by Dan Raviv
The System and its double standard created a new frontier that could be dubbed “Shin Bet Country.” In Shin Bet Country, the agency had its own detention centers for Palestinian detainees. The police and national prisons authority never took a look at what was occurring in the cells behind those walls.
Arabs accused of terrorism faced coercive interrogation. Physical blows were rare, but there were other forms of harsh treatment that left no marks. Once the gates of Shin Bet closed behind a Palestinian prisoner, he typically had his head covered by a black sack, and then he would be left, exposed to the hot Israeli sun or winter cold, waiting for the interrogators. The questioning then went on for hours. Suspects were usually deprived of sleep and sometimes soaked with freezing water.
After failing to ignite an uprising in the territories, Palestinian militants shifted their battle to other locales. Israeli intelligence received fragmentary reports in 1968, from friendly secret services in Europe, indicating stepped-up efforts by Palestinian groups to attract volunteers from radical left-wing circles in Europe. Most of the recruiting was done by George Habash, who led a Marxist-Leninist wing of the PLO known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Peripatetic emissaries—on behalf of Arafat, Habash, and others—hopscotched across Italy, Holland, France, and West Germany, using ideological comradeship and financial incentives to persuade young Europeans to come to the Middle East and fight “the Zionist occupation” and “its imperialist allies.” Dozens of highly motivated volunteers answered the PLO call. They were brought to Jordan and Lebanon, trained in guerrilla camps, and in some cases went on to hijack airplanes and stage other attacks against Israel.
Even as Israeli intelligence tried to figure out what the Palestinians had in mind by being so active outside the Middle East, Habash’s radicals sprang a surprise by targeting Israel’s national airline. In July 1968, three Arabs hijacked an El Al airliner on a flight from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced the plane to land in Algeria.
The passengers and crew were held prisoner in Algiers for three weeks, and only when Israel agreed to free a dozen wounded guerrillas from jail did the first Palestinian hijacking end with the release of the hostages.
That was the last successful hijacking of an Israeli airliner. Israeli decision makers quickly drew lessons from the humiliation of succumbing to blackmail. They vowed never again to surrender to the demands of terrorists, but the Israelis also knew that defiant statements of intent are insufficient in such matters. Rather than words alone, they would need a new and muscular art: counterterrorism.
Palestinian gunmen and bombmakers, however, seemed to have seized the initiative. In December 1968, two PFLP men threw hand grenades and opened fire at an El Al airplane at Athens airport, killing one Israeli passenger and wounding two female flight attendants. An almost identical attack took place at Zurich airport the following February, when four PFLP gunmen killed an El Al pilot and wounded five passengers. Other airlines flying to Israel became targets of hijackings and bombings, as the entire Earth seemed to be transformed into a global terrorist village. No target, especially if connected to Israel or Jews, was off limits.
It took a while for Shin Bet to get fully up to speed, but the agency was close on the Palestinian militants’ heels when they moved abroad. This sparked some interagency rivalry in the intelligence community, as the Mossad preferred to protect its near monopoly over foreign operations. The Mossad did, however, acknowledge that Shin Bet had the legal and professional responsibility to expand its activities abroad in the hot pursuit of terrorism.
Shin Bet officers were either attached—on loan—to Mossad stations, or were assigned to Europe independently by Shin Bet. In what became an undercover, no-holds-barred war fought with innovation and improvisation, Israeli operatives played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Palestinians.
Shin Bet’s responsibilities also focused on developing anti-terrorist defenses. The agency had to build, from nothing, an effective and sophisticated system to protect such Israeli interests abroad as embassies, banks, tourism offices, and the national airline. Not only the fleet of airplanes, but ground facilities, too, had become terrorist targets. El Al’s check-in counters and offices in all airports abroad had their defenses “hardened” and were assigned armed guards.
Israel introduced a radically new type of security setup by posting armed sky marshals on every flight. They sat in ordinary seats in the guise of routine travelers in plainclothes. These were young men who had served in élite army units and had learned to be quick on the draw.
