Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The first hint China was working on a new type of explosive had come in March 2001, when a top-ranking Chinese defector, Senior Colonel Xu Junping of the People’s Liberation Army and one of the nation’s leading military strategists, had defected to the United States, where he was personally questioned by CIA director George Tenet. So important was the debriefing that President Bush had authorized Condoleezza Rice to sit in.

Xu detailed the work that was being done to create the explosives in the ZDF laboratories situated some forty miles to the west of Beijing. He also revealed how China had secretly been helping rogue states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Most critical of all, he outlined China’s contacts with terror groups through its powerful intelligence services, the Military Intelligence Department (MID) and its Science and Technology Department (STD). Employing some five thousand field agents and defense analysts, both agencies operate globally. They are supported by satellite surveillance and state-of-the-art equipment. Xu told the CIA that part of the work of the two services was to maintain contact with terror groups not only in the Middle East, but also in the Philippines, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. But what astonished the CIA was Xu’s revelations of Chinese intelligence contacts in Colombia with FARC, in Spain with ETA, and in Peru with Shining Path.

Now, two years after Xu’s revelation, intelligence services were bracing themselves to confront this latest weapon of choice for terrorists.

Mossad established that the two British suicide bombers had smuggled their explosive in from Jordan. It had arrived there from Pakistan, whose intelligence service has had long and close links to China’s.

Mossad agents already knew that in the months before the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, it was from Pakistan that Osama bin Laden made three separate visits to Beijing. Each time he was accompanied by China’s ambassador to that country and the head of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, PIS.

He had gone to organize a defense contract for the Taliban worth $1 billion.

“We now believe that during those visits he was appraised of the progress with the new explosives,” a senior Mossad source in Tel Aviv told the author. He agreed that there “is a very strong possibility” al-Qaeda had been provided with a quantity of the explosive—a tiny portion of which had been given to the two British suicide bombers. This takes terrorism into a new dimension.

It was a judgment that was never far from Dagan’s thoughts as he continued to lead Mossad into the new millennium.

The failure to locate Saddam or discover if he was dead had irritated Ariel Sharon, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush. On the surface, they said it did not matter, that Saddam was no longer a threat. But few believed that Bush, in particular, would want to write closure to the war until he was able to announce that his much vaunted need for a regime change in Iraq had been completed with the actual death of Saddam.

But soon it was not the disappearance of a tyrant that came to haunt George Bush and Tony Blair. It was the failure to locate any WMD. Bush ordered in hundreds of CIA agents and scientists to find WMD. They searched and they searched. In London, Tony Blair insisted the weapons were there, that he had been told of eight hundred sites that had still not been checked in the deserts of Iraq.

Increasingly, however, the truth seemed otherwise. Britain’s former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who had resigned over the war, and Claire Short, a former cabinet minister in the Blair government, both said Blair had lied to Parliament and to the people of Britain when he said that WMD existed.

By June 2003, Blair was fighting for his credibility and his political future. In Washington, Congress announced there would be a public hearing into the matter. Nobody seriously believed all the truth would finally emerge. But for the moment, there was talk of a scandal that could balloon into another Watergate. Commentators remembered that Bush’s own father had won the first Iraqi war, but lost the presidency to Bill Clinton shortly afterward.

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan kept Mossad clear of the deepening crises in London and Washington. When calls came from the CIA and MI6 for any assistance he could give, he stuck to the same story: Mossad would go on looking. No more, no less.

In December 2003, the hunt for Saddam finally ended. He was captured, ironically, because of the demands of the one woman he still trusted: Samira Shahbander, the second of his four wives.

On December 11, she had called Saddam from an Internet café in Baalbek, near Beirut; she and Saddam’s only surviving son, Ali, had lived under assumed names in Lebanon after leaving Baghdad some months before the war started.

Samira, whose curly blond hair came from the same French hair product company that provided Saddam with his hair dye, was the married woman who first became his mistress and then his wife.

At the start of their courtship, Samira was married to an Iraqi air force pilot. Saddam simply kidnapped him and said he would be set free only if he agreed to divorce Samira. The husband agreed. In return, he was made head of Iraqi Airways—and given a choice from one of Saddam’s cast-off mistresses.

Married, Samira became Saddam’s favorite, though he took two more wives and scores of mistresses.

The marriage was cemented by the birth of Ali. The child’s arrival deepened the hatred of Saddam’s elder sons, Uday and Qusay, toward Samira. But by December, both were dead after a shoot-out with U.S. Special Forces.

Earlier, in March 2003, with the coalition forces closing in on Baghdad, Saddam had arranged for Samira and Ali to flee to Lebanon. With her she took $5 million in cash and a trunk of gold bars from the vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq.

She told friends she was going first to France and then to Moscow, claiming Saddam had been secretly promised by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, that he would give her sanctuary. Instead, she went to a prearranged hideout, a villa in the Beirut suburbs.

It was there that Mossad discovered her in November 2003. Meir Dagan sent a team of surveillance specialists from the service’s yaholomin unit to follow Samira’s every move.

They discovered that the Lebanese government had provided her and Ali with Lebanese passports and new identities. Samira was given the name “Hadija.” But Ali, who has the same deep-set eyes as his father, insisted he would keep the family name of Hussein.

The Mossad team noted that Samira had transferred most of her money out of Lebanon to a Credit Suisse bank account in Geneva. In the past, the bank had been a repository for some of Saddam’s own fortune.

Early in December 2003, Samira cashed in her gold bars for U.S. dollars with a Beirut money dealer. Then she started to call Saddam.

Supported by Israeli air force surveillance aircraft, the yaholomin discovered that the calls were being made from inside Syria, which borders on Iraq. “The calls were affectionate. It was clear there was a close relationship still between them,” said a high-ranking Mossad source in Tel Aviv after Saddam had been captured. That one of the most reviled tyrants in the world—a man who had personally ordered the terrible torture of many thousands, including women and children—could speak of love, both fascinated and repelled the Mossad team.

But along with endearments the listeners also heard, through their electronic equipment, that Samira wanted more money.

Time and again, in further calls in December—each made to a different number the yaholomin team pinpointed as going to an area in the desolate sands of the Wadi al-Myrah, which is close to the Syrian border with Iraq—Samira repeated her request for money.