Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The Bush administration has given groups like the Scholars For Truth credibility by doing so much of its work in secret and by giving the public so many fake stories. A good example is that President Bush finally admitted in September, nine months after he had solemnly denied it, terrorist suspects were being secretly held in interrogation centers outside the jurisdiction of the United States. The result is the paranoia of groups like the Scholars For Truth are fed by the arrogance of those around President Bush.

More certain is that those members of the Bush administration in power on that September 11, 2001, overreacted to the destruction. The official exaggeration began with the initial reports of casualties being estimates as high as twenty thousand. The number, thankfully, would turn out to be under three thousand. In the weeks after 9/11 dozens of innocent “terrorist suspects” were imprisoned without charge. The administration did nothing to deny rumors that Iraq was preparing to launch an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein became the new Hitler. President Bush, like his father, was cast in the role of the fighter pilot ready to lead his nation to victory against the evil forces of al-Qaeda. No wonder the president readily admitted that the Hollywood movie Independence Day was one he never tired of watching.

A Mossad analyst, a veteran of many years of cool and careful judgments, said to the author:

The best argument against a conspiracy within the Bush administration is the profound incompetence of what followed. The same people who are now making a mess of Iraq and Afghanistan simply do not possess the skills, and deviousness, to stage a complex assault on two narrow towers of steel and glass standing alongside the Hudson River. The truth is that the attacks were the work of desperate men ready to die and with a goal that was clear. It was Osama bin Laden, an engineer of standing, and his brightest pupil, Mohamed Atta, who understood the best way to collapse the World Trade Center was not by targeting the base, but by undermining the upper levels of each structure. But this has all been discounted in the search for something more sinister at the very heart of American democracy. The very real danger is that the conspiracies will encourage the world to take its eye off the reality that the further we are away from the last catastrophic terrorist attack, the closer we are to the next.

As the last quarter of 2007 waxed, in Tel Aviv Meir Dagan briefed General Elyezer Shkedy, the country’s air force chief, on the latest intelligence from his deeper agents inside Iran. Israel’s embattled prime minister had told Shkedy to prepare for a full-scale aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mossad’s former director of operations, Rafi Eitan, now a key member of Olmert’s shaky coalition, had publicly warned the population to update their bomb shelters against an attack from Tehran’s missiles. Israel’s decision to ratchet up its preparations for an air assault came after Tehran had ignored the UN deadline to stop its nuclear enrichment program to create atomic weapons. General Shkedy, the forty-nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors whose office is dominated by a photo of an Israeli F15 flying over Auschwitz, described the concern over Iran as “a serious threat to Israel and the rest of the world. My job is to maximize our capabilities in every respect. Beyond that, the less said the better.” Giora Eiland, Israel’s former national security adviser, added: “Trying to negotiate with Iran is going nowhere. Tehran is now a major threat to Israel. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ready to sacrifice half of his people to eliminate us.”

A special Israeli Defense Force Unit, “Iran Force,” had been created under Shkedy. Several Pentagon strategic bombing specialists were attached to work alongside Israeli military planners. The unit has real-time access to American satellite images taken over Iran’s ten nuclear facilities. Israel’s air force, equipped with the latest American bunker-busting bombs, was the only means the country had to attack Iran. Distance ruled out a ground force assault. Uri Dromi, a former air force colonel, told the author: “Dates and timeframes are under close scrutiny. No formal date has yet been set. But the options for an attack are shortening.” Much would depend on information from Mossad spies in Iran.

In London Nathan, the Mossad station chief, had been fully briefed on an MI5 anti-terrorism operation that had discovered Britain’s first Islamic “school for terror.” It followed the arrests across London of fourteen radical Muslim extremists. They included Abu Abdullah, who was detained after he preached at a London mosque that he would “love to see our jihadists go to Iraq to kill British and American soldiers.” Abdullah had been a regular visitor to the Jameah Islamiyah Faith School. The tall, gothic building stood in fifty-four acres on the edge of a beautiful English village and had long been a brooding presence even in its days as a Roman Catholic seminary. It was to the school that Abu Hamsa, the hook-handed extremist preacher, “brought young Muslims to be indoctrinated in jihad,” confirmed a senior MI5 officer. Hamsa is currently serving seven years for incitement to murder. After he finishes his sentence he will be deported to the United States to face charges of inciting to murder American citizens in Yemen.

The discovery of the school for terror reveals how extensive al-Qaeda’s influence was within Britain’s Muslim community. Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad, said that Britain now had “a secret army of thousands of well-trained guerrilla fighters ready to kill in the name of religion.” Over two hundred MI5 and anti-terrorist officers had surrounded the school at Mark Cross near Crowborough in East Sussex. The raid followed the latest admission by a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay that he had attended a summer training camp at the school. It had been conducted by Abu Hamsa shortly before he was jailed in February 2006. The school was run by Bilal Patel, the school imam. He claimed (to the author) the school “welcomes all groups to enjoy camping in an Islamic environment in our grounds.” Mr. Patel ran the private school “as a charity.” But he admitted he had received donations from wealthy Muslims to buy the property for £800,000 from the previous owners, a ballet school.

A senior MI5 officer said: “We have long feared that Britain has become a sanctuary for terrorists from the battlegrounds of Chechnya, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. They pose as asylum seekers. What we are now discovering is a nightmare scenario coming true.” He revealed that al-Qaeda has developed a one-week basic jihad training course to be taught at “foundation camps set up in rural UK locations.” The course is available through al-Qaeda Web sites. A British government report published last May revealed their number was “somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand.” The report also said there were an estimated 16,000 people in the United Kingdom who “are supportive of al-Qaeda.”

The news didn’t surprise Meir Dagan. He had long felt that in one of their meetings, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, had shown commendable reality when she had said: “We can catch some of them, but not all of them.”

The early morning sun caught the rust-stained hull of the 1,700-ton cargo ship as it slowly steamed into the busy Mediterranean port of Tartus in Syria on September 3, 2007. From its mast flew the flag of South Korea and the stern plate identified the al-Hamed as being registered in Inchon, one of the country’s major ports.

Watching the ship maneuvering into its berth from a distance was a man with the swarthy skin of a Kurd or one of the marsh Arabs of Iraq. He was fluent in both their languages as well as some of the dialects of Afghanistan. He was, in fact, a Turkish-born Jew who had eschewed the life of a carpet seller in the family business in Istanbul to go to Israel, serve in its army as a translator, and finally achieve his life’s ambition to work in Mossad. Fifteen years later, he was recognized as one of its most brilliant operatives. In that time, he had operated in a dozen countries under as many aliases, using his linguistic skills and chameleon-like characteristics to observe and be absorbed into whichever community he had been sent.