Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Whether Meir Dagan’s meeting with Qiao Shi took place in the compound would remain unknown, just as what was agreed between them. But twenty-four hours after his plane had landed it was in the air again heading back to Israel.

A few days later Mossad was among a number of Western intelligence services that discovered North Korea was weaponizing the bird flu virus. It added to the mounting concern that was already sweeping the world as the prospect grew of a repetition of the 1918 influenza pandemic that had killed 50 million. Then, as now, there was no ready vaccine to inoculate entire populations. Warnings from intelligence services said that in aerosol form the weaponized virus would be undetectable at border crossings, making it an ideal weapon for terrorists. In Washington, the Bush administration gave briefings classified “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” to members of Congress and the Senate, during which CIA Director Porter Goss and John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence, revealed details of the terrorist threat.

The outbreak had originated in Asia and the intelligence chiefs explained it would be relatively easy for North Korean agents to obtain birds infected with the H5N1 strain from which the virus could be weaponized. Biopreperat’s former director, Dr. Ken Alibek, who had defected from Russia and was now a senior adviser to the Bush administration on biodefense, said to the author, “The threat of a weaponized bird flu virus cannot be overemphasized. It would be the most terrible weapon in the hands of a terrorist. An aerosolized bird flu would be impossible to detect from one spread naturally by infected birds. But the lab-produced virus would be far more lethal and could be directed at specific targets.”

Peter Openshaw, professor of virology at Imperial College, London, said, “It would be more terrifying than engineered smallpox. That would be relatively easy to contain because there is an existing vaccine.” Hugh Pennington, professor of microbiology at Aberdeen University in Scotland, said North Korea’s molecular biologists “could mix the bird flu virus with other flu viruses, making it easier to spread from personal contact.”

Were the reports that North Korea was weaponizing bird flu an indication the regime had dismissed any approach by China to stop arming Iran? Had Qiao Shi simply politely listened to Dagan and done nothing? Or had he agreed with the old men of Zhongnanhai that it would not be in their own interest to put pressure on their unstable neighbor?

The one certainty was that a warhead filled with weaponized virus and launched against Tel Aviv would have disastrous consequences. But it was now not only the possibility of a weaponized bird flu virus that threatened Israel and the world beyond its borders. This one came from six nuclear scientists who had worked in the Pakistan nuclear industry and had left the country.

Mossad had discovered their activities before they had left Pakistan after having worked closely with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Islamic bomb and the godfather of nuclear proliferation. Their technical experience included the complex disciplines needed to use centrifuges to produce enriched uranium, the precursor for a nuclear bomb.

Their skills had been enhanced by South African nuclear experts secretly employed in Pakistan’s nuclear program at the Khan Research Laboratories. South Africa’s own space-age program had been dismantled after America had threatened trade sanctions in 1993. Overnight President Nelson Mandela had canceled his dream of putting an astronaut into space. And along with billions of rands being wasted, hundreds of highly skilled men and women found themselves out of work.

But the more talented did not have to wait long for offers. The first came from Dimona, Israel’s nuclear facility. Its relationship with the South African program had prospered from the time Dimona know-how had fine-tuned South Africa’s first intermediate-range missile, the Arniston, a carbon copy of Israel’s own Jericho II rocket. A decade of close collaboration had finally ended in 1992, again with pressure from the United States. But the ties between the scientists had remained.

To those who had worked at Kempton Park, a facility outside Johannesburg developing high-resolution camera systems for satellites; at Somerset West, in the bushland of Eastern Cape, where rocket motors had been designed; at the systems engineering facility at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, came attractive offers. No longer would they need to live in a country with the highest murder rate in the world and plagued with corruption scandals. In Israel they would earn salaries in a hard currency of their choice that far exceeded what they had previously earned. In no time they had begun to sell their homes near the missile test sites in Kwa/Zula/ Natal and in the former nature reserve near Cape Town, and had flown north on the regular El Al flight to Tel Aviv, joining others from the nuclear warheads manufacturing plant out on the veldt beyond the country’s capital, Pretoria. With all expenses paid and a substantial down payment in their bank accounts, they had settled into their new lives in the palm-fringed settlements that had been created for them in the Negev Desert. They found themselves working alongside a number of Russians who had also been headhunted after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The recruiters from Pakistan had also been busy. Working with even more discretion than the Israelis had shown, they had offered other disaffected scientists salaries at even higher levels than those from Dimona. With them came the promise of a lifestyle in Pakistan that would match those the scientists had enjoyed during the high days of apartheid: servants they had to let go after the collapse of South Africa’s space-age program would once more be plentiful in Pakistan, along with sundowners, the evening ritual of cocktails at sunset that had been an integral part of their South African life. They would live in homes even more lavish than those on the Cape; their children would be educated in private schools whose teachers came from the great universities of England, France, and the United States, and their private medical facilities would be staffed with the best doctors. Along with generous holidays, their income would be tax-free and deposited in any bank of their choice anywhere in the world. The offers were eagerly accepted and flights out of Johannesburg to Islamabad were filled with the scientists and their families.

Over the years, they helped to develop the skills of the six Pakistani nuclear scientists who had discretely slipped out of the country after they had been identified as being involved in what became known in Mossad, MI6, and the CIA as “America’s Hiroshima.” The intention was to smuggle into the United States a nuclear device that would be detonated in Washington. The bomb would be transported in one of the container ships that arrived at American East Coast ports every week. Few were subjected to a full search. Sleeper agents would collect the bomb, packed inside a container, take it to Washington, and detonate it, creating even more deaths and casualties than the September 11 attacks had achieved.

The operation had been devised by Osama bin Laden with an exactness that would have the same terrible synchronicity as the September 11 attacks. The intention was not only to terrorize and appall by the sheer number of victims, but at the same time provide an example of victory won by violence. Politically it was designed as a rallying call for global jihad, worldwide holy war. The leaders of Muslim nations who opposed it would be swept away in what bin Laden had likened to the creation of the new caliphate of which he had long dreamed. He envisaged how, barely a generation after many Muslim countries had won their independence, mostly from Britain, their world would enter a new religious era. Already the first phase was in place in Iran where the 1979 Khomeini revolution had aroused the deprived masses. Next to fall in the aftermath of America’s Hiroshima would be the Saudi royal family, who bin Laden had long accused of betraying their duties as custodians of the holy places of Mecca and Medina.