Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  The Sunday Times published a slightly different version of the event. It said that the sharpshooters were members of the Israeli naval commando, Flotilla 13, who had arrived on the Syrian coast aboard a yacht belonging to an Israeli businessman, and had sailed back immediately after fulfilling their mission.

  When the news reached Damascus, it caused a tremendous shock, but the government kept silent and did not respond to the media coverage. The military and security establishments were confused. How did the hit team reach Tartus, which was 140 miles away from Damascus? How did they escape? Was there no place in Syria where its leaders were safe?

  Only after a few days a laconic communiqué was issued, announcing that “Syria is undertaking an investigation to find the perpetrators of this crime.” But the press in other Arab countries had not waited for this official reaction. From the outset, it had published extensive coverage, with detailed reports and speculation about the identity of the assassins. The Arab media focused on who had an interest in eliminating this general and pointed an accusing finger at Israel, claiming that Israel had carried out the assassination because of Suleiman’s role in the Dir Al-Zur reactor.

  The reaction of the Western secret services was different. None shed a tear over Suleiman’s death. In June 2010, Flotilla 13 was decorated by the commander in chief of the Israel Defense Forces for “several feats of arms,” the nature of which was not revealed.

  One may wonder if the honors bestowed on the naval commando unit are not, at least in part, in recognition of the Suleiman operation.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Love and Death in the Afternoon

  On February 12, 2008, several men surreptitiously fanned out around an apartment building in an exclusive Damascus neighborhood. In the late afternoon they saw a silver Mitsubishi Pajero SUV parked by the building. A man in a black suit, with a smartly trimmed beard, got out of the vehicle and entered the house. He was not accompanied by bodyguards. The agents posted on the street whispered in their miniature transmitters that “the man” had arrived in Damascus and he was on his way to the apartment. They knew that the man in black was about to meet his secret lover, Nihad Haidar, a Syrian woman, who was waiting for him in the apartment. The man was carrying a present for gorgeous Nihad, who celebrated her thirtieth birthday that week.

  The lovers spent a few hours in the luxurious apartment that was left at their disposal by Rami Makhlouf, a successful businessman and the cousin of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad.

  Shortly before ten P.M., the man in black left the building and got into the silver Pajero. He was on his way to a meeting in a discreet safe house, in the Kafr Soussa neighborhood, where he met with Iranian, Syrian, and Palestinian envoys.

  According to the London Sunday Express, the agents following him checked an updated photo of the man on the screens of their mobile phones to make sure there would be no identification mistake. They kept open lines of transmission and reported every move of the “mark” to the Mossad command post.

  When he left the building, where he had spent a few hours with Nihad, the agents had a good opportunity to check his face against the photos on their screens. They confirmed the identification to their colleagues in Damascus and to headquarters in Tel Aviv. An overwhelming tension swept the Mossad. The department heads gathered in Meir Dagan’s office, where all the necessary equipment was set up for monitoring the operation in real time.

  The man started the silver Pajero.

  “He’s on his way,” whispered one of the agents into his miniature mike.

  The man in the silver Pajero was Imad Mughniyeh, who had left a bloody trail, years-long, behind him.

  November 15, 2001.

  Following the attack on the Twin Towers, the FBI publishes a large poster containing the list of the most-wanted terrorists in the world.

  The poster is stamped with the logos of the FBI, the State Department, and the Department of Justice.

  The list shows twenty-two names and twenty-two pictures.

  The first name is the most dangerous of them all.

  The award for his capture is $5 million.

  Until the attack on the Twin Towers, he had been considered as responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any other living terrorist.

  Imad Mughniyeh.

  April 18, 1983—bombing of the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon—63 dead.

  October 23, 1983—bombing of the U.S. Marines headquarters in Beirut—241 dead.

  October 23, 1983 (same day)—bombing of the French paratrooper headquarters in Beirut—58 dead.

