Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  Ironically, in the decades that followed, the militant ambassador would become a reformist publisher and politician in Tehran, supporting pro-democracy causes in his country.

  In any event, the exploding book was a waste of time and blood. Hezbollah’s growth seemed unstoppable, and it became a more sophisticated force than the PLO. The Shi’ites were better trained, with the backing of their masters in Tehran. Together they innovated a new line of booby traps and mines that were cleverly camouflaged, causing casualties and damage to Israeli forces.

  Similar improvised explosive devices would be aimed against U.S. troops in Iraq after 2003, as bombs were planted along roadsides by Iranian-supported militias. Hezbollah experts, honed by their experiences in Lebanon, would infiltrate into Iraq to train their Shi’ite brethren in the anti-American resistance.

  The long war in Lebanon became asymmetrical: a regular army facing a guerrilla force. The Israelis eventually realized that the best way to fight guerrillas would be to emulate their tactics. The IDF put soldiers in special small units that staged ambushes, hid explosives, and behaved in unpredictably offensive ways.

  Many Israelis, not only in the intelligence community, saw the unexpected and uncomfortable truth of what was unfolding in Lebanon. Israel went into that country to get rid of one enemy—the PLO. But it stayed there, and over the years it faced a more dangerous enemy, Hezbollah.

  Israelis had to fight even more fiercely, and the mutual bleeding was not confined to Lebanese soil. It spilled over into Israel.

  Hezbollah introduced a new threat, courtesy of its Iranian sponsors: short-range rockets, and then longer-range missiles that could reach many Israeli towns and cities. For the first time since 1948, the civilian population in Israel might be thrust onto the front line, because the military front came to them.

  Israel and the radical Lebanese Shi’ites kept hammering each other, and a new crisis would focus on one Israeli airman.

  In October 1986 one of Israel’s American-made F-4 Phantom warplanes, during a bombing mission over Lebanon, was damaged when one of its own bombs exploded. The pilot and the navigator ejected and safely parachuted to the ground. The pilot was quickly picked up by an Israeli helicopter-borne rescue squad, but the rescuers could not reach the navigator, Ron Arad. Ground fire from gunmen in Lebanon did not let up, and Arad was captured by Shi’ite Muslims.

  His captors were not Hezbollah militants, but members of the more traditional Shi’ite movement called Amal. Israeli leaders, pressured by heavy criticism of a lopsided prisoner exchange with a small Palestinian terrorist group two years earlier, were in no rush to offer a deal. The politicians in Jerusalem were reading intelligence analyses from Aman that suggested Arad was not in imminent danger. Meetings were held with Amal representatives in London, aimed at arranging his release. For about 18 months, Israel was certain that Arad was alive, and his family even received letters from him.

  But Aman’s reading of the situation was wrong. In fact, Amal was sinking quickly in the constellation of Lebanese factions and could not hold on long to its prize captive. Hezbollah paid Amal and took possession of the prisoner. Ron Arad vanished into a black hole.

  His mysterious disappearance would haunt Israeli intelligence, the military, politicians, the press, and the public for decades. It is assumed that he died. It is also assumed that his captors, whether Hezbollah or Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, did not want him to die, as he could be a precious trading asset. For the operatives and chiefs of Aman and the Mossad, it was truly a low point that an Israeli imprisoned behind enemy lines could not be traced.

  Realizing that there was no consistent framework for dealing with such cases, the two agencies created permanent units called Shon, a Hebrew acronym for Shvu’yim v’Ne’edarim (Prisoners and Missing). The units would be directed by senior officers, to emphasize the importance of locating anyone who was lost—rooted in the Israeli ethos of leaving no soldier behind.

  Among the steps recommended for the Arad case was to kidnap senior members of Hezbollah, so as to have bargaining chips. This was modeled on a success in 1972, when Sayeret Matkal commandos kidnapped five Syrian military officers along the Syria-Lebanon border and exchanged them for Israeli pilots held by Syria.

