It was a covert mission whose details were reconstructed for Vanity Fair
by two experts on Israeli intelligence operations. It would lead to the
unnerving discovery that ISIS terrorists were working on transforming
laptop computers into bombs that could pass undetected through airport
security. U.S. Homeland Security officials—quickly followed by British
authorities—banned passengers traveling from an accusatory list of
Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptops and other portable
electronic devices larger than a cell phone on arriving planes. It would
not be until four tense months later, as foreign airports began to
comply with new, stringent American security directives, that the ban
would be lifted on an airport-by-airport basis.
In the secretive corridors of the American espionage community, the
Israeli mission was praised by knowledgeable officials as a casebook
example of a valued ally’s hard-won field intelligence being put to
good, arguably even lifesaving, use.
Yet this triumph would be overshadowed by an astonishing conversation
in the Oval Office in May, when an intemperate President Trump revealed
details about the classified mission to Russia’s foreign minister,
Sergey V. Lavrov, and Sergey I. Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the
U.S. Along with the tempest of far-reaching geopolitical consequences
that raged as a result of the president’s disclosure, fresh blood was
spilled in his long-running combative relationship with the nation’s
clandestine services. Israel—as well as America’s other allies—would
rethink its willingness to share raw intelligence, and pretty much the
entire Free World was left shaking its collective head in bewilderment
as it wondered, not for the first time, what was going on with Trump and
Russia. (In fact, Trump’s disturbing choice to hand over highly
sensitive intelligence to the Russians is now a focus of special counsel
Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia,
both before and after the election.) In the hand-wringing aftermath, the
entire event became, as is so often the case with spy stories, a tale
about trust and betrayal.
And yet, the Israelis cannot say they weren’t warned.
n
the American-Israeli intelligence relationship, it is customary for the
Mossad station chief and his operatives working under diplomatic cover
out of the embassy in Washington to go to the C.I.A.’s Langley,
Virginia, headquarters when a meeting is scheduled. This deferential
protocol is based on a realistic appraisal of the situation: America is a
superpower, and Israel, as one of the country’s senior intelligence
officials recently conceded with self-effacing candor, is “a speck of
dust in the wind.”
Nevertheless, over the years
the Israeli dust has been sprinkled with flecks of pure intel gold. It
was back in 1956, when the Cold War was running hot, that Israeli
diplomats in Warsaw managed to get their hands on the text of Soviet
premier Nikita Khrushchev’s top-secret speech
to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow. Khrushchev’s startling words
were a scathing indictment of Stalin’s three decades of oppressive
rule, and signalled a huge shift in Soviet dogma—just the sort of
invaluable intelligence the C.I.A. was eager to get its hands on.
Recognizing the value of what they had, the Israelis quickly delivered
the text to U.S. officials. And with this unexpected gift, a mutually
beneficial relationship between the resourceful Jewish spies and the
American intelligence Leviathan began to take root.
Over
the ensuing decades it has expanded into a true working partnership.
The two countries have gone as far as to institutionalize their joint
spying. The purloined documents released to the press by Edward Snowden,
for example, revealed that the N.S.A., the American
electronic-intelligence agency that eavesdrops on the world, and Unit
8200, its Israeli counterpart, have an agreement to share the holiest of
intelligence holies: raw electronic intercepts.
And the two countries
inventively worked in tandem, during the administration of George W. Bush
and continuing with President Obama, on Operation Olympic Games,
creating and disseminating the pernicious computer viruses that
succeeded in damaging Iran’s uranium-enrichment centrifuges. American
and Israeli spooks have even killed together. In 2008, after President
George W. Bush signed off on the operation, the C.I.A. cooperated with
agents from the Mossad’s Kidon—the Hebrew word for “bayonet,” an
appropriate name for a sharp-edged unit that specializes in what Israeli
officials euphemistically call “targeted prevention.” The shared target
was Imad Mughniyah, the Hezbollah
international operations chief, and
any further terrorist acts he’d been planning were quite effectively
prevented: Mughniyah was blown to pieces, body parts flying across a
Damascus parking lot, as he passed an S.U.V. containing a
specially-designed C.I.A. bomb. But like any marriage, the cozy—yet
inherently unequal—partnership between the American and Israeli
intelligence agencies has had its share of stormy weather. In fact, an
irreparable divorce seemed likely in 1985 after it was discovered that
Israel was running a very productive agent, Jonathan Pollard, inside
U.S. Naval Intelligence. For a difficult period—measured out in years,
not months—the American spymasters fumed, and the relationship was more
tentative than collaborative.
