The Fist of God (35 page)

“Nothing new about that,” observed Gorbachev dryly.

The Fist of God

“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.

The Fist of God

“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.

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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’état 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.

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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 The Fist of God

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 world-weary 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 The Fist of God

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 Land-The Fist of God

Rover, stripped down to basic essentials but equipped with extralong-range 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.

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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.

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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.