In Asia House in downtown Tel Aviv, the directors of IAI were furious after the years spent making Israel’s arms industry its main export. They had brokered deals not only with China but South Africa and the nations of Latin America. IAI had become a home for former Mossad directors Zvi Zamir, Yitzhak Hofi, and Danny Yatom. Amos Manor, the first head of Shin Bet, the country’s equivalent to the FBI, also had his office in IAI. It was a standing joke among them that the “big question is whether the state owns IAI or whether IAI owns the state of Israel.” The corporation’s unique position included being the only one in Israel that had total tax relief on all its income.
Dagan knew that when the time came for him to give up being the Mossad chief, he too would be offered a comfortable desk at IAA. How he performed on this mission to Beijing would be carefully watched.
For the previous sales trip to Beijing, the Israeli delegation had brought with them a number of enticing new weapons, many developed from their American originals. Among them was the latest version of Promis, the software program that could track the movements of literally untold numbers of people anywhere in the world (see chapter 10, “A Dangerous Liaison,” pp. 195–202). China had been among the 142 countries to buy the software whose undetectable “trapdoor” had been installed by Israel’s top programmers, enabling Mossad to monitor all those who used it. The new version could do that even better.
On that first visit, Dagan had seen that technology had become something China could not get enough of; more was spent on this than on food. Nowhere was it more evident than in surveillance. Ultrasonic detectors sensitive to noise or motion, electronic invisible beams that activated hidden cameras and silent alarms, bugging and debugging devices: Israel had the best and found a ready market in China. Some of the equipment the sales team had brought included gadgets developed by Mossad, such as voice analysers that would monitor the tension in a person making a telephone call. IAI had created a new radar that emitted electromagnetic energy pulses that bounced off an enemy aircraft and betrayed its shape and size. Other Israeli companies had found a ready market for the kind of surveillance equipment that had become an integral part of the urban Chinese infrastructure: electronic monitors analyzed every minute of the working day, checked on performance rates, even toilet breaks and personal activities. Meir Dagan had seen that no building in Beijing appeared able to operate without its quota of Israeli microchips that constantly fed the banks of computers by which the government kept track of its citizens from birth to death.
At the banquets where the delegation had been feted, speaker after speaker had spoken of the Asian Century, that by the year 2005, of the thirteen cities with world populations in excess of 10 million, seven would be around the Pacific Rim. China’s predicted economic growth of 8 percent a year would allow it to create the world’s largest cybercity; its reserve of currency, by 2010, would exceed that of Japan; by that year one in ten of all corporations around the Pacific Rim would be under the virtual control of its Chinese investors; by the year 2015, countries like Thailand and the Philippines would be under the economic management of China. All this would be achieved, a banquet speaker had enthused, by China’s ability to export technology it had bought from Israel. The irony was not lost on the guests.
At one banquet Meir Dagan had been introduced to Qiao Shi, once China’s supreme intelligence chief. At over six feet, he was unusually tall for a Chinese man. Qiao’s stoop, it was rumored, was from a childhood illness that had kept him bedridden for long periods during which he had pored over the written Chinese language. By the age of six he had mastered its radicals, strokes, phonetics, and recensions. The discipline of learning was good training for his future as China’s spymaster, and he had become the longest-serving intelligence chief in the world. In their brief encounter, Meir Dagan had found Qiao polite yet distant, but ready to raise his glass of French cognac to toast the Israeli delegation and offer them Cuban cigars.
Now, eighteen months later on that October day in 2005, Dagan had come as an emissary to pass on the request to Qiao that Beijing must intervene to stop North Korea from arming Iran, an action that could not only precipitate a regional war but also might lead to a global conflict.