But spies are by
instinct and profession a pragmatic breed, and so by the 1990s the
existence of shared enemies, as well as shared threats, worked to foster
a reconciliation. Besides, each had something the other needed: Israel
had agents buried deep in neighboring Arab countries, producing
“HUMINT,” as the jargon of the trade refers to information obtained by
human assets. While the U.S. possessed the best technological toys its
vast wealth could buy; its “SIGINT,” or signals intelligence, could pick
up the chatter in most any souk in the Arab world.
And
so by the time of Trump’s election, despite the snarky, rather personal
feud between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama, the two
countries’ spies were back playing their old tricks. Together they were
taking on a rogues’ gallery of common villains: al-Qaeda, Hamas,
Hezbollah, and the Islamic State.
“We are the front line,” a
high-ranking Israeli military official bragged to me, “in America’s war
on terror.”
Over recent months, the U.S. intelligence windfall has been particularly
bountiful. Israel, according to sources with access to the activities
of the Mossad and Unit 8200, has delivered information about Russia’s
interaction with the Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces taking the
field in the Syrian civil war. And there is little that gets American
military strategists more excited than learning what sort of tactics
Russia is employing.
It was against this reassuring backdrop of recent successes and shared history, an Israeli source told Vanity Fair,
that a small group of Mossad officers and other Israeli intelligence
officials took their seats in a Langley conference room on a January
morning just weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump.
The meeting proceeded uneventfully; updates on a variety of ongoing
classified operations were dutifully shared.
It was only as the meeting was about to break up that an American
spymaster solemnly announced there was one more thing: American
intelligence agencies had come to believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin
had “leverages of pressure” over Trump, he declared without offering
further specifics, according to a report in the Israeli press.
Israel, the American officials continued, should “be careful” after
January 20—the date of Trump’s inauguration. It was possible that
sensitive information shared with the White House and the National
Security Council could be leaked to the Russians.
A moment later the
officials added what many of the Israelis had already deduced: it was
reasonable to presume that the Kremlin would share some of what they
learned with their ally Iran, Israel’s most dangerous adversary.
Currents
of alarm and anger raced through those present at the meeting, says
the Israeli source, but their superiors in Israel remained
unconvinced—no supporting evidence, after all, had been provided—and
chose to ignore the prognostication.
The
covert mission into the forbidden plains of northern Syria was a “blue
and white” undertaking, as Israel, referring to the colors of its flag,
calls ops that are carried out solely by agents of the Jewish state.
Yet—and
this is an ironclad operational rule—getting agents in and then swiftly
out of enemy territory under the protection of the nighttime darkness
can be accomplished only if there is sufficient reconnaissance: the
units need to know exactly where to strike, what to expect, what might
be out there waiting for them in the shadows. For the mission last
winter that targeted a cell of terrorist bombers, according to ABC News,
citing American officials, the dangerous groundwork was done by an
Israeli spy planted deep inside ISIS territory.
Whether he was a double
agent Israel had either turned or infiltrated into the ISIS cell, or
whether he was simply a local who’d happened to stumble upon some
provocative information he realized he could sell—those details remain
locked in the secret history of the mission.
What
is apparent after interviews with intelligence sources both in Israel
and the U.S. is that on the night of the infiltration the helicopters
carrying the blue-and-white units came down several miles from their
target. Two jeeps bearing Syrian Army markings were unloaded, the men
hopped in, and, hearts racing, they drove as if it had been the most
natural of patrols into the pre-dawn stillness of an enemy city.
“A
shadow unit of ghosts” is what the generals of Aman, Israel’s
military-intelligence organization, envisioned when they set up Sayeret
Matkal. And on this night the soldiers fanned out like ghosts in the
shadows, armed and on protective alert, as the Mossad tech agents did
their work.