  In July 1989, armed with excellent intelligence, Sayeret Matkal soldiers went into action again inside Lebanon. In the middle of the night, they kidnapped Sheik Abdul Karim Obeid from his home. He was ostensibly a spiritual leader in Hezbollah, but according to the Israelis he directed many acts of violence.

  Once again, in the complex Lebanese kaleidoscope, Israeli intelligence was confused by all the facets. Hezbollah stubbornly offered nothing in exchange for Obeid. Either he was not sufficiently important in their organization, or the group had no idea where Arad was—and did not wish to reveal that it did not know. Israel was stuck with Obeid for 15 years and faced international criticism for holding a hostage without trial.

  With no progress made on the Arad front, Israeli intelligence and the political echelon decided to escalate. If Obeid turned out to be merely a tail, now Israel would aim at the snake’s head. A decision was made to kidnap Abbas Musawi, who only recently had become secretary-general of Hezbollah. Teams of Sayeret Matkal and naval commandos—known as Flotilla 13—practiced various scenarios: grabbing Musawi from an office, from a home, or from a car.

  The commander of Aman, General Uri Saguy, spotted an opportunity in February 1992: a newspaper item that said Musawi would visit a Shi’ite village in southern Lebanon. The Israelis would not be far away.

  When Musawi was driven southward out of Beirut in a convoy on February 16, the line of vehicles was watched constantly by an Israeli air force drone flying undetectably high above. The pilotless plane transmitted real-time pictures to a command center in the Kirya in Tel Aviv. General Saguy and his analysts realized, to their disappointment, that there were too many cars and people around Musawi, so a snatch operation would be too dangerous.

  Without much deliberation, the chief of staff, General Ehud Barak—with General Saguy reluctantly agreeing but some other officers opposed—decided, on the spot, to eliminate the Hezbollah leader. American-made Apache helicopters, on standby at a base in northern Israel, were summoned. Not knowing which car contained Musawi, the pilots were ordered to destroy the entire convoy.

  One of the Israeli pilots later spoke of making his own decision, while airborne, to hit the procession of “good-looking black Mercedes cars” and one Land Rover far from any buildings to reduce civilian casualties.

  He was not told beforehand who the main target would be, and he said “professional behavior” meant not asking questions. “We knew they weren’t sending us out for nothing,” he said. The five-minute attack was like a shooting gallery. Four helicopters fired missile after missile to liquidate all the Hezbollah targets. The gruesome results, shattered and smoking remnants of expensive German- and British-made vehicles, formed a killing field.

  The death toll included Musawi, his wife, their son, and at least five security guards. This was the first assassination by Israeli attack helicopters, several years before the practice—officially aimed at blocking future terrorism—became legalized by an attorney general as “targeted prevention.” America would come to call the method “targeted killing,” when aimed against al-Qaeda years later.

  Barak did manage to get an okay by telephone from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Defense Minister Moshe Arens, around a minute before the rockets struck. The political level did adhere to tradition by taking responsibility for an assassination.

  This particular killing would lead to terrible blowback for Israel, a mere 30 days later.

  First, it rapidly became clear that Hezbollah would not be caving in. Musawi was replaced by a new leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who turned out to be much more charismatic, vigorous, wily, and dangerous. Nasrallah would become one of Israel’s bitterest enemies, causing a lot of trouble for the Jewish state—including starting a war in 2006 that d
isrupted normal life for Israelis.

  According to Israeli intelligence, the new leader consulted with his Iranian masters—the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hashemi Rafsanjani—and together they decided to avenge Musawi in a big way. And they had the capability to do that, far from the expected field of battle.

  Israeli security agencies were prepared for some level of retaliation. There was the fairly standard shower of Katyusha rockets fired into northern Israel by Hezbollah gunners. Then, when the security officer at the Israeli embassy in Ankara was killed by a car bomb on March 7, Israelis naturally considered that to be Hezbollah’s response to the death of Musawi.

  There were, however, conflicting claims of responsibility for that blast in Turkey. Hezbollah never made a habit of publicly announcing its operations outside Lebanon, and Iranian intelligence certainly never declared anything.

