That night, far away in Tel Aviv, General Kobi Dror of the Mossad sat in his office in the Hadar Dafna building, taking a late-night drink after work with an old friend and colleague, Shlomo Gershon, always known as Sami. Sami Gershon was head of the Mossad"s Combatants or Komemiute Division, the section responsible for running illegal agents, the dangerous cutting edge of espionage. He had been one of the other two present when his chief had lied to Chip Barber. "You don"t think we should have told them?" Gershon asked, because the subject had come up again. Dror swirled his beer in the bottle and took a swig. "Screw them," he growled. "Let them recruit their own b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sets." As a teenage soldier in the spring of 1967, Dror had crouched under his Patton tank in the desert and waited while four Arab states prepared to settle accounts with Israel once and for all. He still recalled how the outside world had confined itself to muttering, "Tut tut." With the rest of his crew, commanded by a twenty-year-old, he had been one of those under Israel Tal who had punched a hole straight through the Mitla Pa.s.s and driven the Egyptian Army back to the Suez Ca.n.a.l. And he recalled how, when Israel had destroyed four armies and four air forces in six days, the same Western media that had wrung its hands at his country"s impending obliteration in May had accused Israel of bully-boy tactics by winning. From then on, Kobi Dror"s philosophy had been made: Screw them all. He was a sabra, born and raised in Israel, and had none of the breadth of vision nor forbearance of people like David Ben-Gurion. His political loyalty lay with the far-right Likud Party, with Menachem Begin, who had been in the Irgun, and Itzhak Shamir, formerly of the Stern Gang. Once, sitting at the back of a cla.s.sroom, listening to one of his staff lecture the new recruits, he had heard the man use the phrase "friendly intelligence agencies." He had risen and taken over the cla.s.s. "There is no such thing as a friend of Israel, except maybe a diaspora Jew," he told them. "The world is divided into two: our enemies and neutrals. Our enemies we know how to deal with. As for neutrals, take everything, give nothing. Smile at them, slap them on the back, drink with them, flatter them, thank them for their tipoffs, and tell them nothing." "Well, Kobi, let"s hope they never find out," said Gershon. "How can they? There"s only eight of us who know. And we"re all in the Office." It must have been the beer. He was overlooking someone.
In the spring of 1988 a British businessman called Stuart Harris was attending an industrial fair in Baghdad. He was sales director of a company in Nottingham that made and sold road-grading equipment. The fair was under the auspices of the Iraqi Ministry of Transport. Like almost all Westerners, he had been staying at the Rashid Hotel on Yafa Street, which had been built mainly for foreigners and was always under surveillance. On the third day of the exhibition, Harris had returned to his room to find a plain envelope pushed under his door. It had no name on it, just his room number, and the number was correct. Inside was a single sheet of paper and another completely plain envelope of the airmail type. The slip of paper said in English and in block capitals: "On your return to London pa.s.s this envelope unopened to Norman at the Israeli emba.s.sy." That was all. Stuart Harris had been panic-stricken, terrified. He knew the reputation of Iraq, of its dreaded Secret Police. Whatever was in the plain envelope could get him arrested, tortured, even killed. To his credit, he kept cool, sat down, and tried to work things out. Why him? for example. There were scores of British businessmen in Baghdad. Why pick Stuart Harris? They could not know he was Jewish, that his father had arrived in England in 1935 from Germany as Samuel Horowitz, could they? Though he would never find out, there had been a conversation two days earlier in the fairground canteen between two functionaries of the Iraqi Transportation Ministry. One had told the other of his visit to the Nottingham works the previous autumn; how Harris had been his host on the first and second days, then disappeared for a day, then come back. He-the Iraqi-had asked if Harris was ill. It was a colleague who had laughed and told him Harris had been off for Yom Kippur. The two Iraqi civil servants thought nothing more of it, but someone at the next booth did. He reported the conversation to his superior. The senior man appeared to take no notice but later became quite thoughtful and ran a check on Mr. Stuart Harris of Nottingham, establishing his room number at the Rashid. Harris sat and wondered what on earth to do. Even if, he reasoned, the anonymous sender of the letter had discovered he was Jewish, there was one thing they could not have known. No way. By an extraordinary coincidence, Stuart Harris was a sayan. The Israeli Inst.i.tute for Intelligence and Special Operations, founded in 1951 on the order of Ben-Gurion himself, is known outside its own walls as the Mossad, Hebrew for "Inst.i.tute." Inside its walls it is never, ever called that, but always "the Office." Among the leading intelligence agencies of the world, it is by far the smallest. In terms of on-the-payroll staff, it is tiny. The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, has about 25,000 employees on its staff, and that excludes all the outstations. At its peak the KGB"s First Chief Directorate, responsible like the CIA and Mossad for foreign intelligence-gathering, had 15,000 case officers around the world, some three thousand based at the Yazenevo headquarters. The Mossad has only between 1,200 and 1,500 employees at any time and fewer than forty case officers, called katsas. That it can operate on such a slim budget and tiny staff and secure the "product" that it does depends on two factors. One is its ability to tap into the Israeli population at will-a population still amazingly cosmopolitan and containing a bewildering variety of talents, languages, and geographical origins. The other factor is an international network of helpers or a.s.sistants, in Hebrew sayanim. These are diaspora Jews (they must be wholly Jewish on both sides) who, although probably loyal to the country in which they reside, will also sympathize with the State of Israel.
