‘I am instructed to tell you that my government and my country are very grateful,’ said the Mossad bureau chief. Both knew he was referring to the donation of the access codes to the master computer at Fordow.
This was praise indeed. In the spook world, and especially in the now-integrated cyber-world, the state of Israel stands head and shoulders above the rest. Mossad has agents worldwide and, in the Middle East, it is unmatchable. Buried beneath the Negev Desert outside Beer Sheva is a think tank known as Shmone Matayim, or Unit 8200. There are grouped the finest cyber-brains of the republic, cracking codes, creating fresh ones, penetrating hostile databases and monitoring a tidal wave of coded exchanges that flit between the agencies of its enemies – and its friends, for that matter. Unit 8200 never rests.
Sir Adrian’s career had largely preceded all this. He was a veteran in a world of youngsters. But some things do not change. There are friends, there are enemies, there are traitors, there are fools who talk too much. The days of brush passes in the cobbled alleys of Soviet-occupied Bratislava might seem a thing of the past, but the right piece of information in the right place at the right time could still alter history.
More to the point, a knife between the ribs or a hidden bomb beneath a car could still end a human life. And Sir Adrian knew perfectly well that the urbane bureau chief across the table represented an agency that had in no way abandoned these old ways when their use was thought necessary.
Backing the intelligence-harvesting of the Mossad is a range of Special Forces units that match the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and Special Reconnaissance Regiment of the British, or the USA’s Delta Boys, Navy SEALs and Special Activities Division of the CIA. The Sayeret Matkal specialist commandos, the Kidon (‘Bayonet’ or ‘Speartip’), who carry out overseas assassinations, and the even more mysterious Duvdevan, whose particular skill is to be so fluent in the languages and communities of the Middle East that they can infiltrate enemy countries, pass for a native and ‘sleep’ for years before going active.
All this Sir Adrian knew because, although the Middle East was never his area, it is common knowledge in espionage circles. So he was aware that Iran had to be impregnated with Israeli sleepers, some, no doubt, in high places. He sat quietly and waited for Avi Hirsch to start the ball rolling.
‘Let me be perfectly frank,’ said the Israeli, meaning the opposite. ‘It is clear that the source of the extraordinary information you gave us – the access codes to Fordow – must have come from some kind of cyber-genius. We have some very good code-crackers in Unit 8200, but your boy was ahead of them. He crossed the air gap, which is deemed impossible. That makes him very valuable, but also very vulnerable.’
‘Vulnerable?’
‘To revenge. With hindsight, the circumstances surrounding the disaster that struck the Admiral Nakhimov are becoming a little clearer. It looks as if someone took over the controls of that vessel.’
Sir Adrian replied in full. He said: ‘Ah.’
‘I can tell you that, just over a week after the Fordow burn-out, the Russian ambassador had a private meeting with the Ayatollah Khamenei. Any ideas?’
Sir Adrian said, ‘Ah,’ again.
‘You see, Sir Adrian, it has occurred to us that Moscow may now have informed Iran of the identity of this remarkable person you seem to have under wraps. And possibly of his location – that is, if they know it. If the Iranians have this information, they might consider revenge. Just a piece of friendly counsel. From a grateful agency. It might be wise to move him. Without delay. Iran also has killer units.’
‘Very kind of you,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘Most grateful. Certainly worth considering at the highest level.’
He knew what Avi Hirsch did not know. Moving Luke Jennings to a new and strange environment was easier said than done. Such was the youth’s mental state, so obsessional his attachment to his immediate surroundings, to the placing of every ornament in his living area, although above all to the arrangement of the algorithms in his computer, that a sudden uprooting and transfer to somewhere miles away could provoke a breakdown.
But it was a timely warning. Iran had suicide bombers, fanatics and professional killers at its disposal. Within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran, was the inner kernel, the Al-Quds Brigade, which had killed generally and selectively all over the Middle East. Was Chandler’s Court out of reach? Would the Prime Minister permit another shoot-out on the peaceful green grass of Warwickshire?
