But this wasn’t about my education or my job or my qualifications or lack thereof. Something else had angered Yael, and I still had no idea what. For the moment, I needed to stay calm and pass her test.
“Well, Miss Katzir, let’s see,” I began. “As a young man in his thirties, Muhammad used to climb up into the caves of Mount Hira, not far from Mecca, to pray and to meditate. As I recall, he began having dreams and visions in the year AD 610, which would have made him about forty years old. At first he couldn’t decide if it was Allah or Satan speaking to him. I think it turned out to be his first wife, Khadijah, who convinced her husband he was hearing the voice of Allah. She ended up becoming his initial convert. She encouraged him to keep going to the cave and listening to the voice. And soon Muhammad came to believe that Allah was commanding him to proclaim a new message to the pagans on the Arabian peninsula.”
I paused for a moment to gather my thoughts, then looked back at Yael. “It was about ten years later—around the year 620—that he experienced what became known as the Night Vision and the Ascension. Muslims believe the angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad in Arabia and gave him a mystical winged horse, or maybe a donkey, named Buraq. If I remember, one hadith says that Buraq bucked when Muhammad tried to mount him, but Gabriel put his hand on the winged creature and rebuked him. Anyway, this creature ostensibly flew through the night sky and took Muhammad to ‘the farthest mosque,’ otherwise known as ‘the mosque in the corner.’ Today it’s called Al-Aksa Mosque.”
“In Jerusalem?” Yael challenged, showing no evidence she was impressed by my answer thus far.
“Well, nobody actually knows for sure where ‘the mosque in the corner’ was located,” I replied.
“What are you talking about?” Yael snapped, suddenly pacing again. “Every Muslim on the planet claims Jerusalem is their third-holiest city, right after Mecca and Medina.”
“They do,” I agreed. “But the Qur’an never actually mentions Jerusalem. Not by name. Not even once. And of course, there was no mosque on the Temple Mount in AD 620. When the mosque was later built there, it was named Al-Aksa to comport with sura seventeen. So how could Muhammad have flown to a mosque that didn’t exist? But that’s a different discussion.”
“Go on,” she said, circling the table. “What about the Ascension?”
“Well, again, according to the Qur’an and the hadiths, once he arrived at the mosque in the corner, Muhammad prayed and earnestly sought the counsel of Allah,” I explained, straining to remember everything I’d ever read or been taught on the subject. I tried hard not to ad lib or embellish, knowing I couldn’t afford even one false step. “As I recall, it was at this time that Allah supposedly reassured Muhammad that he was on the right path, that he was doing the right thing, that despite all the opposition he was encountering, he was in fact submitting to the divine will. Then Muhammad was told to climb up a ladder—the Mi’raj—right up into the seven levels of heaven, where he met and spoke with the prophets of old—prophets like Abraham and Moses and even Jesus. These revered holy men, according to the ancient Islamic texts, assured Muhammad that he was one of them, that he was a true prophet just like they were, and that he was truly hearing the voice of God.”
Every eye turned back to Yael. It was as if we were playing singles at Wimbledon. Serve. Smash. Return. Smash. But I wasn’t done yet.
“What I find particularly interesting is that this all came during—or perhaps right after—what Muslims call the Year of Sorrow. That was the fateful year that Muhammad’s beloved uncle died. Then his first wife, Khadijah, died as well. This was the wife he truly loved, the wife he’d apparently been faithful to. In fact, he didn’t marry another woman until Khadijah passed away. So these dreams and visions were occurring during a time when Muhammad was grieving—and facing many other challenges as well. Most Jews and Christians, unsurprisingly, were rejecting his insistence that he was their rightful religious leader and that Islam was the divine successor to Judaism and Christianity. Some people were saying he was a heretic, that he was listening to the voice of Satan, not God. So this was a time of great distress and confusion. Muhammad was in deep mourning. He was desperately seeking a sign from Allah, and in the Night Vision and the Ascension, he suddenly believed that he had received what he had asked for.”
Yael just glared at me, and that’s when Shalit stepped in. “Perhaps it’s fair to say Mr. Collins knows the story of the Night Vision and the Ascension after all,” said the Mossad chief.
“Maybe so, but I’m still waiting for him to answer my questions,” Yael shot back.
“Which were what exactly?” Shalit asked. “Remind me.”
“She’s asking why,” I said before she could respond. “Why would Khalif reference the festival marking these events? What exactly is he trying to say? Is he hatching a plot connected somehow to the Al-Aksa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock? Is he going to attack Jerusalem?”
Yael stood motionless.
“And?” Shalit prompted. “Do you have an answer, Mr. Collins?”
“My answer is Yael’s answer,” I said, wanting her to know I’d been listening.
“Meaning what?” Shalit asked.
“Meaning I can’t say whether Khalif is planning to strike Jerusalem and the Temple Mount,” I said. “But Yael said it herself. The reason Khalif released this video isn’t to tell Muslims where he’s going to strike next. It’s to tell Muslims when he’s going to strike, during the festival marking the Night Vision and the Ascension.”
“Precisely,” she said. “And when is that?”
