Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1 - BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS
CHAPTER 2 - BEFORE THE BEGINNING
CHAPTER 3 - ENGRAVINGS OF GLILOT
CHAPTER 4 - THE SPY IN THE IRON MASK
CHAPTER 5 - GIDEON’S NUCLEAR SWORD
CHAPTER 6 - AVENGERS
CHAPTER 7 - THE GENTLEMAN SPY
CHAPTER 8 - ORA AND THE MONSTER
CHAPTER 9 - SLUSH MONEY, SEX, AND LIES
CHAPTER 10 - A DANGEROUS LIAISON
CHAPTER 11 - UNHOLY ALLIANCES
CHAPTER 12 - BLESSED ARE THE SPYMASTERS
CHAPTER 13 - AFRICAN CONNECTIONS
CHAPTER 14 - THE CHAMBERMAID’S BOMB
CHAPTER 15 - THE EXPENDABLE CARTOONIST
CHAPTER 16 - SPIES IN THE SAND
CHAPTER 17 - BUNGLEGATE
CHAPTER 18 - NEW BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER 19 - AFTER SADDAM
CHAPTER 20 - GOD’S BANKER, WHISTLEBLOWER, AND OSAMA BIN LADEN
CHAPTER 21 - A NEW CALIPHATE OF TERROR
CHAPTER 22 - OLD ENEMIES, NEW THREATS
CHAPTER 23 - THE PAKISTANI NUCLEAR BLACK MARKETEER
CHAPTER 24 - WEB OF TERROR
CHAPTER 25 - CONFRONTING THE DRAGON
CHAPTER 26 - MISCALCULATIONS
CHAPTER 27 - A SECRET CHANNEL AND HEZBOLLAH ROCKETS
CHAPTER 28 - FIGHTING THE FIRES OF SATAN
CHAPTER 29 - FOR THE MOMENT …
CHAPTER 30 - A PERSONAL NOTE
OTHER INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
BRIEF ARABIC GLOSSARY
GLOSSARY
MOSSAD DIRECTORS GENERAL
ALSO BY GORDON THOMAS
Universal Critical Acclaim for Gideon’s Spies
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright Page
GIDEON’S SPIES
Acknowledgments
ISRAEL
Meir Amit
Juval Aviv
Ari Ben-Menashe
Barry Chamish
Eli Cohen
Jaakov Cohen
Meir Dagan
Alex Doron
Ran Edelist
Raphael Eitan
Efraim Halevy
Isser Harel
Wafa’a Ali Ildris
David Kimche
Michael Koubi
Amiran Levine
Ariel Merari
Reuven Merhav
Danniy Nagier
Yoel Ben Porat
Uri Saguy
Zvi Spielman
and those who still cannot be named
ELSEWHERE
Mohamed al-Fayed
Ehud Barak
Alice Baya’a
John A. Belton
Richard Brenneke
Sean Carberry
Ahmad Chalabi
Sebastian Cody
David Dastych
Art Dworken
Heather Florence
Ted Gunderson
William Hamilton
Cheryl Hanin Bentov
Amanda Harris
Barbara Honegger
Diana Johnson
Emery Kabongo
Gile Kepel
Otto Kormek
Zahir Kzeibati
Emer Lenehan
Lewis Libby
John Magee
Paul Marcinkus
John McNamara
Laurie Meyer
Muhamed Mugraby
Daniel Nagier
John Parsley
Samir Saddoui
Samira Shabander
Christopher Story
Susannah Tarbush
Michael Tauck
Elizabeth Tomlinson
Richard Tomlinson
Jacques Verges
Colin Wallace
Russell Warren-Howe
Catherine Whittaker
Stuart Winter
Marcus Wolff
David Yallop
each in their own way played their part
AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST
CHAPTER 1
BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS
The one in Paris was like all the others. It had a bombproof front door and window glass which, like the panes in the White House, could deflect scanners. There were scores of such apartments in all the major cities in the world, either purchased outright or rented on long leases. Many were left unoccupied for lengthy periods, ready for the time they would be needed for an operation.
One had been conducted from the Paris apartment since June 1997, when Monsieur Maurice had arrived. He spoke fluent French with a slight Central-European accent. Over the years his neighbors had encountered others like him: men, and occasionally women, who arrived without warning, spent weeks or months among them, then one day were gone. Like his predecessors, Maurice had politely discouraged interest in himself or his work.
Maurice was a katsa, a Mossad field agent.
Physically he was nondescript; it had been said that even on an empty street he would pass virtually unnoticed. He had been recruited in what was still a halcyon time for Mossad, when its legend remained largely intact. His potential was spotted during Israel’s compulsory military service, when, after boot camp, he had been drafted into air force intelligence. An aptitude for languages (he knew French, English, and German) had been noted, along with other qualities: he was good at filling gaps in a case study and drawing fact out of speculation, and he knew the limits of informed conjecture. Above all, he was a natural manipulator of people: he could persuade, cajole, and, if all else failed, threaten.