There are two thousand sayanim in London alone, five thousand in the rest of Britain, and ten times that number in the United States. They are never brought into operations, just asked for favors. And they must be convinced that the help they are asked to give is not for an operation against their country of birth or adoption. Conflicting loyalties are not allowed. But they enable operational costs to be cut by a factor of up to ten. For example: A Mossad team arrives in London to mount an operation against a Palestinian undercover squad. They need a car. A used car sayan is asked to leave a legitimate secondhand car at a certain place with the keys under the mat. It is returned later, after the operation. The sayan never knows what it was used for; his books say it was out to a possible customer on approval. The same team needs a "front." A property-owning sayan lends an empty shop, and a confectionery sayan stocks it with sweets and chocolates. They need a mail drop; a real estate sayan lends the keys to a vacant office on his roster. Stuart Harris had been on vacation at the Israeli resort of Eilat when, at the bar of the Red Rock, he fell into conversation with a pleasant young Israeli who spoke excellent English. At a later conversation, the Israeli brought a friend, an older man, who quietly elicited from Harris where his feelings toward Israel lay. By the end of the vacation, Harris had agreed that, if there was ever anything he could do ... At the end of the vacation Harris went home as advised and got on with his life. For two years he waited for the call, but no call ever came. However, a friendly visitor kept periodically in touch-one of the more tiresome jobs of katsas on foreign a.s.signment is to keep tabs on the sayanim on their list. So Stuart Harris sat in a wave of rising panic in the hotel room in Baghdad and wondered what to do. The letter could well be a provocation-he would be intercepted at the airport trying to smuggle it out. Slip it into someone else"s bag? He did not feel he could do that. And how would he recover it in London? Finally, he calmed down, worked out a plan, and did it exactly right. He burned the outer envelope and the note in an ashtray, crushed the embers, and flushed them down the toilet. Then he hid the plain envelope under the spare blanket on the shelf above the wardrobe, having first wiped it clean. If his room were raided, he would simply swear he had never needed the blanket, never climbed to the top shelf, and the letter must have been left by a previous occupant. In a stationery shop he bought a stout manila envelope, an adhesive label, and sealing tape; from a post office, enough stamps to send a magazine from Baghdad to London. He abstracted a promotional magazine extolling the virtues of Iraq from the trade fair and even had the empty envelope stamped with the exhibition logo. On the last day, just before leaving for the airport with his two colleagues, he retired to his room. He slipped the letter into the magazine and sealed them in the envelope. He addressed it to an uncle in Long Eaton and stuck on the label and the stamps. In the lobby, he knew, was a mailbox, and the next pickup was in four hours. Even if the envelope were steamed open by goons, he reasoned, he would be over the Alps in a British airliner. It is said that luck favors the brave or the foolish or both. The lobby was under surveillance by men from the AMAM, watching to see if any departing foreigner was approached by an Iraqi trying to slip him something. Harris carried his envelope under his jacket and beneath his left armpit. A man behind a newspaper in the corner was watching, but a trolley of baggage rolled between them as Harris dropped the envelope into the mailbox. When the watcher saw him again, Harris was at the desk handing in his key. The brochure arrived at his uncle"s house a week later. Harris had known his uncle was away on vacation, and as he had a key in case of fire or burglary, he used it to slip in and retrieve his package. Then he took it down to the Israeli emba.s.sy in London and asked to see his contact. He was shown into a room and told to wait. A middle-aged man entered and asked his name and why he wanted to see "Norman." Harris explained, took the airmail envelope from his pocket, and laid it on the table. The Israeli diplomat went pale, asked him to wait again, and left. The emba.s.sy building at 2 Palace Green is a handsome structure, but its cla.s.sical lines give no indication of the wealth of fortifications and technology that conceals the Mossad London Station in the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was from this underground fortress that a younger man was summoned urgently. Harris waited and waited. Though he did not know it, he was being studied through a one-way mirror as he sat there with the envelope on the table in front of him. He was also being photographed, while records were checked to ensure he really was a sayan and not a Palestinian terrorist. When the photograph of Stuart Harris of Nottingham from the files checked with the man behind the one-way mirror, the young katsa finally entered the room. He smiled, introduced himself as Rafi, and invited Harris to start his story at the very beginning, right back in Eilat. So Harris told him. Rafi knew all about Eilat (he had just read the entire file), but he needed to check. When the narrative reached Baghdad, he became interested. He had few queries at first, allowing Harris to narrate in his own time. Then the questions came, many of them, until Harris had relived all he had done in Baghdad several times. Rafi took no notes; the whole thing was being recorded. Finally he used a wall phone to have a muttered conversation in Hebrew with a senior colleague next door. His last act was to thank Stuart Harris profusely, congratulate him on his courage and cool head, exhort him never to mention the entire incident to anyone, and wish him safe journey back home. Then Harris was shown out. A man with antiblast helmet, flak-jacket, and gloves took the letter away. It was photographed and X-rayed. The Israeli emba.s.sy had already lost one man to a letter bomb, and it did not intend to lose another. Finally the letter was opened. It contained two sheets of onionskin airmail paper covered in script. In Arabic. Rafi did not speak Arabic, let alone read it. Neither did anyone else in the London station, at least not well enough to read spidery Arabic handwriting. Rafi sent a copious and heavily encrypted radio report to Tel Aviv, then wrote an even fuller account in the formal and uniform style called NAKA in the Mossad. The letter and the report went into the diplomatic bag and caught the evening flight by El Al from Heathrow to Ben-Gurion. A dispatch rider with an armed escort met the courier right off the plane and took the canvas bag destined for the big building on King Saul Boulevard, where, just after the breakfast hour, it found itself in front of the head of the Iraq Desk, a very able young katsa called David Sharon. He did speak and read Arabic, and what he read in those two onionskin pages of letter left him with the same sensation he had felt the first time he threw himself out of an airplane over the Negev Desert while training with the Paras.
Using his own typewriter, avoiding both secretary and word processor, he typed out a literal translation of the letter in Hebrew. Then he took them both, plus Rafi"s report as to how the Mossad had come by the letter, to his immediate chief, the Director of the Middle East Division.
What the letter said, in effect, was that the writer was a high-ranking functionary in the topmost councils of the Iraqi regime and that he was prepared to work for Israel for money-but only for money.
There was a bit more, and a post-office-box address at Baghdad"s princ.i.p.al post office for a reply, but that was the gist of it.
That evening, there was a high-level meeting in Kobi Dror"s private office. Present were he and Sami Gershon, head of the Combatants. Also Eitan Hadar, David Sharon"s immediate superior as Director of the Middle East Division, to whom he had taken the Baghdad letter that morning. Sharon himself was summoned.From the outset, Gershon was dismissive."It"s a phony," he said. "I"ve never seen such a blatant, clumsy, obvious attempt at entrapment. Kobi, I"m not sending any of my men in there to check it out. It would be sending the man to his death. I wouldn"t even send an oter to Baghdad to try and make contact."An oter is an Arab used by the Mossad to establish preliminary contact with a fellow Arab, a low-level go-between and a lot more expendable than a full-fledged Israeli katsa.Gershon"s view seemed to prevail. The letter was a madness, apparently an attempt to lure a senior katsa to Baghdad for arrest, torture, public trial, and public execution. Finally, Dror turned to David Sharon."Well, David, you have a tongue. What do you think?"
Sharon nodded regretfully. "I think Sami almost certainly has to be right. Sending a good man in there would be crazy." Eitan Hadar shot him a warning look. Between divisions, there was the usual rivalry. No need to hand victory to Gershon"s Combatants Division on a plate. "Ninety-nine percent of the chances say it has to be a trap," said Sharon. "Only ninety-nine?" asked Dror teasingly. "And the one percent, my young friend?" "Oh, just a foolish idea," Sharon said. "It just occurred to me, the one percent might say that out of the blue, we have a new Penkovsky." There was dead silence. The word hung in the air like an open challenge. Gershon expelled his breath in a long hiss. Kobi Dror stared at his Iraq Desk chief. Sharon looked at his fingertips.
