Tenet was furious. He was wedded to the wonders of electronic surveillance. For him, it was the ultimate billion-dollar instrument of superpower espionage. The sentinels in space, the high-tech spy satellites with exotic-sounding names like Argus, Magnum, and Keyhole, were how Washington—and in many ways Tenet himself as the head of its intelligence community—kept track of the rest of the world. On his own visits to Israel, he had shown Halevy how, out in the icy blackness of outer space, a satellite pointed down on Yasser Arafat’s headquarters on the West Bank had picked up his conversations. Halevy, so the story went, had smiled politely. But what had Arafat been saying that justified the expense of all that surveillance? Tenet had shrugged.
Halevy had studied the satellite photo for a moment longer, noting the date. Then he had asked one of his analysts to fetch a report on the same day. It was a detailed account from a Mossad
At his next meeting with President George W. Bush, the CIA chief had complained that “the old man in Tel Aviv is outta touch.” Bush had discussed the matter with Condoleezza Rice, his closest adviser. She said she would speak to Dick Clarke, who had been President Clinton’s counterterrorism “czar.” Few people in Washington had worked for longer in the field.
The son of a Boston chocolate factory worker, Clarke was a survivor of the American politico-military establishment. For successive administrations, from President Reagan onward, he had become a source of endless advice. He saw himself as a defender of American values.
Despite his enemies, people listened to him. Privately they may have mocked the way Clarke strove to look like the latest incumbent in the White House—he had even dyed his hair silver when Clinton was in office, so they said—but he was the man who knew the standing of every intelligence chief in the West, and of many in China and Arab countries. He told Rice that Halevy was “past his sell-by date.” She told Bush. He called Sharon. It was only a matter of time before Israel’s prime minister would find a reason to send Halevy into retirement.
The men and women making their way through Mossad’s corridors knew, if not all, then part of this. Some of their colleagues had already left Mossad, either resigning or being driven out by a feeling that there was no real future in the organization. For them it was no longer enough to create situations that sought to draw fact out of surmise, to spend their days applying the art of informed conjecture and dealing in the middle range of probability. Others had stayed on in the hope that one day things would change—that there would, for instance, be no repetition of an operation for which Efraim Halevy would forever be remembered in these corridors.
On May 9, 2001, two young men drove up to the guard post at Volk Field in Wisconsin, one of several air bases the Air National Guard maintains across the country. Volk Field has another claim of interest. Within its perimeter is a small aeronautical museum. Every year from spring until September, a steady stream of visitors comes to inspect the display of aircraft.
The guard asked the men for their IDs, and was surprised when they produced Israeli passports. He could not recall visitors coming from so far. They explained they were “art students” at the “University of Jerusalem.”
As with all visitors, the guard noted down their names—Gal Kantor and Tsvi Watermann—then directed them to the museum. Ten minutes later a military police patrol caught them taking photographs of parked fighter planes. The men were arrested but pleaded that they had not known they were committing an offense. The base duty security officer released them with a warning. His report of the incident made its way through the Wisconsin military command structure and on to the Pentagon.
From there it was sent to the FBI. On that May day, the bureau had already received twenty-seven other reports involving Israeli “art students.” The reports came from as far apart as Los Angeles and Miami, Denver and Dallas, Seattle and New Orleans.
