Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The world in the twenty-first century had become far more dangerous and unstable than ever before. While Mossad had contributed to assessing the technological developments terrorists had acquired, it played no significant part in identifying new roles for the global intelligence community on how to counter drugs and economic espionage. Mossad’s contribution had been to argue the need to bring back the traditional spy as a complement to the satellites and other exotic systems. The view was often coolly received.

Then, on September 11, 2001, the world and the global intelligence community were shocked into a new reality after the most deadly terrorist attack ever known. Yet, stunning as it was, the events of that day had been long in the making: the assault was the climax of the most sophisticated and horrifying scheme masterminded by Osama bin Laden and his jihad group, al-Qaeda.

In the countless millions of words written in newspapers and the accumulating library of books on the subject, one question has remained, until now, unanswered: How much did Mossad know beforehand of the events leading up to the destruction of the Twin Towers and the partial toppling of the Pentagon?

A year after the attacks, only a handful of the most senior Mossad officers from the Operations floor in the Mossad headquarters building knew the answers—and then, not all of them.

From the day bin Laden’s suicide bombers partly destroyed the World Trade Center in 1993, Mossad had placed him at the top of its own list of most wanted terrorists. Its deep-cover field agents in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan had all picked up “whispers in the wind” that bin Laden was planning “something big,” said one report. Another spoke of a “strong rumour bin Laden is planning a Hiroshima type attack.” Still another revealed a flight simulator being used in an al-Qaeda training camp near Kabul. Then came the even more alarming news that bin Laden had been trying to obtain chemical and nuclear weapons.

While Mossad analysts tried, in the words of one (to this author), to “connect the dots,” the reports were also passed on through the long-established back channel to the CIA. The Pentagon was asked to evaluate the threat of an air strike. One of its analysts, Marvin Cetron, wrote, “Coming down the Potomac, you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House.”

A full three years before the September attacks, a commission chaired by Vice President Al Gore had produced a report that urged substantially more spending on airport security. Other reports, again based on input from Mossad, followed. All were ignored, first by the Clinton White House and then by Clinton’s successor, President George W. Bush. When he protested, Marvin Cetron was told by a Pentagon official. “Look, we can’t manage a crisis until it is a crisis.” There was a feeling in Washington that Mossad was once more crying wolf, that it had a vested interest in promoting Islamic fundamentalism as a threat because it feared its terrorists and wanted to persuade the United States that it also faced a similar threat.

By the time Efraim Halevy had come into office, dutifully read the files on terrorism threats, and seen the reaction to Mossad’s warnings, he had decided that, in the words of one of his senior officers, “there was no point in pushing against a bolted door.”

In Washington, the impending debacle of intelligence ignored had led, not for the first time, to a rupture between the FBI and the CIA. Both agencies had concrete evidence that al-Qaeda was an increasing threat: one of its operatives had been stopped at the last moment from flying a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Credible intelligence had emerged at Langley that bin Laden was planning to launch an air strike against the economic summit in Italy earlier in 2001. But the sense of paralysis and denial, compounded by the growing turf war between the FBI and the CIA, had continued to hold the U.S. intelligence community in its grip.

It would take the events of September 11 to break that hold.

In the aftermath, senior officers at both agencies were publicly attacked for their lack of counterterrorism policies and their failure of coordination and cooperation. There emerged a picture of recalcitrant intelligence bureaucracies, too concerned with issues of political expediency to take risks. The CIA, in particular, had failed to grasp the importance of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the crucial role played by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. From its training camps, thousands of terrorists had graduated to leave their mark on the world stage. First came the destruction in 1998 of the American embassy in Nairobe, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in which 213 died. Then followed the attack on the American destroyer the USS Cole in the port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Both were very public preludes to the September 11 attacks.

After September 11, among the hundreds of questions dominating Washington’s collective soul-searching, were: Why had the CIA not had more spies on the ground in Africa and the Middle East? Why had it depended too much on electronic surveillance? And why had it not relied upon what Paul Bremer, the counterterrorism chief for President Reagan, had called “third-country intelligence”?

Everyone knew he meant Mossad.

Since then, Halevy had been bombarded with calls from CIA director George Tenet, himself facing intense criticism. Tenet wanted to know how much more Mossad had known about the impending attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Halevy, in his careful, diplomatic way, had pointed out to Tenet that Mossad had sent several warnings in the weeks prior to September that an attack was coming. Halevy had then cited “credible chatter” Mossad agents had picked up in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. But under mounting pressure from Congress and the White House, Tenet had furiously persisted in challenging Halevy. How much had Mossad known?

A serving Mossad officer later described the “hot line from Langley” as superheated. Sometimes there were a dozen calls a day from Tenet. And then there was all the secure-line high-speed signals traffic. There had never been anything like it. Washington was shocked that a bearded man operating out of a cave somewhere in the Middle East had “done more damage to American prestige than Pearl Harbor.”

In a tense phone call, one which, though he did not know it, would trigger his own downfall, Halevy had snapped at Tenet. Where was your electronic surveillance?

America’s National Security Agency is the most secretive and powerful such service in the world. From Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, it casts an electronic ear over the globe. Its supercomputers hum around the clock, hoping to intercept or identify communications between terrorists. Suspects, names, key words, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses are all sucked up by NSA satellites—either circling or geopositioned around the earth—and downloaded to the computers. There the data are coded into “watch lists,” then fed into the system that takes the lists on secure lines throughout the U.S. intelligence community.

In theory, everyone who had needed to know would have been aware of who was out there posing a real and present danger to the United States. But the reality had been different.

Few know exactly what NSA costs to run, but it is widely reported to be more than several billion dollars a year. Its massive, powerful data crushers are part of the ECHELON surveillance system, which sifts tens of billions of snippets of information, daily, matching them up.

The one drawback with the system is that it still has language difficulties: it cannot recognize the dialects and patois of some of the eighteen languages of the Middle East and the even greater number in India and Pakistan. Some of the material obtained from there has to be scrutinized by old-fashioned methods—linguists trained to interpret what is being said and, equally important, what might have been left out. In the end, the lists depend on being accurate.