Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  They exploded.

  The detonation of long-simmering rage was not orchestrated, with no central organizers. It was spontaneous: a popular uprising. It was an intifada, the Arabic term for “shaking off.”

  Like other major historical events, a wide array of contributing factors can be seen, even when the precise timing defies explanation. For the Palestinians under occupation, the sad facts of life included economic decline, disappointment in the empty promises of the PLO to win their freedom, and despair from the apathy of the Arab world about their fate. Above all, they were expressing frustration—a message that enough was enough.

  The spark was an unintentional tragedy in December 1987. An Israeli truck hit a group of Palestinians in Gaza, killing four and injuring others. To Gazans, it seemed to be murder: the last straw, the breaking point. They took to the streets the next morning. The protest movement spread to the West Bank, and it went on and on.

  It was basically a youth movement. Young protesters refused to leave the streets. Day and night, they were out there: throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and military vehicles and at Jewish settlers’ cars, burning tires at nearly every intersection, attacking police stations, and tearing down Israeli flags and replacing them with the PLO’s national flag of black, white, red, and green. Hardly any guns were used. No terrorist bombs were set. This was a homemade and handmade rebellion.

  Institutions on two sides were taken by surprise: the PLO, and Israel’s military and Shin Bet.

  The PLO—officially embodying the national aspirations of the Palestinian people—was supposed to have its finger on their pulse. But since being forced out of Lebanon by the Israeli invasion of 1982, the PLO was disoriented. It was headquartered in far-off Tunis, and its activists were dispersed all over the Arab world. The organization lost touch with the Palestinian reality under occupation.

  Fairly quickly, however, the PLO was able to pull itself together and jump on the protest wagon. It started to lead the intifada, so Yasser Arafat was back in the driver’s seat.

  Intifada activists and the PLO were helped by a new bit of technology: not the greatest breakthrough, perhaps, but the fax machine was literally a revolutionary instrument. Orders were faxed back and forth, between Tunis and the various Gaza and West Bank committees that were being established to coordinate the violence against the Israeli occupiers.

  Once a strategy was developed, Palestinian leaders assigned a high priority to breaking one of the central tools of the occupation: the informers who were working for Israel. They were a central link of a chain that enabled Shin Bet to control the daily lives of the Palestinians and to pacify the territories. There were several thousand informers, ranged across Palestinian society, from factory workers to intellectuals.

  Manipulating a host of human weaknesses, Shin Bet recruited them by combining pressure, threats, and favors. Life in the West Bank and Gaza required permits to do almost anything: travel, build a house, open a shop, pursue higher education, and access specialist clinics. Licenses would be withheld or granted, depending on the Palestinian’s willingness to cooperate.

  Shin Bet operatives could suitably be described as “princes of the territories,” moving around like they owned the place. In a modern-day feudal system, they were the lords—each controlling a neighborhood or village where local residents were like serfs who were expected to cooperate. Many of the Palestinians received stipends of up to $200 per month, and they were supposed to keep the Israelis informed about everything.

  Now, the informers were at the receiving end of hatred. Protesters targeted them. Their houses were burned. They were abducted, tortured, and sometimes killed. Their families were branded “collaborators” and shunned by Palestinian society.

  Israeli security officials, however, were slow to realize what was happening before their eyes. The security apparatus looked at the first protests as unconnected and believed that they could be easily smashed, like Arafat’s efforts to stir up a revolution just after the Six-Day War. But this, in fact, was an uncontainable earthquake.

  No one typified the odd Israeli mix of confusion and arrogance more than Yitzhak Rabin—serving as defense minister in the uncomfortable coalition of Shamir and Peres. Rabin ordered the IDF to “break the bones” of protesters, and soldiers wielding batons did that quite a lot.

  The Israeli government and security chiefs still had trouble absorbing the fact that the intifada was a product of the grassroots. Their outmoded view was that it was all directed from outside, and they had to find an address. They easily found one: PLO headquarters in Tunisia.

