Whether Meir Dagan’s meeting with Qiao Shi took place in the compound would remain unknown, just as what was agreed between them. But twenty-four hours after his plane had landed it was in the air again heading back to Israel.
A few days later Mossad was among a number of Western intelligence services that discovered North Korea was weaponizing the bird flu virus. It added to the mounting concern that was already sweeping the world as the prospect grew of a repetition of the 1918 influenza pandemic that had killed 50 million. Then, as now, there was no ready vaccine to inoculate entire populations. Warnings from intelligence services said that in aerosol form the weaponized virus would be undetectable at border crossings, making it an ideal weapon for terrorists. In Washington, the Bush administration gave briefings classified “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” to members of Congress and the Senate, during which CIA Director Porter Goss and John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence, revealed details of the terrorist threat.
The outbreak had originated in Asia and the intelligence chiefs explained it would be relatively easy for North Korean agents to obtain birds infected with the H5N1 strain from which the virus could be weaponized. Biopreperat’s former director, Dr. Ken Alibek, who had defected from Russia and was now a senior adviser to the Bush administration on biodefense, said to the author, “The threat of a weaponized bird flu virus cannot be overemphasized. It would be the most terrible weapon in the hands of a terrorist. An aerosolized bird flu would be impossible to detect from one spread naturally by infected birds. But the lab-produced virus would be far more lethal and could be directed at specific targets.”
Peter Openshaw, professor of virology at Imperial College, London, said, “It would be more terrifying than engineered smallpox. That would be relatively easy to contain because there is an existing vaccine.” Hugh Pennington, professor of microbiology at Aberdeen University in Scotland, said North Korea’s molecular biologists “could mix the bird flu virus with other flu viruses, making it easier to spread from personal contact.”
Were the reports that North Korea was weaponizing bird flu an indication the regime had dismissed any approach by China to stop arming Iran? Had Qiao Shi simply politely listened to Dagan and done nothing? Or had he agreed with the old men of Zhongnanhai that it would not be in their own interest to put pressure on their unstable neighbor?
The one certainty was that a warhead filled with weaponized virus and launched against Tel Aviv would have disastrous consequences. But it was now not only the possibility of a weaponized bird flu virus that threatened Israel and the world beyond its borders. This one came from six nuclear scientists who had worked in the Pakistan nuclear industry and had left the country.
Mossad had discovered their activities before they had left Pakistan after having worked closely with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Islamic bomb and the godfather of nuclear proliferation. Their technical experience included the complex disciplines needed to use centrifuges to produce enriched uranium, the precursor for a nuclear bomb.
Their skills had been enhanced by South African nuclear experts secretly employed in Pakistan’s nuclear program at the Khan Research Laboratories. South Africa’s own space-age program had been dismantled after America had threatened trade sanctions in 1993. Overnight President Nelson Mandela had canceled his dream of putting an astronaut into space. And along with billions of rands being wasted, hundreds of highly skilled men and women found themselves out of work.
But the more talented did not have to wait long for offers. The first came from Dimona, Israel’s nuclear facility. Its relationship with the South African program had prospered from the time Dimona know-how had fine-tuned South Africa’s first intermediate-range missile, the Arniston, a carbon copy of Israel’s own Jericho II rocket. A decade of close collaboration had finally ended in 1992, again with pressure from the United States. But the ties between the scientists had remained.
