As the last quarter of 2007 waxed, in Tel Aviv Meir Dagan briefed General Elyezer Shkedy, the country’s air force chief, on the latest intelligence from his deeper agents inside Iran. Israel’s embattled prime minister had told Shkedy to prepare for a full-scale aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mossad’s former director of operations, Rafi Eitan, now a key member of Olmert’s shaky coalition, had publicly warned the population to update their bomb shelters against an attack from Tehran’s missiles. Israel’s decision to ratchet up its preparations for an air assault came after Tehran had ignored the UN deadline to stop its nuclear enrichment program to create atomic weapons. General Shkedy, the forty-nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors whose office is dominated by a photo of an Israeli F15 flying over Auschwitz, described the concern over Iran as “a serious threat to Israel and the rest of the world. My job is to maximize our capabilities in every respect. Beyond that, the less said the better.” Giora Eiland, Israel’s former national security adviser, added: “Trying to negotiate with Iran is going nowhere. Tehran is now a major threat to Israel. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ready to sacrifice half of his people to eliminate us.”
A special Israeli Defense Force Unit, “Iran Force,” had been created under Shkedy. Several Pentagon strategic bombing specialists were attached to work alongside Israeli military planners. The unit has real-time access to American satellite images taken over Iran’s ten nuclear facilities. Israel’s air force, equipped with the latest American bunker-busting bombs, was the only means the country had to attack Iran. Distance ruled out a ground force assault. Uri Dromi, a former air force colonel, told the author: “Dates and timeframes are under close scrutiny. No formal date has yet been set. But the options for an attack are shortening.” Much would depend on information from Mossad spies in Iran.
In London Nathan, the Mossad station chief, had been fully briefed on an MI5 anti-terrorism operation that had discovered Britain’s first Islamic “school for terror.” It followed the arrests across London of fourteen radical Muslim extremists. They included Abu Abdullah, who was detained after he preached at a London mosque that he would “love to see our jihadists go to Iraq to kill British and American soldiers.” Abdullah had been a regular visitor to the Jameah Islamiyah Faith School. The tall, gothic building stood in fifty-four acres on the edge of a beautiful English village and had long been a brooding presence even in its days as a Roman Catholic seminary. It was to the school that Abu Hamsa, the hook-handed extremist preacher, “brought young Muslims to be indoctrinated in jihad,” confirmed a senior MI5 officer. Hamsa is currently serving seven years for incitement to murder. After he finishes his sentence he will be deported to the United States to face charges of inciting to murder American citizens in Yemen.
The discovery of the school for terror reveals how extensive al-Qaeda’s influence was within Britain’s Muslim community. Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad, said that Britain now had “a secret army of thousands of well-trained guerrilla fighters ready to kill in the name of religion.” Over two hundred MI5 and anti-terrorist officers had surrounded the school at Mark Cross near Crowborough in East Sussex. The raid followed the latest admission by a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay that he had attended a summer training camp at the school. It had been conducted by Abu Hamsa shortly before he was jailed in February 2006. The school was run by Bilal Patel, the school imam. He claimed (to the author) the school “welcomes all groups to enjoy camping in an Islamic environment in our grounds.” Mr. Patel ran the private school “as a charity.” But he admitted he had received donations from wealthy Muslims to buy the property for £800,000 from the previous owners, a ballet school.
A senior MI5 officer said: “We have long feared that Britain has become a sanctuary for terrorists from the battlegrounds of Chechnya, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. They pose as asylum seekers. What we are now discovering is a nightmare scenario coming true.” He revealed that al-Qaeda has developed a one-week basic jihad training course to be taught at “foundation camps set up in rural UK locations.” The course is available through al-Qaeda Web sites. A British government report published last May revealed their number was “somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand.” The report also said there were an estimated 16,000 people in the United Kingdom who “are supportive of al-Qaeda.”
The news didn’t surprise Meir Dagan. He had long felt that in one of their meetings, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, had shown commendable reality when she had said: “We can catch some of them, but not all of them.”
