The decision was more than justified when the elegant and world-weary capital of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire became a center for ultradiscreet banking, the home of three separate United Nations agencies, and a favored entry point into Europe for Palestinian and other terrorists.
Dedicated to its neutrality, Austria has long had a counterintelligence and internal security apparatus that is so simple to evade that Mossad agents refer to these well-intentioned officers as fertsalach , a not terribly complimentary word meaning a fart.
Kobi Dror’s chosen mission controller was a tough katsa with years of European experience behind him in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels.
Gideon Barzilai had also served time in one of the kidon execution units that had pursued the Arab terrorists responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games. Fortunately for his own career, he had not been involved in one of the biggest fiascos in Mossad history, when a kidon unit shot down a harmless Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, after wrongly identifying the man as Ali Hassan Salameh, the brains behind the massacre.
Gideon “Gidi” Barzilai was now Ewald Strauss, representing a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures in Frankfurt. Not only were his papers in perfect order, but a search of the contents of his briefcase would have revealed the appropriate brochures, order books, and correspondence on company stationery.
Even a phone call to his head office in Frankfurt would have confirmed his cover story, for the telephone number on the stationery gave an office in Frankfurt manned by the Mossad.
Gidi’s paperwork, along with that of the other ten on his team, was the product of another division of the Mossad’s comprehensive backup services. In the same subbasement in Tel Aviv that housed the forgery department is another series of rooms dedicated to storing details of a truly amazing number of companies, real and fictional. Company records, audits, registrations, and letterhead stationery are stored in such abundance that any katsa on a foreign operation can be equipped with a corporate identity virtually impossible to penetrate.
After establishing himself in his own apartment, Barzilai had an extended conference with the local Head of Station and began his mission with a relatively simple task: finding out everything he could about a discreet and ultratraditional private bank called the Winkler Bank, just off the Franziskanerplatz.
That same weekend, two American Chinook helicopters lifted into the air from a military base outside Riyadh and headed north to cut into the Tapline Road that runs along the Saudi-Iraq border from Khafji all the way to Jordan.
Squeezed inside the hull of each Chinook was a single long-base Land-Rover, stripped down to basic essentials but equipped with extralong-range fuel tanks. There were four SAS men traveling with each vehicle, squeezed into the area behind the flight crews.
Their final destination was beyond their normal range, but waiting for them on the Tapline Road were two large tankers, driven up from Dammam on the Gulf coast.
When the thirsty Chinooks set down on the road, the tanker crews went to work until the helicopters were again brimming with fuel. Taking off, they headed up the road in the direction of Jordan, keeping low to avoid the Iraqi radar situated across the border.
Just beyond the Saudi town of Badanah, approaching the spot where the borders of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan converge, the Chinooks set down again. There were two more tankers waiting to refuel them, but it was at this point they unloaded their cargoes and their passengers.
If the American aircrew knew where the silent Englishmen were going, they gave no sign, and if they did not know, they did not inquire. The loadmasters eased the sand-camouflaged trucks down the ramps and onto the road, shook hands, and said, “Hey, good luck, you guys.” Then they refueled and set off back the way they had come. The tankers followed them.
The eight SAS men watched them go, then headed in the other direction, farther up the road toward Jordan. Fifty miles northwest of Badanah they stopped and waited.
The captain commanding the two-vehicle mission checked his position. Back in the days of Colonel David Stirling in the Western Desert of Libya, this had been done by taking bearings of the sun, moon, and stars. The technology of 1990 made it much easier and more precise.
In his hand the captain held a device the size of a paperback book. It was called a Global Positioning System, or SATNAV, or Magellan. Despite its size, the GPS can position its holder to a square no bigger than ten yards by ten yards anywhere on the earth’s surface.
The captain’s hand-held GPS could be switched to either the Q-Code or the P-Code. The P-Code was accurate to the ten-by-ten-yard square, but it needed four of the American satellites called NAVSTAR
to be above the horizon at the same time. The Q-Code needed only two NAVSTARs above the horizon but was accurate only to a hundred yards by a hundred.
That day there were only two satellites to track by, but they were enough. No one was going to miss anyone else a hundred yards away in that howling wilderness of sand and shale, miles from anywhere between Badanah and the Jordanian border. Satisfied that he was on the rendezvous site, the captain switched off the GPS and crawled under the camouflage nets spread by his men between the two vehicles to shield them from the sun. The temperature gauge said it was 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
An hour later, the British Gazelle helicopter came in from the south. Major Mike Martin had flown from Riyadh in an RAF Hercules transport to the Saudi town of Al Jawf, the place nearest to the border at that point that had a municipal airport. The Hercules had carried the Gazelle with its rotors folded, its pilot, its ground crew, and the extra fuel tanks needed to get the Gazelle from Al Jawf to the Tapline Road and back.
In case of watching Iraqi radar even in this abandoned place, the Gazelle was skimming the desert, but the pilot quickly saw the Very starshell fired by the SAS captain when he heard the approaching engine.