Everyone looked at me. I struggled to recall the date. I so wanted to pass this test. But in the end I simply could not remember. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Do you?” Shalit asked, turning back to Yael.
“Of course,” she said.
“Then when?” he asked.
“This year the festival occurs on April 3.”
My stomach suddenly tightened.
That was only thirty-three days away.
61
Yael’s analysis sparked a firestorm.
For much of the next hour, the group dissected every sentence—every word—of Khalif’s statement. For now the group was split. Fingers and Dutch agreed with Yael that Khalif was marking April 3 as the date of the next attacks. Trotsky and Gingy weren’t convinced. Shalit didn’t take a side. Nobody asked me for any further analysis.
In the end Shalit told the group he wanted them to test their theories against every other piece of intel they had on Khalif and ISIS. He said he was supposed to brief Prime Minister Eitan in person at four o’clock that afternoon. Thus he needed the best they had no later than three, when he would be boarding a chopper to the Kirya—the IDF’s headquarters—in Tel Aviv.
Soon everyone had been dismissed, leaving the conference room and racing back to their workstations. It was closing in on noon. They had less than three hours, and the stakes were high.
“So what do you think?” Shalit asked me as he pushed away from the table.
I hadn’t left the conference room. I had no workstation, no place to go.
“I think you’ve put together an impressive team,” I said.
He nodded. “With an impressive leader, no?”
“Very,” I said.
“Not so happy with you.”
“Apparently not.”
“Don’t forget she’s got a very personal stake in the success of this mission,” Shalit added. “That’s why she’s good. That’s why I have no doubt she’ll succeed.”
“That’s why you recruited her away from the prime minister’s office.”
“That’s why she said yes.”
“And that’s why you let me join your team—because I’ve got a personal stake in this too?” I asked.
“Of course,” Shalit replied. “You’ve just met the best of the best, J. B. These guys are in a class of their own. But you two are the key. You and Yael will work harder and longer, driv
e deeper, look more thoroughly, and think about this mission every moment of every day, because it’s not a job for you. You’re not here because you’re experts. Neither of you. You’re here—both of you—because you want Abu Khalif found and taken out even more than I do.”
He leaned forward. “Now tell me: does it concern you that the team is divided?”
“You mean that they almost came to blows over the significance of April 3?”
“Exactly.”
“Welcome to Israel,” I said. “Five Israelis. Six opinions. Right?”
“For better or for worse,” Shalit said, nearly smiling, though not quite.
“For better,” I said. I was actually glad to see how divided the team was. It required each side to dig hard, fast, and deep into all the intelligence they had at their disposal to see if there was anything that would bolster their case. That was good. Skepticism in the face of even the most impressive intelligence analysis was not only justified but essential.
Groupthink, by contrast, was dangerous, especially when it came to national security. Too often it led to blind spots, caused people to be unaware of their own misguided assumptions and biases. Too many in Washington had been blindsided by the catastrophic attacks by the Islamic State. Some of the best and the brightest intelligence, security, and political officials in the world had tragically missed the signs of what was coming.
Shalit motioned for me to come and sit beside him. When I did, he said very quietly, “James, it’s time. Tell me what you have.”
I nodded. He was right; it was time. I walked him through the three names Khachigian had left me, the research I’d done on them, and all the information on each that I’d been able to track down.
Shalit listened carefully but looked disappointed. When I was finished, he sighed. “I’d expected more.”
“More names?”
“More quality. More depth. These men are fine. I know two of them—Pritchard and Hussam. They were competent operatives in their day. But Pritchard was fired and now he’s dead, and Hussam was jailed, and these are the names you bring me?”
“I’m not giving you these names,” I clarified. “Bob Khachigian is. I don’t know any of the three. I have no idea what they can tell me. But if Bob says these guys can help me, I believe him.”
Shalit sighed again. “I certainly agree with your assessment of Bob. He was a great spy. He was a great analyst and one of the finest men to lead the CIA, certainly the finest I ever knew. I’m skeptical about these names, but clearly he must have known something I don’t.”
“So?” I asked.
“So let’s get moving,” he replied. “We trusted him in life. Why not trust him in death? I’m putting you and Yael on a plane to Cairo this afternoon. You’re going to start with Walid Hussam and find out where this trail leads.”
62
Walid Hussam was not the first name on Khachigian’s list.
But Shalit had insisted on sending us to see Hussam first. Initially I’d pushed back, arguing Yael and I should go first to Dubai and meet Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE’s intelligence chief and the only name on the list who was still an active intelligence agent. That had been my original plan, and I thought we should stick to it.
But Shalit had overruled me. “Cairo first, then Dubai,” he’d said, explaining that he had better contacts in the Egyptian capital.
Upon hearing this new development, Yael was not happy, to say the least. I could clearly hear her even through the closed conference room door as she told Shalit she had better things to do than go off on a wild-goose chase, spending what could be upwards of four or five days crisscrossing the Arab world with me. But in the end Shalit outranked and overruled her, just as he had me. She might not like it—she didn’t, in fact—but Yael was stuck with me now.