  They almost had to remind themselves that they already bombed Tunis three years earlier, in 1985. What could they do now? They were determined to find a culprit, someone who was giving the intifada orders.

  The Mossad easily alighted upon one of the founders of the PLO, Khalil el-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad. It was no secret that he was Yasser Arafat’s deputy and in charge of PLO operations in the West Bank and Gaza. As early as 1965, when Abu Jihad was organizing a Palestine Liberation Army in Damascus, the Mossad operations chief Rafi Eitan proposed assassinating him. Meir Amit and other intelligence bosses decided not to pursue that.

  In 1988, however, Abu Jihad—the self-titled “Father of the Holy War”—was deemed a deserving target. One reason was that in March he sent three Palestinians into southern Israel from Egypt. The terrorists hijacked a bus carrying nuclear workers to Dimona, killing three of the Israelis and then themselves dying in an ensuing gunbattle.

  The Israeli leadership was alarmed whenever Dimona was approached by enemies in any way. Abu Jihad stood out as a daring and dangerous man. In addition, cabinet ministers were looking for a way to boost the morale of the public in the dark days of the Palestinian intifada.

  An assassination plan was immediately requested, and this one would be complex and high-priority. Planners were pleased to find that information needed to penetrate Tunisia was available in abundance. After the PLO moved its headquarters there, the Mossad was hot on its trail and created front companies in the capital city, Tunis—a terrific base for keeping an eye on the Palestinian leadership.

  Aman military officers opened a safe that contained “personal target files.” The files included everything known about someone Israel might want to get rid of someday: the home address, of course, but also the precise plan of his house; his habits and daily routines; the number of guards, if any; the target’s vehicles; and details of his family and friends. All of that and more were in the file about Abu Jihad, truly thick with data.

  Caesarea teams visited his neighborhood and subtly photographed his house, while assessing how many guards were on duty and where. The Mossad operatives also pinpointed a landing area on the beach and rented several cars. The operation was ready to be launched.

  Israeli navy missile boats ferried special operations commandos to waters just north of Tunisia. Israel’s air force flew a Boeing 707 over the Mediterranean, with senior military and Mossad personnel acting as a forward command post and communications center.

  This was one of the most coordinated and long-distance missions in Israeli military history. It involved the air force, the navy, the sigint experts of Aman’s Unit 8200, and the secretive commandos of Flotilla 13 and Sayeret Matkal.

  Before the final go-ahead was given, the Israelis wanted to try to confirm that Abu Jihad was at home. The innovative method chosen was to make a phone call to him, ostensibly from someone he knew. The call was actually made by a Shin Bet man, calling from the Boeing jet over the sea. Shin Bet always had someone with perfect Palestinian Arabic on duty for such purposes—known as a maz’ik, or alarm-giver, because his function was usually to get an urgent message to an Arab agent.

  Just after midnight on April 16, Abu Jihad answered the phone.

  Flotilla 13 frogmen landed first, in motorized rubber craft, to prepare the beachhead. Next came Sayeret Matkal soldiers in civilian clothes, who had practiced how to be assassins. They got int
o the cars with Mossad operatives, heading for Abu Jihad’s villa.

  Storming the house at around 2 a.m. at high speed, the soldiers shot at least one guard and a gardener at the front and burst inside. Abu Jihad was at the top of the stairs, and the Israelis shot him dozens of times—but they spared his wife and daughter, who were watching.

  The Mossad team, the special operations soldiers, and lastly the Flotilla 13 boat crews all rushed out of Tunisia with no trouble. Everyone returned home safely.

  From the intelligence and operational points of view, this was a high-class success. Abu Jihad was dead. Yet, the intifada in the West Bank and Gaza was very much alive.

