Close Ties Between CIA, Mossad Seen as Fraying

The Mossad agents were on the run, winding through the crowded streets of Khartoum, one step ahead of Sudan’s secret police and their Libyan allies. The Israeli spies had been betrayed by Sudanese informants, their cover as European businessmen blown and their station--disguised as a private business office--compromised. They had managed to salvage only their secret communications gear before speeding off into the dark.

Their destination: Milton Bearden’s house.

For the next 30 days, Bearden, Khartoum station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, hid the four agents from Sudanese authorities, moving them from one CIA house to another to prevent their capture and likely execution.

Finally, the CIA arranged a remarkable escape, packing the four into crates custom-fitted with oxygen tanks, then shipping them as cargo on a Kenya-bound aircraft, just as their pursuers were closing in.

The story of how the CIA rescued the Mossad agents in Sudan has never before been told, and it helps to shed new light on the ties between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, one of the least understood, most complex relationships in the espionage world.

With the demise of the Russian KGB, no other spy service remains so shrouded in mystery and intrigue as Israel’s Mossad. In the post-Cold War world where U.S. intelligence agencies are giant bureaucracies facing constant congressional oversight, Mossad stands as a tough, daring spy service stripped down for fighting with a clear-cut goal: ensuring the survival of the Jewish state.

“Mossad,” Bearden said “always fights above its weight.”

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Mossad’s reputation for independence and ruthless action is legendary. But its effectiveness has always relied on its close ties with the CIA, its institutional big brother in the West. Increasingly, though, that relationship is complicated by a growing feeling among some in the American national security establishment that it has become too one-sided.

Mossad, some U.S. sources complain, has done little recently to help U.S. efforts to track down international terrorists, even in the Middle East. For example, the United States neutralized teams of assassination and terrorist agents sent out by Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf crisis without help from Mossad, U.S. intelligence sources say.

Worse, some in the U.S. now see Israeli intelligence as a post-Cold War rival that has made the United States a prime target for its spying, for both political and economic information.

“By all accounts, the Israelis are among the most active foreign intelligence services operating in the United States,” observed Jeffrey Richelson, an author and expert on U.S. intelligence.

In fact, a decade after U.S. naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was imprisoned for spying for Israel, a Defense Department memo on counterintelligence recently labeled Israel a “nontraditional adversary” on espionage matters. The memo caused a furor in the American Jewish community after it was leaked, because it suggested that Israeli intelligence relied on “strong ethnic ties” to American Jews to conduct its spying. The report was quickly disavowed by the Pentagon and was withdrawn.

Still, one U.S. source acknowledges that while the CIA has had long-standing orders not to spy on Israel, “Mossad faces no such restrictions” in the United States.

Both the CIA and Israel’s government refused to comment on any aspect of the intelligence relationship between the CIA and Mossad.

But U.S. experts believe that Israel aggressively spies on the United States because of--and in spite of--its reliance on Washington for economic and military aid. Politically, Israel needs to know where U.S. policy toward the Jewish state is heading; economically, it craves U.S. technology to maintain its high-tech military.

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“Israeli intelligence has done many things for the U.S. over the years,” said Amos Perlmutter, editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies and an expert on Israeli national security matters. “Israel was a prime source of Soviet-made weaponry for the U.S. after the 1967 and 1973 wars, and the strategic understanding between the two countries was then complete. But today, the U.S. is the supermarket for espionage. If you want to steal military technology, you come to the United States, and Israel is, of course, involved in that.”

Meanwhile, the Mossad can be lackadaisical about helping the CIA with its U.S. intelligence operations because it can afford to be, intelligence experts say. Focused on its nation’s precarious strategic position, the agency cares single-mindedly about Israel, not fairness or teamwork. If it can receive intelligence help without bothering to respond in kind, why should it?

“What can the U.S. claim now against Israel?” Perlmutter asked. With its strong political support in the U.S. and a pivotal role in the Mideast peace effort, Israel believes that it is doing enough. “And that has an impact on the intelligence relationship,” he said.

At the same time, Israel also seems eager to develop greater independence from American intelligence, prodded by suspicions that the CIA’s Near East division--which handles the U.S.-Israeli intelligence liaison--is pro-Arab. For example, U.S. sources say they believe that Israel has secretly developed its own “imaging capability.” This, they say, suggests that Israel has launched its own spy satellites.

Despite the ambiguities in the relationship, the ties between many CIA and Mossad officers in the field remain close, and the agencies can work together well. Earlier this decade, for example, in another episode never before disclosed, the CIA agreed to broker secret meetings in Germany between Mossad and the Palestine Liberation Front, as Israeli intelligence sought to reduce conflicts on the espionage front.

Further, observers say, the Clinton administration is likely to offer even greater intelligence support to Israel if it agrees to give up the Golan Heights--and its critical listening posts--as part of a peace treaty with Syria.

