The lynchpin of “Sunburst” was Meir Dagan. Early in the summer, he had presented Olmert with evidence of what he called “the nuclear connection” between Syria and North Korea that had reached a dangerous level. Syria already possessed sixty Scud-C missiles, which it had bought from North Korea, and on August 14, when the freighter al-Hamed was already bound for Syria, North Korea’s foreign trade minister, Rim Kyung Man, was in Damascus to sign a protocol on “cooperation and trade in science and technology.” Afterward the minister had flown to Tehran, furthering the triangular relationship between North Korea, Syria, and Iran.
Mossad’s analysts had concluded that Syria was not only a conduit for the transport to Iran of an estimated £50 million of missiles, but also could serve as “a hideout” for North Korea’s own nuclear weapons, particularly its plutonium, while the regime continued to promise it would give up its nuclear program in exchange for the massive security guarantees and financial aid the West had promised.
Until recently, Meir Dagan had remained uncertain whether this was the case. Now, the latest intelligence from his agents in the country showed that Syria was determined to create its own nuclear weapons.
The meeting had been called to discuss the matter. Dagan began by saying the crates unloaded from the al-Hamed had been tracked by Israel’s satellite to the complex. Dagan continued the meeting with his usual succinct analysis. The building was now almost certainly to be where the crates had been delivered. Inside its main structure was the machinery to cast the warheads for housing the weaponized plutonium. Scientists at Dimona had concluded that a small quantity of polonium and beryllium would be used to create the chain reaction for the plutonium, after the pellets were machined in “glove boxes,” sealed containers accessed only by special laboratory gloves to protect the technicians at the site. Dagan had concluded with a final warning: the longer Israel waited to destroy the site, the closer the technicians in the building would come to creating their weapons.
Within minutes the decision was taken to eliminate the complex.
In the late evening of September 5, 2007, Israeli commandos from the Sayeret Matkal dressed in Syrian army uniform crossed into Syria over its northern border with Iraq. They were equipped with a laser guidance system designed to guide aircraft to the target. With them were specialists from the Israeli Defense Forces. In their backpacks was equipment linked to IDF electronic counter-measure jamming technology designed to disrupt Syria’s formidable air defenses. When they were forty miles from the target the men hid and waited.
At their airfield in the Negev, the five mission pilots sat down to a large dinner. Even though they were not hungry, they knew they would need all the nutrients for the sheer physical energy and mental skills they would expend in the coming hours. Afterward they went to the briefing room where Shkedy was waiting with other senior officers. The briefing officer once more ran through the mission procedure: radio frequencies, radio silence protocols, and individual call signs. Take-off time would be at 23:59 with twenty seconds separating each plane. There would be a dogleg out to sea at five hundred knots, over eight miles a minute, then, with Haifa to their right, they would drop to sea level and head up the coast of Lebanon, past Beirut and continue into Syrian airspace. From there it was on to the IP.
When the briefing ended, Shkedy walked to the front of the room and paused to look at each pilot.
“You all know the importance of your target. It must be destroyed at all costs. This is the most important mission any of you have taken or probably will ever take. Every step has been taken to protect you. But if anything does happen, we will do everything to rescue you. That I promise you. But I am confident that surprise is on our side. You will be in and out before the Syrians realize what has happened,” said General Shkedy.
No one in the room doubted him. They all knew the mission was a pivotal point in the protection of Israel. The silence was broken by Shkedy’s final words: “God be with you!” Then he stepped forward and shook the hand of each pilot.
By 11:45 in the evening, the ordnance technicians had checked the bombs, ensuring each was securely positioned in its release clip beneath the wings of each F-151. After his check, the technician removed the metal safety pin from each bomb.
A minute later, the runway crew had reported the strip was clear of small stones or any other obstruction that could be sucked into the engine and destroy it.
From the twin tailpipes of the first aircraft, followed by the others, came the scalding heat from the afterburners.
In each cockpit the pilots had gone through the same drill: activating the computerized checks of the navigation, mechanical, communications, and finally the firing systems.
Each pilot wore two suits: his flight suit and, over it, the G-suit, a torso harness, survival gear, and a helmet. Clipped to each harness was a small gadget that would send a homing-signal if he was forced to abandon the mission.
At one minute to midnight the first F-151, with a roar and a plume of exhaust marking its progress, sped down the runway. Shortly after midnight the last of the planes had retracted its wheels. Sunrise had started.
The mission was a total success. Satellite images showed the complete destruction of the complex and, the next day, Syrian bulldozers covering the blitzed area with earth to avoid the spread of radiation. It would be ten days before the country’s vice president, Farouk al-Sharaa, would only say: “Our military and political echelon is looking into the matter.” In Tel Aviv Ehud Olmert, not quite able to conceal his smile, said: “You will understand we naturally cannot always show the public our cards.” But to play them, in the early hours of the morning of September 6, 2007, those pilots had carried out one of the most daring air strikes ever.