In espionage there are only four ways of recruiting an agent for infiltration into the high councils of a target country. The first is far and away the most difficult: to use one of your own nationals, one trained to an extraordinary degree to pa.s.s for a national of the target country right in the heart of that target. It is almost impossible, unless the infiltrator was born and raised in the target country and can be eased back in, with a cover story to explain his absence. Even then, he will have to wait years to rise to useful office with access to secrets-a sleeper for up to ten years. Yet once, Israel had been the master of this technique. This was because, when Israel was young, Jews poured in who had been raised all over the world. There were Jews who could pa.s.s as Moroccans, Algerians, Libyans, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Yemenis. This was apart from all those coming in from Russia, Poland, Western Europe, and North and South America. The most successful of these had been Elie Cohen, born and raised in Syria. He was slipped back into Damascus as a Syrian who had been away for years and had now returned. With his new Syrian name, Cohen became an intimate of high-ranking politicians, civil servants, and generals who spoke freely to their endlessly generous host at his sumptuous parties. Everything they said, including the entire Syrian battle plan, went back to Tel Aviv just in time for the Six-Day War. Cohen was exposed, tortured, and publicly hanged in Revolution Square in Damascus. Such infiltrations are extremely dangerous and very rare. But as the years pa.s.sed, the original immigrant Israelis became old; their sabra children did not study Arabic and could not attempt what Elie Cohen had done. This was why, by 1990, the Mossad had far less brilliant Arabists than one might imagine. But there was a second reason. Penetration of Arab secrets is easier to accomplish in Europe or the United States. If an Arab state is buying an American fighter, the details can more easily be stolen, and at a lot less risk, in America. If an Arab high-up seems susceptible to an approach, why not make it while he is visiting the fleshpots of Europe? That is why, by 1990, the vast bulk of Mossad operations were conducted in low-risk Europe and America rather than in the high-risk Arab states. The king of all the infiltrators, however, was Marcus Wolf, who for years had run the East German intelligence net. He had one great advantage-an East German could pa.s.s for a West German. During his time "Mischa" Wolf infiltrated scores and scores of his agents into West Germany. One of them became the personal private secretary of Chancellor w.i.l.l.y Brandt himself. Wolf"s speciality was the prim, dowdy, little spinster secretary who rose to become indispensable to her West German minister-employer-and who could copy every doc.u.ment that crossed her desk for transmission back to East Berlin. The second method of infiltration is to use a national of the aggressor agency, posing as someone coming from a third nation. The target country knows that the infiltrator is a foreigner but is persuaded he is a friendly, sympathetic foreigner. The Mossad again did this brilliantly with a man called Ze"ev Gur Arieh. He was born Wolfgang Lotz in Mannheim, Germany, in 1921. Wolfgang was six feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, uncirc.u.mcised, and yet Jewish. He came to Israel as a boy, was raised there, took his Hebrew name, fought with the underground Haganah, and went on to become a major in the Israeli Army. Then the Mossad took him in hand. He was sent back to Germany for two years to perfect his native German and "prosper" with Mossad money. Then, with a new gentile German wife, he emigrated to Cairo and set up a riding school. It was a great success. Egyptian staff officers loved to relax with their horses, attended by the champagne-serving Wolfgang, a good right-wing, anti-Semitic German in whom they could confide. And confide they did. Everything they said went back to Tel Aviv. Lotz was eventually caught, was lucky not to be hanged, and after the Six-Day War was exchanged for Egyptian prisoners. But an even more successful impostor was a German of an earlier generation. Before the Second World War, Richard Sorge had been a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, speaking j.a.panese and with high contacts in Hideki Tojo"s government. That government approved of Hider and a.s.sumed Sorge was a loyal n.a.z.i-he certainly said he was. It never occurred to Tokyo that Sorge was not a German n.a.z.i. In fact, he was a German Communist in the service of Moscow. For years he laid the war plans of the Tojo regime open for Moscow to study. His great coup was his last. In 1941, Hitler"s armies stood before Moscow. Stalin needed to know urgently: Would j.a.pan mount an invasion of the USSR from her Manchurian bases? Sorge found out; the answer was no. Stalin could transfer forty thousand Mongol troops from the east to Moscow. The Asiatic cannon fodder held the Germans at bay for a few more weeks, until winter came and Moscow was saved. Not so Sorge; he was unmasked and hanged. But before he died, his information probably changed history. The most common method of securing an agent in the target country is the third: simply to recruit a man who is already "in place." Recruitment can be tediously slow or surprisingly fast. To this end, talent spotters patrol the diplomatic community looking for a senior functionary of the other side who may appear disenchanted, resentful, dissatisfied, bitter, or in any way susceptible to recruitment. Delegations visiting foreign parts are studied to see if someone can be taken aside, given a fine old time, and approached for a change of loyalty. When the talent spotter has tabbed a "possible," the recruiters move in, usually starting with a casual friendship that becomes deeper and warmer. Eventually, the "friend" suggests his pal might do him a small favor; a minor and inconsequential piece of information is needed. Once the trap is sprung, there is no going back, and the more ruthless the regime the new recruit is serving, the less likely he will confess all and throw himself on that regime"s nonexistent mercy. The motives for being so recruited to serve another country vary. The recruit may be in debt, in a bitter marriage, pa.s.sed over for promotion, revolted by his own regime, or simply l.u.s.t for a new life and plenty of money. He may be recruited through his own weaknesses, s.e.xual or h.o.m.os.e.xual, or simply by sweet talk and flattery. Quite a few Soviets, like Penkovsky and Gordievsky, changed sides for genuine reasons of conscience, but most spies who turn on their own country do so because they share a quite monstrous vanity, a conviction that they are truly important in the scheme of things. But the weirdest of all the recruitments is called the "walk-in." As the phrase implies, the recruit simply walks in, unexpected and unannounced, and offers his services. The reaction of the agency so approached is always one of extreme skepticism-surely this must be a "plant" by the other side. Thus when, in 1960, a tall Russian approached the Americans in Moscow, declared he was a full colonel of the Soviet military intelligence arm, the GRU, and offered to spy for the West, he was rejected. Bewildered, the man approached the British, who gave him a try. Oleg