The Fist of God (26 page)

After three weeks, Alfonso Benz Moncada bade good-bye to his The Fist of God

tearful parents and flew back to Baghdad via London. The senior instructor leaned back in his chair at the villa, passed an exhausted hand over his forehead, and told the team:

“If that bugger stays alive and free, I’ll make the pilgrimage to Mecca.”

The team laughed; their leader was a deeply Orthodox Jew. All the time they were teaching Moncada, none of them had known what he was going to do back in Baghdad. It was not their job to know. Neither did the Chilean.

It was during the stopover in London that he was taken to the Heathrow Penta Hotel. There he met Sami Gershon and David Sharon, and they told him.

“Don’t try and identify him,” Gershon warned the young man. “Leave that to us. Just establish the drops and service them. We’ll send you the lists of things we want answered. You won’t understand them—they’ll be in Arabic. We don’t think Jericho speaks much English, if at all. Don’t ever try to translate what we send you. Just put it in one of the you-to-him drops and make the appropriate chalk mark so he knows to go and service the drop.

“When you see his chalk mark, go and service the him-to-you box, and get his answer back.”

In a separate bedroom Alfonso Benz Moncada was given his new luggage. There was a camera that looked like a tourist’s Pentax but took a snap-on cartridge with more than a hundred exposures in it, plus an innocent-looking aluminum strut frame for holding the camera at exactly the right distance above a sheet of paper. The camera was preset for that range.

His toilet kit included combustible chemicals disguised as aftershave, and various invisible inks. The letter-writing wallet held all the treated The Fist of God

paper for secret writing. Last, they told him the means for communicating with them, a method they had been setting up while he was training in Chile.

He would write letters concerning his love of chess—he already was a chess fan—to his pen pal Justin Bokomo of Uganda, who worked in the General Secretariat of the UN building in New York. His letters would
always
go out of Baghdad in the UN diplomatic mail pouch for New York. The replies would also come from Bokomo in New York.

Though Benz Moncada did not know it, there
was
a Ugandan called Bokomo in New York. There was also a Mossad
katsa
in the mail room to effect the intercepts.

Bokomo’s letters would have a reverse side that, when treated, would reveal the Mossad’s question list. This was to be photocopied when no one was looking and passed to Jericho in one of the agreed drops.

Jericho’s reply would probably be in spidery Arabic script. Each page was to be photographed ten times, in case of smudging, and the film dispatched to Bokomo.

Back in Baghdad the young Chilean, with his heart in his mouth, established six drops, mainly behind loose bricks in old walls or ruined houses, under flagstones in back alleys, and one under a stone windowsill of a derelict shop.

Each time, he thought he would be surrounded by the dreaded AMAM, but the citizens of Baghdad seemed as courteous as ever and no one took any notice of him as he prowled, apparently a curious foreign tourist, up and down the alleys and side streets of the Old Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the fruit and vegetable market at Kasra, and the old cemeteries—anywhere he could find crumbling old walls and loose flagstones where no one would ever think of looking.

He wrote down the locations of the six drops, three to contain The Fist of God

messages from him to Jericho and three for replies from Jericho to him. He also devised six places—walls, gates, shutters—on three of which an innocent chalk mark would alert Jericho that there was a message for him, and three others where Jericho would signal he had a reply ready and sitting in a dead-letter box awaiting collection.

Each chalk mark responded to a different drop. He wrote down the locations of these drops and chalk-mark sites so precisely that Jericho could find them on written description only.

All the time he watched for a tail, either driving or on foot. Just once he was under surveillance, but it was clumsy and routine, for the AMAM seemed to pick occasional days to follow occasional diplomats. The following day there was no tail, so he resumed again.

When he had it all ready, he wrote it down using a typewriter, after having memorized every detail. He destroyed the ribbon, photographed the sheets, destroyed the paperwork, and sent the film to Mr. Bokomo. Via the mail room of the UN building on the East River in New York, the small package came back to David Sharon in Tel Aviv.

