by Dan Raviv
“I was a strong, blond boy, very impressive,” Gleser reminisced. “There wasn’t a tree I couldn’t climb. I was like a cat. I fished in the river and hunted animals. I specialized in hunting iguanas. I would lie in ambush for them for hours by a hole in the ground, and when the lizard emerged from the opening, I would hit it with a stick and kill it.”
When Gleser was nine, his father ran off with a younger woman. Leo’s mother took him to a new home in Buenos Aires.
Life in the capital city changed him. The wild nature boy became an urban street fighter, molded by the militancy of a left-wing Jewish youth movement, Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza’ir (The Young Guard). “In Buenos Aires, I encountered anti-Semitism that was not just religious. It had economic, social, and political dimensions.”
When Mossad personnel and Israeli soldiers in civilian garb flew in and offered training to Gleser and his pals, “everything smelled of secrecy in the style of a French thriller,.” he said. There was also a paradox. Isser Harel, who did not trust the left within Israel, was relying heavily on young idealistic leftists in Argentina to be the protectors of the community.
The Israelis ran a camp where they taught martial arts, intelligence-gathering surveillance, navigation, and other skills. The fact that Gleser had known, from his youth, how to shoot a hunting rifle made him one of the top campers. Once they were trained, the volunteers were assigned various security tasks.
“We guarded Jewish buildings, and after meetings we would escort the boys and girls home, so that they would not be attacked in the street,” Gleser recalled.
Another former Framework member gave a more aggressive description, saying members of this Argentine underground “initiated deterrence operations, beat up local anti-Jewish hooligans, destroyed places where they met, and sabotaged printing presses where anti-Semitic material was produced.”
Gleser’s Zionist organization sent him to Israel in 1967 for more elaborate training at a kibbutz—but not yet for aliyah (immigration). He got to witness the patriotic fervor of a victorious Israel, as the stunning Six-Day War changed the Jewish state forever.
Returning to Argentina in 1968, Gleser was given a leadership role in the self-defense movement. “The studies and training in Israel gave me tremendous strength and confidence,” he recalled. “I was a kid of 19 without commitments to a family, and without any sentiments. Now I became a proud Jew fighting for his people. I felt I was the representative of a small, powerful nation.”
A few months later, however, Gleser was arrested just after one of his operations. He and his team had set fire to a printing plant that was producing anti-Jewish literature. A few days in jail were bad enough, and Gleser left Argentina for good. He spent a little time in the United States, then sailed to Israel. He settled there and became a successful consultant on private security.
Ambitious, secret missions to protect Jewish communities worldwide continued in the decades that followed. Immigration projects relied still on the partnership of the Mossad’s Bitzur unit with the New York-based Joint, often with the help of sympathetic Western governments.
In this way, in the 1970s, the remnants of the ancient community in Iraq—around 3,000 Jews—were extracted with the help of Kurdish rebels and the Shah of Iran. Israeli operatives said, years later, that some of the cash they and the Joint brought along for bribery went to an Iraqi deputy prime minister named Saddam Hussein.
Around the same time, Jews were also smuggled out of Syria, the Arab country most hostile to Israel. Bitzur men and some Jewish sayanim (helpers) from various nations engaged with the small Jewish communities in Syria and coordinated an exit plan with them. In small groups they were driven to Lebanon. Then, like Israeli secret agents in the past, they headed for the Mediterranean shore, where small boats ferried them out to Israeli navy ships.
Seeing the Syrian Jews sail into the port of Haifa was what triggered Mossad chief Zamir to remark that no espionage mission could possibly be so exciting and satisfying. As a bonus, the sayanim were able to smuggle out some old, precious Torah scrolls that no one in Syria would ever have read again.
In the 1990s, the few Jews who remained in Yemen were able to leave for Israel. This was similar to the Iraq mission, with Bitzur, the Joint, and lavish bribes working together to perfection.
The Mossad also had to operate inside Iran, which was exceedingly difficult after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, to help Jews escape—often leaving vast properties behind—through a variety of routes that Israel insisted on keeping secret.
