There are other terms which give Israel “favored status.” It is allowed to use 25 percent of its allocation to subsidize its own defense industry; again, no other nation is allowed to use U.S. funds for that purpose. Neither does Israel have to account for how the money is spent; this makes it hard for Washington to prevent the allocation being only partly used for purposes, which Israel opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, Washington has encouraged Israel’s burgeoning defense industry to use a substantial amount of the annual budget it provides to develop the latest weapons systems. Some of these have been created from material stolen from the United States (see chapter 10, “A Dangerous Liaison”). The United States has also given Israel, at production costs, Black Hawk helicopters and F-16 jets. To top it all off, it has given the Jewish state vital intelligence it refuses to share with its NATO allies and has continued to allow Israel to increase its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
On the day their aircraft headed out from Ben Gurion airport, the men in their First Class armchairs would have seen on their left the distant outline of Dimona, the country’s nuclear facility where over two hundred kinds of nuclear weapons were stored in 2006.
Equally important, successive U.S. administrations provided Israel with invaluable diplomatic support. Since 1982 the United States vetoed thirty-two significant resolutions critical of Israel: this was more than all the numbers of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. U.S. diplomatic support had also included blocking the efforts to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s agenda—which would have laid Dimona open to inspection. Time and again America supported Israel in time of war and used its influence when negotiating peace. Successive U.S. administrations had protected Israel against Soviet threats and later played a crucial role in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Meir Amit, the former Mossad chief and in 2006 still an “elder” of the intelligence community, recalled (to the author): “There may have been occasional bumps along the way, but Washington consistently supported our position.” Rafi Eitan, Mossad’s retired director of operations and in 2006 the head of a small political grouping of pensioners in the Knesset, remembered: “Time and again Israel has found Washington functioning as our unpaid lawyer on the world stage.”
Eitan was among those who believed that Israel, for its part, had been a “valuable asset” to the United States during the Cold War. “In many ways we had acted as Washington’s proxy by helping to contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicting heavy defeats on Soviet client states like Egypt and Syria. We had also helped to protect another U.S. ally, like Jordan, and, of course, we passed on important intelligence about Soviet intentions.”
But Israel had also provided sensitive military technology, either sent directly from the United States to the Jewish state or developed within its own defense industry, to countries like China and South Africa. The State Department’s inspector-general had described this as “a systematic, and continuing to grow, pattern of unauthorized transfers. Israel also remains the most aggressive in running operations against the U.S. of any ally.”
Since 9/11 Israel and the United States has become even closer enjoined—“like identical twins” Meir Dagan said—due to the war against terrorism. Part of that relationship has been to allow Tel Aviv a free hand on how it would deal with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah’s threat on Israel’s northern border.
It was against that background that the Houston discussions began. Much of the initial tension revolved around Uri Saguy. While he was seen in Israel as a hawk who had turned dove and the first to detect what he called “a sea of change in Damascus,” it was a judgment which made him unpopular in Israel together with his argument that the Golan Heights must be surrendered. But to Fatah he was also the man who had approved Mossad assassinations including attempts on Yasser Arafat’s life. Jibril Rajoud, for one, felt that “the jury is still out” on how Arafat had died. “Natural causes or murder, we may never now know,” he said.
