The Chinese were the acknowledged leaders in the field of facial surgery. But the Beijing regime had turned its back on Hezbollah. The Russians were a possibility, but again the Mossad medical experts ruled out plastic surgeons that had once worked for the KGB. Others who operated on what the experts called “close to the wind” were checked in Romania, Serbia, and North African countries. But Mossad agents did not discover any evidence Mughniyeh had undergone plastic surgery in any of these countries.
Then, in June 2007, came the break. Since the end of the war with Hezbollah in south Lebanon, Mossad had been steadily recruiting Israeli Arabs in the West Bank who were opposed to Hezbollah. One of the informers had a relative in a village near Mughniyeh’s birthplace. The cousin had told him that a friend of her family had heard Mughniyeh had traveled to Europe from the safe house the Syrian regime had provided. He had sent postcards from Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, and finally Berlin. It was little to go on, but it was a start.
First a Mossad agent, a fluent Arab speaker, had traveled to south Lebanon and had met the informer’s cousin. The agent had posed as an old friend of Mughniyeh. Little more had emerged except the cousin was certain Mughniyeh was back in Damascus, but according to her friend’s family, he now looked different.
In hours, Reuben had been ordered to investigate the possibility that Mughniyeh had visited Berlin to undergo further plastic surgery. Now, six months later, the katsa had the proof in the file his informer had handed over.
On Sunday afternoon, February 3, 2008, Meir Dagan chaired a meeting in the conference room adjoining his office. On the table were jugs of water and pots of coffee for those seated around it. They were the head of Shin Bet, the country’s internal security force, the government’s national security adviser, the political adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the military advocate-general to the Israeli Defense Forces, IDF. Among them sat a brigadier-general, the head of kidon, Mossad’s unique unit that conducted legally-approved assassinations. Beside Dagan sat his Director of Operations. In a corner of the room was the table and chair usually occupied by the notetaker to record decisions and other discussions. Now it was empty. There would be no record of this meeting.
Over the past six years, similar meetings had been held by Dagan since he came to office in August 2002. The first had been four months later in December that year to discuss the case of Ramzi Nahara, a Mossad informer Dagan had known personally who had defected to Hezbollah. Was it for money? A skewed belief in the group’s cause? Had he fallen for one of the Arab women Hezbollah used to try and entrap a foreigner? There were no answers. But the meeting was short and unanimous. Nahara had to be located. He was tracked to an Arab village and killed with a car bomb planted by a former colleague in the service he betrayed.
In March 2003, another meeting discussed Abu Mohammed Al-Masri, who had been sent by al-Qaeda from Pakistan to create a cell to target Israeli villages on the border with Lebanon using rockets. He, too, died in a car bomb as he drove around south Lebanon seeking recruits and suitable sites to launch the weapons. The next target the meeting had discussed, in August 2003, was Al Hussein Salah, Hezbollah’s explosives expert who had begun rebuilding the organization’s arsenal in the Beirut suburbs. He was on his way to meet his bomb-makers when he died in yet another car bomb planted by the Mossad.
A full year passed before Dagan once more had summoned the men in his conference room. The decision had been taken in the stifling heat of July 2004 that Ghaleb Awali, the Hezbollah link-man between Damascus and the activists in the Gaza strip, should be killed by a car bomb as he headed south to meet the activists. The bomb was planted under his seat. In Awali’s place came Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil, a senior Hezbollah official in Damascus who had been given responsibility by Syria to liaise between Damascus and Hamas and Hezbollah units in Gaza and the West Bank. Even as he drove to his first appointment, Khalil was killed by a Mossad car bomb in a Damascus suburb. In May 2006, Mahmoud Majzoub, a senior member of the Islamic jihad committee through which Hezbollah liaised with Tehran, was killed by a car bomb as he drove for lunch in a south Lebanon restaurant.
Each of the targets had been carefully selected, placed under surveillance and the moment of their deaths was the result of the planning that would once more occupy the men in the conference room on that Sunday afternoon. It was there that the fate of Imad Mughniyeh would be settled. His death warrant was in the folder beside Dagan on the table. It had originally been signed by the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon (in 2008 still in a coma) and ratified by Ehud Olmert. The question the meeting was asked to decide was how could the warrant be executed?
