Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Piece by piece Nathan had collected and analyzed the testimony of those involved in the scientist’s death. He uncovered details of Dr. Kelly’s hitherto unsuspected links to the biowarfare program of South Africa’s apartheid regime—and that in the week before his death the scientist had been told he would be questioned by MI5 over bringing the program’s head, Dr. Wouter Basson, to Porton Down. With all the other pressure he was facing, had the prospect of a grilling by security service interrogators finally been the last straw? Could his death possibly have any connection with the madcap schemes of Basson? Had he been killed to be silenced, another victim of the “dark side of intelligence” that Ari Ben-Menashe had identified? The questions would remain unanswered until Michael Shrimpton, a lawyer who has briefed the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on national security issues made a bid to end the mystery.

He claimed to the London Sunday Express that “Dr. Kelly was most likely murdered by a team of assassins from the French DGSE security service and his body dressed up to look like a suicide. Within forty-eight hours of the Kelly death, I was contacted by a British intelligence officer who told me he had been murdered. Neither MI5 nor MI6 were involved and both services are unhappy over what happened. It is my opinion that well-placed persons in Whitehall considered Kelly to be a threat to the survival of the government and used a team from outside the country to take out Kelly. My information is that the French used Iraqi intelligence killers to carry out the killing.” Shrimpton produced no copper-bottomed evidence to support his claim. But they formed part of Nathan’s report, which, in turn, would become part of the curriculum at the Mossad training school.

In that first week of July 2005, high summer had come to London, filling the city with optimism. A continuing heatwave had clothed the crowds in pretty dresses and open-necked shirts. Cafés had moved tables outside for al fresco dining. The stock market was still on the rise, and the shops were offering discounts on already bargain prices. The television images from Baghdad had faded from the screens.

Mossad had been among foreign intelligence services informed by the Home Office that the threat of a terrorist attack on Britain had been downgraded from “severe general” to the third highest alert, “substantial.” That week Scotland Yard’s commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, had briefed his senior staff that MI5 was “quietly confident” the battle against terrorism was under control.

Nathan had met, and liked, the commissioner. Since he had been appointed the previous January, Blair had started to run London’s police force as a modern corporation based on the latest management techniques. With his calm, measured tones, the stocky uniformed figure, police cap clamped firmly on his head and jaw thrust forward, Blair radiated a bullish certainty. He had set out his stall in much the way Meir Dagan had done when taking over a dispirited Mossad. Blair had told his force of thirty thousand officers and fifteen thousand civilians that he intended to drag them away from what he saw as a sexist, homophobic, and often racist past. He had reminded them that he was a policeman who knew what it was like to extract a corpse from a train crash and had peppered his laying-down-the-rules-first speech to his senior officers with quotations from Voltaire. He raised a smile when he said that on his deathbed the great French thinker, asked to renounce the devil, replied this was not the time to make new enemies. He told the officers he didn’t want them to treat him as their enemy, but he would not tolerate anyone who clung “to the old ways.” From then on he slipped easily into the business jargon of “multitiered policing,” “customer-shaped service,” and “infrastructure connectivity.” He used such unlikely police terms as “encapsulate,” “ ex cathedra, ” “antithesis,” and “counsel of perfection.”

Nathan had suspected those words would not sit easily with Meir Dagan’s blunt language, nor the way Blair signed his memos with a gold-tipped fountain pen, nor how he had a Miro painting on his office wall and filled his bookshelf with copies of Tennyson and Yeats.

Satisfied that London was not at risk from an impending terrorist attack, Blair had ordered fifteen hundred Metropolitan police officers to the Gleneagles summit, where anarchists were among the protesters. The Yard’s antiterrorist squad had also sent almost all its officers to Scotland. MI5 and MI6 had drawn tight its part of the net, which had been cast far and wide to catch terrorists. Not one had been spotted. Even the hunt for the “Raven” had petered out when Mossad said he had come and gone from Britain, disappearing somewhere into Europe. Around Gleneagles the massed ranks of police had overwhelmed protesters. The only moment of tension had come when President George W. Bush fell off his bicycle and grazed his hand.

Britain’s capital awoke on July 6 to find the city had won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, and driving to work that morning, tuned into the Today program, Nathan heard Commissioner Blair assuring Londoners that “we will cope with any terror threat to the games. Our police force is the envy of the policing world in relation to counterterrorism. We’ve upped our game.”

That Wednesday afternoon a war game was winding down in JTAC (Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre). Predicting disaster scenarios on their computers was a regular part of the work of the specialists at their interlinked work stations. This one centered on two different types of attack on London. The first scenario predicted that terrorists would fly over the capital in a light plane leased from one of the private airfields to the west of the city and dump VX nerve gas to catch the prevailing wind. The specialists calculated 30 people would die at the point of release and another 250 downwind. The next scenario was based on terrorists spraying pneumonic plague in aerosol form at Heathrow. Not only would several thousand die in the chosen terminal, but the wind could carry the plague into London. The calculated death toll was put at 2 million as all the emergency services would be overwhelmed. To cope with the dead, JTAC had recommended that the London Strategic Disaster Mortuary Working Group, part of the UK Mass Fatalities Working Group, should set up mobile mortuaries on the outskirts of the city to provide “overflow capacity for hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

That evening Mossad Station in London received its daily report from Tel Aviv that there was no evidence of any increase in “terrorist chatter” involving a threat to the United Kingdom. In MI5 headquarters, overlooking the river Thames in Westminster, the vast, open-plan operations room that stretched along most of one wing was in stand-down mode: its plasma screens were blank, the whiteboards empty, the maps of London streets rolled up, the scores of telephones silent.

Not one of the police and security services had picked up a hint of the atrocity about to happen.

On Thursday morning, July 7, Nathan was running a staff meeting in his office at the Israeli Embassy when his MI5 liaison officer telephoned shortly after 9:00 A.M. He did not bother to hide the tension and anger in his voice. There had been three separate attacks on rush-hour trains on London’s subway system and one on its famous double-decker buses. The death toll would be heavy (it turned out to be fifty-five dead and more than two hundred injured). The atrocity bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda suicide attack. The MI5 officer concluded by asking Mossad to provide all possible assistance.

In the past three years MI5 had made several requests for Mossad’s help over suspected plots to attack London’s transport system, which the security service believed had Middle East links. They included poisoning the subway with sarin gas, planting cyanide in its air-conditioning system, placing the deadly poison ricin on the trains. Another plot had centered on exploding a car bomb in the city’s Soho District, a favorite tourist area. Mossad had failed to find any evidence to support the MI5 claims that the plans had originated in the Middle East. Yet shortly before the London bombings, Lord Stevens, taking time out from his investigation into the death of Princess Diana, had publicly insisted MI5 had thwarted the plots. The claim had irritated Mossad.