  Yet, without doubt, it was the two of them—Hezbollah and Iran—that committed a much more astounding act aimed against Israel. Their agents blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. They chose Argentina because Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) already had assets in South America, including sleeper cells that had melted into friendly Shi’ite communities in several countries.

  A truck laden with explosives was detonated by a suicide bomber in front of Israel’s embassy, in an elegant neighborhood, on March 17. Twenty-nine people, including four Israeli diplomats, were killed.

  Yaakov Perry, the head of Shin Bet, had just been in Buenos Aires—as part of a tour of Israeli and Jewish facilities in South America with the head of the agency’s security department. They met with Argentine counterparts to discuss the dangers of Middle Eastern terrorism, but they thought they had no reason to think that Argentina would be targeted within a few days.

  Separate and joint investigations by the Mossad, the CIA, and Argentina’s state intelligence agency SIDE found that the attack was a joint project of Hezbollah with Iranian government agents. MOIS officers, under diplomatic cover at Iran’s embassy, had activated local sleeper cells and arranged the logistics: procuring the truck and delivering the explosives in diplomatic pouches from Tehran.

  A few more Iranian intelligence officers had flown into neighboring countries, Brazil and Paraguay, and the operation was planned and executed with impressive speed.

  People in Israel were truly shocked. This was the first time that one of its embassies had been destroyed. Israeli intelligence began to reconsider whether killing Musawi had been such a good idea.

  An even bigger blow—again in Buenos Aires—two years later drove home the message that Israel was involved in a war that it barely understood. No one can mess blithely with the Iranians, who are proud to be leading what they see as a historic rise of Shi’ite Islam. They have very long memories. They plot in complex ways. They get even, and sometimes doubly so.

  In 1994, yet again, it was a truck bomb. This time the target was in a working-class neighborhood of small markets: the seven-story headquarters of AMIA, Argentina’s national Jewish organization. On July 15, an explosion brought down the entire building. Eighty-five people were killed and over 300 injured.

  The driver was vaporized, and no pieces remained of him to put together. There were no documents, no clothing, and no fingerprints. But the Mossad managed to piece together a logical conclusion that he was from a Shi’ite village in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, because a plaque was quickly erected to honor a Hezbollah fighter killed on that particular date. And a pro-Hezbollah television station in Lebanon announced that Musawi’s killing by Israel in 1992 had now been avenged.

  Having destroyed an Israeli embassy, Hezbollah fell in love with the tactic as a stunning blow to the Jews and their sovereign state. Hezbollah would plot similar bombings, time and again.

  In 1996, Aman received a piece of intelligence that seemed to be a secret message between a terrorist in the Middle East and a partner overseas. A junior intelligence officer in the military’s counter-terrorism unit—who happened to be good with hunches—tried to identify the person who was far away. Sticking with it beyond where others would have quit, he located a suspect in a Southeast Asian country.

  The man’s name was not familiar to the Mossad, but the fact that he was in touch with Hezbollah was enough to set off a sense of alarm. Knowing that the Lebanese Shi’ite militants were making major efforts to extend their global reach, the Israelis chose to be safe, rather than sorry. Bitter experience, notably the Buenos Aires bombs, had taught them not to ignore clues in unexpected countries.

  The identity of the suspect was passed to Mossad officers in charge of foreign liaison, who arranged for the man—native of another Asian nation—to be arrested and interrogated. The questioning, accompanied by strong local police pressure, was highly effective. The man said that he was a Muslim student who recently had been to Qom, the spiritual center in Iran. He spent time there with a Lebanese colleague who turned out to be a recruiter for Hezbollah. He was offered a training program in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and agreed.

  He also told interrogators that his mission, in the country where he had been caught, had been to purchase forged passports.

  Pressed further, the man revealed that he had been in Thailand, just a few days before, with a senior Hezbollah operative on a highly murderous mission. They stole a fuel tanker truck, killed the driver, stuffed his corpse inside the fuel tank, and then took the truck to a workshop in Bangkok that they had leased earlier.

