Mossad
Page 35
04:44 P.M.—Kevin enters room 237. He checks the window and the door peephole, by which he would be able to watch Al-Mabhouh enter his room.
05:06 P.M.—Gail goes into room 237. She and Kevin go over the timetables and keep receiving reports about Al-Mabhouh’s moves in the city.
05:36 P.M.—one of the watchers enters the hotel wearing a visor cap. At a corner of an empty hallway, he replaces the cap with a wig.
06:21 P.M.—Gail leaves room 237, carrying the case previously delivered to Kevin by Peter. She goes to the hotel parking lot and gives the case to one of the hit team members.
06:32 P.M.—the first detail of the hit team leaves the parking lot and enters the hotel lobby.
06:34 P.M.—the second detail of the hit team enters the hotel and settles on the armchairs and sofas in the far corner of the luxurious lobby, as far as possible from the first detail.
06:43 P.M.—the first watchers detail, the agents wearing tennis clothes, leaves the hotel.
07:30 P.M.—Peter, the logistics coordinator, leaves Dubai on a flight to Munich, Germany.
08:00 P.M.—a hotel employee who cleaned the second floor leaves the place. The hit team detail tries to enter Al-Mabhouh’s room.
08:04 P.M.—Kevin, who is posted by the elevators, signals to the members of the hit team to get into the room, because an elevator stops at the second floor and a hotel guest gets out of it. The electronic control system registers an attempt to break into room 230, the room of Al-Mabhouh.
08:20 P.M.—Al-Mabhouh returns to the hotel. The watchers inform Kevin that he is walking toward the elevator.
08:27 P.M.—Al-Mabhouh enters his room. Kevin and Gail are on guard at the second-floor corridor, by the elevators. In room 230, the assassination takes place.
08:46 P.M.—four members of the hit team leave the hotel.
08:47 P.M.—Gail and another member of the hit team leave the hotel.
08:51 P.M.—Kevin enters Al-Mabhouh’s room after the killing and places the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle.
08:52 P.M.—the watchers detail leaves the hotel.
10:30 P.M.—Kevin and Gail leave Dubai on a direct flight to Paris. Approximately at the same time, all the team members depart to different destinations.
At 10:00 P.M., Al-Mabhouh’s wife called his cell phone. The phone rang and went to voice mail. She called over and over again but with no results. A close friend also tried to reach Al-Mabhouh, but failed. Text messages sent to Al-Mabhouh remained unanswered. Time passed by and there was no sign of life from Al-Mabhouh. The distraught wife called several Hamas senior officials, who decided to send the Hamas resident in Dubai to the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel. The man went to the reception desk and called room 230; there was no answer.
After midnight, the hotel employees finally went up to Al-Mabhouh’s room, unlocked the door, and found his body. A doctor rushed to the room examined the corpse and concluded that the cause of death was cardiac arrest.
The Hamas published an official statement attributing Al-Mabhouh’s death to “medical reasons.” But Al-Mabhouh’s family rejected the medical diagnosis and insisted that Al-Mabhouh had been murdered by the Mossad. His body was sent to the Dubai medical examiner, while a sample of his blood was flown to a laboratory in France. The lab report came back nine days later. The Hamas now announced that Mossad agents had assassinated Al-Mabhouh, first stunning him with an electronic shocker and then suffocating him with a pillow. Simultaneously, the Dubai police announced that no traces of poison were found in Al-Mabhouh’s blood. Nevertheless, they quickly reached the conclusion that the Mossad had killed Al-Mabhouh on their territory. On January 31, twelve days after Al-Mabhouh’s death, the London Sunday Times published a piece about his poisoning by the Mossad. Its reporters claim that Israeli hit men had entered Al-Mabhouh’s room and injected him with a poison that simulated a heart attack; the agents then photographed all the documents he carried and exited the room, leaving behind the DO NOT DISTURB sign.
