by Dan Raviv
Arafat would be permitted to return to Gaza and the West Bank—26 years after he fled the clutches of Shin Bet. Yet, even at that celebrated moment, he could not kick his old, deceptive habits. In the car that brought him in from Egypt, Arafat smuggled weapons and a few wanted terrorists.
Shin Bet operatives noticed what he was doing but turned a blind eye to it. The Israelis hoped that, in due course, he would transform from a revolutionary terrorist to a Palestinian nation-builder and peace-seeking statesman.
The intelligence community had to decide how best to monitor Arafat—now that he was practically running a foreign government so close to Israeli borders and citizens.
Aman was traditionally in charge of watching and analyzing Arab nations whose military forces posed potential threats to Israel; but the military analysts had to admit that they were weak in trying to understand the ebbs, flows, deceits, and double-crosses of Palestinian politics.
Shin Bet had been keeping close track of rival factions, usually regarding them as various wings of a Palestinian terrorism threat to Israelis. Shin Bet did not want to lose this significant part of its responsibilities, just because there was a new Palestinian Authority with offices in Gaza and the West Bank.
A division of labor was worked out: a deal that intelligence community leaders called “the Magna Carta.” Shin Bet would maintain a close eye on Arafat’s movement, his intelligence and security apparatus, and Palestinian organizations opposed to Arafat’s peacemaking. Aman’s analysts would try to predict changes in the Palestinian Authority’s plans, including the constant possibility that the PA would cut off all negotiations and try to rally global support with a unilateral declaration of independence.
Aman contended that it could carry out its routine duty of predicting the likelihood of war, even on this new Palestinian front. Shin Bet insisted that the PA, governing most of the people who had been administered by Israel since 1967, could not simply be labeled “a target country” in the usual Aman way.
Shin Bet developed a strong, mostly cooperative relationship with Arafat’s security services. The Israelis pressed them to crack down more emphatically on terrorist factions, and the CIA provided equipment and training to make the Palestinian secret police better at eavesdropping and other skills. Ironically, these Palestinians were the successors to Force 17: Arafat’s personal guards whose leader had been the Mossad’s assassination target, the Red Prince of the 1970s.
That kind of relationship had to walk delicately on a tightrope. Shin Bet wanted the Palestinian secret service to do the dirty work for Israel: hunting down terrorists. The Palestinians were concerned that they would be hated by their local population as a mercenary force—or as a shield for the Israeli overlords.
Shin Bet, Aman, and the Mossad all gathered information meant to help Israeli negotiators in the peace talks that tried to move forward—mainly with American mediation—in the spirit of the Madrid conference. A senior intelligence officer in Aman was always part of the negotiating team.
There was often a problem of false optimism. Arafat’s side would indicate that it was considering some kind of sweeping concession, such as tolerating the presence of large Jewish settlements in parts of the West Bank. Israeli intelligence officers felt that it fell upon them to explain to their negotiators that they should not be excited by Palestinians thinking aloud—as the aim often was to wrest concessions from the Israelis without genuinely giving anything.
The great goals of peace and reconciliation, in fact, never materialized. Both sides would have to share the blame for adhering to most of their traditional suspicions, mistrust, and petty-mindedness.
The final blow to the Oslo process was inflicted by an Israeli on an Israeli: the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin on November 4, 1995, during a peace rally. Moments before, Israel’s leader was part of a group singing a peace song on the terrace overlooking a large square in Tel Aviv. While Rabin walked toward his car, with his bodyguards nearby, a young, right-wing Jewish zealot named Yigal Amir fired three bullets into the prime minister’s back.
Shin Bet had many failures and questionable episodes in its history, but this was by far its nadir. The agency is, by nature, an intelligence-gathering organization; but, unlike in other Western nations, it also has the responsibility for guarding political VIPs. The personal protection unit is small, but well trained and self-confident in its ability to deal with most eventualities.
Yet, the bodyguards failed. This failure traumatized the Israeli public and shocked the world.
