Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Meir Dagan made it a priority to trace the final destination of the money in the hope it could lead Mossad to the men who prepared the bombers. But it was a daunting task. The Martyrs operate on a small-cell basis. Often there are no more than two or three persons in a cell. In the closed world of the refugee camps, informers for Israeli intelligence are hard to recruit. Those discovered are executed. For them death can be agonizingly slow, preceded by unspeakable torture. For their families there is the odium of having bred a traitor to Islamic extremism.

But for the suicide bomber there was only glory. In the world they inhabited there was little enough of that. For them death was perhaps all too often a welcome relief.

After Wafa’a died, a leaflet with her photo was circulated throughout the West Bank. It read “We do not have tanks or rockets. But we have something superior—our Islamic human bombs. In place of a nuclear arsenal we are proud of our arsenal of believers.”

The one certainty is that other young men and women will blow themselves—and many others—into eternity. Meir Dagan knew that the further Israel was from the last suicide bomber, the nearer it was to the next.

That was the fearful reality of life and death in the Holy Land.

By January 2003, five months after he had walked from the Mossad headquarters canteen to thunderous applause, Meir Dagan had become a hero to his staff and a man feared by Israel’s enemies. Even the most bitter of them acknowledged that Mossad was once more the most effective and ruthless spy service in the Middle East, and beyond. Dagan knew more about the secrets of Arab security services than did the Arab political rulers. Indeed, he had placed new agents in the private offices of senior government officials in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Under his watchful eye, Mossad had infiltrated with new vigor all sectors of Arab political life, its business communities, and other areas of Muslim society.

In the past four months since taking command, he had studied the sins and mistakes that had led to a collapse of morale in Mossad. He had rectified this by ensuring that those who were responsible were culled from the ranks of Mossad. Replacements had been brought in from the army; some were also recruited from Shin Bet and Israel’s other intelligence services. Dagan made it clear that he had chosen them because they would follow his rules—not the rule book. For their part, they had shown they would serve him purely out of the conviction that he was the man they wished to follow.

He worked eighteen-hour days, and longer, at his desk. He sometimes slept on his couch. Life was hard. He came and went like the proverbial thief in the night. He went to Mombasa and places beyond to follow the trail of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Other intelligence chiefs would not have left their office. But that was not his style. He had always led, from the front.

Dagan had created a plan that he felt would reduce the threat from suicide bombers. Israel should reduce the stranglehold on Yasser Arafat and ease the blockade on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—after a firm guarantee from the Palestinian authorities that they would deal with the bombers. The plan had gone to the Sharon cabinet, which had rejected it unless Arafat was removed.

Dagan had bided his time. He well understood that the relationship between Ariel Sharon and Arafat was one of personal hatred: there would be no resolution until Arafat was removed. Dagan’s intelligence acumen suggested that this might well come from within Palestine. One of his tasks since coming to office had been to foment dissatisfaction among its more susceptible groups, promoting the idea that Arafat was the one remaining obstacle on the road to peace. Propaganda, in all its guises, was a weapon Dagan had used in his days as a military commander.

Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare, the LAP, had created a mythical “Academy of Terrorism” in Gaza City, where suicide bombers were trained. The story received wide coverage. Many other stories followed that piece of propaganda, and their results were often included in the Overnight Intelligence Summary delivered to Ariel Sharon when he awoke. Dictated by Dagan, the summary shaped the thinking of Sharon for his coming day.

Both men still shared a close relationship and the same ideal for Israel: to ensure that, in Sharon’s words, “this little patch of soil, barren and inhospitable, until we Jews turned it into the powerhouse of the region, will never be taken from us.”

Over dinner in his home shortly after Dagan had been appointed, the prime minister had shown him a black painted arrowhead in a showcase. It represented the code name—Hetz Shabor—Sharon had chosen for his attack against the Egyptian army in Gaza in the Six Day War. It had been the start of his career as the most ruthless military commander since Moshe Dayan. Then had come the massacre in the two Lebanon refugee camps in which allegedly up to one thousand men, women, and children had been slaughtered on September 17, 1982 while Sharon’s troops did not intervene. Sharon’s career seemed to have ground to a halt. But he had entered the political arena and outsmarted Benyamin Netanyahu—no mean feat—to take charge of the Likud Party. It had been a stepping-stone to the premiership he now held.

Over that dinner, Sharon had told Dagan he had chosen him to head Mossad because they both were fearless, hard-driving leaders.

But there was one difference: Sharon was a gambler, ready to take risks, like his visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which had triggered the Second Intifada and paved the way for the suicide bombers to gain strength. Dagan was not a gambler. He calculated every move.

Weeks into the job, Dagan had taken an El Al flight to London to meet Britain’s two intelligence chiefs, Richard Billing Dearlove, head of MI6, the secret intelligence service, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director of MI5.

He had studied their backgrounds as thoroughly as when dealing with an enemy. While both the intelligence chiefs were most certainly not that, they did cause him concern. Britain had for years been a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. Both Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who had attempted to destroy an American airliner with explosives packed in his shoes, and Zacharias Moussaoui, identified as the twentieth hijacker of the September 11 attacks, were recruited for their missions in London mosques.

The capital had become the headquarters for extremist Islamic preachers who, through a network of organizations, were dedicated to sowing pure hatred: hatred of Israel, hatred of America, hatred of the West—hatred of all democracies that valued tolerance and freedom, the very ideal that gave the extremists freedom to operate in Britain.

Despite protests, Britain had continued to give refuge to Islamic fundamentalists wanted for terrorism in other countries. The governments of France, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as the United States, had all challenged Britain’s refusal to extradite the terrorists. But the British had successfully claimed that to remove them from British protection would result in their “political persecution.”

The Islamic preachers who had inducted these individuals into terrorism had hired expensive lawyers to fight extradition. Legal maneuvers had tied up cases for years. Khalid al-Fawwaz, wanted in the United States for his role in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, had successfully used the English courts to ensure that he stayed in the country. His legal costs of sixty thousand dollars had been met out of public funds.

Dressed in one of his custom-tailored black pin-striped suits, a hand-stitched white shirt, and a striped club tie, Dearlove had sat in his office overlooking the Thames River while Meir Dagan set out his case for why the presence of terrorists in Britain must stop.