  Seen in a broader perspective, the Palestinian uprising was precisely what Shin Bet was meant to prevent. After all, its name meant “Security Services,” and it had battled in 1967 to get the right to be in charge in the territories—instead of Aman getting that responsibility.

  Shin Bet had a very narrow focus on preventing terrorism, and it did not recognize that a society was developing in the occupied territories. Shin Bet’s top officers did not see the Palestinians as people. They were considered only to be a human reservoir for terrorists.

  At its unlabeled headquarters in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv, Shin Bet concentrated on gathering information rather than producing informed analysis. Once again, Israeli intelligence was binding itself to a preconceived idea—like The Concept preceding the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Hardly anyone wanted to believe that the Palestinians would rise up in mass rebellion.

  The intifada’s fires burned hot for four years, with the IDF and Shin Bet finding some countermeasures in a mini-war of attrition. No one felt victorious—certainly not the Israelis. Both they and the Palestinian protestors were exhausted: truly burned out.

  The immediate results were 185 Israelis killed and around 2,500 Palestinians—almost half of them suspected collaborators killed by other Palestinians.

  The bureaucratic lessons included Shin Bet’s realization that it needed a research and analysis division, which would provide it with a more complete picture of Palestinian life.

  Shin Bet did rearrange its resources and thus was able to recognize the importance of Hamas: the beginning of a Muslim extremist movement within the Palestinian population. Hamas was inspired and, at the start, somewhat directed by Egypt’s well-established Muslim Brotherhood.

  Israeli analysts could see that, especially in Gaza, many Palestinians had lost faith in the PLO and instead renewed their vows to radical clerics who linked Allah with liberating the land held by “the Jews.” Hamas issued its founding charter in August 1988, eight months after the truck accident that sparked the initifada.

  They would always be remembered like twins who were born together, the intifada and Hamas. The group’s charter was totally uncompromising and declared all of Palestine as a holy land that belonged only to Muslims, with no room for a Jewish state. Before long, Israel would find that Hamas, with its daring methods and glorification of suicide bombers, was a much more dangerous foe than the PLO.

  Yet, at the same time, the intifada created the strong feeling—among reasonable majorities on both sides—that something big had to change. Mutual suffering offered no hope and no way forward.

  Chapter Twenty

  Hope and Despair

  The strangest thing about the first Gulf War—which followed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990—was that the missiles fired by Saddam Hussein at Israel ignited hopes for peace.

  The Iraqi dictator’s intention had been to draw Israel into the war, because that would shatter the anti-Saddam coalition cobbled together by the United States. The Arab countries that were fighting alongside the Americans and the British surely would quit if the Jewish state were to jump in on “their” side.

  So, Saddam did what he could to aggravate the Israelis. His army fired 39 long-range Scud missiles in January and February 1991, trying with limited accuracy to hit Tel Aviv. He also aimed for the nuclear reactor at Dimona. That was partly a measure of revenge for his Osirak reactor having been destroyed in 1981, but, above all, he hoped to provoke the Israelis to enter the war.

  It was the first time since the 1948 War of Independence that Tel Aviv was hit by enemy fire. The 1991 Scud missile strikes exposed a soft underbelly: Israel’s highly populated core was vulnerable.

  Because Aman and the Mossad had warned that there was a significant chance that Iraq would use chemical or biological warheads on the Scuds, millions of Israelis walked around with gas masks and hurried to plastic-sheeted safe rooms whenever an air raid siren was heard.

  Saddam was indeed managing to anger the Israelis, and it seemed as natural as sunrise every morning that Iraq would be struck by retaliation. That was basic Israeli military doctrine: not to let any damage to Israel go unanswered. But President George H.W. Bush insisted that Israel not exercise its right of self-defense. He did not want his Arab coalition partners to bolt.

  The war and its aftermath triggered a major geostrategic change. Saddam was defeated and, to a degree, humiliated. Positive outcomes for Israel included the dismantling of Iraq’s chemical weapons and the apparent end of Saddam’s attempts to restart his nuclear arms program.

