Every morning, in his precise tones, Meir Dagan updated those around the table on the hunt for both the soldiers and Nasrallah. For ninety minutes the daily briefing on the next steps to be taken ranged from providing targets for the advance into south Lebanon by the IDF’s six brigades to identifying renewed air strikes to be made on the Beirut suburbs. Then came what Meir Dagan has called “the wider picture.” Would Syria once more increase Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal? Fifteen hundred had been fired so far, another fifteen hundred destroyed. That left ten thousand. What would be the next step that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could take? His palace at Ladekye, outside Damascus, had already been buzzed by Israeli warplanes. It was Dagan’s idea. He called it “a little warning.” And Iran—what would President Ahmadinejad do? The wiry, gaunt-faced, heavily bearded president had once more said, “We will wipe Israel from the face of the earth.” An idle boast or a serious threat? Meir Dagan’s answers to those troubling questions would remain—at least for the moment—inside the war room. By 8:00 A.M. the men around the table had left to carry out their daily orders. The first the world would learn about them would be on the news bulletins.
Two thousand miles to the west of the Kirya war room, the analysts in Britain’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), continued to explore the latest ramifications of Operation Overt, the multi-national terrorist operation. Their suspicions had hardened when the FBI sent MI5 an urgent bulletin—copied to all the other intelligence services engaged in the operation—that suicide bombers had been recruited to hijack transatlantic aircraft by smuggling individual explosive ingredients past airport security and then assembling them as bombs on board. The FBI warning (a copy of which the author has seen) was entitled: “Possible Hijacking Tactic for Using Aircraft as Weapons.” In part it read: “Components of improvised explosive devices can be smuggled onto an aircraft, concealed in either clothing or personal carry-on items such as shampoo and medicine bottles, and assembled on board. To avoid cases of suspicious passenger activity, this will most likely take place in an aircraft’s lavatory.”
Another piece of information had come from an al-Qaeda Web site believed to be operating out of Yemen. Though protected by a secret password, it had been interdicted by GCHQ specialists and had yielded valuable clues. It gave detailed instructions on how to create new types of miniature bombs by using the flash mechanism on a digital camera as an electronic detonator. Various ways of powering the detonator were suggested, including personal music players. What focused the attention of the analysts was that the instructions were written in English as well as Arabic. This raised the strong possibility that the planned attack would require the services of the two cells under surveillance by Operation Overt.
Then, a few days later, a third GCHQ intercept came from another al-Qaeda Web site, this one in Uzbekistan. It discussed the qualities of using an explosive it called “The Mother of Satan” and indicated it had been tried out by Hezbollah. Mossad’s London station chief confirmed the explosive was made from triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and was made from combining four ingredients: two harmless domestic liquids, hair bleach, and nail varnish remover. The Web site promised that “when care is taken to mix the ingredients, the result will be a powerful explosion similar to that produced by a military grenade.” TATP had been the choice of explosive used by suicide bombers in the July 7, 2005, attacks on London. TATP could be carried on board in containers such as bottles of soft drinks or even a feeding bottle for a baby. The two chemicals to create TATP would normally have to be mixed at low temperatures to make the explosive more stable. But for a suicide bomber this would not be necessary. The only problem the terrorists would face would be to ensure the mixture was sufficiently solid before it became a lethal explosive, otherwise it would be difficult to detonate as shown by the failure of the second London suicide attacks on July 21, 2005.
But there was still no timeframe for the attack Operation Overt was monitoring, only that it would most likely originate with flights taking off from Heathrow, London, heading for the United States. As July drew to a bloody close in south Lebanon and Israel, Eliza Manningham-Buller reminded the hunters that “we will not stop them all—but we will have a damned good try.”
