When China’s president, Hu Jinto, had visited Cuba in late 2005, he had agreed to provide Castro with the latest signals intelligence and electronic-warfare facilities. The complex was near Bejucal, twenty miles south of Havana. At the other end of the island, Chinese technicians had installed a surveillance system capable of eavesdropping on classified U.S. military communications by intercepting satellite signals. The presence of these powerful monitoring posts enabled China to conduct electronic surveillance of the southern United States and across Central America. They gave al-Qaeda cells on the continent vital foreknowledge of moves by Mossad and the CIA to attack them.
In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan had told senior staff that he shared Porter Goss’s frustration that there could be no preemptive strike against the Cuban sites.
“The memory of the Bay of Pigs fiasco still haunts Washington,” Dagan was quoted as telling his staff.
On an afternoon in early February 2005, when even the air pollution was bearable, a Mossad agent, code named “Manuel,” had arrived in Mexico City’s international airport. He had flown from Florida on a Spanish passport; his base was in the city, a safe house in a neighborhood settled mostly by Jews who had retired.
In the past weeks he had visited the Bogotá headquarters of DAS, Colombia’s intelligence service, and the security services of Peru, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic. His hosts had described the extent of al-Qaeda’s penetration of their countries. In Colombia, it had held meetings with FARC, the country’s terror group, and with Shining Path, the Peruvian anarchists. Before he left, DAS had given Manuel copious documents showing how hard it was trying to cope with the terrorism al-Qaeda had brought within their borders and which they had little firsthand knowledge about. Manuel had promised he would arrange for key members of their security forces to come to Israel and receive firsthand briefing.
Mossad had been doing that for years in third world countries. It was another way to have its own contacts on the inside and work through them to fight terrorism.
In Mexico, Manuel was not yet certain he would find suitable contacts. Its law-enforcement agencies, especially its police, had a deserved reputation for bribery and corruption. Officers were involved in drug smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, and killings. But most alarming of all were the links between al-Qaeda and the country’s Popular Revolutionary Army, EPR. They had been discovered in documents during antiterrorist operations by the CIA in Pakistan to try and locate Osama bin Laden. Copies had been passed on to Mossad at the instigation of Porter Goss. As well as confirming al-Qaeda ties with the substantial student population of Muslims on Dominica and the large number of Arabs living on Peru’s border with Chile, the documents revealed that EPR had a key role in helping al-Qaeda operatives enter the United States through the busiest land crossing in the world, Tijuana.
Mossad analysts believed the documents were authored by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leading strategist. His psychoprofile in the Mossad archives included the observation that his few pleasures included watching videos of the attacks of 9/11. Since then he was reported to have made several visits to Latin America.
Manuel was eager to know if Mexico’s Center for Investigation and National Security, CISEN, could provide further evidence of this. He would be unlucky. Its director, Eduardo Medina, insisted his service had no reason to believe al-Qaeda had any presence in Mexico. “Purely media speculation,” he had said.
Next day Manuel caught a plane back to Florida. He had found no one in Mexican intelligence he would recommend should be invited to Israel. When he had made his report, he would then fly to Washington on a very different assignment.
At 10:00 a.m. EST, on a biting cold winter day, January 14, 2005, a war game chaired by POTUS—White House speak for the president of the United States—stand-in Madeleine Albright entered a hotel ballroom in midtown Washington, D.C., to preside over a summit of world leader stand-ins. They had convened in the expectation that they would discuss how best to handle the greatest natural disaster in modern history, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the death toll of which had climbed to over one hundred thousand and would eventually reach beyond three hundred thousand.
Instead, Manuel was among a select number of official observers invited to see how another and even more dangerous crisis would be handled. It posed a threat that successive Mossad directors, like intelligence chiefs everywhere, feared more than any other attack. What was about to be unveiled in the ballroom was a threat virtually impossible to detect in its creation or launch.
