The Fist of God

booth.

The trunnions or supports came from Greece, the pipes, pumps, and valves that formed the recoil mechanism from Switzerland and Italy, the breech block from Austria and Germany, the propellant from Belgium. In all, seven countries were involved as contractors, and none knew quite what they were making.

The popular press had a field day, as did the exultant customs officers and the British legal system, which began eagerly prosecuting any innocent party involved. What no one pointed out was that the horse had bolted. The intercepted parts constituted Superguns 2, 3, and 4.

As for the killing of Gerry Bull, it produced some weird theories in the media. Predictably, the CIA was nominated by the CIA-is-responsible-for-everything brigade. This was another absurdity. Although Langley has, in the past and under particular circumstances, countenanced the elimination of certain parties, these parties have almost always been in the same business—contract officers turned sour, renegades, and double agents. The notion that the lobby at Langley is choked with the corpses of former agents gunned down by their own colleagues at the behest of genocidal directors on the top floor is amusing but wholly unreal.

Moreover, Gerry Bull was not from that back-alley world. He was a well-known scientist, designer, and contractor of artillery, conventional and very unconventional, an American citizen who had once worked for America for years and talked copiously to his U.S.

Army friends about what he was up to. If every designer and industrialist in the weapons industry who was working for a country not at that time seen to be an enemy of the United States was to be

“wasted,” some five hundred individuals across North and South America and Europe would have to qualify.

Finally, Langley has for at least the past ten years become gridlocked by the new bureaucracy of controls and oversight committees. No professional intelligence officer is going to order a hit without a written and signed order. For a man like Gerry Bull, that signature would have to come from the Director of Central Intelligence himself.

The DCI at that time was William Webster, a by-the-book former judge from Kansas. It would be about as easy to get a signed hit authority out of William Webster as to burrow a way out of the Marion penitentiary with a blunt teaspoon.

But far and away the league leader in the who-killed-Gerry-Bull enigma was, of course, the Israeli Mossad. The entire press and most of Bull’s friends and family jumped to the same conclusion. Bull had been working for Iraq; Iraq was the enemy of Israel; two and two equals four. The trouble is, in that world of shadows and distorting mirrors, what may or may not appear to be two, when multiplied by a factor that may or may not be two, could possibly come out at four but probably will not.

The Mossad is the world’s smallest, most ruthless, and most gung-ho of the leading intelligence agencies. It has in the past undoubtedly undertaken many assassinations, using one of the three kidon teams—the word is the Hebrew for bayonet. The kidonim come under the Combatants or Komemiute Division, the deep-cover men, the hard squad. But even the Mossad has its rules, albeit self-imposed.

Terminations fall into two categories. One is “operational requirement,” an unforeseen emergency in which an operation involving friendly lives is put at risk by someone, and the person in the way has to be eased out of the way, fast and permanently. In these cases, the supervising katsa, or case officer, has the right to waste the opponent who is jeopardizing the entire mission, and will get retroactive support from his bosses back in Tel Aviv.

The other category of terminations is for those already on the execution list. This list exists in two places: the private safe of the Prime Minister and the safe of the head of the Mossad. Every incoming Prime Minister is required to see this list, which may contain between thirty and eighty names. He may initial each name, giving the Mossad the go-ahead on an if-and-when basis, or he may insist on being consulted before each new mission. In either event, he must sign the execution order.

Broadly speaking, those on the list fall into three classes. There are a few remaining top Nazis, though this class has almost ceased to exist.

Years ago, although Israel mounted a major operation to kidnap and try Adolf Eichmann because it wanted to make an international example of him, other Nazis were simply liquidated quietly. Class two are almost all contemporary terrorists, mainly Arabs who have already shed Israeli or Jewish blood like Ahmed Jibril and Abu Nidal, or who would like to, with a few non-Arabs thrown in.

Class three, which might have contained the name of Gerry Bull, are those working for Israel’s enemies and whose work will carry great danger for Israel and her citizens if it progresses any further.

The common denominator is that those targeted must have blood on their hands, either in fact or in prospect.

If a hit is requested, the Prime Minister will pass the matter to a judicial investigator so secret, few Israeli jurists and no citizens have ever heard of him. The investigator holds a “court,” with the charge read out, a prosecutor, and a defender. If the Mossad’s request is confirmed, the matter goes back to the Prime Minister for his signature. The kidon team does the rest—if it can.

The problem with the Mossad-killed-Bull theory is that it is flawed at almost every level. True, Bull was working for Saddam Hussein, designing new conventional artillery (which could not reach Israel), a rocket program (which might, one day), and a giant gun (which did not worry Israel at all). But so were hundreds of others. Half a dozen German firms were behind Iraq’s hideous poison gas industry, with whose products Saddam had already threatened Israel. Germans and Brazilians were working flat-out on the rockets of Saad 16. The French were the prime movers and suppliers of the Iraqi research for a nuclear bomb.

That Bull, his ideas, his designs, his activities, and his progress deeply interested Israel, there is no doubt. In the aftermath of his death much was made of the fact that in the preceding months he had been worried by repeated covert entries into his flat while he was away. Nothing had ever been taken, but traces had been left. Glasses were moved and replaced; windows were left open; a videotape was rewound and removed from the player. Was he being warned, he wondered, and was the Mossad behind it all? He was, and they were—but for a less-than-obvious reason.

In the aftermath, the black-jowled strangers with the guttural accents who tailed him all over Brussels were identified by the media as Israeli assassins preparing their moment. Unfortunately for the theory, Mossad agents do not run around looking and acting like Pancho Villa.

They were there, all right, but nobody saw them; not Bull, not his friends or family, not the Belgian police. They were in Brussels with a team who could look like and pass for Europeans—Belgians, Americans, whatever they chose. It was they who tipped off the Belgians that Bull was being followed by another team.

Moreover, Gerry Bull was a man of extraordinary indiscretion. He simply could not resist a challenge. He had worked for Israel before, liked the country and the people, had many friends in the Israeli Army, and could not keep his mouth shut. Challenged with a phrase like:

“Gerry, I bet you’ll never get those rockets at Saad 16 to work,” Bull would leap into a three-hour monologue describing exactly what he was doing, how far the project had got, what were the problems, and how he hoped to solve them—the lot. For an intelligence service, he was a dream of indiscretion. Even in the last week of his life he was entertaining two Israeli generals at his office, giving them a complete up-to-the-minute picture, all tape- recorded by the devices in their briefcases. Why would they destroy such a cornucopia of inside information?

Finally, the Mossad has one other habit when dealing with a scientist or industrialist, but never with a terrorist. A final warning is always given; not a weird break-in aimed at moving glasses or rewinding videotapes, but an actual verbal warning. Even with Dr. Yahia El Meshad, the Egyptian nuclear physicist who worked on the first Iraqi nuclear reactor and was assassinated in his room at the Meridien Hotel in Paris on June 13, 1980, the procedure was observed. An Arabic-speaking katsa went to his room and told him bluntly what would happen to him if he did not desist. The Egyptian told the stranger at his door to get lost—not a wise move. Telling a Mossad kidon team to perform an impractical act upon themselves is not a tactic approved by the insurance industry. Two hours later, Meshad was dead. But he had had his chance. A year later, the whole French-supplied nuclear complex at Osirak 1 and 2 was blown away by an Israeli air strike.

Bull was different—a Canadian-born American citizen, genial, approachable, and a whiskey drinker of awesome talent. The Israelis could talk to him as a friend, and did constantly. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to send a friend to tell him bluntly that he had got to stop or the hard squad would come after him— nothing personal, Gerry, just the way things are.