Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Details of the plan to detonate a nuclear device in America had emerged with the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden’s military operations chief, in an al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi on March 2, 2003. The arrest was made by Pakistani intelligence agents, allowing President Musharraf to offer further proof to Washington that he remained a staunch supporter of the war against terrorism. It continued to be less than the full truth. While Pakistan had indeed detained scores of al-Qaeda members, it still sponsored terrorist groups in the disputed state of Kashmir, funding, training, and arming them in their war of attrition against India. The Bush administration continued to regard Pakistan as its powerful ally in the war on terrorism espoused by bin Laden. “Kashmir is a side issue,” a State Department official told the author.

The arrest of Mohammed earned further public gratitude from Washington. No mention would be made of the role played by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces, who had flown the high-value captive to their interrogation compound at the American base at Bagram in Afghanistan. They brought with them over a thousand documents and a hundred hard drives recovered from Mohammed’s safe house in a Karachi back street; he had been betrayed for a thousand U.S. dollars. The documents and disks would later be deemed as “an operational gold mine” and served as the basis for Mohammed’s interrogation.

Manacled and hooded in one of the compound’s railroad freight trucks, subjected to sleep deprivation and long periods of amplified “white noise,” denied air-conditioning during the intense heat of the day and no warmth for the icy cold of the night, injected with drugs to weaken his resistance, coupled with physical violence and threats of summary execution—techniques later exposed by Amnesty International—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began to reveal details of America’s Hiroshima. It called for the detonation of seven tactical nuclear devices in seven cities simultaneously. The cities were New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. Each device would be capable of creating an explosion of ten kilotons. The planning for the multiple explosions was still in its early stages, and the operation would ultimately require smuggling into the United States the nuclear devices in seaborne cargo containers. Every year around 18 thousand container ships arrive at U.S. ports; only a small percentage are thoroughly checked. To check all would require manpower far beyond what is available and would have serious consequences for America’s commerce.

It was at this stage, in May 2003, that Mossad became directly involved.

A set of the captured documents and the first interrogation transcripts had been passed to Mossad as part of the close collaboration established between Porter Goss and Meir Dagan. In return Mossad had provided the CIA with electrifying news. Abdul Qadeer Khan had, in April 2003, met with bin Laden. The scientist had flown to Peshawar in the Northwest Province and had been driven through the towering mountains and across the Pakistan border into the hard, unforgiving, and desolate land of eastern Afghanistan. With Khan had gone one of the six nuclear scientists Mossad had been tracking. His name was Murad Qasim and he was the leading expert in the intricacies of centrifugal technology in the Khan Laboratories.

Now, a month later in mid-May, Qasim was among Khan’s guests at his weekend house overlooking a lake outside Rawalpindi on the north plane of the Punjab. The area was a conservationist paradise.

Posing as fishermen, a Mossad yaholomin team had set up surveillance near the house. Direction mikes had been disguised as rods.

Five years had passed since Khan had successfully detonated Pakistan’s first nuclear bomb at the test site beneath the Baluchistan Desert. In the intervening years he had continued to sell nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. As well as Murad Qasim, Mossad had identified five of his colleagues who had also traveled there; Muhammad Zubair, Bashiruddin Mahmood, Saeed Akhther, Imtaz Baig, and Waheed Nasir. All were senior managers at the Khan Laboratories. On that weekend in May, they completed the guest list at Khan’s retreat by the lake.

Like their host, Khan’s guests were confirmed al-Qaeda supporters. Bashiruddin Mahmood, in addition, had held a meeting with bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, in Kandahār, Afghanistan, earlier in the year. On his way back to Pakistan he had been briefly detained by U.S. forces in the town. Mahmood had claimed diplomatic immunity and insisted he was in the country on an “agricultural visit.” Faced with documents supporting his claim, he had been allowed to fly back to Islamabad. After being prompted by the CIA to interview him, Pakistan intelligence officers were astonished when Mahmood admitted he had indeed met the terrorists, who had asked him to devise a radiological bomb. It would be constructed from nuclear material wrapped in conventional high explosives, which bin Laden had obtained from a former Soviet Union nuclear site in Uzbekistan. Mahmood had insisted he had refused the request. The Pakistani government informed Washington that Mahmood was above suspicion. No mention was made of his meeting with bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

Now the eavesdropping Mossad team heard Mahmood tell Khan and his guests that his own contacts in Pakistan Intelligence had warned him that the CIA knew about their own role in America’s Hiroshima after their names had surfaced in the documents discovered with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s capture. Mossad’s long-rooted suspicions had been confirmed: Mahmood had gone to Kandahār not to discuss with bin Laden the making of a relatively simple “dirty bomb” but to pledge the services of himself and the five other scientists around Khan’s table.

Next day, even as Meir Dagan was sending Porter Goss details of what the yaholomin unit had recorded, all six scientists had left Pakistan. Khan subsequently resolutely denied any knowledge of his staff being involved in the plot to launch nuclear strikes against America.

Their names had gone onto the Detain Lists of a number of security services. But like others with terrorist links, the scientists had vanished like proverbial thieves in the night. A year would pass before Mossad once more picked up their trail. They were in Saudi Arabia.

Almost a year after Abdul Qadeer Khan had made his televised confession of being a nuclear weapons black marketeer, a commercial flight from Cyprus landed at Tel Aviv airport. Among its passengers was Moshe Feinstein (a pseudonym). He was a Mossad katsa and its expert on nuclear proliferation. In Nicosia he had met with a member of Saudi Arabia’s large foreign community. After months of careful cultivation and detailed checks into his background and that of his family, the foreigner had been recruited as a sayanim and given the code name of “The Salesman,” a nod toward his business acumen. Meetings would be arranged through The Salesman placing a notice in the Lonely Hearts section of a London newspaper available in Riyadh. Two days after it appeared, Moshe would fly to keep the appointment.

The Salesman had developed strong connections with the House of Saud, exploiting the fact that its administration was highly personalized, often being no more than functionaries surrounding one individual, usually a prince of the kingdom. It was The Salesman’s ability to target those key individuals that had made him important to Mossad. In an early briefing, The Salesman had explained to Moshe that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revolved around Prince Saud al-Faisal; and no decision, however inconsequential, could be made without his approval. Other ministries were similarly run. The Salesman had summed up the situation as “if you give them a list of more than one item, they often don’t get to the second. Negligence and incompetence are bywords.” In November 2008, five years after the lakeside meeting, Waheed Nasir chose to deny the Mossad report that he had been present or had gone to Iran.