Chapter 10
Both the CIA and the SIS were in a hurry. Although little mention was made of it then or since, by late October there had been established in Riyadh a very large CIA presence and operation.
Before too long, the CIA presence was at loggerheads with the military chieftaincy a mile away in the warren of planning rooms beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry. The mood, certainly of the air generals, was one of conviction that with the skillful use of the amazing array of technical wizardry at their disposal, they could ascertain all they needed to know about Iraq's defenses and preparations.
And an amazing array it was. Apart from the satellites in space supplying their constant stream of pictures of the land of Saddam Hussein; apart from the Aurora and the U-2 doing the same but at closer range, there were other machines of daunting complexity dedicated to providing airborne information.
Another breed of satellite, in geosynchronous position, hovering over the Middle East, was dedicated to listening to what the Iraqis said, and these satellites caught every word uttered on an open line. They could not catch the planning conferences held on those 45,000 miles of buried fiber-optic cables.
Among the airplanes, chief was the Airborne Warning and Control System, known as AWACS. These were Boeing 707 airliners, carrying a huge radar dome mounted on their backs. Turning in slow circles over the northern Gulf, on twenty-four-hour rotating shifts, the AWACS could inform Riyadh within seconds of any air movement over Iraq. Hardly an Iraqi plane could move or mission take off but Riyadh knew its number, heading, course speed, and altitude.
Backing up the AWACS was another Boeing 707 conversion, the E8-A, known as J-STAR, which did for movements on the ground what AWACS did for movements in the air.
With its big Norden radar scanning downward and sideways, so that it could cover Iraq without ever entering Iraqi airspace, the J-STAR could pick up almost any piece of metal that began to move.
The combination of these and many more technical miracles on which Washington had spent billions and billions of dollars convinced the generals that if it was said, they could hear it, if it moved, they could see it, and if they knew about it, they could destroy it. They could do it, moreover, come rain or fog, night or day. Never again would the enemy be able to shelter under a canopy of jungle trees and escape detection. The eyes-in-the-sky would see it all.
The intelligence officers from Langley were skeptical, and it showed.
Doubts were for civilians. In the face of this the military became irritable. It had a tough job to do, it was going to do it, and cold water it did not need.
On the British side the situation was different. The SIS operation in the Gulf Theater was nothing like that of the CIA, but it was still a large operation by the standards of Century House, and in the manner of Century it was lower profile and more secretive.
Moreover, the British had appointed as commander of all U.K. forces in the Gulf, and second-in-command to General Schwarzkopf, an unusual soldier of uncommon background.
Norman Schwarzkopf was a big, burly man of considerable military prowess and very much a soldier's soldier. Known either as Stormin' Norman or "the Bear," his mood could vary from genial bonhomie to explosions of temper, always short-lived, which his staff referred to as the general going ballistic. His British counterpart could not have been more different.
Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billi鑢e, who had arrived in early October to take command of the Brits, was a deceptively slight, lean, wiry man of diffident manner and reluctant speech. The big American extrovert and the slim British introvert made an odd partnership, which succeeded only because each knew enough of the other to recognize what lay behind the up-front presentation.
Sir Peter, known to the troops as P.B., was the most decorated soldier in the British Army, a matter of which he would never speak under any circumstances. Only those who had been with him in his various campaigns would occasionally mutter into their beer glasses of the icy cool under fire that had caused all those "gongs" to be pinned to his tunic. He had also once been commanding officer of the SAS, a background that gave him a most useful knowledge of the Gulf, of Arabic, and of covert operations.
Because the British commander had worked before with the SIS, the Century House team found in him a more accustomed ear to listen to their reservations than in the CIA group.
The SAS already had a good presence in the Gulf Theater, holed up in their own secluded camp in the corner of a larger military base outside Riyadh. As a former commander of these men, General P.B. was concerned that their remarkable talents should not be wasted on workaday tasks that infantry or paratroopers could do. These men were specialists in deep penetration and hostage-recovery.
Sitting in that villa outside Riyadh during the last week of October, the CIA and SIS team came up with an operation that was very much within the scope of the SAS. The operation was put to the local SAS commander, and he went to work on his planning.