On February 28, the deputy chief of the Dubai police informed the press that the French lab had found in Al-Mabhouh’s blood traces of a strong hydrochloride painkiller, used for anesthesia before surgery. This substance, he said, causes a muscular relaxation followed by a loss of consciousness. He assumed that the killers injected their victim with the anesthetic and then suffocated him so that his death would look natural.
The journalist Gordon Thomas published an article in the London Telegraph about “the Mossad’s license to kill.” Thomas asserted that the modus operandi in Al-Mabhouh’s death was similar to other assassinations carried out by the Mossad in the past. He added that the eleven members of the hit team, six of them women, had been chosen out of forty-eight members of the Kidon operational unit. Yossi Melman of Haaretz daily also stressed that the killers’ moves, as reflected by the security cameras and other findings, were identical to past Mossad operations: arrival by separate flights from different parts of the world, stays in different hotels, phone calls placed through international operators, clothes that make identification difficult, and an effort to pose as genuine tourists or businessmen trying to mix business with pleasure. But other experts dismissed that theory, saying that these were exactly the methods used by most Western secret services, therefore it was impossible to establish clearly who had carried out the assassination.
The German weekly Der Spiegel revealed that the German intelligence agency, the BND, had informed the members of the German parliament that Al-Mabhouh had been killed by Mossad agents. Der Spiegel also described how Michael Bodenheimer, born in Israel, had applied in 2009 for a German passport because his parents had been born in Germany. With his new passport, he had flown, on November 8, 2009, from Frankfurt to Dubai and then to Hong Kong, an itinerary identical to his flights before and after the assassination. According to Der Spiegel, nine other agents had flown to Dubai on the same day in November 2009 from different airports in Europe. That seemed to be a dress rehearsal for the real operation carried out in January 2010.
In an interview with the Al-Arabiya newspaper, the chief of the Dubai police, Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, explained why he was certain that the Mossad had killed Al-Mabhouh: “First, we have some DNA samples and fingerprints. Second, all of [the hit team members] carried genuine foreign passports whose details were false, and when it turned out that some of the owners [of the passports] were from Israel—so what do you think, that ‘Peace Now’ murdered Al-Mabhouh? . . . It is the Mossad, one hundred percent!”
The chief of the Dubai police soon became a media star, spending hours in front of the world televisions, giving interviews to anyone who was ready to listen. He became the favorite of the television reporters, mostly thanks to Dubai’s security cameras. He showed to the press a video film, actually assembled from the tapes of security cameras spread all over Dubai. Tamim cleverly explained and showed how the hit team members moved throughout the emirate, and how they entered and exited hotels, shopping centers, and the airport, in their effort to shadow Al-Mabhouh, often changing clothes and disguises.
According to Tamim, the core of the hit team was composed of eleven members: three Irish citizens, six Britons, one Frenchman, and one German. They arrived in Dubai aboard several flights from various European airports, some of them the night before the operations, others at the same time as Al-Mabhouh, and a few of them a mere couple of hours before the operation. Six hundred forty-eight hours of tape from the security cameras helped the Dubai police to reconstruct the events culminating with Al-Mabhouh’s death.
The tapes and the photos taken by immigration authorities of all the passengers entering and exiting Dubai drove the Dubai police chief to the conclusion that not eleven but more than a score of Mossad agents participated in the operation. The official number he mentioned was twenty-seven, but Tamim later added a few more names to his list of suspects.
Yet his conclusions raised several questions: Didn’t the Mossad know that a network of security cameras was spread all o
ver Dubai? According to Tamim, Israeli agents had visited Dubai several times, to prepare the operation. Didn’t they see the security cameras? And if they did, then perhaps a large part of the getting in and out of hotels, the change of clothes, wigs, and mustaches were nothing but a show for the cameras; and quite a few of the participants were not a part of the operation but were used only to mislead those who would examine the tapes later.
And another point: the chief of police boasted that all the members of the hit team were photographed as they went through immigration. Didn’t the Mossad know that was the procedure in Dubai? Didn’t it make sure that the faces of its agents would be made up and disguised so that it would be impossible to recognize them afterward?
A third question: How come the security cameras recorded every frame and every second of the secret agents’ moves, except for two—the entering and exiting of the hit detail in and out of Al-Mabhouh’s room?
