Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

To all his instructors he was identified only by a number; they neither demeaned him nor offered praise. They gave Shalom no clue as to how he was doing; they were like robots. Part of each day was given over to testing his sheer physical stamina with a forced march in the fierce noon heat, carrying a rucksack weighted with rocks. He was constantly on the clock, but no one told him if he was meeting his times. Another test was to haul him out of an ongoing exercise to get his responses to such questions as: “A Bedouin child spots you: do you kill her to preserve your mission?” “You are about to be taken prisoner. Do you surrender or kill yourself?” “You come across a wounded Israeli soldier who has been on another mission: do you stop to help or leave him, knowing he will certainly die?” Shalom’s answers were not intended to be definitive: the questions were designed as another way to test his ability to decide under pressure. How long did he take to respond? Was he flustered or confident in making it?

He ate only the food he would live on in the desert: concentrates that he mixed with the brackish water he could expect to find at watering places in the sand. He had attended a one-to-one class with a Mossad psychiatrist on handling stress and how to relax. The doctor also wanted to make sure Shalom still thought for himself, so that he could draw on the right amount of resourcefulness and ruthlessness for the unpredictable situations he would encounter in the field. Aptitude tests determined his present emotional stability and his self-confidence. He was assessed to see if he had developed signs of becoming a “lone wolf,” a worrying trait that had ended other promising careers for katsas.

A dialect coach sat with him for hours, listening to him repeat the Sufis’ patois. Already fluent in Farsi and Arabic, Shalom quickly grasped the dialect of the tribesmen. Every night he was driven to a different part of the Negev to sleep. Burrowing into the ground, he would rest for a short while, never more than dozing, then move to another place to avoid the instructors he knew were hunting him. Discovery would almost certainly mean his mission would be either postponed for further training, or assigned to another katsa.

Shalom had escaped detection. On the evening of November 25, 1990, he had boarded a CH-536 Sikorsky helicopter of the Israel Defense Forces Central Regional command.

Its crew had also been separately trained for the mission. In another area of the Negev base, they had practiced low-level weaving through an aerial obstacle course in the dark. Turbines had blasted the chopper with sand so that they could improve their techniques for flying through the unstable air currents of the Iraqi desert. The pilot had continuously stayed as close to the ground as he could without crashing. In another exercise, instructors had straddled the landing struts, firing weapons at target silhouettes, while the pilot kept his machine steady. In between, the crew had studied their flight path.

Only their commanding officer, Major General Danny Yatom, knew the route they would fly to the border with Iraq. Yatom had been a member of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Israel’s Green Berets, who in 1972 had successfully stormed a hijacked Belgium airliner at Tel Aviv airport. Other commandos in the operation included Benyamin Netanyahu. The friendship with Israel’s future prime minister would lead to Yatom later being given command of Mossad, a position that would also end his relationship with Netanyahu. But that was all in the future.

On that December morning, while Shalom continued to peer out over the rim of the wadi, he had no inkling that the long and dangerous journey that had brought him deep into hostile territory had been decided in a conference room in the Kirya, the Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv.

As well as Yatom, present had been Amnon Shahak, the head of Aman, military intelligence, and Shabtai Shavit. They had convened to discuss the latest information from a deep-penetration informer inside Iran’s terrorist network in Europe. The person—only Shavit knew if the informer was a man or a woman—was known by the letter “I.” All that Shahak and Yatom would have deduced was that the informer must have access to the fortified complex on the third floor of the Iranian embassy in Bonn, Germany. The complex contained six offices and a communications room. The entire area had been reinforced to withstand a bomb blast and it was permanently manned by twenty Revolutionary Guards, whose task it was to coordinate Iran’s terrorist activities in western Europe. They had recently tried to ship a ton of Semtex and electronic detonators out of Lebanon into Spain. The shipment was to replace explosives for a number of pro-Iranian terrorist groups in European countries. On a tip-off from Mossad, Spanish customs had boarded the ship as it sailed into territorial waters.

But by the summer of 1990, Iran was also providing through the Bonn embassy huge cash disbursements to increase the influence of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in Europe. The amounts involved were all the more surprising given that Iran had been economically crippled by its eight-year war with Iraq, which had ended in a cease-fire in 1988.

But on that November day in the Kirya’s guarded conference room, it was not a new threat from Iran that the double agent had discovered. It was one from Iraq. “I” had obtained a copy of a detailed Iraqi battle plan stolen by Iran’s own secret intelligence service from Baghdad military headquarters outlining how Scud missiles would be used to launch chemical and biological weapons against Iran, Kuwait, and Israel.

Uppermost in the mind of each man in the conference room was one question: Could the information be trusted? “I” had proven to be sound in all the previous data he had provided. But, important though the information had been, it paled against what “I” had now sent. Yet was the battle plan part of a plot by Iranian intelligence to drive Israel into launching a preemptive attack against Iraq? Had “I” been unmasked and was he being used by Iran?

Trying to answer that question was also fraught with risk. It would need time to brief a katsa to make contact with “I.” It might be weeks before that was possible; bringing an informer out of deep cover was a slow and delicate process. And if “I” proved to have remained loyal, his safety could have still been jeopardized. Yet, the consequences of acting on the Iraqi document without checking could be calamitous for Israel. A preemptive strike would certainly lead to an Iraqi retaliation—and could destroy the coalition being laboriously cobbled together in Washington to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. Many of its Arab members were likely to support Iraq against Israel.

The only way to discover the truth about the stolen battle plan had been to send Shalom into Iraq. Skimming above the desert, his helicopter had flown across a strip of Jordan in the deep black of night. Coated with stealth paint, its engine noise muffled, the Sikorsky was virtually undetectable to even the most sophisticated Jordanian radars. Flying on silent mode so that its rotor blades made almost no sound, the helicopter had reached its dropping point at the Iraqi border.

Shalom had disappeared into the night. Despite all his training, nothing had quite prepared him for that moment: he was on his own; to survive he had to respect his surroundings. A desert was like no other place on earth for surprises. A sandstorm could appear in moments, changing the landscape, burying him alive. One kind of sky meant one thing, another something quite different. He would do his own weather forecasting; he would have to do everything by himself and learn to let his ears adjust to the silence, to remember that the silence of the desert was like no other. And always he must remember that his first mistake could be his last.