The assassin had been known to Shin Bet. Amir had been at many rallies, hearing rabbis and others declare that Rabin was a danger to the Jewish people—and deserved to die—because he was making concessions to Arabs. Posters at rallies portrayed Rabin as a Nazi SS officer.
Amir’s files, fully examined after the murder, named many people in his right-wing circle of friends and acquaintances, including one man who had been recruited by Shin Bet as a mole codenamed “Champagne.” Yet the agency failed to understand that the political Right was, literally, dead serious.
Shin Bet already had suffered a huge blow to its prestige more than a decade earlier, when Palestinian bus hijackers were killed and a history of torture was revealed. This was another slap, and Shin Bet was deeply ashamed.
The first Israeli political assassination of such magnitude naturally worsened the friction among various factions in the country. One notable fault line, to paint in broad strokes, was between “pro-peace” left-wing activists and “anti-concession, hard-line” right-wingers. The leftists had just lost their hero, Rabin, and they bitterly blamed rightists for feeding a poisonous atmosphere that led to murder.
Right-wingers rushed forward to spread their own conspiracy theories, mainly to deflect the accusations leveled against them. This was like an Israeli version of the JFK assassination, in which, decades later, people refused to accept the official findings and looked for convoluted explanations—blaming shadowy government elements for the murder.
Israeli rightists tried to create the impression that Shin Bet deliberately neglected to protect Rabin on the fateful night: a kind of “inside job.”
As long as stories of that ilk came from fringe elements, they could be dismissed lightly. But the leader of the opposition’s trying to spread such tales—that was quite different. Benjamin Netanyahu—who had high hopes of soon becoming prime minister—seemed to be panicking that he would be blamed for inciting the murder. He and other Likud leaders had been the star speakers at rallies with portrayals of Rabin as a Nazi.
Netanyahu personally phoned journalists to call their attention to a possible inside job. He pointed out that Amir, a few years earlier, had been in Russia as an instructor for Jewish students. So Amir had been a paid agent, in a sense, for Nativ—the former intelligence agency tasked with supporting Soviet Jewry.
“Follow the money,” Netanyahu solemnly advised, borrowing a phrase from the Watergate scandal in the country where he had spent many years, the United States. He hinted that the intelligence community controlled Amir, a story that Netanyahu seemed to be pushing, apparently to deflect criticism from himself and his appearances at anti-Rabin rallies.
Investigative committees found grievous errors by Shin Bet. They faulted the agency’s complacency, its negligence in the area of intelligence-gathering, the poor process of debriefing informants in the months before the murder, and poor on-the-spot security.
A few heads at Shin Bet were chopped. Among those forced out was the agency director, Carmi Gillon, who had taken over only 18 months earlier.
The irony of Gillon’s departure was that he was a veteran of the Shin Bet unit in charge of keeping an eye on right-wing extremists. The final words in his master’s thesis on that subject for Haifa University had been that “the lone wolf” is the greatest danger: an attacker operating singly and difficult to detect.
Before departing, Gillon asked Rabin’s successor, Peres, to let him stay at the job for just a
little while—to complete an operation that Shin Bet was planning. Gillon was hoping for a success so that he could leave with some glory and not only shame.
Peres agreed, and that would eventually contribute to his own political downfall in an unexpected chain reaction.
Shin Bet was pursuing the most notorious Palestinian bomb maker, Yehya Ayyash, considered responsible for the bloody deaths of dozens of Israeli civilians at the hands of suicide bombers. Ayyash, with a senior role in the military wing of Hamas, was an expert at designing explosive devices that were difficult to detect. Nicknamed “The Engineer,” he fled Shin Bet’s pursuit in the West Bank and found shelter in Gaza.
The Israelis were working on a highly innovative way to get him. They identified his principal associates and managed to recruit one of them, providing him with a cellular phone to give to Ayyash as a gift.
The Engineer took the bait, receiving a nice new “mobile.” The phone had been remanufactured by Aman’s technological toy shop, which installed high-powered explosives.
