by Dan Raviv
She was referring to the 2008 Oscar-nominated Israeli film that depicted the Lebanon war’s horrors from the point of view of director Ari Folman, who had been a tank crewman. She asked the question before a private screening of the animated film was arranged for Mossad employees.
After the movie, Navot lectured the crowd: “A lot of people think that I am responsible for the war. When you talk about the war in Lebanon, unfortunately, they bring up my name. That is the image that was stuck on me and the Mossad.”
Before and during the war, Navot was Mossad’s deputy director and was in charge of the Tevel liaison department. His job was to cultivate a clandestine relationship with the Christians’ armed Phalangist party in Lebanon.
In 1952, at age 21, Navot joined Shin Bet and became a bodyguard to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. He later moved to the operations department, which was shared with the Mossad, and eventually worked on foreign intelligence projects. He worked in the Shah’s Iran and facilitated Israeli military assistance to the Kurds inside Iraq. In the mid-1970s, he was the Mossad’s primary representative in Washington.
Back in Tel Aviv, he and his boss, General Yitzhak Hofi, followed in the footsteps of Reuven Shiloah, the first Mossad director, whose brainchild was the peripheral-alliance strategy. In Lebanon, the chief partners were the Christian Maronites.
The small country just to the north was not a significant threat to Israel, and an oft-told joke was that if a war broke out the IDF would send its military orchestra to the front. But Lebanon was a crossroads for infiltrations in all directions, particularly into and out of Syria. Being a relatively open and permissive society with casinos and brothels, Lebanon attracted influential élites from the Arab world. Thus, it served as a convenient field of play for collecting intelligence.
Since the 1950s, Aman case officers from Unit 154 (later 504) had Lebanese agents who spied on all kinds of people passing through. These agents also provided safe houses and transportation for Israeli operatives, when necessary.
As part of the spycraft of that era, even for the simplest tasks an agent would be needed. Some of the Lebanese then on the Israeli payroll had to endanger themselves, almost every day, for such mundane tasks as bringing Beirut’s newspapers south to the border and handing them to Israeli intelligence analysts. There was no internet. There was no embassy in Beirut. And open-source information has always been a vital part of espionage.
In addition, Israelis frequently went undercover into Lebanon. Unit 154 men developed close relationships with the two leading Christian families, the Chamouns and the Gemayels.
The patriarchs of the two families met secretly with Israeli leaders. One of the Lebanese, Camille Chamoun served as president of his country. Here was a head of state of an Arab country who had no hesitation in mutually beneficial cooperation with the Jewish state. Senior Israelis were friendly with Pierre Gemayel despite his sympathy with fascism, as his own Phalange militia had been formed based on Mussolini’s template. As in the cases when tactics called for cooperation with ex-Nazis served Israel’s needs, Israeli intelligence had no compunctions against cooperating with Phalangists.
Responsibility for maintaining contact with the Lebanese minorities eventually was transferred from military intelligence to the Mossad’s Tevel unit. The secret liaison advanced further in the 1970s, against the background of a vicious civil war in Lebanon, when the Mossad started coordinating the supply of weapons to Phalangist militiamen—and Israel created the South Lebanese Army.
The growing cooperation, however, blasted cracks within the Israeli intelligence community. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who met with both the Chamoun and Gemayel clans, decided that the role of Israel should be limited to helping the Christians to support themselves. After Begin’s election in 1977, that approach began to change. With his Holocaust obsession, Begin believed that the Christian minority in Lebanon was facing possible destruction by the majority Muslims and Palestinians.
Sharon saw the Christian story as one more element in his strategy to install a compliant government in Lebanon on the sharp points of Israeli bayonets. Military intelligence analysts at Aman opposed his grand schemes and believed that the Phalangists aimed to drag the Israelis deeper into Lebanon: to manipulate Israel into fighting their wars for them.
In the Mossad itself there were divisions. Hofi believed in Rabin’s concept of limited aid. His lieutenants, Navot and David Kimche, favored widening the Israeli role—and they did so.
