Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Trying to avert that possibility had taken Nathan once more into the Muslim enclaves in the north of England. Not only did Mossad have its sayanim there, but it had also built up a network of informers within the Muslim communities. Mostly young, they risked their own lives and those of their families by providing information. They, too, had been alerted to watch for any signs that a suicide bomber attack was being planned.

In London, as part of the preparations for the G8 Summit, Mossad had already circulated a document to the police and security services on how Mossad had learned to identify a suicide bomber. In part the document read:

A suicide bomber will be young, at most in his late twenties. While he will usually be a male, remember there are an increasing number of female bombers. A bomber will either be carrying a rucksack filled with explosives or a bag, similarly equipped. A person about to undertake something so high risk will be perspiring. Look at hands; are they perspiring? Look at the eyes. Are they furtive? Does the person constantly look around? Are they making an obvious attempt not to make eye contact? A suicide bomber will usually wear a baseball cap or other headgear that will hide the face from close-circuit television. If the bomb is in a bag, the bomber may constantly check it, especially on public transport. Look at physical shape. Average-sized legs usually mean an average-sized body. But if the person is bulkier than their legs, neck, or face suggest, that could be suspicious. Do not in any circumstances challenge the suspect. If you shout ‘it’s a bomb!’, you will most likely panic the bomber into detonating it. And remember: a suicide bomber has to live somewhere. His or her behaviour may have aroused suspicion in his community. Good intelligence will likely mean you have someone in that community to alert you. But also remember there is no precise science to spot a bomber. It depends on past experience and luck.

Mossad was not alone in its penetration of Muslim communities. MI5 had set up sophisticated surveillance sites in areas where Asian communities had become assimilated into British society, where the young held steady employment and made regular trips to see aunts and uncles in Pakistan and other places, where young men were never publicly seen mixing with angry militants after Friday prayers. These were the men that MI5 watched for. On those trips to Pakistan some had made contacts with al-Qaeda. Known as “Trojans,” they had been recruited to become home-grown terrorists. Their cell phones were bugged, their conversations recorded and analyzed, their movements filmed, and their contacts subject to the same deep surveillance. Radio waves were bounced off windowpanes to monitor conversations in a room; the latest technology was used to screen e-mails and search for incriminating files on Web sites. Each MI5 surveillance unit had a lawyer from JTAC attached to it who oversaw the surveillance to ensure any evidence would be admissible in a court. The arrests had numbered few.

In part, this was because Islamic groups have been quick to embrace new information technology to achieve their goals. The Internet’s full potential in the Arab world was first realized at the onset of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000. The most successful Web site was Electronic Intifada, dubbed by Yasser Arafat “as our weapon of mass destruction.” Its founding members were based in the Netherlands, Canada, Chicago, and Leicester in the English midlands. From there they waged asymmetric warfare using the latest technology to spread their message of hate across cyberspace.

Like MI5, Mossad’s London Station collected the biweekly online magazine for all jihadists and, since 2001, a quarterly version for women mujahideen. The same Web sites were monitored by diplomats at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. There was one significant difference. Mossad stations had staff able to instantly read what the Web site said; no such capability existed among those diplomats. They merely transmitted the material on to the State Department or the CIA. Their already hard-pressed translators and analysts played what one translator called “pick and choose” from the daily input of foreign language material. He told the author: “Lookit, not much has changed since the week before 9/11 when Mossad picked up a phone call from bin Laden to his mother—yes, his mother, for Chrissake!—that he couldn’t come to her birthday party because he was too busy. The message was passed up the line to middle management at the CIA. It was deemed to be too vague to act upon.”

From his contacts with sayanim and informers in Leeds, where Jews and Muslims lived cheek-to-jowl, Nathan had learned radicals had started to write messages on Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail accounts—but not sending them. Instead they left them stored in the “draft” folders of the accounts. Unsent, they could not be intercepted. However, any other radical who knew an account password could log on from anywhere in the world and read a message.

An informer had provided Nathan with a password. But there was nothing on the site to indicate an impending suicide bomber attack, or any form of assault, on the Gleneagles summit.

In the first week of July 2005, Nathan began each day began by listening to the BBC Radio-4 program Today as he drove to work. The program had long established itself as required listening for London’s politicians, foreign diplomats, the mandarins of Whitehall, and the capital’s intelligence community. All were expecting another clash with the Blair government and the BBC over the continuing fallout from its role in the Iraqi war. Though the initial war with Iraq had ended, the issue of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction had remained at the center of a political maelstrom that had threatened the governments of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush. At the core of the increasingly bitter storm was the original Today claim on air that Tony Blair had approved of the “sexing-up” of a dossier stating that Saddam had the capability of launching weapons of mass destruction against the West, the reason Blair had given for joining Bush in the war against Iraq. Dr. David Kelly had been publicly identified on the program as the scientist who had given one of its reporters evidence that the dossier had been “sexed up.”

Dr. Kelly worked for the British government. He was a world-ranking expert on biological weapons at Britain’s Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down and head of its Microbiology Department. In the still largely secret world of how to combat the threat from biological weapons, Dr. Kelly became the voice of unchallengeable authority regularly consulted by officers on the counterproliferation desks in the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defense, MI5 and MI6, and Mossad. For over a decade he had confronted the deceits, lies, and trickery of Saddam’s biological weapons program. Into his office, room 2/35 in the Ministry of Defense Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat in Whitehall, came daily e-mails and phone calls asking for his help.

Nathan had met him after Dr. Kelly had taken part in a joint Canadian /Mossad operation to interdict biological materials being shipped to Iraq from Montreal. Later, Nathan had accompanied the scientist to the Institute of Biological Research in Tel Aviv, one of the few outsiders allowed such a visit. When the second war against Iraq ended in 2003, Dr. Kelly returned to Baghdad. He had been told by the CIA and MI6 there were shells and missiles with warheads capable of delivering huge quantities of germs that had been secretly developed between the wars. He had found no such weapons. He had been urged by his superiors to go and look again. Still he had found nothing. The pressure continued. No one suspected the inner gyroscope that balanced Dr. Kelly’s decision making had begun to slip out of kilter. Nathan had followed every twist and turn in the very public humiliation of Dr. Kelly that had followed his failure to find weapons of mass destruction: his appearance before a House of Commons Intelligence Oversight Committee, the leaking of his name as the source for the Today story that the government had “sexed up” its dossier, his subsequent hounding by the media. Finally, it had all become too much for Dr. Kelly.