At the end of each meeting, using secure communication links provided by the U.S. State Department, Rajoud reported to President Mahmoud Abbas and Saguy briefed Ehud Olmert. That briefing, by agreement, had included Meir Dagan. It was in every sense Olmert’s first real taste of international politics. The rise of the sixty-one-year-old lawyer had been meteoric as it was unexpected. Injured while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a combat officer, Olmert had completed his military service as a journalist on the Force’s BaMahne magazine. An untaxing position, it also had an unforeseen benefit. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Olmert joined General Ariel Sharon’s headquarters as a military reporter. Sharon took a liking to the tall Olmert in his carefully pressed uniform and shoulder pip, which identified him as a lieutenant. Others saw him as “arrogant, cold, cunning, and unpleasant.” That judgment, by Israeli’s historian Tom Segev, would follow Olmert after he took a law degree at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and opened a successful law partnership. From there it was but a step into political life. In 1973, at the age of twenty-eight, he became the youngest member of the Knesset. “I was often impetuous and wrong in the early years,” he later admitted. He opposed Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai land captured in the Six-Day War and had voted against the Camp David Peace Accords in 1978. The year before, he had also been embroiled in a political finance scandal involving Jerusalem businessmen, organized crime, and corrupt legislators. Though he was later acquitted, he was unable to shake off his image of a fat-cat lawyer tainted by sleaze.
On the February day the negotiators had flown out to Houston, an inquiry was announced into the 1999 sale and leaseback of Olmert’s Jerusalem house in allegedly questionable circumstances. But soon events brewing in Lebanon would see the investigation firmly placed on the back burner of Israel’s legal system. In the meantime, Olmert had become a rising, but colorless politician, holding portfolios that included health, communications, and finance until, in 2003, he became Sharon’s deputy prime-minister. By then he learned to control his temper with reporters and had cultivated an air of being shrewd. Benjamin Netanyahu, the new leader of Likud, the party Sharon had left to form Kadima, said that Olmert is “a very clever guy.” Certainly, while withdrawal went against Olmert’s hawkish views, he also now believed it was the only response to the changing demographics of a growing Palestinian population which could eventually outvote Israelis.
Olmert’s political position was one of the few times he found favor among his own family. His wife, Aliza, a left wing playwright and a painter whom he had met at college, publicly admitted she had been at odds with his right wing politics for much of their thirty-five-year marriage. Their children shared her dovish views. His daughter, Danna, a lesbian who lived openly with her girlfriend in Tel Aviv, was an active member of Machson Watch, a group monitoring Palestinian rights in Gaza and the West Bank. She had barely spoken to her father since he withdrew funding for an annual gay parade in the city in 2006. His eldest son, Shaul, had signed a petition refusing to serve in the Israeli army when he was ordered to duty in the occupied Palestinian territories. His brother, Ariel, named after Olmert’s admiration of Sharon, had avoided his military service by moving to Paris.
Just as with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, circumstances had intervened to change Ehud Olmert’s future. When Sharon announced he was leaving Likud to implement his plans for radical political adjustment that would take into account the demographic changes of a growing Palestinian population, Olmert had been one of the first to join him. When Sharon had collapsed from a massive stroke in January 2006, a month before the joint Israeli-Fatah team flew to Houston, Olmert became acting prime minister. When Kadima won the election, Olmert became head of a coalition government with the Labour party.
Weeks before then, the secret “back door channel” that came into operation after a series of meetings in Houston had—like so many other expectations involving the Middle East—achieved little. Saguy comment
ed, “It’s really a question of whether we both saw the glass as being half full or half empty.”
Mossad analysts had already decided the Houston meetings were doomed to failure after Mahmoud Abbas had made it clear that underpinning them was his plan to solve his own mounting internal crisis in Gaza. Daily the plan brought closer the possibility of a civil war involving Fatah and Hamas as gun battles spread across the Gaza Strip between the two organizations. Hamas was determined to hang on to political power. Abbas saw resolution in what he called the “prisoners’ covenant,” a document worked out by Hamas and Fatah prisoners in Israeli jails and designed to be “a platform for national reconciliation.” Abbas had seized upon the covenant as a solution to the crisis erupting all around him. What he had failed to take into account was that his search for an internal solution in Gaza had reduced his “already desperately narrow space for compromise in future peace negotiations with Israel,” one analyst wrote.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former foreign minister of Israel, had echoed that view. “It is one thing to work out a platform for an internal peace with Hamas and quite another to ask Israel to subscribe to such a platform. Referenda are supposed to approve peace deals; they are not made in advance of peace negotiations to tie the hands of the negotiators.”
