Gideon's Spies полностью

Those requirements were imbued in the team who had begun to devise ways to assassinate the six Pakistani scientists the State of Israel had decided must die. Kidon assembled profiles of the scientists with the help of the Asia Desk, with information from The Salesman provided to Moshe Feinstein, from Jamal’s informers in Pakistan and elsewhere. Ari Ben-Menashe articulated to the author: “They were getting to know their targets; background, family, and friends, any connection that could be useful. How they reacted in a situation; what pushes their buttons. Only then could an operational plan be constructed. They would study every inch of the country where they worked, its geography and climate. They would study videotapes, travel brochures, local newspapers. Their methodology was anchored in their well-honed ability to separate fact from conjecture and the plans they created were governed by the golden rule that facts could not always wait for certainty.”

Late in October 2005, The Salesman gave Moshe Feinstein the news that the six scientists had flown from Riyadh to Tehran, a week after North Korea had delivered liquid propellant to power Iran’s Shahab-3 rocket with its range of eight hundred miles and a capability of delivering a warhead that would obliterate Tel Aviv. On Tuesday, October 25, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a Tehran conference called “The World Without Zionism.” It was the last week of Ramadan, the time of prayer. Five months before, he had replaced a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, who had advocated international dialogue and improving Iran’s relationship with the West. With words reminiscent of Hitler, Ahmadinejad said, “Israel and the Jews must be wiped off the map. Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”

In the kirya Israel’s three nuclear submarines and their arsenal of missiles with nuclear warheads were brought to a level one stage below launch as they kept silent watch on the seabed in the Strait of Hormuz opposite the Iranian Coast.

On November 2, 2005, a Mossad-inspired operation was moving to a climax in the Indonesian tropical city of Batu. A month had passed since a katsa in Delhi, the Indian capital, had learned that Azhari Husin, al-Qaeda’s most experienced bomb maker, who had already been identified by Mossad as the mastermind behind the July bombers in London, had been in Delhi shortly before bombs had ripped through the city’s Pahargani District. The attack was later earmarked as the work of an al-Qaeda group in Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Soldiers of Fortune. Over sixty people had died and over a hundred were seriously injured. Mossad’s offer to help Indian intelligence track Husin was swiftly accepted.

For three weeks the search yielded no trace of one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Then a sayanim on East Java, part of the Indonesian archipelago, told his katsa controller that a number of men had rented a house in a suburb of Batu, and two of them bore a resemblance to newspaper photographs of the terrorists suspected of being behind the previous month’s attack on a restaurant in Bali in which twenty-three people had died. Within hours the katsa arrived in Batu. The newspaper photographs were of Azhari Husin and the leader of another militant group, Jamaah Islamiah, called Noordin Mohammed Top, a ruthless killer cast from the same pitiless mold as Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. The sayanim reported that Top had left Batu the previous evening.

Working through a well-established rule that ensured Mossad’s presence remained unknown, the katsa informed his station chief at the Israeli Embassy in Dehli. The Indian Foreign Ministry was told. From there a call went to its counterpart in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. Within an hour of the first call, a full-scale operation was underway in Batu. Led by Indonesia’s elite antiterrorist unit, snipers were posted on neighboring roofs and a pitched battle began. From within the house, hand grenades were hurled and gunfire raked the street as the unit stormed the house. As they entered, Husin reached for the detonator on the explosive belt he was wearing, but was stopped from doing so when a police officer shot him in the chest and legs. But there was no time to stop another terrorist from detonating his own belt. The blast knocked the roof off the house. Azhari Husin ended his life like most of his victims, amid the devastation of a suicide bombing.