  And the abduction and murder of CIA official William Buckley; several attacks on the American embassy in Kuwait; hijacking of a TWA airliner and two planes of the Kuwait airline; the murder of Colonel W. R. Higgins of the UN observer force in South Lebanon; massacre of twenty American soldiers in Saudi Arabia . . .

  When the above list is sent to Israel, the Mossad adds its own data:

  November 4, 1983—bombing of the IDF headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon—60 dead.

  March 10, 1985—attack on an IDF convoy by Metullah, on the Israeli-Lebanese border—8 dead.

  March 17, 1992—bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina—29 dead.

  July 18, 1994—bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—86 dead.

  And the abduction and murder of three Israeli soldiers at the Har Dov border sector, the abduction of Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum, a bombing near kibbutz Matzuba, and the most destructive of them all: the abduction and murder of the soldiers Regev and Goldwasser on the Israeli-Lebanese border, which triggered the Second Lebanon War.

  Imad Mughniyeh, the arch-terrorist behind all those crimes, was a ghost, who moved constantly between the Middle East capitals. He evaded photographers and refused to be interviewed. The Western secret services knew a lot about his activities, but almost nothing about his outward appearance, his habits, and his hideouts. They knew he was born in 1962, in a South Lebanon village. According to the fragmentary reports, his parents were devoted Shiites; while in his teens, he had moved to Beirut and grown up in a poor neighborhood mostly populated by Palestinians, supporters of the PLO. He had dropped out of high school and joined the Fatah, the terrorist branch of the PLO. Later he had become the bodyguard of Abu Ayad, Arafat’s deputy, and became a member of Force 17, the special security unit of the Fatah organization that was formed in the mid-seventies and commanded by Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince (see chapter 12). But in 1982, Israel launched the Lebanon war, called Operation Peace for Galilee, invaded Lebanon, and crushed the PLO. Its surviving members, headed by Yasser Arafat, were exiled to Tunisia. Mughniyeh, though, decided to stay behind and joined the first group of Hezbollah founders.

  The Hezbollah—literally, the Party of God—was a Shiite terrorist organization created in 1982 in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini, trained and supplied by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Hezbollah became Israel’s vile enemy, defining its main goal as “Israel’s final departure from Lebanon as a prelude to its final obliteration.” From the first day of its existence, Hezbollah engaged in violent acts of terrorism against Israel. And Mughniyeh was an ideal recruit for the nascent group.

  As a real man of shadows, he chose to operate in secret and refrained from appearing in public. The reports about him became fragmentary and often contradictory. One source described him as the bodyguard of Sheikh Fadlallah, the Hezbollah spiritual leader—while another claimed he had become the operations chief of the organization, the brain behind Hezbollah’s most risky actions, which ended in bloodbaths. Unlike the present Hezbollah leader, the Sheikh Nasrallah, Mughniyeh never appeared on television and never made hateful speeches; but in reality he was far more dangerous than the loquacious sheikh. He soon rose to the position of the most efficient and most elusive terrorist in the world, like Carlos in his time, and like his colleague and great admirer Osama bin Laden.

  Mughniyeh was a cr
uel and creative terrorist. He emerged suddenly, when he planned and commanded several mass massacres in Lebanon, at the end of Operation Peace for Galilee. He was only twenty-one years old on this day in October 1983, when he sent explosive-laden trucks, driven by suicide bombers, to the compounds of the American Marines and the French paratroopers in Beirut; a few days later, he repeated the same scenario against the IDF headquarters in Tyre. At twenty-two, he led a group of terrorists on an attack against the fortified American embassy in Kuwait and afterward hijacked his first plane there. After each of his operations, he vanished into thin air. At twenty-three, Mughniyeh hijacked a TWA plane on its way from Athens to Rome and forced its pilot to land in Beirut airport. During the hijacking, he murdered navy diver Robert Dean Stethem and threw his body out the cockpit door. Mughniyeh escaped after the hijacking operation that lasted seventeen days, but this time he left behind a memento: his fingerprint in the aircraft restroom.