The most significant Bitzur operation took place, in several stages, in the Horn of Africa. Israelis had always known that some of the black inhabitants of Ethiopia claimed to be Jewish. Their story was ignored by successive governments in Jerusalem, but Prime Minister Begin believed them—not deterred in any way by the color of their skin, unlike many of his countrymen. Begin ordered the Mossad chief, Hofi, to find a way to bring the black Jews “home” to Israel.
Bitzur operatives infiltrated Ethiopia, which was beset and distracted by civil war and famine, in the late 1970s. They made contact with the “Beta Israel” (House of Israel) communities, helped them with food, medicine, and enticing conversations about life in the actual State of Israel. The Mossad people spread the message that the Jews should move to neighboring Sudan.
After uncomfortable truck rides and, more typically, exceedingly long treks with all their belongings, the Jews were placed in refugee camps run by international humanitarian organizations. The Mossad knew that this arrangement was temporary, at best. A cover story for some sort of processing facility in Sudan, which was an Arab country, would have to be created.
The Israeli spies set up a travel agency in Europe and purchased a small beach resort on the Red Sea coast of northeastern Sudan. The hotel staff and the diving instructors were Mossad operatives, who entertained genuine European customers with a smile by day—and then, by night and in the off-season, became secret agents delivering Jews to the shoreline. The Ethiopians who would soon be Israelis were taken by truck to the beach, where small boats would ferry them to Israeli navy vessels. The boats headed to the Israeli port of Eilat, where instant citizenship was bestowed upon them.
The process, however, was slow and required too many steps. The number of immigrants who got to Israel was relatively low.
Prime Minister Begin ordered Hofi to find a better method. The Mossad gingerly approached Sudan’s dictator, Gaafar Nimeiri, and his security chief, General Omar el-Tayeb, and a deal was clinched. The Jews from Ethiopia could be bused to the international airport in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, and a Belgian charter airline—usually used to fly Muslim pilgrims to Mecca for the hajj (pilgrimage)—would fly the Jews to freedom.
Israel would raise substantial sums of money from Jewish contributors around the world to finance the operation, and a significant part of that would go into bank accounts belonging to Nimeiri and Tayeb.
The Israeli role would be kept hidden, and at Nimeiri’s insistence all flights had to go to Europe—and not directly to the Jewish state.
To the Mossad’s pleasure, the CIA was more than happy to help coordinate this modern-day Exodus. The plan had plainly touched the hearts of many officials in Ronald Reagan’s administration. Foremost among them was a former CIA director, Vice President George H.W. Bush.
The CIA station chief in Khartoum was Milt Bearden. He recalled years later that Bush had personally asked Nimeiri to facilitate the rescue of the starving Jews from Ethiopia. Sudan’s president consented, apparently not mentioning that the Israelis had already started making the necessary bank transfers.
The operation began in 1983, and Bearden recalled meeting in Sudan with Efraim Halevy, the Bitzur director who would become the head of the Mossad 15 years later. The conveyor belt for the refugees changed yet again, as Bearden helped organize a fleet of American military transport planes—apparently Vice President Bush’s idea—to take the Jews from a desert airstrip directly to Israel. It was an un
comfortable trip for a few thousand Ethiopians, waiting their turn to be crammed into aircraft not designed for passengers; but the new arrangement avoided bringing them into an unstable and unpredictable Arab capital.
Matters became more complicated when Nimeiri, while visiting the United States in 1985, was overthrown by Sudanese officers who had help from Libya. They immediately declared that the president and his secret police chief, Tayeb, were guilty of collaborating with the Mossad and the CIA in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes. This was a rare case in which claims broadcast by rebels were precisely correct.
Now the Sudanese authorities were searching for the Israelis and Americans who were involved in such perfidy. Bearden, over 20 years later, recounted how three Mossad men individually made their way—as was prearranged—to his house in Khartoum as their emergency shelter.
Bearden’s wife, Marie-Catherine, heard a knock on the door. “A young man stood there and told her: ‘I am French and I want to talk your husband,’” Bearden said. “My wife smiled at him and answered: ‘You are not French. I am French. But I know who you are. Come in and go to the second floor.’”
