Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

CSIS had helped to produce some spectacular results in the drug war, including the now celebrated Golden Aquarium case in San Francisco. A million pounds of heroin had been discovered wrapped in cellophane and condoms inside fish imported from Asia. American federal agents had taken the credit for the bust. Privately they admitted they could not have succeeded without the CSIS team who had trailed the consignment across the Pacific. Later, after the Los Alamos theft, Qiao Shi had handed over to Mossad valuable information it possessed about the Triads. With an estimated million members scattered worldwide, the Triads were the largest drug traffickers on earth.

In the three years since Meir Dagan had stood on a table in Mossad’s canteen on September 11, 2001, and had punched a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand and told his staff that, metaphorically, he expected them to eat the brains of their enemies, the number and actions of those enemies had dramatically increased.

Suicide bombers continued to strike; some were little more than children. The supply of martyrs appeared to be inexhaustible.

Fissionable materials had been stolen from stockpiles in the former Soviet Union; scientists at the European Transuranium Institute and Karsruhe in Germany, responsible for tracking all such material, had traced a small quantity of uranium-235 to the Paris apartment of three criminals known to broker arms deals with terror groups like al-Qaeda. The uranium was of weapons-grade quality. Two of the men—Sergei Salfati and Yves Ekwella—were traveling on Cameroon passports. The third, Raymond Loeb, possessed South African documents. The material came from a nuclear storage site at Chelyanbisk-70, sited deep in the Ural Mountains. Tipped off by Mossad, French police had arrested the criminals.

Mossad had traced the route along which the uranium had been transported across the Ukraine, through Poland and Germany to Paris by employees of Semion Yokovich Mogilevich. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had positioned himself to traffic not only in humans and arms but fissionable material as well. As with the site in the Urals, it had disappeared from other poorly guarded locations.

President Vladimir Putin had spoken darkly of a “new network of terror against which our forces are increasingly hard-pressed to overcome.”

In Afghanistan and the near-lawless northern provinces of Pakistan, thousands of jihadists—holy war warriors—were being trained for what they were promised would be the endgame, the elimination of Israel from the face of the earth. Some of the graduates had returned to their homes in places like the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the souks of Egypt, the Yemen, and, farther afield, the cities of Britain. All made no secret of their readiness to die in jihad, holy war, to perfect their newfound skills anywhere that could damage the financial and economic structure of Israel.

They were often financed by state-sponsored terrorism, either because of a shared ideology (Hezbollah and Iran), or calculated realpolitik (Hamas and Syria). Israel had worked tirelessly through the United Nations to get sponsors of terrorism to be stopped by sanctions or even military action. Mossad’s department of psychological warfare had spun the story that Israel was ready to launch a preemptive strike should the ayatollahs continue to support Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. The threat created fear among the Iranian population, even though its military tacticians briefed the country’s rulers that geographically the Jewish state was sufficiently far away not to pose a serious and sustained threat. In the case of Libya it had played a background role in persuading Gadhafi that his interests would prosper by avoiding being the bagman for a number of terror groups.

Along with every major Western intelligence service, al-Qaeda remained on top of Mossad’s own threat list. Early on in Meir Dagan’s tenure, two names had emerged to stand beside Osama bin Laden in the cause of Islamic extremism. One was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who increasingly performed the role as al-Qaeda’s chief television propagandist. The Egyptian medical doctor, who had trained in London and Paris, had made over six video and audio broadcasts in 2005, earning himself the adulation of the Arab world as the organization’s intellectual guiding force. Mossad analysts had postulated that bin Laden nowadays reserved his own appearances for major occasions, such as addressing the American people four days before the U.S. election, where he had sat at a desk like a newsreader and promised further attacks if Bush was reelected; and after the Madrid commuter train attacks that killed two hundred and injured almost two thousand, when he had repeated the warning. The other member of this trinity of evil was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian ill-educated peasant responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Iraq. Before he had reached the age of thirty, he had beheaded a dozen Iraqis and foreigners and posted videos of their murders on Islamic Web sites around the world. He, too, had promised that the day would come when he would join bin Laden’s son, Saad, at the head of a triumphal march into Jerusalem.

Now in the first weeks of 2005, it was not only terrorists that Meir Dagan found himself confronting. He had begun to have doubts about the new MI6 director-general, Sir John Scarlett. The roots of these reservations lay in what Dagan knew was seriously inaccurate MI6 intelligence that had led to the politicizing of information about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It had confirmed Dagan’s view that John Scarlett had a tendency to “shoot from the hip.” Certainly for the crew-cropped Mossad chief with a liking for open-necked shirts, Scarlett was radically different as the quintessential English spymaster in his customized suits from Gieves, the Saville Row tailor, and hand-stitched cotton shirts, along with his buff-coloured security files each bearing the red cross of Saint George. Over dinner at the Traveller’s Club, Scarlett would display a taste for expensive claret and his gourmet’s appetite for fine food. After his thirty-two years as an intelligence officer in Moscow, Kenya, and Paris, Scarlett had become chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) that monitored Britain’s other intelligence services and reported directly to Tony Blair in Downing Street. It was a widely held view that Blair had exercised his prime minister’s prerogative to appoint Scarlett to take over MI6. His appointment had brought Scarlett a knighthood to go with his CMG and OBE. It had also continued his close relationship with Blair, and Dagan was not the only foreign intelligence chief who sensed that Downing Street’s hand could be detected in decisions made by Scarlett. It went against Dagan’s own firm belief that an intelligence service should be independent of political influence.

Dagan’s concern over this had turned to anger when Scarlett, with prime minister Tony Blair’s approval, secretly sent a team of officers to Gaza to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas, led by an experienced Middle East veteran intelligence officer, Alistair Cooke. For Dagan, the arrival of an uninvited foreign intelligence service on his doorstep contravened what he saw as a long-standing arrangement over the rules of cooperation. When Dagan had confronted Scarlett, he was reminded that MI6 had a long history of entering into negotiations with outlawed terror groups, notably the IRA in the 1980s, and that dialogue had ultimately led to the armed struggle in Northern Ireland giving way to political negotiation.

“Gaza is not Belfast,” Dagan had said before ending the conversation. For him this signaled a low point in Mossad’s working relationship with MI6. Not for the first time, he had been heard to say the English had never quite come to terms with not being spymasters to the world. It was a view he shared with Carlo de Stefano, director of Italy’s antiterrorism unit; Manolo Navarette, the head of Guardia Civil Intelligence in Spain; and Porter Goss, who had replaced George Tenet as director of the CIA. Goss was no pushover. He was cut in the same no-holds-barred mold as Dagan, saying publicly that Tenet had ignored the agency’s “hard core mission, and that it must return to the ‘good old days of human intelligence’ when information was gathered not by computers and satellites and other sophisticated eavesdropping, but by planting our agents within or behind enemy lines.” Goss suddenly resigned in May 2006, after a turf battle with John Negroponte, the politically shrewd new director of national intelligence, a post created by President Bush to oversee intelligence gathering after 9/11. Goss was already unpopular with senior managers at the CIA, having forced half a dozen to resign. A high-ranking CIA officer told the author, “When Goss quit, there was more champagne drunk than on New Year’s Eve.”