Eventually, Kimche’s deep involvement in Lebanon and his belief in the alliance with the Christians led to his downfall. Hofi, who suspected that Kimche was operating behind his back, forced Kimche to resign—ending, after 30 years, the British-born spy’s aspirations of becoming the agency director.
Lebanon also brought down Hofi’s designated successor, Yekutiel (Kuti) Adam, a decorated army general and an experienced agent-runner as head of the Mossad’s Tsomet department. Just before the invasion in 1982, Begin selected Adam to be the next Mossad director. As the tanks rolled in, in June, Adam rushed to the front—motivated by little more than the excitement of combat—and the unlucky general was killed by a Palestinian ambush.
The partial blindness of some Mossad operatives such as Navot and Kimche could be explained by the excessive warmth of their reception by Lebanese Christians—fine restaurants and nightclubs, at beauty spots along the Mediterranean coast. The Mossad seemed not to see the dark side of the alliance. The agency helped the Phalangists and the SLA restructure themselves along Israeli lines: with combat strategies, shadowy prisons, and interrogation teams. The added Lebanese elements included torture and executions without trial.
Outrageous behavior by Christian allies, more than once, backfired on Israel. Phalangists at a roadblock during the 1982 war kidnapped four Iranians, including three diplomats, and then murdered them and dumped their bodies. (Years later, when Israel wanted to arrange a swap with Hezbollah—of prisoners and corpses of soldiers—negotiations were prolonged by a demand that Israel deliver the remains of the four Iranians. Israel responded that it had no way of doing so, as a building had been constructed on the suspected burial site.)
However, Navot saw the entire drama in a very different, insider’s context. “I was sitting with Hofi and his chief of staff in Mossad headquarters, when the news about the assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London reached us. All of us said, ‘Oy va voy [oh, woe!], we are going into a war!’”
Navot feared that Lebanese Christians would not be reliable allies when fighting began. “We knew that the Christian Phalangists wanted us to conquer all of Lebanon for their sake,” Navot reminisced.
When their leader Bashir Gemayel—Israel’s great hope—was killed by a Syrian bomb planted in his office, Navot took it hard and took it personally. He rushed to the scene. “People were searching for Bashir and did not find his body. I met one of Bashir’s advisors there, who asked me, seriously, ‘Have you abducted him?’ Later I went with Bashir’s widow to the hospital, and there we identified his body.”
There were many more corpses and tons of destruction, as Israel remained in southern Lebanon until the year 2000. The involvement of the intelligence community deepened and widened. It was not only the Mossad there, but also Aman and increasingly Shin Bet. Israel’s domestic security agency, with its counter-terrorism specialty, started running more Lebanese agents than ever, arresting and interrogating suspects, and getting to know the territory as though settling in for a long occupation.
Lebanon instantly became the biggest focus for all three Israeli agencies, consuming resources budgeted for other projects. Case officers, interrogators, and researchers were taken off their projects and relocated to Lebanon. A notable example of someone who had to move was Dubi, the same katsa who was busy running an extremely important agent in Cairo: Ashraf Marwan, the Mossad’s best eyes and ears in Egypt.
Lebanon was a dangerous place that required extra guards and defenses when going to meetings with sources a
nd agents. Ambushes and roadside bombs were frighteningly common. A thin organization, such as the Mossad, where personnel liked to move around invisibly, instead wound up in heavily armed convoys. For Aman’s Unit 504, which specialized in running agents and interrogations, Lebanon was its biggest field of play ever.
Using all three major agencies in a relatively small territory did not make sense. There was a question of organizational ego, leading to inevitable turf fights and a lack of proper division of labor. Unnecessary duplication was evident in the absurdity of the three agencies’ often running the very same agents, hiding their identities and information from the other Israelis.
Worse than that, they depended on well-established drug dealers as sources of information. Lebanon was known for decades as a hotbed for growing poppies and hashish and producing opium and cocaine, to be smuggled out of the country—often via Syria and Jordan into Egypt in one direction, and to European markets in the other.
