Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Shortly after Dagan had left, Sharon complained to his other son, Gilad, that he felt unwell and had some difficulty in focusing and had a strange feeling in the left side of his body. Soon he was finding difficulty in speaking at all. Schlomo Segev, Sharon’s personal physician who was at the ranch, was summoned. By then Gilad had called one of the paramedics on standby duty with an ambulance and the head of Sharon’s bodyguards. Gilad said his father should be moved to the nearest hospital, twenty minutes away. Segev overrode them, insisting the prime minister had suffered a major second stroke and should be taken directly to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The journey took fifty-five minutes, during which Sharon’s condition worsened. In the ambulance he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage caused by the rupture of an artery wall.

After seven hours of surgery, doctors put Sharon into a deep coma and onto a life-support machine. Meir Dagan was among those told that Ariel Sharon had suffered irreparable brain damage. He would never again make his mark on Israel’s future. Mossad, whom Sharon admired, would never again have a political leader who had given it unprecedented freedom to operate. Emblematic of the gaping void left in Israeli politics by the loss of Sharon’s leadership was the huge chair in the adjoining conference room to Dagan’s office. It was where Ariel Sharon liked to sit when he came calling. Dagan told his senior aides that whoever rose to the daunting task of replacing Sharon would never sit in that chair. He had the piece of furniture removed.

In Gaza and beyond, extremists clamored for his death. From his mountain fastness in the Tora Bora range that divides North Pakistan from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden called upon all Muslims to pray for Sharon’s death to “be long and painful and that he should not die like our hero Azhari Husin, who went to Paradise like a true martyr.”

Mossad’s role in the elimination of Azhari Husin was not publicly acknowledged in the congratulations from countries where his suicide bombers had left a trail of death and destruction. It was ever so: compliments remained between intelligence services involved in a joint operation, along with commiserations over one that failed or led to loss of life. Rafi Eitan, the former director of operations for Mossad, once said to the author: “Herograms have no place in our business. We just do our job. If it works, fine. If not, we make sure it works next time.” Many of the still-unsung operations in which he and his successors have participated will remain forever secret; the only clue to their loss in lives are the growing number of names carved into the sandstone memorial at Glilot (see chapter 3, “Engravings of Glilot,” p. 69).

“Gathering secret intelligence is not only dangerous, but a very imprecise art,” Eitan once said. It is also very expensive. By 2004 the United States was spending $40 billion annually on acquiring it, Israel a small percentage of that; for both countries costs will inevitably rise in the coming years. But in Washington, Tel Aviv, and London, in all those nations with substantial intelligence services, information is power and the cost of obtaining it worthwhile.

Britain in 2005 had a £2 billion annual intelligence budget, half of it devoted to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham in Gloustershire. Costing £1.2 billion to build, contractors spent £50,000 of that to provide stainless-steel handrails to avoid marking by staff with rings on their fingers. Two electric trains circle the building’s basement carrying boxes of files and sandwiches to the desks of its seven thousand staff on four floors. Shaped like a giant doughnut, the building has an inner courtyard the size of the Albert Hall. Eightinch-thick black cladding is fitted to all the outer walls.

Its high-security computers handle strategic intelligence, the most important element of all modern intelligence gathering; it enables Britain’s government and their advisers—civil servants, diplomats, and military chiefs—to be kept fully briefed on other countries and their future plans. Tactical intelligence, second, focuses on a potential enemy’s battle plans, monitoring its training exercises to discern methods likely to be deployed in war. The third element is counterespionage, in Britain called “the defence of the realm.” It focuses on uncovering foreign spying activities.

Mossad’s brief includes all three elements, but it shares discoveries with “friendly” services on its long-established policy articulated to the author by its former director general David Kimche as “Israel, first, last—and always.”

However, GCHQ maintains a “nothing held back” relationship with the most powerful intelligence-gathering organization on earth, whose activities are rooted in the deep black of space. From there America’s National Security Agency (NSA) uses its armada of satellites to spy on the globe. The threat of terrorism has increased NSA’s power; fresh targets are added to its electronic shopping lists by the CIA and other members of the U.S. intelligence community.

NSA cost more than $4 billion to run in 2005, employed twenty-seven thousand full-time experts, analysts, and technicians, plus a team of shredders to dispose of forty tons of paper a day; it also could call upon a hundred thousand U.S. servicemen and civilians scattered around the world. Part of its budget is spent on running highly secret listening posts in Britain: at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, Edzell in Scotland, Brawdy in Wales, and, the largest of all, at Menwith Hill near Harrogate in the north of England. All are linked to GCHQ and its own monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia. It ensures nowhere is beyond surveillance.

Behind NSA’s double-chain fence, topped by barbed wire interwoven with electric strands, its acres of computers vacuum the entire electromagnetic global spectrum, homing in on a dictionary of key words in scores of languages. Nothing politically, economically, or militarily significant in a telephone call, a conversation in the office of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, in a fax or an e-mail, escapes NSA’s attention. While the UN headquarters in New York is sovereign territory and placing a bug there is illegal under international law, it is routinely done by NSA and GCHQ to spy on hostile countries and those deemed to be friendly to the United States and Britain; the latter are spied upon mainly for commercial reasons or to give London and Washington an edge on diplomatic negotiations. NATO allies are also under regular surveillance at the UN, and Mossad keeps a yaholomin unit in New York to spy on Arab and other missions.

The material finds its way through the electronic corridors of the intelligence community in Washington and London, and on to Tel Aviv. In turn, Mossad reveals intelligence to NSA and GCHQ on a need-to-know basis. Master copies of NSA data are stored in temperature-controlled vaults underground. Somewhere among the library of secrets are the 1,015 intercepts of surveillance it admits to carrying out on Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed in the weeks before their deaths in Paris. In 2005, NSA continued to resist all attempts by Dodi’s father, Mohammed, to obtain copies of the intercepts, insisting they contained material of “national importance.”

In the run-up to the war with Iraq, both agencies combined to provide their political masters—ultimately President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair—with sensitive private conversations of at least one leader who had steadfastly pledged his support for the war.

On February 9, 2003, Sir Richard Dearlove, then the dapper, soft-spoken director general of Britain’s MI6, had by early afternoon made several telephone calls about a surveillance operation to be mounted against Spain’s prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s ambassador at the United Nations, and senior officers at the Foreign Ministry in Madrid. Code named Condor, the operation was marked “Beyond Secret,” the highest classification MI6 shared with GCHQ and NSA.