She was, as always, at work before dawn and had almost cleared her desk when the Chief was shown in. She listened to his bizarre request with a rather puzzled frown, demanded several explanations, thought it over, and then, in her usual way, made her mind up without delay.
“I’ll confer with President Bush as soon as he rises, and we’ll see what we can do. This, um, man—is he really going to do that?”
“That is his intention. Prime Minister.”
“One of your people, Sir Colin?”
“No, he’s a major in the SAS.”
She brightened perceptibly.
“Remarkable fellow.”
“So I believe, ma’am.”
“When this is over, I would rather like to meet him.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged, Prime Minister.”
When the Chief was gone, the Downing Street staff placed the call to the White House, even though it was still the middle of the night, and set up the hotline connection for eightA.M. Washington, oneP.M.
London. The Prime Minister’s lunch was rescheduled by thirty minutes.
President George Bush, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, had always found it hard to refuse the British Prime Minister something she wanted when she was firing on all cylinders.
“All right, Margaret,” said the President after five minutes, “I’ll make the call.”
“He can only say no,” Mrs. Thatcher pointed out, “and he shouldn’t. After all, we’ve jolly well done a lot for him.”
“Yes, we jolly well have,” said the President.
The two heads of government made their calls within an hour of each other, and the reply from the puzzled man at the other end of the line was affirmative. He would see their representatives, in privacy, as soon as they arrived.
That evening Bill Stewart headed out of Washington, and Steve Laing caught the last connection of the day from Heathrow.
If Mike Martin had any idea of the flurry of activity his demand had started, he gave no sign of it. He spent October 26 and 27 resting, eating, and sleeping. But he stopped shaving, allowing the dark stubble to come through again. Work on his behalf, however, was being carried out in a number of different places.
The SIS Station Head in Tel Aviv had visited General Kobi Dror with a final request. The Mossad chief had stared at the Englishman in amazement.
“You really are going to go ahead with this, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I only know what I’ve been told to ask you, Kobi.”
“Bloody hell, on the black? You know he’ll be caught, don’t you?”
“Can you do it, Kobi?”
“Of course we can do it.”
“Twenty-four hours?”
Kobi Dror was playing his Fiddler on the Roof role again.
“For you, boychick, my right arm. But look, this is crazy, what you are proposing.”
He rose and came from behind his desk, draping an arm around the Englishman’s shoulders.
“You know, we broke half our own rules, and we were lucky. Normally, we never have our people visit a dead-letter box. It could be a trap. For us, a dead-letter box is one-way: from the katsa to the spy. For Jericho, we broke that rule. Moncada picked up the product that way because there was no other way.
And he was lucky—for two years he was lucky. But he had diplomatic cover. Now you want ... this ?”
He held up the small photograph of a sad-looking Arab-featured man with tufted black hair and stubble, the photo the Englishman had just received from Riyadh, brought in (since there are no commercial routes between the two capitals) by General de la Billière’s personal HS-125 twin-jet communications plane.
The 125 was standing at Sde Dov military airfield, where its livery markings had been extensively photographed.
Dror shrugged.
“All right. By tomorrow morning. My life.”
The Mossad has, beyond any room for quarrel, some of the best technical services in the world. Apart from a central computer with almost two million names and their appropriate data, apart from one of the best lock-picking services on earth, there exists in the basement and subbasement of Mossad headquarters a series of rooms where the temperature is carefully controlled.
These rooms contain paper. Not just any old paper—very special paper. Originals of just about every kind of passport in the world lie there, along with myriad other identity cards, drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, and suchlike.
Then there are the blanks, the unfilled identity cards on which the penmen can work at will, using the originals as a guide to produce forgeries of superb quality.
Identity cards are not the only speciality. Banknotes of virtually foolproof likeness can be and are produced in great quantities, either to help ruin the currencies of neighboring but hostile nations, or to fund the Mossad’s black operations, the ones neither the Prime Minister nor the Knesset knows about nor wishes to.
It had only been after some soul-searching that the CIA and SIS had agreed to go to the Mossad for the favor, but they simply could not produce the identity card of a forty-five-year-old Iraqi laborer with the certainty of knowing it would pass any inspection in Iraq. No one had bothered to find and abstract an original one to copy.
Fortunately, the Sayeret Matkal, a cross-border reconnaissance group so secret that its name cannot even be printed in Israel, had made an incursion into Iraq two years earlier to drop an Arab oter who had some low-level contact to make there. While on Iraqi soil, the agents had surprised two working men in the fields, tied them up, and relieved them of their identity cards.
As promised, Dror’s forgers worked through the night and by dawn had produced an Iraqi identity card, convincingly dirty and smudged as if from long use, in the name of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, age forty-five, from a village in the hills north of Baghdad, working in the capital as a laborer.
The forgers did not know that Martin had taken the name of the Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested his Arabic in a Chelsea restaurant in early August; nor could they know that he had chosen the village from which his father’s gardener had come, the old man who, long ago beneath a tree in Baghdad, had told the little English boy of the place where he was born, of its mosque and coffee shop and the fields of alfalfa and melons that surrounded it. And there was one more thing the forgers did not know.