The entire afternoon of Mike Martin's first day at the villa was spent in explaining to him the discovery by the Anglo-American Allies of the existence of the renegade in Baghdad who had been code-named Jericho. They told him he still had the right to refuse and to rejoin the regiment.
During the evening he thought it over. Then he told the CIA SIS briefing officers: "I'll go in. But I have my conditions, and I want them met."
The main problem, they all acknowledged, would be his cover story.
This was not a quick in-and-out mission, depending on speed and daring to outwit the counterintelligence net. Nor could he count on covert support and assistance such as he had met in Kuwait. Nor could he wander the desert outside Baghdad as an errant Bedou tribesman.
All Iraq was by then a great armed camp. Even areas that on the map seemed desolate and empty were crisscrossed with army patrols. Inside Baghdad, Army and AMAM check-squads were everywhere, the Military Police looking for deserters and the AMAM for anyone at all who might be suspicious.
The fear in which the AMAM was held was well known to everyone at the villa. Reports from businessmen and journalists, and from British and American diplomats before their expulsion, amply testified to the omnipresence of the Secret Police, who kept Iraq's citizens in dread and trembling.
If Martin went in at all, he would have to stay in. Running an agent like Jericho would not be easy for him. First, the man would have to be traced through the dead-letter boxes and realerted that he was back in operation. The boxes might already be compromised and under surveillance. Jericho might have been caught and forced to confess all.
More, Martin would have to establish a place to live, a base where he could send and receive messages. He would have to prowl the city, servicing the drops if Jericho's stream of inside information resumed, although it would now be destined for new masters.
Finally, and worst of all, there could be no diplomatic cover, no protective shield to spare him the horrors that would follow capture and exposure. For such a man, the interrogation cells of Abu Ghraib would be ready.
"What--er, exactly did you have in mind?" asked Paxman when Martin had made his demand.
"If I can't be a diplomat, I want to be attached to a diplomatic household." "That's not easy, old boy. Embassies are watched." "I didn't say embassy. I said diplomatic household."
"A kind of a chauffeur?" asked Barber. "No. Too obvious. The driver has to stay at the wheel of the car. He drives the diplomat around and is watched like the diplomat."
"What, then?" "Unless things have changed radically, many of the senior diplomats live outside the embassy building, and if the rank is senior enough, they will have a villa in its own walled garden. In the old days such houses always rated a gardener-handyman."
"A gardener?" queried Barber. "For chrissake, that's a manual laborer. You'd be picked up and recruited into the Army."
"No. The gardener-handyman does everything outside the house. He keeps the garden, goes shopping on his bicycle for fish at the fish market, fruit and vegetables, bread and oil. He lives in a shack at the bottom of the garden."
"So what's the point, Mike?" asked Paxman. "The point is, he's invisible. He's so ordinary, no one notices him. If he's stopped, his ID card is in order and he carries a letter on embassy paper, in Arabic, explaining that he works for the diplomat and is exempt from service, and would the authorities please let him go about his business. Unless he is doing something wrong, any policeman who makes trouble for him is up against a formal complaint from the embassy."
The intelligence officers thought it over. "It might work," admitted Barber. "Ordinary, invisible. What do you think, Simon?" "Well," said Paxman, "the diplomat would have to be in on it."
"Only partly," said Martin. "He would simply have to have a flat order from his government to receive and employ the man who will present himself, then face the other way and get on with his job. What he suspects is his own affair. He'll keep his mouth shut if he wants to keep his job and his career. That's if the order comes from high enough."
"The British embassy's out," said Paxman. "The Iraqis would go out of their way to offend our people." "Same with us," said Barber. "Who do you have in mind, Mike?"
When Martin told them, they stared at him in disbelief. "You cannot be serious," said the American. "But I am," said Martin calmly.
"Hell, Mike, a request like that would have to go up to--well, the Prime Minister." "And the President," said Barber.
"Well, we're all supposed to be such pals nowadays, why not? I mean, if Jericho's product ends up saving Allied lives, is a phone call too much to ask?"
Chip Barber glanced at his watch. The time in Washington was still seven hours earlier than that in the Gulf. Langley would be finishing its lunch. In London it was only two hours earlier, but senior officers might still be at their desks.
