Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Dagan continued to resist the way other agencies employed more specialists, being called in to operate satellites and other technological intelligence. He still believed technology alone could not unravel secret plans. He was committed to show in the first decade of the twenty-first century that the number of good spies was in inverse proportion to the size of Mossad’s support apparatus.

For him, Mossad’s spies were more important than any piece of technology. He relished the thought that Mossad still remained a mysterious organization, where a small number of extraordinary individuals, armed with great courage, could achieve extraordinary results. That, for him, and his men and women, was a comforting assurance as they prepared to face the rapidly changing and frightening world ahead.

In the last week of October 2004, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who had once publicly embraced Saddam Hussein and brought upon himself further fury from Israel, sat down for dinner in his compound in Ramallah on the West Bank. For the past three years he had been confined to shell-pocked buildings on the orders of Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. The decision to isolate him was in the hope that Arafat would call off the suicide bombers and the terror they had inflicted across Israel. Sharon felt Arafat had only paid lip service to stop the killing and mutilation.

Surrounded by Israeli tanks and his every word listened to by the surveillance experts of Mossad, Arafat’s influence on peace in the Middle East remained strong. World leaders, like President Jacques Chirac of France, still telephoned him. His following among millions of radicals across the Arab world was constant. Sharon had said again publicly that until Yasser Arafat was removed from power there could be no lasting peace.

His own life had been a testimony to his ultimate failure to become president of a Palestinian state. He had seen his people demoralised by high unemployment through his failure to compromise, especially over the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees, a concession that would have sounded the knell of the Israeli state. His intransigeance was matched by his autocratic style of governing, highlighted by increasing sycophancy and corruption.

Now thinner and physically frailer than when he had first swept onto the world stage at the United Nations thirty years before as leader of his people, Yasser Arafat was now in his seventy-fifth year and, to ordinary Israelis, still a terrorist godfather whose complete annihilation of their state was a burning aim. To other previous U.S. administrations he was a Nobel Prize winner and the only Palestinian to do business with. To the Bush White House, he was a pariah.

But he sensed that soon, with the return of George W. Bush for another four-year term, Israel might finally decide to remove him. For twenty years he had been telling his doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, “They will do something.”

“‘They,’ was Mossad; ‘something’ was to kill him,” Dr. al-Kurdi said (to the author).

On October 26 Arafat sat down for dinner. He began with a cream-based soup, the recipe for which he claimed had been handed down to him by his mother. Then came a fried piece of Saint Peter’s fish from the lake of Galilee and named after the catch the apostle Peter was reputed to have made before Jesus converted him. All the fish bones had been carefully removed before Arafat ate. Next Arafat consumed roast chicken, hummus, bread, tomatoes, and a green salad. The ingredients were, as usual, from the local market in Ramallah. The food was set out on the long table in Arafat’s workroom. There was also a nonalcoholic drink. Arafat had insisted it be prepared from homeopathic potions and herbs.

“He secretly chose them himself. The drink smelled awful. It made people unwell just sniffing it. But Arafat swallowed it as if it was champagne,” Dr. al-Kurdi would tell Al-Jazeera Television.

The drink was based on homeopathic ingredients not available to the souks of Ramallah. But they could be obtained in one of the upmarket alternative medicine outlets in Tel Aviv. Within hours Arafat was complaining of severe stomach pains. Dr. al-Kurdi diagnosed gastric flu. But when the prescription medicine did not help, the physician decided Arafat had a blood disorder, “perhaps one of the many types of leukemia.” But again the symptoms did not confirm that. Just a few hours later, more expert medical aid was on the way to Ramallah. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt dispatched his personal medical team, including a cancer specialist. King Abdullah of Jordan also sent the best doctor available in Amman. Both teams recommended that the increasingly ill Arafat, whose symptoms could not be firmly diagnosed, be sent to Europe. President Chirac was contacted. He said the Percy Military Hospital outside Paris would make its own renowned specialists available to treat Arafat.

On October 29 the still-conscious Arafat was helicoptered out of the Ramallah compound. But by then the Arab world was already asking one question. Had Mossad’s chemists obtained a sample of the contents of Arafat’s homeopathic concoction? Had Meir Dagan done what his predecessors had resisted—out of the understandable fear of escalating the suicide bomber attacks—and taken charge of an audacious operation to assassinate Yasser Arafat?

Even as Arafat’s plane was heading toward Paris, Dr. al-Kurdi added his medical guess to the souk rumors. He said, “Poisoning is a strong possibility.” The other Arab doctors who had seen Arafat hinted darkly that they also did not rule out poisoning. In Paris, Arafat’s wife, Suha, compounded the intrigue by saying she alone would reveal details of his medical condition—but only when she received “guarantees of my own personal position” regarding the whereabouts of $2 billion of Palestinian Authority funds, which the International Monetary Fund, having carried out an audit in 2003, said were still missing. A deal would later be made in which the Palestinian Authority agreed to pay her $2 million a year for the rest of her life “in recognition of her importance to the Palestinian movement and in her husband’s life.” She had, in fact, not seen him for four years before she visited his bedside at the Percy Military Hospital. She had traveled from her large suite at the deluxe Hotel Le Bristol in Paris; Arafat had also bequeathed her a magnificent villa on the city’s elegant rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

But by the time the deal was cemented, the medical mystery of Arafat’s condition had deepened. He was variously reported as having liver failure, kidney failure, that he was brain dead, semiconscious, or unconscious. His French doctors refused to provide any details of scans, biopsies, or blood tests, which would have shown the condition of his vital organs. The information that dribbled out of the hospital came from Arafat’s Palestinian aides. Apart from Dr. al-Kurdi, none of them were qualified and had been denied further access to al-Kurdi’s long-time patient. Arafat’s aides announced on November 4 that Arafat was on a life-support system. Then abruptly the hospital spokesman said its doctors had found no trace of poisoning “having conducted two tests for a substance.” He would not say what substance Arafat had been tested for.

In the Arab world speculation and anger raged. Somewhere in the innuendos and half-truths certain inescapable facts floated to the surface. Mossad had used a lethal chemical agent to kill newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell when he’d threatened to expose Mossad’s activities in his newspapers unless they agreed to help bail him out of his serious financial problems. Dr. Ian West, the Home Office pathologist who’d conducted Maxwell’s autopsy, had written in his report (a copy of which the author possesses): “We cannot rule out homicide being the cause.”