In the morning Kobi Dror handed the identity card to the Tel Aviv-based SIS man.
“This will not let him down. But I tell you, this”—he tapped the photo with a stubby forefinger—“this, your tame Arab, will betray you or be caught within a week.”
The SIS man could only shrug. Not even he knew that the man in the smudged photo was not an Arab at all. He had no need to know, so he had not been told. He just did what he was told—put the card on the HS-125, by which it was flown back to Riyadh.
Clothes had also been prepared, the simple dish-dash of an Iraqi working man, a dull brown keffiyeh , and tough, rope-soled canvas shoes.
A basket weaver, without knowing what he was doing or why, was creating a wicker crate of osier strands to a most unusual design. He was a poor Saudi craftsman, and the money the strange infidel was prepared to pay was very good, so he worked with a will.
Outside the city of Riyadh, at a secret army base, two rather special vehicles were being prepared. They had been brought by a Hercules of the RAF from the main SAS base farther down the Arabian Peninsula in Oman and were being stripped down and reequipped for a long and rough ride.
The essence of the conversion of the two long-base Land-Rovers was not armor and firepower but speed and range. Each vehicle would have to carry its normal complement of four SAS men, and one would carry a passenger. The other would carry a big-tired cross-country motorcycle, itself fitted with extra-long-range fuel tanks.
The American Army again loaned its power on request, this time in the form of two of its big twin-rotor Chinook workhorse helicopters. They were just told to stand by.
Mikhail Sergeivitch Gorbachev was
sitting as usual at his desk in his personal office on the seventh and top floor of the Central Committee building on Novaya Ploshad, attended by two male secretaries, when the intercom buzzed to announce the arrival of the two emissaries from London and Washington.
For twenty-four hours he had been intrigued by the requests of both the American President and the British Prime Minister that he receive a personal emissary from each of them. Not a politician, not a diplomat—just a messenger. In this day and age, he wondered, what message cannot be passed through the normal diplomatic channels? They could even use a hotline that was utterly secure from interception, although interpreters and technicians did have access.
He was intrigued and curious, and as curiosity was one of his most notable features, he was eager to solve the enigma.
Ten minutes later, the two visitors were shown into the private office of the General Secretary of the CPSU and President of the Soviet Union. It was a long, narrow room with a row of windows along one side only, facing out onto New Square. There were no windows behind the President, who sat with his back to the wall at the end of a long conference table.
In contrast to the gloomy, heavy style preferred by his two predecessors, Andropov and Chernenko, the younger Gorbachev preferred a light, airy decor. The desk and table were of light beech, flanked by upright but comfortable chairs. The windows were masked by net curtains.
When the two men entered, he gestured his secretaries to leave. He rose from his desk and came forward.
“Greetings, gentlemen,” he said in Russian. “Do either of you speak my language?”
One, whom he judged to be English, replied in halting Russian, “An interpreter would be advisable, Mr.
President.”
“Vitali,” Gorbachev called to one of the departing secretaries, “send Yevgeny in here.”
In the absence of language, he smiled and gestured to his visitors to take a seat. His personal interpreter joined them in seconds and sat to one side of the presidential desk.
“My name, sir, is William Stewart. I am Deputy Director (Operations) for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington,” said the American.
Gorbachev’s mouth tightened and his brow furrowed.
“And I, sir, am Stephen Laing, Director for Operations, Mid-East Division, of British Intelligence.”
Gorbachev’s perplexity deepened. Spies, chekisti —what on earth was this all about?
“Each of our agencies,” said Stewart, “made a request to its respective government to ask you if you would receive us. The fact is, sir, the Middle East is moving toward war. We all know this. If it is to be avoided, we need to know the inner counsels of the Iraqi regime. What they say in public and what they discuss in private, we believe to be radically different.”
“Nothing new about that,” observed Gorbachev dryly.
“Nothing at all, sir. But this is a highly unstable regime. Dangerous—to us all. If we could only know what the real thinking inside the cabinet of President Saddam Hussein is today, we might better be able to plan a strategy to head off the coming war,” said Laing.
“Surely that is what diplomats are for,” Gorbachev pointed out.
“Normally, yes, Mr. President. But there are times when even diplomacy is too open, too public a channel for innermost thoughts to be expressed. You recall the case of Richard Sorge?”
Gorbachev nodded. Every Russian knew of Sorge. His face had appeared on postage stamps. He was a posthumous hero of the Soviet Union.
“At the time,” pursued Laing, “Sorge’s information that Japan would not attack in Siberia was utterly crucial to your country. But it could not have come to you via the embassy.
“The fact is, Mr. President, we have reason to believe there exists in Baghdad a source, quite exceptionally highly placed, who is prepared to reveal to us all the innermost counsels of Saddam Hussein. Such knowledge could mean the difference between war and a voluntary Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.”
Mikhail Gorbachev nodded. He was no friend of Saddam Hussein either. Once a docile client of the USSR, Iraq had become increasingly independent, and of late its erratic leader had been gratuitously offensive to the USSR.