Barber went hotfoot back to the U.S. embassy and sent a blitz message in code to the Deputy Director (Operations), Bill Stewart, who, when he had read it, took it to the Director, William Webster. He in turn called the White House and asked for a meeting with his President.
Simon Paxman was lucky. His encrypted phone call caught Steve Laing at his desk at Century House, and after listening, the head of Ops for Mid-East called the Chief at his home.
Sir Colin thought it over and placed a call to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler.
It is accepted that the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service has a right, in cases he deems to be an emergency, to ask for and secure a personal meeting with his Prime Minister, and Margaret Thatcher had always been notable for her accessibility to the men who ran the intelligence services and the Special Forces. She agreed to meet the Chief in her private office in 10 Downing Street the following morning at eight.
She was, as always, at work before dawn and had almost cleared her desk when the Chief was shown in. She listened to his bizarre request with a rather puzzled frown, demanded several explanations, thought it over, and then, in her usual way, made her mind up without delay.
"I'll confer with President Bush as soon as he rises, and we'll see what we can do. This, um, man--is he really going to do that?"
"That is his intention. Prime Minister."
"One of your people, Sir Colin?" "No, he's a major in the SAS." She brightened perceptibly.
"Remarkable fellow." "So I believe, ma'am." "When this is over, I would rather like to meet him." "I'm sure that can be arranged, Prime Minister."
When the Chief was gone, the Downing Street staff placed the call to the White House, even though it was still the middle of the night, and set up the hotline connection for eight A.M. Washington, one P.M. London. The Prime Minister's lunch was rescheduled by thirty minutes.
President George Bush, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, had always found it hard to refuse the British Prime Minister something she wanted when she was firing on all cylinders.
"All right, Margaret," said the President after five minutes, "I'll make the call." "He can only say no," Mrs. Thatcher pointed out, "and he shouldn't. After all, we've jolly well done a lot for him." "Yes, we jolly well have," said the President.
The two heads of government made their calls within an hour of each other, and the reply from the puzzled man at the other end of the line was affirmative. He would see their representatives, in privacy, as soon as they arrived.
That evening Bill Stewart headed out of Washington, and Steve Laing caught the last connection of the day from Heathrow. If Mike Martin had any idea of the flurry of activity his demand had started, he gave no sign of it. He spent October 26 and 27 resting, eating, and sleeping. But he stopped shaving, allowing the dark stubble to come through again. Work on his behalf, however, was being carried out in a number of different places.
The SIS Station Head in Tel Aviv had visited General Kobi Dror with a final request. The Mossad chief had stared at the Englishman in amazement. "You really are going to go ahead with this, aren't you?" he asked.
"I only know what I've been told to ask you, Kobi." "Bloody hell, on the black? You know he'll be caught, don't you?" "Can you do it, Kobi?" "Of course we can do it." "Twenty-four hours?"
Kobi Dror was playing his Fiddler on the Roof role again. "For you, boychick, my right arm. But look, this is crazy, what you are proposing."
He rose and came from behind his desk, draping an arm around the Englishman's shoulders. "You know, we broke half our own rules, and we were lucky. Normally, we never have our people visit a dead-letter box. It could be a trap. For us, a dead-letter box is one-way: from the katsa to the spy. For Jericho, we broke that rule. Moncada picked up the product that way because there was no other way. And he was lucky--for two years he was lucky. But he had diplomatic cover. Now you want ... this?"
He held up the small photograph of a sad-looking Arab-featured man with tufted black hair and stubble, the photo the Englishman had just received from Riyadh, brought in (since there are no commercial routes between the two capitals) by General de la Billi鑢e's personal HS-125 twin-jet communications plane. The 125 was standing at Sde Dov military airfield, where its livery markings had been extensively photographed.
Dror shrugged. "All right. By tomorrow morning. My life."
The Mossad has, beyond any room for quarrel, some of the best technical services in the world. Apart from a central computer with almost two million names and their appropriate data, apart from one of the best lock-picking services on earth, there exists in the basement and subbasement of Mossad headquarters a series of rooms where the temperature is carefully controlled.
