Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

When the briefing ended, Shkedy walked to the front of the room and paused to look at each pilot.

“You all know the importance of your target. It must be destroyed at all costs. This is the most important mission any of you have taken or probably will ever take. Every step has been taken to protect you. But if anything does happen, we will do everything to rescue you. That I promise you. But I am confident that surprise is on our side. You will be in and out before the Syrians realize what has happened,” said General Shkedy.

No one in the room doubted him. They all knew the mission was a pivotal point in the protection of Israel. The silence was broken by Shkedy’s final words: “God be with you!” Then he stepped forward and shook the hand of each pilot.

By 11:45 in the evening, the ordnance technicians had checked the bombs, ensuring each was securely positioned in its release clip beneath the wings of each F-151. After his check, the technician removed the metal safety pin from each bomb.

A minute later, the runway crew had reported the strip was clear of small stones or any other obstruction that could be sucked into the engine and destroy it.

From the twin tailpipes of the first aircraft, followed by the others, came the scalding heat from the afterburners.

In each cockpit the pilots had gone through the same drill: activating the computerized checks of the navigation, mechanical, communications, and finally the firing systems.

Each pilot wore two suits: his flight suit and, over it, the G-suit, a torso harness, survival gear, and a helmet. Clipped to each harness was a small gadget that would send a homing-signal if he was forced to abandon the mission.

At one minute to midnight the first F-151, with a roar and a plume of exhaust marking its progress, sped down the runway. Shortly after midnight the last of the planes had retracted its wheels. Sunrise had started.

The mission was a total success. Satellite images showed the complete destruction of the complex and, the next day, Syrian bulldozers covering the blitzed area with earth to avoid the spread of radiation. It would be ten days before the country’s vice president, Farouk al-Sharaa, would only say: “Our military and political echelon is looking into the matter.” In Tel Aviv Ehud Olmert, not quite able to conceal his smile, said: “You will understand we naturally cannot always show the public our cards.” But to play them, in the early hours of the morning of September 6, 2007, those pilots had carried out one of the most daring air strikes ever.

In January 2008, three days after President Bush had left Israel, where he had been privately briefed on the mission, the Israeli Defense Force released a satellite image that showed Syria had commenced rebuilding the destroyed site.

On Saturday morning, February 2, 2008, a man emerged from the U-Bahn, Berlin’s railway system, and stood outside the subway exit on the Kurfüerstendamm, the city’s elegant shopping quarter. He had started his journey in one of the eastern suburbs of the city and its purpose was contained in the briefcase he carried. A car pulled up, the driver opened the passenger door, and together they drove off.

Who the man was and what he had been asked to do was known, apart from the driver, to only Meir Dagan and a handful of senior Mossad officers in Tel Aviv. They had patiently waited for the car’s passenger to obtain what they wanted.

Six months before, the driver introduced himself to the man as “Reuben.” It was not his real name: like all other details about his identity, it remained in a secure room where the names of all current katsas , field agents, were kept in Mossad headquarters. A few days ago, the man had left a message at one of the agreed dead-letter boxes, which Reuben regularly checked, that he was ready to deliver what he had been asked to provide in return for a substantial sum of euros, half as a down payment, the balance on delivery of what was now in his briefcase.

They were photos of Imad Mughniyeh. Next to Osama bin Laden, he was the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Long before the al-Qaeda leader had launched his pilots against New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, Mughniyeh had introduced suicide bombers into the Middle East. The Hezbollah terrorist mastermind had read an account of the WWII Japanese kamikaze pilots in Hezbollah’s own newspapers, Al Sabia and Al Abd , which had praised the pilots for their sacrifices. In the alleys and souks of Beirut, Mughniyeh had persuaded families it was a matter of honor to provide a son, or sometimes even a daughter, for similar sacrifices. They had remained the human weapons of choice against Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Those who had chosen to die were remembered in Friday prayers in the shadowy coolness of the mosques, after the rhetoric of the muezzin calling for the destruction of all those who opposed Hezbollah.

The deaths of the young bombers were lauded and their memories kept alive. Mughniyeh told their families the souls of their children needed no more, that their suicide bombings would be remembered forever and assured them a place in Hezbollah’s version of Heaven.

Like bin Laden, Mughniyeh had been hunted across the Middle East and beyond by Mossad, the CIA, and every other Western intelligence service. But each time he came close to capture, he escaped, the trail gone cold. Until now.

On that cold winter day in February 2008, with a bitterly harsh wind from the Polish steppes whistling through the streets of Berlin, Reuben drove along past the smoke-blackened ruins of the Gedäechtniskirche, the church that was a memorial to the Allied bombing raids of WWII, a grim contrast to all the other buildings, which made the city look like any other European capital.

At some point the man produced a file from his briefcase and, in return, replaced it with an envelope Reuben handed over containing the balance of the fee for the images in the file.

The cover of the gray-colored document bore the stamp of what was once one of the most powerful agencies in the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, itself at one time the most important satellite nation in the former Soviet Union. The stamp identified the file had once belonged to the Stasi, the security service of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security.

In the forty years of its existence it had employed 600,000 full time spies and informers, roughly 1 secret policeman for every 320 East Germans. The Stasi had its own imposing headquarters in East Berlin, interrogation centers around the city, its own hotels and restaurants in the countryside, and clinics where only Stasi staff and their families could be treated. One clinic, close to the River Spree, had facilities to perform plastic surgery including facial reconstruction for Stasi agents and sometimes carefully selected members of terror groups with which the Stasi had close connections.

With bewildering speed, the citizens of East Germany awoke in November 1988 to find the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the resignation of the GDR’s Politburo and the official end of the Stasi’s reign of terror. But not everything had ended. The clinic near the Spree had still remained in business, offering its skills to those with the funding to pay for plastic surgery.

The file now in Reuben’s possession contained photos of Imad Mughniyeh, which had been taken at the clinic after post-operative surgery. His face looked very different from the one, which had last filled the pages of newspapers and magazines after he had been photographed at a Hezbollah rally before once more disappearing almost a quarter of a century previously when he had established an even more murderous reputation than any other terrorist of the 1980s.

It was an era when the Venezuelan-born Marxist, Carlos the Jackal’s, claim to notoriety had begun with taking forty-two Opec oil ministers hostage in Vienna in 1975. He had then embarked on a reign of terror before Mossad had tipped off French intelligence where they could grab Carlos in Sudan and bring him to trial in Paris for his crimes on French soil and where he continues to serve a life sentence. Like Carlos, Abu Nidal had become another headline-grabbing terrorist after he ordered the gunning down of innocent men and women as they waited to board their Christmas flights in Rome and Vienna airports in 1985. Nidal had finally been killed by a Mossad kidon team. For a quarter of a century Imad Mughniyeh had avoided assassination.