The one certainty was that the Hamas victory had brought substantial gains by Islamic radicals in Egypt and Lebanon. In his own analysis, Meir Dagan had shown a political clarity that always surprised his people. He had told his senior staff at their Monday morning conference following the election: “There is a huge transition going on across the entire Middle East. It will be many months before we can see beyond the present unpredictability. That is the nature of big historic change. It’s simply the way it is. We must be ready to accommodate it—whatever it brings. But the truth is that neither Israel, the United States, Britain, and the countries of Europe can ignore the popular will of the Palestinian voters. Their turnout was an impressive 78 percent. No other democratic country can claim to have recently achieved such a turnout. We should see it as a sign that democracy may well have taken root. We should take this into account when making decisions. That does not mean rushing to judgment. It means being realistic.”
On May 14, 2006, Britain’s Intelligence Security Committee issued its report on the London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller was cited as saying: “Even with the wisdom of hindsight I doubt whether MI5 could have done much better than it did, given the resources available to us at the time and the other demands placed on us. Neither can we guarantee to stop future attacks.”
While Meir Dagan admired her honesty, he also saw it as the inevitable result of MI5’s failure to recognize the threat posed by Islamic terrorism from the end of the 1990s. It had taken what Dagan termed “the ultimate wake-up call of 9/11 to galvanize American intelligence.” He found it depressing to read Dame Eliza’s judgment that MI5 was still taking the attitude that attacks by Islamic extremists were unavoidable. “It may be realistic, but it also sounds complacent. Intelligence should not be touched by complacency,” he told his aides. They were sentiments that would guide Mossad into the future.
On a cool morning in February 2006, eight middle-aged men were allowed to bypass the stringent security checks at Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv. Four were Israelis, casually dressed. The Arabs wore dark suits and neatly knotted neckties. Little known outside their communities, the group had been given a pivotal role on the seesaw of Middle East politics. The Arabs were senior members of Fatah and were led by Jibril Rajoud, the party’s hard line national security adviser. The Israeli quartet was headed by Uri Saguy, a trim, quiet-spoken man who had once been head of Israeli army intelligence.
Only Meir Dagan and Ehud Olmert, soon to be prime minister of Israel, and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, knew the purpose of the trip was to establish a “back door channel” between Israel and Fatah that would effectively sidetrack Hamas’s overwhelming political dominance over the Palestinian parliament.
And, not for the first time, President George W. Bush had personally approved this secret intervention in the affairs of an elected government.
Each man carried a bulging briefcase which contained the details of their secret mission. Success would have a dramatic effect on Israel’s relationship with Hamas and the new generation of Middle East political leaders. The men about to board the plane for their long flight to Houston, Texas, knew that any of those leaders would block what they hoped to achieve.
One leader was Bashar al-Assad, at thirty-four-years-old, the president of Syria for the past six years. He came to office after his elder brother, Basil al-Assad, had been groomed by their father, Hafez al-Assad, the country’s long-serving tyrant, to take over. When Hafez died in June 2002, it should have been Basil who became president leaving Bashar to pursue his career as a London-trained eye surgeon where he had received his degree and met his wife. But one foggy night in January 1994, Basil crashed his Mercedes outside Damascus with fatal consequences and Bashar found himself lined up by his father to ensure the Assad dynasty continued.