These rooms contain paper. Not just any old paper--very special paper. Originals of just about every kind of passport in the world lie there, along with myriad other identity cards, drivers' licenses, Social Security cards, and suchlike.
Then there are the blanks, the unfilled identity cards on which the penmen can work at will, using the originals as a guide to produce forgeries of superb quality.
Identity cards are not the only speciality. Banknotes of virtually foolproof likeness can be and are produced in great quantities, either to help ruin the currencies of neighboring but hostile nations, or to fund the Mossad's black operations, the ones neither the Prime Minister nor the Knesset knows about nor wishes to.
It had only been after some soul-searching that the CIA and SIS had agreed to go to the Mossad for the favor, but they simply could not produce the identity card of a forty-five-year-old Iraqi laborer with the certainty of knowing it would pass any inspection in Iraq. No one had bothered to find and abstract an original one to copy.
Fortunately, the Sayeret Matkal, a cross-border reconnaissance group so secret that its name cannot even be printed in Israel, had made an incursion into Iraq two years earlier to drop an Arab oter who had some low-level contact to make there. While on Iraqi soil, the agents had surprised two working men in the fields, tied them up, and relieved them of their identity cards.
As promised, Dror's forgers worked through the night and by dawn had produced an Iraqi identity card, convincingly dirty and smudged as if from long use, in the name of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, age forty-five, from a village in the hills north of Baghdad, working in the capital as a laborer.
The forgers did not know that Martin had taken the name of the Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested his Arabic in a Chelsea restaurant in early August; nor could they know that he had chosen the village from which his father's gardener had come, the old man who, long ago beneath a tree in Baghdad, had told the little English boy of the place where he was born, of its mosque and coffee shop and the fields of alfalfa and melons that surrounded it. And there was one more thing the forgers did not know.
In the morning Kobi Dror handed the identity card to the Tel Avivbased SIS man. "This will not let him down. But I tell you, this"--he tapped the photo with a stubby forefinger--"this, your tame Arab, will betray you or be caught within a week."
The SIS man could only shrug. Not even he knew that the man in the smudged photo was not an Arab at all. He had no need to know, so he had not been told. He just did what he was told--put the card on the HS-125, by which it was flown back to Riyadh.
Clothes had also been prepared, the simple dish-dash of an Iraqi working man, a dull brown keffiyeh, and tough, rope-soled canvas shoes.
A basket weaver, without knowing what he was doing or why, was creating a wicker crate of osier strands to a most unusual design. He was a poor Saudi craftsman, and the money the strange infidel was prepared to pay was very good, so he worked with a will.
Outside the city of Riyadh, at a secret army base, two rather special vehicles were being prepared. They had been brought by a Hercules of the RAF from the main SAS base farther down the Arabian Peninsula in Oman and were being stripped down and reequipped for a long and rough ride.
The essence of the conversion of the two long-base Land-Rovers was not armor and firepower but speed and range. Each vehicle would have to carry its normal complement of four SAS men, and one would carry a passenger. The other would carry a big-tired cross-country motorcycle, itself fitted with extra-long-range fuel tanks.
The American Army again loaned its power on request, this time in the form of two of its big twin-rotor Chinook workhorse helicopters. They were just told to stand by.
Mikhail Sergeivitch Gorbachev was sitting as usual at his desk in his personal office on the seventh and top floor of the Central Committee building on Novaya Ploshad, attended by two male secretaries, when the intercom buzzed to announce the arrival of the two emissaries from London and Washington.
For twenty-four hours he had been intrigued by the requests of both the American President and the British Prime Minister that he receive a personal emissary from each of them. Not a politician, not a diplomat--just a messenger. In this day and age, he wondered, what message cannot be passed through the normal diplomatic channels? They could even use a hotline that was utterly secure from interception, although interpreters and technicians did have access. He was intrigued and curious, and as curiosity was one of his most notable features, he was eager to solve the enigma. Ten minutes later, the two visitors were shown into the private office of the General Secretary of the CPSU and President of the Soviet Union. It was a long, narrow room with a row of windows along one side only, facing out onto New Square. There were no windows behind the President, who sat with his back to the wall at the end of a long conference table.
