As well as MI6’s continued insistence the forged documents were genuine, there were other claims that concerned Mossad’s view of the way the service was operating under Scarlett. He had claimed another “high-value source” had provided “good evidence” in the run-up to war that Saddam Hussein had portable chemical labs roaming in Iraq deserts ready to launch warheads with chemical and biological agents. The then U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell had endorsed the claim in his eve-of-war address to the United Nations, citing the source as MI6. Later, Mossad’s deep-cover agents had established no mobile labs ever existed.
A senior Mossad analyst recalled (to the author): “MI6 was serving up, at best, speculation, at worst, baseless information as fact. It was the constant promise, underwritten by Scarlett, that the details were well sourced which made them acceptable. Only later, after the war was over, did we see that much of the data from London was often no better than the stuff the ‘spy’ in ‘Our Man In Havana’ dreamed up. He used drawings of a vacuum cleaner to support his reports. MI6 produced toy mobile labs for Powell to display before the United Nations.”
Shortly before the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004, MI6 informed Mossad that the expansion could result in an influx of terrorists into Britain whose prime targets would be the Jewish business community. London Station failed to find any evidence to support this.
In May 2004, Dagan had sensed a sea of change happening in Langley, and he was determined that Mossad would benefit from it. He already knew Porter Goss’s reputation from his eight years as the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, during which he had openly declared the CIA had become too “gunshy” after the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa. Dagan had been further won over when Goss had publicly said he was not against assassinations. “I believe it is a concept most Americans are fairly comfortable with. If you have exhausted all other avenues then the possibility of lethal force is well understood,” he had said after President Bush had nominated him to be the CIA’s next director. His words had found considerable support among conservatives at a time when Osama bin Laden’s freedom remained a major threat to America.
From their first meeting the two spy chiefs had formed an immediate bond. Goss had listened as Dagan had explained how he had inherited a Mossad where morale was low and its reputation seriously damaged, and how he revitalized it by the simple expedient of being a hands-on director. Since coming to office Dagan had made close to fifty trips overseas. Goss had spoken about his own stint with the CIA in the 1960s, the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with a poisoned cigar or a booby-trapped seashell when the Cuban leader went diving. Goss explained that ill health had finally made him give up a career with the Directorate of Operations that was responsible for all spying missions. He had entered politics, winning a seat for the Republicans in Florida. But he had never lost touch with the global intelligence world. In London, Paris, and other European capitals, he had kept alive a network that would serve him well in his new post.
As a practical step in their alliance, Goss and Dagan sent their spies into the badlands of Kazakstan, to the mountains of Kashmir, to the seaports of the Horn of Africa, into the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia, and reinforced their presence in Saudi Arabia.
The Kingdom’s increasing volatility continued to provide a fertile recruiting ground for the jihadists and the seemingly unlimited funds available to finance them. Split by a power struggle, the seventy-nine-year-old King Fahd clinging to life (he would finally die in August 2005) and many of the royal family’s five thousand princes living in fear of the fundamentalist groups sprouting in their midst, had provided them with billions of petrodollars in the hope they would be spared in any insurrection by the country’s radicals. The most extreme spoke of the day when Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi, would bring the royal family to its knees in much the way the Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to Iran in triumph. Already bin Laden had fulminated that
Supported by the Bush administration, the House of Saud had finally begun to crack down hard on the fundamentalists. Shoot-outs between the security forces and fundamentalists became routine. Captured jihadists were beheaded, and their heads displayed on spikes in public squares around the country. The displays had only increased the violence. In 2004, over 150 foreigners, agents of the security forces, and terrorists, had died.
