Everything was ready. The team of hackers arrived in Puerto Penasco at the upper reaches of Mexico’s Golfo de California. They were supplied with fishing equipment and boxes of tackle. Their journey to the port had been a long one. From Hong Kong they had flown into Mexico City and then driven to Puerto Penasco. Waiting for them was their rented fishing boat. Hidden on board, placed there by a CSIS agent in Mexico, was their equipment for hacking. They set to sea, ostensibly on a fishing trip.
With Los Alamos evacuated as the brushfire threatened to engulf the facility, the team set to work. Using the coordinates they had been provided with, the hackers had homed in on the X-Division vault at Los Alamos. Just as they had waited in Shanghai for the right moment, so they had electronically lifted all the data from the hard drive disks in the fireproof bag. A week later, the team was back in Beijing.
No one would ever establish how the disks were subsequently found behind the photocopier. Was there a Mossad or CSIS agent inside Los Alamos? Late in November 2002, a meeting was held at Los Alamos to discuss the possibility. Gathered in a conference room in X-Division was George Tenet, then director general of the CIA; Britain’s current MI6 chief, Dearlove; Director Freeh of the FBI (soon to lose his job); and Los Alamos security chief, Eugene Habinger. There was a consensus the theft had changed, almost certainly for the foreseeable future, the close intelligence links between Washington and London with Israel.
The sheer cold professionalism of the operation had placed CSIS, in Mossad’s mind, as the one service it could rate as an equal. But in the past, the CIA had also worked with the Chinese. In 1984, William Casey, then head of the CIA, had secretly met Qiao Shi and persuaded him to act against the Triads who controlled over 60 percent of New York’s heroin market. Every major American city had its Triad godfather, through whom an increasing amount of cocaine from Colombia and the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia was marketed by dealers whose lineage went back to the opium dens of the 1800s. Casey had proposed a joint intelligence operation to combat the traffickers who had also started to target students on China’s campuses. Mossad had monitored a meeting in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong between senior CSIS officers and a team from the CIA, FBI, and the DEA in January 1985. It was another striking example of the hidden links and interdependencies between intelligence services.
CSIS had helped to produce some spectacular results in the drug war, including the now celebrated Golden Aquarium case in San Francisco. A million pounds of heroin had been discovered wrapped in cellophane and condoms inside fish imported from Asia. American federal agents had taken the credit for the bust. Privately they admitted they could not have succeeded without the CSIS team who had trailed the consignment across the Pacific. Later, after the Los Alamos theft, Qiao Shi had handed over to Mossad valuable information it possessed about the Triads. With an estimated million members scattered worldwide, the Triads were the largest drug traffickers on earth.
In the three years since Meir Dagan had stood on a table in Mossad’s canteen on September 11, 2001, and had punched a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand and told his staff that, metaphorically, he expected them to eat the brains of their enemies, the number and actions of those enemies had dramatically increased.
Suicide bombers continued to strike; some were little more than children. The supply of martyrs appeared to be inexhaustible.
Fissionable materials had been stolen from stockpiles in the former Soviet Union; scientists at the European Transuranium Institute and Karsruhe in Germany, responsible for tracking all such material, had traced a small quantity of uranium-235 to the Paris apartment of three criminals known to broker arms deals with terror groups like al-Qaeda. The uranium was of weapons-grade quality. Two of the men—Sergei Salfati and Yves Ekwella—were traveling on Cameroon passports. The third, Raymond Loeb, possessed South African documents. The material came from a nuclear storage site at Chelyanbisk-70, sited deep in the Ural Mountains. Tipped off by Mossad, French police had arrested the criminals.
Mossad had traced the route along which the uranium had been transported across the Ukraine, through Poland and Germany to Paris by employees of Semion Yokovich Mogilevich. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had positioned himself to traffic not only in humans and arms but fissionable material as well. As with the site in the Urals, it had disappeared from other poorly guarded locations.
President Vladimir Putin had spoken darkly of a “new network of terror against which our forces are increasingly hard-pressed to overcome.”
