Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

A few days before, Mossad had finally confirmed the MI5 claim that the mysterious “Mustafa” had been Husin, who had planned and recruited volunteers for the London bombings. Meir Dagan had told Eliza Manningham-Buller that Husin had traveled to London before the attacks, using one of the many passports known to be in his possession and traveling under one of his disguises. He may even have been in the capital when the attacks occurred: one of his trademarks was to observe the effects of the destruction for which he was responsible. He had been spotted at previous locations each time escaping in the confusion to return to one of his hideouts, which Mossad believed were in the Toba Kakar range of mountains separating Pakistan’s Northwest frontier from the equally inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan.

America’s National Security Agency geopositioned a satellite over an area that extended from Murgha and Khanozai, small towns in the foothills of the Toba Kakar range. Pakistani troops, supported by U.S. Special Forces and Britain’s SAS, began to prepare for another foray into the region. In the early hours of October 8, the entire region was devastated by an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale. Millions of tons of rock and rubble buried the area. The Mossad analysts, who had been closely monitoring the area, decided that if Husin was buried beneath the debris it was unlikely his body would be found.

Then came reports that not only galvanized the analysts in Tel Aviv but also those in every major intelligence service; Osama bin Laden could be among the dead. Informers had told their intelligence controllers that he had been seen in the devastated area. One report said his face looked thinner. Could that be an indication his kidney condition had worsened? In recent weeks, Mossad had discovered that bin Laden had received from China a portable kidney dialysis machine. Drones, unmanned aircraft launched by U.S. Special Forces to overfly the search area, reported that all power supplies had been destroyed. In Islamabad, President Pervez Musharraf agreed to a CIA request to keep rescue teams looking for earthquake survivors from entering the search area for bin Laden and Husin. In Washington bin Laden watchers joined the speculation. Bruce Hoffman at the RAND Corporation, a think tank with good connections in the U.S. intelligence community, said that if bin Laden had survived he could have made his way back into Afghanistan. Milt Beardman, a CIA officer with hands-on experience of the search area, added: “If bin Laden is dead the world will never know. We just have to wait until somebody drags out his body, does the DNA checks, and says ‘this is bin Laden.’ My bet is that it won’t happen.”

Nevertheless the speculation continued. Donald Rumsfeld, the feisty U.S. secretary of Defence, said it was now almost a year since bin Laden had made his last public appearance, and he could be dead; Nature’s justice. “No longer the face of al Qaeda,” Rumsfeld had mused. Certainly on the jihadist Web sites Mossad analysts noticed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Iraq, was increasingly labeled as a prime mover in the dream of restoring the Islamic caliphate.

On one of the Web sites appeared a chilling document titled: The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad and the Way to Enrich Uranium . Its eighty pages contained detailed instructions on how to “look for radium, an effective alternative to uranium and available on the market.” Matti Steinberg, one of Mossad’s experts on al-Qaeda’s search for a nuclear weapon, said the manual was “dangerously impressive.” While the author described himself as “Layth al-Islam,” the Lion of Islam, it was to whom he had dedicated the manual that raised doubt that bin Laden was dead. “A gift to the commander of the jihad fighters, Sheikh Osama bin Laden, for the sake of jihad for the sake of Allah.”

On October 18, a deep-cover Mossad agent in Tehran recorded a conversation between bin Laden’s oldest son, Saad, and his siblings Mohammed and Othman. The three men were living in secure compounds in the city suburbs from where they ran terrorist operations rather than languishing under house arrest as the Iran government claimed. In the conversation, Saad reported he had spoken that day to his father, who wanted his sons to know he was alive and well. The recording was made ten days after the earthquake had struck.

Shortly afterward came the first clue for Mossad analysts that there was a shift of power in the upper echelons of al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan the CIA had intercepted a letter to be hand-couriered from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the long-time deputy to bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s long-time strategist, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose ruthless bombing campaign in Iraq had brought a $25 million bounty on his head, posted by the United States. A copy of the letter was sent to Mossad to study. Its analysts were surprised: while the usual flowery Arabic remained, there was a sharpness to the tone over the deaths of many hundreds of Shias who had died in suicide bombings launched by al-Zarqawi. Zawahiri questioned “the wisdom of such a policy by you. Such action is not acceptable to our Shia supporters and will do nothing to achieve our aims. I have personally tasted the bitterness of American brutality when my family was killed in a bombing attack in Afghanistan. Despite that I say to you: we are in a battle and more than half of that battle is fought in the media. What you are doing is killing our Shia brothers and it will not help us win that battle.”

Days later al-Zarqawi delivered his response. On a cold night in Amman, his suicide bombers lit the sky over the Jordanian capital with massive explosions that seriously damaged three hotels and a nightclub, which in the tourist season would be filled with foreign visitors. But on that night, the majority of the ninety-six dead and scores of wounded were Arabs, including a number of Shia families who had traveled over the border from Iraq to holiday after Ramadan.

The atrocity was seen by Mossad analysts as evidence al-Zarqawi was making a grim presentation to the al-Qaeda membership that he was their leader in waiting.

In the fading daylight of an October afternoon in 2005, an Israeli air force plane landed at a high security airport near Beijing. The flight had been specially arranged for Meir Dagan, the sole passenger on board. Only Prime Minister Sharon and members of the Committee of the Heads of Service knew the purpose of his long journey across Asia.

The Mossad station chief in Moscow had obtained evidence that former members of the Russian armed forces had supplied rocket technology to North Korea, enabling the pariah state to build missiles capable of striking not only Israel but all the capitals of Europe. Even more worrying was that the Pyongyang regime had secretly passed on the technology to Iran, immensely boosting its already formidable military capability. In the past month North Korea’s state-owned Chongchengang Arms Corporation, which had brokered the deal with the Russians, had sent tanker planes to Iran loaded with liquid propellant needed to drive the rockets. Each missile was designed to carry a 1.2-ton payload, more than sufficient to reduce Tel Aviv to a wasteland. One of the rockets, the Taep’o-dong 2, could reach America’s West Coast when launched in the Pacific from one of the Soviet SSN-6 submarines Moscow had sold to North Korea in 2003.

Even more disturbing was a later report from a Mossad undercover agent stationed in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The city had long been a haven for spies from all over the world, who were on the constant lookout for refugees from the north who could provide inside information or, more important, who had worked in the secret military programs of North Korea. For weeks the agent had been cultivating a defector who had worked as a production manager at Factory 395 near the town of Jaijin in the far northeast of the country. He had not only provided details of the missile guidance systems being produced but also information about the scores of other factories in the regime’s industry to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. All told, over two hundred thousand people were employed in producing nuclear materials, and chemical and biological weapons. The defector revealed that at Factory 395, its missile guidance systems were capable of delivering warheads filled with chemical and biological agents. His duties had included buying electronic equipment made in a factory outside Nagasaki. Its salesmen regularly traveled to Factory 395. Their names had been passed to Mossad’s Asia Desk and in turn to its station in Tokyo: the possibility of recruiting a salesman as an informer was an enticing one.