  They installed two tons of explosives in the truck—enough to destroy whole city blocks. The plan was to fly in a suicide bomber from Lebanon and destroy Israel’s embassy in Bangkok. But, judging by the lack of any headlines about it in the news, the truck obviously never exploded. The detainee who was questioned did not know why.

  It turned out—luckily for the Israelis and thousands of Thai innocents—that the vehicle had gotten stuck in an awful traffic jam in Bangkok on the appointed morning, caused by a car accident that attracted a lot of police. The Lebanese bomber saw the officers, panicked, parked the tanker truck on the side of the road, and ran away.

  Thai police towed away the truck—unaware that it had explosives and a dead driver in the huge tank—and left it at a police station. They discovered that the truck had been stolen, and the driver was listed as a missing person, but they believed it was merely a local crime.

  After a few days, a senior police officer asked his subordinates why the truck was still there. He insisted that they check the truck more carefully. They opened the fuel tank and found the corpse and the explosives.

  After the capture of the terrorist who was compelled to be talkative, it was clear that Israel’s embassy in Bangkok was the intended target. Hezbollah was truly showing that it had worldwide ambitions, and defensive measures would increasingly require better international cooperation. Israel intelligence would have plenty to do.

  Sometime later, Israel was informed that Jordan had captured a Hezbollah man—apparently plotting to fire rockets into Israel. Israeli liaison operatives quickly realized that the suspect was the same Hezbollah commander who had run the fuel tanker truck plot in Bangkok.

  One of the heads of Jordan’s main security agency promised that the Lebanese suspect would never be released. But within three weeks, he was set free. Israeli officials naturally complained; but the Jordanians said they felt they had no choice, because Hezbollah had threatened to attack Jordan.

  The takeaway lesson for the Mossad was that liaison relationships are a fine thing, but ultimately every country acts on its own self-interests. No one, even longtime colleagues for decades, can fully be relied upon. Israelis had to do many things on their own.

  The Mossad continued—almost by rote—to play the game according to the rules it understood. Ron Arad was still missing, and the Mossad intended to squeeze someone in Lebanon for information.

  True, the kidnapping plan aimed at Musawi had produced a killing field and then twin Buenos Aires massacres. The I
sraelis would still, however, make an effort to obtain a new bargaining chip: this time, a man they also hoped could provide new information.

  A case officer in Aman’s Unit 504 managed to recruit a young Lebanese woman, a university graduate from Beirut who worked as a housekeeper for a prominent family in southern Lebanon. It was Mustafa Dirani’s household.

  He was the security chief for Amal and was the last official of that Shi’ite organization to hold Arad. Israeli intelligence believed that Dirani sold Arad for $300,000 to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

  It was decided to kidnap Dirani and bring him to Israel. The young woman who was spying for Aman provided information about his daily routine and habits—even a sketch of the Dirani home—so that the kidnap squad could make specific plans. Based on the details she provided, the technological unit of Aman built a mock-up of the house; and Sayeret Matkal commandos practiced snatching their target.

  In May 1994, the soldiers grabbed him in his house in the middle of the night, and they spirited him away to Israel. Dirani joined Sheik Obeid as the second bargaining chip for the Israelis.

  The Lebanese woman, by then, was dead. Israeli intelligence learned later that she had been sleeping with both Dirani and his brother, whether for information-gathering purposes or just because such things happen. When the brothers discovered that they were sharing her affections, instead of being angry at each other, they killed her.

  Israeli interrogators found that Dirani was a very tough nut to crack. He claimed that he did not sell Arad—that Lebanese guards had lost Arad during an Israeli air raid on a nearby village. Unit 504’s interrogators were not convinced by Dirani’s version, and Israeli newspapers would eventually publish details of how the questioners tortured him.

  In a court affidavit filed by his Israeli lawyer, Dirani would claim that one of the torturers—a 504 officer codenamed “George”—put a stick up his rectum. He also would claim that an Israeli soldier pulled down his own trousers and threatened to rape Dirani. Israel’s Supreme Court refused to believe the allegations, but they proved to be correct.