Intercept Read Online Free PDF

proved beyond the capabilities of both the British and the Russians. No one had to try very hard in order to die up there in the Hindu Kush.

    Locating Ben had been largely good luck. A Mossad Intelligence cell had picked someone up on a highly suspicious mobile phone in Netanya in the hours before the hotel explosion. They had swooped on the Mediterranean resort too late. But their surveillance teams had a fix on that cell phone, and they located it again, eight days later, in the middle of a packed football stadium in Amman, on the far side of the Jordan River.
    Ben went quiet after that. But Mossad surveillance nailed that telephone again four months later, working in conjunction with the British military: this time in central Afghanistan near the capital city of Kabul. By now Israel’s entire Intelligence network believed the man who had killed and maimed all of those people in Netanya was headed up the slopes to rendezvous with bin Laden’s high command.
    These were innocent days, long before the jihadists wised up to the fact that their cell phones were the most lethal aid to their enemies. Today they avoid the incriminating message. They rarely, if ever, use phones, because the tiny electronic signal can pinpoint the whereabouts of the caller.
    In the days when bin Laden was plainly still alive, the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, was able to listen in to the al-Qaeda leader on his cell phone, in his cave, talking to his aged mother in Saudi Arabia. They would play the tapes to selected visitors, as a regular party-piece.
    Meantime up in the high peaks, Ben al-Turabi was using his phone like a lovesick teenager at an English boarding school, chatting away, checking the football scores, leaving disgraceful messages on his friends’ answering machines, and generally behaving in a manner unbecoming for a Palestinian mass-murderer.
    The American interceptors picked him up in about five minutes and immediately sent in the heavies, a top SEAL team that crossed the mountains in pouring rain, on foot, slipping and sliding through the gullies, until they fell upon the al-Qaeda redoubt with ruthless efficiency. Somehow or another Ben had managed to smash and then get rid of his cell phone before the SEALs slammed into his cave. The phone was never found and thus another small piece of evidence that might have betrayed his exact identity was lost forever.
    The rest fell into place automatically. The laughing goalkeeper wound up, within a week, in Guantanamo, a true no-home, no-name, no-future, pacing-his-cell political prisoner, uncharged but suspected of high-treason and murder against the State of Israel and its people.

    Despite his “Who? Me?” attitude and joshing manner with his American guards he was listed as a number-one hard-man, unbroken by years of intense interrogation, constantly in shackles, kept in solitary confinement, and regarded as a security risk of the first order. When he played football, armed guards were posted right next to the goalposts. One step out of line, they would have gunned Ben down, no questions asked.
    But Ben never stepped out of line. He was a model prisoner despite his “known terrorist” pedigree and obvious connections to al-Qaeda. Several guards over the years had whiled away the boring hours by chatting to the tall Palestinian, whose command of English was outstanding. And although he had zero access to any form of Intelligence beyond the coils of razor-wire that bound up the camp, he gleaned more information than anyone else ever did from the friendlier U.S. guards.
    This did not involve specific Intelligence, but it did involve snippets such as U.S. lawyers being involved in protests against the system, advising outfits like Amnesty International. When a newspaper ran a story that a Washington law firm had been retained by a Saudi oil company with suspected connections to terrorist organizations, one of the guards jokingly told Ben he might yet get out of