Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Mossad discovered one colorful figure who had also worked with South Africa and North Korea, a Mormon gynecologist, Dr. Larry Ford, based on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. With his cultivated bedside manner, casual clothes, and hightop basketball shoes, none of his patients suspected he was a villain from the pages of the thrillers he kept in his waiting room bookcase. Dr. Ford had built up a close relationship with Wouter Basson and, through him, had established contacts with the equally sinister scientists of North Korea. Not one of his patients suspected Dr. Ford regularly carried deadly toxins in his baggage on flights to South Africa. The mystery of where he had obtained them, who had authorized their transportation out of the United States, and the identity of the end user were also secrets Dr. Ford would carry to his grave. In the spring of 2000, he had committed suicide. When the police dealing with the case opened Dr. Ford’s refrigerator in his home in Irvine, California, they found sufficient vials to poison, in the words of one officer, “pretty well the whole of the state. We knew then we were not dealing with some routine suicide.” There were bottles containing cultures of cholera, botulism, and typhoid fever. It would remain an unresolved mystery how they got there.

In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Mossad had been allowed to interrogate Dr. Rihad Taha, the notorious “Dr. Germ” who directed Saddam Hussein’s biowarfare program. Her total willingness to conduct terminal experiments on humans and her eagerness to find new ways to weaponize germs into even more effective armaments had made the slim, mousy-haired biologist a firm favorite with the Iraqi dictator. The daughter of one of the country’s ruling Baath families, she had acquired her skills at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She had gone there in 1979, arriving at Heathrow Airport on a First Class ticket with Iraqi Airlines from Baghdad. In her suitcases were designer suits from Paris. Taha took a $150 taxi to the campus. No one thought this was remarkable; foreign students were renowned free spenders. She had enrolled to study crop diseases. She was twenty-three years old, with an unattractive way of chewing flower stalks, a habit that had already turned her teeth yellow. While students found her arrogant, tutors were impressed by Taha’s dedication and were sympathetic when her end-of-term results were disappointing. No one suspected this was a deliberate ploy to ensure she would remain at the university to continue her degree course.

The idea had been that of her Iraqi intelligence controller based at the Iraqi Embassy in London and enabled her continued access to restricted papers on germ warfare, some of which came from Porton Down, Britain’s own center for biowarfare research. The documents showed her how to weaponize anthrax, botulism, and other toxins. She learned how deadly germs could be sprayed in shopping malls and bomblets of pathogens distributed over a sports arena. All this could be achieved by using little more than the equipment in a school science lab. When Taha returned to Iraq in 1984, she had a degree in microbiology and joined a small team of other British-trained Iraqi graduates to spearhead Saddam’s biological program. After she became its director in 1986, she abandoned her designer suits for the battle fatigues Saddam favored and hennaed her hair to the color of the Euphrates, which flowed past her mansion home. She set up her laboratories in the Al-Hasan ibn al-Hatham Institute outside Baghdad. It was there she started to kill her victims, the methods including how to inject babies with lethal doses of diarrhea. The babies were taken from women prisoners.

In the summer of 2004, Dr. Taha attempted to barter her freedom for the lives of American, British, and Irish hostages held by a fanatical Islamic terror group in Iraq. When the deal was rejected by the United States, the hostages were beheaded by the group’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In Tel Aviv, the Committee of the Heads of Services had met that year under Meir Dagan’s chairmanship and agreed that after Iran the most serious threat posed to Israel by bioterrorism was from North Korea. The regime continued to threaten Israel with destruction by providing Iran with rockets capable of delivering warheads filled with germs. Mossad had established that a week before the meeting, the Pyongyang regime had been about to ship a container of warheads to Tehran. Using Mossad’s “backdoor” channel with the CIA, Meir Dagan had asked Porter Goss to persuade the White House to ask the Beijing regime to halt the transfer. A phone call from Condoleezza Rice had produced the required result. But in Tel Aviv the intervention was seen as doing little to stop the deadly and illegal traffic between the two pariah states.

The meeting ended with the request that Dagan should send a small team of agents to South Korea to discover what was happening across the border with its northern neighbor. One of its members was Jamal. Under cover of being an Iranian businessman trading in artefacts, he had established a network of informers across South Asia. One had been Horaj, who had provided the first details of what became known in Mossad as New Exodus, the secret route refugees used to escape from the harsh regime of North Korea. For them it had become the equivalent to the biblical Exodus.

The route had a long and colorful history. Originally created by the CIA at the end of the Korean War, it had been used to smuggle its own agents and high-value informers out of North Korea and China. The informers were moved from one safe house to another and escorted by guides through China’s towns and villages to the borders of Cambodia, Laos, and Hong Kong, and who received little or no payment for this dangerous work. One guide probably spoke for many when he told his CIA controller, “I do this for democracy.”

A journey could take weeks, even months. A CIA officer involved in running the operation recalled (to the author): “It was like traveling on a railway where you never knew when the signal would turn from green to red. Then everything shut down until there was another green light.”

The route out of China was a torturous one, often doubling back, and involved traveling by road, river, and train. Several of those who set out never reached safety; the risk of betrayal was a constant threat. China’s Public Security spies and its formidable secret intelligence service were a fearsome duo. No one knows how many CIA agents or informers were captured and never heard of again. Eventually the Exodus route ceased to operate. Then during the 1990s, once more shocking accounts of the depravity of the North Korean regime began to emerge. Defectors all told the same story of a nation living increasingly in near starvation, of torture, and forced labor. Most horrifying of all were the reports of inhuman experiments on prisoners from relatives who managed to cross the 880-mile-long border into China. But those who had fled found little relief there. It had an estimated 5 million of its own prisoners in camps as grim as the gulags of North Korea. When caught, asylum seekers were swiftly transported back across the border to an inevitable fate of interrogation, torture, and death.

To save them, two remarkable human rights activists reopened the old CIA route. Their Mossad profiles paint ennobling pictures.

Douglas Shin and Norbert Vollersten were both in their late forties and came from very different cultural backgrounds. Shin was a Korean-American church pastor who had been ordained after a career as a businessman and filmmaker, and he lived in a Los Angeles suburb as pastor of his church. He had the Asian’s mannerisms of being polite and diffident; only when he spoke of the gross abuses of North Korea or its people was he aroused to quiet passion. Then his words filled with religious metaphors; the pain and anger in his eyes was there for all to see. There was about him then a sense that if you were not part of the answer he wanted, you were part of his many problems in rescuing people from the terror of Kim Jong Il’s regime. He was one of the two “station masters” for New Exodus. The other was Vollersten.