Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Not suspecting what lay ahead, Sowan flew to London on August 4, 1987. He was arrested by armed Special Branch officers at Heathrow and charged with the murder of Naji Al-Ali. When he protested he was a Mossad agent, the officers laughed at him. Sowan had become as expendable as the cartoonist who had died after two weeks clinging to life in hospital. Sowan would be sacrificed in an attempt to regain favor with the Thatcher government. The presence of the arms cache in Sowan’s apartment would destroy any effort he made to claim he was employed by Mossad. The arms had been brought there by a Mossad sayan.

In London, Arie Regev had turned over to MI5—who passed it on to Scotland Yard—all the “evidence” Mossad had “accumulated” of Sowan’s “involvement” with terrorism. The file detailed how Mossad had tailed Sowan through the Middle East, Europe, and Britain, never able to obtain enough proof until now. The moment the arms cache had been discovered, Mossad decided, “in the name of common security,” to turn in Sowan.

The decision to do so was a grim reminder of Mossad’s unwritten law of expediency. A great deal of time and money had been invested by the service in training and supporting Sowan in the field. But when the time came, all that counted for nothing when weighed against the greater need for Mossad to cover its own tracks in Britain. Sowan would be the sacrificial victim, served up to the British as an example of the kind of terrorist Mossad was always warning about. There would be a loss, of course: Sowan had done a good enough job—even if he had failed to deliver all that was asked of him. But the arms cache had been too good an opportunity to miss. It would wreck the PLO’s relationship with the Thatcher government and allow Israel to present Yasser Arafat as the double-dealing terrorist Mossad still said he was. And there would always be another Ismail Sowan ready to be seduced by men in Israel who reveled in broken promises.

For a full week Mossad relaxed, convinced that whatever Sowan told his British interrogators could be shrugged off.

But Admoni had not counted on Sowan’s desperate efforts to stay out of jail. He gave Special Branch interrogators detailed descriptions of his controllers as well as everything he had been taught by Mossad. The police gradually realized Ismail could be telling the truth. The MI6 liaison officer in Tel Aviv was recalled. He questioned Sowan. Everything he said about Mossad’s headquarters and its methods fit what the officer knew. The full extent of Mossad’s role began to unravel.

Regev, Barad, and Samara were expelled from Britain. The Israeli embassy in London issued a defiant statement: “We regret that Her Majesty’s Government saw fit to take measures of the kind adopted. Israel did not act against British interests. The struggle against terrorism was its one and only motive.”

Telling the truth did not save Ismail Sowan. In June 1988, he was sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment for possessing firearms on behalf of a terrorist organization.

Five years after the expulsion of the three katsas, which had effectively closed down Mossad’s station in Britain, the service was back. By 1998, five katsas worked out of the Israeli embassy in Kensington, liaising with MI5 and the Special Branch in targeting Iranian factions in Britain.

Three years previously, in December 1994, Ismail Sowan had been released from Full Sutton Prison, handed back his Jordanian passport, and deported on a plane to Amman. The last anyone saw of him was walking out of the airport carrying the suitcase Mossad had given him all those years ago when he had traveled to London. But its false bottom had been removed.

From the desert kingdom he had a ringside seat at the gathering storm in the Persian Gulf, which was preceded by a change of watch commander on the Mossad bridge. Nahum Admoni’s eight years at the helm finally ended on the eve of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Into his place stepped Shabtai Shavit, who inherited a series of failures: the Pollard affair, Irangate, and, of course, those blank, forged British passports found in that Frankfurt phone box, which had heralded the end of Admoni’s tenure. But, for his successor, beyond Jordan more than a sandstorm blew. Saddam Hussein had finally decided the time had come to take on the world.

On December 2, 1990, well to the south of Baghdad, a figure in the dirty robes of a desert dweller lay motionless just below the lip of a wadi. It was dawn and the sand ice-cold; during the night the temperature had dropped to well below zero. The man’s head was covered with a sheep’s wool hupta, a hat that identified him as a tribesman of the Sarami, the oldest of the Islamic Sufi sects, who roamed the vast Iraqi desert and whose fanaticism was matched by a code of honor unequaled by other tribes’. But the man’s loyalty lay some six hundred miles to the west, in Israel; he was a katsa.

His clothes came from a Mossad storeroom where garments from all over the world were kept and regularly updated. Most were obtained by sayanim and delivered to local Israeli embassies and sent on to Tel Aviv in diplomatic bags. Other garments were brought out of hostile Arab countries by pro-Israeli visitors. A few were actually made by the wardrobe mistress who presided over the storeroom. Over the years she and her small team of seamstresses had developed a reputation for detail, even using the right sewing cotton for adjustments.

The katsa ’s code name—Shalom—came from a list of aliases kept on file in the Operations Division; Rafi Eitan had introduced the idea of a list after the Eichmann operation. Shalom Weiss had been one of the best forgers in Mossad before he had joined the team to help capture Adolf Eichmann. Shalom Weiss had died of cancer in 1963 but his name lived on and had been used on several occasions by katsas. Only a handful of senior IDF officers, Shabtai Shavit, and Shalom’s own section head knew why he was in the desert.

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, an action that became the precursor to the eventual Gulf War. Iraq’s move against Kuwait had been a spectacular intelligence failure for all the West’s services; not one had anticipated it would happen. Mossad had tried to verify reports that Saddam had actually stockpiled chemical weapons at secret sites south of Baghdad, which would place the weapons well within range not only of Kuwait City but also cities in Israel.

Within Mossad there remained doubt as to whether Iraq possessed the rockets needed to fire the warheads. Gerald Bull had been removed from the scene, and his supergun, after its initial testing, according to U.S. satellite surveillance, was now in bits. Shavit’s analysts suggested that even if Saddam possessed the warheads, there was no certainty they were actually filled with chemicals; he had done that kind of posturing before.

Shabtai Shavit, displaying the caution of a new man in charge, had said that on what he had been told, to raise the alarm could only create needless panic. Shalom had been given the mission to discover the truth. He had carried out several previous operations in Iraq, once going into Baghdad, where he had posed as a Jordanian businessman. In Baghdad there had been sayanim who could have helped him. But here, in the vast, empty desert, he had to depend on his own resources—and the skills his instructors had once more tested.

Shalom had undergone survival training in the Negev Desert, mastering “memory training,” how to recognize the target even in a sandstorm; and “self-image protection,” how to blend in with his surroundings. He wore his garments day and night to give them a lived-in look. He spent a full day on the shooting range, demonstrating instinctive and rapid-aim firing for close-quarter combat. An hour was spent with a pharmacist learning when to use his emergency medicine in the desert; a morning was devoted to memorizing the maps that would lead him across the sands.