Penkovsky turned out to be one of the most amazing agents ever. In his brief thirty-month career he turned over 5,500 doc.u.ments to the Anglo-American operation that ran him, and every one of them was in the secret or top secret category. During the Cuban missile crisis, the world never realized that President Kennedy knew the full hand of cards that Nikita Khrushchev had to play, like a poker player with a mirror behind his opponent"s back. The mirror was Penkovsky. The Russian took crazy risks, refusing to come out to the West while he had the chance. After the missile crisis he was unmasked by Soviet counterintelligence, tried, and shot. None of the other three Israelis in Kobi Dror"s room that night in Tel Aviv needed to be told anything about Oleg Penkovsky. In their world, he was part of legend. The dream hovered in all their minds after Sharon dropped the name. A real, live, gold-plated, twenty-four-carat traitor in Baghdad? Could it be true-could it possibly be true? Kobi Dror gave Sharon a long, hard look. "What have you in mind, young man?" "I was just thinking," said Sharon with feigned diffidence. "A letter ... no risks to anyone-just a letter ... asking a few questions, difficult questions, things we would like to know. ... He comes up or he doesn"t." Dror glanced at Gershon. The man who ran the illegal agents shrugged. "I put men in on the ground," the gesture seemed to say. "What do I care about letters?" "All right, young David. We write him a letter back. We ask him some questions. Then we see. Eitan, you work with David on this. Let me see the letter before it goes." Eitan Hadar and David Sharon left together. "I hope you know what the h.e.l.l you"re doing," the head of Middle East muttered to his protege. The letter was crafted with extreme care. Several in-house experts worked on it-the Hebrew version at least. Translation would come later. David Sharon introduced himself by his first name only, right at the start. He thanked the writer for his trouble and a.s.sured him the letter had arrived safely at the destination the writer must have intended. The reply went on to say that the writer could not fail to understand that his letter had aroused great surprise and suspicion both by its source and its method of transmission. David knew, he said, that the writer was clearly no fool and therefore would realize that "my people" would need to establish some bona fides. David went on to a.s.sure the writer that if his bona fides could be established, his requirement for payment would present no problem, but clearly the product would have to justify the financial rewards that "my people" were prepared to pay. Would the writer therefore be kind enough to seek to answer the questions on the attached sheet? The full letter was longer and more complicated, but that was the gist of it. Sharon ended by giving the writer a mailing address in Rome for his reply. The address was actually a discontinued safe house that the Rome station had volunteered at Tel Aviv"s urgent request. From then on, the Rome station would keep an eye on the abandoned address. If Iraqi security agents showed up at it, they would be spotted and the affair aborted. The list of twenty questions was carefully chosen and after much head-scratching. To eight of the questions Mossad already knew the answers but would not be expected to know. So an attempt to fool Tel Aviv would not work. Eight more questions concerned developments that could be checked for veracity after they had happened. Four questions were things that Tel Aviv really wanted to know, particularly about the intentions of Saddam Hussein himself. "Let"s see how high this b.a.s.t.a.r.d really goes," said Kobi Dror when he read the list. Finally a professor in Tel Aviv University"s Arabic Faculty was called in to phrase the letter in that ornate and flowery style of the written language. Sharon signed it in Arabic with the Arab version of his own name, Daoud. The text also contained one other point. David would like to give his writer a name, and if the writer in Baghdad did not object, would he mind being known simply as Jericho? The letter was mailed from the only Arab country where Israel had an emba.s.sy-Cairo. After it had gone, David Sharon went on with his work and waited. The more he thought it over, the crazier the affair seemed to be. A post-office box, in a country where the counterintelligence net was run by someone as smart as Ha.s.san Rahmani, was horrendously dangerous. So was writing top secret information "in clear," and there was no indication that Jericho knew anything about secret writing. Continuing to use the ordinary mail was also out of the question, if this thing developed. However, he reasoned, it probably would not. But it did. Four weeks later, Jericho"s reply reached Rome and was brought unopened in a blastproof box to Tel Aviv. Extreme precautions were taken. The envelope might be wired to explosives or smeared with a deadly toxin. When the scientists finally declared it clean, it was opened. To their stunned amazement, Jericho had come up with paydirt. All the eight questions to which the Mossad already knew the answers were completely accurate. Eight more-troop movements, promotions, dismissals, foreign trips by identifiable luminaries of the regime-would have to wait for check-out as and when they occurred, if they ever did. The last four questions Tel Aviv could neither know nor check, but all were utterly feasible. David Sharon wrote a fast letter back, in a text that would cause no security problems if intercepted: "Dear Uncle, many thanks for your letter which has now arrived. It is wonderful to hear that you are well and in good health. Some among the points you raise will take time, but all being well, I will write again soon. Your loving nephew, Daoud." The mood was growing in the Hadar Dafna building that this man Jericho might be serious after all. If that was so, urgent action was needed. An exchange of two letters was one thing; running a deep-cover agent inside a brutal dictatorship was another. There was no way that communication could continue on the basis of in-clear script, public mails, and post-office boxes. They were a recipe for an early disaster. A case officer would be needed to get into Baghdad, live there, and run Jericho using all the usual tradecraft-secret writing, codes, dead-letter boxes, and a no-intercept means of getting the product out of Baghdad and back to Israel. "I"m not having it," Gershon repeated. "I will not put a senior Israeli katsa into Baghdad on a black mission for an extended stay. It"s diplomatic cover, or he doesn"t go." "All right, Sami," said Dror. "Diplomatic cover it is. Let"s see what we"ve got." The point of diplomatic cover is that a black agent can be arrested, tortured, hanged-whatever. An accredited diplomat, even in Baghdad, can avoid such unpleasantness; if caught spying, he will merely be declared persona non grata and expelled. It is done all the time. Several major divisions of the Mossad went into overdrive that summer, especially Research. Gershon could already tell them he had no agent on the staff of any emba.s.sy accredited to Baghdad, and his nose was already well out of joint because of it. So the search began to find a diplomat who would suit. Every foreign emba.s.sy in Baghdad was identified. From the capital cities of every country, a list was acquired of all their staff in Baghdad.
