Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

More intriguing is the possibility that it was Anderson’s death that had concerned Halevy. Had someone in the past tried to recruit him for Mossad? While there may well have been nothing on a Mossad file, it was still a possibility that a katsa on an operation had come across the photographer and tried to use him.

Whatever Efraim Halevy had thought of all this he had kept to himself. He was that sort of man. His inability to share some secrets may well have contributed to his downfall. He had arrived quietly in Mossad. He left the same way.

Now, on that eleventh day of September 2002, the staff of Mossad waited for his successor to arrive in the canteen to address them. No one knew what to expect. The tension, one man recalled, was “a living thing.”

Meir Dagan waited in the corridor until he was sure there was total silence in the canteen. Long ago, when he had been a military commander briefing his troops, he had learned the importance of making an entrance. Now the tenth memune to take charge of Mossad, he was equally determined to stamp his authority from the outset. Since his appointment, he had studied staff files. He had a prodigious memory, and a face once seen was not forgotten.

At fifty-seven years of age, his own face was a road map of all the recent wars Israel had fought. He had himself crushed the first Intifada in Gaza in 1991. He had led his men from the front in the Yom Kippur War. In Lebanon, he had fought with distinction. In all these places, he had displayed the same regimen to awaken from a combat veteran’s light sleep, take a cold shower, and eat a daily breakfast of natural yogurt, toast spread with honey, and strong black coffee. Blunt, proud, and imperious, he was prepared to stand on his record.

The battle-hardened hero of past wars had earned his reputation in Arab capitals as a man to be feared, one who would not hesitate to venture into those alleys that often have no names with no more than a handgun in his pocket. Twice he had been wounded in action; on some days, when the twinge in his knee became too severe, he walked with the help of a walking stick. He disliked doing so; he had an antipathy to any sign of weakness in himself or others. On that September day he had no stick.

In his spare time he was a student of military history and the intelligence lessons to be learned from battles lost and won.

Few knew he was also an accomplished landscape painter (he had already earmarked a corner of his office where he would set up his easel to produce one of his watercolors). Like everything else about him, this fact remained part of his private world. A man of few friends and with a happy domestic life, he came to Mossad with only one aim: to make it the intelligence service it had once been.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had taken him out of military command to do so. The two men had been friends from their days together fighting the PLO in Lebanon. Dagan had made an impression in that political quagmire by showing his skill at morale building. That, Sharon had said, was now a priority in Mossad. He had chosen Dagan because in many ways he was cast from the same steely mold as perhaps the greatest leader Mossad had ever had, Meir Amit.

Satisfied that the sense of expectation in the canteen had built sufficiently, Dagan entered the room. Making his way rapidly past the silent staff to the center, he used a chair as a step to stand on a table. For a long moment, he stared down at the faces looking up at him. Then he spoke.

“In Lebanon I witnessed the aftermath of a family feud. A local patriarch’s head had been split open, his brain on the floor. Around him lay his wife and some of his children. All dead. Before I could do anything, one of the patriarch’s sons scooped up a handful of the patriarch’s brain and swallowed it. That is how they do things in family feuds in that place. Eat the brain. Swallow its power.”

He paused, letting the impact of his words have their full effect.

“I don’t want any of you to have your brains eaten. You eat their brains.” Dagan emphasized his point by punching a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand.

His words could only have held his listeners in thrall, even though what he said may also have sent a shudder through some of them. Others in the canteen had killed enemies of Israel who could not be brought to trial because they were protected deep within the boundaries of Arab neighbors.

Underpinning Dagan’s words was a clear guarantee that from now on he would sanction any operation against those who would “eat their brains.” In turn, he would protect Mossad with every means he knew—legal or illegal. That meant he would effectively allow his agents to use proscribed nerve toxins, dumdum bullets, and methods of killing that even the mafia, the former KGB, or China’s secret service rarely used. But he was also implicitly reminding them that he would not hesitate to expose them to torture and certain death at the hands of their enemies. No wonder he held them in thrall.

Some of them who had recently graduated from the training school might well have remembered the words long ago articulated by Meir Amit, and which formed part of the schooling lectures on assassination: “Mossad is like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal injection. Your actions are all endorsed by the State of Israel. When you kill, you are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day.”

Once more Dagan spoke. “I am here to tell you that the old days are back. The dice are ready to roll.”

Then he told them about himself. How he was born on a train between Russia and Poland. That he spoke several languages. That he operated on the premise that action could not wait for certainty. He finished with a final punch of his fist into his palm.

It had been a bravura performance. As he jumped down from the table and walked from the canteen, applause followed him all the way to the door.

The time swiftly came when Meir Dagan would show what he meant by eating their enemies’ brains. In Mombasa in East Africa, an explosive-laden land cruiser had driven into the reception area of the island’s Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in October 2002. Fifteen people were killed and eighty seriously injured. At almost the same time, two shoulder-fired missiles had nearly downed an Israeli passenger plane bringing tourists back to Tel Aviv from Kenya. Two hundred seventy-five people on board had barely missed a Lockerbie-style death.

Meir Dagan immediately decided that the attacks had been the work of al-Qaeda and that the missiles had come from Iraq’s arsenal. Confirmation of this had come from his own deep-cover agents in Baghdad and from the CIA and MI6.

Within hours, Dagan had assembled a team to go to Mombasa. All had local language skills. They could pass for Arabs or for Asian traders on the island. His men not only dressed the part, they looked the part. Their prime task in Mombasa was to find and kill the men behind the three suicide bombers, who had gone to their deaths laughing as they plunged their vehicle into the hotel.

The team would carry a small laboratory of poisons, sealed in vials until the moment came to strike. They had long- and short-bladed knives. Piano wire to strangle. Explosives no bigger than a throat lozenge capable of blowing off a person’s head. They would take an arsenal of guns: short-barreled pistols, sniper rifles with a killing range of a mile. Each agent carried several passports to enable him to cross borders in different guises.

And so they flew south in their own plane to Mombasa. Mossad agents from Lagos, Nigeria—from where Israel gets the bulk of its oil—were there to support the team from Tel Aviv. Other katsas from South Africa, Rome, Malta, and Cyprus had sped through Africa into the fierce heat of Mombasa.