Martin nodded. He had heard of the tactic. It was designed to monitor Iraqi air-defense reactions to such seeming attacks on their air space, forcing them to “illuminate” their radar screens and SAM missile sights, thus revealing their exact positions to the watching AWACS circling out over the Gulf.
“The speaker refers to the Beni el Kalb, ‘the sons of dogs,’ meaning the Americans, and the listener laughs and suggests Iraq is wrong to respond to these tactics, which are evidently meant to trap them into revealing their defensive positions.
“Then the speaker says something that we can’t work out. There’s some garbling at this point, static or something. We can enhance most of the message to clear the interference, but the speaker muffles his words at this point.
“Anyway, the listener gets very annoyed and tells him to shut up and get off the line. Indeed, the listener—who we believe to be in Baghdad—slams the phone down. It’s the last two sentences I’d like you to hear.”
After lunch, Plummer drove Martin over to the monitoring complex, which was still functioning precisely as on a weekday. GCHQ operates on a seven-days-per-week schedule. In a soundproofed room rather like a recording studio, Plummer asked one of the technicians to play the mystery tape. He and Martin sat in silence as the guttural voices from Iraq filled the room.
The conversation began as Plummer had described. Toward the end, the Iraqi who had initiated the call appeared to become excited. The voice pitch rose.
“Not for long, Rafeek. Soon we shall...”
Then the clutter began, and the words were garbled. But their effect on the man in Baghdad was electric.
He cut in.
“Be silent, ibn-al-gahba.”
Then he slammed the phone down, as if suddenly and horribly aware that the line was not secure.
The technician played the tape three times and at slightly different speeds.
“What do you think?” asked Plummer.
“Well, they’re both members of the Party,” said Martin. “Only Party hierarchs use the address Rafeek , or Comrade.”
“Right, so we have two bigwigs chatting about the American arms buildup and the U.S. Air Force provocations against the border.”
“Then the speaker gets excited, probably angry, with a hint of exultation. Uses the phrase ‘not for long.’
”
“Indicating some changes are going to be made?” asked Plummer.
“Sounds like it,” said Martin.
“Then the garbled bit. But look at the listener’s reaction, Terry. He not only slams the phone down, he calls his colleague ‘son of a whore.’ That’s pretty strong stuff, eh?”
“Very strong. Only the senior man of the two could use that phrase and get away with it,” said Martin.
“What the hell provoked it?”
“It’s the garbled phrase. Listen again.”
The technician played the single phrase again.
“Something about Allah?” suggested Plummer. “ ‘Soon we shall be with Allah? Be in the hands of Allah?’ ”
“It sounds to me like: ‘Soon we shall have ... something ... something ... Allah.’
“All right, Terry. I’ll go along with that. ‘Have the help of Allah,’ perhaps?”
“Then why would the other man explode in rage?” asked Martin. “Attributing the goodwill of the Almighty to one’s own cause is nothing new. Nor particularly offensive. I don’t know. Can you let me have a duplicate tape to take home with me?”
“Sure.”
“Have you asked our American cousins about it?”
“Of course. Fort Meade caught the same conversation, off a satellite. They can’t work it out, either. In fact, they don’t rate it highly. For them it’s on the back burner.”
Terry Martin drove home with the small cassette tape in his pocket. To Hilary’s considerable annoyance, he insisted on playing and replaying the brief conversation over and over again on their bedside cassette player. When he protested, Terry pointed out that Hilary sometimes worried and worried over a single missing answer in the Times crossword puzzle. Hilary was outraged at the comparison.
“At least I get the answer the following morning,” he snapped, and rolled over and went to sleep.
Terry Martin did not get the answer the following morning, or the next. He played his tape during breaks between lectures, and at other times when he had a few spare moments, jotting down possible alternatives for the jumbled words. But always the sense eluded him. Why had the other man in that conversation been so angry about a harmless reference to Allah?
It was not until five days later that the two gutturals and the sibilant contained in the garbled phrase made sense.
When they did, he tried to get hold of Simon Paxman at Century House, but he was told his contact was away until further notice. He asked to be put through to Steve Laing, but the head of Ops for the Mid-East was also not available.
Though he could not know it, Paxman was on an extended stay at the SIS headquarters in Riyadh, and Laing was visiting the same city for a major conference with Chip Barber of the CIA.
The man they called the “spotter” flew into Vienna from Tel Aviv via London and Frankfurt, was met by no one, and took a taxi from Schwechat Airport to the Sheraton Hotel, where he had a reservation.
The spotter was rubicund and jovial, an all-American lawyer from New York with documents to prove it. His American-accented English was flawless—not surprising, as he had spent years in the United States—and his German passable.
Within hours of arriving in Vienna, he had employed the secretarial services of the Sheraton to compose and draft a courteous letter on his law firm’s letterhead to a certain Wolfgang Gemütlich, vice-president of the Winkler Bank.
The stationery was perfectly genuine, and should a phone check be made, the signatory really was a senior partner at that most prestigious New York law firm, although he was away on vacation (something the Mossad had checked out in New York) and was certainly not the same man as the visitor to Vienna.