The illegal but thriving drug trade first attracted Lebanese politicians and generals, then powerful Syrians as their country’s influence in Lebanon grew. This trend eventually generated a class of professional drug traffickers, often as a family tradition. These criminal clans learned to cooperate with every power: with the central Lebanese government; with the Syrians; and now, acknowledging their new masters, with the Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.
The Israelis welcomed those families and gangs and started using them. Part of the deal was that the agencies turned a blind eye to their business. Israeli intelligence did not notice what impression all of this would make on local residents, who became aware of the foreigners’ extending their protection to drug smugglers. The Biro family was a case in point. Muhammad Biro, the father of the family, was a Lebanese customs officer at a border crossing with Syria in the 1950s, but his real business was selling drugs.
In a 20-year period, he became one of the biggest drug traffickers in the Middle East. Biro’s business extended from Lebanon into Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Europe. He was moving tons of drugs by land and sea to supply an unending demand. By becoming rich, he also became respectable. The Israelis started paying their respects to him and his heirs.
When Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Arens, visited the area, he accepted an invitation to dine with the Biro family. He did not know the family’s true business, and Aman’s case officers who handled Biro did not tell Arens. It was no surprise that ridiculous rumors spread across Lebanon that Arens and Biro were drug-smuggling partners.
In any contacts with Arab drug smugglers, one key rule was imposed on them: If you sell to Israeli drug dealers, you have to inform on them and testify in court. The dealers, however, believed in free trade and globalization—before that term was coined—and for them there were no borders.
Ramzi Nahara, another giant in the Lebanese drug trade, cooperated with Israeli intelligence officers. While making a fortune, he furnished information to Israeli police; but he also smuggled more of his inventory into Israel behind the backs of the cops—until, one day, they decided that enough was enough and arrested him.
He was put on trial and sentenced to a long stay in an Israeli prison. Nahara continued to run his drugs business from a prison cell. He also managed to smuggle out a message to the emerging power of Lebanon—Hezbollah—telling them that he was severing his ties with Israel and now would be on their side. This would be significant in the future.
Starting in the 1990s, Israeli intelligence considered whether to dismantle Unit 504, with its checkered history. The proposal was to merge it with the Mossad, to put the art of running agents under one roof. But top military commanders had doubts about the wisdom of such a move, arguing that Unit 504 case officers and agents were providing tactical intelligence that was necessary for the troops in the field. They doubted that the Mossad, with its international and strategic outlook, would be interested in filling that role so well.
Hezbollah’s birth stemmed from a long history of Shi’ite Muslim suffering, the facts of local Lebanese politics, and the Iranian Islamic revolution of February 1979. Its emergence also coincided with the Israeli invasion. The longer Israel remained in Lebanon, and the wider its activities there, the stronger Hezbollah became.
The Israeli presence gave the Shi’ite Party of God a focal point for its passion, fueled by resentment and hatred. Its first spiritual leader was Muhammad Fadlallah, a Muslim cleric who studied in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. Returning to Lebanon in 1966, he immersed himself in religious and educational concerns, even establishing an orphanage.
His work sowed the first seeds of Shi’ite pride in the country. For generations, his community in Lebanon and other majority Sunni Muslim countries suffered from discrimination and a lack of resources. In 1979 and 1980, with the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, Shi’ites around the world were energized by the establishment of the first Shi’ite government in modern history.
From Iran’s perspective, Lebanon was important because of the Shi’ite community—but also as a bridgehead to the Mediterranean and beyond to Europe. It could be a key base for a holy war against Israel and Western interests.
As in the French and Russian revolutions, the activists who took power quickly sought to export their ideals. The Iranians started sending emissaries to establish ties with other Shi’ite communities, and Lebanon was an obvious destination.
Iran’s point man for the Lebanese community was Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian ambassador in Syria. He found that Lebanese Shi’ites had already been spiritually inspired by Fadlallah, and now the envoy from Iran would add a large measure of political power. And money. And arms.