The Gazelle settled on the road fifty yards from the Land-Rovers, and Martin climbed out. He carried a kitbag over his shoulder and a wicker basket in his left hand, the contents of which had caused the Gazelle pilot to wonder if he had joined the Royal Army Air Corps—or some branch of the Farmers Union. The basket contained two live hens.
Otherwise, Martin was dressed like the eight SAS men waiting for him: desert boots, loose trousers of tough canvas, shirt, sweater, and desert-camouflage combat jacket. Round his neck was a checkered keffiyeh that could be pulled up to shield his face from the swirling dust, and on his head a round knitted woolen helmet surmounted by a pair of heavy-duty goggles.
The pilot wondered why the man did not die of heat in all that gear, but then, he had never experienced the chill of the desert night.
The SAS men hauled from the rear of the Gazelle the plastic gasoline cans that had given the little reconnaissance chopper its maximum all-up weight, and they refilled the tanks. When he was full up again, the pilot waved good-bye and took off, heading south for Al Jawf, the ride back to Riyadh, and a return to sanity from these madmen in the desert.
Only when he was gone did the SAS men feel at ease. Though the eight with the Land-Rovers were D
Squadron men—light-vehicle experts—and Martin was an A Squadron freefaller, he knew all but two.
With greetings exchanged, they did what British soldiers do when they have the time: they brewed up a strong pot of tea.
The point where the captain had chosen to cross the border into Iraq was wild and bleak for two reasons. The rougher the country they were running over, the less chance there would be of running into an Iraqi patrol. His job was not to outpace the Iraqis over open ground but to escape detection completely.
The second reason was that he had to deposit his charge as near as possible to the long Iraqi highway that snakes its way from Baghdad westward across the great plains of desert to the Jordanian border crossing at Ruweishid.
That miserable outpost in the desert had become very familiar to television viewers after the conquest of Kuwait, because it was
where the hapless tide of refugees—Filipinos, Bengalis, Palestinians, and others—were wont to cross after fleeing the chaos that the conquest had caused.
In this far northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, the distance from the border to the Baghdad road was at its shortest. The captain knew that to his east, from Baghdad down to the Saudi border, the land tended to be flat desert, smooth as a billiard table for the most part, lending itself to a fast run from the border to the nearest road heading for Baghdad. But it was also likely to be occupied by Army patrols and watching eyes. Here in the west of Iraq’s deserts, the land was hillier, cut by ravines that would carry flash floods during the rains and that still had to be carefully negotiated in the dry season but were virtually empty of Iraqi patrols.
The chosen crossing point was fifty kilometers north of where they stood, and beyond the unmarked border only another hundred to the Baghdad-Ruweishid road. But the captain decided he would need a full night, a layup under camouflage nets during the next day, and the night after, in order to deliver his charge to a point within walking distance of the road.
They set off at four in the afternoon. The sun still blazed, and the heat made driving seem like moving past the door of a blast furnace. At six the dusk approached, and the air temperature began to drop—fast. At seven it was completely black, and the chill set in. The sweat dried on them, and they were grateful for the thick sweaters that the Gazelle pilot had mocked.
In the lead vehicle the navigator sat beside the driver and ran a constant series of checks on their position and course. Back at their base, he and the captain had spent hours poring over a series of large-scale, high-definition photographs, kindly provided by an American U-2 mission out of their Taif base, which formed a picture better than a mere map.
They were driving without lights, but with a penlight the navigator kept track of their swerving passage, correcting every time a gully or defile forced them to divert several kilometers east or west.
Every hour, they stopped to confirm position with the Magellan. The navigator had already calibrated the sides of his photographs with minutes and seconds of longitude and latitude, so that the figures produced by the Magellan’s digital display told them exactly where they were on the photos.
Progress was slow because at each ridge one of the men had to run forward and peer over, to ensure that there was no unpleasant surprise on the other side.
An hour before dawn, they found a steep-sided wadi, drove in, and covered themselves with netting.
One of the men withdrew to a nearby prominence to look down on the camp and order a few adjustments until he was satisfied a spotter plane would practically have to crash into the wadi to see them.
During the day they ate, drank, and slept, two always on guard in case of a wandering shepherd or another lonely traveler. Several times they heard Iraqi jets high overhead, and once the bleating of goats ranging a nearby hill. But the goats, which seemed to have no herdsman with them, wandered off in the opposite direction. After sundown they moved on.
There is a small Iraqi town called Ar-Rutba that straddles the highway, and shortly before fourA.M. they saw its lights dimly in the distance. The Magellan confirmed they were where they wanted to be, just south of the town, a five-mile hike to the road.
Four of the men scouted around until one found a wadi with a soft, sandy bottom. Here they dug their hole, silently, using the trenching tools slung on the sides of the Land-Rovers for digging them out of drifts. They buried the cross-country motorcycle with its reinforced tires, and the jerrycans of spare fuel to get it to the border, should the need arise. All were wrapped in tough polyethylene bags to protect against sand and water, for the rains had still to come.
To protect the cache from being washed away, they erected a cairn of rocks to prevent water erosion.
The navigator climbed to the hill above the wadi and took an exact bearing from the spot to the radio mast above Ar-Rutba, whose red warning light could be seen in the distance.