Again, the operational details are
sparse, and even contradictory. One source said the actual room where
the ISIS cell would meet was spiked, a tiny marvel of a microphone
placed where it would never be noticed. Another maintained that an
adjacent telephone junction box had been ingeniously manipulated so that
every word spoken in a specific location would be overheard.
The
sources agree, however, that the teams got in and out that night, and,
even before the returning choppers landed back in Israel, it was
confirmed to the jubilant operatives that the audio intercept was
already up and running.
Now the waiting began.
From an antenna-strewn base near the summit of the Golan Heights, on
Israel’s border with Syria, listeners from Unit 8200 monitored the
transmissions traveling across the ether from the target in northern
Syria. Surveillance is a game played long, but after several wasted days
8200’s analysts were starting to suspect that their colleagues had been
misinformed, possibly deliberately, by the source in the field. They
were beginning to fear that all the risk had been taken without any
genuine prospect of reward.
Then
what they’d been waiting for was suddenly coming in loud and clear,
according to Israeli sources familiar with the operation: it was, as a
sullen spy official described it, “a primer in constructing a terror
weapon.” With an unemotional precision, an ISIS soldier detailed how to
turn a laptop computer into a terror weapon that could pass through
airport security and be carried on board a passenger plane. ISIS had
obtained a new way to cause airliners to explode suddenly, free-falling
from the sky in flames.
When the news of this frightening ISIS lecture arrived at Mossad’s
headquarters outside Tel Aviv, officials quickly decided to share the
field intelligence with their American counterparts. The urgency of the
highly classified information trumped any security misgivings. Still, as
one senior Israeli military official suggested, the Israeli decision
was also egged on by a professional vanity: they wanted their partners
in Washington to marvel at the sort of impossible missions they could
pull off.
They did. It was a much-admired, as
well as appreciated, gift—and it scared the living hell out of the
American spymasters who received it.
On
the cloudy spring morning of May 10, just an uneasy day after the
president’s sudden firing of F.B.I. director James B. Comey, who had
been leading the probe into possible collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russian operatives, a beaming President Trump huddled in
the Oval Office with Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak.
And,
no less improbably, Trump seemed not to notice, or feel restrained by,
the unfortunate timing of his conversation with Russian officials who
were quite possibly co-conspirators in a plot to undermine the U.S.
electoral process.
Instead, full of a chummy candor, the president
turned to his Russian guests and blithely acknowledged the elephant
lurking in the room. “I just fired the head of the F.B.I.,” he said,
according to a record of the meeting shared with The New York Times.
“He was crazy, a real nut job.” With the sort of gruff pragmatism a
Mafia don would use to justify the necessity of a hit, he further
explained, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Yet that was only the morning’s perplexing prelude. What had been an
unseemly conversation between the president and two high-ranking Russian
officials soon turned into something more dangerous.
“I
get great intel,” the president suddenly boasted, as prideful as if he
were bragging about the amenities at one of his company’s hotels. “I
have people brief me on great intel every day.”
He
quickly went on to share with representatives of a foreign adversary
not only the broad outlines of the plot to turn laptop computers into
airborne bombs but also at least one highly classified operational
detail—the sort of sensitive, locked-in-the-vault intel that was not
shared with even Congress or friendly governments. The president did not
name the U.S. partner who had spearheaded the operation. (Journalists,
immediately all over the astonishing story, would soon out Israel). But,
more problematic, President Trump cavalierly identified the specific
city in ISIS-held territory where the threat had been detected.
As
for the two Russians, there’s no record of their response. Their
silence would be understandable: why interrupt the flow of information?
But in their minds, no doubt they were already drafting the cable they’d
send to the Kremlin detailing their great espionage coup.
So
why? Why did a president who has time after volatile time railed
against leakers, who has attacked Hillary Clinton for playing fast and
loose with classified information, cozy up to a couple of Russian
bigwigs in the Oval Office and breezily offer government secrets?
Any
answer is at best conjecture. Yet in the search for an important truth,
consider these hypotheses, each of which has its own supporters among
past and current members of the U.S. intelligence community.
The
first is a bit of armchair psychology. In Trump’s irrepressible way of
living in the world, wealth is real only if other people believe you’re
rich. If you don’t flaunt it, then you might as well not have it.