The risky part was getting all this information to Jericho. It meant one last letter to that damnable post-office box in Baghdad. Sharon wrote to his “friend” that the papers he needed would be deposited at exactly noon in fourteen days, August 18, 1988, and should be picked up no more than one hour later.

The precise instructions, in Arabic, were with Moncada by the sixteenth. At five to noon on the eighteenth, he entered the post office, was directed to the post box, and dropped the bulky package in. No one stopped or arrested him. An hour later, Jericho unlocked the box and withdrew the package. He too was not stopped or arrested.

With secure contact now established, traffic began to flow. Jericho The Fist of God

insisted he would price each consignment of information that Tel Aviv wanted, and if the money was deposited, the information would be sent. He named a very discreet bank in Vienna, the Winkler Bank in the Ballgasse, just off Franzis-kanerplatz, and gave an account number.

Tel Aviv agreed and immediately checked out the bank. It was small, ultradiscreet, and virtually impregnable. It clearly contained a numbered account that matched, because the first transfer of twenty thousand dollars by Tel Aviv into it was not returned to the transferring bank with a query.

The Mossad suggested that Jericho might care to identify himself “for his own protection, in case anything went wrong and his friends to the west could help.” Jericho refused point-blank; he went further. If any attempt was made to survey the drops or close in on him in any way, or if ever the money was not forthcoming, he would shut off immediately.

The Mossad agreed, but tried other ways. Psychoportraits were drawn, his handwriting studied, lists of Iraqi notables drawn up and studied.

All that the back-room boys could guess was that Jericho was middle-aged, of medium education, probably spoke little or hesitant English, and had a military or quasi-military background.

“That gives me half the bloody Iraqi High Command, the top fifty in the Ba’ath Party, and John Doe’s cousin Fred,” growled Kobi Dror.

Alfonso Benz Moncada ran Jericho for two years, and the product was pure gold. It concerned politics, conventional weapons, military progress, changes of command, armaments procurement, rockets, gas, germ warfare, and two attempted coups against Saddam Hussein. Only on Iraq’s nuclear progress was Jericho hesitant. He was asked, of course. It was under deep secrecy and known only to the Iraqi The Fist of God

equivalent of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar.

To press too hard would be to invite exposure, he reported.

In the autumn of 1989 Jericho told Tel Aviv that Gerry Bull was under suspicion and under surveillance in Brussels by a team from the Iraqi Mukhabarat. The Mossad, who were by then using Bull as another source for progress on Iraq’s rockets program, tried to warn him as subtly as they could. There was no way they would tell him to his face what they knew—it would be tantamount to telling him they had an asset high in Baghdad, and no agency will ever blow away an asset like that.

So the
katsa
controlling the substantial Brussels station had his men penetrate Bull’s apartment on several occasions through the autumn and winter, leaving oblique messages by rewinding a videotape, changing wineglasses around, leaving a patio window open, even placing a long strand of female hair on his pillow.

The gun scientist became worried all right, but not enough. When Jericho’s message concerning the intent to liquidate Bull came through, it was too late. The hit had been carried out.

Jericho’s information gave the Mossad an almost-complete picture of Iraq in the buildup to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. What he told them about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction confirmed and amplified the pictorial evidence that had been passed over to them by Jonathan Pollard, by then sentenced to life in prison.

Bearing in mind what it knew and what it assumed America must also know, the Mossad waited for America to react. But as the chemical, nuclear, and bacteriological preparations in Iraq progressed, the torpor in the West continued, so Tel Aviv stayed silent.

Two million dollars had passed from the Mossad to the numbered account of Jericho In Vienna by August 1990. He was expensive, but The Fist of God

he was good, and Tel Aviv decided he was worth it. Then the invasion of Kuwait took place, and the unforeseen happened. The United Nations, having passed the resolution of August 2 calling on Iraq to withdraw at once, felt it could not continue to support Saddam by maintaining a presence in Baghdad. On August 7, the Economic Commission for West Asia was abruptly closed down, and its diplomats recalled.

