Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  The agent brought the gift-wrapped box to Haddad, who, once alone, wolfed down the chocolates, each and every one of them. In a few weeks, the plump Haddad started losing his appetite and losing weight. The blood tests performed by his doctors indicated a severe immune deficiency. Nobody in Baghdad understood what was happening to the leader of the Popular Front.

  Haddad’s health worsened. He became weak, skeletal, and was confined to his bed. As his state became critical, he was urgently transferred to an East German clinic. Like most countries of the Soviet bloc, East Germany offered generous support, training, weapons, and refuge to the Palestinian terrorists. But their otherwise top-notch expertise did not help this time. The East German doctors could not save Haddad, and on March 30, 1978, he died “of unknown causes.” The forty-eight-year-old terrorist leader left his sister millions of dollars he had personally hoarded while leading his patriotic war for Palestine.

  The German doctors’ diagnosis was that Haddad had died of a terminal disease that had attacked his immune system. Nobody suspected the Mossad. Some of Haddad’s closest aides accused the Iraqi authorities of poisoning him because he had embarrassed the regime. Only after many years were Israeli writers allowed to publish the truth about the Mossad’s involvement in Haddad’s untimely death. When Yasser Arafat died thirty years later, his aides accused Israel of causing his death. This accusation was never proven, despite the thorough examination and tests run by Arafat’s French doctors.

  With Haddad’s death, his lethal organization collapsed. The attacks by Haddad’s group against Israel ceased almost completely, and the long battle with one of Israel’s vilest enemies was definitely over.

  After Bull and Haddad, it was Shaqaqi’s turn.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent the commander of the Imperial Navy, a famous and admired admiral, to conquer the Mediterranean island of Malta. The admiral set sail and wandered for many months in the Mediterranean.

  But he did not find Malta.

  The admiral returned to Istanbul, reported to the sultan, and announced: “Malta Yok!” (In Turkish, There is no Malta.)

  But in our times, there were some who found Malta, and not only found the island but also found a man there who arrived in disguise, under an assumed identity, traveling in total secrecy. This was Dr. Fathi Shaqaqi, the head of the Islamic Jihad.

  On October 26, 1995, in the late morning, Fathi Shaqaqi came out of the Diplomat Hotel in the town of Selma, in Malta. He was on his way to do some shopping before returning to Damascus, where he had been living for the last few years. Shaqaqi was wearing a wig and carrying a Libyan passport in the name of Ibrahim Shawush. He felt quite safe in the serene Maltese town. He did not know that several Mossad agents had been shadowing him since he flew, a week before, from Malta to Libya, to participate in a conference of underground Palestinian organizations.

  Nine months before that, on January 22, two suicide bombers, members of Shaqaqi’s Islamic Jihad, killed themselves close to a bus station at the Beit Lid Junction, not far from the city of Netanya. Twenty-one people were killed, most of them soldiers, and sixty-eight were wounded. It was one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in Israeli history. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who rushed to Beit Lid, was deeply shocked by the carnage; his wrath peaked when he read Shaqaqi’s boasts in a Time magazine interview that “This was the biggest military attack ever inside Palestine [outside the Arab-Israeli wars].

  “Time: It seems to give you satisfaction?”

  “Shaqaqi: It gives satisfaction to our people.”

  The furious Rabin ordered ramsad Shabtai Shavit, a career Mossad officer, to kill the head of the Islamic Jihad.

  Shavit had been stalking Shaqaqi for a long time.

  According to the Der Spiegel weekly, the Mossad proposed to hit Shaqaqi in his Damascus headquarters. But Rabin refused. He was secretly engaged in peace talks with Syria’s president Hafez Al-Assad and did not want to jeopardize the slim chances of ending the conflict with Israel’s northern neighbor. Rabin asked the Mossad to propose alternative plans for the operation. It was a very complicated mission, Shavit explained, because Shaqaqi knew he was in the Mossad’s crosshairs. That was why he rarely left Syria. Nevertheless, Rabin refused to authorize a hit in Damascus and ordered Mossad to carry out the operation outside of Syria’s borders.