No one checked out; no one had ever worked for the Mossad before, who could be reactivated. There was not even one sayan on those lists. Then a clerk came up with an idea: the United Nations. The world body had one agency based in Baghdad in 1988, the UN Economic Commission for West Asia. The Mossad has a big penetration of the United Nations in New York, and a staff list was acquired. One name checked out: a young Jewish Chilean diplomat called Alfonso Benz Moncada. He was not a trained agent, but he was a sayan and therefore presumably was prepared to be helpful. One by one Jericho"s tips came true. The checking process revealed that the Army divisions he had said would be moved were mewed; the promotions he foretold duly happened, and the dismissals took place. "Either Saddam himself is behind this farrago, or Jericho is betraying his country from a.s.shole to elbow," was Kobi Dror"s judgment. David Sharon sent a third letter, also innocently couched. For his second and third missives, the professor had not been needed. The third letter referred to an order by the Baghdad-based client for some very delicate gla.s.sware and porcelain. Clearly, said David, a little more patience was needed so that a means of transshipment could be devised that would guarantee the cargoes from accidental disaster. A Spanish-speaking katsa already based in South America was sent p.r.o.nto to Santiago and persuaded the parents of Senor Benz to urge their son home immediately on compa.s.sionate leave because his mother was seriously ill. It was the father who telephoned his son in Baghdad. The worried son applied for and at once got three weeks" compa.s.sionate leave and flew back to Chile. He was met not by a sick mother but by an entire team of Mossad training officers who begged him to accede to their request. He discussed the matter with his parents and agreed. The emotional pull of the needs of the Land of Israel, which none of them had ever seen, was strong. Another sayan in Santiago, without knowing why, lent his summer villa, set in a walled garden outside the city near the sea, and the training team went to work. It takes two years to train a katsa to run a deep-cover agent in hostile terrain, and that is the minimum. The team had three weeks. They worked sixteen-hour days. They taught the thirty-year-old Chilean secret writing and basic codes, miniature photography and the reduction of photographs to microdots. They took him out on the streets and taught him how to spot a tail. They warned him never to shake a tail, except in an absolute emergency, if carrying deeply incriminating material. They told him that if he even thought he was being followed to abort the rendezvous or the pickup and try again later. They showed him how to use combustible chemicals stored in a false fountain pen to destroy incriminating evidence in seconds while hiding in any men"s restroom or just around a corner. They took him out in cars to show him how to spot a car tail, one acting as instructor and the rest of the team as the "hostiles." They taught him until his ears rang and his eyes ached and he begged for sleep. Then they taught him about dead-letter boxes or drops-secret compartments where a message may be left or another collected. They showed him how to create one from a recess behind a loose brick in a wall, or under a tombstone, in a crevice in an old tree, or beneath a flagstone. After three weeks, Alfonso Benz Moncada bade good-bye to his tearful parents and flew back to Baghdad via London. The senior instructor leaned back in his chair at the villa, pa.s.sed an exhausted hand over his forehead, and told the team: "If that b.u.g.g.e.r stays alive and free, I"ll make the pilgrimage to Mecca." The team laughed; their leader was a deeply Orthodox Jew. All the time they were teaching Moncada, none of them had known what he was going to do back in Baghdad. It was not their job to know. Neither did the Chilean. It was during the stopover in London that he was taken to the Heathrow Penta Hotel. There he met Sami Gershon and David Sharon, and they told him. "Don"t try and identify him," Gershon warned the young man. "Leave that to us. Just establish the drops and service them. We"ll send you the lists of things we want answered. You won"t understand them-they"ll be in Arabic. We don"t think Jericho speaks much English, if at all. Don"t ever try to translate what we send you. Just put it in one of the you-to-him drops and make the appropriate chalk mark so he knows to go and service the drop. "When you see his chalk mark, go and service the him-to-you box, and get his answer back." In a separate bedroom Alfonso Benz Moncada was given his new luggage. There was a camera that looked like a tourist"s Pentax but took a snap-on cartridge with more than a hundred exposures in it, plus an innocent-looking aluminum strut frame for holding the camera at exactly the right distance above a sheet of paper. The camera was preset for that range. His toilet kit included combustible chemicals disguised as aftershave, and various invisible inks. The letter-writing wallet held all the treated paper for secret writing. Last, they told him the means for communicating with them, a method they had been setting up while he was training in Chile. He would write letters concerning his love of chess-he already was a chess fan-to his pen pal Justin Bokomo of Uganda, who worked in the General Secretariat of the UN building in New York. His letters would always go out of Baghdad in the UN diplomatic mail pouch for New York. The replies would also come from Bokomo in New York. Though Benz Moncada did not know it, there was a Ugandan called Bokomo in New York. There was also a Mossad katsa in the mail room to effect the intercepts. Bokomo"s letters would have a reverse side that, when treated, would reveal the Mossad"s question list. This was to be photocopied when no one was looking and pa.s.sed to Jericho in one of the agreed drops. Jericho"s reply would probably be in spidery Arabic script. Each page was to be photographed ten times, in case of smudging, and the film dispatched to Bokomo. Back in Baghdad the young Chilean, with his heart in his mouth, established six drops, mainly behind loose bricks in old walls or ruined houses, under flagstones in back alleys, and one under a stone windowsill of a derelict shop. Each time, he thought he would be surrounded by the dreaded AMAM, but the citizens of Baghdad seemed as courteous as ever and no one took any notice of him as he prowled, apparently a curious foreign tourist, up and down the alleys and side streets of the Old Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the fruit and vegetable market at Kasra, and the old cemeteries-anywhere he could find crumbling old walls and loose flagstones where no one would ever think of looking. He wrote down the locations of the six drops, three to contain messages from him to Jericho and three for replies from Jericho to him. He also devised six places-walls, gates, shutters-on three of which an innocent chalk mark would alert Jericho that there was a message for him, and three others where Jericho would signal he had a reply ready and sitting in a dead-letter box awaiting collection. Each chalk mark responded to a different drop. He wrote down the locations of these drops and chalk-mark sites so precisely that Jericho could find them on written description only. All the time he watched for a tail, either driving or on foot. Just once he was under surveillance, but it was clumsy and routine, for the AMAM seemed to pick occasional days to follow occasional diplomats. The following day there was no tail, so he resumed again. When he had it all ready, he wrote it down using a typewriter, after having memorized every detail. He destroyed the ribbon, photographed the sheets, destroyed the paperwork, and sent the film to Mr. Bokomo. Via the mail room of the UN building on the East River in New York, the small package came back to David Sharon in Tel Aviv. The risky part was getting all this information to Jericho. It meant one last letter to that d.a.m.nable post-office box in Baghdad. Sharon wrote to his "friend" that the papers he needed would be deposited at exactly noon in fourteen days, August 18, 1988, and should be picked up no more than one hour later. The precise instructions, in Arabic, were with Moncada by the sixteenth. At five to noon on the eighteenth, he entered the post office, was directed to the post box, and dropped the bulky package in. No one stopped or arrested him. An hour later, Jericho unlocked the box and withdrew the package. He too was not stopped or arrested. With secure contact now established, traffic began to flow. Jericho insisted he would price each consignment of information that Tel Aviv wanted, and if the money was deposited, the information would be sent. He named a very discreet bank in Vienna, the Winkler Bank in the Ballga.s.se, just off Franzis-kanerplatz, and gave an account number. Tel Aviv agreed and immediately checked out the bank. It was small, ultradiscreet, and virtually impregnable. It clearly contained a numbered account that matched, because the first transfer of twenty thousand dollars by Tel Aviv into it was not returned to the transferring bank with a query. The Mossad suggested that Jericho might care to identify himself "for his own protection, in case anything went wrong and his friends to the west could help." Jericho refused point-blank; he went further. If