In January 2008, three days after President Bush had left Israel, where he had been privately briefed on the mission, the Israeli Defense Force released a satellite image that showed Syria had commenced rebuilding the destroyed site.
On Saturday morning, February 2, 2008, a man emerged from the U-Bahn, Berlin’s railway system, and stood outside the subway exit on the Kurfüerstendamm, the city’s elegant shopping quarter. He had started his journey in one of the eastern suburbs of the city and its purpose was contained in the briefcase he carried. A car pulled up, the driver opened the passenger door, and together they drove off.
Who the man was and what he had been asked to do was known, apart from the driver, to only Meir Dagan and a handful of senior Mossad officers in Tel Aviv. They had patiently waited for the car’s passenger to obtain what they wanted.
Six months before, the driver introduced himself to the man as “Reuben.” It was not his real name: like all other details about his identity, it remained in a secure room where the names of all current katsas, field agents, were kept in Mossad headquarters. A few days ago, the man had left a message at one of the agreed dead-letter boxes, which Reuben regularly checked, that he was ready to deliver what he had been asked to provide in return for a substantial sum of euros, half as a down payment, the balance on delivery of what was now in his briefcase.
They were photos of Imad Mughniyeh. Next to Osama bin Laden, he was the world’s most wanted terrorist.
Long before the al-Qaeda leader had launched his pilots against New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, Mughniyeh had introduced suicide bombers into the Middle East. The Hezbollah terrorist mastermind had read an account of the WWII Japanese kamikaze pilots in Hezbollah’s own newspapers, Al Sabia and Al Abd, which had praised the pilots for their sacrifices. In the alleys and souks of Beirut, Mughniyeh had persuaded families it was a matter of honor to provide a son, or sometimes even a daughter, for similar sacrifices. They had remained the human weapons of choice against Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Those who had chosen to die were remembered in Friday prayers in the shadowy coolness of the mosques, after the rhetoric of the muezzin calling for the destruction of all those who opposed Hezbollah.
The deaths of the young bombers were l
auded and their memories kept alive. Mughniyeh told their families the souls of their children needed no more, that their suicide bombings would be remembered forever and assured them a place in Hezbollah’s version of Heaven.
Like bin Laden, Mughniyeh had been hunted across the Middle East and beyond by Mossad, the CIA, and every other Western intelligence service. But each time he came close to capture, he escaped, the trail gone cold. Until now.
On that cold winter day in February 2008, with a bitterly harsh wind from the Polish steppes whistling through the streets of Berlin, Reuben drove along past the smoke-blackened ruins of the Gedäechtniskirche, the church that was a memorial to the Allied bombing raids of WWII, a grim contrast to all the other buildings, which made the city look like any other European capital.
At some point the man produced a file from his briefcase and, in return, replaced it with an envelope Reuben handed over containing the balance of the fee for the images in the file.
The cover of the gray-colored document bore the stamp of what was once one of the most powerful agencies in the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, itself at one time the most important satellite nation in the former Soviet Union. The stamp identified the file had once belonged to the Stasi, the security service of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security.
In the forty years of its existence it had employed 600,000 full time spies and informers, roughly 1 secret policeman for every 320 East Germans. The Stasi had its own imposing headquarters in East Berlin, interrogation centers around the city, its own hotels and restaurants in the countryside, and clinics where only Stasi staff and their families could be treated. One clinic, close to the River Spree, had facilities to perform plastic surgery including facial reconstruction for Stasi agents and sometimes carefully selected members of terror groups with which the Stasi had close connections.
With bewildering speed, the citizens of East Germany awoke in November 1988 to find the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the resignation of the GDR’s Politburo and the official end of the Stasi’s reign of terror. But not everything had ended. The clinic near the Spree had still remained in business, offering its skills to those with the funding to pay for plastic surgery.
The file now in Reuben’s possession contained photos of Imad Mughniyeh, which had been taken at the clinic after post-operative surgery. His face looked very different from the one, which had last filled the pages of newspapers and magazines after he had been photographed at a Hezbollah rally before once more disappearing almost a quarter of a century previously when he had established an even more murderous reputation than any other terrorist of the 1980s.
It was an era when the Venezuelan-born Marxist, Carlos the Jackal’s, claim to notoriety had begun with taking forty-two Opec oil ministers hostage in Vienna in 1975. He had then embarked on a reign of terror before Mossad had tipped off French intelligence where they could grab Carlos in Sudan and bring him to trial in Paris for his crimes on French soil and where he continues to serve a life sentence. Like Carlos, Abu Nidal had become another headline-grabbing terrorist after he ordered the gunning down of innocent men and women as they waited to board their Christmas flights in Rome and Vienna airports in 1985. Nidal had finally been killed by a Mossad kidon team. For a quarter of a century Imad Mughniyeh had avoided assassination.
