By early afternoon, POTUS and the other world leaders had received projections on how the smallpox would spread. Within a month, there would be hundreds of thousands of deaths. Within a year the global number would have reached tens of millions. The computer projection showed that neither the medieval Black Death, the bubonic plague that had come close to destroying Europe, nor the influenza pandemic of 1918 would match the pandemic created by the smallpox disaster of 2005.
It was only then that POTUS looked around to her fellow leaders and spoke. “Gentlemen, we all know now what we face. We should all thank God this has not happened.” There were murmurs of agreement from those present.
The events unfolded in that Washington ballroom, titled “Atlantic Storm,” were designed by the world’s leading experts on bioterrorism. Former prime ministers and senior diplomats represented other countries. For five intense hours they had tried to cope with one emergency report after the other. Increasingly, their efforts to stop the spread of smallpox had faltered. Albright told her fellow “world leaders” that “the crisis we have failed to successfully cope with will face us, if not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow. But it will come…”
When Meir Dagan read her words, he echoed them. Then he and Porter Goss wrote a document that was circulated to European intelligence chiefs. Titled “The Future of Bioweapons,” it concluded: “Al-Qaeda will soon be in a position to create artificially engineered biological agents which can spread disease on an unparalleled scale. The same science which is taught in universities can now be adapted to create the world’s most frightening weapons. We must be aware that al-Qaeda is investing in postgraduate Muslim students on our campuses in the same way it invested in sending the 9/11 pilots to our flying schools.”
There was no more than a polite response from other intelligence chiefs. The feeling was that once again Mossad and the CIA were combining to raise the level of the terrorist threat. This was particularly felt in London where MI5 and MI6 were still irritated by the constant demands from Israel that Britain should curb the activities of radical Muslim preachers allowed to remain in the country. In mosques in London and elsewhere in Britain they openly preached hatred against Israel and the United States.
On a Monday morning in the first week of March 2005, the heads of Israel’s intelligence community drove down Tel Aviv’s Rehov Shaul Hamaleku and turned into the Kirya, the headquarters of the Israeli Defence Forces. They included the director of Shin Bet, the service responsible for internal security; the heads of Air Force and Naval intelligence; the commander of the Sholdag special forces battalion, and the chief of the Research and Political Center that advised the country’s policy makers on long-term strategy. Meir Dagan, in his capacity as
Every man could recall the years of tension the Islamic Republic had brought to Israel since 1979. Over the ensuing twenty-six years, its policy had been articulated in a huge banner draped above the main entrance to the foreign ministry in Tehran. It bore the chilling words in Farsi: “Israel Must Burn.”
For all those years Iran had been a terrorist-sponsoring nation, with particularly close ties to Hezbollah. Most of the weapons used by that group came from Iran. It was also currently engaged in undermining the fledgling democracy in Iraq by supporting its growing terrorism. Yet the diplomats of Washington’s State Department and Britain’s Foreign Office still clung to the belief that Iran was in a transition period toward democracy, and that there were moderates in the regime who could be persuaded to enter into an “accommodation” with the West and convince Hezbollah and other terror groups to cease their attacks on Israel. Mossad’s eavesdroppers and informers in Gaza had overheard the MI6 team reiterating the claim.