The day after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, an Iranian military delegation arrived in Damascus and discussed how to stir up resistance against the Israelis. The group was led by Iran’s defense minister and by the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, joined by Ambassador Mohtashemi. It was agreed to send Iranian volunteers into Lebanon, and that was the start of a significant Iranian presence in the country. The volunteers were mostly Revolutionary Guards and intelligence officers.
With the help of the Iranian professionals, Hezbollah began to organize itself on three fronts: as a Lebanese political entity, as a religious and social organization, and as a military force. They called themselves resistance fighters. The Israelis and the West labeled them terrorists.
As well as turning their guns on Israelis, they also targeted Westerners. Americans, Britons, and other foreigners working in Lebanon were kidnapped. An American TWA airliner was hijacked to Beirut in June 1985, enabling the whole world to get acquainted with a young Lebanese Shi’ite by the name of Imad Mughniyeh. The 22-year-old had just defected from the PLO to the fast growing Hezbollah, and later he would become the world’s most wanted terrorist—until the arrival of Osama Bin Laden.
A veiled war between the United States and Lebanese Shi’ite radicals had already begun. The CIA found no alternative to violence—not only because of the attack that killed sleeping U.S. Marines in their barracks in October 1983, but also the loss of the CIA’s top case officer for the Middle East, Robert Ames, the previous April, when the United States embassy in Beirut was leveled by a car bomb. Those blows at American interests would also be blamed on Mughniyeh. The CIA retaliated, in a most unorthodox and bloody way: with a massive car bomb.
That may have seemed a fitting weapon in the Middle East, land of “an eye for an eye,” but unless the explosives are sized and tailored with great expertise—as the Mossad has done repeatedly in enemy capitals—the casualties are almost sure to include many non-combatant civilians.
So it was in the southern Shi’ite district of Beirut on March 8, 1985. The target was Muhammad Fadlallah, the cleric who established Hezbollah. William Casey, then the director of the CIA, spoke with journalist Bob Woodward about it, and Woodward reported that Saudi Arabia helped organize placement of an explosives-laden vehicle, which went off in front of Fadlallah’s home.
Several buildings collapsed and 80 people were killed outside an adjacent mosque, but Fadlallah survived.
Chapter Fifteen
A New Enemy
Israel’s intelligence community and the IDF were slow to realize that they faced a very potent enemy in Hezbollah. The wake-up blast came in November 1983: a suicide car bomb that toppled an office building used by Shin Bet as its local headquarters in the port city of Tyre. Twenty-eight Israelis were killed, as well as 32 Lebanese prisoners held inside. Shin Bet’s official history calls that the first suicide attack against an Israeli target.
That historical version is challenged, however, because an even taller building nearby—used by Shin Bet and the army—suffered a devastating explosion one year earlier. It caused the deaths of 78 Israelis and around two dozen Arab detainees. A senior military investigatory committee’s official conclusion was that the first blast was an accident caused by a gas leak, yet the Lebanese media have always boasted that it was a Hezbollah attack.
Some Israeli investigators agree with the Hezbollah version, and they reveal that part of the car and a leg of the suicide bomber were found in the rubble weeks later. Still, Israel has stuck to the official version of a gas explosion.
The Mossad and Aman intensively probed into the second blast, hoping to trace the bombers to a specific location. Before long, there was a strong focus on Iran’s ambassador in Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. They concluded that he was the key link between Iran, providing logistical support and training, and Hezbollah men carrying out terrorist operations. They suspected that the ambassador was also involved in plotting the major suicide attacks on the Marines barracks and the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
In the tradition of sending letter bombs in the 1960s to German scientists and in the 1970s to Palestinian terrorists, a parcel was mailed to Mohtashemi in February 1984 at the Iranian embassy in Damascus. It contained a booby-trapped Muslim holy book, a Quran. It exploded but failed to achieve the entire goal: Mohtashemi lost his right hand and part of his left hand, but he survived.