Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Ever the consummate politician, Netanyahu made no mention of the role he had played.

Efraim Halevy became the ninth director general of Mossad on Thursday, March 5, 1998. He broke with tradition and did not summon his senior staff to hear his views on how the service should be run for the next two years. In appointing Halevy, Netanyahu had also announced that, on March 3, 2000, the new deputy director of the service, Amiram Levine, would take over running the service. The news was greeted with some surprise. No other director general had been given a fixed tenure; no other deputy had been assured he would step into the top job.

By 1999, Yatom had found himself a niche in Israel’s thriving arms industry. He became a salesman for one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of arms; the company not only provides a range of weapons for internal use but has a thriving export industry to Third World countries. Yatom makes regular visits to African countries and South American nations. From time to time he turns up in Washington.

Like Meir Amit, Levine had no previous intelligence experience, but he had commanded with distinction the Israeli army in northern Israel and south Lebanon.

Halevy’s first task was to reduce the tremendous tension and resentments inside Mossad that had so seriously damaged its image both within Israel and beyond. In routine congratulatory telephone calls from both the CIA and MI6, the new director had been told those services would prefer to wait and see how he dealt with the crisis within Mossad before wholeheartedly committing their own services to no-secrets-based collaboration. One factor would be how Halevy dealt with the hard-liners in the Israeli government, especially its prime minister.

Would the urbane Halevy, only a year away from his pension and, by many years, the oldest to be given the office, be able to keep Netanyahu at a proper distance? And for all Halevy’s undoubted diplomatic skills—he had played a central role in the negotiations that led to the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan—he had been away from the coalface of intelligence for several years. Since his time with Mossad the agency had increasingly shown signs of being out of control as senior officers had tried to stake their own claims for promotion. Most of those middle-aged men remained in office. Could Halevy deal firmly with them? Would the new director have the essential hands-on skills to raise morale? Mingling on the cocktail circuit in Brussels had hardly been the best preparation for the task of leading agents away from the brink of resignation. Critically, Halevy had no personal operational field experience. He had always been a desk man in his previous time with Mossad. And what could he really achieve in two years? Or was he really there to rubber-stamp what Netanyahu wanted done, or, for that matter, what Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, wanted done? Speculation continued within the Israeli intelligence community over the part she had played in the removal of Yatom, a man to whom she had never warmed.

Halevy found a way to charm her. He presented Sara with a microchip that Mossad research scientists had developed. It could be implanted under her skin and allow her to be rescued in the unlikely event she ever fell into the hands of terrorists. Using natural body energy, the bleep was linked to one of Israel’s new space satellites, enabling a person who wore it to be swiftly tracked to his or her hiding place. No one knows if Sara has had the implant inserted in her body.

But soon there were more pressing matters than beguiling the prime minister’s wife. The first major operation Halevy had enthusiastically approved, an attempt to set up a spy base in Cyprus, came disastrously unstuck. Two Mossad agents, posing as teachers on vacation, were swiftly unmasked by the small but efficient Cypriot security service. They raided the apartment the agents had rented and discovered it was filled with high-tech equipment, capable of spying-out Cypriot plans to stiffen its defenses against neighboring Turkey.

Halevy sent his deputy to Cyprus to negotiate the release of the two men. He might well have wished he had gone himself. Israel’s president, Ezer Weizman, was a close personal friend of the Cypriot president, Biafcos Clerides (in their youth both men had served together in the Royal Air Force). Weizman dispatched his chief of staff to “eat humble pie in Cyprus” and then lambasted Halevy in a manner that even Netanyahu would have hesitated to have used against Yatom.

Further public embarrassment followed when, having approved a plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein during a visit to his mistress, it was canceled after details were leaked to an Israeli journalist. Netanyahu learned what had happened when the reporter called his office for comment. Once more the hapless Halevy found himself facing a severe dressing-down.

For weeks the mercurial prime minister avoided all but essential contact with the Mossad chief, until late November 1998. Then the Turkish prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, telephoned Netanyahu and asked if Mossad would help capture Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader, long designated as a terrorist by other countries. Turkey held him responsible for 30,000 deaths on its soil. For over twenty years Ocalan’s Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, had waged a guerrilla war to get autonomy for Turkey’s 12 million Kurds who have no minority rights such as education or permission to broadcast in their own language.

Ocalan had constantly evaded Turkey’s own security service with effortless ease. He was a leader who inspired messianic fervor in his people. Whether a man, woman, or child, they were ready to die for him. To many he was the epitome of the legendary Scarlet Pimpernel; his deeds of derring-do endlessly recited where two or more Kurds met. There was a raw passion about his speeches, an unnerving defiance in his challenge to Turkey.

That November—after flitting through Moscow—Ocalan turned up in Rome. The Italian government refused to extradite him to Turkey—but also refused his request for political asylum. Earlier Ocalan had been arrested on a German warrant for traveling on a false passport. He was freed when Bonn withdrew its extradition demand for fear of inflaming its large Kurdish communities. That was the moment that Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit telephoned Netanyahu.

For Israel, a close working relationship with Turkey is an important element in its strategic and diplomatic survival in the region. Netanyahu agreed and ordered Halevy to find Ocalan. It would be a “black” operation—meaning Mossad’s own involvement would never surface publicly. If successful, all the credit would go to Turkish intelligence.

The plan was given the code-name “Watchful.” It reflected Halevy’s own concern to do as little as possible to disturb his own running operation inside Iraq. There, Mossad katsas were working alongside Kurdish rebels to destabilize Saddam’s regime.

Six Mossad agents were dispatched to Rome. They included a bat leveyha, a woman, and two technicians from Mossad yahalomin, its communications unit.

Working out of a Mossad safe house near the Pantheon, the team set up surveillance on Ocalan’s apartment close to the Vatican. The woman agent was briefed to try and make contact with him. She followed the well-established guidelines that had been used by another Mossad female agent to entice Mordechai Vanunu to his doom in this same city over a decade before. But a plan to do the same with Ocalan failed when the Kurdish leader suddenly left Italy.

The Mossad team began to scour the Mediterranean basin for him: Spain, Portugal, Tunis, Morocco, Syria. Ocalan had been to all those countries—only to move on when refused sanctuary. On February 2, 1999, the Kurdish leader was discovered trying to enter Holland. The Dutch government refused him permission to do so. A Dutch security officer at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport informed the head of the local Mossad station that Ocalan had caught a KLM flight to Nairobi. His Mossad pursuers set off for the Kenyan capital, arriving on Thursday morning, February 5.