Above the radar

The Arctic Sea, the ship at the centre of allegations about Mossad activity

THERE is a scene in The Bourne Ultimatum when, following an incident in which a journalist is shot dead by a sniper in the middle of a crowded Waterloo concourse, one CIA executive berates the chief responsible for turning the railway station “into a shooting gallery”.

It isn’t what we expect our fictional spies to say, or do. We expect them to have supercars that can be chased above or below the water, to stage fights in the Eiffel Tower, Venice and a score of other world-famous locations, to be threatened with death by laser, and to save the world from nuclear warfare or specially-designed toxins from space.

Our secret services have a lot to thank James Bond for, not least because he has us all looking the other way (and – assuming a spook’s natural paranoia here – perhaps that is what he intended). But in recent times, our view of the intelligence services has changed. Here, it is to do with intelligence gathering. Among the Secret Intelligence Service, there remains some disquiet over former C Sir John Scarlett’s involvement – some would say collusion – in providing the intelligence that justified the UK’s role in the Iraq War.

Over in the US, it is intelligence activities that is causing the CIA to squirm uncomfortably. After eight years of being urged to get results at any cost, the agency now finds itself embroiled in allegations of torture and other issues relating to the rendition program. If it gets as far as the courts, it will represent the CIA’s greatest crisis since the Family Jewels reports of the mid-1970s.

This isn’t the way that Mossad operates. Although Israel is a democracy, it works hard to maintain a climate where it and not politicians decide what is in the best interests of the country’s security. Perhaps the proximity of Israel’s many enemies, and increasing enmity from the rest of the world over its conduct where the Palestinians are concerned, allows Mossad to carry on with minimal scrutiny from its own people.

But now Mossad has unwittingly found itself in the glare of the world’s media, albeit in a series of stories that have to feature question marks in their headlines. The reason for this is an increasingly intense battle of wills with the Russians, all part of Israel’s attempt to curtail the regional ambitions of its greatest foe, Iran.

It all centres around the hijacking of The Arctic Sea, a ship flying a Maltese flag that was taken by pirates in the English Channel on July 24 while en route from Finland to Algeria. Ostensibly carrying a £1.3 million load of timber, claims about its fate were immediately questioned by shipping experts and at least one Russian journalist, who later fled his country following what he said were death threats made against as a result of his interest in the story.

The crew were Russian, and the pirates were reportedly demanding a ransom of £1 million for the ship’s release. They were arrested off the coast of west Africa on August 17. But, according to the doubters, it wasn’t concern for its countrymen that had galvanised the government to urgent action. The ship had stopped off for repairs in Kaliningrad, a port notorious for arms smuggling, where it reportedly took on a load of latest generation S-300 Russian anti-aircraft missiles.

It was later reported, including in The Sunday Times, that this is what Mossad did: After observing the missiles being loaded on board The Arctic Sea – in direct violation of international treaties – it allowed a group of pirates to know where the vessel was and where it could be taken, but not the true nature of the mission.

Once the pirates took the vessel, it created an international incident. There was a high likelihood that the missiles would have been sold by the pirates, or a possibility that they would have been discovered had the ship been rescued by forces from another country. Realising that this would cause huge embarrassment for the Russians and having successfully created “a lot of noise around the ship”, as one unnamed Kremlin official told The Sunday Times, Mossad then allowed the Russians to save international face by facilitating a daring rescue.

All of this may have appeared far fetched if it wasn’t for what happened next. The following morning, Israeli president Shimon Peres visited Russia. After a lengthy meeting with president Dmitri Medvedev, Israel released a statement saying that Russia would not supply arms to either Iran or Syria. A source within the IDF told The Sunday Times: “Peres used the incident as a bargaining chip over the issue of arms sales to Arab states, while Israel allowed the Kremlin a way out with its claims to have successfully foiled a piracy incident.”

It’s unlikely, given the carrot-and-stick approach that Israel took, that we’ll ever find out the level of Russian government involvement in the sale of these missiles, if there was any collusion at all. What will grate some Mossad chiefs is that its name has been dragged into the frame. However, Israel had to do something. It had been prevailing upon the Russians not to sell the system to Iran, as it believes that the S-300 would tilt the power equilibrium in the region against it, robbing it of superiority over Iranian airspace and the skies over its other enemies.

It’s some way from the Mossad of old. Back then, it cared little for what other countries thought, regarding its own security as paramount to pretty much all other concerns. The high mark of this thinking came with Operation Wrath of God, the elimination of the Black September gang which had been responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. It was to rumble on for years, with the eventual assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh, Black September’s chief of operations, in a car bomb in Beirut in 1979.

It’s unlikely that Mossad’s methods from that time, which included blowing up apartments of Black September members with planted bombs triggered by telephone calls, would be tolerated by the governments in countries where the attacks took place. This may be because forensics and surveillance make it harder for spooks to get away with such activities. We can only speculate here.

With this incident, Israel’s secret service appears to have gone from an organisation content to shoot and bomb its way across Europe in order to achieve its aims to adopting a far more subtle operational approach that saw it get its own way without, so we are led to believe, a single shot being fired.

Having surfaced above the radar, even if only allegedly, Mossad will be anxious to get back in the shadows. It goes, having given a lesson that both our intelligence agencies and its own defence force could learn from.