  There was also an effect on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Having scored a military victory in the Middle East—a new experience for the Americans—they felt that they could follow that up with peacemaking. Arrangements were difficult, in part because Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir refused to negotiate with Yasser Arafat’s PLO.

  The Bush administration was able to organize the Madrid peace conference in October 1991, and it was a breakthrough in several ways: Shamir found himself sitting with a Palestinian delegation notionally representing West Bank and Gaza residents, and senior officials from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon were also taking part.

  Arafat went along with giving a silent nod to the Palestinian negotiators. There was no chance that the PLO leader would get his own seat at the table, in part because he had enthusiastically supported Saddam Hussein during the war. Arafat had gambled and lost, so he was isolated.

  Follow-up talks never realized the optimistic promise of the grand get-together in Spain’s capital. Shamir was enmeshed in discord with the Bush administration, which had insisted that loan guarantees to help Jewish immigrants would be cut unless Israel stopped building settlements in occupied territories.

  Israeli voters usually hate indications of bad relations with Washington, and that was one reason that Shamir lost his bid for reelection in 1991. The Labor Party, led by its same old faces, was back in power, but this time Yitzhak Rabin returned as prime minister; while his intra-party rival, Shimon Peres, became foreign minister.

  Peres, who never took no for an answer, fervently felt that the time was ripe to have serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians. A few Israeli officials and peace activists who were close to Peres initiated their own clandestine channel with the Tunis-based PLO.

  Despite its declared policy and a Knesset-passed law banning contacts with terrorist groups, Israel occasionally had some communications with the PLO—mainly for prisoner swaps. In those cases, it was the Mossad that conducted secret talks. Yet now, the espionage agencies were left in the dark as the clandestine channel proceeded.

  It should not have been so, because the Mossad and Aman’s high-tech Unit 8200 had wiretaps all over PLO headquarters in Tunis. They were even able to plant microphones in furniture delivered to leaders of the organization.

  Much of this was accomplished by a senior PLO security official who had been recruited by the Mossad. He turned out to be a gift from Heaven. Adnan Yasin had been targeted for recruitment by a technique the Mossad had been perfecting for many years: the medi-trap.

  The Mossad had learned that one of the best times to take advantage of the vulnerability of a potential agent was when he or she or a close relative needed top-quality medical therapies in Western countries—not readily available in the Middle East.
Most people in such a position would do almost anything, including treachery.

  Yasin’s wife needed expensive cancer treatment, and they were looking for the best doctor they could afford in Paris. Mossad operatives—posing as non-Israelis in another of their traditional techniques, false-flagging—offered their help in finding a great doctor. Yasin agreed. Medical treatment was provided, and the medi-trap was set.

  For three years, until Yasin was caught in 1993, he provided vital information on the inner workings of the PLO leadership, including the meetings, travels, and plans of Arafat; his deputy, Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen, a future Palestinian president); and their associates.

  By the end of Yasin’s brief espionage career, his work was less important to the Mossad. Israel and the PLO were negotiating peace and not plotting to kill each other anymore.

  The result of the clandestine channel was a historic and astounding breakthrough: the Oslo Accords. In the Norwegian capital in August 1993, Peres and Abbas signed a deal that would lead to a ceremony on the White House lawn a month later—featuring the indelible sight of a handshake between Prime Minister Rabin and Arafat, with President Bill Clinton as the proud and smiling godfather. Rabin, Peres, and Arafat would share a Nobel Peace Prize that year.

  The two sworn enemies, Israel and the PLO, were now promising to be partners for peace. It was a barely believable breakthrough. Until just before that, Israeli intelligence had been plotting assiduously against Arafat. Also, the hunting trails and pools of blood were still fresh from the secret war in which Mossad and PLO operatives tried to kill each other in Europe.

  But now, Israel was recognizing the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO, in turn, recognized the State of Israel.