The letter was both apologetic and intriguing, as it was meant to be. The writer represented a client of great wealth and standing who now wished to make substantial lodgements of his fortune in Europe.
It was the client who had personally insisted, apparently after hearing from a friend, that the Winkler Bank be approached in the matter, and specifically the person of the good Herr Gemütlich.
The writer would have made a prior appointment, but both his client and the law firm placed immense importance upon utter discretion, avoiding open phone lines and faxes to discuss client business, so the writer had taken advantage of a European visit to divert to Vienna personally.
His schedule, alas, only permitted him three days in Vienna, but if Herr Gemütlich would be gracious enough to spare him an interview, he—the American—would be delighted to come to the bank.
The letter was dropped by the American personally through the bank’s mail slot during the night, and by noon of the next day, the bank’s messenger had deposited the reply at the Sheraton. Herr Gemütlich would be delighted to see the American lawyer at ten the following morning.
From the moment the spotter was shown in, his eyes missed nothing. He took no notes, but no detail escaped and none were forgotten. The receptionist checked his credentials, phoned upstairs to confirm he was expected, and the commissionaire took him up—all the way to the austere wooden door, upon which he knocked. Never was the spotter out of sight.
Upon the command “Herein,” the commissionaire opened the door and ushered the American visitor in, withdrawing and closing it behind him before returning to his desk in the lobby.
Herr Wolfgang Gemütlich rose from his desk, shook hands, gestured his guest to a chair opposite him, and resumed his place behind his desk.
The word Gemütlich in German means “comfortable,” with a hint of geniality. Never was a man less aptly named. This Gemütlich was thin to the point of cadaverous, in his early sixties, gray-suited, gray
-tied, with thinning hair and face to match. He exuded grayness. There was not a hint of humor in the pale eyes, and the welcoming smile of the papery lips was less a grin than the rictus of something on a slab.
The office conveyed the same austerity as its occupier; dark paneled walls, framed degrees in banking in place of pictures, and a large ornate desk, whose surface was bare of any hint of clutter.
Wolfgang Gemütlich was not a banker for fun; clearly, all forms of fun were something of which he disapproved. Banking was serious—more, it was life itself. If there was one thing that Herr Gemütlich seriously deplored, it was the spending of money. Money was for saving, preferably under the aegis of the Winkler Bank. A withdrawal could cause him serious acidic pain, and a major transfer from a Winkler account to somewhere else would ruin his entire week.
The spotter knew he was there to note and report back. His primary task, now accomplished, was to identify the person of Gemütlich for the yarid team out in the street. He was also looking for any safe that might contain the operational details of the Jericho account, as well as security locks, door bolts, alarm systems—in short, he was there to case the joint for an eventual burglary.
Avoiding specifics of the amounts his client wished to transfer to Europe but hinting at their immense size, the spotter kept the conversation to inquiring as to the level of security and discretion maintained by the Winkler Bank. Herr Gemütlich was happy to explain that numbered accounts with Winkler were impregnable and discretion was obsessive.
Only once during the conversation were they interrupted. A side door opened to admit a mouse of a woman, bearing three letters for signature. Gemütlich frowned at the nuisance.
“You did say they were important, Herr Gemütlich. Otherwise ...” said the woman. At second glance, she was not as old as her appearance would have indicated—perhaps forty. It was the scraped-back hair, the bun, the tweed suit, the lisle stockings, and flat shoes that suggested more.
“Ja, ja, ja...” said Gemütlich, and held out his hand for the letters. “Entschuldigung...,” he asked his guest.
He and the spotter had been using German, after establishing that Gemütlich spoke only halting English.
The spotter, however, got to his feet and bobbed a small bow at the newcomer.
“Grü ss Gott, Fräulein,” he said. She looked flustered. Gemütlich’s guests did not usually rise for a secretary. However, the gesture forced Gemütlich to clear his throat and mutter:
“Ah, yes, er—my private secretary, Miss Hardenberg.”
The spotter noted that, too, as he sat down.
When he was shown out, with assurances that he would offer his client in New York a most favorable account of the Winkler Bank, the regimen was the same as for entry. The commissionaire was summoned from the front hall and appeared at the door. The spotter made his farewells and followed the man out.
Together they went to the small, grille-fronted elevator, which clanked its way downward. The spotter asked if he might use the men’s room before he left. The commissionaire frowned as if such bodily functions were not really expected within the Winkler Bank, but he stopped the elevator at the mezzanine. Close to the elevator doors, he indicated to the spotter an unmarked wooden door, and the spotter went in.
It was clearly for the bank’s male employees: a single stall, a single booth, a handbasin and towel roll, and a closet. The spotter ran the taps to create noise and did a quick check of the room. A barred, sealed window, run through with the wires of an alarm system—possible, but not easy. Ventilation by automatic fan. The closet contained brooms, pans, cleaning fluids, and a vacuum cleaner. So they did have a cleaning staff. But when did they work? Nights or weekends? If his own experience was anything to go by, even the cleaner would work inside the private offices only under supervision. Clearly, the commissionaire or the nightwatch could easily be taken care of, but that was not the point. Kobi Dror’s orders had been specific: No clues to be left behind.
