Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

First obtain the raw ingredients. Where possible, always shop in supermarkets to avoid the staff remembering your visit. An ideal base liquid is nitromethane. This is used to propel the engine of a model aircraft. It should be mixed with a suitable sensitizing chemical. Gloves must be worn at all times when mixing the chemicals so as to avoid generating heat which could produce a premature explosion. The mixing should also be done in a cool room. The final result will be a crystalline white powder. The technical name for this is triacetone triperoxide. The powder can be suitably concealed in containers in common use.

Sidney Alford, chairman of Alford Technologies, a leading British explosives company, said (to the author): “Everyone in the business knows that nitromethane is an explosive, but many people, including some in the police and security services, have yet to cotton on to that.” And in Tel Aviv, Ehud Keinan, a world-ranking authority on liquid explosives whose expertise was prized by Mossad, confirmed that the details discovered on the al-Qaeda DVD were “of major importance in the fight against terrorism. It is very easy to produce such explosives once the know-how is explained. The raw materials are readily available in unlimited quantities on any main street.”

Meir Dagan learned the DVD was discovered during the climax of an MI5 surveillance operation that had begun in Dublin, Ireland, and ended on the road to Chester in the north of England when intelligence officers swooped on a 2000-reg Lancia, which had come from Dublin on the car ferry to Holyhead in North Wales. At the wheel of the vehicle was a middle-aged English woman who had driven to the Welsh port from the Midlands. Beside her sat an Algerian-born man, also middle-aged, who has lived in a fashionable Dublin suburb. Both have been under surveillance as part of Operation Overt, which led to the arrests of twenty-four terrorists in March 2007. The couple and their car were driven to an MI5 safe house near London. Waiting were senior interrogation officers. While they questioned the couple in separate rooms, MI5 forensic experts conducted a search of the car. It was then that the DVD was found.

Dagan also learned that MI5 officers had reopened the case of another Algerian terrorist who had lived for four years in Lucan, another Dublin suburb. In December 2005 he was convicted under the name of Abbas Boutrab for conspiracy to blow up aircraft and sentenced to six years at Belfast Crown Court. However, it subsequently emerged that Boutrab was not his real name—but one of nine different aliases on passports found in an al-Qaeda safe house in Ireland.

The Republic had increasingly become a concern for Mossad since it had emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 that al-Qaeda had infiltrated the thriving Muslim community in Dublin. Ireland’s small security service had gratefully accepted help from Mossad, MI5, and European intelligence services to mount various surveillance operations and GCHQ, Britain’s “spy in the sky” had monitored the e-mails and phone calls of suspects. One result had been to thwart the plan of Abu Hamsa, the radical cleric, to seek political asylum in Ireland before he could be arrested on an extradition warrant to face terrorist-related charges in the United States. Hamsa was now in Belmarsh, one of Britain’s high-security prisons, serving a sentence for his involvement in terrorism. Hamsa believed, wrongly, that the long history of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, in successfully opposing extradition from the United States of IRA suspects to face trial in Northern Ireland would ensure he would not be extradited to America. He was counting on the Dublin government facing legal problems; like other European countries, Ireland has strict laws about extradition. In 2008, the Irish government had still refused to return the three Continuity IRA members to Colombia. They continue to live quite close to the Irish border with Northern Ireland.

In the past year al-Qaeda had started an intensive recruitment drive among Ireland’s young Muslims to become jihadists. MI5 agents had established that one-and-a-half tons of ammonium-based nitrate fertilizer, which had been found in London, had been smuggled into Britain from Ireland. If it exploded, it could have killed more than had died in the Madrid train massacre. The agents had discovered that every year 150,000 tons of the lethal material were shipped annually from Russia and there were few controls at any of the Republic’s docks as to who collected it. An MI5 agent had then established that a terrorist could buy half-a-ton of the fertilizer at any of the Republic’s agricultural merchants. The fertilizer had lain in plastic sacks in the yard the agent visited. To weaponize it, all a terrorist had to do was separate the potash from the ammonium nitrate then douse the nitrate with domestic fuel oil and add a detonator.

The deep concern this had caused was reinforced (to the author) by Northern Ireland’s leading anti-terrorist chief, Detective Superintendent Andy Sproule of the Serious and Organized Crimes Unit: “There are increasingly large amounts of this fertilizer coming into Ireland and it is not even what it claims to be. The levels of ammonium nitrate are too high and it is dangerous.” The ban in Northern Ireland since 1996 to stop it being sold to the IRA has led to a dramatic increase in the import figures of the deadly fertilizer into the Republic. It arrives in container ships from Russian plants near the Ural Mountains. Before 2001 the Republic had imported hardly any artificial fertilizer containing high levels of potash and ammonium nitrate. Sensing a market opening, the Irish Fertilizer Manufacturers Association (IFMA) began to import the Russian fertilizer. In 2003 the amount was 120,000 tons. A year later it reached 150,000 tons. The figure continued to grow.

It was one matter Meir Dagan could raise with General Michael Hayden, who had been appointed to replace Tenet in 2006. Their meeting in Washington would be their first face-to-face encounter. The agenda would include the ongoing roundup by Hezbollah’s security service of informers in the Beka’a Valley and south Lebanon, several of whom had risked their lives and those of their families by identifying for Mossad the locations of missiles. Hassan Nasrallah had made the capture of the informers a priority. For discussion would also be the failure of Israeli intelligence to locate and capture the Hezbollah leader and his senior aides.

The two spy chiefs would also update each other on the identity of a mysterious name—Rakan Ben Williams. Was he who he claimed to be, an American convert to Islam? Al-Qaeda now claimed to have hundreds of such members. Or was it a codename for a cell or even a group? In London, MI5 analysts were trying to discover if the name fit one of the men arrested in Operation Overt. In the meantime, “Williams” had continued to utilize the Internet for his threats. Each was signed as “Al-Qaeda undercover soldier in the USA.” But the style suggested the writer could be a woman. Or it might simply have been a hoaxer of either sex. Long ago, Meir Dagan had realized counter-terrorism was plagued with often well-constructed nonsense. But no matter how outlandish it appeared, it had to be tracked down. At the Mossad training school, instructors reminded students that from the moment man established himself as a new species unique among all animals, it was the moment when he first used his primitive language to lie; the world became his to create and destroy. It would be ever so.

Mossad, like other intelligence services around the world, braced itself for the fifth anniversary on September 11, and the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Since the discovery of the London-based plot to bring down ten American and British airliners over the Atlantic, the intelligence analysts had listened closely to what one called “the whispers in the wind” for the first hint that the fifth anniversary would be marked by another massive atrocity. The analysts of Mossad focused on the latest threat al-Qaeda had issued—that it would soon strike against Israel with a ferocity never seen before. The Jewish state was still reeling from its failure to defeat Hezbollah and the increased fighting in the Gaza Strip. The threat from Tehran continued. Islam, the giver of many lasting benefits to mankind and the proud possessor of a thrilling history, had been transformed into a rabid form of Islamism by its devotees who called for the elimination of all those who opposed them. “Death to the infidel” had become a call, which closed anti-West rallies across the Muslim world.