Gideon's Spies полностью

Arriving at work at his usual hour of 6:30 on the morning of Tuesday, January 24, 2006, Meir Dagan found on his desk the report he had eagerly awaited from Mossad’s Research and Development Department. Its scientists, programmers, and technicians had finally succeeded in creating a new range of gadgets that would ensure the service remained at the forefront of intelligence gathering. Each item had been field-tested across Europe by katsas. In Paris and Brussels they had tried out the EDLB, the updated electronic dead letter box, which used a state-of-the-art miniaturized computer system so that an agent could exchange information with other field agents or his controller at Mossad headquarters. Built into the EDLB was an encryptor that R & D programmers believed even the code breakers of the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service—acknowledged to be the best in the world—could not break. With it came a specially adapted mobile phone the size of a cigarette packet. Known as an “infinity device,” it could hack into any cell phone, making it activate itself without triggering its display light. The device had been tested outside the European Union headquarters in Brussels, providing an eavesdropping conduit over a twenty-four-hour period and automatically transmitting, on the hour, every conversation it had downloaded. Another gadget known as “keystroke” was designed by the R & D team to be inserted into a target computer to download everything stored on its hard drive. This had been tested out on a dating agency in Madrid. Yet another device code-named “Tempest” was designed to scan all the computers in a building to discover the level of electronic protection each one had. The test site chosen was an unsuspecting Siemens Building in Munich. The R & D report indicated that Tempest had “provided a satisfactory result.” Undoubtedly the greatest triumph had been creating a surveillance device known as “Smart Dust.” These were ant-sized sensors that could be scattered in hostile territory—hidden in dust, grass, or soil—and their microdot microphones would pick up data transmitted to an EDLB designed to store several megabytes of information, which would then be automatically transferred to Mossad headquarters. The life of a sensor was a month before they would self-destruct.

Among the first to be equipped with this arsenal of gadgets were Mossad field agents in the Balkans, where al-Qaeda had set up a network that ran from Bosnia in the north down to Albania and where, under cover of mosques, Islamic fund-raising organizations and information centers operated. In the mountains behind the Adriatic Sea were the staging camps for jihadists from England, France, Spain, and Italy to be assessed before continuing their long journey east to Afghanistan, traveling along one of the many well-established heroin-smuggling trails. Later, their training completed in the mountains of Afghanistan—where bin Laden and his senior aides remained hidden—the jihadists made their way back across Iran into northern Turkey, through the south of Bulgaria, across Macedonia, and back into Albania. From there they either crossed the Adriatic into Italy or traveled north through Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and into Austria. From there they made their way back home. Mossad called them “Trojan Horses,” the silent, watchful, suicide bombers, the explosives makers, the terrorists trained in urban warfare ready to strike at the heart of Europe. Their prime target, Meir Dagan had told his katsas, were always going to be Jewish institutions—banks, synagogues, schools, and any organization in which Jews had invested. Then would come the American and British institutions. But those owned or partly controlled by Jews would be the first.

He had dispatched his finest operatives to interdict and kill the jihadists ideally as they made their way to Afghanistan or on their return journey. Those who survived were hunted down as they made their way north back into Europe. Those who still managed to avoid death were brought to the notice of other security services. By 2006, Mossad had provided the Dutch security service, Algemene Inlichtingen–en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD), the names of fifty jihadists who had arrived back in Holland in the past three years. In Belgium, Mossad had helped its intelligence service to uncover an al-Qaeda cell whose members had survived the long journey back from Afghanistan. In the cell’s apartment in Brussels were discovered expertly forged passports and an al-Qaeda textbook on how to assemble a bomb. But once more Mossad had been frustrated to see that the much-vaunted security cooperation between Europe’s own security services was not as close as its political leaders maintained. French intelligence continued to argue in 2006 that Holland was failing to extradite terrorist suspects wanted in France. The Dutch had rejected the accusation.