Counterintuitively, perhaps, the more I read, the calmer I became. Shalit knew what I was asking. He knew my weaknesses and liabilities. He knew the risks I was taking as well as the risks he and his government were taking. Yet he was bringing me in anyway. It wasn’t out of charity. Shalit had to sincerely believe I brought something critical to the table and possessed something he urgently needed. It wasn’t just the three names. It was my unique set of experiences and insights. I really did know Abu Khalif in a way no other Westerner did.
When I finished reading the final page, I went back and signed each document one by one. When I was done, the major led me along a darkened basement corridor to a lounge, where we met Shalit.
“All set?” he asked.
I nodded.
“You’re sure?” he pressed.
“I’m sure.”
“Good.”
Shalit led me through a labyrinth of corridors and past a series of workstations where analysts quietly labored on computers displaying satellite images of various remote towns and villages. Then we arrived at a large conference room. A guard holding an Uzi stood outside the door. At Shalit’s command, he stepped aside. Shalit then entered a password into a keypad and opened the door.
The moment we entered, everyone stood to attention.
Even Yael Katzir.
55
RAMAT DAVID AIR BASE, ISRAEL
“At ease,” Shalit said, taking a seat at the head of the large oak table.
The group of five—four men and Yael—just stared at me. One guy’s mouth literally dropped open. Yael’s hand shot to her mouth, perhaps to prevent a similar reaction. I scanned each face and forced myself to look at her last. I saw shock in her eyes along with a flash of anger. The shock I could understand. She knew I was here in Israel because I’d told her in numerous e-mails and text messages over the last few days, though clearly Shalit hadn’t told her he was bringing me to Ramat David. But the hostility? Where was that coming from?
“I said, at ease,” Shalit repeated.
The team members took their seats. Most of them were dressed casually—jeans, sweaters, and a few plaid wool shirts over white cotton T-shirts—suggesting that none of them were military. Not currently, anyway, though they certainly all had been and probably still held fairly senior ranks in the reserves. They were older than most of the others I’d seen on the base, ranging in age from late forties to early sixties, making Yael—still in her early thirties—the youngest person in the room.
I tried to pick out the team leader. A guy on the far side of the table struck me as the most likely suspect. He was the oldest of the group, aside from Shalit. He was also the only one wearing a crisp, white oxford shirt and had a pair of reading glasses dangling from a chain around his neck. His small, intense eyes stayed locked on me even as the others shifted their attention to the head of the table.
Shalit motioned for me to take an empty chair to his left. The table was cluttered with open notebook computers, thick three-ring binders, and half-filled ashtrays. The walls were covered with maps, satellite imagery, and eight-by-ten black-and-white photos of various ISIS commanders, all high-value targets. A much-larger photo of Abu Khalif—a screen capture from the video of him speaking to the American people from Alqosh—was hanging front and center.
I noticed, too, photos of Jamal Ramzy and Tariq Baqouba, each with a big red X drawn over their faces. Ramzy had been the commander of ISIS rebel forces in Syria until Yael and I had gunned him down in the king’s palace in Amman. Baqouba, his replacement, had been taken out by an American drone strike just days earlier.
As I sat down, I looked back at Yael. Her eyes were riveted on me. I couldn’t read what she was thinking. Her expression was inscrutable. But one thing was clear: until sixty seconds ago, the last thing she had expected was for me to walk through that door.
“I’d like you all to meet Mr. Mike McClaire,” the Mossad chief began.
The room was deathly quiet. Was this a joke? they were wondering. They didn’t say it, but I could see it in their eyes.
“Officially, Mr. McClaire is an ISIS specialist on loan to us from NATO—from the Canadian government, to be precise,” Shalit said. “That’s our cover story. Of course, like everything else that happens in this room, on this floor, in this building, and on this base, Mr. McClaire’s presence here is classified. You won’t discuss his presence or reveal his identity to anyone outside this room. Not to your best friend on this base. Not to the janitor in the mess hall. Not to the minister of defense. Not to the prime minister himself. And certainly to no one on the outside. Any violation will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Are we clear?”
Everyone nodded.
“To anyone who asks about him, he’s just ‘the new guy.’ If anyone has questions—they shouldn’t; they know better, but if they do—you tell them to come to me. Understood?”
More nods.
“Good. Now, we all know who this really is,” Shalit continued. “And you are all well aware that aside from the president of the United States, there is no one Abu Khalif wants to kill more than Mr. Collins here. His life and the lives of his family are in grave danger. Thus, I need you to treat him as one of the team and protect him like family. Am I clear?”
Reluctantly I scanned the room and made eye contact with each one as they all nodded again. Even Yael.
Still, Shalit could read the room better than I could, and he addressed their understandable cynicism head-on. “Okay, now why have I brought a civilian—an American, a goy, and a journalist, no less—to our illustrious little base camp here on Ramat David? One reason and one reason only: James Bradley Collins is the only person in this room who has ever actually met Abu Khalif. He’s the only one of us who has ever spoken to him, ever looked into his eyes. He’s also the only one of us who has had family members murdered by Khalif’s men. He found him before. He’s going to do it again with our help. And together we’re going to take him out once and for all. Any questions?”
