Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Nathan knew that this time the request for help was being made to all foreign intelligence station chiefs in the capital. Within the hour they would have pulled back their own agents from the G8 Summit to help piece together the background on those who had carried out the worst terrorist attack Britain had ever experienced. Mossad would focus its own efforts on the Middle East and Africa, areas where its network of field agents and informers was unrivaled. Their information would be directed through Mossad headquarters for assessment and then routed by encoded e-mail to the London Station. It would receive a further assessment by Nathan and his own agents before being sent on to JTAC. A katsa based in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia on the Horn of Africa, had been briefed to listen out for “chatter” that could link the London bombings with al-Qaeda terrorists who controlled the country through the local warlords. In the past three years more than thirty-five thousand Somalis had been granted asylum in Britain to escape the brutality. One or more of them might have become radicalized by Britain’s imams.

By early afternoon Mossad Station in Cape Town, South Africa, had learned of a dispute between MI6 and CIA operatives over what to do with a British citizen of Indian descent, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who was under arrest in Zambia for an alleged connection with al-Qaeda. The CIA said he was wanted on an arrest warrant in the United States, which charged him with providing “material support to al-Qaeda and attempting to establish a terror training camp in Bly, Oregon, in 1999.” The CIA had told MI6 they had a “strong supposition” that Aswat had made a number of phone calls to suspected Muslim radicals in Britain shortly before the bombings.

The CIA wanted Aswat to be collected by its Gulfstream and flown to a torture chamber in Uzbekistan. But while MI6 was ready to support having Aswat legally extradited to America over the Oregon charges, it would not allow a British citizen to be subjected to brutality. It had also told the CIA that Aswat’s phone calls did not link him to the London bombings.

While the hunt for the London suicide bombers continued, the relationship within the international intelligence community developed its first crack. The French and German security services told MI5 they had no evidence to support its claim that a senior al-Qaeda operative, identified as “Mustafa,” had traveled halfway across Europe and in and out of England shortly before the bombings. Yet Mustafa had continued to be listed as a “priority target” on the Anacapa charts, the specialist diagrams used in the MI5 operations center to try and build up a coherent picture from the information coming in. Nathan had been asked by his MI5 liaison officer to help establish whether Mustafa could still have been the mastermind behind the suicide bombers. Had he told them which targets to hit? Once more Mossad put out the word among its sayanim across Britain and informers in the Middle East. In the weeks to come the mysterious Mustafa would remain just that—a mystery.

London had remained in a grip of fear when, on July 21, the city was subjected to a further suicide bomb attack. But this time the operation bore all the signs of amateur bungling: the homemade bombs failed to explode and the bombers were soon identified. Nevertheless hundreds of reports continued to reach Scotland Yard of people acting suspiciously. Each one had been checked and the suspect shown to have behaved, at most, foolishly. The police had warned that people who behaved like this in a time of high tension ran the risk of their behavior “being misunderstood.”

And such was the case with Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian electrician, on his way by subway to fix a fire alarm in north London. Somewhere walking between his home and the nearby Stockwell underground station he had come to the attention of one of the many antiterrorist police teams on the streets. Each member was aware of the rule they could fire only if they believed a suspect was carrying a bomb. The order of shoot to kill, aiming at the head of a person, would come after a “gold commander” at Scotland Yard had given the order by radio phone to a team commander. The police did not have to shout a warning before they fired; to do so would negate the essential surprise. The rules of engagement were based on those drawn up by Israeli Special Forces to deal with the country’s suicide bombers.

The unsuspecting de Menezes was tracked through the subway station, down an escalator, and onto the platform, where a train was about to depart. As he boarded, the police team moved. One wrestled de Menezes to the floor. Two others fired a total of seven bullets into his head and body. The details caused a growing public furor as it emerged Scotland Yard had lied in claims that de Menezes was “dressed like a suicide bomber.” He had worn lightweight clothes. Police Commissioner Blair found himself progressively challenged over his statements that attempted to justify the shooting. Within his own police force, he was increasingly subjected to criticism by senior officers, who began to leak details to the media about unhappiness within the ranks over Blair’s leadership. The criticism deepened when the early stages of the investigation into de Menezes’s death showed a failure in communication between the team tracking de Menezes and their controllers at Scotland Yard. It transpired that one of the team had taken an unauthorised toilet break during a key part of the surveillance, and radio links between the team and Scotland Yard had temporarily broken down at a crucial stage. Later came the embarrassing news that Blair had authorized a small payment to be offered to the de Menezes family to help them with funeral expenses. The family rejected the offer.

Meantime, the death of the young electrician continued to fuel a huge outcry in Britain’s media. Human rights organizations had seized upon the shooting to mount a campaign against police methods and demand a reassessment of its shoot-to-kill policy. In March 2006, Blair found himself mired in a new controversy. He admitted that he had secretly bugged his conversation with Britain’s attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. They had been discussing telephone surveillance and the bugging of suspects at the time. The revelation brought new demands he should resign, the fifth call to do so since the death of de Menezes. He had brushed all those aside. But over the shooting he had one firm supporter. Nathan had told his MI5 liaison officer, “Those policemen thought they were acting in the best interests of everybody on the information they were given. Mistakes do happen.”

In Tel Aviv for Meir Dagan one death had to be weighed against the loss of life suicide bombers had already carried out, not only in London and Israel, but all around the world. The one certainty, he had told his staff, was the further away the last attack, the closer was the next one.

In the early hours of the first Saturday in October 2005, the duty officer on the Asia Desk in Mossad headquarters received a “Flash” e-mail from the katsa based in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. It brought news that al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers had struck again on the popular holiday resort of Bali, killing and injuring over fifty people. In 2002, other bombers had destroyed nightclubs on the island, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. The message ended with the chilling words: “All indications are this is the work of Husin.”

The forty-eight-year-old graduate engineer from Reading University in England had been personally recruited by Osama bin Laden to become the organization’s master bomber. As well as the previous Bali bombing, the Malaysian-born Azhari Husin had organized suicide bomb attacks on the American-owned Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and the Australian Embassy in the city in 2004. Thirty people had died in the attacks and over a hundred were injured.