In Afghanistan and the near-lawless northern provinces of Pakistan, thousands of jihadists—holy war warriors—were being trained for what they were promised would be the endgame, the elimination of Israel from the face of the earth. Some of the graduates had returned to their homes in places like the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the souks of Egypt, the Yemen, and, farther afield, the cities of Britain. All made no secret of their readiness to die in jihad, holy war, to perfect their newfound skills anywhere that could damage the financial and economic structure of Israel.
They were often financed by state-sponsored terrorism, either because of a shared ideology (Hezbollah and Iran), or calculated
Along with every major Western intelligence service, al-Qaeda remained on top of Mossad’s own threat list. Early on in Meir Dagan’s tenure, two names had emerged to stand beside Osama bin Laden in the cause of Islamic extremism. One was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who increasingly performed the role as al-Qaeda’s chief television propagandist. The Egyptian medical doctor, who had trained in London and Paris, had made over six video and audio broadcasts in 2005, earning himself the adulation of the Arab world as the organization’s intellectual guiding force. Mossad analysts had postulated that bin Laden nowadays reserved his own appearances for major occasions, such as addressing the American people four days before the U.S. election, where he had sat at a desk like a newsreader and promised further attacks if Bush was reelected; and after the Madrid commuter train attacks that killed two hundred and injured almost two thousand, when he had repeated the warning. The other member of this trinity of evil was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian ill-educated peasant responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Iraq. Before he had reached the age of thirty, he had beheaded a dozen Iraqis and foreigners and posted videos of their murders on Islamic Web sites around the world. He, too, had promised that the day would come when he would join bin Laden’s son, Saad, at the head of a triumphal march into Jerusalem.
Now in the first weeks of 2005, it was not only terrorists that Meir Dagan found himself confronting. He had begun to have doubts about the new MI6 director-general, Sir John Scarlett. The roots of these reservations lay in what Dagan knew was seriously inaccurate MI6 intelligence that had led to the politicizing of information about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It had confirmed Dagan’s view that John Scarlett had a tendency to “shoot from the hip.” Certainly for the crew-cropped Mossad chief with a liking for open-necked shirts, Scarlett was radically different as the quintessential English spymaster in his customized suits from Gieves, the Saville Row tailor, and hand-stitched cotton shirts, along with his buff-coloured security files each bearing the red cross of Saint George. Over dinner at the Traveller’s Club, Scarlett would display a taste for expensive claret and his gourmet’s appetite for fine food. After his thirty-two years as an intelligence officer in Moscow, Kenya, and Paris, Scarlett had become chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) that monitored Britain’s other intelligence services and reported directly to Tony Blair in Downing Street. It was a widely held view that Blair had exercised his prime minister’s prerogative to appoint Scarlett to take over MI6. His appointment had brought Scarlett a knighthood to go with his CMG and OBE. It had also continued his close relationship with Blair, and Dagan was not the only foreign intelligence chief who sensed that Downing Street’s hand could be detected in decisions made by Scarlett. It went against Dagan’s own firm belief that an intelligence service should be independent of political influence.