The assumption was—and all experience had shown—that hijackers would want to stay alive, land the plane somewhere, and hold hostages. But as early as 1973, Israel was aware that there could be a major change: Intelligence intercepts indicated that terrorists might hijack an airliner and crash it into a building.
The United States and almost all other countries generally ignored Israel’s aviation security knowhow, methods, and preparations for worst-case scenarios. This was mainly for budgetary reasons. Only after the terrorism of September 11, 2001, would they follow in Shin Bet’s footsteps to protect their own respective airlines.
Yet, Israeli security was not perfect. Whether best described by clichés about shutting barn doors after horses bolt, or about fighting the last war, the fact is that Israeli procedures—as good as they are—generally have been reactive to attacks mounted by terrorists. It was impossible to predict where, when, and how violent enemies determined to shock the world would strike next.
Chapter Ten
More than Vengeance
In 1968 Meir Amit was replaced as director of the Mossad. No offense was intended by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, and none was taken. Everyone involved with these appointments seemed to agree that an 11-year tenure—the time Isser Harel wielded his outsized power—was too long. Amit’s five years, marked by impressive modernization, felt honorably sufficient.
As was then standard practice, the name of the new director was not announced to the public, but he was Zvi Zamir. One army general was replacing another, and the new chief was a soft-spoken man who was always willing to work hard. For better or for worse, he was never a headline maker during his long military career.
As the head of Israel’s foreign espionage, however, he would see the most imaginably exciting events unfold. And Zamir would be compelled to refocus his country’s covert war against its enemies—in ways that would have a lasting impact, even on the Mossad’s eventual secret war against Iran.
Why was someone so colorless selected for one of the most important jobs in Israel? Because leaders of the Labor Party considered Zamir “one of us.” Similar to many Labor politicians, he was born in Poland in 1925. He arrived in Palestine in his parents’ arms, at the age of seven months, and the family name then was Zarzevsky.
Zamir joined the underground fighters of the Palmach at age 18, fought in the 1948 War of Independence, and chose to stay in the Israel Defense Forces. He attained the rank of major general, was placed in charge of the Southern Command, and served in London as the military attaché at the Israeli embassy.
His post in Britain meant that he missed the Six-Day War and the limelight of glory cast upon other IDF generals. He truly lacked glamour and seemed to be an expressionless military bureaucrat.
From Eshkol’s point of view, Zamir’s strength could be found in his weakness. After two decades of strong, overconfident spymasters, the prime minister wanted to appoint a completely different type of character. Zamir fit the bill.
He immediately threw himself into cooperation with Shin Bet’s Yosef Harmelin in the fight against growing Palestinian terrorism. These joint efforts brought the ostensibly domestic security agency into foreign battlefields more than ever before.
When the PLO began to attack Israeli embassies and diplomats in Europe and Asia, Shin Bet was ready to respond. The embassies and consular offices were transformed into fortresses. Double-thick steel doors protected e
ntrances, television cameras scrutinized all visitors, building perimeters were surrounded by electronic sensors, and Shin Bet guards were assigned to keep watch over buildings and their staff. The expanded “protective security” department of Shin Bet did everything possible to defend Israeli facilities abroad, but the intelligence chiefs realized that to deter terrorism they needed stronger measures.
Dissatisfied by passive defense, Israeli intelligence moved full speed ahead into active defense. More accurately, it was offensive action.
IDF special forces—led by Sayeret Matkal, which had infiltration into enemy territory as its specialty—suddenly landed in helicopters at the international airport near Beirut, Lebanon, on December 28, 1968. Two days earlier, terrorists had attacked an El Al airliner in Athens, Greece.
Almost casually engaging in a gun battle with Lebanese troops, the Israeli commandos blew up 13 empty civilian aircraft belonging to Arab airlines.
The world was shocked by the audacity of the move. Some critics condemned an act of “state terrorism” and found it hypocritical that now the Israelis were attacking civil aviation. The United Nations Security Council voted, 15 to 0, to condemn Israel’s raid on Beirut. Israeli leaders would feel, over the decades that followed, that the U.N. always voted against them; and that sending a strong message that terrorists and their supporters were subject to attack was more important than winning votes in New York.