Just after 3 p.m., with the initial written assessment of Khalif’s videotaped address complete, Yael and I said good-bye to the team, headed upstairs to the flight deck, and approached the Sikorsky S-76 executive helicopter piloted by two Israeli air force colonels who would fly us to the airport where my private jet was waiting. I stepped forward and offered to help Yael, who looked a little uncomfortable with the cast on her left arm, into the chopper. She ignored me and did just fine on her own, taking the leather seat immediately behind the pilots. So much for chivalry, I thought as I scrambled into the back and slid across the leather bench to the left window seat. Two security guys climbed in next and sat beside me. Then one of the ground crew shut the door behind us and tapped the fuselage twice. The moment we were all buckled in, we lifted off and headed south.
As the chopper banked to the right—southwest—I snuck a glance at Yael. She looked exhausted, and while the wounds to her face and neck were healing nicely, short of extensive plastic surgery, they were going to leave some serious scars. It didn’t matter. She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever met, even though she hadn’t said a word to me since storming out of her meeting with Shalit.
I gazed out the window at the Jezreel Valley below and thought of Matt. I tried to picture what he was doing just then. It was only eight in the morning on St. Thomas. He was probably having breakfast and reading his Bible out on the veranda overlooking Magens Bay. He was probably praying for me, and even though I still didn’t believe what he believed, I was grateful.
I grabbed my briefcase from the floor and retrieved the briefing paper I’d prepared at Shalit’s request, summarizing my research on Walid Hussam. If I was going to meet this guy, Ari had told me, I might as well know as much as possible about him.
Hussam had been born in 1954 in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. He was only thirteen in 1967, too young to fight in the war against Israel. But in 1973, when Egypt launched a surprise attack against “the criminal Zionists” on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Hussam was on the front lines as a nineteen-year-old deputy commander. When his superior officer was mortally wounded in a ferocious firefight with IDF forces near the Gaza Strip, Hussam had to take over. His bravery in combat caught the attention of those up the chain of command.
In time, Hussam became the aide-de-camp for Omar Suleiman, the notorious head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service. After Suleiman fired two of his deputies and another was later mysteriously murdered on a visit to Tripoli, the spy chief named Hussam his new deputy in late 2009. But soon the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia and rapidly spread to the streets of Egypt. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak promoted Suleiman to vice president on January 29, 2011. That same day, Mubarak promoted Hussam to become head of EGIS.
But by then all hell was breaking loose. Millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets, burning cars, burning police stations, calling for Mubarak to step down, calling for the entire Egyptian government to be arrested and tried on charges of treason. To Hussam’s astonishment, even the White House was openly calling for Mubarak to step down. Once that happened, it didn’t require being an intelligence professional to read the handwriting on the wall. Mubarak was going down.
On June 30, 2012, the once unthinkable occurred. The Muslim Brotherhood was swept into power, and that very day, Hussam found himself arrested, thrown into prison with thousands of other Mubarak loyalists, tortured, and left to rot and die without a trial.
What no one had foreseen that day, not even Hussam, was how rapidly the Egyptian people would then turn against the Brotherhood and their leaders. Less than a year later, a stunning 20 million Egyptians—roughly a quarter of the population—signed a petition calling for the Brotherhood to relinquish power. Many turned out on the streets, demanding the same. They didn’t want Sharia law imposed on them. With Egypt teetering on the brink of full-blown civil war, the army finally stepped in, launching a coup in late June of 2013. It was bloody but successful. Within weeks, the military was in full control of the capital and the country. Most of the Brotherhood leadership was dead or in prison, and suddenly Hussam and thousands of his colleagues found themselves released from prison.
&nb
sp; Now sixty-four, Hussam was out of the intelligence game. He hadn’t reentered government but had started teaching at various universities. He wrote a book on the Arab Spring, though it sold poorly. He joined a few corporate boards, probably making a few bucks, and spent far more time with his children and grandchildren than he ever had.
How he was going to help us find Abu Khalif, I had no clue. But like Shalit, I was operating on the basis of my confidence in Robert Khachigian. He hadn’t steered me wrong yet. Except perhaps with Laura.
Just then our chopper touched down. When the door opened, it was immediately apparent we were not at Ben Gurion International Airport but rather at an airfield in Herzliya, the upscale community up the coast from Tel Aviv. I saw my Learjet being fueled up and readied for departure. How it had gotten here, I had no idea. Who had authorized the flight, I had no idea. Why I hadn’t been told a thing about it, I also had no idea. But frankly, at the moment, I didn’t care. I was in the world of the Israeli Mossad. They operated differently than the New York Times. I knew I’d better get used to it, and fast.
63
HERZLIYA, ISRAEL
Yael and I hurriedly boarded, took our seats, buckled up, and roared down the runway.
The whole process from start to finish took less than fifteen minutes, and it was a good thing we’d moved so quickly. It was 4:37. It was already getting dark. A storm was rolling in, and winter rains were pelting the plane.
As we reached cruising altitude, I was tempted to lean my chair back and get some rest, which I desperately needed. So did Yael. Instead, Yael opened her laptop and buried herself in her work.
I stared out the window, trying desperately to think of something to say. “Yael, do you remember General El-Badawy?” I asked.