On the table before each man was a copy of the file that Reuben had transmitted on a high-security line from his Berlin office. Inside the file were a series of still prints from a video, in all thirty-four images. They showed the various stages of the plastic surgery Imad Mughniyeh had undergone. First his beard had been shaved and the previous scar tissue carefully removed. A note attached to the print contained the original observation in German, now translated into Hebrew, that the scar tissue on the cheeks, jaw and the temples dated from 1993 following surgery at a clinic in Tripoli, Libya. Close-up images revealed further details of the surgeon’s work at the East German clinic. The eyes had been reshaped by tightening the skin on Mughniyeh’s temples. His lower jaw had been expertly cut, a piece of bone removed and then re-sewn to provide a narrower jaw line, which gave the face a leaner look. A number of front teeth had been removed and replaced with others of a different shape. His hair had been colored a distinguished-looking gray and, instead of his spectacles, he now wore contact lenses. Compared to the original newspaper photograph, Imad Mughniyeh looked radically different.
Those around the table decided a car bomb would once more be the most effective way to carry out the assassination. But there were problems. Mossad’s previous car bombing of Mughniyeh’s associates would undoubtedly have made him cautious about traveling anywhere in his own car. There was a possibility he would use the vehicle of one of his bodyguards. But there was no firm intelligence of who they were or what type of cars they used. The information the Mossad agent had acquired that Mughniyeh was back in Damascus looking “very different” would need time to be checked so a plan could be properly developed.
It was Meir Dagan who brought the discussion to a halt. He reminded others that in nine days time, February 12, a historic event would be taking place in Tehran and other Arab countries. It would mark the twenty-ninth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution. In Syria a day of celebration would be marked by a reception at the city’s Iranian Cultural Center, given by the newly appointed Iranian ambassador to Syria, Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi. It would be a fitting time for him to be introduced to Imad Mughniyeh. In Dagan’s view there was more than “a good chance” Mughniyeh, if he were back in Damascus, would attend the function. To refuse such an invitation would not only offend his Syrian hosts who had given him shelter, but also the Tehran mullahs and their ambassador that would bask in the reflected glory of being in the presence of such an exalted figure who had done so much damage to the West.
Meir Dagan had spoken the words he had used before at other meetings to order an assassination.
“We do it.”
By Monday, February 4, 2008, the kidon brigadier-general had chosen the three operatives he would use for the assassination. Each had been assigned a code name, which matched the one-off passport he would have. The documents would be specially prepared by the Mossad travel department from the stock of passports in storage. Other documents provided details of their home address and occupation. “Pierre,” the French passport holder, had an address in Montpelier, France, and was identified as a car mechanic. “Manuel,” the holder of the Spanish passport, had a home in Malaga and was described as a tour guide; “Ludwig” ’s German passport described him as living in Munich where he worked as an electrician.
The names, addresses, and job backgrounds were gen
uine, those of sayanim, the Jewish volunteers upon whom Mossad often depended on for its more dangerous operations. Among the tasks the volunteers fulfilled was that of providing cover for agents by allowing them to assume their identity.
While the documents were being prepared by the forgers working in the basement of Mossad headquarters, in the Negev Desert the three kidon memorized their “legends”—the stories they would tell if challenged by immigration, police, or the security officers of Syria. Each story was kept as simple as possible: Pierre could talk knowledgably about car engines; Manuel about his work escorting tourists around the south of Spain; Ludwig memorized the intricacies of being an electrician.
In the meantime the travel department checked the flights into Damascus. In his briefing, the brigadier-general had told the head of the department the kidon should travel separately and arrive at different times in the Syrian capital, and the flights should be on Air France, Jordanian, and Alitalia airlines. Each ticket should have a selection of return flights booked. All the seats should be in Economy. Pierre should arrive first and have a prepaid hired car waiting for him at Damascus. Like the other two, the purpose of his visit should be given as “holiday.”