  But where? For a while, the Mossad leaders were at a loss. But, finally, as luck would have it, Shaqaqi was invited to a conference of Palestinian terrorist organizations in Libya. At first, he replied that he would not come; but then he was told that his archrival, Said Mussa, the head of the hated Abu Mussa organization, intended to participate in the conference. The Mossad experts assumed that Shaqaqi would not cede the floor to his adversary, and would come to the conference, at all costs. And indeed, a secret report from Damascus confirmed: Shaqaqi was going to Libya. In Jerusalem, Rabin gave the go-ahead.

  European sources claim that the preparations for the hit started when the Mossad terrorist experts checked the records of Shaqaqi’s former flights to Libya. It turned out that he always chose to fly to Tripoli via Malta. The ramsad decided to operate in Malta, not in Libya. Malta was a more convenient and quiet location. Mossad agents waited at Valletta Airport for Shaqaqi, who was supposed to make a short stopover there on his way to Libya. Shaqaqi almost fooled his followers by landing in Malta only on the third daily flight from Damascus, in an elaborate disguise. He spent a short while in the transit lounge and took the connecting flight to Libya.

  On October 26, in the early morning, he came back to Malta and checked into the Diplomat Hotel, where he had stayed previously. He got room 616, and left the hotel immediately. Two Mossad agents riding a blue motorcycle followed him wherever he went. He spent a couple of hours visiting shops and markets. He was on his way back to the hotel when the blue motorcycle stopped beside him. One of the agents, later described as a man with Middle Eastern features, approached and fired six bullets at him from close range, with a silenced gun. Shaqaqi collapsed on the sidewalk while his killer ran to a nearby alley, where his partner was waiting on the motorcycle, engine running. They darted toward the nearby beach and jumped aboard a speedboat that took them to a freighter waiting in the high seas. The boat officially carried cement from Haifa to Italy; but beside the cement it carried another load: Shabtai Shavit himself, who monitored the operation from an improvised command post on board. The getaway route had been well planned. Nobody followed the two agents and they reached the mother ship safe and sound.

  After Shaqaqi’s death, his aides at the Islamic Jihad tried to unravel a major mystery: who was the traitor that had leaked the details about his trip to the Mossad? The killers knew everything: the date of his departure for Malta, the flight number, the false identity, the date of his return to Malta and Damascus . . . After a five-month investigation, the Islamic Jihad leaders arrested a Palestinian student, who was a close assistant to Shaqaqi, and accused him of treason. The student broke under interrogation and confessed: he had been recruited by the Mossad while studying in Bulgaria; his handlers instructed him to move to Damascus and join Shaqaqi’s group. During the next four years, he had gained Shaqaqi’s confidence and even became one of the few in the know about Shaqaqi’s activities.

  Unlike the Hamas and the Hezbollah, which invested a large part of their resources in social activities, the Islamic Jihad had a sole purpose: terror. It was based on a very small and very compartmentalized number of cells, composed of Palestinians who had no other purpose but to fight Israel. Shaqaqi himself was considered by the Palestinian diaspora to be the ideological father of suicide terrorism. He was the first to find in Islam’s holy teachings a legitimization for suicide bombings and killings.

  Shaqaqi’s organization was responsible for a long list of bloody terrorist attacks: sixteen dead in the attack on a 405 bus on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on July 6, 1989; nine dead in the attack on a bus of Israeli tourists close to Cairo
, on February 4, 1990; eight dead in the bombing of a bus by Kfar Darom, in Southern Israel on November 20, 2000; three soldiers killed at the suicide attack on the Netzarim roadblock in the Gaza strip on November 11, 1994; and the terrible bombing in Beit Lid, where twenty-one people died on January 22, 1995. He had rightfully earned the death sentence that the Mossad carried out in a Malta street. After Shaqaqi’s death, the Islamic Jihad almost collapsed, and it took years for the organization to recover from the death of its leader.

  Israel never assumed responsibility for the assassination. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said: “I did not know about the assassination—but if it is true I shall not be sorry.”

  A short while afterward, Yitzhak Rabin himself was assassinated, not by a Palestinian terrorist but by a Jewish fanatic.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Fiasco in Amman

  Baba! Baba!” (Father! Father!) the little girl cried, jumped out of the black jeep, and ran after her father into a tall office building in central Amman, Jordan.