The flaws in Abbas’s initiative arose from the wrong assumption that he could reconcile his domestic crisis and use a united Hamas Fatah alliance to strong-arm Israel into reopening peace talks or face the consequence of renewed attacks. There was much more in the covenant that the Mossad analysts knew would be rejected. One example was its repetitive demand for Palestinian refugees to return to their former lands in Israel, the mystical “right of return.” The document also represented a clear departure from Fatah’s willingness to consider compromises on border adjustments and the controversial position of Jerusalem. All these had been stumbling blocks in the past. Now the document made it clear that they were non-negotiable. Legitimized by Abbas’s endorsement, it led to further radicalization of Fatah and the growing fear in Israel that it did not have a negotiating partner on the Palestinian side, regardless of who was in office in Gaza and the West Bank. The expectations of Houston, never high, were now dead.
As the first quarter of 2006 drew to a close, for part of what was called “the education of Ehud Olmert,” Mossad continued, on the sixth floor of its headquarters, to supply the new prime minister with only carefully selected intelligence. The mood within Mossad was that Olmert was still struggling to shake off the shadow of his illustrious predecessor, Ariel Sharon. With tensions mounting in Gaza and the West Bank, and further north on the border with Lebanon and in the Beka’a Valley, the fear was that Olmert did not yet have Ariel Sharon’s capability to see what Meir Dagan called “the big picture.” Israelis continued to have deep reservations about Olmert’s political decisions, though few would deny they could count on “Arik”—the nickname that the comatose Sharon had enjoyed all his political life—to fight in their corner. And unlike other flamboyant characters who had occupied the prime minister’s office—including the devious Moshe Dayan, the iconic Yitzhak Rabin, and the driven “Bibi” Netanyahu—Ehud Olmert gave the impression of being the backroom, career politician who had risen, almost without trace, to implement Sharon’s plan to complete Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Palestinian territories it had occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967. While Israelis were open to persuasion by Ariel Sharon, they increasingly wondered if Olmert had the skills to ensure that Israel would not be drawn into conflict. In a martial nation like Israel, whose voters have traditionally been reassured by the presence of a battle-hardened veteran at the political helm, Meir Dagan knew that Olmert faced a massive task in trying to convince his countrymen that their security was as safe in his hands as it had been under Ariel Sharon.
With Mahmoud Abbas’s power base in Gaza almost daily being further eroded and Hamas’s continued rhetoric against its near neighbor, Ehud Olmert became more belligerent. While Israeli prime ministers have rarely been inclined to demonstrate restraint when responding to Arab provocation because the eye-for-an-eye ethos is far too deeply ingrained in the national psyche, the language coming from the new prime minister raised the question: Just how serious was his government in coming to a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians?
Mossad analysts increasingly felt that irrespective of the pledges Ehud Olmert had given President Bush and Prime Minister Blair about adhering to the principles of the much-maligned “road map” for a permanent Arab/Israeli peace deal, Olmert would welcome the chance for a military resolution with Hamas and Hezbollah, a view his generals also encouraged. They saw it as one way to deal with the “plight of the Palestinians,” the potent propaganda tool for radical Islamic groups in the Middle East and beyond—a tool which would remain as long as the Palestinian aspirations for statehood remained unfulfilled. There was a feeling in Mossad that Ehud Olmert wanted an opportunity to show he was as rough as Ariel Sharon, both as politician and as a military leader. That feeling had been reinforced by what Meir Dagan described at his weekly senior staff meeting in early May 2006, as “a Shia expansion.” He asked them to “join the dots” and find answers to pressing questions. What was the exact nature of the current link between Hezbollah and Hamas after Iran’s President Ahmadinejad had publicly embraced the Sunni organization? What was the involvement of Iran in Gaza and the West Bank? Was there evidence of a shift of power between Syria and Iran, which could change the geopolitics of the region for the foreseeable future?
