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