In the next week a Mossad sayanim in Beirut, a man who had made the journey several times, drove north to Damascus. His familiar figure and the reason for his journey—to explore with the Syrian Ministry of Tourism the possibility of creating twin holidays to Lebanon and the historic ruins of Syria—aroused no suspicion. The sayanim visited the Ministry, made his pitch and drove around Damascus. Among the many photographs he took were several of the Iranian Cultural Center and the surrounding streets. By nightfall he was back in Beirut. That evening the photos had been transferred onto a disk and transmitted to a travel agency, a front for Mossad in downtown Tel Aviv. From there it was couriered to their headquarters in the city.
Day after day the planning for the assassination continued. Instructors at their desert base checked every detail with the kidon: the language they would speak, the clothes they would wear, the reason why they had come to Syria out of season. The answer to that, given in different ways, was they each wanted a quiet holiday and one they could afford. Like the rest of their cover stories, it was believable from the way they dressed and spoke.
In between, the three men still had much to study and memorize: the roads to the Iranian Cultural Center, the routes from across the city, the area where they could find a lock-up garage, the location of the dead-letter box where the explosives had been left for them to kill Imad Mughniyeh. The material would be placed there by the Beirut sayanim. How and when he did so would remain one of the secrets of the operation moving to its climax.
Meir Dagan had tasked Israel’s own spy satellite, Trescas, to mount surveillance in the area of Damascus where the Iranian Cultural Center was situated. Mossad had priority over all the country’s military agencies for such an operation.
Day by day images were downloaded and studied by photo interpreters in the Kirya, the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, looking for any sign of Mughniyeh. There were several “possibles,” but none that matched the photo in the file Reuben had sent. The silent search from outer space continued. Dagan had “a gut feeling” the terrorist would be going to the Iranian celebration at the cocktail party, he told his Director of Operations.
On Saturday, February 9, 2008, the three kidon made their way to Tel Aviv airport to catch their flights to Vienna, Paris, and Frankfurt. A week before, Reuben had received the file from his informer and transmitted it to Tel Aviv. By nightfall, the three kidon were in their airport hotels waiting for their flights to Damascus the following day.
On their cell phones was a close-up of Mughniyeh’s face, which had been altered in that former Stasi clinic near the River Spree.
On Sunday morning, February 10, 2008, Pierre boarded Air France Flight AF 1519 at Charles De Gaulle airport for the journey to Damascus. The sun was setting over the city when he arrived. From Madrid, Manuel had flown on Jordanian Airways Flight RJ 110 to Amman and then on to the Syrian capital. An hour later, Ludwig’s Alitalia Flight AZ 7353 had left Milan’s Malpensa airport in mid-afternoon and arrived in Damascus at 6:30 P.M. local time.
Shortly after, the three men—untroubled by Syrian immigration and customs officers—stowed their carry-in bags in the trunk of the hired car and, with Pierre at the wheel, drove into the city. By late evening they had driven past the dead-letter box and located the lock-up garage which the Beirut sayanim had said would suit their purpose. Satisfied that neither the dead-letter box nor the garage were under surveillance, they picked up the explosives, the small portable radio, and the key to the lock-up garage left in the box. Behind the door of the garage, they worked to prepare the bomb, which would be concealed inside the radio and placed in the car’s headrest on the passenger side. By dawn they had finished.
Taking turns to stand watch, the three kidon slept in the car for most of the day. Late that afternoon, they drove around the city finally passing the Iranian Cultural Center. It was bigger than the sayanim’s photographs had suggested. It stood on a road with exit routes close by. The plan they had devised would work. Satisfied, the team returned to the lock-up garage. There was no sign that anyone had disturbed its door by dislodging the piece of cigarette paper placed at the bottom.
What they did for the next twenty hours would remain a mystery.
At 7 P.M. on Tuesday, February 12, the team was back outside the Iranian Cultural Center. Ludwig took up position at one street corner, Manuel another. Pierre drove the hired car further down the street from where the oncoming traffic was approaching. He activated the bomb placed in the headrest. Inside the radio, the timer began to tick. It had a four-hour clock. It was now 7:30.