In contrast to the gloomy, heavy style preferred by his two predecessors, Andropov and Chernenko, the younger Gorbachev preferred a light, airy decor. The desk and table were of light beech, flanked by upright but comfortable chairs. The windows were masked by net curtains.
When the two men entered, he gestured his secretaries to leave. He rose from his desk and came forward.
"Greetings, gentlemen," he said in Russian. "Do either of you speak my language?" One, whom he judged to be English, replied in halting Russian, "An interpreter would be advisable, Mr. President."
"Vitali," Gorbachev called to one of the departing secretaries, "send Yevgeny in here."
In the absence of language, he smiled and gestured to his visitors to take a seat. His personal interpreter joined them in seconds and sat to one side of the presidential desk.
"My name, sir, is William Stewart. I am Deputy Director (Operations) for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington," said the American. Gorbachev's mouth tightened and his brow furrowed.
"And I, sir, am Stephen Laing, Director for Operations, Mid-East Division, of British Intelligence." Gorbachev's perplexity deepened. Spies, chekisti--what on earth was this all about?
"Each of our agencies," said Stewart, "made a request to its respective government to ask you if you would receive us. The fact is, sir, the Middle East is moving toward war. We all know this. If it is to be avoided, we need to know the inner counsels of the Iraqi regime. What they say in public and what they discuss in private, we believe to be radically different." "Nothing new about that," observed Gorbachev dryly.
"Nothing at all, sir. But this is a highly unstable regime. Dangerous--to us all. If we could only know what the real thinking inside the cabinet of President Saddam Hussein is today, we might better be able to plan a strategy to head off the coming war," said Laing.
"Surely that is what diplomats are for," Gorbachev pointed out. "Normally, yes, Mr. President. But there are times when even diplomacy is too open, too public a channel for innermost thoughts to be expressed. You recall the case of Richard Sorge?"
Gorbachev nodded. Every Russian knew of Sorge. His face had appeared on postage stamps. He was a posthumous hero of the Soviet Union.
"At the time," pursued Laing, "Sorge's information that Japan would not attack in Siberia was utterly crucial to your country. But it could not have come to you via the embassy.
"The fact is, Mr. President, we have reason to believe there exists in Baghdad a source, quite exceptionally highly placed, who is prepared to reveal to us all the innermost counsels of Saddam Hussein. Such knowledge could mean the difference between war and a voluntary Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait."
Mikhail Gorbachev nodded. He was no friend of Saddam Hussein either. Once a docile client of the USSR, Iraq had become increasingly independent, and of late its erratic leader had been gratuitously offensive to the USSR.
Moreover, the Soviet leader was well aware that if he wanted to carry through his reforms, he would need financial and industrial support. That meant the goodwill of the West. The cold war was over--that was a reality. That was why he had joined the USSR in the Security Council condemnation of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
"So, gentlemen, make contact with this source," Gorbachev replied. "Produce us information that the powers can use to defuse this situation, and we will all be grateful. The USSR does not wish to see a war in the Middle East either."
"We would like to make contact, sir," said Stewart. "But we cannot. The source declines to disclose himself, and one can understand why. For him, the risks must be very great. To make contact, we have to avoid the diplomatic route. He has made plain he will use only covert communications with us."
"So what do you ask of me?" The two Westerners took a deep breath. "We wish to slip a man into Baghdad to act as a conduit between the source and ourselves," said Barber.
"An agent?" "Yes, Mr. President, an agent. Posing as an Iraqi."
Gorbachev stared at them hard. "You have such a man?" "Yes, sir. But he must be able to live somewhere--quietly, discreetly, innocently--while he picks up the messages and delivers our own inquiries. We ask that he be allowed to pose as an Iraqi on the staff of a senior member of the Soviet embassy."
Gorbachev steepled his chin on the tips of his fingers. He was anything but a stranger to covert operations; his own KGB had mounted more than a few. Now he was being asked to assist the KGB's old antagonists in mounting one, and to lend the Soviet embassy as their man's umbrella. It was so outrageous, he almost laughed.
"If this man of yours is caught, my embassy will be compromised."
"No, sir. Your embassy will have been cynically duped by Russia's traditional Western enemies. Saddam will believe that," said Laing.