Ayyash received a cellphone call, answered, and with a loud boom his head was blown off. The Engineer had been out-engineered by an Israeli intelligence designer.
The Israeli public, widely depressed after the murder of Rabin, enjoyed reading and hearing news of the January 1996 assassination of the feared bomb maker in Gaza. But the joy was short-lived, and in the weeks and months to come the Israelis would suffer.
In a massive wave of revenge, Hamas struck back. A series of suicide bombers were sent into Israel, blowing themselves up in buses and other crowded civilian targets. In a single week in late March, 57 Israelis were killed.
The political impact seemed clear. Prime Minister Peres was losing his edge in opinion polls against Netanyahu. Fearing that he would be viewed as too soft on security issues—and thus feeling he had to do something to respond to the suicide bombings—Peres authorized a military incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah and Palestinian forces in April 1996.
The army’s campaign went astray when Israeli artillery mistakenly hit a United Nations refugee camp at Qana, in southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 civilians.
Nothing was going right for Peres. Netanyahu won the May election by a slim margin, and the right wing was back in power.
Netanyahu was far from enthusiastic about the Oslo process and decided to slow it down. The truth was that the negotiations with the PLO already had been doomed to a kind of clinical death by the three bullets fired by Yigal Amir into Yitzhak Rabin’s back.
There were sporadic efforts to revive the peace talks, but Arafat was also unhelpful. The Palestinian leader continued to pay lip service to the peace process, but it seemed that he was merely trying to deceive the world about his real intentions.
The always zigzagging Israeli political system took another turn to Labor’s zag, after three years of Netanyahu’s zig. Ehud Barak was now the Labor party leader—ironically, Netanyahu’s former commando commander in Sayeret Matkal. In the 1999 election the left-wing Barak defeated the right-wing Likud leader.
Shin Bet and Aman analysts were divided on whether Arafat was still a peace partner or simply hopeless.
President Clinton clung to his belief that a deal was possible. He was intent on overcoming the tragedy of his friend Rabin’s murder and took a last stab at negotiations in the second half of 2000—his final months in office. At his mountain retreat, Camp David, in Maryland, Clinton brought Arafat and Prime Minister Barak together. There were dramatic moments, and Clinton felt that Barak was offering unprecedented concessions, but Arafat refused to reciprocate and sign a deal that might have ended the entire historic conflict.
Arafat instead ignited a second intifada in October 2000, claiming he was provoked by an unnecessary visit by Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in east Jerusalem—holy to both Jews and Muslims.
Shin Bet, Aman, and the Israeli army—on one side—and the PLO, now supplemented by Hamas suicide bombers, were once again at the barricades. Palestinians stepped up their atrocities in the heart of Israeli urban centers. Israelis in buses, pizza places, restaurants, and shopping centers became targets for them.
Israel reacted by using fighter planes to bomb Hamas and PLO installations in Gaza and the West Bank. Targets for retaliation included the compound near Ramallah of Arafat’s secret service—apparently, the end of Israel’s cooperation with those gunmen. That particular air raid angered the CIA, which was doing its best to foster cooperation and still believed that the Palestinian secret service was valuable as a crusher of radicals.
In a slightly more subtle fashion, Shin Bet introduced a new wave of targeted killings, now on an industrial scale. The agency head who took over in 2000, Avi Dichter, was notably more willing to share efforts and information with the other Israeli agencies. He set up a situation room and made a point of hosting representatives of the air force and Aman, so that they together could process the latest intelligence on individuals to be targeted. Helicopters and drone aircraft firing missiles were used to assassinate Palestinians who allegedly organized terrorism.
Israeli attack planners, when considering any act of “targeted prevention,” would discuss the likely collateral damage. Definite efforts were made to avoid or minimize harm to uninvolved civilians, and attacks were sometimes cancelled when—even at the last minute—intelligence indicated that children or other innocents were with the target at his house or other attack site. Still, many unintended casualties were caused.
