As 2005 drew to a close, the war on terrorism had not achieved many of its targets. While Saddam had been captured, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda remained a potent threat. Mossad’s analysts had concluded that capturing or killing bin Laden would do nothing to eliminate al-Qaeda; it had a well-defined command structure ready to replace him, and the organization itself was increasingly focused on spreading its ideology to inspire others and imitate what had been achieved on September 11, 2001. Madrid, London, Bali, and Amman were all signposts on the road to further massacres. The analysts estimated al-Qaeda was now entrenched in sixty countries, truly a hydra-headed monster.
No one could have said what the effect would have been from the power play between Ayman al-Zawahiri, a fanatic with a scholar’s beguiling mind, and the clinically insane Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Both grasped the importance of using the Internet as a virtual base from which to proselytize and provide instruction. It meant that al-Qaeda training camps could attract jihadists who had already acquired the essential hatred of the United States, Britain, and, above all, Israel. The time recruits needed to be in the camps could be shortened, reducing the risk of them being caught in an air strike or a ground assault. Ironically, al-Zarqawi would be killed by a carefully planned air attack by the United States in Iraq in 2006.
Increasingly, state-sponsored terrorism had flourished and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Countries like Syria, North Korea, and Iran had calculated the risk of punishments they could face—and concluded they were worth the risk. In Damascus, Pyongyang, and Tehran the collective view was that not even the United States would contemplate starting a global war by launching a nuclear bomb against those states; neither would Israel, for all its posturing with nuclear submarines posted in the Gulf of Oman, be likely to launch a preemptive strike. So Islamic radicalism continued to grow, its sponsors knowing they would face, at most, no more than conventional military strikes. Sanctions, as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had demonstrated, did not work.
Al-Qaeda had also recognized that terrorism was war by another name, but was
The danger of terrorism, as Meir Dagan had regularly lectured new members of Mossad, was its cost effectiveness. It cost little to produce a suicide bomber. One attack can create havoc, forcing a government to use its resources—manpower and technology—to try and capture the terrorists. A Mossad analyst had once calculated (for the author) that “one terrorist cost as much as a hundred expensively trained men to catch or capture him or her.”
Into this already complex situation there was the ever-expanding role of the Chinese secret service, CSIS. China has a tradition of espionage that reaches back over twenty-five hundred years. But never had its activities been more far-reaching than today.
