Chapter 1
The man with ten minutes to live was laughing.
The source of his amusement was a story just told him by his personal aide, Monique Jaminé, who was driving him home that chill, drizzling evening of March 22, 1990, from his office to his apartment.
It concerned a mutual colleague in the Space Research Corporation offices at rue de Stalle, a woman regarded as a real vamp, a man-eater, who had turned out to be gay. The deception appealed to the man’s lavatorial sense of humor.
The pair had left the offices in the Brussels suburb of Uccle, Belgium, at ten to seven, Monique driving the Renault 21 estate wagon. She had, some months earlier, sold her employer’s own Volkswagen because he was such a rotten driver, she feared he would end up killing himself.
It was only a ten-minute drive from the offices to his apartment in the center building of the three-building Cheridreu complex off rue François Folie, but they stopped halfway there at a baker’s shop. Both went inside, he to buy a loaf of his favorite pain de campagne . There was rain in the wind; they bowed their heads, failing to notice the car that followed behind them.
Nothing strange in that. Neither was trained in tradecraft; the unmarked car with its two dark-jowled occupants had been following the scientist for weeks, never losing him, never approaching him, just watching; and he had not seen them. Others had, but he did not know.
Emerging from the shop just in front of the cemetery, he tossed his loaf into the back seat and climbed aboard to complete the journey to his home. At ten minutes after seven, Monique drew up in front of the plate-glass doors of the apartment building, set fifteen meters back from the street. She offered to come up with him, to see him home, but he declined. She knew he would be expecting his girlfriend Helene and did not wish them to meet. It was one of his vanities, in which his adoring female staff indulged him, that Helene was just a good friend, keeping him company while he was in Brussels and his wife was in Canada.
He climbed out of the car, the collar of his belted trench coat turned up as ever, and hefted onto his shoulder the big black canvas bag that hardly ever left him. It weighed over fifteen kilograms and contained a mass of papers: scientific papers, projects, calculations, and data. The scientist distrusted safes and thought illogically that all the details of his latest projects were safer hanging from his shoulder.
The last Monique saw of her employer, he was standing in front of the glass doors, his bag over one shoulder, the loaf under the other arm, fumbling for his keys. She watched him go through the doors and the self-locking plate glass swing closed behind him. Then she drove off.
The scientist lived on the sixth floor of the eight-story building. Two elevators ran up the back wall of the building, encircled by the stairs, with a fire door on each landing. He took one of them and stepped out at the sixth floor. The dim, floor-level lights of the lobby came on automatically as he did so. Still jangling his keys, leaning against the weight of his bag, and clutching his loaf, he turned left and left again across the russet-brown carpet and tried to fit his key into the lock of his apartment door.
The killer had been waiting on the other side of the elevator shaft, which jutted into the dimly lit lobby.
He came quietly around the shaft holding his silenced 7.65-mm. Beretta automatic, which was wrapped in a plastic bag to prevent the ejected cartridges from spilling all over the carpet.
Five shots, fired from less than a one-meter range into the back of the head and neck, were more than enough. The big, burly man slumped forward against his door and slithered to the carpet. The gunman did not bother to check; there was no need. He had done this before, practicing on prisoners, and he knew his work was done. He ran lightly down the six fligh
ts of stairs, out of the back of the building, across the tree-studded gardens, and into the waiting car. In an hour he was inside his country’s embassy, in a day out of Belgium.
Helene arrived five minutes later. At first she thought her lover had had a heart attack. In a panic she let herself in and called the paramedics. Then she realized his own doctor lived in the same building, and she summoned him as well. The paramedics arrived first.
One of them tried to shift the heavy body, still facing downward. The man’s hand came away covered in blood. Minutes later, he and the doctor pronounced the victim quite dead. The only other occupant of the four flats on that floor came to her door, an elderly lady who had been listening to a classical concert and heard nothing behind her solid timber door. Cheridreu was that kind of building, very discreet.
The man lying on the floor was Dr. Gerald Vincent Bull, wayward genius, gun designer to the world, and more latterly armorer for Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
In the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Gerry Bull, some strange things began to happen all over Europe.
In Brussels, Belgian counterintelligence admitted that for some months Bull had been followed on an almost daily basis by a series of unmarked cars containing two men of swarthy, eastern Mediterranean appearance.
On April 11, British Customs officers seized on the docks of Middlesborough eight sections of huge steel pipes, beautifully forged and milled and able to be assembled by giant flanges at each end, drilled to take powerful nuts and bolts. The triumphant officers announced that these tubes were not intended for a petrochemical plant, as specified on the bills of lading and the export certificates, but were parts of a great gun barrel designed by Gerry Bull and destined for Iraq. The farce of the Supergun was born, and it would run and run, revealing double-dealing, the stealthy paws of several intelligence agencies, a mass of bureaucratic ineptitude, and some political chicanery.
Within weeks, bits of the Supergun began popping up all over Europe. On April 23, Turkey announced it had stopped a Hungarian truck carrying a single ten-meter steel tube for Iraq, believed to be part of the gun. The same day, Greek officials seized another truck with steel parts and held the hapless British driver for several weeks as an accomplice. In May the Italians intercepted seventy-five tons of parts, while a further fifteen tons were confiscated at the Fucine works, near Rome. The latter were of a titanium steel alloy and destined to be part of the breech of the gun, as were more bits and pieces yielded by a warehouse at Brescia, in northern Italy.
The Germans came in, with discoveries at Frankfurt and Bremerhaven, also identified as parts of the by now world-famous Supergun.
In fact, Gerry Bull had placed the orders for his brainchild skillfully and well. The tubes forming the barrels were indeed made in England by two firms, Walter Somers of Birmingham and Sheffield Forgemasters. But the eight intercepted in April 1990 were the last of fifty-two sections, enough to make two complete barrels 156 meters long and with an unbelievable one-meter caliber, capable of firing a projectile the size of a cylindrical telephone 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 prosecuto
r, 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.
Bull was not in the business of winning a posthumous Congressional Medal. Moreover, he had already told the Israelis and his close friend George Wong that he wanted out of Iraq—physically and contractually. He had had enough. What happened to Dr. Gerry Bull was something quite different.
Gerald Vincent Bull was born in 1928 at North Bay, Ontario. At school he was clever and driven by an urge to succeed and earn the world’s approval. At sixteen he graduated from high school, but because he was so young the only college that would accept him was the University of Toronto Engineering Faculty.