Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Beginning with the debacle on the streets of Amman in July 1997, when a kidon team failed to assassinate the Hamas leader Khalid Meshal, the past seven months had been, Yatom had told friends, “like living on the edge of the block waiting for the ax to fall.”

His executioner-in-waiting was Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Their once-close friendship had soured to the point where not a day passed without snipers in the prime minister’s office targeting the Mossad chief with the same whisper: It was only a matter of time before he was sacked. Other men would have resigned. But not Yatom. Proud and imperious, he was prepared to stand on his record. There were so many successful operations he had ordered that no outsider knew about. “It’s only the failures that get publicly dumped on my doorstep,” he had bitterly told his friends.

They, together with his family, had seen the strain in him: the sleepless nights; the sudden, unexpected bursts of anger, quickly extinguished; the restless pacing; the long silences; all the outward signs of a man under huge strain.

Two years into the job, he still faced pressures no other Mossad director had. Consequently, his own staff were increasingly demoralized, and he could no longer count on their loyalty. The media were circling, sensing he was wounded, but holding back, waiting to see when the one man Yatom had trusted, but no longer, would finally wield the ax. So far Benyamin Netanyahu had only kept an icy distance.

But on this cold February morning, Yatom knew his time was running out. That was why he needed the operation he had nurtured these past weeks to work. It would show the prime minister his spymaster had not lost his skills. But none of this showed on Yatom’s face; despite all he had endured, he kept his emotions under lock and key. Seated in a corner of the backseat of the Peugeot, in repose Yatom looked genuinely intimidating in black leather bomber jacket, open-neck shirt, and gray pants. It was how he usually dressed for work; clothes had never interested him.

His receding hair, steel-framed glasses, and thin lips went well with his nickname—the Prussian. He knew he still commanded by something close to fear. Beside him on the seat were the morning newspapers: for once there had been no speculation about his future.

The Peugeot made its swift way down through the hills toward Tel Aviv, the sun reflecting off the burnished bodywork; morning and evening the chauffeur polished the vehicle to mirror perfection. The Peugeot had bulletproof windows, armor-plated coachwork, and anti-mine flooring. Only the official car of the prime minister had similar protection.

Benyamin Netanyahu had Yatom confirmed in the post of director general of Mossad within minutes of Shabtai Shavit’s going. In Yatom’s first weeks in office, he had spent at least one evening a week with the prime minister. They had sat over cold beers and olives and put the world to rights, and remembered the times when Yatom had commanded “Bibi” in an IDF commando unit. Afterward Netanyahu had gone on to become Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and then, during the Gulf War, a self-styled expert on international terrorism, even broadcasting with a gas mask over his face in case a Scud should fall nearby. Yatom, for his part, had said how much he relished the role of the outsider who had been given the most important post in the country’s intelligence community: the quintessential career soldier, he had served as military attaché to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Yatom and Netanyahu had seemed inseparable until two embarrassments had left a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. There had been the bungled affair in Amman. The operation had been ordered by Netanyahu. When the attack failed and Mossad had been caught in the spotlight of the world’s media, the prime minister blamed Yatom for the debacle. He had taken the criticism without flinching; privately he had told friends that Netanyahu had “the courage of other people’s convictions.”

A second and, in many ways, a graver embarrassment surfaced. In October 1997, a senior Mossad officer, Yehuda Gil, was discovered to have invented, for the past twenty years, top secret reports from a nonexistent “agent” in Damascus. Gil had drawn substantial sums from Mossad’s slush fund to pay the man, pocketing the money for himself. The scam had only come to light when a Mossad analyst studying the “agent’s” latest report that Syria was about to attack Israel had become suspicious. Gil had been confronted by Yatom and made a full confession.

Netanyahu had pounced. In a stormy meeting in the prime minister’s office, Yatom had been brutally questioned over the way he ran Mossad. Netanyahu had brushed aside the argument that Gil had successfully carried off his deception under four previous directors. Yatom should have known, Netanyahu had shouted. It was another foul-up. Staff in the prime minister’s office could not recall such a dressing-down. The details had been leaked to the media, causing further embarrassment to Yatom.

How different it had been when he had come into office and his name had been splashed across the world’s media. Reporters had called him a safe pair of hands and there had been speculation that he would assume the mantle of the great spymasters of yesteryear—Amit, Hofi, and Admoni—and once more rekindle the fire Shabtai Shavit had deliberately damped down.

The proof was not long in coming. Despite the Oslo accord giving the PLO a homeland—the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—Yatom had increased the number of Arab agents to spy on Yasser Arafat. He had ordered Mossad programmers to develop new software to hack into PLO computers, and create electronic “microbes” to destroy, should the need arise, its communication systems. He had asked scientists in research and development to focus on “infowar” weapons that could insert black propaganda into enemy broadcasting systems. He wanted Mossad to be part of the brave new world where the weapons of the future would be in keyboards that shut down an enemy’s ability to mobilize its military forces.

Yatom had returned to Mossad’s old stomping ground, Africa: in May 1997, the service had provided important intelligence that had helped rebel forces to topple President Mobutu of Zaire, who for so long had dominated central Africa. Mossad also increased its ties with Nelson Mandela’s security service, helping it to target white extremists, many of whom it had previously worked with. Yatom also increased the budget and strength of the special Mossad unit, Al, responsible for stealing the latest U.S. scientific research.

At fifty-one years of age, there was something unstoppable about Danny Yatom; tireless and ruthless, he had the chutzpah of a street fighter. That was typified by his response to the discovery by the FBI in January 1997 of Mega—the high-level Mossad deep-penetration agent within the Clinton administration. He had told the Committee of the Heads of Services, whose role included preparing a fallback position in the event of an operational failure, all that needed to be done was to make sure that the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States countered demands from Arab organizations that the hunt for Mega must be pursued as vigorously as the FBI dealt with spies from other countries. Jewish dinner guests at the White House dinner table—Hollywood stars, attorneys, editors—all lost no opportunity to remind the president of the damage an ill-conceived manhunt would produce—even more if one of his own staff was arrested. In a presidency already besieged by scandal, that could be an opening that could finally destroy Clinton. Six months later, on July 4, 1997, Independence Day in the United States, Yatom had learned that the FBI had quietly downgraded its hunt for Mega.

Then two months later had come the disaster on the streets in Amman, swiftly followed by the scandal of the agent-who-never-was. Danny Yatom had begun to seek a new operation that would reestablish his authority. Now, on that January morning in 1998, he was on his way to put the finishing touches in place.