The answers were not reassuring. The signs were that the doctrinal, cultural, and political differences between the Sunni Hamas and the Shia Hezbollah were being buried in the common cause to destroy Israel. Bashar al-Assad, who has a powerful resemblance to his father—the same high forehead and piercing eyes—had begun to try and steer Syria clear of the theocratic militancy of Iran his father had supported, but in the complex religious map of the region, the al-Assads are members of a minority Shia sect in a predominantly Sunni majority Syria. But increasingly the new power of the Iraqi Shia—65 percent of the population—had allowed Iran to profit enormously from their dominant role in that chaotic country. A Mossad report revealed: “Iraq’s Shia leaders regularly visit Tehran to settle issues such as border security and developing joint energy projects. Iranian businessmen are investing heavily in Iraq’s overwhelmingly Shia southern regions and Iran’s highly skilled intelligence operatives are embedded in Iraq’s nascent security forces and within the Shia militias who rule the streets of Basra.”
Even more worrying for Israel, Mossad undercover agents reported the growing presence of those spies in the Hezbollah strongholds in the Beka’a Valley. It was there that the organization was believed to have stockpiled its growing supply of missiles and rockets supplied by Iran. One Mossad report put the figure at 18,000. This number included the Katyusha rockets made in Russia, which have a range of fifteen kilometers. More powerful were the Iranian-built Fajr-3 missiles, almost six meters long, which have a range of almost forty kilometers. Most powerful of all were Iran’s version of a Scud missile, the Shabtai-1. They could reach any Israeli city. When Iraqi Scuds rained down on Haifa and Tel Aviv during the Desert Storm conflict in 1991 (see chapter 16, “Spies in the Sand”), hundreds of buildings were destroyed and scores of civilians injured. One of Mossad’s yaholomin, the electronic surveillance units, had picked up conversations between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Khalid Meshal in his fortress-like villa in a suburb in the north of Damascus. Meshal, who had survived a Mossad assassination attempt in Amman, Jordan, was now the overall strategist for Hamas and a respected figure within Hezbollah.
Meir Dagan was a good example that much intelligence is anti-historical because it uses stratagems to frustrate the truth as well as unearth it. Facts are often directed toward some distant, unwritten goal, and it is the highest purpose of any intelligence to leave complicity hidden and ambiguous. At the Mossad training school, the Sources and Methods class
reminds students that they cannot simply adhere to the historian’s discipline; that a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque, but he must control it so absolutely to work only with the material on hand and refrain from supplementing deficiencies with additions of his own. But the class instructor explained that in intelligence work the deficiencies are precisely what is expected to be supplied. “Action cannot wait for certainty. Motive deception will be at the center of their endeavors. They will create situations to draw fact out of the darkness. The art of informed conjecture will be part of their skills, but always to be used within the range of probability. Their writ will confine them to the realm of surmise,” one of the instructors told the author.
Those finely-honed skills had served Meir Dagan well. Now they went into overdrive after Mohammad Khatami, a senior member of the Iranian leadership, in the second week of May described Hezbollah as “the sun of Islam who will soon shine even brighter.” A few days later President Ahmadinejad ended another of his anti-Semitic harangues to a Tehran crowd with the promise: “We shall very soon witness the elimination of the Zionist state of shame.” Was this merely more rabble-rousing rhetoric? Or was it finally the precursor of what Dagan had long predicted: an attack on Israel on two fronts—Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah coming out of the olive and banana groves of south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley? And would that be the moment Iran would mobilize its Revolutionary Guards and would al-Qaeda seize the opportunity to marshal its untold numbers of jihadists throughout the Muslim world. To try and find answers Meir Dagan had sent encoded priority signals to Mossad stations across the Middle East to report signs of mobilization. Then he refreshed himself on Hezbollah and its previous methods.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 71