Scotland Yard’s Serious Crimes Squad investigated. They called in forensic pathologist Dr. Ian West. He said, “Hashemi’s death was one of the strangest I have investigated.” West sent tissue samples to Porton Down, Britain’s chemical and biological warfare establishment, for its scientists to decide if Hashemi had been poisoned. The result of their findings remains unknown to this day.
The location of Saddam’s billions may also remain undiscovered in the foreseeable future.
In April 2004, the French lawyer Jacques Verges announced he had been appointed by Saddam’s family as lead counsel for his trial. Verges became famous when he represented the former SS officer Klaus Barbie, who was convicted of “crimes against humanity” in 1987. Since then the attorney has acted for the notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal, now serving a life sentence in Paris, and still acts as adviser to Slobodan Milosevic, whose trial at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal is now into its fourth year and could last several more years.
Verges has said he expects Saddam’s trial to last even longer. “I will present him as a vanquished hero.” He plans to call President George W. Bush and his father, the former U.S. president, as witnesses, along with Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair and other world leaders. “Arguing why they should appear should take at least a year,” said Verges, in his seventy-eighth year when he took the case. One of the key elements of his defense will be to show “how very important people took their slice of the action for helping Saddam hide his money. They still hold high office. But not after I finish with them.”
Only time will tell if that will lead to the discovery of the tyrant’s fortune. More certain is that by then Mossad will have other tyrants to hunt down.
On April 22, 2004, on one of those balmy days when Israelis remind themselves that this was why God had chosen their Promised Land, Meir Dagan watched the live transmission on his television in his top-floor office in Mossad headquarters.
The screen showed Mordechai Vanunu, the former nuclear technician who had exposed Israel’s atomic arsenal, finally emerging from incarceration in the high-security prison at Ashkelon in southern Israel. He had served eighteen years. One of Dagan’s predecessors, Shabtai Shavit, had publicly said that given the chance, he would have had Vanunu assassinated. On the television screen protesters opposed to Vanunu’s release were shouting the same demand: “Kill him! Kill him!” Vanunu responded by raising his clenched hands above his head in a boxer’s victory salute. The screams of “Traitor! Traitor!” mingled with the cheers of supporters who had come from all over the world to welcome Vanunu.
There had never been a scene like it, and it was one that Dagan had difficulty understanding. How could a man who had betrayed his country be treated by anyone as a hero? If Vanunu had done it for money, Dagan had said, that he could almost understand and even accept that Vanunu, once a committed Jew, had converted to Christianity. What the Mossad chief could not understand was the
Dagan had been part of Israel since its creation, he had played his own part in helping it fight for its place among nations. He believed with passionate conviction that no other people had struggled so much, and for so long, to enlighten others about the moral and spiritual imperatives that govern the ways of mankind. In those long nights when he sat alone in his office reading the incoming traffic from his agents all over the world, his principle article of faith and an inexhaustible wellspring from which he drew his strength was that the State of Israel was the single most important thing in his life.
That was why Vanunu’s great betrayal had preoccupied him. During his imprisonment, Vanunu had filled eighty-seven boxes of documents detailing the production of nuclear weapons at Dimona, out in the Negev Desert. They had, of course, been confiscated on the eve of his release. But what he had put out on paper was to Dagan “proof that Vanunu’s knowledge is still enormous, far too extensive to let him leave Israel.”
That had been one of the conditions accompanying his release; others included that he was not to have contact with foreigners, he would have his Internet and phone calls monitored, and that he would not approach within five hundred meters of any border crossing or foreign diplomatic mission. He would also have a team of surveillance officers close to him day and night.
