Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

It was a time when Osama bin Laden was looking for new places to defeat the infidel. Almost simultaneously with the fighting in Bosnia, the conflict in Chechnya erupted. Then Albania provided another battlefield for al-Qaeda; chaos and anarchy already prevailed in the country, making it a fertile ground for arms traffickers and other terrorist-linked groups. Al-Qaeda welded them into a powerful force; unlimited funding was provided, along with humanitarian aid. Albania became a springboard into neighboring Kosovo. Dumont was among some five hundred Mujahideen smuggled into the Albanian capital of Tirana. The operation was led by Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. After a kill-or-be-killed conflict against government forces, the Mujahedeen swept on into Macedonia. Again money and aid won over impoverished villagers. In the end it would be NATO that drove them out. But by then al-Qaeda had scooped up hundreds more recruits. Many went to Afghanistan for specialist training.

When an uneasy peace came to the region, Dumont returned to Roubaix and formed his own group, which he trained and led to conduct a number of terrorist attacks. The French police tried, but failed, to arrest him, and Dumont fled to Bosnia. There he became a senior member of the rapidly expanding al-Qaeda organization. Finally captured, he escaped from prison and was spirited along the trail to Afghanistan. Twice Mossad katsas almost killed him before he reached the safety of the mountain fastness where al-Qaeda had its camps along the Afghanistan border with Pakistan. In January 2006, Mossad believed Dumont was still there, supervising the training of other French-born jihadists. The gadgets Mossad’s R & D department had created would be used to track and kill them.

The budget of hundreds of millions of dollars to create the surveillance arsenal had been approved by Ariel Sharon. But on that morning of January 24, Meir Dagan knew that the one Israeli politician he revered above all others would never recover from the massive stroke that had left Sharon in an ever-deepening coma, paralyzed, and kept alive by a life-support system in his Jerusalem hospital. His medical team had indicated they could do no more. As often as he could Dagan had visited the seventh-floor suite where his old friend lay at death’s door. Each time Dagan stood in the doorway, his sharply intelligent eyes watching Sharon’s heartbeats continuing to move across the monitor positioned near the bed, the blips on the screen pulsing, reducing the old man’s grasp on life to an endless trace. Sharon’s family would be there, grouped around the bed, quiet, the emotions aroused by approaching death seeming to settle even more over them. Dagan could detect the sorrow, despair, and helplessness of the family and the barely concealed resignation of the doctors and nurses. He had wondered if Sharon sensed their presence. More certain was the family gathered around the bed were caught in some deep, primitive, and instinctive ritual, staring silently at the motionless figure, almost as if no words could communicate their inner feelings. Dagan well understood that; in his life as a soldier and head of Mossad, he had seen the effect of death on others many times.

He knew that the medical equipment surrounding Sharon, machines that clicked and pinged, would provide some confirmation for the family that all was not yet lost; that active measures were still being taken to keep the inevitable at bay. Close to the bed was a red-painted surgical trolley. This was the crash cart, the ultimate emergency aid with drugs to stimulate cardiac output, sponges, needles, tourniquets, probes, catheters, airway tubes, an aspirator, and a defibrillator capable of delivering through its paddles a powerful electric shock to start Sharon’s heart if it stopped. The decision to resuscitate would come only when that moment arrived. Dagan had told aides that if it were his choice, he would not revive his friend to exist in a vegetative state.

After reviewing the R & D report, Dagan prepared for his first meeting of the day. It would be with two senior officers of France’s Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory (DST). The largest of the Republic’s six intelligence agencies, it employed several thousand staff and, over the years, had developed close ties with Mossad. These had been cemented when Mossad had helped the DST foil a terrorist plot to launch a jetliner into the Eiffel Tower. Since then both services had collaborated to thwart a number of al-Qaeda attacks in France. None of the details had subsequently emerged in public, but they had included a plan to assassinate President Chirac.

While France, like many European countries, publicly advocated a judicial approach to the war on terrorism, wherever possible arresting and trying terrorists; behind the scenes the DST were as ruthless as Mossad. This had followed a major overhaul in 1986 of the country’s police and its intelligence-gathering apparatus. After the 9/11 attacks the cooperation with Mossad rapidly expanded. Both services had common ground in dealing with the effects of the jihad in Chechnya, Gaza, the West Bank, and Kashmir, which had led to a radicalization among Middle East Arabs who had arrived in Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon, cities where Jewish investment and influence was well established. The al-Qaeda network in France consisted largely of North African second-generation emigrants from working-class or middle-class families. The majority were still in their early twenties and had been seduced by the messianic preaching of Osama bin Laden on a video or persuaded to become a jihadist after listening to a radical preacher in a mosque. Hundreds had made their way to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq.

The closeness of Spain to North Africa made it an important conduit for al-Qaeda to smuggle operatives into France. A document that a Mossad analyst prepared in 2005 (which the author has seen) accuses the Moroccan police of receiving payment in return for smuggling terrorists into Spain. “Al-Qaeda controls criminal networks in Spain who deal in money laundering and trafficking in drugs and prostitutes from the Balkans. Spain is still considered a safe haven for Islamic extremists even after the Madrid bombings. The current estimate is that they are linked to eighteen radical groups that Spanish intelligence has not been able to successfully penetrate.”

Information produced by Mossad’s Spanish sayanim was passed on to the DST, together with al-Qaeda’s growing presence on France’s border with Germany. The Federal Republic had itself become a fertile ground for al-Qaeda to recruit jihadists in university cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Weisbaden, Duisburg, and Munich. Though Mossad had helped to destroy the most important al-Qaeda cell in Germany, the Meliani Kommando, as it was about to launch a terrorist attack in Strasbourg against the city’s cathedral and its historic synagogue, al-Qaeda still had a sizeable network; many of its members had come from the Balkans.

To update themselves, DST officers regularly visited Tel Aviv and Mossad Station in Paris and had free access to the DST data bank. Central to this relationship was the joint monitoring of mosques and individuals across France. Warrants for wiretapping were easily granted and, since December 2005, surveillance had been extended to use video cameras in public areas and access to phone and e-mail communications of suspects. Again with the help of Mossad the DST had developed an unprecedented number of Muslim informers within the country’s Muslim communities. For Mossad the value of its ties to the DST was that it served as an intelligence data clearinghouse from other French agencies, including the national police.

Through the DST Mossad could provide evidence to the country’s judicial arm when it came to issuing arrest warrants, wiretaps, and subpoenas. These were served by a team of investigating judges who could also order the detention of suspects for an initial six days and even keep some of them imprisoned for years. In court, the suspects were judged by professional magistrates rather than under the jury system of Britain and the United States. Meir Dagan felt this approach could offer lessons to the Bush administration as it faced growing pressure and controversy over its own approach to fighting terrorism: its incarcerating suspects in its Guantánamo Bay camp, its continued rendition of suspects to secret prisons in Eastern Europe, and the doubtful legality of its military tribunals to try suspects.