any attempt was made to survey the drops or close in on him in any way, or if ever the money was not forthcoming, he would shut off immediately. The Mossad agreed, but tried other ways. Psychoportraits were drawn, his handwriting studied, lists of Iraqi notables drawn up and studied. All that the back-room boys could guess was that Jericho was middle-aged, of medium education, probably spoke little or hesitant English, and had a military or quasi-military background. "That gives me half the b.l.o.o.d.y Iraqi High Command, the top fifty in the Ba"ath Party, and John Doe"s cousin Fred," growled Kobi Dror. Alfonso Benz Moncada ran Jericho for two years, and the product was pure gold. It concerned politics, conventional weapons, military progress, changes of command, armaments procurement, rockets, gas, germ warfare, and two attempted coups against Saddam Hussein. Only on Iraq"s nuclear progress was Jericho hesitant. He was asked, of course. It was under deep secrecy and known only to the Iraqi equivalent of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar. To press too hard would be to invite exposure, he reported. In the autumn of 1989 Jericho told Tel Aviv that Gerry Bull was under suspicion and under surveillance in Brussels by a team from the Iraqi Mukhabarat. The Mossad, who were by then using Bull as another source for progress on Iraq"s rockets program, tried to warn him as subtly as they could. There was no way they would tell him to his face what they knew-it would be tantamount to telling him they had an a.s.set high in Baghdad, and no agency will ever blow away an a.s.set like that. So the katsa controlling the substantial Brussels station had his men penetrate Bull"s apartment on several occasions through the autumn and winter, leaving oblique messages by rewinding a videotape, changing winegla.s.ses around, leaving a patio window open, even placing a long strand of female hair on his pillow. The gun scientist became worried all right, but not enough. When Jericho"s message concerning the intent to liquidate Bull came through, it was too late. The hit had been carried out. Jericho"s information gave the Mossad an almost-complete picture of Iraq in the buildup to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. What he told them about Saddam"s weapons of ma.s.s destruction confirmed and amplified the pictorial evidence that had been pa.s.sed over to them by Jonathan Pollard, by then sentenced to life in prison. Bearing in mind what it knew and what it a.s.sumed America must also know, the Mossad waited for America to react. But as the chemical, nuclear, and bacteriological preparations in Iraq progressed, the torpor in the West continued, so Tel Aviv stayed silent. Two million dollars had pa.s.sed from the Mossad to the numbered account of Jericho In Vienna by August 1990. He was expensive, but he was good, and Tel Aviv decided he was worth it. Then the invasion of Kuwait took place, and the unforeseen happened. The United Nations, having pa.s.sed the resolution of August 2 calling on Iraq to withdraw at once, felt it could not continue to support Saddam by maintaining a presence in Baghdad. On August 7, the Economic Commission for West Asia was abruptly closed down, and its diplomats recalled. Benz Moncada was able to do one last thing before his departure. He left a message in a drop telling Jericho that he was being expelled and contact was now broken. However, he might return, and Jericho should continue to scan the places where the chalk marks were put. Then he left. The young Chilean was extensively debriefed in London until there was nothing left he could tell David Sharon. Thus Kobi Dror was able to lie to Chip Barber with a straight face. At the time, he was not running an a.s.set in Baghdad. It would be too embarra.s.sing to admit that he had never discovered the traitor"s name and that now he had even lost contact. Still, as Sami Gershon had made plain, if the Americans ever found out ... In hindsight, perhaps he really should have mentioned Jericho.
Chapter 8.
Mike Martin visited the tomb of Able Seaman Shepton in the cemetery of Sulaibikhat on the first of October and discovered the plea from Ahmed Al-Khalifa.
He was not particularly surprised. If Abu Fouad had heard of him, he had also heard of the steadily growing and spreading Kuwaiti resistance movement and its shadowy leading light. That they should eventually have to meet was probably inevitable. In six weeks, the position of the Iraqi occupation forces had changed dramatically. In their invasion they had had a pushover, and they had begun their occupation with a sloppy confidence, a.s.sured that their stay in Kuwait would be as effortless as the conquest. The looting had been easy and profitable, the destruction amusing, and the using of the womenfolk pleasurable. It had been the way of conquerors that went back to the days of Babylon. Kuwait, after all, had been a fat pigeon ready for the plucking. But in six weeks, the pigeon had begun to peck and scratch. Over a hundred Iraqi soldiers and eight officers had either disappeared or been found dead. The disappearances could not all be explained by desertions. For the first time, the occupation forces were experiencing fear. Officers no longer traveled in a single staff car but insisted on a truckload of escorting troops. Headquarters buildings had to be guarded night and day, to the point where Iraqi officers had taken to firing over the heads of their sleeping sentries to wake them up. The nights had become periods of no-go for anything less than a substantial troop movement. The roadblock teams huddled inside their redoubts when darkness fell. And still the mines went off, the vehicles burst into flame or seized up with ruined engines, the grenades were thrown, and the soldiers disappeared with cut throats into sewers or garbage dumps. The escalating resistance had forced the High Command to replace the Popular Army with the Special Forces, good fighting troops who should have been at the front line in case the Americans came. Early October for Kuwait was not, to echo Churchill"s phrase, the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning. Martin had no means of replying to Al-Khalifa"s message when he read it in the graveyard, so it was not until the following day that he deposited his answer. He agreed to meet, he said, but on his own terms. To have the advantage of darkness but to avoid the curfew at ten P.M., he called for a meeting at half past seven. He gave exact directions as to where Abu Fouad should park his car and the small grove of trees where he would meet. The place he indicated was in the district of Abrak Kheitan, close to the main highway from the city to the now shattered and unused airport. Martin knew it to be an area of traditional stone-built houses with flat roofs. On one of those roofs he would be waiting for two hours before the rendezvous to see if the Kuwaiti officer was being followed and if so by whom: his own bodyguards, or the Iraqis. In a hostile environment, the SAS officer was still at large and in combat because he took no chances, none at all. He knew nothing of Abu Fouad"s concept of security and was not prepared to a.s.sume it was brilliant. He established the meeting for the evening of the seventh and left his reply beneath the marble slab. Ahmed Al-Khalifa retrieved it on the fourth.
* * * Dr. John Hipwell would never have been taken during a casual meeting for a nuclear physicist, let alone one of those scientists who spent his working days behind the ma.s.sive security of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston designing plutonium warheads for the soon-to-be-fitted Trident missiles.
A pa.s.sing observer would have a.s.sumed he was a bluff Home Counties farmer, more at home leaning wisely over a pen of fat lambs at the local market than supervising the cladding of lethal disks of plutonium in pure gold. Although the weather was still mild when Hipwell reappeared before the Medusa Committee, he wore, as in August, his square-patterned shirt, wool tie, and tweed jacket. Without waiting to be asked, he used his big red hands to fill and tamp a briar pipe with s.h.a.g tobacco before starting into his report. Sir Paul Spruce twitched his pointed nose in distaste and gestured for the air conditioning to be raised a notch. "Well, gentlemen, the good news is that our friend Mr. Saddam Hussein does not have, an atomic bomb at his disposal. Not yet, not by a long chalk," said Dr. Hipwell, as he disappeared into a cloud of pale blue smoke. There was a pause while he attended to his personal bonfire. Perhaps, Terry Martin mused, if you risk collecting a lethal dose of plutonium rays every day, the occasional pipe of tobacco does not really matter. Dr. Hipwell glanced at his notes. "Iraq has been on the trail of her own nuclear bomb since the mid1970s, when Saddam Hussein really came to power. It seems to be the man"s obsession. In those years Iraq bought a complete nuclear reactor system from France-which was not bound by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968-for that very purpose." He sucked contentedly and tamped the glowing brushfire at the top of his pipe once again. Drifting embers settled onto his notes. "Forgive me," said Sir Paul. "Was this reactor for the purpose of generating electricity?" "Supposed to be," agreed Hipwell. "Absolute rubbish, of course, and the French knew it. Iraq has the third-largest oil deposits in the world.