He doubted it. To avenge the naked attack with the Novichok nerve agent on the streets of Salisbury by grounding the Admiral Nakhimov had been retributive justice and, to the world, unprovable. To assist Israel in unmasking the nuclear treachery of Iran to the American President was one thing. To provoke revenge attacks by Middle East maniacs in the English countryside was another.
‘Tell me, Avi, if there were one other highly secret Iranian organization the contents of whose database your masters would value more than any other, which would it be? VAJA or FEDAT?’
The Israeli agent struggled to keep his composure. He was surprised that this elderly retired Kremlinologist knew of either of them. But Sir Adrian had been reading up. He knew that VAJA is the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and employs its own killers, at home but mainly abroad, and that FEDAT is the extremely secret nuclear weapons research and development HQ, operating under the Defence Ministry. It works from a modern complex of office blocks in central Tehran, right opposite Malek Ashtar University.
As he was driven away from the wrought-iron gates of the Israeli embassy Sir Adrian mused upon the chances that his latest ruse – doing the Israelis a second favour – would also work. Helping them wreck the centrifuges at Fordow had been helpful to world security. What he had in mind now was closer to home.
He needed a favour and, in his world, and that of Avi Hirsch, favours were purchased with favours.
Privately, Sir Adrian surmised that, whichever Tel Aviv chose, the other one would probably have been penetrated already by Unit 8200, tapping away at their keys under the Negev Desert outside Beer Sheva. Three days later he had his reply: FEDAT.
Chapter Thirteen
WHEN A NATION decides to try to become a nuclear power, vast amounts of records are generated. Iran made the decision many years ago, just after the ayatollahs took over and created their ruthless theocracy. The statement by Ayatollah Rafsanjani that Israel should be wiped from the face of the Earth was like a declaration of war – an undercover war, but still a war, to be fought out of sight and with no regard to the Geneva Convention or any accepted rules.
In declaring an existential war on the small and encircled country across the Arabian Peninsula, Iran was taking on the most formidable opponent for 2,000 miles around Tehran. Israel was born out of covert operations, first against the war-weary British of 1945 but since 1948 against the surrounding array of angry and vengeful Palestinian and Arab entities.
The Arabs were able to bring to their arsenal huge numbers, enormous space and limitless funds. The Israelis had none of these, but their weapons and skills were better. These included years of experience of undercover planning, plotting and executing. Add to that fanatical patriotism, the sure knowledge that to fail would be to die, a worldwide network of fellow Jews prepared to help in any way they could and upon first call, and the chameleon-like ability to pass for anything except an Israeli or a Jew.
Further elements were exceptional levels of technology. Faced with obliteration if it failed, Israel had no scruple about accepting help from white South Africa, another embattled minority, in acquiring the necessary quantities of refined uranium to become a nuclear power, setting up its own bomb factory at Dimona in the Negev Desert.
The payback was helping South Africa to build its own six atomic bombs, dismantled before the African National Congress took over under the Rainbow Coalition.
The undercover war raged for six decades, and still rages. Occasionally, the public see a tiny trace of it – a dead
body here, a destroyed facility there. The old Mossad LeAliyah Bet, set up to smuggle European Jews who had survived Hitler’s Holocaust out of the camps and into the Promised Land, was transformed into the Mossad and it became probably the most formidable secret intelligence service on earth.
The American CIA has its Special Activities Division, which will go to war and kill if so ordered. The British MI6 (or SIS) prefers to keep its hands as clean as possible and relies on the Special Forces regiments to do what has to be done. Israel also has its Special Forces, but the Mossad will unhesitatingly carry out ‘terminations’ at home or abroad when required. Hence the litany of selective assassinations of enemies across the world, either on the grounds of future danger to Israel or, as with those who slaughtered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, for retribution.
