Gideon's Spies полностью

When the Spanish lost track of Mairead Farrell, it was a katsa who located her. He discovered that Farrell had hired another car, a white Fiesta, and parked it, loaded with sixty-four kilos of Semtex and thirty-six kilos of shrapnel, in an underground parking lot in Marbella.

The fashionable resort is not only a favorite refuge from the fierce desert sun where a number of Arab notables spend their time dreaming of the day the hated Israel will be overrun; Marbella is only a short distance from the raffish marina of Puerto Banus, where many Arab petrodollar millionaires kept their luxury yachts. Mossad had long feared that the boats traveled the length of the Mediterranean to smuggle explosives and weapons to Arab terrorists. Farrell’s car was suspected of being parked for that purpose, ready to be hoisted on board a boat ostensibly bound on a cruise to the Holy Land.

The Mossad team conducted surveillance on the car. They also spotted Farrell at the wheel of another Fiesta, the one she had used to drive McCann and Savage around Spain these past weeks. Two of the Mossad team followed the IRA unit as it drove south toward Puerto Banus. Ten minutes after leaving Marbella, Farrell passed the entrance to the marina and continued on down the coast.

Using their car radio tuned to the police channel, the Mossad katsa alerted the Spanish police that the IRA trio were heading toward Gibraltar. The Spanish alerted the British authorities. The SAS team moved into position. Hours later Farrell, McCann, and Savage were shot dead. They were given no warning or chance to surrender. They were executed.

A week later, Stephen Lander, the MI5 officer officially credited with running the operation—and who would later become director general of MI5—telephoned Admoni to thank Mossad for their help with the assassination.

On that October evening in 1995, in the safe house off Pinsker Street, all was ready for the meeting to settle the next assassination.

Selected for execution was the religious head of Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shkaki. Mossad had established that his group had orchestrated the deaths of over twenty Israeli passengers in a bus destroyed the previous January by two suicide bombers outside the small town of Beit Lid.

The incident brought the number of terrorist attacks to over ten thousand in the last quarter century. In that time over four hundred Israelis had been killed and another thousand injured. Many of those responsible for this catalog of death and maiming had themselves been hunted down and killed in what katsa Yaakov Cohen, who had himself done his share of revenge taking, would describe as “all those back streets that have no names; where a knife can be more effective at times than a gun; where it’s either kill or be killed.”

In this pitiless world Shkaki had long been lionized by his people. It was he who had personally granted the bombers of Beit Lid absolution from the inviolable Islamic prohibition against suicide. To do so he had combed the Koran to extrapolate a philosophical assumption that oppression makes the oppressed discover new strengths; in preparing the suicide bombers he had exploited the psychological flaws in unbalanced youngsters who, like the Japanese kamikaze teenagers in World War II, went to their own end on that January day in a state of religious fervor. Afterward, Shkaki had paid for their death notices in Jihad’s newspaper and, at Friday prayers, had praised their sacrifice, assuring their families their sons had found a place in heaven.

In the tension of the streets where he operated, it had become a matter of honor for a family to provide a son for Shkaki to sacrifice. Those who died were remembered each day after the muezzin wailed through the crackling loudspeakers to call the faithful to prayer. In the shadowy coolness of the mosques of south Lebanon, their memories were kept alive.

His next recruits chosen, their target selected, Shkaki would hand the youths over to his bomb makers. They were the strategists who could study a photograph of a target and decide upon the quantity of explosive needed. Like ancient alchemists, they worked by experience and instinct, and their language was filled with the words that brought death: “oxidizer,” “desensitizer,” “plasticines,” and “freezing point depressants.” These were Shkaki’s people. Borrowing a phrase once used by a leader of his hated enemy, Israel, he told them all: “We fight, therefore we exist.”