Gideon's Spies полностью

Within the Institute is a special department that creates lethal toxin weapons for the use of Mossad to carry out its state-approved mandate to kill without trial the enemies of Israel. Over the years at least six workers at the plant have died but the cause of their deaths is protected by Israel’s strict military censorship.

The first crack in that security curtain has come from a former Mossad officer, Victor Ostrovsky. He claims that “we all knew that a prisoner brought to the Institute would never get out alive. PLO infiltrators were used as guinea pigs. They could make sure the weapons the scientists were developing worked properly and make them even more efficient.”

Israel has so far issued no denial of these allegations.

The start of the NATO spring offensive against Serbia in 1999 gave Halevy an opportunity for Mossad to provide an intelligence input to the nineteen countries that formed the Alliance. Mossad had long-established contacts in the region—out of real concern that the Balkans could eventually become a Muslim enclave, so providing a back door from which to launch terrorist attacks against Israel. It gave Halevy a welcome opportunity to visit NATO headquarters in Brussels and meet his counterparts. He traveled to Washington to see the CIA. Back home he worked a long day, often not taking a day off from one week to the next. In that respect he reminded people of Meir Amit.

In the spring of 1999, Mossad’s old bete noir, Victor Ostrovsky, surfaced to irritate the service. Carefully leaked reports from the team acting for two Libyans finally charged with the Lockerbie bombing said that Ostrovsky would give evidence for the defense. Given that the former katsa had left Mossad well before the incident, it was hard to see what he would have to contribute. Nevertheless, the sight of Ostrovsky in the witness box in the specially convened court in the Hague had, according to one senior Mossad source, deeply angered Halevy. He believed that an “understanding” had developed between Ostrovsky and his former employers that he would do nothing more to embarrass the agency in return for being allowed to live an unfettered life. For a while Halevy considered if there was any legal action he could take to stop Ostrovsky; in the end he was advised there was none.

In any event, by the time Ostrovsky appears in court, if he does, Halevy would have retired.

To achieve all he must do before he leaves the service would continue to be a huge test of Halevy’s physical and mental stamina. Aman and Shin Bet had seized upon the trouble in Mossad to boost their own position to be first among equals. Yet no one had suggested that Mossad should not retain its role as Israel’s secret eye on the world. Without its skills Israel might well find itself defeated by its enemies in the next century. Iran, Iraq, and Syria were all developing technology that needed to be closely monitored.

In the beginning, the operational style of Mossad had been to do what must be done, but do it secretly. In one of his one-to-one meetings with a staffer, Halevy had said he would like to see the Israeli intelligence community become a united family once more, “with Mossad the uncle no one talks about.”

Only time would tell whether that is an unsupportable dream or whether, as many observers fear, the further Mossad is from its last public humiliation, the closer it is to the next.

That came a step closer when, in June 1999, Mossad learned it could be asked to move its European headquarters in Holland following highly embarrassing claims that it has been secretly buying plutonium and other nuclear materials from the Russian Mafia. The allegation had been made by Intel, a small but formidable division of Dutch intelligence.

Intel’s investigation had been run out of a deep bunker—ironically built to shelter the Dutch Royal Family in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on Amsterdam. The bunker is near the city’s Central Railway Station. Intel had established the terminus was journey’s end for some of the nuclear materials stolen from Russian weapons labs such as Chelyabinsk-70 in the Ural Mountains and Arzamas-16 in Nizhnii Novgorod, formerly Gorky.

Senior Mossad officers had insisted to Intel that precisely because the deadly materials were stolen, their agents purchased them from the Russian Mafia. It was the only way to stop the material being sold to Islamic and other terror groups.

While conceding that the Mossad claim was plausible, Intel investigators had become convinced that the nuclear materials had also been secretly shipped out of Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport to Israel to boost the country’s own nuclear weapons manufacturing plant at Dimona. Already stockpiled there were, by 1999, an estimated 200 nuclear weapons.