Mossad discovered one colorful figure who had also worked with South Africa and North Korea, a Mormon gynecologist, Dr. Larry Ford, based on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. With his cultivated bedside manner, casual clothes, and hightop basketball shoes, none of his patients suspected he was a villain from the pages of the thrillers he kept in his waiting room bookcase. Dr. Ford had built up a close relationship with Wouter Basson and, through him, had established contacts with the equally sinister scientists of North Korea. Not one of his patients suspected Dr. Ford regularly carried deadly toxins in his baggage on flights to South Africa. The mystery of where he had obtained them, who had authorized their transportation out of the United States, and the identity of the end user were also secrets Dr. Ford would carry to his grave. In the spring of 2000, he had committed suicide. When the police dealing with the case opened Dr. Ford’s refrigerator in his home in Irvine, California, they found sufficient vials to poison, in the words of one officer, “pretty well the whole of the state. We knew then we were not dealing with some routine suicide.” There were bottles containing cultures of cholera, botulism, and typhoid fever. It would remain an unresolved mystery how they got there.
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, Mossad had been allowed to interrogate Dr. Rihad Taha, the notorious “Dr. Germ” who directed Saddam Hussein’s biowarfare program. Her total willingness to conduct terminal experiments on humans and her eagerness to find new ways to weaponize germs into even more effective armaments had made the slim, mousy-haired biologist a firm favorite with the Iraqi dictator. The daughter of one of the country’s ruling Baath families, she had acquired her skills at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She had gone there in 1979, arriving at Heathrow Airport on a First Class ticket with Iraqi Airlines from Baghdad. In her suitcases were designer suits from Paris. Taha took a $150 taxi to the campus. No one thought this was remarkable; foreign students were renowned free spenders. She had enrolled to study crop diseases. She was twenty-three years old, with an unattractive way of chewing flower stalks, a habit that had already turned her teeth yellow. While students found her arrogant, tutors were impressed by Taha’s dedication and were sympathetic when her end-of-term results were disappointing. No one suspected this was a deliberate ploy to ensure she would remain at the university to continue her degree course.
The idea had been that of her Iraqi intelligence controller based at the Iraqi Embassy in London and enabled her continued access to restricted papers on germ warfare, some of which came from Porton Down, Britain’s own center for biowarfare research. The documents showed her how to weaponize anthrax, botulism, and other toxins. She learned how deadly germs could be sprayed in shopping malls and bomblets of pathogens distributed over a sports arena. All this could be achieved by using little more than the equipment in a school science lab. When Taha returned to Iraq in 1984, she had a degree in microbiology and joined a small team of other British-trained Iraqi graduates to spearhead Saddam’s biological program. After she became its director in 1986, she abandoned her designer suits for the battle fatigues Saddam favored and hennaed her hair to the color of the Euphrates, which flowed past her mansion home. She set up her laboratories in the Al-Hasan ibn al-Hatham Institute outside Baghdad. It was there she started to kill her victims, the methods including how to inject babies with lethal doses of diarrhea. The babies were taken from women prisoners.
In the summer of 2004, Dr. Taha attempted to barter her freedom for the lives of American, British, and Irish hostages held by a fanatical Islamic terror group in Iraq. When the deal was rejected by the United States, the hostages were beheaded by the group’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In Tel Aviv, the Committee of the Heads of Services had met that year under Meir Dagan’s chairmanship and agreed that after Iran the most serious threat posed to Israel by bioterrorism was from North Korea. The regime continued to threaten Israel with destruction by providing Iran with rockets capable of delivering warheads filled with germs. Mossad had established that a week before the meeting, the Pyongyang regime had been about to ship a container of warheads to Tehran. Using Mossad’s “backdoor” channel with the CIA, Meir Dagan had asked Porter Goss to persuade the White House to ask the Beijing regime to halt the transfer. A phone call from Condoleezza Rice had produced the required result. But in Tel Aviv the intervention was seen as doing little to stop the deadly and illegal traffic between the two pariah states.