Chief Tamim revealed to the press that the members of the hit team used a phone number in Austria for some of their communications; by checking telephone records, Tamim could establish the identities of the foreigners who had used that number and were, apparently, members of the Mossad team. He also pointed out that several of the agents had paid their expenses in Dubai with Payoneer—MasterCard rechargeable credit cards, an Iowa-based company that had a research and development center in Israel.
The most intriguing revelation in the investigation was that most of the hit team members had used real passports of Israeli citizens with dual nationality—and only very few used forged passports. Apparently, this was for a reason—the hit team was operating in an Arab country that is considered enemy territory. If the hit team members were captured, they could ask for the protection of the consuls of Great Britain, Germany, France, and Australia . . . If the consuls checked their computers, they would have found out that these people really existed, and they would have agreed to assist them. If, on the contrary, the hit team had used forged passports, the deception would have been exposed right away, and the agents would have been left without protection.
After all this became known, Israel was harshly criticized by the nations whose passports had been used in Dubai. Great Britain, Australia, and Ireland expelled the Mossad representatives from their soil. Poland arrested a man called Uri Brodsky at Warsaw’s airport and extradited him to Germany. Brodsky was suspected of helping the agent Michael Bodenheimer to obtain a German passport under false pretenses. (Brodsky was finally released by Germany after paying a fine of 60,000 euros. Bodenheimer was not found.) Other countries expressed their indignation and fury. These reactions seemed laced with hypocrisy, as the use of forged or doctored passports is the standard rule of secret service activity; the nations now accusing Israel were and are using forged passports exactly the same way as the Mossad. Yet when a Russian spy network was uncovered in the United States in late 2010, nobody accused its members of using forged British and American papers.
The reports in the world press created the impression that the Dubai operation was successful but had suffered from a grave mistake, the result of Israel’s gross underestimation of Dubai and the Western nations they involved. That was a blow to Israel’s international image, but not to its secret activity. The expelled Mossad envoys were soon replaced by others. The promises of the Dubai chief of police that the hit team members would be apprehended, because their identities were known all over the world, went unanswered. Not one Mossad agent of the Dubai team was identified by any police and arrested.
Yet Dubai became a symbol of the new challenges facing any secret service in a changing world. The cloak-and-dagger era is definitely over. Security cameras, photographs and thumbprints at immigration, rapid checks of passports, DNA . . . all those require much more sophisticated means and methods from the spooks of this world when they set off on their dark, sinister missions.
On April 7, 2011, an unidentified aircraft fired a missile on a passenger car, on a road fifteen kilometers south of Port Sudan, in the African state of Sudan. According to Israeli sources, the car was attacked by a Shoval drone that can fly four thousand kilometers without refueling and carry a load of a ton. The Shoval is of a new generation of drones that Israel now uses in risky over-the-border missions, replacing aircraft piloted by men. The Israeli drones, some of the best in the world, carry out intelligence and attack missions all over the Middle East.
One of the two people killed in the car attack in Sudan was said to be a Hamas leader. The Hamas used the Sudan trail for smuggling weapons from Iran to Gaza. The weapons came by boat, were unloaded in Port Sudan, and proceeded in a convoy of vehicles via Egypt and the Sinai to Gaza, their drivers bribing their way through borders and check posts.
The Sudanese government immediately accused Israel of the coup.
Israel had been designated as the culprit for another mysterious attack on a weapons convoy in January 2009; the trucks carrying weapons, missiles, and explosives had been destroyed, and forty people manning the convoy had been killed.
One of the men allegedly killed was the Hamas leader in charge of smuggling weapons from Iran to Gaza.
Chapter Twenty-one
From the Land of the Queen of Sheba
A group of Ethiopian children, black-skinned and clothed in white, entered the stage of the huge audience hall in Jerusalem. The children, blessed with a unique kind of beauty, watched the public with big, black eyes, filled with curiosity and pride. The famous Israeli composer Shlomo Gronich, sat by the piano. Its first notes smoothly sailed over the hushed crowd, and a beautiful, yet chilling song surged from the children’s choir:
The moon is watching from above
On my back is a small bag of food
The desert beneath us has no end ahead
And my mother promises my little brothers:
“A little more, a little more,
Lift up your legs, a last push
Toward Jerusalem.”