Behind the condemnations, the world had to admire Israel’s military prowess. The Beirut raid was a clear sign that Israel could strike with astonishing accuracy at the heart of the Arab world. Excellent intelligence, built up over many years, made such freedom of action a reality.
A vicious circle of violence and retaliation reached its peak at the Olympic Games in Munich on September 5, 1972. Under the cover of the shadowy Black September group—named for the month in 1970 when Jordan’s King Hussein crushed the PLO—eight Palestinian terrorists seized 11 Israeli athletes and coaches in the Olympic village. Two Israelis were shot dead, while fighting back.
Though Black September pretended to be autonomous, it was actually a front for the PLO.
As in other hostage incidents, the terrorists at the Olympics demanded that Israel free their comrades from prison—in this case, 250 jailed Palestinians. The Israeli government, true to its firm policy, refused.
As the world’s media broadcast the siege into homes around the globe, there were two simultaneous, perhaps contradictory, impacts. The live TV coverage publicized the demands of the Palestinians, and it also generated sympathy for Jewish victims suffering again on German soil.
In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Golda Meir handed responsibility for the Munich crisis to the Mossad director. Zamir immediately flew to Munich and held urgent discussions with West German security officials. He was accompanied by Victor Cohen, a veteran Shin Bet interrogator who had gotten Israel Be’er and other spies to break. Cohen was fluent in Arabic, and that could be helpful if negotiations were to commence with the Palestinian terrorists.
Under Prime Minister Meir’s direct orders, and armed with the experience of rescuing the hijacked passengers of a Belgian Sabena airliner in Tel Aviv only four months earlier, Zamir pleaded with the West Germans to permit a specially trained Israeli commando unit to deal with the siege. The country’s Chancellor, Willy Brandt, probably would have agreed, but the German federal constitution left the decision in the hands of local state officials. And they refused.
Zamir and Cohen, therefore, could only watch helplessly from the control tower of Munich’s military airport—where the terrorists by then had taken the hostages—as inexperienced and ill-equipped German sharpshooters opened fire. They failed to kill all the terrorists in the first volley, and the three who were still alive slaughtered the nine Israeli hostages by firing machine guns and tossing hand grenades into two helicopters in which the athletes were sitting.
The head of the Mossad had the searing experience of seeing Israelis shot, burned alive, and blown to pieces. The level of frustration could not be overstated, as leaders of the Jewish state have always been determined not to depend on other countries for Israel’s security. The lessons of Munich were being drawn at a sickeningly rapid pace.
Waves of shock reverberated around the world. The massacre was seen as both a human tragedy and a warning that terrorism was growing out of control.
In Israel, an inquiry committee decided that the head of Shin Bet’s protective security department, who had been responsible for guarding the Olympic athletes, should be dismissed. Agency chief Harmelin, however, argued passionately against pinning the blame on the department head, and for the only time in his career Harmelin threatened to resign. Prime Minister Meir insisted that the dismissal was a cheap bureaucratic price to pay, and Harmelin reluctantly fired his subordinate.
Only five days after the Munich murders, the PLO/Black September struck again. A Shin Bet officer, on loan to the Mossad and listed as first secretary at his embassy in Brussels, was shot at point-blank range at a café. Zadok Ofir suffered wounds to his head, abdomen, and chest. Miraculously, he survived.
Ofir admitted later that he knew his assailant and had mishandled him. The terrorist was part of a clever plot by the PLO to identify and attack Israeli case officers in Europe. The Arab first made contact by writing a letter to the Israeli embassy from a prison in the Netherlands, where he was serving time for theft. He claimed he was a Moroccan revolutionary who now wanted to work with Israeli intelligence.
The Mossad turned to its Dutch liaison, asking that the man be released, but that was refused. Ofir found some pretext to visit the man in jail, claiming he was a relative. The inmate left a good impression on Ofir. The man seemed valuable, and it was agreed that he would get in touch when his prison term was over.