So
there is the new president, shaky as any bounder might be in the
complicated world of international politics, sitting down to a
head-to-head with a pair of experienced Russians. How can he impress
them? Get them to appreciate that he’s not some lightweight, but rather a
genuine player on the world stage?
There’s
also the school of thought that the episode is another unfortunate
example of Trump’s impressionable worldview being routinely shaped by
the last thing he’s heard, be it that morning’s broadcast of Fox & Friends
or an intelligence briefing in the Oval Office. As advocates of this
theory point out, the president was likely told that one of the issues
still on his guests’ minds would be the terrorist explosion back in
October 2015 that brought down a Russian passenger plane flying above
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board. With that seed
planted in the president’s undisciplined mind, it’s a short leap for
him to be off and running to the Russians about what he knew about an
ISIS scheme to target passenger aircraft.
Yet
there is also a more sinister way to connect all the dots. There are
some petulant voices in official Washington who insist that the
president’s treachery was deliberate, part of his longtime collaboration
with the Russians. It is a true believer’s orthodoxy, one which
predicts that the meeting will wind up being one more damning count in
an indictment that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, will ultimately
nail to the White House door.
But, for now, to
bolster their still very circumstantial case, they point to a curiosity
surrounding the meeting in the Oval Office—U.S. journalists were kept
out. And, no less an oddity, the Russian press was allowed in. It was
the photographer from TASS, the state-run Russian news agency, who
snapped the only shots that documented the occasion for posterity. Or,
for that matter, for the grand jury.
But
ultimately it is the actions of men, not their motives, that propel
history forward. And the president’s reckless disclosure continues to
wreak havoc. On one level, the greatest casualty was trust. The
president was already waging a perilous verbal war with the U.S.
intelligence agencies. His sharing secrets with the Russians has very
likely ground whatever remnants of a working relationship had survived
into irreparable pieces. “How can the agency continue to provide the
White House with intel,” challenged one former operative, “without
wondering where it will wind up?” And he added ominously, “Those leaks
to The New York Times and The Washington Post about
the investigations into Trump and his cohorts is no accident. Trust me:
you don’t want to get into a pissing match with a bunch of spooks. This
is war.”
And what about America’s vital
intelligence relationships with its allies? Former C.I.A. deputy
director Michael Morell publicly worried, “Third countries who provide
the United States with intelligence information will now have pause.”
In
Israel, though, the mood is more than merely wary. “Mr. Netanyahu’s
intelligence chiefs . . . are up in arms,” a prominent Israeli
journalist insisted in The New York Times. In recent interviews
with Israeli intelligence sources the frequently used operative verb
was “whiten”—as in “certain units from now on will whiten their reports
before passing them on to agencies in America.”
What
further exacerbates Israel’s concerns—“keeps me up at night” was how a
government spymaster put it—is that if Trump is handing over Israel’s
secrets to the Russians, then he just might as well be delivering them
to Iran, Russia’s current regional ally. And it is an expansionist Iran,
one Israeli after another was determined to point out in the course of
discussions, that is arming Hezbollah with sophisticated rockets and
weaponry while at the same time becoming an increasingly visible
economic and military presence in Syria.
“Trump
betrayed us,” said a senior Israeli military official bluntly, his
voice stern with reproach. “And if we can’t trust him, then we’re going
to have to do what is necessary on our own if our back is up against the
wall with Iran.”
Yet while appalled governments are now forced to rethink their tactics
in future dealings with a wayward president, there is also the dismaying
possibility that a more tangible, and more lethal, consequence has
already occurred. “The Russians will undoubtedly try to figure out the
source or the method of this information to make sure that it is not
also collecting on their activities in Syria—and in trying to do that
they could well disrupt the source,” said Michael Morell.
What,
then, was the fate of Israel’s agent in Syria? Was the operative
exfiltrated to safety? Has he gone to ground in enemy territory? Or was
he hunted down and killed?
One former Mossad officer with knowledge of the operation and its
aftermath will not say. Except to add pointedly, “Whatever happened to
him, it’s a hell of price to pay for a president’s mistake.”
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