As both sides sank further into a whirlpool of mutual killings, the chances of rescuing the peace process dimmed to near invisibility. Israelis elected Sharon prime minister in February 2001 to restore security, not to pursue negotiations. The intelligence community, meantime, was so busy coping with violence and fighting back that it paid little attention to grievances and social trends among the Palestinians.
Disputes within and between Shin Bet and Aman about Arafat came to an end. The PLO leader was once again, in their eyes, the master terrorist.
The three men in Varash, the acronym for Va’adat Rashei ha-Sherutim (the Committee of the Heads of Services), took the fairly unusual step of recommending a new political strategy. Meeting with Sharon and senior cabinet members on March 28, 2002, the night after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 30 Jews at a Passover Seder meal in a hotel in Netanya, the directors of Shin Bet, Aman, and the Mossad proposed that Arafat be expelled from the Israeli-held territories.
The government decided not to turn the Palestinian leader into a globally admired exile, but Israel would instead keep him confined inside a single building in the West Bank. The presidential compound in Ramallah had been heavily bombed by the air force, and for three years, Arafat never left it.
Living in crowded conditions, with poor hygiene and no running water, his health deteriorated markedly. European peace mediators who visited him were worried about the world icon, in his mid-70s, apparently fading away from day to day. They asked the Israelis to permit Arafat to leave, so he could get medical treatment in Europe.
The intelligence chiefs in Varash convened a special meeting on the subject in late October 2004 and debated whether to grant a favor to the Palestinian leader. On one hand, it would make Israel look kind and just. But there were objections that he was not so terribly ill, and he would probably recover and then go on a worldwide propaganda tour.
The military suggested that it could forcibly evacuate Arafat: grab him, put him on a stretcher, rush him out of the building and take him to a clinic somewhere. Prime Minister Sharon rejected that, saying the hustle and bustle might kill Arafat—and that would look terrible for Israel.
The prime minister actually sided with the softer faction that leaned toward letting Arafat go. Sharon felt that leaving Arafat—certainly a celebrity and to many in the world a hero—to die in his smashed compound, without medical treatment, would do serious diplomatic damage to Israel.
So, France and Jordan were permitted to organize
the Palestinian leader’s exit: on a stretcher, in a helicopter, on a wheelchair, and then onto a French military airplane. Apparently it was too late to save him. He died in a hospital in Paris within two weeks, in November 2004, but that sparked a new, mysterious controversy. What was the cause of death? The French military doctors treating Arafat refused to specify, at least in any public statement.
Rumors swirled that Israel had poisoned him, perhaps little by little adding lethal substances to the air in his compound in Ramallah or sneaking poison into his food. There also were rumors that Arafat was gay, and it might have been AIDS that killed him.
Israeli intelligence knew of indications that Arafat—who for decades had been “married to the movement”—was not intimately interested in women. This knowledge came into play during a rare encounter between Mossad officials and Israeli journalists, a few years before Arafat’s demise.
Intelligence officers invited two journalists to a private chat, mostly about Arafat. The Mossad clearly wanted to spread scandalous stories about Arafat being corrupt, including the notion that he had “stolen money from the revolution” and had millions of dollars hidden in European banks.
A third journalist, who was truly an intelligence junkie, made a point of dropping in to the coffee shop where the conversation was taking place and practically invited himself to join in. Excited by the possibility of taking part in Mossad psychological warfare, he offered to pose as a foreign writer who could approach Arafat’s wife Suha and get secrets from her—and he volunteered to sleep with Suha as part of an espionage escapade.
The Mossad said no, thanks.
As for claims that Israeli intelligence poisoned Arafat, there was a resonance of truth based on prior experience. In at least two cases, the Mossad had used poison to try to eliminate enemies. There were, indeed, the Belgian chocolates that killed Palestinian terrorist leader Wadia Haddad in 1978. And in 1997, Mossad men sprayed poison into the ear of a Hamas leader in Jordan. (See Chapter 22 on assassinations.)