Next came Brigadier General Doran Tamir, chief intelligence officer for the Israel Defense Forces. Nimble and in the prime of his life, everything about him suggested the authority that came from long years of commanding.
Finally Uri Saguy arrived, strolling into the safe house like a warrior god on his way to stardom even more glittering than his position as director of Aman, military intelligence. Soft-voiced and self-deprecating, he continued to provoke controversy among his peers by insisting that beneath its renewed bluster, Syria was still ready to talk peace.
The relationship among the three men was, in Shavit’s words, “cautiously cordial.”
Said Uri Saguy, “We can hardly compare with each other. As head of Aman, I tasked the other two. There was competition between us but, as long as we were serving the same aim, it’s fine.”
For two hours they sat around the living-room table and reviewed the plan to have Fathi Shkaki murdered. His execution would be an act of pure vengeance, the biblical “eye for an eye” principle Israelis liked to believe justified such killings. But sometimes Mossad killed a person when he stubbornly refused to provide his skills to support Israel’s aspirations. Then, rather than risk those talents falling into the hands of an enemy, he too was ruthlessly terminated.
Dr. Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist, was the world’s greatest expert on barrel ballistics. Israel had made several unsuccessful attempts to buy his expertise. Each time Bull had made clear his distaste for the Jewish state.
Instead he had offered his services to Saddam Hussein to build a supergun capable of launching shells containing nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads from Iraq directly into Israel. The supergun’s barrel was 487 feet long, composed of thirty-two tons of steel supplied by British firms to Iraq. Late in 1989 a prototype had been test-fired at a gunnery range at Mosul in northern Iraq. Saddam Hussein had ordered three of the weapons to be built at a cost of $20 million. Bull was retained as a consultant at $1 million. The project was code-named Babylon.
His company, Space Research Corporation (SRC), was registered in Brussels as an armaments design company. From there it had sent out a detailed requirement list to European suppliers, including twenty in Britain, to provide high-technology components.
On February 17, 1990, a
Mossad’s director general, Nahum Admoni, sought an immediate meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. A former urban guerrilla leader who had ruthlessly fought the British during the dying weeks of the Mandate, Shamir was the kind of political leader Mossad liked, fully supporting the need to destroy Israel’s enemies when it was critical and all else failed. During the 1960s, when Nazi rocket scientists were working with Egypt to provide long-range weapons capable of hitting Israel from across the Sinai Desert, Shamir had been called in by Mossad to provide expertise in planning assassinations. His speciality during the Mandate rule had been devising means to eliminate British soldiers. Shamir had sent former members of his underground forces to kill the German scientists. Some of these assassins later became founding members of the Mossad’s kidon unit.
Shamir spent only a short time studying Mossad’s file on Bull. The service had done its usual thorough job tracing Bull’s career from the time, at the age of twenty-two, he had been awarded a doctorate in physics and gone to work for the Canadian government’s Armaments and Research Development Establishment. There he had clashed with senior officials, sowing the seeds for what had become a lifelong hatred of bureaucrats. He had set up as a private consultant—“literally a gun for hire,” the file observed with a touch of black humor.
His reputation as an armaments inventor was established in 1976 when he designed a .45-caliber howitzer that could shell targets twenty-five miles away; at that time the only comparable weapon NATO possessed had a maximum range of only seventeen miles. But once more Bull fell foul of government attitudes. NATO members were blocked from buying the new gun because the major European weapon producers had effective political lobbies. Bull finally sold the howitzer to South Africa.
