While the CIA worked closely with the Saudi secret service to locate the fundamentalists, Mossad’s role was different. With Saudi Arabia having no Jewish economic interests to attack within its borders, Mossad agents were concerned with tracking jihadists coming out of the country and heading toward Israel. All too often before reaching its borders, they met their deaths at the hands of Mossad’s most feared unit, kidon, its assassination squad.
Among the first decisions Meir Dagan had made was to increase its number from forty-eight to sixty; eight of them were women. All kidon had graduated from the Mossad training school at Herseliya before undergoing specialist training at an army facility in the Negev Desert. On graduating, their average age was still in their midtwenties. They regularly underwent the same physical checks as a front-line pilot in the Israeli air force. Between them kidon were fluent in Arabic and the major European languages, English, Spanish, and French. Some had acquired a proficiency in Chinese.
In the $100 billion global intelligence industry, which engaged over a million people, kidon was regarded with respect. With an unpublished budget and no accounting for how it was spent, kidon was also the envy of other secret services. Only the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS) had a similar freedom to kill.
In the past three years Dagan had sent kidon to seek out all those who had been condemned at a meeting he chaired in his office. The assassins had done so in countries across the Middle East, in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, striking in places where the souks and alleys had no names; in each case a killing had been swift and unexpected, using anything from a single bullet to the nape of the neck, to garrotting with a cheese-cutting wire or a knife thrust into the larynx. Kidon had also used nerve agents and a poisoner’s arsenal of substances specially prepared for them. There were many ways of killing, and kidon knew them all.
To perfect their skill they watched some of Israel’s leading forensic pathologists in Tel Aviv’s Institute of Forensic Medical Research at work so as to better understand how to make an assassination appear to be an accident. They learned how a small blemish or a pinprick on a victim’s skin would be a giveaway. Watching the pathologists cutting and dissecting a corpse, kidon were encouraged to ask questions. How had a pathologist decided exactly how a corpse had been murdered? What attempts had been made to disguise the method of killing? What was the significance of some small mark on the skin or damage to an internal organ the pathologist had discovered that had led him to a final conclusion? Later, back at their base, kidon would be closely questioned by an instructor on what they had seen and how it could be used for their own purposes. It was rare that a member of the unit failed the grilling, which would mean coming off the active duty roster for a spell of further intensive study of the pathologists at work.
Kidon routinely drove out to the Institute for Biological Research at Nez Ziona to consult with its scientists in their secure laboratories where they tested the efficacy of chemical and biological weapons prepared in labs in Iran, North Korea, and China. Some of the Institute’s Jewish chemists had once worked for the KGB and the East German Stasi intelligence service. When these collapsed at the end of the Cold War, the scientists were recruited by Mossad.
In a conference room reserved for the purpose, chemists and assassins would sit and discuss the merits and drawbacks of what was available for a specific assassination. Would the killing be at night or day? Some lethal pathogens did not work so well in daylight. Would an assassination be in an open or a closed space? Nerve gas often responded very differently in either situation. Would an aerosol be more effective than an injection? Where should either be aimed at the body? Behind an ear, the back of a hand, a jab into a calf or thigh? The questions required careful answers. A kidon’s life could depend on them.
The choice of location was also important. Some nerve agents smelled of new-mown grass, others of spring flowers. To use them in desert surroundings would risk raising suspicion. Sometimes, however, it was important to leave evidence that kidon had struck to raise fear in others.
More recently, the desert tracks out of Saudi Arabia had been littered with the bodies of dead jihadists who had set off to wage terrorism against Israel—and had encountered kidon.