Under the Shah, Israel had little to fear from Iran, but after the arrival of the ayatollahs all that changed, and even more so after the Iranian mission to build its own nuclear bomb got under way. Iran armed herself with the Pasdaran, and its inner Al-Quds Brigade, tasked to execute acts of terrorism and murder both inside and outside that country. To that can be added the VAJA, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the SAVAMA, the secret police, with its chain of hideous prisons and torture facilities.
The body charged with creating that elusive nuclear bomb was and remains FEDAT, guardian of the vast archive of activities undertaken, purchases made, scientists suborned, location of stocks of fissionable materials and details of progress so far. For years, Iran perpetrated a cunning deception regarding all these records. As the world moved from paper records to computerized databases, Iran kept many of her secret records still in paper form. On the theory of ‘hidden in plain sight’, they were stored in an enormous but shabby warehouse in south Tehran, at a place called Shorabad.
Then they were stolen, the whole half-ton of them. It was the Mossad that accomplished the coup, although exactly how remains a mystery, save to its leadership in its equally anonymous office block north of Tel Aviv. Its agents seem to have gained access to the Shorabad warehouse and then, amazingly, shifted the whole cargo either to a helicopter landing pad or direct to a ship waiting offshore in the Gulf. And thence to Israel – round the Saudi peninsula and up the Red Sea.
But that harvest was not the whole story. The rest was still locked into the database of FEDAT, and that had not been penetrated. Yet. This penetration was Sir Adrian’s part of the deal he had struck with Avi Hirsch, who had clearly secured the go-ahead during a blitz visit to Tel Aviv, travelling incognito on El Al.
The Israeli executive jet was a Gulfstream VI and it landed at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. It belonged to an Israeli multimillionaire and was in the livery of his IT company. He was one of the Sayanim, the Helpers, a worldwide network of Jews who cannot be traced to Mossad but who will ‘lend a hand’ when asked. The executive jet was based not at Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, but at the military airbase of Sde Dov to the north. The British group had been waiting out of sight. They emerged after refuelling and were led by a senior NCO from ground-handling to the steps of the Gulfstream. The reception committee, who would accompany them to Israel, did not leave the aircraft.
The British party included a handsome blonde woman who was clearly very protective of a nervous, painfully shy and evidently unwilling teenage boy and his kid brother. Also in the group were three cyber-technicians who lived with him and his mother.
On board were the two-man crew and the stewardess, all in company uniforms. And there were four from Mossad, who only ever gave their forenames – Yeuval, Moshe, Mordechai, known as Motti, and Avram – and these were not their real names. Photography was forbidden – not that anyone wanted to produce a camera anyway.
The not-so-good news was that one of them was a traitor. Iranian-born and raised, he had been approached by VAJA and offered a very large sum if he would spy for them. Desirous one day of emigrating to the USA as a very rich man, he had succumbed.
The better news was that the Director of Mossad, Meyer Ben-Avi (codename Cufflinks), knew about this and was using him to transmit a torrent of disinformation to Tehran. Still, there were limits and, one day, not long in the future, there would be a pre-dawn arrest, a secret trial and a very long sentence in a below-ground cellar, or, more likely, a terminal car crash. After that a secret bank account which was not entirely secret would be seized and its contents donated to the widows and orphans fund.
It was an uneventful flight, and they landed at the old Ovda airport to be met by three limousines that would take them to the newly equipped villa on the outskirts of Eilat, well away from any tourist gaze but close enough to the water to permit daily bathing in the warm blue sea. The cove and bar that had been established by Rafi Nelson were just along the shore.
With the British party installed in their villa beside the waters of the Gulf of Eilat, the four escorting Mossad agents were released and flown back to Tel Aviv. One of them, the one known as Motti, had a major problem. He needed to report all he had learned to his paymasters in Tehran.
The disaster that had befallen the uranium purification plant at Fordow was by now common knowledge. But Motti also knew that, bizarre though it might seem, the computer genius who had obtained the access codes to the master computer at Fordow had been sitting a few feet away from him during the six-hour flight from Brize Norton to Eilat.