Since graduating from the Mossad training school in 1982, he had worked in Europe, South Africa, and the Far East. At various times he had done so under the guise of a businessman, a travel writer, and a salesman. He had used a number of names and biographies drawn from the library of aliases maintained by Mossad. Now he was Maurice, once more a businessman.
During his various postings he had heard of the purges back in “the Institute,” the name its staff used for Mossad: corrosive rumors of disgraced and ruined careers, of changes at the top, and each incoming Mossad director with his own priorities. None of them had stemmed the loss of morale within the service.
This had increased with the appointment of Benyamin Netanyahu as Israel’s youngest prime minister. A man with a proven intelligence background, he was supposed to know how things worked on the inside ; when to listen, how far to go. Instead, from the outset, Netanyahu had astonished seasoned intelligence officers by dabbling in operational details.
At first this was put down to unnecessary zeal, a new broom showing he was ready to look into every closet to make sure there were no secrets he should know. But matters had become alarming when not only the prime minister but his wife, Sara, wanted to peer behind the looking glass into Israel’s intelligence world. She had invited senior Mossad officers to call on her at home and answer her questions, claiming she was following the example of Hillary Clinton’s interest in the CIA.
The featureless corridors of Mossad’s headquarters bu
ilding in Tel Aviv had echoed with the scandalized whispers of how Sara Netanyahu had demanded to see psychological profiles of world leaders she and her husband would be entertaining or visiting. She had especially asked for details about President Bill Clinton’s sexual activities. She had also asked to review dossiers on Israel’s ambassadors whose embassies they would be staying in during overseas trips, expressing an interest in the cleanliness of their kitchens and how many times the bedding was changed in the guest suites.
Bemused by her requests, Mossad officers had explained to the prime minister’s wife that obtaining such information was not in their intelligence-gathering remit.
Some of the veterans had been removed from the mainstream of intelligence and given responsibility for small operations that required little more than creating paperwork which went virtually unread. Realizing their careers were stagnating, they had resigned, and were now scattered across the length of Israel, keeping themselves occupied with reading, mostly history, trying to come to terms with the fact that they were also yesterday’s people.
All this had made Maurice glad to be out of Tel Aviv and back in the field.
The operation that had brought him to Paris had provided another chance to show he was a methodical and careful agent, one able to deliver what was expected. In this case the task was relatively simple: there was no real physical danger, only the risk of embarrassment should the French authorities discover what he was doing and quietly deport him. The Israeli ambassador knew Maurice was in Paris but had not been told why. That was standard operational procedure: if things went wrong, the envoy could plead ignorance.
Maurice’s task was to recruit an informer. This was known in the esoteric language of Mossad as a “cold approach,” suborning a foreign national. After two months of patient work, Maurice believed he was now close to succeeding.
His target was Henri Paul, assistant chief of the city’s Ritz Hotel, who also acted as chauffeur to its celebrity guests.
One had been Jonathan Aitken, a minister in Britain’s last Conservative government. Aitken had held special responsibility for coordinating arms sales and had built up a raft of contacts with Middle Eastern weapons dealers. This had led to World in Action, a TV investigative program, and the Guardian newspaper publishing highly damaging reports about Aitken’s ties to men not normally found in the company of government ministers. Aitken had sued for libel. The case had come to hinge on who had paid Aitken’s hotel account when he had stayed at the Ritz to meet some of his Arab contacts. In court, Aitken had sworn on oath that his wife had settled the account.
Through a third-party source, Mossad had tipped off investigators acting for the defendants that Mrs. Aitken had not been in Paris. The case had collapsed. Mossad, who had long regarded Aitken’s activities as a threat to Israel, had effectively destroyed him.
In 1999, after facing a lengthy criminal trial in London, Aitken was found guilty of perjury and given a prison sentence. By then his wife had left him, and a man who walked the corridors of power for many years faced a bleak future.
Understanding if not sympathy, came from an unlikely source, Ari Ben-Menashe (see chapter 8). He had once experienced the rigors of a New York prison after his own fall from grace as intelligence coordinator for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The position had given Ben-Menashe a rare insight into how Mossad and Israel’s other intelligence services operated. He regarded Aitken as “a man consumed by his own belief that he could outwit anyone. He did for years. But his mistake was to underestimate Mossad. They don’t take prisoners.”
Unlike Jonathan Aitken, whose life after prison holds little prospects, Ben-Menashe has made a spectacular recovery. By 1999 he had a well-established intelligence-gathering company based in Montreal, Canada. It numbers among clients several African countries as well as some in Europe. Multinationals also seek his services, having assured themselves their anonymity will be protected by Ben-Menashe.
His staff includes several former Canadian secret intelligence service officers and others who had worked for similar Israeli and European organizations. The company provides a wide range of economic, industrial, and protection services. The staff know their way around the arms dealers and well understand the rules of negotiating with kidnappers. There is not a city in the world where they are without contacts, many of them nurtured by Ben-Menashe from his days as a serious player in the Israeli intelligence world. He and his associates constantly update themselves on shifting political alliances and can often foresee which Third World government will fall—and who will replace it. Small and compact, Ben-Menashe’s company is in many ways modeled on Mossad, “moving,” Ben-Menashe cheerfully admits, “like thieves in the night. That’s the way it has to be in our business.” And it pays well.