A month later, Bearden and his CIA colleagues felt it was safe to fly the Mossad operatives out of Sudan.
In all, from 1977 to 1985, an estimated 20,000 Jews left their villages in Ethiopia in search of food, safety, comfort, and spiritual fulfillment. As many as 4,000 died on the way, and even as a new dark-skinned minority group joined the kaleidoscope of Israeli society, the sacrifice made by parents and grandparents to move future generations to the Promised Land of ancient times was never forgotten.
After the biggest immigration projects undertaken in the name of Jewish intelligence were complete, there were growing calls—even within the Mossad—to shut down the Bitzur unit. The separate agency Nativ, after all, had withered and vanished. Perhaps Israel could now move on to protecting its own citizens at home.
A decision was made to keep Bitzur open as a small unit, as two Mossad officers put it in simple terms: “just in case,” and “for a rainy day.” Unpleasant precipitation arrived after 9/11, when Israel noticed an upsurge of anti-Semitism in many countries. A historic synagogue in Tunisia was bombed; and other Jewish sites were targeted by terrorists who seemed to believe that Jews and Americans all constituted the same enemy, which Islam needed to wipe out.
Bitzur operatives were assigned to perform their traditional task of helping to organize self-defense for Jewish communities around the globe. This time, however, the task was almost always performed in conjunction with local police forces.
Israel’s intelligence community could never abandon completely the duty it saw to protect Jews and guarantee a safe shelter to them. That, after all, was why the Jewish state existed.
Chapter Fourteen
Northern Exposure
No one needed the best intelligence in the world to know that Israel was poised to attack the PLO infrastructure in Lebanon in 1982.
Menachem Begin’s intentions became clear after his reelection in 1981. With a measure of reluctance and a whirlwind of controversy, Begin elevated Ariel Sharon to the post of defense minister. The feisty and ambitious retired general had a reputation as a man of action who believed in using a glove of iron—rather than velvet—in dealing with Arabs.
Another cabinet minister remarked—only half-jokingly—that if Sharon got that job, one day tanks would surround the prime minister’s office in a coup d’état. Yet Sharon, as a hero of the Yom Kippur War against Egypt, had many admirers and lobbied vigorously for the defense ministry. Begin lavished praise on Sharon as a modern-day Judah the Maccabee, but also feared Sharon as a charismatic figure who could cause trouble.
What did occur, and quickly, was that Sharon began planning an invasion of Lebanon. Military planners codenamed it “Big Pine.” The concept, in truth, also fit Begin’s strategy. The prime minister was feeling remorse over his offer of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza—part of his peace treaty with Egypt’s President Sadat in 1979. Begin now was concerned that autonomy would lead to an independent Palestinian state, which he opposed. The most effective way to derail that would be to smash the organization that embodied the Palestinians’ aspirations, the PLO.
In public, Begin kept warning that Palestinian terrorists—after being expelled from Jordan in 1971—had built a state within a state in Lebanon as a launching pad for attacks southward into Israel. He even dehumanized the enemy by referring to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat as “this man with hair on his face,” and to the PLO as “two-legged beasts.”
Even for the large circle of Israelis who were privy to the secret war plans, it was a surprise to see how trigger-happy Begin and his defense minister were when news broke in April 1982 that two Israelis had been murdered in the Bois de Boulogne park in Paris. Sharon called Begin, and suggested that this would be the opportunity to execute the pre-cooked plan to invade Lebanon.
It turned out that the corpses in Paris were those of Israeli criminals, killed in an organized crime clash. They were not victims of Palestinian terrorism.
Tranquility reigned for only two months. Late on a Thursday night, the third of June, the Israeli ambassador in London—Shlomo Argov—was shot in the head, and crippled for life, while leaving the elegant Dorchester Hotel after a banquet.
