But Dr. Ri’s research showed that creating an ethnic bomb was no longer a fantasy. It had become what the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Joshua Lederberg had called the “monster in our backyard.” Anthropologist John Moore, an acknowledged expert in the threat from an ethnic bomb, had predicted its creation would unleash genetic variations that could produce widespread contagion of the human population with rates of mortality like the fictional Andromeda Strain, sufficient to exterminate the whole species.
By the time Jamal and Horaj had separated after their meeting in the Hindu Kush, the Mossad agent had acquired a photograph of Dr. Ri. It showed he was physically the quintessential Korean, short and stocky with a pleasantly rounded face, eyes set wide apart behind his glasses. With the photo came a curriculum vitae that indicated his importance after graduating from the country’s Hambung University of Chemical Industry, which produced scientists for North Korea’s nuclear, chemical, and biological programs.
During the years that followed, Dr. Ri was transferred from one biotechnology center to another, and from time to time he would have encountered some of the thirty-eight thousand scientists and technicians from the Soviet Union who had been recruited to work in North Korea’s biological warfare program. Others had gone to China, Syria, Libya, and Iran.
In 1999, he was appointed to work at Sogram-ri’s Institute 398. NSA satellite images routinely passed to Mossad showed the compound was a half-mile square area, bordered by heavily patrolled roads. The featureless buildings included a headquarters block, a communications building, barracks, and fuel storage tanks. To one side were living quarters for officers and scientists close to a tunnel entrance. The photo analysts believed it led to the underground complex where Dr. Ri and his team worked.
The Institute was under the overall command of Dr. Yi Yong Su. Intelligence sources had established the fifty-one-year-old geneticist was widely respected and not a little feared by her fellow geneticists. She was known to have a close relationship with Kim Jong Il, who had succeeded his father in 1994 to become the country’s supreme leader.
News that Dr. Ri planned to defect had alerted not only Mossad but the CIA, MI6, and the German, French, and Australian intelligence services. Then, as so often happens in the intelligence world, came a whisper: Dr. Ri was heading for Guangzhou, the port city of Canton Province in South China. With Hong Kong a short distance away, there was an opportunity to smuggle Dr. Ri on to one of the many foreign ships in the harbor. In the early hours of one morning—the day of the week or month would remain unknown—Dr. Ri, wearing a dark blue coverall, had appeared at one of the staff entrances to the Guangdong Hotel. Apart from its many fine facilities, the hotel also houses a number of foreign consulates on the fifteenth floor. Dr. Ri used a swipe card to access the building; how he obtained it would remain unknown. At some point inside the hotel, he was confronted by Chinese Public Security officers. Shortly afterward a police van drove him away from the hotel staff entrance.
In Tel Aviv, the file on Dr. Ri was closed and sent to the registry. Jamal and the other Mossad agents, who had hoped to find and persuade the scientist to work for Israel, were reassigned to other duties. They knew that by the very nature of their work, another “target of opportunity” would inevitably show up.
Early in May 2005, Jamal was tipped off by one of his informers in Rawalpindi that two men in the custody of the Pakistan Intelligence Service had revealed to their interrogators they had been asked to take part in an attack on London’s subway system. The men were identified as Zeesham Hyder Siddiqui, who had been arrested by Pakistani agents in Peshawar, and Naeem Noor Khan, who had been arrested in Lahore.
On Mossad’s computers they were both already listed as members of two of the forty-five extremist groups in Pakistan. Khan belonged to Jundullah, the Army of God; Siddiqui to Karkat-e-Jihad-e-Islami, the Movement for Islamic Jihad. Both groups were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