  Almost nothing was known about his private life, except for his marriage to his cousin, who gave him a son and a daughter. At a very early age, he knew he was in the crosshairs of several Western secret services, and tried to conceal his identity. He went through a rudimentary plastic surgery in Libya, grew a beard, and stayed out of the limelight. Only a single confirmed photo of Mughniyeh—fat, bearded, wearing glasses and a visor cap—made its way to the Western services. His description was flawed as well—the FBI portrayed him as “born in Lebanon, speaking Arabic, brown hair and beard, height 5'8'' (170 centimeters), weight 120 pounds (about 60 kilograms).” It is hard to imagine how Mughniyeh’s generous dimensions managed to shrink into a 120-pound model body . . . But the description only reconfirmed that Mughniyeh protected himself well and succeeded in misleading all his enemies.

  After all the attacks, bombings, and hijackings he carried out, he became an admired hero of the Hezbollah. He was lauded for his sophistication, his bravery, and his operational talents that made the Hezbollah’s military arm feared by the world’s intelligence services. As his power increased, he became a major target for assassination by Israel and the West. Mughniyeh realized this, and became a paranoid who lived a life of eternal flight, suspected everybody, including his closest confidants, changed his bodyguards very often, and slept every night in another place; his trips between Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran took place under a thick veil of secrecy.

  According to the profile prepared by Israel and other secret services, Mughniyeh was a loner, very charismatic, very impulsive, and very knowledgeable about the newest electronic instruments and gadgets. He had an uncanny capacity for changing identities and appearances, which enabled him to fool his enemies; Israeli secret agents used to call him “the terrorist with nine lives.”

  Aman officer David Barkai, a former major in the secret intelligence Unit 504 that assembled the profile file on Mughniyeh, said in an interview to the British Sunday Times: “We tried to knock him down several times in the late 1980s. We accumulated intelligence on him, but the closer we got, the less information we gleaned—no weak points, no women, money, drugs—nothing.”

  The hunt for Mughniyeh lasted for many years. In 1988, he was almost captured by the French authorities when his plane made a stopover in Paris. The CIA had supplied the French with information about Mughniyeh, including his photograph and some details about the false passport he was using. But the French feared that his arrest might cause the murder of the French hostages that were held in Lebanon at that time, so they chose to ignore his presence and let him go away. The American services tried to capture him in Europe in 1986 and in Saudi Arabia in 1995. But he disappeared, as always.

  In those years, Mughniyeh was deeply involved in planning and executing attacks on Israelis and Jews in Argentina. In 1992, he organized the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires by a truck stuffed with explosives, driven by a suicide bomber. Twenty-nine people were killed. Some of the heads of the Mossad saw in the operation an act of revenge for the killing of Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Abbas Al-Musawi, in a helicopter attack in South Lebanon.

  Two years later, another bombing shook Buenos Aires, this time at the Jewish community center, leaving eighty-six dead. Once again, some experts thought Hezbollah was avenging the abduction by Israel of one of its leaders, Mustafa Dirani, in Lebanon.

  Intelligence crews from the United States and Israel, who flew to Buenos Aires to investigate the two bombings, concluded that they were connected. The modus operandi was identical—loading a truck with explosives and sending it to its target with a suicide bomber behind the wheel. Mughniyeh had used exactly the same method in Beirut and in Tyre at the outset of his career. The investigators established that the Iranian secret services and their local collaborators were involved in the bombings as well. At least one of the trucks, the one that had served for the embassy bombing, had been sold to the terrorists by a Buenos Aires Shiite car dealer, Carlos Alberto Taladin. The trail clearly led to Imad Mughniyeh.