Equipped with a new Canadian citizenship, he has found himself once more working with “the princes and kings of this world … the famous and those who use their fortunes to buy better protection. For them all knowledge is power and part of my job is to provide that essential information.”
In London he is a favored guest at the Savoy. In Paris it is the Ritz that greets him with deference.
In no time Ben-Menashe discovered that the hotel remained a meeting place for Middle Eastern arms brokers and their European contacts. He checked with Mossad colleagues. From them he learned just how important the hotel had become in Mossad’s overall strategy. Ben-Menashe, a natural-born acquirer of information—“long ago I learned that nothing I hear goes to waste”—decided he would watch how matters developed. It was a decision that would eventually directly involve him in the fate of Diana, Princess of Wales and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed, the playboy son of the Ritz’s owner, the mega-wealthy Mohamed al-Fayed.
Mossad had decided to have an informer in the Ritz who would be able to report on activities. It had set about the task by first obtaining the hotel’s staff list; this had been done by hacking into the Ritz computer system. No one at the hotel’s senior management level appeared to be a likely prospect; junior staff did not have the overall accessibility to guests for the task required. But Henri Paul’s responsibility for security meant every area of the Ritz was open to him. His passkey could access a guest’s safe-deposit box. There would be no questions asked if he wanted a copy of a person’s hotel bill, no raised eyebrows if he asked to see the hotel’s telephone log to obtain details of calls made by arms dealers and their contacts. He could know which woman a dealer had discreetly hired for a contact. As chauffeur to VIPs, Paul would be in a good position to overhear their conversations, witness their behavior, see where they went, whom they met.
The next stage had been to create a psycho-profile of Paul. Over several weeks information on his background had been unearthed by one of the resident katsas in Paris. Using a number of covers including an insurance company employee and a telephone salesman, the katsa had learned that Paul was a bachelor in no permanent relationship, lived in a low-rent apartment, and drove a black Mini but liked fast cars and racing the motorcycle of which he was part owner. Hotel staff had spoken of his liking a drink. There had been hints that, from time to time, he had used the services of an expensive hooker who also serviced some of the hotel’s guests.
The information had been evaluated by a Mossad psychologist. He had concluded that there was an inherent vulnerability about Henri Paul. The psychologist had recommended that steadily increasing pressure, linked with the promise of substantial monetary reward to finance Paul’s social life, could be the best way to recruit him. The operation could be a lengthy one, requiring considerable patience and skill. Rather than make further use of the resident katsa, Maurice would be sent to Paris.
As in any such Mossad operation, Maurice had followed well-tried guidelines. First, over several visits, he had familiarized himself with the Ritz and its environs. He had quickly identified Henri Paul, a muscular man with a certain swagger in his walk, who made it apparent that he sought approval from no one.
Maurice had observed th
e curious relationship Paul had with the paparazzi who staked out the front of the Ritz, ready to snatch photographs of the more newsworthy rich and famous guests. From time to time Paul would order the photographers to leave, and usually they would do so, circling the block on their motorcycles before returning. During those short trips, Paul would sometimes emerge from the hotel’s staff entrance and engage the paparazzi in friendly banter as they passed.
At night, Maurice had observed Paul drinking with several of the paparazzi in one of the bars around the Ritz he patronized with other staff after work.
In progress reports to Tel Aviv, Maurice had described Paul’s ability to drink considerable amounts of alcohol yet appear stone-cold sober. Maurice also confirmed that Paul’s suitability for the role of informer overrode his personal habits: he appeared to have the essential access and a position of high trust.
At some point in his discreet surveillance, Maurice discovered how Paul was betraying that trust. He was receiving money from the paparazzi for providing details of guest movements, enabling the photographers to be in a position to snatch pictures of the celebrities.
The exchange of information for cash took place either in one of the bars or in the narrow rue Cambon, where the Ritz staff entrance was situated.
By mid-August that exchange had focused on the expected arrival at the Ritz of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her new lover, Dodi Al-Fayed, the son of the hotel’s owner. They would stay in the fabled Imperial Suite.
All the Ritz staff were under strict instructions to keep details about Diana’s arrival secret under penalty of instant dismissal. Despite this, Paul had continued to risk his career by providing details of the forthcoming visit to several paparazzi. From each he had received further sums of money.
Maurice saw that Paul had also begun to drink more heavily and had overheard Ritz staff complain that the assistant security chief had become even more of a martinet: he had recently fired a floor maid he had caught stealing a bar of soap from a guest bedroom. Several of the hotel’s employees said that Paul was also taking pills and wondered if they were to help control his mood swings. Everyone agreed Paul had become more unpredictable: one moment he would be good-humored; the next he would display barely controlled anger over some imagined slight. Maurice decided the time had come to make his move.