  “Baba!” she called, and triggered one of the worst mishaps in the history of the Mossad.

  The operation had been masterly planned. Even though it seemed somewhat clumsy, it had every chance of success. Its goal was to kill Khaled Mash’al, the newly appointed head of the Hamas Political Bureau. Mash’al, a forty-one-year-old computer engineer, was a handsome man, sporting a well-groomed black beard. He was a rising leader of Hamas, which, in the previous few years, had become Israel’s worst enemy. This terrorist organization, fueled by Islamic fanaticism, had replaced the PLO in the ruthless fight against Israel after Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin had made a move toward peace by signing the Oslo agreements together in September 1993. The senior officers of Mossad had proposed Mash’al as a target for assassination after a deadly suicide bombing in Jerusalem on July 30, 1997. Two terrorists blew themselves up in the crowded Mahane-Yehuda market, killing 16 Israelis and wounding 169 others. Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu called an emergency meeting of the cabinet that decided to kill one of the Hamas leaders. The ramsad, General Danny Yatom, who had been appointed to his post in 1996, was tasked by Netanyahu with designating which man should die.

  Yatom had a long military career behind him. A muscular, bald man with a ready smile, he had been a fighter and a deputy commander at Sayeret Matkal, then an Armor Corps officer, and the head of the Israeli Central Command with the rank of major general. Devoted heart and soul to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, he had been his military secretary. After Rabin’s death, he was, to the surprise of many, appointed head of the Mossad. All those who knew him appreciated his efficiency and his military record, but he seemed to lack all of the qualities needed in a man at the helm of a secret organization. His appointment seemed to be more of a tribute to the dead Rabin than a choice of the best man for the job.

  After his meeting with Netanyahu, in early August 1997, Yatom called an urgent meeting at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. The heads of the Mossad’s major departments were summoned to the conference room. These were Aliza Magen, Yatom’s deputy; B., the head of Caesarea, the special operations department; Yitzhak Barzilai, the head of Tevel—department in charge of cooperation with foreign intelligence services; Ilan Mizrahi, head of Tzomet, the intelligence-gathering department; D., head of Neviot, which specialized in penetrating enemy targets; and the heads of the research and terrorism departments (persons designed by a letter instead of a name are still on active duty).

  At first, the discussion reached a dead end. The Mossad did not have a full list of the Hamas leaders. The most prominent Hamas chief was Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, but the man carried an American passport and any attack on him could create complications with the United States. Khaled Mash’al, on the other hand, was unanimously regarded as a suitable target; but his office was in Amman. After signing a peace agreement with Jordan, in October 1994, Prime Minister Rabin had prohibited all Mossad operations in that country. As long as General Yatom was Rabin’s military secretary, he followed Rabin’s order to the letter; but after he was appointed ramsad, Yatom decided to ignore the late Rabin’s instructions and proposed Mash’al’s name to Prime Minister Netanyahu. His suggestion was backed by the head of Caesarea and his intelligence officer, Mishka Ben-David.

  Netanyahu agreed; yet, determined to avoid a crisis with Jordan, he ordered a “quiet” operation, not a showy hit. Yatom charged the Kidon group—the elite unit of Caesarea—with executing the operation. A doctor of biochemistry, employed at the Mossad research department, suggested using a lethal poison that had been developed in the Biology Institute in Ness Ziona. A few drops of this poison, sprinkled on a person’s skin, would cause his death. This poison did not leave any traces and could not be detected even in an autopsy. A similar poison was used in the past, in the Godiva Affair against Wadie Haddad, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (see chapter 16).

  “The poison thing didn’t bother you?” Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman asked Mishka Ben-David years later. “Such a disgusting way to die . . .”

  “Tell me,” Ben-David answered, “a bullet in the head or a missile fired at the car is more humane than poison? . . . It would have been better, of course, if there was no need to kill people, but in the war against terror this is unavoidable. The prime minister’s decision to carry out a ‘quiet’ operation in order not to harm our relations with Jordan was a logical one.”