  In those years, Mughniyeh spent long stretches of time in Iran. After the assassination of Sheikh Al-Musawi, he feared that Israel would try to kill him, too. In Tehran, he created an operational team, composed of Hezbollah fighters and Iranian intelligence officers. His partners in setting up that unit were the Commander in Chief of the Revolutionary Guards Mohsen Rezaee, and the Minister of Intelligence Ali Fallahian. Apparently, that unit carried out the two deadly attacks in Buenos Aires. These attacks had one result: Mughniyeh became Israel’s most wanted man. By his acts, he sentenced himself to death. But long years would pass by before his death sentence would be carried out.

  In December 1994, Mughniyeh was seen in Beirut; shortly after, he escaped an assassination attempt by a booby-trapped car in a southern neighborhood. The Lebanese police quickly published its findings: an explosive charge had been placed underneath a car parked near the mosque where Sheikh Fadlallah read his sermon. The explosion destroyed the store of Fuad Mughniyeh, Imad’s brother, and his body was found in the rubble. But Imad, who was supposed to be there, changed his mind at the last moment, decided not to come, and survived. His nine lives saved him again.

  A few weeks after the bombing, the security services, acting jointly with the Hezbollah, arrested several civilians suspected of being involved in the attack, as Mossad collaborators. The main suspect was a man named Ahmed Halek.

  According to the official police statement, “Halek and his wife had parked their car close to Fuad Mughniyeh’s store. Halek entered the store to make sure that Fuad was there, shook his hand, returned to the car, and activated the bomb.” The Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, quoting reliable sources, said that Halek had participated in a meeting with a senior Mossad official in Cyprus; the Mossad officer had instructed him how to use the bomb and paid him about $100,000. Halek was subsequently executed.

  This time Mughniyeh escaped, but the Mossad agents did not give up. They painstakingly collected every small detail they could find, compiled reports from foreign intelligence services, and studied Mughniyeh’s personal methods. In 2002, the Mossad received another report about Mughniyeh, linking him to the shipping of fifty tons of weapons to Palestinian terrorists. But then he vanished again, although rumors had it that he had become the commander in chief of the Hezbollah and the likely successor of Sheikh Nasrallah. His main connection was with Iranian intelligence, and he was said to act jointly with the Al-Quds (the Arab name of Jerusalem) Brigades, charged with the cooperation with Shiite communities throughout the world and with Iranian-controlled terrorist organizations. Mughniyeh’s high position made it imperative for him to beef up his security measures. Persistent rumors affirmed that he once again had changed his outward appearance, possibly by another plastic surgery.

  According to European sources, at the end of the Second Lebanon War, the Mossad recruited quite a few Palestinians living in Lebanon, those strongly opposed to the Hezbollah. One of them had a cousin in Mughniyeh’s village. She told the newly recruited agent that Mughniyeh had traveled to Europe and re
turned to Lebanon with a totally different face.

  The Mossad now had a new challenge—spying in plastic surgery clinics throughout Europe.

  The unexpected breakthrough occured in Berlin. According to the British writer Gordon Thomas, the Mossad resident agent in Berlin, Reuven, met a German informer who maintained discreet connections with people in the former East Berlin. The informer reported that Imad Mughniyeh had recently gone through several plastic surgeries that completely changed his facial features. The treatment had taken place in a clinic that in the past had belonged to the Stasi, the former East German secret service. The Stasi had used the clinic for remodeling the faces of agents and terrorists sent on covert missions to the West.

  After a tough negotiation, Reuven agreed to pay his German collaborator a substantial fee, and received from him a file containing thirty-four updated photos of Mughniyeh.

  The analysis of the photos by Meir Dagan’s experts showed that Mughniyeh had undergone jaw surgeries: the lower jaws had been cut, and bone taken from him had been grafted in them in order to achieve a more narrow chin line, which made him look skinny and emaciated. Several front teeth had been replaced by artificial teeth of a different shape. The eyes, too, had been treated by a tightening of the skin around them. The treatment was completed by dying his hair gray and replacing his eyeglasses with contact lenses. Mughniyeh bore no resemblance to the “original” anymore, and the old pictures collected by Western services since the eighties had become irrelevant.