Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The floridly handsome Chalabi had been a Mossad informer in Iraq after Saddam seized power in 1979. Chalabi had moved to neighboring Jordan, where he set up the Petra Bank. For a while it had served as a conduit for Mossad to fund black operations in the Middle East. But in 1979 the bank collapsed, owing hundreds of millions of dollars to depositors.

Mossad had managed to withdraw its own modest deposits before the crash. Shortly afterward, the head of Jordan’s central bank, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, had accused Chalabi of switching $70 million of the bank’s funds into his own Swiss bank accounts.

Chalabi had arrived in Washington at the time George H. W. Bush had been elected as president. Until the first Iraqi war, following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Chalabi had seemed to be no more than another of those Middle East lobbyists, in a city filled with them, trying to promote their own interests. But the war changed all that. Using his imposing-sounding Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi found himself readily being welcomed by Bush’s neoconservatives. They included future vice president Dick Cheney and future deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Through them, he was introduced to Donald Rumsfeld. Common ground was established in their belief Saddam was a menace to peace not only in the Middle East, but possibly the entire world.

Incredibly, Chalabi began to see intelligence reports provided by the Pentagon on Saddam that had been prepared by the CIA and the National Security Agency. At first he confined himself to expressing that some of the intelligence did not fit what his small organization knew from inside Iraq. Gradually those expressions, often made directly to Rumsfeld, became more critical. Chalabi felt the CIA, in particular, was out of touch because it had no agents on the ground in Iraq.

In the late summer of 2002, in the run-up to the first anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Rumsfeld ordered the formation of a special secret unit in the Pentagon to “reexamine” information provided by Chalabi and to “reassess” ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda and Iraq’s development of WMD.

Ahmad Chalabi, a discredited banker accused of looting his own vaults, had become a prime source for Rumsfeld. CIA chief Tenet, a man who jealously guarded his turf, was furious—to the point that in August 2002 he had threatened to resign. Cheney had poured balm on very troubled waters, and Tenet had stayed in office. But using his own backdoor connections to MI6 director Richard Dearlove, Tenet had briefed the MI6 chief on Chalabi’s continued involvement in the upper echelon of the Bush administration.

When he took over Mossad, Dagan had quickly picked up on Chalabi’s bizarre role as Rumsfeld’s source. From the Mossad file on the banker, it was clear that Chalabi had provided only low-grade intelligence when he had spied for them in Iraq. Now, over a decade since he had left Baghdad, it was unlikely the banker had any real connections within Saddam’s regime.

Not for the first time Mossad analysts wondered how matters of importance were being conducted within the Bush administration.

Dagan’s own trips to Washington, obligatory for any new director, had filled in the gaps in the reports from the katsa in the Israeli embassy in the capital. In meetings with members of the administration—men like Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, and Elliot Abrams, in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council—Dagan had encountered advocates of what they called “muscular democracy.” They peppered their conversations with Arabic words like jihad and phrases like Allah akbar wallilahi’l-hamd. They knew what they meant: “holy war” and “Allah is great to whom we give praise.” What baffled them, they told Dagan, was that they could not understand how God could endorse such a terrible massacre as had occurred on September 11.

Dagan was uncomfortable in religious discussion; his faith, like much else in his life, was a private matter. He had tactfully sidestepped the question. Nevertheless, he later told colleagues in Tel Aviv, he was fascinated by the way religion assumed such an importance in the Bush administration.

When President Bush returned to the White House four days after the attacks of September 11, he received a welcome visitor. The evangelist Billy Graham, a longtime friend of the Bush family, had sat with the understandably shaken president and spoken for a long time about the evil of terrorism and the Bible’s “righteous wrath” to destroy it.

A scripture passage struck a chord with the president: “Thus saith the Lord. Because the Philistines have dealt by revenge, and have taken vengeance with a despiteful heart; therefore thus saith the Lord God: Behold I will stretch out my hand upon the Philistines. And they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”

The words of the prophet Ezekiel became a leitmotif for George W. Bush, the rallying call for all he would say and do in the months to come for his “War on Terrorism”: the justification for his attack on Afghanistan, for his forthcoming war against Iraq. The Iraqi dictator was his Philistine.

Ezekiel, that biblical man of iron, had infused Bush with a similar strength.

At the end of the meeting, Graham gave Bush a pocket-sized Bible. The evangelist had taken the time to annotate it, using a marker to highlight all the scripture passages that reinforced the right to use “righteous wrath.”

Bush, like Bill Clinton and other past presidents, was not short of Bibles. He had grown up in what he liked to call “God-fearing country”—that great swath of the southern states known as the Bible Belt. No shack, house, or stately mansion is without its Bible. On the Bush Texas ranch, and in his office when he had been state governor, a Bible stood on a table close to the furled flag of the United States. Equipped with the Bible Billy Graham had presented to him, the president had no doubt that God was on his side as he launched his Global War on Terrorism.

The belief was an insight into his thinking. Another came with his admission he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.” Further evidence of his mind-set came when he spoke of “an axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The phrase had a strong biblical connotation.

Throughout 2002, for his speeches to Congress and his military commanders, in his folksy weekly radio talks to the nation, and in meetings with world leaders, Bush drew on passages in Graham’s leather-bound gift to reinforce the notion that the War on Terrorism had the total approval of God. Holy war—the jihad of Islamic fundamentalism—had taken on a new meaning.

President Bush’s insistence that he would conduct a preemptive strike against Iraq was also deeply rooted in the religious faith of the neoconservatives around him.

Against that background of increasing religious fervor, Mossad monitored Washington’s progress to try to assassinate Saddam Hussein—a move that could head off an all-out war against Iraq.

In early February 2003, after a telephone conversation between Ariel Sharon and President Bush, Israel’s prime minister told Dagan he had offered to allow Mossad to become directly involved in the assassination of Saddam. Bush had accepted.

In Tel Aviv, the operation planning followed a well-tried procedure. First, previous attempts to kill Saddam were examined to understand why they had failed. In the past ten years there had been fifteen separate attacks on the Iraqi leader. They had been sponsored by either Mossad or MI6. Their failure was due to inadequate planning, or enlisting Iraqi assassins who had either been discovered by Saddam’s formidable security apparatus, or simply been unable to get close to their target.