A year later, the telephone call arrived at Ofir’s desk. They agreed to meet in the café where Ofir was shot. He did not have any bodyguard, although an armed observer is usually assigned to such a meeting. The Arab gunman fled to Paris, where a PLO representative—Mahmoud Hamshari—helped him vanish.
The Palestinians probably knew that Brussels was the center of Israeli espionage activity in Europe. The Belgian capital gained that status after Charles de Gaulle expelled the Mossad from Paris: a reaction to Israelis helping Moroccan security men there kill the dissident Ben Barka in 1965. (See Chapter 7.)
The Brussels shooting should have kindled huge warning lights in the Mossad and Shin Bet headquarters. For the first time, an Israeli intelligence officer on active duty abroad had been shot. The massacre at Munich, however, was overshadowing all other incidents and considerations. Even Zvi Zamir, returning from Munich, did not recognize the importance of the attack on Ofir.
The Mossad chief hurried from Lod Airport to Jerusalem, where he told the prime minister of the disaster he had witnessed in Germany. There were tears in Meir’s eyes. She was a tough politician, but nevertheless a sensitive woman who tried to be the entire nation’s “Jewish mother.”
Now she felt torn between calm logic and an angry desire to avenge the lives of her murdered “boys.” Meir wanted to get some cool-headed advice on what could and should be done to hit the Palestinian killers most effectively. She created a new post, the prime minister’s adviser on counter-terrorism, and chose General Aharon Yariv for the job. He had just retired after eight years as Aman director, his place in history assured by the six-day victory of 1967.
Terrorism became an obsession for Meir, Yariv, and Zamir. It also became a magnet for curiosity all around the world, as reports mounted of a clandestine tit-for-tat war in the shadows between Israel and Arab extremists. The body count was also mounting, and soon it became clear that most of the casualties were Palestinian radicals. A mythology of Mossad vengeance missions grew quickly and would persist for decades.
The central myth—disseminated by books and at least two movies—was that Israel embarked on a worldwide, murderous manhunt for the sake of striking back for the Munich Olymp
ics massacre. Yes, the Mossad sent gunmen and bombers who killed Palestinian terrorists in Europe and elsewhere. But the motives were more nuanced than mere revenge.
The popular tale has been bolstered by the secondary myth of a top-secret Committee X created by Meir and Moshe Dayan. The image suggested that with great drama and formality this tribunal decreed that any Black September member involved in planning, assisting, or executing the attack at the Olympics should be killed by the Mossad.
What truly occurred was that Israel’s leaders decided to step up their war against the PLO. As the Palestinians were turning Europe into a battlefield, the Mossad would join the bloody battle and win it there. The Munich massacre—followed by the shooting of the Shin Bet man in Belgium—made Meir and her advisors realize that the Jewish state was under attack beyond the country’s borders, and that passivity would lead only to more losses.
For the sake, then, of going on the offensive, Zamir created a team that would specialize in finding and liquidating terrorists. He assigned Mike Harari to be the “project manager,” a dry title for a violent job. His selection was only natural, as Harari had taken over from Yosef Yariv as head of Caesarea—the operations department that sometimes called itself Metsada.
Harari never publicly revealed his life story, but he was born in 1927 and fought in the pre-state Palmach strike force. He worked on Aliyah B clandestine immigration projects, then became a leading figure in the joint operations unit of Shin Bet and the Mossad. He tended to be wherever the action was for Israeli secret agents.
Harari looked like a tough guy, and indeed he was. To show how small and intermingled Israeli society tends to be, however, it may be noteworthy that his wife was a senior administrator at Tel Aviv University; his sister-in-law, Dorit Beinish, was later the president of Israel’s supreme court. Those institutions celebrate openness, freedom of speech, and the rule of law: qualities that seem totally at odds with the Mossad’s image. Yet Israel’s covert combatants would contend that they fight to preserve those democratic values.