Gideon's Spies полностью

By September 1997, Netanyahu had begun to call Yatom at all hours of the night about progress. The pressurized Mossad chief bowed. He pulled in katsas from other stations. For one, “Yatom was rearranging the map as a knee-jerk to Bibi’s demands. Yatom is one tough guy. But when it came to push-and-shove, he was just no match for Bibi, who had started to talk about how quickly his brother had helped to put together the raid on Entebbe. The comparison had no meaning. But that’s Bibi all over—use anything that can push his case.”

On September 9, news reached Tel Aviv that Hamas had struck again, this time seriously wounding two Israeli bodyguards of the cultural attaché at the newly opened Israeli embassy in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

Three days later, shortly before the Friday Sabbath began, Netanyahu requested that Yatom join him for lunch at his home in Jerusalem. The two men sat down to a meal of soup, salad, and a fish course, washed down with beer and bottled water. The prime minister immediately raised the attack in Amman. How could the Hamas gunmen have come close enough to shoot? Why had there been no advance warning? What was the Mossad station in Amman doing about it?

Yatom interrupted Netanyahu in midflow: There was a Hamas leader in Amman named Khalid Meshal who ran the organization’s politburo from an office in the city. For weeks Meshal had been traveling through various Arab countries, but Amman station reported that he was back in the city.

Netanyahu was galvanized. “Then go and knock him down!” he said across the table. “That’s what you have to do. Knock him down! Send your people in Amman to do that!”

Stung by almost six weeks of relentless pressure from a prime minister who increasingly had appeared to have no grasp of the political sensitivity of any intelligence operation, the Mossad chief delivered a sharp lesson. Eyes glinting behind his spectacles, he warned that to launch an attack in Amman would destroy the relationship with Jordan that Netanyahu’s predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, had created. To actually kill Meshal on Jordanian soil would jeopardize Mossad’s operations in a country that had yielded a continuous flow of intelligence about Syria, Iraq, and Palestinian extremists. Yatom suggested it would be better to wait until Meshal once more left Amman and then strike.

“Excuses! That’s all you give me! Excuses!” Netanyahu was said to have shouted. “I want action. I want it now. The people want action. It’s Rosh Hashanah soon!” he added, in a reference to the Jewish New Year. “This will be my gift to them!”

From that moment on, every move that Yatom made would be personally approved by Netanyahu. No other Israeli prime minister had taken such a close personal interest in a state-sponsored act of murder.

Khalid Meshal was forty-one years old, a full-bearded and physically strong man. He lived close to King Hussein’s palace and by all accounts was a devoted husband and father of seven children. Cultured and well-spoken, he had remained a little-known figure in the Islamic fundamentalist movement. But the rapidly assembled data that Mossad’s Amman station had put together indicated Meshal was the driving force behind the suicide bomb attacks against Israeli civilians.

Details of Meshal’s movements had been furnished, together with a photograph the Mossad head of station had surreptitiously taken. With his report was a personal plea that Yatom should once more try to persuade Netanyahu not to go ahead with an assassination in Amman. Such a reckless action would jeopardize two years of important counterespionage work Mossad had done with Jordan’s cooperation.

Netanyahu had rejected the plea, saying it sounded like a prediction of failure, something he would not tolerate.

Meantime, an eight-man kidon squad had been preparing: a two-man team would actually carry out the hit in broad daylight; the others would provide backup, including car support. The team would all drive back into Israel, crossing over at the Allenby Bridge near Jerusalem.

Mossad’s weapon of choice was unusual, not a gun, but an aerosol filled with a nerve agent. It would be the first time a kidon hit team had used this method of killing, though it had long been perfected by the KGB and other Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies. Russian scientists recently emigrated to Israel had been recruited by Mossad to create a range of deadly toxins, including tabun, sarin, and soman, nerve agents that were all outlawed under international treaties. The substances were intended to produce death that could be instantaneous or lingering; in all cases the victim lost control over his internal organs and suffered pain so excruciating that death itself would be a merciful release. This form of killing had been selected as appropriate for Meshal.