The next morning in Jerusalem, Begin’s cabinet convened for an urgent meeting. Researchers from Aman explained that the three Palestinian attackers, arrested by efficient British police, belonged to a renegade wing of the PLO named for its leader: the Abu Nidal organization. The army chief of staff, General Rafael (Raful) Eitan, immediately jumped up and said: “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal, they all are the same.” (The IDF’s top officer was not related to the intelligence operative, Rafi Eitan.)
The cabinet approved a limited penetration by Israeli forces into Lebanon, to smash PLO positions. Begin told parliamentarians in the Knesset—in Biblical terms—that the IDF operation would bring the Jewish state 40 years of peace and quiet, in which “the children of Israel will happily go to school and joyfully return home.”
On Sunday, June 6, the mighty Israeli military invaded Lebanon by land, sea, and air. Things went well, at first. Palestinian guerrilla fighters were no match for the fully trained and equipped IDF. Within six days, the Israelis encircled the sprawling capital city, Beirut.
Along the way, as tanks advanced northward from the border, the Israelis were welcomed by Druze villagers, Maronite Christians, and even Shi’ite Muslims who showered the invaders with the traditional greeting of handfuls of rice. They saw the Israelis as liberators from an oppressive PLO-Sunni Muslim coalition backed by Syria.
But the honeymoon did not last long.
The promises made by Begin and Sharon, and supported by General Eitan, for a quick victory turned out to be hollow. The invaders went far beyond the 40 kilometers (25 miles) declared by Begin as the war plan. Sharon had a grander strategy, intent upon forcing the Palestinians to leave Lebanon and make their way back to Jordan—the country he wanted to be the permanent solution for the Palestinian problem.
That was not the way events played out. Very soon, the Israelis were perceived by most of Lebanon’s factions as an occupying force. The IDF became the target of attacks by Palestinians and by a new force: Hezbollah, or Party of God, created by the new Islamic regime in Iran to empower their Shi’ite brethren.
The major breakdown of Sharon’s strategy occurred that September. Just after being elected president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel—whose family had a long history of secret cooperation with Israeli intelligence—was assassinated by Syrian agents. Syria felt it had to crush the obvious alliance between Israel and Maronite Christians, including the Gemayels.
Retaliation followed swiftly, and it was bloody and history-changing. Either encouraged or malevolently ignored by the Israeli military, Christian militiamen entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut and massacred 800 Palestinian men, women, and children.
American, French, and Italian forces intervened, intending to stabilize the failed state of Lebanon, but they themselves became the targets of a new form of terrorism: suicidal attacks by Hezbollah. The organization glorified the Shi’ite Muslim tradition of martyrdom: giving your life for a holy cause, wiping out Islam’s enemies, while guaranteeing yourself a place in Paradise where 72 virgins would await you.
The worst attack of all was the truck bombing that brought down the United States Marines barracks, killing over 240 servicemen in October 1983. A simultaneous suicide bombing in Beirut killed 58 French paratroopers.
Israel found small comfort in the mass departure of PLO fighters, led by Arafat. Ships brought them from Beirut’s harbor to their new headquarters, far to the west in Tunisia. Israeli snipers had Arafat in the crosshairs of their gunsights, and a junior intelligence officer felt this could be an opportunity to get rid of the man viewed by Israel as a terrorist chief. Restraint prevailed, because of a ceasefire an American envoy had negotiated, so Begin and Sharon did not approve taking the shot.
The PLO left, but Israel was stuck for another 17 years in its own Vietnam.
An Israeli inquiry commission forced Sharon to resign. Begin’s mental condition deteriorated, as he felt severe pangs of conscience for the more-than 600 Israelis who ultimately were killed in the Lebanon war. The prime minister retreated into seclusion, becoming a prisoner in his official residence.
Both politicians and the Mossad were pilloried for the nation’s quagmire.
Inside Mossad headquarters at the Glilot junction, the finger-pointing was directed at Menachem (Nahik) Navot. Even 27 years after the start of the war, Navot—now retired—was perceived as the intelligence mastermind behind Israel’s conspiracies in Lebanon. “Have you seen the movie, Waltz With Bashir?” Navot was asked by a senior female colleague from the 1980s.