As the sky darkens into deep ebony, Saddam prepares for his night. His dinner will be fruit—dates and olives are a must on his menu—along with soup, possibly chicken and rice. The diet has led to Saddam shedding his potbelly. His shaggy salt-and-pepper beard is trimmed once a week, enhancing his sharp, penetrating eyes. After supper he will return to his law books, trying to fashion a defense for what the world thinks was indefensible. When his trial opened in January 2006, Saddam made good use of his studies, ranting at the trial judge and challenging court rulings.
Like his predecessors, Meir Dagan had come to accept the reality that intelligence is only occasionally successful and that the agency’s best work is ignored, never makes it to the public domain. Coupled with this was the daily routine of giving unwelcome news to Mossad’s political masters.
Increasingly, the sheer volume of intelligence reports meant politicians often had little time to digest what was being said. Dagan continued the system whereby only a few people—usually senior members of Sharon’s cabinet—had access to all the intelligence information. It was not unique to Mossad; the CIA, Germany’s BND, and even the two services Dagan most admired, MI6 and MI5, were careful about what they allowed to go beyond their own closed doors. All too often, the inquisitive media had increasingly ensured that no significant facts or operations could be kept totally secret for long.
Dagan continued to resist the way other agencies employed more specialists, being called in to operate satellites and other technological intelligence. He still believed technology alone could not unravel secret plans. He was committed to show in the first decade of the twenty-first century that the number of good spies was in inverse proportion to the size of Mossad’s support apparatus.
For him, Mossad’s spies were more important than any piece of technology. He relished the thought that Mossad still remained a mysterious organization, where a small number of extraordinary individuals, armed with great courage, could achieve extraordinary results. That, for him, and his men and women, was a comforting assurance as they prepared to face the rapidly changing and frightening world ahead.
In the last week of October 2004, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader who had once publicly embraced Saddam Hussein and brought upon himself further fury from Israel, sat down for dinner in his compound in Ramallah on the West Bank. For the past three years he had been confined to shell-pocked buildings on the orders of Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. The decision to isolate him was in the hope that Arafat would call off the suicide bombers and the terror they had inflicted across Israel. Sharon felt Arafat had only paid lip service to stop the killing and mutilation.
Surrounded by Israeli tanks and his every word listened to by the surveillance experts of Mossad, Arafat’s influence on peace in the Middle East remained strong. World leaders, like President Jacques Chirac of France, still telephoned him. His following among millions of radicals across the Arab world was constant. Sharon had said again publicly that until Yasser Arafat was removed from power there could be no lasting peace.
His own life had been a testimony to his ultimate failure to become president of a Palestinian state. He had seen his people demoralised by high unemployment through his failure to compromise, especially over the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees, a concession that would have sounded the knell of the Israeli state. His intransigeance was matched by his autocratic style of governing, highlighted by increasing sycophancy and corruption.
Now thinner and physically frailer than when he had first swept onto the world stage at the United Nations thirty years before as leader of his people, Yasser Arafat was now in his seventy-fifth year and, to ordinary Israelis, still a terrorist godfather whose complete annihilation of their state was a burning aim. To other previous U.S. administrations he was a Nobel Prize winner and the only Palestinian to do business with. To the Bush White House, he was a pariah.
But he sensed that soon, with the return of George W. Bush for another four-year term, Israel might finally decide to remove him. For twenty years he had been telling his doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, “They will do something.”
“‘They,’ was Mossad; ‘something’ was to kill him,” Dr. al-Kurdi said (to the author).
