Shortly after Dagan had left, Sharon complained to his other son, Gilad, that he felt unwell and had some difficulty in focusing and had a strange feeling in the left side of his body. Soon he was finding difficulty in speaking at all. Schlomo Segev, Sharon’s personal physician who was at the ranch, was summoned. By then Gilad had called one of the paramedics on standby duty with an ambulance and the head of Sharon’s bodyguards. Gilad said his father should be moved to the nearest hospital, twenty minutes away. Segev overrode them, insisting the prime minister had suffered a major second stroke and should be taken directly to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The journey took fifty-five minutes, during which Sharon’s condition worsened. In the ambulance he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage caused by the rupture of an artery wall.
After seven hours of surgery, doctors put Sharon into a deep coma and onto a life-support machine. Meir Dagan was among those told that Ariel Sharon had suffered irreparable brain damage. He would never again make his mark on Israel’s future. Mossad, whom Sharon admired, would never again have a political leader who had given it unprecedented freedom to operate. Emblematic of the gaping void left in Israeli politics by the loss of Sharon’s leadership was the huge chair in the adjoining conference room to Dagan’s office. It was where Ariel Sharon liked to sit when he came calling. Dagan told his senior aides that whoever rose to the daunting task of replacing Sharon would never sit in that chair. He had the piece of furniture removed.
In Gaza and beyond, extremists clamored for his death. From his mountain fastness in the Tora Bora range that divides North Pakistan from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden called upon all Muslims to pray for Sharon’s death to “be long and painful and that he should not die like our hero Azhari Husin, who went to Paradise like a true martyr.”
Mossad’s role in the elimination of Azhari Husin was not publicly acknowledged in the congratulations from countries where his suicide bombers had left a trail of death and destruction. It was ever so: compliments remained between intelligence services involved in a joint operation, along with commiserations over one that failed or led to loss of life. Rafi Eitan, the former director of operations for Mossad, once said to the author: “Herograms have no place in our business. We just do our job. If it works, fine. If not, we make sure it works next time.” Many of the still-unsung operations in which he and his successors have participated will remain forever secret; the only clue to their loss in lives are the growing number of names carved into the sandstone memorial at Glilot (see chapter 3, “Engravings of Glilot,” p. 69).
“Gathering secret intelligence is not only dangerous, but a very imprecise art,” Eitan once said. It is also very expensive. By 2004 the United States was spending $40 billion annually on acquiring it, Israel a small percentage of that; for both countries costs will inevitably rise in the coming years. But in Washington, Tel Aviv, and London, in all those nations with substantial intelligence services, information is power and the cost of obtaining it worthwhile.
Britain in 2005 had a £2 billion annual intelligence budget, half of it devoted to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham in Gloustershire. Costing £1.2 billion to build, contractors spent £50,000 of that to provide stainless-steel handrails to avoid marking by staff with rings on their fingers. Two electric trains circle the building’s basement carrying boxes of files and sandwiches to the desks of its seven thousand staff on four floors. Shaped like a giant doughnut, the building has an inner courtyard the size of the Albert Hall. Eightinch-thick black cladding is fitted to all the outer walls.
Its high-security computers handle strategic intelligence, the most important element of all modern intelligence gathering; it enables Britain’s government and their advisers—civil servants, diplomats, and military chiefs—to be kept fully briefed on other countries and their future plans. Tactical intelligence, second, focuses on a potential enemy’s battle plans, monitoring its training exercises to discern methods likely to be deployed in war. The third element is counterespionage, in Britain called “the defence of the realm.” It focuses on uncovering foreign spying activities.
Mossad’s brief includes all three elements, but it shares discoveries with “friendly” services on its long-established policy articulated to the author by its former director general David Kimche as “Israel, first, last—and always.”