Gorbachev thought it over. He recalled the personal entreaty of one president and one prime minister in this matter. They evidently held it to be important, and he had no choice but to regard their goodwill to him as important. Finally he nodded. "Very well. I will instruct General Vladimir Kryuchkov to give you his full cooperation."
Kryuchkov was, at that time, Chairman of the KGB. Ten months later, while Gorbachev was on vacation on the Black Sea, Kryuchkov, with Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and others, would launch a coup d'閠at against their own President.
The two Westerners shifted uncomfortably. "With the greatest respect, Mr. President," asked Laing, "could we ask that it be your Foreign Minister and him only in whom you confide?"
Eduard Shevardnadze was then Foreign Minister and a trusted friend of Mikhail Gorbachev. "Shevardnadze and him alone?" asked the President. "Yes, sir, if you please." "Very well. The arrangements will be made only through the Foreign Ministry."
When the Western intelligence officers had gone, Mikhail Gorbachev sat lost in thought. They had wanted only him and Eduard to know about this. Not Kryuchkov. Did they, he wondered, know something that the President of the USSR did not?
There were eleven Mossad agents in all--two teams of five and the mission controller, whom Kobi Dror had picked personally, pulling him off a boring stint as lecturer to the recruits at the training school outside Herzlia.
One of the teams was from the yarid branch, a section of the Mossad concerned with operational security and surveillance. The other was from neviot, whose speciality is bugging, breaking and entering--in short, anything where inanimate or mechanical objects are concerned. Eight of the ten had reasonable or good German, and the mission controller was fluent. The other two were technicians anyway. The advance group for Operation Joshua slipped into Vienna over three days, arriving from different European points of departure, each with a perfect passport and cover story.
As he had with Operation Jericho, Kobi Dror was bending a few rules, but none of his subordinates were going to argue. Joshua had been designated ain efes, meaning a no-miss affair, which, coming from the boss himself, meant top priority.
Yarid and neviot teams normally have seven to nine members each, but because the target was deemed to be civilian, neutral, amateur, and unsuspecting, the numbers had been slimmed down.
Mossad's Head of Station in Vienna had allocated three of his safe houses and three bodlim to keep them clean, tidy, and provisioned at all times.
A bodel, plural bodlim, is usually a young Israeli, often a student, engaged as a gofer after a thorough check of his parentage and background. His job is to run errands, perform chores, and ask no questions. In return he is allowed to live rent-free in a Mossad safe house, a major benefit for a short-of-money student in a foreign capital. When visiting "firemen" move in, the bodel has to move out but can be retained to do the cleaning, laundry, and shopping.
Though Vienna may not seem a major capital, for the world of espionage it has always been very important. The reason goes back to 1945, when Vienna, as the Third Reich's second capital, was occupied by the victorious Allies and divided into four sectors--French, British, American, and Russian.
Unlike Berlin, Vienna regained her freedom--even the Russians agreed to move out--but the price was complete neutrality for Vienna and all Austria. With the cold war getting under way during the Berlin blockade of 1948, Vienna soon became a hotbed of espionage. Nicely neutral, with virtually no counterintelligence net of its own, close to the Hungarian and Czech borders, open to the West but seething with East Europeans, Vienna was a perfect base for a variety of agencies.
Shortly after its formation in 1951, the Mossad also saw the advantages of Vienna and moved in with such a presence that the Head of Station outranks the ambassador.
The decision was more than justified when the elegant and worldweary 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 LandRover, stripped down to basic essentials but equipped with extra longrange 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 allup 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 largescale, 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 four A.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 vicepresidents. 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, Gemuetlich, 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 oldfashioned 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.
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 roombugging, 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.
The only other thing the sayan could vouchsafe was that such highvalue numbered accounts would certainly be handled personally by one of the three vice-presidents and no one else.
The Old Man had chosen his subordinates well: The reputation of all three was that they were humorless, tough, and well-paid. In a word, impregnable. Israel, the sayan had added, need have no worries about the Winkler Bank. He had, of course, missed the point.
Gidi Barzilai, that first week of November, was already getting extremely fed up with the Winkler Bank.
