Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

It was Mossad’s decision to run its own operations within a host country without telling Britain that had led to a souring of relations with London. Ironically. If Mossad left Schipol, it may be to return to Britain. Under the uncritical approval of Prime Minister Tony Blair—Halevy is said to have told Barak—Mossad would find a ready welcome. Blair believes a strong Mossad presence would benefit MI5’s efforts to keep track of the many groups from the Middle East who are now based in London.

A deciding factor in a move to Britain would be whether El Al, the Israeli national carrier, also moved its hub from Schipol to Heathrow. Given El Al’s thriving cargo business, the boost to Heathrow would be considerable.

Intel had established that the link between Mossad and the airline is an integral part of the traffic in nuclear materials.

The Dutch agency insists that Mossad would never have begun the dangerous business of buying nuclear materials unless those materials could be safely and secretly transported to Israel.

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison, now director of Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs, has observed that “a criminal or terrorist group could even ship a weapon into the United States in places small and light enough to be sent through the postal service.”

Implicit in those words is the fact that a highly efficient organization like Mossad, supported by the vast resources Israel puts at its disposal, would have little or no difficulty in smuggling nuclear materials out of Schipol.

Intel’s suspicion about such smuggling was first aroused when it was tipped off that the El Al cargo freighter that crashed shortly after take-off from Schipol in October 1992 was carrying chemicals.

Since then the agency has gathered what an Intel source describes as “at minimum strong circumstantial evidence” that Mossad has also shipped nuclear materials regularly through Schipol.

A “mule”—a courier—who in return for her cooperation was given a guarantee against prosecution—has told Intel that she had smuggled nuclear materials from the Ukraine across Germany and finally into Holland.

The courier has claimed to Intel that she was met at Amsterdam’s Central Station. Shown photographs, the courier picked out the person. It was a Mossad officer Intel knew was based at Schipol.

In the “old days”—the words are those of Meir Amit—a Mossad operative would never have allowed himself to be so easily identified. Many others within the Israeli intelligence community believe such basic failures in trade craft do not augur well for Mossad as it enters the new millennium.

There has been a change of attitude within Israel that has led to anger and disillusion over Mossad’s operational failures. In those “old days” few Israelis had really minded that Mossad’s successes often depended on subversion, lying, and killing. All that mattered was that Israel survived.

But with peace, of a sort, edging closer to Israel’s borders with its Arab neighbors, increasing questions are being asked about such methods being used in Mossad’s continuing role as shield and sword.

Within Mossad itself there is a stubborn feeling that a great institution can only survive by, in the words of Rafi Eitan, “not giving in to every murmur of a new opinion.” Equally there is also a feeling, articulated by Ari Ben-Menashe, that if Mossad persists in locking itself into yesterday’s goals, it “will be in danger of being smothered, like a medieval knight in his armor left unhorsed and forgotten on the field of battle.”

Behind such evocative words lie some hard truths. Fifty years on, Mossad is no longer seen as a derring-do agency, its deeds burnished bright in the consciousness of Israel. Born in those memorable few years in which Israel built a new world for itself, Mossad was one of the guarantors that world would survive. That guarantee is no longer required.

Ari Ben-Menashe put it as well as anybody: “Israel, and the world, should think of Mossad as they would a dose of preventive medicine—to protect against an illness that could be fatal. You only take the medicine when the illness is threatening. You don’t take it all the time.”

The still unanswered question is whether Mossad will be content to play a role where maturity and moderation must replace the policy of doing hard things for hard reasons.

On September 11, 2002, every available man and woman in Mossad—apart from those overseas—made his or her way through the featureless corridors of their headquarters in midtown Tel Aviv. Outside it was another of those late summer days, a clear blue sky and the temperature in the mid-twenties Celsius. There had been the same kind of weather, a year ago to the day, on the northeastern seaboard of the United States when al-Qaeda’s suicide bombers had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. The unprecedented assault had forever changed the perception of terrorism for Mossad and the world’s other intelligence services, who worked, in 2002, in a $100 billion global industry employing a million people. Mossad’s entire staff now numbered 1,500, an increase of 300 over the last decade.

It was not the first anniversary of what had become known as 9/11 that preoccupied those in Mossad headquarters heading for the staff canteen. The sense of foreboding in some, coupled with a frisson of excitement in others, came from a mixture of hope, expectation, and a fear of disappointment.

The question uppermost in their minds was simple: Was the new head of Mossad they were on their way to meet in the headquarters canteen going to continue to run the service as it had been run under Efraim Halevy? If so, morale would inevitably plunge further and there would be more resignations.

Halevy had finally been eased out by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as memune—Hebrew for “first among equals.” In the four years he had been director general, the tension he had inherited—caused by interservice rivalry and backstabbing that had set field agents against analysts and turned planners into plotters—had increased. Mossad, which once prided itself on unity, had become increasingly fractured.

Could the new man heal the rifts? Could he do what Halevy had spectacularly failed to do: lead Mossad into the new millennium and turn it back into a force with which to be reckoned? The men and women making their way to the canteen on that September day agreed that anyone at the helm must be better than Halevy.

In his four-year tenure, there had been marked physical changes in Halevy. There was a grayness to his skin, and his eyes were often red rimmed, the result of disturbed sleep from calls by a Mossad night-duty officer. The lines around Halevy’s mouth were more deeply etched. Gone was the sprightly stride that had once heralded his approach down Mossad’s corridors, there was now a stiffness in his gait. Sartorially, too, he was no longer the figure he had been: he had lost weight; his jackets hung on him. His voice, still cultured, was without its crispness; his questions were less incisive. Halevy had come to look and sound like a man edging toward retirement. On that September day, he was sixty-six years of age, the oldest director general to have led Mossad.

In many ways the service had become like Halevy. Its forays onto the international stage had been cut back to operations in the cauldron of the Middle East. Senior Mossad officers accompanied Halevy on his regular visits to the CIA at Langley, to MI6 at its new headquarters at Vauxhall Cross in London, and to Pullach in Bavaria, home of Germany’s BND. Visits to other intelligence chiefs were less frequent. But little came from any of these contacts.