Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

In Tel Aviv, the file on Dr. Ri was closed and sent to the registry. Jamal and the other Mossad agents, who had hoped to find and persuade the scientist to work for Israel, were reassigned to other duties. They knew that by the very nature of their work, another “target of opportunity” would inevitably show up.

Early in May 2005, Jamal was tipped off by one of his informers in Rawalpindi that two men in the custody of the Pakistan Intelligence Service had revealed to their interrogators they had been asked to take part in an attack on London’s subway system. The men were identified as Zeesham Hyder Siddiqui, who had been arrested by Pakistani agents in Peshawar, and Naeem Noor Khan, who had been arrested in Lahore.

On Mossad’s computers they were both already listed as members of two of the forty-five extremist groups in Pakistan. Khan belonged to Jundullah, the Army of God; Siddiqui to Karkat-e-Jihad-e-Islami, the Movement for Islamic Jihad. Both groups were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

Scant though the details from Jamal were, nevertheless Meir Dagan sent an encrypted message to Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5. The months of frost between Mossad’s and Britain’s intelligence services, caused by MI6’s presence in Gaza to try and broker a deal with Hamas, was returned to normal after Meir Dagan had flown to meet with MI6 director John Scarlett. The two men and Eliza Manningham-Buller met in a private room in the Traveller’s Club over lunch. Details of their discussion would remain secret. But shortly afterward, the MI6 agents left Gaza and Nathan, Mossad’s London Station chief, received details of the interrogation by two MI5 officers who had flown to Pakistan to question Siddiqui and Khan. Both admitted being close associates of two other young British Muslims who had launched a suicide bomb attack on a Tel Aviv nightclub two years before. They had also provided further details about the extent of al-Qaeda’s network throughout Britain’s Muslim community.

Collecting the daily editions of the city’s newspapers published in Arabic, Urdu, and other Middle East languages remained part of the daily routine for Mossad’s London Station because the capital remained a center for radical Islamists to fulminate against Israel and the West.

After an initial assessment by the London Station analysts, the material was sent by the embassy’s daily diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv. There it was cross-checked for published names against those on the growing list of captured al-Qaeda operatives who had been spirited away by the CIA to secret interrogation centers where the rules of the Geneva Convention and American law did not apply. Sometimes the relatives of the suspected terrorists gave the Arab-language newspapers details of where they had been captured, which helped the Mossad analysts build up a picture of the CIA’s activities. It was doing so not because Mossad disapproved of torture—far from it—but for Israel’s self-protection. For years Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and other human rights organizations had condemned the Jewish state for its harsh interrogation methods and prison conditions. If the day should come when the United States would be forced to support an investigation into Israeli methods of coercive interrogation, then the file Mossad was accumulating would show that it was not alone in such methods.

Central to the CIA operation were two aircraft it had hired from a private company in Massachusetts, Premier Executive Transport Services. One was a fourteen-seater Gulfstream, with registration number N379P, the other a white-painted Boeing 737, with the registration number N313P (the company later declined to discuss the leasing with the author). Mossad had obtained both aircraft’s flight logs detailing the journeys the planes had made to countries with poor human rights records; by October 2005, there had been forty-nine flights to Jordan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Guantánamo Bay. Rob Baer, a former CIA intelligence officer in the Middle East, would later claim (to The Washington Post ): “If you want a strong interrogation you send prisoners to Jordan. If you want them to be seriously tortured fly them to Egypt, from where they never return. If you want them to be most severely tortured for information, send them to Uzbekistan.” Craig Murphy, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, was sacked in the autumn of 2004 for leaking a memo he wrote to foreign secretary Jack Straw, in which the diplomat alleged that some of the prisoners sent to Uzbekistan were “boiled alive. Its Soviet-trained interrogators carry out tortures watched by CIA officers stationed in the country, which is regarded as a close ally of the Bush administration.”

An MI6 officer told the author, “I have personal knowledge that the prisoners are shackled to their seats and are often gagged and drugged during their flights.”

Some of the flights had been cleared to overfly Israeli air space from the CIA secret interrogation center in Kabul known as “the Pit.” It was part of a constellation of worldwide secret detention centers that were sometimes as small as shipping containers or as large as the complex at Guantánamo Bay. Majeed Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who represented the families of dozens of what he called “the disappeared,” said (to the author), “No one will ever know how many have gone. But probably many thousands.”

The conditions under which they were incarcerated were identified by the New York–based Human Rights Watch. “They are shackled continuously, intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time, and forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods.”

Mossad had established that some of the techniques used at the secret interrogation centers were based on the notorious MK-ULTRA brainwashing program run by the CIA at the height of the Cold War. The MI6 officer who had witnessed the shackled prisoners on their way to Uzbekistan claimed (to the author) that upon arrival they were subjected to “sensory deprivation for lengthy periods, mock executions, starvation, sexual violence, rape, immersion in water to the point of drowning, beatings, exposure to intense heat or cold, clamping off blood circulation by wire restraints, near strangulation, flesh burning with cigarettes, and the use of a variety of drugs to weaken a prisoner’s resistance.”

Meantime Mossad continued to identify names in Arabic newspapers of terrorists who had been sent to the torture chambers. The daily trawl also gathered up the latest pamphlets extolling as “heroes” the bombers of 9/11 and issued updated lists of addresses for Britain’s synagogues and the homes of their rabbis. “They should be reminded of the crimes Jews had committed against Muslims,” urged the London-based radical group, Al-Muhajiroun. The same kind of reminder was spelled out by another group, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades. It told its growing number of supporters in Britain it had “declared a bloody war against our non-Muslim neighbors. We will rase the cities of Europe to the ground. We will turn them into cities drenched with blood until its leaders withdraw their troops from Iraq.”

Muslim clerics were regularly invited on to the BBC to justify the “martyrdom” of suicide bombers because, as Dr. Yusuf al-Qardawi told the corporation’s current affairs flagship program, Newsnight: “It is an indication of the justice of Allah the Almighty.” Many young British Muslims still carried with them the fatwa Osama bin Laden had issued in February 1998: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the great Mosques of Mecca from their grip and in order for their armies to move out of the lands of Islam.”