Benz Moncada was able to do one last thing before his departure. He left a message in a drop telling Jericho that he was being expelled and contact was now broken. However, he might return, and Jericho should continue to scan the places where the chalk marks were put. Then he left. The young Chilean was extensively debriefed in London until there was nothing left he could tell David Sharon.

Thus Kobi Dror was able to lie to Chip Barber with a straight face. At the time, he was
not
running an asset in Baghdad. It would be too embarrassing to admit that he had never discovered the traitor’s name and that now he had even lost contact. Still, as Sami Gershon had made plain, if the Americans ever found out ... In hindsight, perhaps he really should have mentioned Jericho.

Chapter 8

Mike Martin visited the tomb of Able Seaman Shepton in the cemetery of Sulaibikhat on the first of October and discovered the plea from Ahmed Al-Khalifa.

The Fist of God

He was not particularly surprised. If Abu Fouad had heard of him, he had also heard of the steadily growing and spreading Kuwaiti resistance movement and its shadowy leading light. That they should eventually have to meet was probably inevitable.

In six weeks, the position of the Iraqi occupation forces had changed dramatically. In their invasion they had had a pushover, and they had begun their occupation with a sloppy confidence, assured that their stay in Kuwait would be as effortless as the conquest.

The looting had been easy and profitable, the destruction amusing, and the using of the womenfolk pleasurable. It had been the way of conquerors that went back to the days of Babylon.

Kuwait, after all, had been a fat pigeon ready for the plucking. But in six weeks, the pigeon had begun to peck and scratch. Over a hundred Iraqi soldiers and eight officers had either disappeared or been found dead. The disappearances could not all be explained by desertions. For the first time, the occupation forces were experiencing fear.

Officers no longer traveled in a single staff car but insisted on a truckload of escorting troops. Headquarters buildings had to be guarded night and day, to the point where Iraqi officers had taken to firing over the heads of their sleeping sentries to wake them up.

The nights had become periods of no-go for anything less than a substantial troop movement. The roadblock teams huddled inside their redoubts when darkness fell. And still the mines went off, the vehicles burst into flame or seized up with ruined engines, the grenades were thrown, and the soldiers disappeared with cut throats into sewers or garbage dumps.

The escalating resistance had forced the High Command to replace the Popular Army with the Special Forces, good fighting troops who should have been at the front line in case the Americans came. Early The Fist of God

October for Kuwait was not, to echo Churchill’s phrase, the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.

Martin had no means of replying to Al-Khalifa’s message when he read it in the graveyard, so it was not until the following day that he deposited his answer.

He agreed to meet, he said, but on his own terms. To have the advantage of darkness but to avoid the curfew at ten P.M., he called for a meeting at half past seven. He gave exact directions as to where Abu Fouad should park his car and the small grove of trees where he would meet. The place he indicated was in the district of Abrak Kheitan, close to the main highway from the city to the now shattered and unused airport.

Martin knew it to be an area of traditional stone-built houses with flat roofs. On one of those roofs he would be waiting for two hours before the rendezvous to see if the Kuwaiti officer was being followed and if so by whom: his own bodyguards, or the Iraqis. In a hostile environment, the SAS officer was still at large and in combat because he took no chances, none at all.

He knew nothing of Abu Fouad’s concept of security and was not prepared to assume it was brilliant. He established the meeting for the evening of the seventh and left his reply beneath the marble slab.

Ahmed Al-Khalifa retrieved it on the fourth.

* * *

The Fist of God

A passing observer would have assumed he was a bluff Home Counties farmer, more at home leaning wisely over a pen of fat lambs at the local market than supervising the cladding of lethal disks of plutonium in pure gold.

Although the weather was still mild when Hipwell reappeared before the Medusa Committee, he wore, as in August, his square-patterned shirt, wool tie, and tweed jacket. Without waiting to be asked, he used his big red hands to fill and tamp a briar pipe with shag tobacco before starting into his report. Sir Paul Spruce twitched his pointed nose in distaste and gestured for the air conditioning to be raised a notch.