But any attack would require a measure of coordination with American forces in the Gulf. Israeli warplanes would probably require to overfly Turkey and close to Iraqi airspace, which was under the complete control of the Pentagon. But that would present a further problem with Washington. The Arab world, and probably beyond, would see an air attack as part of a joint effort with the United States. Almost certainly it would be followed by new terrorist strikes on American soil.
Increasingly the feeling among the men in the Kirya conference room was to take all necessary precautions but not recommend a preemptive strike. In the meantime, Meir Dagan would send his already hard-pressed agents back into Kurdish Iraq, long a listening post close to Iran, and send other
The mountain Spring flowers of the Hindu Kush would have briefly blossomed when the Mossad agent met his Pakistani informer. Both were on the front line against terrorism, bound by a common cause. Pakistan had become part of Mossad’s front line against terrorism since the arrival of al-Qaeda as the world’s major terror group. To recruit informers in the country was a priority. Jamal, the code name for the Mossad agent, had encountered Horaj on his first trip to the region in 2001. Jamal had listened carefully to Horaj as Horaj expressed fears that Pakistan would become a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism he was ready to do anything to stop. Initially, Jamal wondered if Horaj’s offer to inform for Israel had really been motivated by a desire to return respectability to his religion, which had been hijacked by the Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden, who he believed had distorted the words of the Prophet to create hatred and fear. But Mossad psychologists had studied Jamal’s background reports on Horaj and decided he could serve a useful role. Conspicuously excluded from the Washington list of states that sponsored terrorism was Pakistan. Indeed, after the September 11 attacks, the country had been regularly praised in the words of Condoleezza Rice as “our important ally in the war on terrorism.” On the speed dial of her secure desk telephone was a button that enabled the secretary of state to reach Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf. Another button was her direct link to President George Bush. Dr. Rice, a fifty-year-old former academic and Soviet specialist, was Bush’s key adviser on foreign affairs and had guided his decision to keep Pakistan on-side, choosing to ignore that since 1989 the country had supported a number of Kashmiri terror groups in their war against India. They had carried out several mass killings on the subcontinent, helped by Pakistani intelligence agents to select targets and provide advance planning, which had included the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.
Mossad had become alarmed when Pakistan had developed its nuclear capability, which Musharraf had lauded as “our equaliser, which serves as a restraining influence on India.” In Washington, Israel’s fear that Pakistan had a weapon that could threaten the Jewish state was downplayed. A large number of officers in Pakistan’s intelligence services were not only members of the country’s radical religious groups but were also strong supporters of al-Qaeda. Would that terror group one day be able to acquire the means to make at least a “dirty bomb” or even obtain a fully fledged nuclear weapon? It was a question constantly debated within Mossad and which had once more brought Jamal on a long journey through icy ravines and past mountains shrouded in cloud to keep his appointment. Waiting for him was his informer, Horaj. The payment Horaj received each time he met Jamal may also have been a contributing factor to have brought him once more to this bleak vastness close to the roof of the world.
This was a land where Alexander the Great had lost an entire division one winter and, centuries later, where the Russians had fought, and lost, their war against the Mujahideen tribesmen of Afghanistan. And here, against a mountain peak cloaked permanently in snow and deep fissures splitting the rocks, American Special Forces had lost some of their finest in their search for Osama bin Laden.
