Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

All these issues formed a backdrop to Dr. Rice’s discussions in Israel. Those who attended, including Meir Dagan, listened intently to a woman who combined elegance—her weekly hairdo in her apartment in Washington’s Watergate Center cost $500—with a steely determination. “Her smile never quite reached her eyes. We remembered that when, for instance, it came to push and shove between Blair and Rice, Bush always chose her view. With Blair now a lame-duck prime minister, her mood was that he didn’t really matter anymore,” recalled one of those who attended the meetings.

While those discussions went on, so did the war. The dead and the dying, the homeless and the bereaved in northern Israel and up through southern Lebanon to the suburbs of Beirut continued to grow. And elsewhere, other developments required Meir Dagan to shift the focus of Mossad’s attention.

A Mossad undercover agent in Tehran had established that the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA), the extreme Irish terror group, was providing Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard with expertise on how to make ultra-sophisticated roadside bombs. The agent tracked the Irish bomb-makers to three factories in the Lavizān suburb in northern Tehran. Adapted to be fired from anti-tank missiles, the bombs were made from concave steel or copperplate. When fired, they traveled at two thousand meters per second and could penetrate ten centimeters of armor at a distance of one hundred meters. The missiles had already destroyed several Israeli tanks in Lebanon.

Earlier in 2006 the six-man CIRA team had traveled from Dublin to Frankfurt and onward to Damascus. From there they were brought in an Iranian military aircraft to Tehran. The bomb-makers had been recruited to provide expertise in how to make and disguise infrared triggering devices. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the success of roadside bombs had left dozens of British soldiers dead or injured. The bombs were also used to topple buildings and bring terror to the streets of Belfast and other cities in the province.

The weapons were attached to explosively formed projectiles (EFPs). Since June, EFP weapons have been transported out of Iran into Iraq and Damascus, Syria. From there they were smuggled down into the Beka’a Valley. In Tehran the CIRA team was divided between the three ordinance factories that were working around the clock mass-producing the sophisticated roadside bombs. This was not the first time that CIRA had sold its bomb-making experience to a terror group. Four years ago, three of its members went to Colombia to train that country’s terror group, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Colombian intelligence, on a tip from Mossad, arrested the trio. They were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in a Bogota court, but escaped with the help of the terror group and eventually were smuggled back to Ireland. Despite attempts by the Colombian government to have them extradited to serve out their sentences, the Dublin government refused to return them to Colombia.

The membership of the CIRA was estimated by Mossad at “no more than two hundred.” More certain was that they had never recognized the terms of the Good Friday Agreement that finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. Since the ratification of the protocol, the IRA has been selling its expertise to other groups associated with al-Qaeda.

“The Islamic terrorists are well financed and expanding their operations. But they lack the skills of the CIRA. Its members have become ‘guns for hire.’ Following the ceasefire in Northern Ireland they are out of work and in need of money,” a Mossad analyst told the author.

Mossad also learned that the CIRA members had met with members of a South African terror group called People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD). The meetings took place in a favorite holiday resort for Irish tourists, Sotto Grande, near Malaga in southern Spain. PAGAD wanted to recruit them to come to South Africa to work in their terror camps in the hinterland beyond Durban. PAGAD was originally formed in 1995 to rid the streets of South Africa of drug dealers, but its ideology changed due to the strong influence of the million-plus Muslims in the country. In the past year, intelligence services like Mossad and MI6 have established that PAGAD had strong links to the Tehran regime. Meetings with the regime have taken place in Beirut and Damascus.

A Mossad analyst on South African terror groups told the author: “Since the bombings in London last year, PAGAD has become more militant. No country is safe from the global terror network that is growing, it is highly organized and extends across the world. Its patron and ultimate beneficiary is Iran.”

That July in London, Nathan learned that the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Christopher Kelly, the microbiologist who had been Britain’s foremost expert on biological and chemical warfare, had been reopened three years after his body had been found in an area of woodlands near his home in Oxfordshire. An inquest pronounced the scientist had taken his own life shortly after he was identified as passing classified information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the BBC. The weapons had proven to be nonexistent. But as Operation Overt continued to move forward, Mossad found itself feeding into what would eventually turn out to be the biggest intelligence operation ever mounted in post-war Britain, whose focus had narrowed down to the possibility that two Islamic terror cells in London had been working on bombs made from liquid explosives.

Against this background two members of parliament announced they wanted a new inquiry into Dr. Kelly’s death. One was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, Norman Baker, who revealed that for the past six months he had been investigating the Kelly death and had concluded there was “strong evidence he had not committed suicide but may have been murdered.” Another Member of Parliament, Andrew MacKinlay, a Labour member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, had tabled questions to the Defense Secretary, Des Browne, about the connections between Dr. Kelly and Wouter Basson, who had run a team of scientists in apartheid South Africa whose work allegedly had included attempts to produce a drug that would affect black fertility and darken the skin of white spies so they could infiltrate anti-apartheid groups.

In April 2002, Basson, a heart specialist once the personal physician of the former South African leader, P. W. Botha, had been cleared by a court in Pretoria on forty-six charges. They included fraud, drug-trafficking, and eight counts of murder committed when he had been in charge of Project Coast, the country’s secret apartheid-era germ warfare program. After the verdict, Dr. Basson had been smuggled out of the court by South African intelligence agents. The judge had earlier ruled that cases involving alleged assassinations of apartheid opponents outside South Africa were beyond his jurisdiction. During the trial, Wouter Basson had revealed that the South African government had given him “unlimited power and money to devise defenses against chemical or germ attacks on the country.”

Now, in July 2006, MI5 had begun to investigate whether those defenses had included using the expertise of Dr. Kelly and two other sinister figures in the secret world of biological warfare. One was a Mormon gynecologist, Dr. Larry Ford. Attached to the University of California campus in Los Angeles, Ford had a secret life none of his patients suspected. He had built up a close relationship with Wouter Basson and, through him, established contacts with the biowarfare scientists of North Korea—and Dr. Kelly. The two men had met in a safe house Basson had rented for such meetings. It was at number one, Fair-cloth Farm Cottage, Watersplash, near Ascot, Berkshire. There, MI5 now believed, Dr. Kelly and Dr. Ford regularly met until the gynecologist committed suicide in 2000 at his home in Irvine, California. When police dealing with the case opened Dr. Ford’s refrigerator, they found bottles containing cultures of cholera, botulism, and typhoid fever. All three toxins were among those Dr. Kelly had been working with during his time as head of the microbiology department at Porton Down, the chemical warfare research establishment in England. Had he provided them to Dr. Ford? If so, why? Did Ford or Basson intend to pass them on to North Korea? These were some of the questions for which MI5 wanted answers.