Guests for the Iranian celebration of the Khomeini Revolution were steadily making their way into the Center. At 8 P.M., the Iranian ambassador arrived and hurried inside. None of the guests resembled the face on the cell phones of the three kidon.
At 9 P.M. a silver Mitsubishi Pajero turned into the street and parked close to where Ludwig and Manuel were standing on opposite sides. For a moment the driver and his passenger sat checking the street.
Then the passenger door opened and Imad Mughniyeh emerged. He wore a dark suit and his beard had been neatly trimmed. He started to walk up the street toward where the hired car was parked. He was level with the vehicle when there was a huge explosion, which blew the car into pieces and beheaded Mughniyeh. Later, some of his body parts were found twenty meters away.
Which of the kidon was the first to trigger the bomb would remain unknown. But before the first screaming guests ran from the Iranian Cultural Center reception, and the police and ambulances arrived, the three assassins had vanished.
It would later be suggested in some reports that a car had been left for them in a nearby side street and Pierre had driven the team to a predetermined pick-up point in the south of Syria for an Israeli air force helicopter to collect them. Eyewitnesses would claim they saw a helicopter flying out to sea. Another report said they had left Damascus airport on night flights to Europe. But nobody would ever know.
On the Friday, February 15, following his assassination, Mughniyeh was buried at a huge Hezbollah funeral in Beirut from where he had first launched his terrorist activities. His mother, Um-Imad, sat amid a sea of black chadors, a somber old woman who wailed that her son had planned to visit her on what had turned out to be the day after he had died.
A few days later, she received an envelope. Inside was a copy of one of the pictures taken of Mughniyeh’s face when he had undergone his successful plastic surgery. He had been her third son to die in a Mossad car bombing.
CHAPTER 30
A PERSONAL NOTE
Any account of a secret intelligence service is the real expression of a nation’s subconscious, the history of the nation it serves. For any nation, the first line of defense is knowledge. Nowhere is this truism more apt than in the State of Israel and its r
elationship with Mossad.
This book is an updated edition of the one I first published eleven years ago. At the time, it was generously described by Meir Amit, a former director-general of Mossad, as an account which “tells it like it was—and like it is.” While other critics have praised the book in similar terms, the truth is that no work about an intelligence service can ever hope to unravel the full story of its activities. How close I came, the reader can judge; the one certainty is that no non-Israeli writer has ever been permitted to come so close. Mossad understandably guards its secrets jealously and with whom it shares some of them. I learned more than I ever expected in the two-and-a-half years I originally spent working with, not for, Mossad to research, write, narrate, and produce the only film the service has allowed to be made of its activities. Called The Spying Machine, the documentary was shown on Britain’s Channel-4 network and elsewhere in the world. It, too, received generous praise.
Since then I have maintained a close professional relationship with the spies of Israel and other services. Though some of them have become friends, my work is far from that of the embedded journalists who have become too often sycophants of wars since the September 11 attacks. The spies I have had the privilege to know are also far removed from the Bond image. They believe that unpleasant facts about their work should be faced, and that they are readily cast in the mold of Thomas Beckett, in a world where lies spin faster and faster.
As with the original edition, much of the subsequent updating has remained until now beyond the public domain. In part I was lucky in having my late father-in-law as an officer in MI6 during the Cold War; that connection made it easy to break down the understandable wariness the intelligence world has of outsiders asking questions, the more so when the answers are not always easy to present fairly. At times though, that reticence opened some doors as agents and their controllers saw the opportunity to explain themselves. Among those I spoke to were William Casey, the CIA director; Meir Amit, the director-general of Mossad; Rafi Eitan, its celebrated director of operations; and Marcus Wolff, a former head of Stasi, the East German intelligence service. The names of others, who still serve, will have to remain anonymous. But to them, in particular, I express genuine gratitude; without their help it would have been impossible to update this account of Mossad.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 80