They could have had an oil-fired power station for a fraction of the price. No, the point was to fuel the reactor with low-grade uranium, called yellowcake or caramel, that they could persuade people to sell them. After use in a reactor, the end-product is plutonium." There were nods around the table. Everyone knew that the British reactor at Sellafield created electricity for the power grid and spewed out the plutonium that went to Hipwell for his warheads. "So the Israelis went to work," said Hipwell. "First one of their commando teams blew up the huge turbine at Toulon before it was shipped, setting the project back two years. Then in 1981, when Saddam"s precious Osirak 1 and 2 plants were about to start up, Israeli fighter-bombers swept in and blew the lot to kingdom come. Since then, Saddam has never succeeded in buying another reactor. After a short while, he stopped trying." "Why the h.e.l.l did he do that?" asked Harry Sinclair from his end of the table. "Because he changed direction," said Hipwell with a broad smile, like one who has solved a crossword puzzle in record time. "Up until then, he was pursuing the plutonium road. With some success, by the way. But not enough. Yet-" "I don"t understand," said Sir Paul Spruce. "What is the difference between a plutonium-based and a uranium-based atomic bomb?" "Uranium is simpler," said the physicist. "Look, there are various radioactive substances that can be used for a chain reaction, but for your simple, basic, effective atom bomb, uranium"s the ticket. That"s what Saddam has been after since 1982-a basic uranium-based bomb. He hasn"t got there yet, but he"s still trying, and he"ll get there one day." Hipwell sat back with a broad beam, as if he had settled the enigma of the Creation. Like most of those around the table, Spruce was still perplexed. "If he can buy this uranium for his destroyed reactor, why can"t he make a bomb with it?" he asked. Hipwell pounced upon the question like a farmer on a bargain. "Different kinds of uranium, my dear man. Funny stuff, uranium. Very rare. From a thousand tons of uranium ore, all you get is a block the size of a cigar box. Yellowcake. It"s called natural uranium, with an isotope number of 238. You can power an industrial reactor with it, but not make a bomb. Not pure enough. For a bomb you need the lighter isotope, uranium-235." "Where does that come from?" asked Paxman. "It"s inside the yellowcake. In that one cigar-box-size block there is enough uranium-235 to stick under one fingernail without discomfort. The devil is getting the two separated. It"s called isotope separation. Very difficult, very technical, very expensive, and very slow." "But you said Iraq is getting there," pointed out Sinclair. "He is, but he"s not there yet," said Hipwell. "There"s only one viable way of purifying and refining the yellowcake to the required ninety-three percent pure. Years ago, in the Manhattan Project, your chaps tried several methods. They were experimenting, see? Ernest Lawrence tried one way, Robert Oppenheimer tried another. In those days they used both methods in complementary fashion and created enough uranium-235 to make Little Boy. "After the war the centrifuge method was invented and slowly perfected. Nowadays only this method is used. Basically, you put the feedstock into a thing called a centrifuge, which spins so fast that the whole process has to be done in a vacuum or the bearings would turn to jelly. Slowly the heavier isotopes, the ones you don"t want, are drawn to the outer wall of the centrifuge and bled off. What"s left is a little bit purer than when you started. Just a little bit. You have to do it over and over again, thousands of hours, just to get a wafer of bomb-grade uranium the size of a postage stamp." "But he is doing it?" pressed Sir Paul. "Yep. Been doing it for about a year. These centrifuges ... to save time we link them in series, called cascades. But you need thousands of centrifuges to make up a cascade." "If they"ve been going down that road since 1982, why has it taken so long?" asked Terry Martin. "You don"t go into the hardware store and buy a uranium gas diffusion centrifuge off the shelf," Hipwell pointed out. "They tried at first but were turned down-the doc.u.ments show that. Since 1985 they have been buying the component parts to build their own on-site. They got about five hundred tons of basic uranium yellowcake, half of it from Portugal. They bought much of the centrifuge technology from West Germany-" "I thought Germany had signed a whole range of international agreements limiting the spread of nuclear bomb technology," protested Paxman. "Maybe they have. I wouldn"t know about the politics," said the scientist. "But they got the bits and pieces from all over the place. You need designer lathes, special ultrastrong maraging steel, anticorrosion vessels, special valves, high-temperature furnaces called "skull" furnaces because that"s what they look like, plus vacuum pumps and bellows-this is serious technology we are talking about. Quite a bit, plus the know-how, came from Germany." "Let me get this straight," said Sinclair. "Has Saddam got any isotope separation centrifuges working yet?"
"Yes, one cascade. It"s been functioning for about a year. And another one is coming on stream soon." "Do you know where all this stuff is?" "The centrifuge a.s.sembly plant is at a place called Taji-here." The scientist pa.s.sed a large aerial photo over to the American and circled a series of industrial buildings. "The working cascade seems to be underground somewhere not far from the old wrecked French reactor at Tuwaitha, the reactor they called Osirak. I don"t know whether you"ll ever find it with a bomber-it"s certainly underground and camouflaged." "And the new cascade?" "No idea," said Hipwell. "Could be anywhere." "Probably somewhere else," suggested Terry Martin. "The Iraqis have been practicing duplication and dispersal ever since they put all their eggs in one basket and the Israelis blew the basket away." Sinclair grunted. "How sure are you," asked Sir Paul, "that Saddam Hussein cannot have his bomb yet?" "Very," said the physicist. "It"s a question of time. He hasn"t had long enough. For a basic but usable atomic bomb, he will need thirty to thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium-235. Starting cold a year ago, even a.s.suming the working cascade can function twenty-four hours a day-which it can"t-a spinning program needs at least twelve hours per centrifuge. You need a thousand spins to get from zero percent pure to the required ninety-three percent. That"s five hundred days of spinning. But then there"s cleaning, servicing, maintenance, breakdowns. Even with a thousand centrifuges operating in a cascade now and for the past year, you"d need five years. Bring in another cascade next year-shorten it to three years."