On a personal level, Bearden, who retired from the CIA in 1994, said he and his colleagues felt a sense of “brotherhood” with Mossad. And when the issue was life or death, any hint of rivalry vanished. The CIA rescue of the Mossad agents in Khartoum was clearly a high point in the secret partnership.

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In the spring of 1985, a military coup in Sudan led to the overthrow of President Jaafar Numeiri, a pro-U.S. strongman. Numeiri was in Washington at the time of the coup, but many of his top lieutenants were not so lucky. They were quickly arrested, severing the CIA’s ties to the Sudanese government.

Meanwhile, agents working for Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi began arriving to support the new Islamic government. “Everybody I knew in Sudan intelligence was in jail, and then we had these hoodlums with Kalashnikovs [rifles] flying in from Libya,” Bearden recalled.

The situation grew grimmer when the new Sudanese authorities received a tip disclosing the existence and location of the secret Israeli intelligence station in Khartoum. With the airport closed and no way out of the country, the Mossad agents had few alternatives; Israel had no diplomatic relations with Sudan, so it had no embassy to provide a haven.

Desperate, the agents reached out to the CIA and Bearden.

More than a year earlier, the Mossad agents had held a secret meeting in a Khartoum hotel with the U.S. station chief so they would know each other on sight. Bearden had orders from CIA headquarters to help them if they were ever in a jam.

Then Bearden received a signal that they were coming to him. Two Mossad agents knocked on the front door of his home, unloaded their communications gear and moved into an upstairs bedroom. They were soon joined by a third Mossad agent from their station; a few days later, a fourth agent--sent in undercover by Israel to try to rescue the others--was there too.

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On Khartoum’s streets, the Sudanese and Libyans were hunting them, Bearden recalls.

But the CIA soon was able to monitor which part of the city the Sudanese would be scouring each night, and the agents were moved from house to house. Every few nights, a darkened minibus from the U.S. Embassy would shuttle the Mossad agents and their CIA minders, all packing sidearms, among three sites--Bearden’s home, that of another CIA officer and a CIA safe house.

As station chief, Bearden had a large home in a walled compound on the city’s edge; he had plenty of room for guests. His wife, Marie, kept them well-fed. But explaining the situation to their four Sudanese servants was tricky: “We would tell them we didn’t need them for the night, tell them they weren’t needed in the upstairs part of the house,” Marie Bearden recalled.

Eventually, Bearden tried to Americanize the Israelis, giving them Dallas Cowboys hats and T-shirts to try to convince the servants that they were U.S. officials on temporary duty. Still, the Mossad agents stayed in their rooms day and night, except when shuttling to another location. They couldn’t use their gear to contact Israel for fear the signal would give them away. “We gave them some things to read, and we set them up with some tapes, a VCR and some guns,” Bearden said.

Finally, he said, the Sudanese authorities grew suspicious of the Americans. “We stayed ahead of them,” Bearden recalled. “But the hunt for them was going on all over town. And it seemed like it was only a matter of time before they would be caught.”

Desperate, Bearden gambled, telling the CIA and Mossad he planned to crate up the agents and fly them out of Khartoum’s airport. “I knew some Mossad people at a very senior level, and they trusted me on this one,” he said. “But I don’t think they would have agreed to this if they didn’t know me.”

CIA technicians built special crates, one for each Mossad agent. The crates were fitted with holes and plastic tubes for breathing, as well as solid-state oxygen tanks in case the holes were blocked. The CIA arranged for a cargo aircraft to fly into Khartoum after the airport was reopened. A van from the U.S. Embassy carried the crated Mossad agents straight from Bearden’s house to the airport. A CIA officer rode in the front seat; there were two more in the back with the boxes. The embassy driver bluffed his way through airport security.

The plan seemed to be going smoothly until Bearden got a tip that the Sudanese had figured out that he was hiding the Israeli spies, and that he was trying to get them to Kenya somehow. About the same time, the CIA officers at the airport reported that a Sudanese helicopter had begun to hover suspiciously nearby.

Bearden immediately called on a secure telephone, ordering the plane to take off and get the Mossad agents out. As soon as the crates were aboard, the plane turned and moved onto the runway, despite nervous calls from the Khartoum tower.

The plane took off without incident. By the time it landed in Nairobi, the Mossad men were out of their crates, with new identities to cover their travel back to Israel.

Soon, Bearden got word that he might be the target of an assassination attempt by the Libyans in Sudan. He didn’t push his luck for long. He quickly left for a new assignment; he later became field commander of the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan, and eventually chief of the CIA’s Soviet division.

But as soon as he could, he and his wife visited Israel, where the Mossad gave them a royal welcome, complete with a tour of Jerusalem. Bearden also received a special honorific: “Righteous Gentile.”