There was a bus an hour after dawn, and it slowed for the single passenger sitting on a rock by the road three miles short of Ar-Rutba when he got up and waved. He handed over two grubby dinar notes, took a seat in the back, balanced his basket of chickens on his lap, and fell asleep.
There was a police patrol in the center of the town, where the bus jolted to a halt on its old springs and a number of passengers got off to go to work or to the market, while others got on.
But while the police checked the ID cards of those getting on, they contented themselves with glancing through the dusty windows at the few who remained inside and ignored the peasant with his chickens in back. They were looking for subversives, suspicious characters.
After a further hour, the bus rumbled on to the east, rocking and swaying, occasionally pulling onto the hard shoulder as a column of Army vehicles roared past, their stubbled conscripts sitting morosely in the back, staring at the swirling dust clouds they raised.
With his eyes closed, Mike Martin listened to the chatter around him, latching on to an unaccustomed word or a hint of accent that he might have forgotten. The Arabic of this part of Iraq was markedly different from that of Kuwait. If he were to pass for an ill-educated and harmless fellagha in Baghdad, these out-of-town provincial accents and phrases would prove useful. Few things disarm a city cop more quickly than a hayseed accent.
The hens in their cage on his lap had had a rough ride, even though he had scattered corn from his pocket and shared the water from his flask, now inside a Land-Rover baking under netting in the desert behind him. With each lurch the birds clucked in protest or squatted and crapped into the litter beneath them.
It would have taken a keen eye to observe that the base of the cage on its external measurement was four inches more than on the inside. The deep litter around the hens' feet hid the difference. The litter was only an inch deep. Inside the four-inch-deep cavity beneath the twenty-bytwenty-inch cage were a number of items that those police at Ar-Rutba would have found puzzling but interesting.
One was a fold-away satellite dish, turned into a stumpy rod like a collapsible umbrella. Another was a transceiver, more powerful than that Martin had used in Kuwait.
Baghdad would not offer the facility of being able to broadcast while wandering around the desert. Lengthy transmissions would be out, which accounted, apart from the rechargeable cadmium-silver battery, for the last item in the cavity. It was a tape recorder, but a rather special one.
New technology tends to start large, cumbersome, and difficult to use. As it develops, two things happen. The innards become more and more complicated, although smaller and smaller, and the operation becomes simpler.
The radio sets hauled into France by agents for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War were a nightmare by modern standards. Occupying a suitcase, they needed an aerial strung for yards up a drainpipe, had cumbersome valves the size of light bulbs, and could only transmit messages on a Morse-sender. This kept the operator tapping for ages, while German detector units could triangulate on the source and close in.
Martin's tape recorder was simple to operate but also carried some useful features inside. A ten-minute message could be read slowly and clearly into the mouthpiece. Before it was recorded on the spool, a silicon chip would encrypt it into a garble that, even if intercepted, the Iraqis could probably not decode.
At the push of a button, the tape would rewind. Another button would cause it to rerecord, but at one two-hundredth of the speed, reducing the message to a three-second burst that would be just about impossible to trace.
It was this burst that the transmitter would send out when linked to the satellite dish, the battery, and the tape recorder. In Riyadh the message would be caught, slowed down, decrypted, and replayed in clear.
Martin left the bus at Ramadi, where it stopped, and took another one on past Lake Habbaniyah and the old Royal Air Force base, now converted to a modern Iraqi fighter station. The bus was stopped at the outskirts of Baghdad, and all identity cards were checked.
Martin stood humbly in the line, clutching his chickens, as the passengers approached the table where the police sergeant sat. When it was his turn, he set the wicker basket on the floor and produced his ID card.
The sergeant glanced at it. He was hot and thirsty. It had been a long day. He gestured to the place of origin of the card-bearer. "Where is this?" "It is a small village north of Baji. Well known for its melons, bey."
The sergeant's mouth twitched. Bey was a respectful form of address that dated back to the Turkish empire, only occasionally heard, and then only from people out of the real backwoods. He flicked a dismissive hand; Martin picked up his chickens and went back to the bus.
Shortly before seven, the bus rolled to a stop and Major Martin stepped out into the main bus station in Kadhimiya, Baghdad.