Gideon's Spies

Field agents, analysts, divisional directors, and several department heads of Mossad all contributed their insights into how Mossad works, its decision making process, its relationship with other services. This has enabled me to write accurate stories about Mossad for reputable newspapers and magazines. Some of those accounts have not been flattering.

Since the original edition was published in 1996, new information on Mossad has continued to be passed to me. Some of it came in the form of leaks. I had long learned that Mossad, along with other secret services, likes to get its side of the story out. In all the time I have dealt with its employees, I cannot say a leak has ever been misleading. Nevertheless, the golden rule for my kind of investigative work is enforced: check and check again. I cannot recall an example where my original source had not told the truth.

Since the book was first written, Mossad, like all intelligence services, has found itself confronting new challenges. The end of the Cold War found that while superpower confrontation had vanished, the new world order required a new role for spies. Mossad, like the CIA, MI6, and all the major intelligence services, found itself having to counter drug running, terrorism on an unparalleled scale, and economic espionage. At the same time, Mossad was determined to maintain its position as the one service that still insisted on a prime role for its human spies as a complement to the satellites and the other exotic systems to counter the threat posed by Osama bin Laden.

The milestones along his road to become the evil guru of terrorism were those he exploited: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the failure of the Oslo Accord, the second Intifada, the suicide bombers, the wars in Iran and Iraq.

In September 2006, thereafter, and for the foreseeable future, Osama bin Laden continued to solemnize the suicide bombers with their body belts of explosives, their car bombs, truck bombs, bombs powerful enough to topple buildings and the concrete bunkers which proved no defense against the explosions. He continued to encourage mothers to give their children up to martyrdom. He told them, in that soft, certain voice that seemed to come from deep within him, that martyrdom was the only way a Muslim could bypass the painful interrogation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to heaven immediately transported to Allah’s garden where the celestial virgins awaited. Emerging from the al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, the northwest frontier of Pakistan, the mountains of Iran, and the deserts of the Yemen, the martyrs went to their deaths convinced of the purity of their cause.

Against such an enemy Meir Dagan was among many who said there was no more formidable foe. By 2006, a year that saw more suicide bomber attacks than in previous years, the art of mass murder had been refined with the use of new combinations of explosives, sharper nails and nuts and bolts. In May of that year there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire first Intifada. From a city, London, that had witnessed the effect of suicide bombers in the July bombings, 2005, came the view of its then-mayor, Kenneth Livingstone: “Given that they don’t have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons, in an unfair balance that’s what people use.” Such encouragement can only have pleased Osama bin Laden. And just as those many millions still believed the CIA had been the instrument that triggered 9/11, so many others accepted Livingstone’s judgment, one that was widely reproduced across the Islamic world.

The rise of al-Qaeda in so short a time is one of the more startling aspects of the closing decade of the twentieth century. It was a brilliantly executed conversion of millions of hearts and minds, first across the Middle East, then into Asia, and the Muslim rump of the old Soviet Union. From there it was but a leap into the depths of Africa, from the deserts of Sudan down to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope. At the same time bin Laden’s apostles began to proselytize in Latin America, promising the impoverished of that continent a better way of life awaited them in the new Caliphate bin Laden had insisted was coming. The United States and Canada also became fertile grounds for ensnaring the disenfranchised. By then a Mossad analysis indicated, Europe may have attracted “possibly a million” sympathizers for al-Qaeda’s aims to bring about a new world where corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all other Western vitiation would be excised. People who were dissatisfied with the failure of organized religion and an unequal way of dispensing justice were drawn to the stark principles of Sharia Law.