Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Hours later, Downing and his commandos were on their way to Saudi Arabia. Waiting for them in the tiny Iraqi border village of Ar Ar was Shalom. He was dressed in British army fatigues. He never explained, and no one asked, how he had gotten them. The news he brought was electrifying. He could confirm there were four Scud launchers less than thirty minutes’ flying time away.

“Let’s go!” Downing said. “Let’s go fry some butts!”

Chinooks helicoptered the team into the Iraqi desert, together with their specially adapted Land Rover to operate in a terrain that mostly resembled a moonscape. In an hour, they had located the Scud launchers. Over a secure radio the commando leader called up U.S. fighter-bombers armed with cluster munitions and thousand-pound bombs. A hovering Black Hawk helicopter videoed the kills.

Hours later a copy of the tape was being viewed by Shamir in his office in Tel Aviv.

In another telephone call from Bush, the prime minister conceded he had seen enough to keep Israel out of the war. Neither man mentioned the role Mossad had played.

In the remaining days of the Iraqi war, the Scuds killed or injured almost 500 people—including 128 Americans dead or wounded from a missile that landed in Saudi Arabia; over 4,000 Israelis were left homeless.

The aftermath of the Iraqi war saw Mossad and Aman under fierce attack during secret sessions of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Oversight Intelligence Subcommittee. Both services were roundly condemned for failing to predict the invasion of Kuwait or to provide “sufficient warning” of the Iraqi threat. Leaks from within the committee room spoke of slanging matches involving Amnon Shahak, head of Aman, and Shabtai Shavit, and committee members. After one clash, the Mossad chief had come close to resigning. But all was not lost for the embattled Shavit.

Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare, LAP, usually called upon to spread disinformation and blacken the character of Israel’s enemies with foreign journalists, focused its skills on the local media. Favored reporters were called and told it was not a question of there having been too little intelligence, it was a matter of the Israeli public having grown accustomed to being spoiled for choice in that area.

Familiar truths were trundled out by LAP: no other country proportionate to its size and population analyzed or used as much intelligence as did Israel; no service could match Mossad in understanding the mind-set and intentions of the country’s enemies, or equal its record for frustrating the plans of those who had plagued Israel for almost fifty years. It was rousing stuff and found ready space in a media only too grateful to be given “inside track” information.

A rush of articles appeared reminding readers that, despite defense cuts introduced shortly before the Iraqi war, Mossad had continued to manfully battle on in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. People had been able to read between the lines: Mossad was being hampered because the politicians had mishandled the defense budget. It was a familiar theme, and always guaranteed to work. To a still badly frightened population recovering from the Scud attacks, claims that a lack of funding lay at the root of what they had suffered turned criticism away from Mossad back onto the politicians. Money suddenly became available. Israel, so long dependent on U.S. satellite data, put its own spy satellite program on the fast track. The first priority was to launch a military satellite to specifically monitor Iraq. A new antimissile missile, the Hetz, was put into mass production. Several Patriot batteries were ordered from the United States.

The intelligence subcommittee wilted in the face of the barrage of pro-Mossad publicity. Shavit emerged triumphant—and set about reaffirming Mossad’s position. Deep-penetration katsas in Iraq were ordered to try to discover how much of Saddam’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons had survived allied bombardment.

They discovered that Iraq still possessed quantities of anthrax, smallpox, the Ebola virus, and chemical nerve agents capable of killing not only every man, woman, and child in Israel, but a sizable proportion of the entire population on earth.

The question that faced Shabtai, the other heads of the Israeli intelligence communities, and Israel’s politicians was deciding whether to make public the information. To do so would certainly create fear and panic in Israel, and could provoke other widespread negative effects. The country’s tourist industry had been virtually wiped out by the Iraqi war; the Israeli economy was close to rock bottom and new foreign investment was slow in coming. To reveal that Israel was still in range of deadly weapons would hardly attract tourists or money into the country.

Further, the breakup of the Gulf War coalition, whose Arab members had never been less than cool to waging war against fellow Arabs, had resulted in growing sympathy for the undoubted plight of Iraqis. The evidence of mass destruction caused by coalition bombing and the continued suffering of innocent civilians had stoked up powerful emotions elsewhere in the Middle East, and renewed Arab enmity against Israel. Moreover, if Tel Aviv were to publish details of Iraq’s still-intact chemical and biological weapons, it would be seen in those pro-Arab Western countries as an attempt by Israel to persuade the United States and Britain to stage new assaults on Iraq.

The issue of going public about Saddam’s arsenal was also influenced by the carefully orchestrated secret discussions to bring an end to hostilities between the PLO and Israel. By 1992, these discussions had moved to Norway, and were progressing well, though it would be a full year before an agreement was reached and publicly ratified in October 1993, when Yasser Arafat shook hands with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, under the benevolent smile of President Clinton. For each man it was a diplomatic triumph.

However, not everyone in Mossad shared the hope that the “land for peace” formula—a Palestinian homeland in exchange for no more fighting—would work. Islamic fundamentalism was on the march, and Israel’s neighbors, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, were being buffeted by the extremist forces of Iran. For the Tehran mullahs, Israel remained a pariah state. Within Mossad, and indeed, for many Israelis, the prospect of a lasting peace with the PLO was an unrealistic dream. Zionist Israel had little wish to accommodate itself with Arabs: everything about their religion and culture was seen by Zionists as inferior to their own beliefs and history; they could not accept that the Oslo accord guaranteed the future of their Promised Land and that both races would live together, if not always happily, at least with respect for each other.

All this was carefully weighed by Shabtai Shavit as he considered the question of whether to publicize Iraq’s arsenal. In the end, he decided to keep the information secret so as not to disturb the wave of optimism outside Israel that had followed the Washington accord. Besides, if things went wrong, the information about Iraq’s stockpile of deadly poison could still be made public. The image of a ruthless Saddam poised to have one of his agents place a canister of anthrax in the New York subway, or a terrorist dispersing the Ebola virus into the air-conditioning system of a fully-laden Boeing 747, so that each passenger became a biological time bomb who could spread the virus to thousands of people before the truth was discovered, were scenarios perfectly suited for Mossad’s experts in psychological warfare to exploit whenever the time came to fan public opinion against Iraq.

Two other incidents, the facts of which had been hidden by Mossad, could also cause massive damage and embarrassment to the United States.