The British party did not speak a word of Hebrew and had conversed solely in English, but Motti was fluent in that also. The anxious teenager had sat at the rear of the Gulfstream with the blinds drawn over the portholes, refusing to look out and down at the seas and landmasses passing beneath the wing. He had buried himself in technical magazines which, for Motti, with his workaday grasp of normal computer systems, would have been impenetrable. He accepted only lemonade from the stewardess, smiling shyly when she addressed him. But it became clear that his was the mind that had cracked the codes of Fordow. Now, from his small flat outside Tel Aviv, Motti had to get that information a thousand miles east to Tehran.
He had been born and raised in Isfahan, the scion of a family from the tiny 30,000-strong Jewish community that still lived in Iran. In his late teens he had slipped away, crossing the border in the tumult as the Shah fell from power, and took advantage of the Law of Return to emigrate into Israel.
He could of course pass for an Iranian, speaking accentless Farsi. He volunteered for the Duvdevan, but it was judged that it would be too risky to return to Iran on secret missions with the country under the newly installed ayatollahs. Anyone from his past would be able to recognize and denounce him, even if by accident. Instead, he was inducted into Mossad itself.
Someone in Isfahan must have blabbed. He was approached in Old Jerusalem and offered a deal. For a large fee, to be repeated for future information, he should switch sides and work for VAJA. Thinking ahead to that rich retirement, he agreed.
His exposure as a ‘double’ was not long delayed. It is rare for an Israeli to change sides and work for Iran or any other Middle East dictatorship, but the reverse is not the case. In Iran, a population of many millions is held in subjection by the feared Pasdaran, and there are many prepared to work against it and who long for root-and-branch reform.
Meyer Ben-Avi ran a string of agents in Iran, including two inside VAJA, and the acquisition of Motti as a new recruit was rapid. It would have been simple to arrest Motti and break his resistance in a certain subterranean complex beneath the sands of the Negev, but Ben-Avi chose another way. Though it was expensive in manpower terms, he put the renegade under surveillance, eavesdropped on every syllable he uttered in voice or print and noted to whom he talked.
In espionage, deliberate disinformation is a powerful weapon and to have a ‘feed’ direct into the highest counsels of the enemy is very desirable. This was the role that Motti now unwittingly played.
The coming of completely digitized message-passing has made life much easier in every legitimate and legal activity.
It has also made interception child’s play. Faced with this, there has been a trend to go back to the old ways.
For years, Iran had managed to get away with storing its nuclear records on paper in the Shorabad warehouse, far away from any checks by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Faced with a blizzard of cyber-detection, secret agents have also resorted to the ways of yesteryear. Among these are the brush pass and the dead-letter box.
The former is simple but relies on split-second timing. The spy carries hundreds of classified documents miniaturized to microfilm in a canister no larger than a matchbox. This receptacle must pass absolutely unseen into the possession of his handler. But the spy is already suspected and is being tailed down the street by members of the secret police.
Without warning, he swerves off the pavement into the door of a bar or restaurant. Inside, the handler has left the bar and is walking towards the door. For half a second the two men brush past each other. The switch takes place. The police agents turn into the doorway. The handler politely steps aside to let them pass. Then he leaves with his cargo. The spy is now completely ‘clean’.
The dead-letter box, or ‘drop’, is simply a hole somewhere. It could be behind a loose brick in a wall, or in the trunk of a tree in a park. It is known only to the spy and their handler. The spy visits the drop, ensures he is not being watched and deposits the package, which passes out of sight. Later, a chalk mark appears in a pre-agreed place. The spy and the handler need never come within miles of each other. Alerted by the chalk mark, which he checks for regularly, that the drop contains a package, the handler visits and retrieves it. Motti had a drop behind an Arab coffee shop in Old (East) Jerusalem.