Gideon's Spies полностью

In the forty years of its existence it had employed 600,000 full time spies and informers, roughly 1 secret policeman for every 320 East Germans. The Stasi had its own imposing headquarters in East Berlin, interrogation centers around the city, its own hotels and restaurants in the countryside, and clinics where only Stasi staff and their families could be treated. One clinic, close to the River Spree, had facilities to perform plastic surgery including facial reconstruction for Stasi agents and sometimes carefully selected members of terror groups with which the Stasi had close connections.

With bewildering speed, the citizens of East Germany awoke in November 1988 to find the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the resignation of the GDR’s Politburo and the official end of the Stasi’s reign of terror. But not everything had ended. The clinic near the Spree had still remained in business, offering its skills to those with the funding to pay for plastic surgery.

The file now in Reuben’s possession contained photos of Imad Mughniyeh, which had been taken at the clinic after post-operative surgery. His face looked very different from the one, which had last filled the pages of newspapers and magazines after he had been photographed at a Hezbollah rally before once more disappearing almost a quarter of a century previously when he had established an even more murderous reputation than any other terrorist of the 1980s.

It was an era when the Venezuelan-born Marxist, Carlos the Jackal’s, claim to notoriety had begun with taking forty-two Opec oil ministers hostage in Vienna in 1975. He had then embarked on a reign of terror before Mossad had tipped off French intelligence where they could grab Carlos in Sudan and bring him to trial in Paris for his crimes on French soil and where he continues to serve a life sentence. Like Carlos, Abu Nidal had become another headline-grabbing terrorist after he ordered the gunning down of innocent men and women as they waited to board their Christmas flights in Rome and Vienna airports in 1985. Nidal had finally been killed by a Mossad kidon team. For a quarter of a century Imad Mughniyeh had avoided assassination.

On that February morning, the file in Reuben’s possession could bring his death closer for some of the worst crimes committed on Israel’s doorstep—Lebanon. His history of violent attacks was appalling. In 1983, he had plotted the attack against the American embassy in Beirut. Among the sixty-three dead were eight members of the CIA, including its station chief in the Middle East. In the same year, Mughniyeh arranged for the kidnapping of William Buckley, the CIA replacement station chief in battered Beirut.

Next he arranged the bombing of the U.S. Marines’ barracks near the city’s airport killing 241 people. In between, he had carried out skyjackings and organized the kidnapping of Western hostages, including Terry Waite, who had gone to Beirut to try to negotiate with the Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, to free the hostages Hezbollah already held. Along with Buckley, Waite—the emissary of the Archbishop of Canterbury—had been incarcerated in what became known as the Beirut Hilton, the underground prison beneath the city.

Imad Mughniyeh had been responsible for the murder of over four hundred people and the torture of even more. America had placed a bounty of $25 million (£12.5 million) on his head.

One by one Mossad’s menume, the Hebrew title by which each director-general is known, plotted Mughniyeh’s downfall. Men like the cool Nahum Admoni (1982–1990), the quiet-voiced Shabtai Shavit (1990–1996), the relentless Danny Yatom (1996–1998), and Efraim Halevy (1998–2002), the menume his staff called the “grandfather of spies,” had all chaired endless secret meetings to plan the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh.

Their agents had tracked him to Paris only for him to once more slip away, as he had done in Rome and Madrid. For a while the trail led to Minsk in the Ukraine and then to the Islamic Republics of the former Soviet Union. There were reports he was in Tehran, living under the protection of the Fundamentalist regime. But each time the hunt had petered out.

In 2002, Meir Dagan took over Mossad. He did what all his predecessors had done and studied the growing number of files that listed how close Mossad agents had come to capturing Mughniyeh. At times they had been close, very close. But somehow he had still wriggled free. The suicide bombings had continued. For Dagan it became an article of faith that, as the tenth menume, he would finally terminate Mughniyeh’s reign of terror.