Moreover, the Soviet leader was well aware that if he wanted to carry through his reforms, he would need financial and industrial support. That meant the goodwill of the West. The cold war was over—that was a reality. That was why he had joined the USSR in the Security Council condemnation of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
“So, gentlemen, make contact with this source,” Gorbachev replied. “Produce us information that the powers can use to defuse this situation, and we will all be grateful. The USSR does not wish to see a war in the Middle East either.”
“We would like to make contact, sir,” said Stewart. “But we cannot. The source declines to disclose himself, and one can understand why. For him, the risks must be very great. To make contact, we have to avoid the diplomatic route. He has made plain he will use only covert communications with us.”
“So what do you ask of me?”
The two Westerners took a deep breath.
“We wish to slip a man into Baghdad to act as a conduit between the source and ourselves,” said Barber.
“An agent?”
“Yes, Mr. President, an agent. Posing as an Iraqi.”
Gorbachev stared at them hard.
“You have such a man?”
“Yes, sir. But he must be able to live somewhere—quietly, discreetly, innocently—while he picks up the messages and delivers our own inquiries. We ask that he be allowed to pose as an Iraqi on the staff of a senior member of the Soviet embassy.”
Gorbachev steepled his chin on the tips of his fingers. He was anything but a stranger to covert operations; his own KGB had mounted more than a few. Now he was being asked to assist the KGB’s old antagonists in mounting one, and to lend the Soviet embassy as their man’s umbrella. It was so outrageous, he almost laughed.
“If this man of yours is caught, my embassy will be compromised.
“No, sir. Your embassy will have been cynically duped by Russia’s traditional Western enemies.
Saddam will believe that,” said Laing.
Gorbachev thought it over. He recalled the personal entreaty of one president and one prime minister in this matter. They evidently held it to be important, and he had no choice but to regard their goodwill to him as important. Finally he nodded.
“Very well. I will instruct General Vladimir Kryuchkov to give you his full cooperation.”
Kryuchkov was, at that time, Chairman of the KGB. Ten months later, while Gorbachev was on vacation on the Black Sea, Kryuchkov, with Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and others, would launch a coup d’état against their own President.
The two Westerners shifted uncomfortably.
“With the greatest respect, Mr. President,” asked Laing, “could we ask that it be your Foreign Minister and him only in whom you confide?”
Eduard Shevardnadze was then Foreign Minister and a trusted friend of Mikhail Gorbachev.
“Shevardnadze and him alone?” asked the President.
“Yes, sir, if you please.”
“Very well. The arrangements will be made only through the Foreign Ministry.”
When the Western intelligence officers had gone, Mikhail Gorbachev sat lost in thought. They had wanted only him and Eduard to know about this. Not Kryuchkov. Did they, he wondered, know something that the President of the USSR did not?
There were eleven Mossad agents in all—two teams of five and the mission controller, whom Kobi Dror had picked personally, pulling him off a boring stint as lecturer to the recruits at the training school outside Herzlia.
One of the teams was from the yarid branch, a section of the Mossad concerned with operational security and surveillance. The other was from neviot, whose speciality is bugging, breaking and entering—in short, anything where inanimate or mechanical objects are concerned.
Eight of the ten had reasonable or
good German, and the mission controller was fluent. The other two were technicians anyway. The advance group for Operation Joshua slipped into Vienna over three days, arriving from different European points of departure, each with a perfect passport and cover story.
As he had with Operation Jericho, Kobi Dror was bending a few rules, but none of his subordinates were going to argue. Joshua had been designated ain efes , meaning a no-miss affair, which, coming from the boss himself, meant top priority.
Yarid and neviot teams normally have seven to nine members each, but because the target was deemed to be civilian, neutral, amateur, and unsuspecting, the numbers had been slimmed down.
Mossad’s Head of Station in Vienna had allocated three of his safe houses and three bodlim to keep them clean, tidy, and provisioned at all times.
A bodel , plural bodlim , is usually a young Israeli, often a student, engaged as a gofer after a thorough check of his parentage and background. His job is to run errands, perform chores, and ask no questions.
In return he is allowed to live rent-free in a Mossad safe house, a major benefit for a short-of-money student in a foreign capital. When visiting “firemen” move in, the bodel has to move out but can be retained to do the cleaning, laundry, and shopping.
Though Vienna may not seem a major capital, for the world of espionage it has always been very important. The reason goes back to 1945, when Vienna, as the Third Reich’s second capital, was occupied by the victorious Allies and divided into four sectors—French, British, American, and Russian.
Unlike Berlin, Vienna regained her freedom—even the Russians agreed to move out—but the price was complete neutrality for Vienna and all Austria. With the cold war getting under way during the Berlin blockade of 1948, Vienna soon became a hotbed of espionage. Nicely neutral, with virtually no counterintelligence net of its own, close to the Hungarian and Czech borders, open to the West but seething with East Europeans, Vienna was a perfect base for a variety of agencies.
Shortly after its formation in 1951, the Mossad also saw the advantages of Vienna and moved in with such a presence that the Head of Station outranks the ambassador.