  In the summer of 1997, some passersby in a Tel Aviv street saw two young men shaking cans of Coca-Cola, then pulling their tabs and opening them. The bubbly drink squirted out with a sizzling noise. For a moment, the people on the street cast annoyed looks at the two young men, and then kept moving. They could not guess that the two were Mossad agents, rehearsing Mash’al’s killing: one of them would open a Coke can in his vicinity to divert his attention, while the other would squirt a few drops of poison at the back of his neck.

  Six weeks before the operation, in August 1997, the first agents arrived in Jordan. They carried foreign passports and followed Mash’al’s daily routine: when does he leave his home, who rides with him in his car in the morning, what is the route he takes and where does he go, how is the road traffic when he travels? They measured the time between his getting out of his car and entering this or that building, checked if he stopped on his way to talk with other people entering the same building, and collected any other bits of information that could influence the operational plans.

  The advance team’s report to Kidon headquarters summed up the results of the preliminary mission: Every morning, Mash’al came out of his house without bodyguards. He got into a black SUV driven by his assistant, and headed for the Palestinian Relief Bureau at the Shamia Center building in Amman. After Mash’al got out, the driver departed with the vehicle. Mash’al walked the short distance to the building and entered. The Palestinian Relief Bureau was a cover name for the Hamas headquarters in the Jordanian capital.

  The surveillance report by the advance team also suggested the best way to hit Mash’al: in the morning, on the sidewalk, after he got out of the SUV and walked to the office building.

  The preparations continued through the summer: surveillance, dispatch of other auxiliary teams to Amman, renting safe houses and vehicles. Suddenly, on September 4, another terrorist attack shook Jerusalem: three Hamas members blew themselves up on Ben-Yehuda Street, killing 5 Israelis, wounding 181. Israel could not wait any longer, it was time to act.

  September 24, 1997, a day before the operation. A couple of tourists linger by the pool of a big Amman hotel. The man is wearing a white bathrobe. He tells the hotel employees that he is recovering from a heart attack; his slow, cautious walk proves that he still suffers from the side effects of his illness. The young woman with him is a doctor. Every once in a while, she checks his pulse and his blood pressure. Most of the time, they lie on the chaises by the pool. The “heart patient” is Mishka Ben-David, in charge of the communication between the Mossad headquarters a
nd the agents on the ground. The woman, a Mossad agent as well, is a real doctor who carries an injection of antidote to the poison destined to kill Mash’al. The antidote is capable of neutralizing the effect of the poison. It would be used if one or more Kidon agents are accidentally exposed to some drops of the poison during the operation. An immediate shot of the antidote would be the only way to save them from certain death.

  While the phony patient and the doctor are waiting by the pool, the hit team is making the last preparations. In the last few days, several agents have arrived to Amman; they will drive the escape vehicles and fill secondary roles. After them, the hit team itself has arrived: two Kidon agents, posing as Canadian tourists by the names of Shawn Kendall and Barry Beads. The two of them have checked into the Intercontinental Hotel. In retrospect, disturbing questions arise concerning these two: Why were they chosen, even though they had never operated in an Arab country? And why did they get Canadian passports, when even the most superficial inspection would prove that they were not Canadians? Their English was stilted, their accent Israeli, and their cover certain to be pulverized by a serious investigation. But all this paled in comparison with the surveillance team’s error, exposed only after the operation was launched.

  The hit was to take place at the entrance to the Shamia Center building, where Mash’al’s office was located. The encounter between the Kidon agents and Mash’al was supposed to be quick and deadly. “Shawn” and “Barry” had to approach Mash’al, spray the liquid poison on the back of his neck, and escape aboard a vehicle that was waiting nearby. The two “Canadians” were well prepared after their training in the streets of Tel Aviv. Shawn was to hold the Coke can; when facing Mash’al, he had to pull the tab and “accidentally” spray the Coke in his direction. But the Coke, of course, was not the story. Barry, who held the small container of poison, was the main figure in the operation; in a matter of seconds, he had to spray the poison from his container toward Mash’al. The Coke can was supposed to divert his attention from the poison spray; the liquid would spread on his skin and make him die of a “heart attack.”