On that February morning, the file in Reuben’s possession could bring his death closer for some of the worst crimes committed on Israel’s doorstep—Lebanon. His history of violent attacks was appalling. In 1983, he had plotted the attack against the American embassy in Beirut. Among the sixty-three dead were eight members of the CIA, including its station chief in the Middle East. In the same year, Mughniyeh arranged for the kidnapping of William Buckley, the CIA replacement station chief in battered Beirut.
Next he arranged the bombing of the U.S. Marines’ barracks near the city’s airport killing 241 people. In between, he had carried out skyjackings and organized the kidnapping of Western hostages, including Terry Waite, who had gone to Beirut to try to negotiate with the Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, to free the hostages Hezbollah already held. Along with Buckley, Waite—the emissary of the Archbishop of Canterbury—had been incarcerated in what became known as the Beirut Hilton, the underground prison beneath the city.
Imad Mughniyeh had been responsible for the murder of over four hundred people and the torture of even more. America had placed a bounty of $25 million (£12.5 million) on his head.
One by one Mossad’s menume, the Hebrew title by which each director-general is known, plotted Mughniyeh’s downfall. Men like the cool Nahum Admoni (1982–1990), the quiet-voiced Shabtai Shavit (1990–1996), the relentless Danny Yatom (1996–1998), and Efraim Halevy (1998–2002), the menume his staff called the “grandfather of spies,” had all chaired endless secret meetings to plan the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh.
Their agents had tracked him to Paris only for him to once more slip away, as he had done in Rome and Madrid. For a while the trail led to Minsk in the Ukraine and then to the Islamic Republics of the former Soviet Union. There were reports he was in Tehran, living under the protection of the Fundamentalist regime. But each time the hunt had petered out.
In 2002, Meir Dagan took over Mossad. He did what all his predecessors had done and studied the growing number of files that listed how close Mossad agents had come to capturing Mughniyeh. At times they had been close, very close. But somehow he had still wriggled free. The suicide bombings had continued. For Dagan it became an article of faith that, as the tenth menume, he would finally terminate Mughniyeh’s reign of terror.
Dagan had asked Mossad’s psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, psychoanalysts, and the profilers—collectively known as “the specialists”—to focus on where Imad Mughniyeh could be and the best way to kill him. There was a concensus the ideal means of doing so was with a car bomb. “It would be poetic justice,” one specialist said. Using the only photograph of him published in a newspaper and a handful of biographical details, they set to work.
Born in a south Lebanese village, the son of a fruit seller, Imad Mughniyeh had joined Force 17, Yasser Arafat’s personal bodyguards, at the age of fifteen. He was sixteen-years-old when he had killed his first Israeli, a settler in the Golan Heights. After Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was forced to leave Lebanon in 1982, Mughniyeh stayed behind in Beirut and joined Hezbollah, the organization, which had already established itself as the prime militant force resisting Israel. He came to the notice of Sheikh Fadlallah, who arranged for Mughniyeh to rise quickly in the Hezbollah ranks. By the age of twenty, Mughniyeh was a full-fledged terrorist after a spell of training in Tehran under the auspices of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The newspaper snapshot, showing an exultant Mughniyeh addressing a Hezbollah rally in Beirut, was studied under computer analysis. Various shapes of beard were superimposed to suggest how he might look now as the specialists tried to create an image of him and to seek clues to his mindset. Using a technique, which they properly called “remote in-depth analysis,” but referred to among themselves as RIDA, they continued the task of mapping out his personality. They evoked a great deal in their analysis: Allah and the devil and the role each might play in his life. Much of what they posited was only intended to remain between them, verbal signposts along the road of trying to discover Imad Mughniyeh’s thinking as well as his physical appearance.
Other specialists worked to discover the psychological forces, which motivated Mughniyeh. He was a mass murderer, certainly, yet he did not fit the typology of fanatics, those who were driven by anger. It would be satisfying—at least for the behaviorists—to conclude that at the root of his evil was all-consuming rage. It was there of course, but was it an all-animating and life-energizing force? The psychologists wondered if he was what they deemed “inhabited by a strong streak of masked violence?” This would have allowed him to go about his work in a business-like manner, whether he was recr
uiting little more than children to be suicide bombers or ordering the bomb-makers to make even more powerful explosives. But again there was no clear answer—no more than there was to the question of how he maintained order within his own immediate psychological universe so he could equate his unspeakable actions to his own belief he was right to kill and destroy. Was he the man who had been psychologically shaped by all he had done over the past twenty-five years?
In the photo that had been taken in the 1980s at that Hezbollah rally, a full beard covered his chin and the peaked cap he wore covered his hair. Rimless spectacles also hid his eyes. One by one the facial analysts used their computer skills to remove his beard, spectacles, and hat, and aged him to his present forty-five years. The specialists concluded there was evidence that at some point Mughniyeh’s face had undergone some surgical work. But the traces of scar tissue indicated it had been done at least five years ago when he had first disappeared after the spate of suicide bomb attacks on Israel.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 79