Gideon's Spies полностью

But on that Spring day in 2005, Jamal had met Horaj, not to receive further confirmation that, despite its angry denials, China was offering shelter to bin Laden, but to discover more about a secret underground route along which defectors from China and North Korea made their perilous way to freedom in the West. Of special interest to Mossad was the North Korean scientist who had been working on genetic weapons.

Since March 1984, when Saddam Hussein’s pilots had dropped 100-liter canisters of biological agents on the Kurdish population in the township of Halanja, killing five thousand in minutes, the threat of a biowarfare attack on Israel had become a priority for Mossad.

Russian-speaking agents had tracked down scientists who had once worked for the secret Department 12 of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Their work had been responsible for biological espionage, the planning and preparation of biological terrorism, and all-out biological war. The United States, Britain, and Israel had been among Department 12’s prime targets. Its biologists had successfully genetically weaponized in their Moscow laboratories some of the world’s most dangerous viruses: Ebola, anthrax, smallpox, and baculavius. They had also been working on genes responsible for specific sex, race, and other anthropological features. Another weapon being researched included a toxin that would result in the corruption of human mental processes, induce uncontrollable fear, and lead to death. Substances had also been created to specifically poison reservoirs, food stocks, and pharmaceutical factories; and other Department 12 scientists had been developing sophisticated airborne delivery systems for the Plague, the medieval Black Death, and the equally deadly botulinium. The Mossad agents discovered that when the Soviet Union collapsed, a number of the scientists were recruited to work in North Korea and China.

Links were also found between these countries and genetic weapons research, which had been carried out in the apartheid regime of South Africa; its Project Coast was specifically intended to create an ethnic bomb. The project’s leader, Wouter Basson, was a gifted, totally ruthless, and amoral scientist whose ability to develop biological weapons had made him, in the later words of Archbishop Tutu, “the Devil’s disciple working in the most diabolical aspect of apartheid.” Using front companies that claimed to be conducting bona fide research, Project Coast gathered scientific information from around the world. Some of it came into a small, rented cottage near Ascot in Berkshire, England. Number 1 Faircloth Farm Cottage, Watersplash, was an unlikely address to receive germ warfare material from, among others, the scientists of North Korea. But for them—as isolated as South Africa was from the global scientific community in the days of apartheid—the cottage provided a means of exchanging data, one that escaped the surveillance of MI5. Later, scientists from Project Coast visited Iraq and Libya, and finally Iran.

At first the ayatollahs had refused to keep producing biological weapons as they were contrary to Islamic doctrine, a truth that Mossad’s propagandists skillfully promoted across the Middle East. But after Iraq’s massacre of the Kurds, the Tehran regime reversed the Koran teaching and the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, voted unanimously that biological and chemical weapons should be mass produced. The document the South African scientists had left behind on their visit to Tehran were dusted down by the newly formed Quds Force—in the Arabic language Quds is Jerusalem—which was entrusted in providing Iran with a frontline capability until it had its nuclear arsenal. The South African blueprints ensured the work progressed rapidly.

Among the Project Coast documents was one (seen by the author) that claimed: “The key to creating a successful ethnic bomb lies in isolating the small but critical differences in the human genetic code. That difference consists of no more than 0.1 percent. But this minute amount, which accounts for 3 million letters of the genome code, makes it possible for a comparison between one individual and another. This also makes it possible to identify the differences between large ethnic groups. These differences make them exploitable as a military weapon.” Project Coast’s aim had been to isolate the DNA of certain genes so they could be attacked by deadly microorganisms its scientists were creating in their laboratories. Like Department 12, they also called it an “ethnic bomb,” and it was designed to incapacitate, and even kill, the South African Black population. The work was still in its infancy when the apartheid regime collapsed.