While they worked, Mike Martin stripped to the buff and from his kitbag took the robe, headdress, and sandals of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, the Iraqi laborer and gardener-handyman. With a cloth tote bag containing bread, oil, cheese, and olives for breakfast, a tattered wallet with identity card and pictures of Mahmoud’s elderly parents, and a battered tin box with some money and a penknife, he was ready to go. The Land-Rovers needed an hour to get clear of the site before turning in for the day.
“Break a leg,” said the captain,
“Good hunting, boss,” said the navigator.
“At least you’ll have a fresh egg for breakfast,” said another, and there was a subdued rumble of laughter. Mike Martin waved a hand and began to hike across the desert to the road. Minutes later, the Land-Rovers had gone, and the wadi was empty again.
The Head of Station in Vienna had on his books a sayan who was himself in banking, a senior executive with one of the nation’s leading clearing banks. It was he who was asked to prepare a report, as full as he could make it, upon the Winkler Bank. The sayan was told only that certain Israeli enterprises had entered into a relationship with Winkler and wished to be reassured as to its solidity, antecedents, and banking practices. There was, he was told regretfully, so much fraud going on these days.
The sayan accepted the reason for the inquiry and did his best, which was pretty good considering that the first thing he discovered was that Winkler operated along lines of almost obsessive secrecy.
The bank had been founded almost a hundred years earlier by the father of the present sole owner and president. The Winkler of 1990 was himself ninety-one and known in Viennese banking circles as der Alte , “the Old Man.” Despite his age, he refused to relinquish the presidency or sole controlling interest.
Being widowed but childless, there was no natural family successor, so the eventual disposal of the controlling interest would have to await the reading of his will.
Nevertheless, day-to-day running of the bank rested with three vice-presidents. Meetings with Old Man Winkler took place about once a month at his private house, during which his principal concern seemed to be to ensure that his own stringent standards were being maintained.
Executive decisions were with the vice-presidents, Kessler, Gemütlich, and Blei. It was not a clearing bank, of course, had no current account holders, and issued no checkbooks. Its business was as a depository for clients’ funds, which would be placed in rock-solid, safe investments, mainly on the European market.
If interest yields from such investments were never going to enter the top ten performers league, that was not the point. Winkler’s clients did not seek rapid growth or sky-high interest earnings. They sought safety and absolute anonymity. This Winkler guaranteed them, and his bank delivered.
The standards on which Old Man Winkler placed such stress included utter discretion as to the identity of the owners of its numbered accounts, coupled with a complete avoidance of what the Old Man termed “new-fangled nonsense.”
It was this distaste for modern gimmickry that banned computers for the storage of sensitive information or account control, fax machines, and where possible, telephones. The Winkler Bank would accept instructions and information by telephone, but it would never divulge it over a phone line. Where possible, the Winkler Bank liked to use old-fashioned letter-writing on its expensive cream linenfold stationery, or personal meetings within the bank itself.
Within Vienna the bank messenger would deliver all letters and statements in wax-sealed envelopes, and only for national and international letters would the bank trust the public mailing system.
As for numbered accounts owned by foreign clients—the sayan had been asked to touch upon these—no one knew quite how many there were, but rumor hinted at deposits of hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, if this was so, and given that a percentage of the secretive clients would occasionally die without telling anyone else how to operate the account, the Winkler Bank was doing quite nicely, thank you.
&
nbsp; Gidi Barzilai, when he read the report, swore long and loud. Old Man Winkler might know nothing of the latest techniques of phone-tapping and computer-hacking, but his gut instincts were right on target.
During the years of Iraq’s buildup of her poison gas technology, every one of the purchases from Germany had been cleared through one of three Swiss banks. The Mossad knew that the CIA had hacked into the computers of all three banks—originally the search had been for laundered drug money—and it was this inside information that had enabled Washington to file its endless succession of protests to the German government about the exports. It was hardly the CIA’s fault that Chancellor Helmut Kohl had contemptuously rejected every one of the protests; the information had been perfectly accurate.
If Gidi Barzilai thought he was going to hack into the Winkler Bank central computer, he was mistaken; there wasn’t one. That left room-bugging, mail-interception, and phone-tapping. The chances were, none of these would solve his problem.
Many bank accounts need a Losungswort , a coded password, to operate them, to effect withdrawals and transfers. But account holders can usually use such a password to identify themselves in a phone call or a fax, as well as in a letter. The way the Winkler Bank seemed to operate, a high-value numbered account owned by a foreign client such as Jericho would have had a much more complicated system for its operation; either a formal appearance with ample identification by the account holder, or a written mandate prepared in a precise form and manner, with precise coded words and symbols appearing at precisely the preagreed places.
Clearly, the Winkler Bank would accept an in-payment from anyone, anytime, anywhere. The Mossad knew that because it had been paying Jericho his blood money by transfers to an account inside Winkler that was identified to them by a single number. Persuading the Winkler Bank to make a transfer out would be a whole different affair.
Somehow, from inside the dressing gown where he spent most of his life listening to church music, Old Man Winkler seemed to have guessed that illegal information-interception technology would outpace normal information-transfer techniques. Damn and blast the man.