Technion Institute of Technology near Haifa. Israel negotiated with Amal for his release, but talks broke off after Arad was transferred to the control of Hezbollah and their Iranian overlords. The Iranians know what happened to Arad, but they told Israel nothing. Instead, Tehran’s agents sent his family a fake videotape, which showed a man with heavy Persian features lumbering around a park in an intentionally distant and unfocused blur. The senders claimed the man was Arad, but it was obviously just a crude ploy to torment the family.
Arad’s capture, and the horrors that likely followed, reflect the worst nightmare of every Israeli combatant and intelligence officer. And so even though I have never met Arad, it’s hard not to feel a personal connection to him. His treatment says a lot about what Iran has become under Islamist rule. The mullahs and their proxies don’t follow the Geneva Conventions, or any of the other rules of civilized engagement. In late 2003, Israel agreed to free over four hundred Arab prisoners in exchange for a single kidnapped Israeli businessman held by Hezbollah and the remains of three Israeli soldiers. The lopsided arithmetic reflects the relative value the two sides assign to human life.
I relate all this as background to the mission described in this chapter, lest readers judge me harshly. Tehran’s agents have done many unspeakable things in the last quarter-century, and when I was presented with the opportunity to help even the score—even a tiny bit—I couldn’t help but sign on.
In the late 1990s, the Mossad was tipped off that Iranian agents were visiting South Africa to purchase advanced weapons systems from Denel Ltd., a government-owned manufacturer that produces artillery, guided missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and a variety of other sophisticated equipment.
Despite its own reputation as a rogue state, Iran enjoyed friendly relations with South Africa. The African National Congress came to power in 1994 as a mix of pragmatic politicians and hardcore anti-Western revolutionaries. Many were, and remain, perfectly happy to overlook Iran’s status as a brutal dictatorship. As for Tehran, it saw South Africa as a place to shop for both conventional arms and nuclear technology while remaining under the West’s radar. South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk’s 1993 announcement that South Africa had secretly developed a small nuclear arsenal and then junked it was no doubt especially tantalizing.
As a case officer on Bitsur’s African desk, my task was to send Iran’s agents packing by whatever means necessary. I was after two IRGC agents who had been given the job of procuring weapons and technology for the regime and who had the temerity to run around on my turf. My plan wasn’t complicated: pick up the Iranians, put the fear of Allah into them, and send them home with the clear message that they were unwelcome on South African soil.
I’d gotten the idea from an operation I’d witnessed during my tenure as the Mossad’s counterterrorism liaison officer to the CIA. “Operation Shockwave” was conceived by Cofer Black, until recently the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and chief of a CIA task force responsible for disrupting Iranian intelligence operations on a worldwide basis. On one occasion, Black flew out to Tel Aviv and presented his strategy for doing so.
The CIA, Black told us, had laboriously prepared a database containing the names and addresses of all known MOIS and IRGC officers, who would then get a visit from a local CIA team, typically accompanied by well-armed, refrigerator-sized security personnel. The CIA team would tell their quarry that they could either defect to the West, or their names and biographical details would be broadcast to all and
sundry, including the host country’s intelligence service. In third world nations that didn’t share South Africa’s affectionate attitude toward Tehran, this could mean summary imprisonment, torture, or death.
A few MOIS and IRGC officers turned and became CIA sources. Many others returned to Iran never to be heard of again, overseas anyway. Among the rest, the CIA had at least planted the seeds of doubt and fear. The Iranians were scrambling for a good long while trying to figure out who’d been exposed, who’d defected, who was doubled, and who never reported their CIA encounters but should have. Paranoia spreads like the plague in intelligence circles. Black’s plan infected Iran, and good.
Operation Shockwave had its critics among the Mossad because it was a one-off gambit that would be difficult to repeat. But I liked it because it was proactive. I learned later that it was especially effective in Bosnia, where the Iranians were working overtime to export their brutal brand of theocracy to the newly autonomous Muslim enclave established following the 1995 Dayton Accords. If Hezbollah is a nonentity in Bosnia today, that is due in large part to Cofer Black.
I decided that a more aggressive variant on Operation Shockwave would be a good fit for my South African mission—especially since I had my own refrigerator-sized contact in Port Elizabeth, a former officer in the South African Police whom I’ll call Russ. I rang him up and asked him to meet me in Johannesburg in a few days. I told him we had a job to do.
I still have a small scar on my leg from a bizarre African insect that burrowed into me on one of my previous visits to South Africa. I’m glad it hasn’t disappeared: it brings fond memories.