This was “The Journey Song” of poet Haim Idissis, describing the epic journey of the Ethiopian Jews to the Promised Land, to Israel. The public cheered and applauded. Perhaps that was not Idissis’s intention, and perhaps the enthusiastic crowds did not notice, but the children’s song described the most moving—and the most terrible—chapter of the Ethiopian Jews’ aliyah to the land of their fathers:
The moonlight stood fast
Our bag of food was lost . . .
And at nights bandits attacked
With a knife and a sharp sword
In the desert, the blood of my mother
The moon is my witness
and I promise my little brothers:
“A little bit more, a little more
The dream will be fulfilled
Soon we will arrive in the Land of Israel.”
No other Israeli community ever suffered such appalling woes as the Ethiopian tribe on its way to Israel.
It became a living legend.
Its very existence seemed borrowed from a storybook. A Jewish tribe, cut off from the outside world, entrenched in the heart of Africa, they lived in the mountains and valleys of Ethiopia, the land of the Queen of Sheba. For thousands of years, this tribe stubbornly clung to its faith, a pure and innocent biblical religion.
That quiet and shy tribe had been lost to history. Its leaders, the Kessim, venerable elders dressed in white robes, navigated their flock through the ancient rules of Judaism and the basic customs of modern life. Theirs was a tribe that at times lived in peace and serenity among its neighbors, and at other times was persecuted by cruel rulers. But it also had to face the ugly humiliation by rabbis and Jewish theological experts from the outside world, who had decided that the Ethiopian Jews, commonly called Falasha, were not really Jewish.
Yet the Ethiopian Jews did not give up. And generation after generation, inspired by the tradition passed from father to son and from mother to daughter, they dreamed of the day when they would set off on their way to the Land of Israel.
Very few Ethiopians came to Israel in the first thirty years of its existence. Even during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, the “Lion of Judea,” who was Israel’s close friend and ally, no serious effort was made to bring the Jews of Ethiopia to the Jewish state. Things started to change in 1973, when Israel’s chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef published an unequivocal Halacha ruling that the Ethiopian Jews, who called themselves Beta Israel, were full-fledged Jews. Two years later, the government of Israel decided to apply the Law of Return to the Ethiopian Jews. And when Menachem Begin became prime minister, in 1977, he called the director of the Mossad, General Yitzhak (Haka) Hofi.
“Bring me the Jews of Ethiopia!” Begin said to the ramsad.
In the Mossad structure, a special unit, Bitzur, was charged with protecting Jews in enemy countries and with organizing immigration from those countries to Israel. Bitzur—later renamed Tzafririm—immediately got to work.
Shortly after Begin’s order to Haka, David (Dave) Kimhi landed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. Dave was deputy director of the Mossad and the head of the Tevel—department for secret international relations. He came to meet Ethiopia’s ruler, Mengistu Haile Mariam. In those days, the exit gates of Ethiopia were locked for Jewish emigration. The nation was torn by a civil war, and Mengistu asked Israel for help against the rebels. Kimhi refused to act against the rebels on Mengistu’s behalf, but promised to supply him with weapons. And that on one condition: that Mengistu would allow Jewish emigration. We demand, Kimhi said, that every Israeli Hercules aircraft that lands here, loaded with military equipment, take off loaded with Jews. Mengistu agreed. And the exodus of Jews from Ethiopia started.
This arrangement lasted for six months, till it was destroyed in February 1978 by a “slip of the tongue” of then–minister of foreign affairs Moshe Dayan. Dayan had told a Swiss newspaper that Israel was supplying weapons to Mengistu’s army. Some claimed Dayan had leaked that on purpose, being opposed to the arms deal with Mengistu’s Marxist and pro-Soviet regime.