Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

A senior Mossad analyst recalled (to the author): “MI6 was serving up, at best, speculation, at worst, baseless information as fact. It was the constant promise, underwritten by Scarlett, that the details were well sourced which made them acceptable. Only later, after the war was over, did we see that much of the data from London was often no better than the stuff the ‘spy’ in ‘Our Man In Havana’ dreamed up. He used drawings of a vacuum cleaner to support his reports. MI6 produced toy mobile labs for Powell to display before the United Nations.”

Shortly before the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004, MI6 informed Mossad that the expansion could result in an influx of terrorists into Britain whose prime targets would be the Jewish business community. London Station failed to find any evidence to support this.

In May 2004, Dagan had sensed a sea of change happening in Langley, and he was determined that Mossad would benefit from it. He already knew Porter Goss’s reputation from his eight years as the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, during which he had openly declared the CIA had become too “gunshy” after the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa. Dagan had been further won over when Goss had publicly said he was not against assassinations. “I believe it is a concept most Americans are fairly comfortable with. If you have exhausted all other avenues then the possibility of lethal force is well understood,” he had said after President Bush had nominated him to be the CIA’s next director. His words had found considerable support among conservatives at a time when Osama bin Laden’s freedom remained a major threat to America.

From their first meeting the two spy chiefs had formed an immediate bond. Goss had listened as Dagan had explained how he had inherited a Mossad where morale was low and its reputation seriously damaged, and how he revitalized it by the simple expedient of being a hands-on director. Since coming to office Dagan had made close to fifty trips overseas. Goss had spoken about his own stint with the CIA in the 1960s, the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with a poisoned cigar or a booby-trapped seashell when the Cuban leader went diving. Goss explained that ill health had finally made him give up a career with the Directorate of Operations that was responsible for all spying missions. He had entered politics, winning a seat for the Republicans in Florida. But he had never lost touch with the global intelligence world. In London, Paris, and other European capitals, he had kept alive a network that would serve him well in his new post.

As a practical step in their alliance, Goss and Dagan sent their spies into the badlands of Kazakstan, to the mountains of Kashmir, to the seaports of the Horn of Africa, into the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia, and reinforced their presence in Saudi Arabia.

The Kingdom’s increasing volatility continued to provide a fertile recruiting ground for the jihadists and the seemingly unlimited funds available to finance them. Split by a power struggle, the seventy-nine-year-old King Fahd clinging to life (he would finally die in August 2005) and many of the royal family’s five thousand princes living in fear of the fundamentalist groups sprouting in their midst, had provided them with billions of petrodollars in the hope they would be spared in any insurrection by the country’s radicals. The most extreme spoke of the day when Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi, would bring the royal family to its knees in much the way the Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to Iran in triumph. Already bin Laden had fulminated that shariah law was not being implemented strictly enough in the Kingdom.

Supported by the Bush administration, the House of Saud had finally begun to crack down hard on the fundamentalists. Shoot-outs between the security forces and fundamentalists became routine. Captured jihadists were beheaded, and their heads displayed on spikes in public squares around the country. The displays had only increased the violence. In 2004, over 150 foreigners, agents of the security forces, and terrorists, had died.

While the CIA worked closely with the Saudi secret service to locate the fundamentalists, Mossad’s role was different. With Saudi Arabia having no Jewish economic interests to attack within its borders, Mossad agents were concerned with tracking jihadists coming out of the country and heading toward Israel. All too often before reaching its borders, they met their deaths at the hands of Mossad’s most feared unit, kidon, its assassination squad.

Among the first decisions Meir Dagan had made was to increase its number from forty-eight to sixty; eight of them were women. All kidon had graduated from the Mossad training school at Herseliya before undergoing specialist training at an army facility in the Negev Desert. On graduating, their average age was still in their midtwenties. They regularly underwent the same physical checks as a front-line pilot in the Israeli air force. Between them kidon were fluent in Arabic and the major European languages, English, Spanish, and French. Some had acquired a proficiency in Chinese.

In the $100 billion global intelligence industry, which engaged over a million people, kidon was regarded with respect. With an unpublished budget and no accounting for how it was spent, kidon was also the envy of other secret services. Only the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS) had a similar freedom to kill.

In the past three years Dagan had sent kidon to seek out all those who had been condemned at a meeting he chaired in his office. The assassins had done so in countries across the Middle East, in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, striking in places where the souks and alleys had no names; in each case a killing had been swift and unexpected, using anything from a single bullet to the nape of the neck, to garrotting with a cheese-cutting wire or a knife thrust into the larynx. Kidon had also used nerve agents and a poisoner’s arsenal of substances specially prepared for them. There were many ways of killing, and kidon knew them all.

To perfect their skill they watched some of Israel’s leading forensic pathologists in Tel Aviv’s Institute of Forensic Medical Research at work so as to better understand how to make an assassination appear to be an accident. They learned how a small blemish or a pinprick on a victim’s skin would be a giveaway. Watching the pathologists cutting and dissecting a corpse, kidon were encouraged to ask questions. How had a pathologist decided exactly how a corpse had been murdered? What attempts had been made to disguise the method of killing? What was the significance of some small mark on the skin or damage to an internal organ the pathologist had discovered that had led him to a final conclusion? Later, back at their base, kidon would be closely questioned by an instructor on what they had seen and how it could be used for their own purposes. It was rare that a member of the unit failed the grilling, which would mean coming off the active duty roster for a spell of further intensive study of the pathologists at work.

Kidon routinely drove out to the Institute for Biological Research at Nez Ziona to consult with its scientists in their secure laboratories where they tested the efficacy of chemical and biological weapons prepared in labs in Iran, North Korea, and China. Some of the Institute’s Jewish chemists had once worked for the KGB and the East German Stasi intelligence service. When these collapsed at the end of the Cold War, the scientists were recruited by Mossad.

In a conference room reserved for the purpose, chemists and assassins would sit and discuss the merits and drawbacks of what was available for a specific assassination. Would the killing be at night or day? Some lethal pathogens did not work so well in daylight. Would an assassination be in an open or a closed space? Nerve gas often responded very differently in either situation. Would an aerosol be more effective than an injection? Where should either be aimed at the body? Behind an ear, the back of a hand, a jab into a calf or thigh? The questions required careful answers. A kidon’s life could depend on them.