Gideon's Spies полностью

Mossad’s African safari had been a high mark of its foreign adventures in the 1970s. The classic example of how Meir Amit had put together a textbook operation was part of the curriculum at the Mossad training school. When he came into office, he had studied how a very secret and deadly war had been successfully waged against the KGB and China’s CSIS. Both intelligence services had been training African revolutionaries to mount guerrilla attacks against Western interests from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

The prospect of thousands of well-trained and armed fighters within a few hours’ striking distance of Israel had alarmed the country’s politicians. Meir Amit had sent every available katsa—field officers—and kidon to Central Africa. For three years they waged a pitiless battle of attrition against Russian and Chinese agents. Katsas were killed with the same brutality. Their names were later engraved on one of the sandstone walls of the brain-shaped memorial at Glilot that commemorated Mossad’s dead. In 2005 they numbered ninety-one.

Now this figure could increase as Dagan sent his agents into the jungles of Venezuela, the mountains of Colombia, the back streets of Mexico, the Amazon, and down into Chile and Argentina; in all those countries al-Qaeda was fomenting hatred against Israel. Once more the terror organization was helped by the CSIS Second Intelligence Department of the People’s Liberation Army general staff.

Both organizations had established a strong presence in El Salvador—part of their overall campaign to make Latin America both a powerful new player on the continent for China and to provide al-Qaeda with an operational presence that presented an increasing threat to Jewish interests in the region. San Salvador banks—including offshoots of Israeli, British, and U.S. financial institutions—became a routine stopover for the huge sums of money being laundered by both CSIS and al-Qaeda on cash-washing journeys around the world. These profits from drug running supplemented deals al-Qaeda had made with the drug cartels of Colombia.

Katsas and kidon, supported by CIA and DAS agents, ran a “kill or be killed” campaign in the dense jungles of Venezuela to stop al-Qaeda moving massive quantities of cocaine out of the country into the United States, Europe, and Israel. The dead of al-Qaeda were left to rot in the jungle, a warning to others. The bodies of the agents were airlifted out for burial in their homelands. In Israel there was no official acknowledgement where they had been or what they had done. Only the work of the stonemason at Glilot offered a clue as he carved each name with pride.

In al-Qaeda hideouts in the jungle, evidence had been found that over three thousand American-based companies, many in the high-tech industry, had been penetrated by the organization buying stocks. U.S. Treasury officials calculated that in 2004 the terror group had invested over a billion U.S. dollars. The shares had been acquired through investment brokerages in Asia, Malta, and Poland, payment having first been processed through banks in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. FBI director Robert Mueller had assigned 167 senior agents to try and unravel the complicated financial structure that now gave al-Qaeda a growing presence in the global financial markets.

David Szady, the FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, had called the situation “a most grave and present danger. It could undermine the national security and economic advantage of the United States” (to the author).

At the center of al-Qaeda’s money-laundering activities was the software program, Promis, developed by the Washington-based specialist company, Inslaw, and subsequently obtained by Israel. A copy of the software had later found its way into the hands of Osama bin Laden. It had originally been stolen from the FBI by Robert Hannsen, a long-time KGB spy in the agency. He had passed it on to the KGB, and its agents had then sold it to bin Laden.

While in Washington, al-Qaeda’s tangled financial web was slowly being untangled, in Latin America Mossad had established how the terror group’s operatives entered the continent through Honduras and Venezuela. The CSIS had high-speed trawlers based in Cuba capable of running the terrorists across the Caribbean to the virtually unguarded coastline of both countries.