Israel and Mossad

AGENTS for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, broke into the London hotel room of a top Syrian official and obtained the blueprints of a secret nuclear reactor, according to a new book published in Israel.

The daring operation in late 2006, involving at least 10 undercover agents, led directly to the bombing of the reactor site in northern Syria in September 2007, claim the authors of Israel vs Iran: the Shadow War.

The London operation, which has been confirmed by Israeli sources, came after Israel’s signals intelligence intercepted an online booking for a senior Syrian nuclear official at the hotel in Kensington, west London.

Three Israeli undercover teams were immediately dispatched to the capital. One team of “spotters” at Heathrow airport was charged with identifying the official, who travelled to London from Damascus under a false name. A second team booked into his hotel, while a third monitored his movements and any visitors from vantage points in High Street Kensington.

Some of the agents were drawn from the elite Kidon (“Spear”) division, Mossad’s hit squad responsible for the kidnap of Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower who revealed the secrets of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme to The Sunday Times in 1986. They were also involved in the assassination of Mahmoud alMabhouh, a senior Hamas terrorist, in his hotel room in Dubai last year.

Other agents were drawn from Mossad’s Neviot (“the Springs”) division, which specialises in breaking into houses, embassies and hotel rooms to install bugging devices.

On the first day of the official’s trip, which was devoted to a series of meetings at the Syrian embassy in Belgrave Square, he took his laptop with him. But the following day, shortly before he took a cab back to Heathrow, he popped out for a quick shopping expedition in High Street Kensington. This was enough for the Mossad teams.

The Kidon team followed him closely from shop to shop while the Neviot agents broke into his room and found the laptop.

A computer expert took just 15 minutes to download the hard drive and install trojan software that allowed Israel to monitor every keystroke he made.

Hours later, when the computer’s contents were studied at Mossad’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, officials were stunned. It showed Syria had a secret nuclear programme that no one in the West had suspected.

The computer contained photographs, data and blueprints for a plutonium reactor at Al Kibar near Deir el-Zor, a remote desert town 80 miles from Syria’s border with Iraq. They were based on North Korean plans.

The discovery meant the Syrian official, who has never been named, had become far too valuable to eliminate. “His carelessness in leaving his laptop in his room saved his life,” said an Israeli security official. “His computer and its contents turned out to be his life insurance. If it weren’t for that, he wouldn’t have left Europe alive.”

Israel’s leaders immediately began planning to stop an atomic weapons plant being constructed on their doorstep. Until then it had been assumed that President Bashar al-Assad, the London-educated Syrian leader, had no interest in pursuing a nuclear programme against Israel.

To win American backing for a raid on the reactor, Israel needed to obtain firm evidence of radioactive material in its vicinity. In August 2007 it sent a special forces team into Syria to collect samples.

“For several days two teams from Israel’s top reconnaissance brigade were collecting soil samples near the reactor,” write the authors Yoaz Hendel, a military historian, and Yaakov Katz, the defence correspondent of the Jerusalem Post. “But after the laboratory results arrived, Israel had tangible proof of Syria’s nuclear intentions.”

At 2.55pm on September 5, 2007, the official Syrian news agency reported that Israeli fighter jets coming from the Mediterranean had violated Syrian airspace at “about 1am” .

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister at the time, was standing on the tarmac to greet the returning pilots. The reactor building had been completely destroyed.