There were none. Or rather, there were a thousand, but no one was stupid enough to ask them.
“Fine,” Shalit said. “Now let’s get to work. Miss Katzir, would you introduce your team to Mr. Collins?”
Her team?
Shalit hadn’t mentioned that.
56
“Of course, sir,” Yael replied.
She took off her reading glasses and set them on the notebook in front of her. Then she went around the table and gave me the first name and brief background of each of her colleagues. I assumed the names were false and didn’t even try to remember them. The backgrounds, though, were fascinating.
First, on my immediate left, wearing the oxford shirt, was a dark-skinned and somewhat brooding Sephardic Jew of Yemeni origin with closely cropped graying hair and two fingers missing from his right hand. He’d lost them when wrestling a hand grenade away from a Black September member in Beirut, Yael said, and he was lucky to be alive. Now in his early sixties, I guessed, the man was a thirty-two-year veteran of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, roughly equivalent to the American FBI. He was, Yael noted, the most experienced tracker of high-value targets in the Shin Bet and had been highly decorated.
Sitting beside him was a Russian immigrant who, to me at least, bore a striking resemblance to Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution and the founder of the Red Army. Thin and wiry—almost gaunt—he had a salt-and-pepper mustache and matching goatee even uglier than mine. But unlike me, he had a wild, unkempt shock of graying hair and wore round, black-rimmed spectacles. Yael explained that years before, the man’s father had been the KGB’s station chief in Baghdad, Cairo, and later in Damascus before being posted in Vienna, where he walked into the Israeli embassy one fall Friday and defected. Remarkably, nobody in the Kremlin had ever so much as suspected that the family was Jewish. Today, she concluded, this “son of the KGB” was now the Mossad’s most senior analyst of Islamic terror movements.
> Across the table sat a short, stocky redhead in his mid- to late fifties who Yael said was a major general in the Israeli military and one of the top analysts from Unit 8200, Israel’s signal intelligence–gathering operation, roughly equivalent to the NSA. His father had been a top Mossad agent serving in Arab lands, and his mother was an English teacher who, despite her husband’s job, was a peacenik through and through. Little did she know what her only son had grown up to do. Even today, his mother thought he was an executive with HOT, the Israeli cable TV company. Instead, he’d become one of the best Arabic speakers on her team, Yael said, not to mention the best chef she’d ever met in Israel. “His ginger couscous is to die for,” she concluded.
I’d just learned I had made another mistake. Not only had I wrongly ID’d the guy in the oxford as the team leader, it now turned out that we actually did have an active military man—a senior officer, no less—in our midst, despite the fact that at the moment he wasn’t wearing a uniform. Zero for two, I thought. How exactly was I supposed to add value to this team?
Next to the redhead sat a rather tall, well-built man in his late forties, perhaps early fifties, with thinning, sandy-blond hair and a face that struck me as Swedish or Danish or perhaps Norwegian. Yael explained he was a highly decorated—but now officially retired—former commander of the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s most elite commando unit. No Israeli had personally captured or killed more high-value targets than he had, Yael said, and his ability to drive the intel-gathering process in order to produce hard, clear, actionable, accurate information that led to the actual takedown of HVTs was unparalleled in the Israeli military. And by the way, she added, he’s from Holland.
Well, I thought, I’d been close. Still, it had been a foul ball, at best. At this point my batting average was .000. At least no one else in the room knew it.
So here they were—the team Yael had assembled to hunt down Abu Khalif—Israel’s best and brightest. Fingers, Trotsky, Gingy, and Dutch.
All but Dutch were native Arabic speakers. They’d learned the language growing up, not in the army or university. They all had significant time operating in the Arab world as spies or commandos. And they had real-world military experience, including decades of experience searching for high-value targets.
As Yael added some details and explained their mandate, I had my first chance in two full months to look at her. She was breathtaking in a chocolate-brown sweater, black bomber jacket, faded blue jeans, and brown leather boots, and it was all I could do to stay focused and listen carefully and retain all the details she was saying. Even with the scars on her face and neck, visible despite the fact she was growing out her hair to cover them up, she was beautiful. Even with her left arm in a cast. Even though she had clearly lost weight. Even with the obvious lack of consistent sleep, the sadness in her eyes, and the dark rings underneath them. I found her stunning. I couldn’t help it. I was falling for this girl, no matter how little she reciprocated.
“Thank you,” Shalit said when Yael was finished. “Now, as all of you except Mr. Collins know, I’ve just gotten back from London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome. I met with each of their intel chiefs. I reviewed all they have on ISIS. And the bottom line is I’m coming back empty-handed. Their files are virtually blank. None of them have any real assets in Syria to speak of. None of them have penetrated any ISIS cells. They have no idea where Abu Khalif is, and frankly they don’t seem to care all that much.”