When he emerged from the men’s room, the commissionaire was still outside. Seeing that the broad marble steps to the lobby half a floor down were farther along the corridor, the spotter smiled, gestured to it, and strode along the corridor rather than take the elevator for such a short ride.
The commissionaire trotted after him, escorted him down to the lobby, and ushered him out of the door.
The spotter heard the big brass tongue of the self-locking mechanism close behind him. If the commissionaire were upstairs, he wondered, how would the female receptionist admit a client or messenger boy?
He spent two hours briefing Gidi Barzilai on the internal workings of the bank, so far as he had been able to observe them, and the report was gloomy. The head of the neviot team sat in, shaking his head.
They could break in, he said. No problem. Find the alarm system and neutralize it. But as for leaving no trace—that would be a bastard. There was a nightwatchman who probably prowled at intervals. And then, what would they be looking for? A safe? Where? What type? How old? Key or combination or both? It would take hours. And they would have to silence the nightwatch. That would leave a trace. But Dror had forbidden it.
The spotter flew out of Vienna and back to Tel Aviv the next day. That afternoon, from a series of photographs, he identified Wolfgang Gemütlich and, for good measure, Fräulein Hardenberg. When he had gone, Barzilai and the neviot team leader conferred again.
“Frankly, I need more inside information, Gidi. There’s too much I don’t know still. The papers you need—he must keep them in a safe. Where? Behind the paneling? A floor safe? In the secretary’s office?
In a special vault in the basement? We need inside information here.”
Barzilai grunted. Long ago, in training, one of the instructors had told them all: There is no such thing as a man with no weak point. Find that point, press the nerve, and he’ll cooperate. The following morning the whole yarid and neviot teams began an intensive surveillance of Wolfgang Gemütlich.
But the acidulous Viennese was about to prove the instructor wrong.
Steve Laing and Chip Barber had a major problem. By mid-November, Jericho had come up with his first response to the questions put to him via a dead-letter box in Baghdad. His price had been high, but the American government had made the transfer into the Viennese account without a murmur.
If Jericho’s information was accurate—and there was no reason to suspect it was not—then it was extremely useful. He had not answered all the questions, but he had answered some and confirmed others already half-answered.
Principally, he had named quite specifically seventeen locations linked to the production of weapons of mass destruction. Eight of these were locations already suspected by the Allies; of these, he had corrected the locations of two. The other nine were new information, chief among them the exact spot of the buried laboratory in which operated the functioning gas-diffusion centrifuge cascade for the preparation of bomb-grade uranium-235.
The problem was: How to tell the military, without blowing away the fact that Langley and Century had a high-ranking asset who was betraying Baghdad from the inside?
Not that the spymasters distrusted the military. Far from it, they were senior officers for a reason. But in the covert world there is an old and well-tested rule called “need to know.” A man who does not know something cannot let it slip, however inadvertently. If the men in civilian clothes simply produced a list of fresh targets out of nowhere, how many generals, brigadiers, and colonels would work out where it had come from?
In the third week of the month, Barber and Laing had a private meeting in the basement of the Saudi Defense Ministry, with General Buster Glosson, deputy to General Chuck Horner, who commanded the air war in the Gulf Theater.
Though he must have had a first name, no one ever referred to General Glosson as anything other than
“Buster,” and it was he who had planned and continued to plan the eventual comprehensive air attack on Iraq that everyone knew would have to precede an
y ground invasion.
London and Washington had long since concurred in the view that, regardless of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s war machine simply had to be destroyed, and that very much included the manufacturing capabilities for gas, germs, and nuclear bombs.
Before Desert Shield had finally destroyed any chance of a successful Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia, the plans for the eventual air war were well under way, under the secret code name of Instant Thunder. The true architect of that air war was Buster Glosson.
By November 16, the United Nations and various diplomatic chancelleries around the world were still scratching around for a “peace plan” to end the crisis without a shot being fired, a bomb dropped, or a rocket launched. The three men in the subterranean room that day all knew that such a call-it-all-off plan was just not going to happen.
Barber was concise and to the point: “As you know, Buster, we and the Brits have been trying to get hard identification of Saddam’s WMD facilities for months now.” The Air Force general nodded warily.
He had a map along the corridor with more pins than a porcupine, and each one was a separate bombing target. What now?
“So we started with the export licenses and traced the exporting countries, then the companies in those countries that had fulfilled the contracts. Then the scientists who fitted out the interiors of these facilities, but many of them were taken to the sites in black-windowed buses, lived on base, and never really knew where they had been.
“Finally, Buster, we checked with the construction people, the ones who actually built most of Saddam’s poison gas palaces. And some of them have come up roses. Real paydirt.”
Barber passed the new list of targets across to the general. Glosson studied them with interest. They were not identified with map grid references, such as a bomb-campaign plotter would need, but the descriptions would be enough to identify them from the air photos already available.
Glosson grunted. He knew some of the listings were already targets; others, with question marks, were now being confirmed; others were new. He raised his eyes.