By the first week of August 2006, the war had become a grim parade of military funerals and television interviews with grieving families. With each death the unease within Israel deepened over the conduct of the fighting. Retired military experts—known as “the armchair brigade” among Ehud Olmert’s aides—called for an increase in ground forces and bombing raids on Hezbollah’s rocket launchers and for the razing of villages where Hezbollah was suspected of hiding. This had already led to tragedy roundly condemned around the world when Israeli bombs destroyed an apartment block in the south Lebanon city of Cana, killing some fifty women and children. Journalists had reminded readers that Cana was where Jesus had changed water into wine “and now the water of Cana is red with the blood of the innocent,” wrote one reporter. And for the first time since hostilities started, Mossad came under criticism. Why hadn’t its agents located the bunkers and tunnels which, over the past six years, Hezbollah had been using to stockpile rockets supplied by Syria and Iran? The question had led to angry discussions in the Knesset. But there was no response from Meir Dagan. It had been left to Shabtai Shavit to defend his old service, pointing out that the public perception of intelligence gathering does not take into account the “bigger picture below the surface.”
An example of this came on August 3, 2006, when Dagan received a message from an agent in Balbeck, the historic city in the Beka’a Valley that Hezbollah had turned into a stronghold. The message said that Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, would be traveling overnight to meet with Saad bin Laden, the eldest son of Osama bin Laden and his appointed successor. Days before another Mossad agent in Damascus had reported that the scion of the al-Qaeda leader was in the city and had held meetings with Syrian intelligence officers. That night Israeli Black Hawk helicopters swept IDF commandos ninety miles into Lebanon. With them were several Arab-speaking Mossad officers. While the commandos hunted for their human targets, the officers headed for the Hezbollah-operated hospital in the center of Balbeck. They found it deserted; patients, doctors, and nurses had all fled. Using a floor plan provided by a Mossad informer, the team found what they had come for: computers. One was in the medical records office. Another in a consultant’s suite. A third in a nurse’s station. The computers were unplugged and rushed to a waiting helicopter. Two hours later the disks were being studied in Mossad’s Tel Aviv headquarters.
Some information on the disks set out details of Hezbollah “sleeper cells” in Britain. By the time the commandos returned to their base to report they had not found Nasrallah or Saad bin Laden, details of the cells had been transmitted to London. They found their place on the Anacapa wall charts inside the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was once more back in Tel Aviv, flying in on Air Force One. The Boeing 747-200B was not a particular aircraft, but the call sign for any of the small fleet of aircraft reserved for the president or his senior aides. In all there were seven in the fleet. The aircraft Dr. Rice was using comprised a crew of twenty-six to pilot and look after her needs and seventeen secret agents to protect her on the ground.
The Air Force One fleet had undergone a $50 million upgrade since 9/11 to enable the president to rule the United States from the air. The chaos surrounding his movements after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was a painful reminder of communications shortcomings.
Dr. Rice’s aircraft had a mobile command center with encrypted communication links with all of the national security networks in the United States. The state-of-the-art telephone system had a total of eighty-five separate lines and scrambled handsets. Plasma screens positioned around the aircraft showed, in real time, the live satellite news channels. The plane’s extensive defense system was intended to detect and deflect any missile attacks. Secretary of State Rice had an executive suite behind the flight deck that included a stateroom, which was a duplicate of her Washington office. Behind it was a dressing room, toilet, and shower that only she was allowed to use. Her own bedroom was wood paneled with a queen-sized bed. The suite also had a dining room. On board were two galleys, each capable of providing meals for two hundred passengers; the larders stocked with enough supplies for two thousand meals. The non-stop flight from Washington had cost $40,243 an hour. At the back of the plane sat her officials and carefully vetted members of the press.