“Then what are they doing all day?” Fingers asked.
“Hoping against hope they can identify and thwart the next terror attack in their own countries,” Shalit replied. “They’re purely in defensive mode and have little interest in going on offense. The head of MI6 told me ISIS has weaponized the Syrian refugees coming into the U.K. He and his team are tracking twenty-two different ISIS cells right now. The Brits are identifying a new one every few days. He said he and his team are drowning in refugees. His people can’t possibly vet them fast enough. They’re trying to watch to see who links up with these terror cells. They’re trying to keep them from buying weapons. But they’re completely overwhelmed. Yet the prime minister keeps letting more and more refugees into the country despite all the polls that show the public’s concern rising. And in every other capital, I heard essentially the same story.”
“So once again, we’re on our own,” said Dutch.
It wasn’t a question. It was a cynical, almost bitter statement of fact, and Shalit made no attempt to tell him he was wrong.
57
“Okay, now tell our guest where we are at the moment,” Shalit ordered.
“Honestly?” Yael replied. “Nowhere.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Where do I start?” Yael replied, her body tense and her eyes cold. “Lots of reasons, but at the top of my list at the moment would be the Americans.”
“Meaning President Taylor isn’t taking the hunt for Abu Khalif seriously, isn’t willing to sign an executive order to take him out, and isn’t willing to authorize an invasion of Syria to find him?” I asked, sure we agreed on that much, at least.
But Yael threw a curveball. “No, meaning the White House is obsessed with drone strikes,” she replied. “They keep finding ISIS leaders and killing them, one after another after another.”
Now I was confused. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
“No, Mr. Collins, it’s not a good thing—not if the objective is finding the head of ISIS,” she said. “Last week my team tracked down Tariq Baqouba, the number-three guy, head of all military ops for the caliphate. We hunted him down. We knew exactly where he was. Then, as good allies, we dutifully briefed the Americans, told them his precise location, and asked for their assistance in capturing him. Next thing we know, Baqouba is killed in a drone strike and President Taylor is boasting about it on TV. There’s just one problem. You don’t kill a man like Tariq Baqouba. You snag him and shake him until he tells you everything. Killing him gives you a headline for a day. Capturing him gives you a gold mine of intelligence that can keep you going for weeks, sometimes months. And this wasn’t the only instance. Yet no matter how hard we protest, the president won’t listen to us. He’s become Mr. Drone Strike, and I’m telling you, that’s never going to get us to Abu Khalif.”
“Whoa, whoa, Katzir, let’s pull this thing back,” Shalit said. “We’re not here to bash the chief executive of our most important ally. Let’s focus on what we know and don’t know. A month ago, you all thought Khalif was in Mosul. Walk Mr. Collins through what you’ve learned since then.”
“Fine,” she said, glaring at me, clearly unhappy with the request but even more unhappy, it seemed, with my very presence. “Well, we know for certain that Khalif was in Mosul last November, because you interviewed him there, right? And we know for certain that he spent at least some time in Alqosh because after President Taylor was captured in Jordan, the video ISIS released showed both the president and Khalif together there. Unfortunately, Khalif somehow slipped away in the hours before coalition forces took Alqosh and rescued the president. So the first question is, where did Khalif go after Alqosh?”
“Do you believe he went back to Mosul?” I asked.
“We do,” Yael confirmed. “Mosul was the perfect place to hide. It used to be a city of about two and a half million people, one of Iraq’s largest. When ISIS took over in the summer of ’14, a good deal of the population fled. Still, there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis living in Mosul last December. Khalif had allies there. He had a network of safe houses there. He had money, weapons, communications equipment, everything he needed to hunker down and ride out the storm.”
“But Khalif obviously heard the rumblings that U.S. forces were coming to retake Mosul,” I said.
“Correct,” Yael agreed. “For some bizarre reason that eludes everyone around this table, including yours truly, the White House and Pentagon were telegraphing the impending military operation for the better part of a year. President Taylor—big surprise—had be
en dithering, refusing to sign off on the operation for this reason or that. But the ISIS attack on the summit in Amman and the president’s capture were the last straw. The moment Taylor was safely back in the White House, he finally authorized the formation of a Sunni Arab alliance—Kurds, Egyptians, Saudis, and the emirates, plus whatever King Abdullah could spare from Jordan—to come help the U.S. liberate Mosul and all of northern Iraq. The Arab leaders all said yes. They all sent men and matériel. But when the coalition stormed through Mosul, Khalif was nowhere to be found. He’d slipped the noose again.”
“To where?” I asked.
“Well, that’s the billion-dollar question, isn’t it?”
Yael looked at Trotsky.
The Russian immediately took the baton. “We all would have said Raqqa,” he began, referring to the Syrian city east of Aleppo with roughly a quarter of a million people, making it the sixth-largest city in a country that was imploding by the hour.