He knew that the medical equipment surrounding Sharon, machines that clicked and pinged, would provide some confirmation for the family that all was not yet lost; that active measures were still being taken to keep the inevitable at bay. Close to the bed was a red-painted surgical trolley. This was the crash cart, the ultimate emergency aid with drugs to stimulate cardiac output, sponges, needles, tourniquets, probes, catheters, airway tubes, an aspirator, and a defibrillator capable of delivering through its paddles a powerful electric shock to start Sharon’s heart if it stopped. The decision to resuscitate would come only when that moment arrived. Dagan had told aides that if it were his choice, he would not revive his friend to exist in a vegetative state.
After reviewing the R & D report, Dagan prepared for his first meeting of the day. It would be with two senior officers of France’s Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory (DST). The largest of the Republic’s six intelligence agencies, it employed several thousand staff and, over the years, had developed close ties with Mossad. These had been cemented when Mossad had helped the DST foil a terrorist plot to launch a jetliner into the Eiffel Tower. Since then both services had collaborated to thwart a number of al-Qaeda attacks in France. None of the details had subsequently emerged in public, but they had included a plan to assassinate President Chirac.
While France, like many European countries, publicly advocated a judicial approach to the war on terrorism, wherever possible arresting and trying terrorists; behind the scenes the DST were as ruthless as Mossad. This had followed a major overhaul in 1986 of the country’s police and its intelligence-gathering apparatus. After the 9/11 attacks the cooperation with Mossad rapidly expanded. Both services had common ground in dealing with the effects of the jihad in Chechnya, Gaza, the West Bank, and Kashmir, which had led to a radicalization among Middle East Arabs who had arrived in Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon, cities where Jewish investment and influence was well established. The al-Qaeda network in France consisted largely of North African second-generation emigrants from working-class or middle-class families. The majority were still in their early twenties and had been seduced by the messianic preaching of Osama bin Laden on a video or persuaded to become a jihadist after listening to a radical preacher in a mosque. Hundreds had made their way to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq.
The closeness of Spain to North Africa made it an important conduit for al-Qaeda to smuggle operatives into France. A document that a Mossad analyst prepared in 2005 (which the author has seen) accuses the Moroccan police of receiving payment in return for smuggling terrorists into Spain. “Al-Qaeda controls criminal networks in Spain who deal in money laundering and trafficking in drugs and prostitutes from the Balkans. Spain is still considered a safe haven for Islamic extremists even after the Madrid bombings. The current estimate is that they are linked to eighteen radical groups that Spanish intelligence has not been able to successfully penetrate.”
Information produced by Mossad’s Spanish sayanim was passed on to the DST, together with al-Qaeda’s growing presence on France’s border with Germany. The Federal Republic had itself become a fertile ground for al-Qaeda to recruit jihadists in university cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Weisbaden, Duisburg, and Munich. Though Mossad had helped to destroy the most important al-Qaeda cell in Germany, the Meliani Kommando, as it was about to launch a terrorist attack in Strasbourg against the city’s cathedral and its historic synagogue, al-Qaeda still had a sizeable network; many of its members had come from the Balkans.
To update themselves, DST officers regularly visited Tel Aviv and Mossad Station in Paris and had free access to the DST data bank. Central to this relationship was the joint monitoring of mosques and individuals across France. Warrants for wiretapping were easily granted and, since December 2005, surveillance had been extended to use video cameras in public areas and access to phone and e-mail communications of suspects. Again with the help of Mossad the DST had developed an unprecedented number of Muslim informers within the country’s Muslim communities. For Mossad the value of its ties to the DST was that it served as an intelligence data clearinghouse from other French agencies, including the national police.
