David called the director of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) and asked for assistance in appraising the device that was packed inside the suitcase. The director said that this would be given top priority and instructed a couple scientists to attend to the matter urgently. Despite the late hour, it was getting close to midnight, two of the top physicists arrived at the hotel. They studied the suitcase and the device and suggested that it should be taken to the laboratories of the IAEC at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center. David said that he knew the place quite well because his mother had worked there until her retirement a couple of years earlier, and that as a youth he had spent his summer vacation in a science camp there. The neutralized bomb and suitcase were loaded into a police car and delivered to Soreq, accompanied by the two physicists who couldn't wait to get a closer look at the device.
Meanwhile reports of the failed nuclear bomb in California were the hottest items on all news services. David immediately saw the connection between the two incidents. He called his boss, Haim Shimony the Mossad chief, and asked him to convene a meeting early the next morning to discuss the two incidents.
Part 6. Getting even
Chapter 18
All Mossad department heads, as well as a representative of the Prime Minister's office, the head of the antiterror section of the Israeli police and "The Fish" from the ISA, were gathered in Shimony's office waiting excitedly to hear David's report. David started by giving them all the background on Dr. Nagib Jaber and his disappearance with stolen sensitive data from Los Alamos National Laboratory. He told them that Nagib had been suspected of being a rogue agent but was cleared after a polygraph interrogation. He briefly summarized the route that Nagib and his wife, Alia, had taken from New Mexico to Canada and then to Germany and Belgium before getting to Pakistan. He added that the Americans never officially released the details of the information that Nagib had downloaded but he had surmised that it included schematics and blueprints of America's most advanced nuclear weapons. He stopped for a moment to allow everyone to absorb the ramifications of this type of information in wrong hands, and then continued to state that the information itself was worthless without the possession of enough fissile material. David said that the Americans were now trying to analyze the reason for the failure of the nuclear device that was detonated in Costa Mesa and the Soreq scientists were studying the device that had been seized in Tel Aviv, believed to be identical to the other one. He started to say that he believed the device was an improved American version of the suitcase bombs that were allegedly developed by the Soviet Union. As he was speaking there was a knock on the door and Shimony's adjutant handed him a note and after glancing at it he passed it on to David. David stopped his briefing, read the note and said that preliminary analysis of the device confirmed his hypothesis. The note contained the results of the isotope analysis carried out by the US forensic scientists of plutonium bearing debris and indicated that the fissile plutonium was of inferior weapon grade, just like the type the Pakistanis had used in their 1998 underground tests. He explained that it was possible to use "the football" design to obtain a large yield from a small, lightweight device if high-grade plutonium was used, but using low-grade plutonium could result in a fizzle as indeed happened in Costa Mesa. Another knock on the door interrupted his narration and this time the director of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission entered accompanied by his chief scientist, Professor Eli Halevy. The IAEC director apologized for the interruption while the professor inserted a stick memory into the computer and turned on the overhead projector. He showed a series of photographs depicting the suitcase, the tubular pipe and the blocks of conventional explosives on both ends. He then showed a series of photos in which the device was disassembled and two cone shaped masses of a shiny metal that together looked like a football. He said that judging from the mass of these two pieces a nuclear detonation could have wiped out every structure and human being in a radius of 500 meters and the radioactive fallout would have been carried for tens of kilometers inland and contaminated an area in which more than one quarter of the population of Israel lived. David asked the professor if he thought that the device would fizzle or deliver its full yield and the professor said that he believed that there was a fifty-fifty chance. He added that the plutonium core would be further analyzed in order to determine its origin, but based on the preliminary measurements he was quite certain that it was a product of Pakistan.
The Mossad chief said that he would have to adjourn the meeting and present the information to the Prime Minister and his cabinet. He said that a great disaster was averted thanks to the efforts of the ISA and Mossad operatives, but the fact that a lone terrorist could almost single handed endanger the security, and perhaps the very existence of Israel was a warning sign to them all. He added that Israel had already received an official request from the United States to extradite Nagib and that the Israeli government had agreed in principle but first wanted to interrogate Nagib and find out more about the route he used to infiltrate into Israel with his suitcase bomb. "The Fish" intervened and commented that the ISA was leading the investigation and Nagib's spirit is completely broken down because of his failure and Alia's partial failure and he is cooperating fully. He believed that there would be no more useful information coming from Nagib and therefore no reason to hold him in an Israeli prison any longer. Furthermore, he said, in the United States he would probably receive capital punishment as an accomplice for mass murder of shoppers in Costa Mesa mall while in Israel he would merely get an extended prison sentence and would probably become a hero of the Palestinian people in prison.
The new Head of the Security Office, Commander (Ret.) George W. Haggard, who replaced Colonel (Ret.) Dick Groovey after the fiasco last June, had just completed a major revision of the security procedures at the Lab. He was quite satisfied with the improvements implemented to secure electronic data and files and made sure that they were enforced in spite of the protests by the scientists and engineers that constantly complained that it made their work almost impossible. In addition to installing hardware that physically prevented the insertion of any removable data storage media he had purchased from a company that was founded by veterans of the NSA a sophisticated software package that kept a record of every file that was in use and of every change that was made. The Commander, as everybody referred to him, was especially pleased that the Security Office budget was quadrupled and the personnel doubled. Dr. Eugene Powers who flew down from Washington, DC to carry out an inspection of the Lab's security was not convinced that these new measures would prevent the next Dr. Nagib Jaber from getting away with top secret documents. However, he knew that no system was completely foolproof, especially if it was supervised by fools.
The assessment of the death toll and damage to property resulting from the explosion in the Costa Mesa mall had been completed. The estimates of the amount of conventional explosives contained in the device were between 2 and 5 kilograms — not a very large amount compared to the amount carried by human suicide bombers not to mention booby-trapped trucks driven by suicide bombers. Fortunately the ceiling of the restrooms in the mall was built from very light construction materials so most of the force from the explosion was released skyward. Furthermore, thanks to the fact that the toilet area in the mall, where the suitcase was left, was built of concrete and not flimsy materials, most of the force of the explosion was contained within that area or found its way out through the ceiling. Structural damage was limited to the restrooms and the surrounding stores on all sides of the toilets and to the restroom area on the lower floor below the explosion center. Only a small part of the plutonium contained in the metal pipe was dispersed by the explosion, mainly in quite large chunks, so the amount of aerosolized highly toxic plutonium was very small and decontamination was expected to be costly but relatively easy to do. The number of people killed by the explosion was surprisingly low — only two dozen or so died instantly, mainly women in the restroom and men in the adjoining toilet. About three times as many were wounded by flying debris or by the shock wave from the explosion. Several people were contaminated by the dispersal of the radioactive material, but probably none were exposed to lethal doses of radiation. Eugene and other NNSA staff members received the report of the damage. In the post-detonation analysis there was consensus among the scientists that a true "dirty bomb" with the same amount of explosives but made with powdered radioactive material, rather than solid metallic plutonium, would have caused much more contamination and many more casualties. The bottom line was that the fizzle of the device was very fortunate, and some would go as far as to say that it was the result of divine intervention.