"So he won"t have his thirty-five kilograms until 1993 at the earliest?" interjected Sinclair. "No, he can"t." "One final question: If he gets the uranium, how much longer to an atomic bomb?" "Not long. A few weeks. You see, a country undertaking to make its own bomb will have the nuclear engineering side running in parallel. Bomb engineering is not all that complicated, so long as you know what you are doing. And Jaafar does-he will know how to build one and trigger it. Dammit, we trained him at Harwell. But the point is, on a time-scale alone, Saddam Hussein cannot have enough pure uranium ready yet. Ten kilograms, tops. He"s three years short, minimum." Dr. Hipwell was thanked for his weeks of a.n.a.lysis, and the meeting ended. Sinclair would return to his emba.s.sy and write up his copious notes, which would go to the United States in heavy code. There they would be compared with the a.n.a.lyses of the American counterparts-physicists drawn from the laboratories of Sandia, Los Alamos, and princ.i.p.ally Lawrence Livermore in California, where for years a secret section called simply Department Z had been monitoring the steady spread of nuclear technology around the world on behalf of the State Department and the Pentagon. Though Sinclair could not know it, the findings of the British and American teams would confirm each other to a remarkable degree. Terry Martin and Simon Paxman left the same meeting and wandered across Whitehall in the benign October sunshine. "Quite a relief," said Paxman. "Old Hipwell was quite adamant. Apparently the Americans agree entirely. That b.a.s.t.a.r.d is nowhere near his atom bomb yet. One less nightmare to worry about."
They parted at the corner, Paxman to cross the Thames toward Century House, Martin to cross Trafalgar Square and head up St. Martin"s Lane toward Gower Street. Establishing what Iraq had, or even probably had, was one thing. Finding out precisely where it was situated was another. The photography went on and on. The KH-11s and KH-12s drifted across the heavens in endless sequence, photographing what they saw on the Iraqi land beneath them. By October, another device had entered the skies, a new American reconnaissance plane so secret that Capitol Hill did not know about it. Code-named Aurora, it flew on the fringes of inner s.p.a.ce, reaching speeds of Mach 8, almost five thousand miles per hour, riding its own fireball-the ramjet effect-far beyond Iraqi radar or interceptor missiles. Not even the technology of the dying USSR could spot Aurora, which had replaced the legendary SR-71 Blackbird. Ironically, while the Blackbird was being eased out of commission, another even more aged "old faithful" was plying its trade above Iraq that autumn. Almost forty years old, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, the U-2 was still flying and still taking pictures. It was back in 1960 that Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over Sverdlovsk, Siberia, and it was the U-2 that had spotted the first Soviet missiles being deployed in Cuba in the summer of 1962, even though it was Oleg Penkovsky who had identified them as offensive and not defensive weapons, thus blowing away Khrushchev"s phony protests and sowing the seeds of his own eventual destruction. The U-2 of 1990 had been reequipped as a "listener" rather than a "watcher" and redesignated TR-1, though it still did photography. All this information, from the professors and scientists, a.n.a.lysts and interpreters, the trackers and the watchers, the interviewers and researchers, built up a picture of Iraq through the autumn of 1990, and a frightening picture it became. From a thousand sources the information finally was channeled into a single and very secret room two floors below the Saudi Air Force headquarters on Old Airport Road. The room, down the street from where the military bra.s.s sat in conference and discussed their unauthorized (by the United Nations) plans for the invasion of Iraq, was called simply "the Black Hole." It was in the Black Hole that American and British targeters, drawn from all three services and of all ranks from private to general, pinpointed the sites that would have to be destroyed. Finally, they would make up General Chuck Horner"s air-war map. It contained eventually seven hundred targets. Six hundred were military-in the sense of being command centers, bridges, airfields, a.r.s.enals, ammunition dumps, missile sites, and troop concentrations. The other hundred were targets concerned with weapons of ma.s.s destruction-research facilities, a.s.sembly plants, chemical labs, storage depots. The gas centrifuge manufacturing line at Taji was listed, as was the approximate, a.s.sumed, position of the centrifuge cascade underground somewhere in the Tuwaitha complex. But the water-bottling plant at Tarmiya was not there, nor was Al Qubai. No one knew about them. A copy of the comprehensive report by Harry Sinclair in London joined other reports emanating from various parts of the United States and abroad. Finally, a synthesis of all these in-depth a.n.a.lyses found its way to a very small and very discreet State Department think tank, known only to a restricted group in Washington as the Political Intelligence and a.n.a.lysis Group. The PIAG is a sort of a.n.a.lytical hothouse for foreign affairs and produces reports that are absolutely not for public consumption. Indeed, the unit answers only to the Secretary of State, at that time James Baker.
Two days later, Mike Martin lay flat on a roof that gave him a commanding view of the section of Abrak Kheitan where he had set up his rendezvous with Abu Fouad. At almost exactly the appointed hour, he watched a single car leave the King Faisal Highway leading to the airport and pull into a side street. The car cruised slowly down the street, away from the bright lights of the highway and the occasional traffic, and into darkness. He saw the outline stop at the place he had described in his message to Al-Khalifa. Two people got out, a man and a woman. They looked around, checked that no other car had followed them off the highway, and slowly walked on, toward the place where a grove of trees covered a vacant lot. Abu Fouad and the woman had been told to wait up to half an hour. If the Bedou had not shown up, they were to abort and go home. They actually waited forty minutes before returning to the car. Both were frustrated. "He must have been detained," said Abu Fouad to his companion. "An Iraqi patrol, perhaps. Who knows? Anyway, d.a.m.n. I"ll have to start again." "I think you"re crazy to trust him," said the woman. "You have no idea who he is." They spoke softly, the Kuwaiti resistance leader looking up and down the street to ensure no Iraqi soldiers had appeared while he was away. "He"s successful and cunning, and he works like a professional. That"s all I need to know. I would like to collaborate with him, if he"s willing.""Then I have nothing against that."The woman uttered a short scream. Abu Fouad jerked in his seat."Don"t turn round. Let"s just talk," said the voice from the back seat. In his rearview mirror the Kuwaiti saw the dim outline of a Bedouin keffiyeh and caught the odor of one who lives rough. He let out his breath in a long exhalation."You move quietly, Bedou.""No need to make a noise, Abu Fouad. It attracts Iraqis. I don"t like that, except when I am ready."Abu Fouad"s teeth flashed under his black moustache."Very well. Now we have found each other. Let us talk. By the way, why hide in the car?""If this meeting had been a trap for me, your first words when you got back into the car would have been different.""Self-incriminating-""Of course.""And then?""You would be dead.""Understood.""Who is your companion? I made no mention of companions.""You set up the rendezvous. It was I who had to trust you also. She is a trusted colleague. Asrar Qabandi.""Very well. Greetings, Miss Qabandi. What do you want to talk about?""Guns, Bedou. Kalashnikov machine pistols, modern hand grenades, Semtex-H. My people could do so much more with that sort of thing.""Your people are being caught, Abu Fouad. Ten were surrounded in the same house by an entire company of Iraqi infantry under AMAM leadership. All shot. All youngsters."
Abu Fouad was silent. It had been a major disaster.
"Nine," he said at last. "The tenth played dead and crept away later.
He is injured, and we are taking care of him. It was he who told us."
"What?"
"That they were betrayed. If he had died, we would not have known."
"Ah, betrayal. Always the danger in any resistance movement. And the traitor?"
"We know him, of course. We thought we could trust him."
"But he is guilty?"
"It seems so."
"Only seems?"
Abu Fouad sighed.
"The survivor swears that