Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  Closer in time to Arafat’s death, there was another case. Shin Bet poisoned a senior Hamas military commander in the West Bank. First, the Israelis tried to kill him by their conventional method of “targeted prevention,” but when they failed to get to him they designed an alternative route: adding lethal substances to the man’s food.

  As for the end of Arafat, Israeli officials denied responsibility and said he had actually died of leukemia. They did concede that he had not gotten timely and proper treatment, because he was trapped in Ramallah by Israeli forces. Israel said it had not poisoned this longtime foe, but it knew that many around the world would not believe the official story.

  Arafat was succeeded by Abu Mazen, who lacked charisma and strong support from the Palestinian people. Prime Minister Sharon practically refused to negotiate with him, believing Abu Mazen lacked the clout to make a deal and referring to him as “a chick without feathers”—a potential leader who never matured.

  It was a time of reflection for Israeli politicians who were interested in peace. Some thought more deeply about whether it had been short-sighted to eliminate Abu Jihad, 16 years earlier, in Tunis. He would have been Arafat’s successor. Israel had killed a charismatic PLO figure, a man who could have made daring decisions. Perhaps Israel could have patched together a peace process and a lasting deal if a strong Palestinian had still been around.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  At The Front Together

  Avi Dichter felt no pleasure at all in harboring the biggest “I told you so” in history. What he felt was horror, and not a scintilla of satisfaction, as he watched 9/11 unfold on a TV screen in his office at Shin Bet headquarters in northern Tel Aviv.

  As director of the agency, Dichter and his predecessors—as well as former security officials who had become private counter-terrorism consultants—had been trying for nearly 20 years to persuade the Americans to do more about aviation security.

  Israel, having learned by trial and error, instituted unique measures that were at once simple and advanced. In 1968, after an airliner belonging to Israel’s El Al was hijacked, Israel introduced armed sky marshals and thick metal doors to protect the cockpits.

  Israel also was the first to require that passengers be questioned by security personnel before the flight. The method would become more systematic, but also problematic because of privacy infringement. Many foreign tourists—and especially Israeli Arabs and Palestinians—felt they were unfairly targeted by what was clearly a “profiling” system. It was based on experience and intuition about which nationalities, age, gender, and travel history were most likely to be involved with terrorism. Only a tiny minority of Arab travelers would be dangerous in any way, but they all were hassled.

  When Israeli security planners spoke of experience, they meant the memory of bloody attacks and an oath to prevent their recurrence. In May 1972, three Japanese Red Army terrorists—acting on their partnership with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—landed at Lod Airport, grabbed machine guns from their luggage, and opened fire on innocent passengers. Twenty-six were killed, most of them Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. Part of the security change at Lod was to search all luggage, pat down almost all passengers, and use X-ray machines on both bags and people.

  Israel also became the first country to introduce armed officers dotted throughout the international airport. Areas closely guarded included the luggage hall for arriving passengers and the check-in desks for departures. In almost every other nation, those were practically ignored by police.

  All the new security measures, using both humans and machines, were under the jurisdiction of Shin Bet. The agency established a large security department with sub-units for aviation and for shipping.

  In late 2000, when Israel was suffering through the second intifada—with terrorists targeting civilians in shopping malls, restaurants, and buses—Shin Bet devised another layer of protection: compelling those places to hire private security guards, trained to Shin Bet standards.

  The irony was that the machines and the technology were imported from America. There were plenty available, because manufacturers there found that the U.S. government, airlines, and airports did not want them. Israel saw the need and was the best customer for them.

  Makers of such detectors, scanners, and future developments were prepared to satisfy most every Israeli need. Dichter recalled that Shin Bet would not allow El Al to fly to Bangkok, Thailand, until the airport obtained an adequate explosives-detection machine. An American company, InVision Technologies, immediately dispatched a machine to Bangkok—exclusively to meet El Al’s need.

  Israel was the poster boy for U.S. and Western manufacturers of security gadgets. Nothing sells like success, and Israel exemplified the best aviation security. None of its airliners was hijacked since 1968, and numerous attempts to detonate bombs in mid-air or to attack check-in counters were foiled.

  Some of these conspiracies by Arab terrorists were very clever. In April 1986, a Jordanian of Palestinian ancestry—hired by Syrian intelligence—tried to send a human bomb aboard an El Al flight from London. He had met an Irish hotel chambermaid, got her pregnant, and promised to marry her in his hometown in the Holy Land. He told her to fly ahead of him, so she could meet his family, and he gave her a piece of hand luggage for the trip.

  The British security at Heathrow Airport did not notice anything odd about the bag. Only the thorough security checks by the Israeli guards at the El Al boarding gate discovered that the bag had a false bottom, concealing a bomb so powerful that it could bring down a jumbo jet.

  Had the attack not been foiled at Heathrow, Israel certainly would have launched an all-out war against Syria. The deaths of 400 people on an El Al plane would have felt like a 9/11, in such a small country as Israel.

  When Israeli experts tried to sell their knowhow to U.S. air carriers and the Department of Transportation, the Americans refused to invest the kind of financial resources needed to enhance security. They argued that Israel was small, so it was relatively cheap.

  The airlines feared that their profit margins, in an already precarious industry, would shrink to nothing. They also pointed out that Israel’s national airline was getting a huge government subsidy in the form of a security system. That was not going to happen in the United States.

  The Americans also came up with the claim that U.S. aviation would grind to a halt if every passenger and piece of luggage were subjected to security.

  Even the deaths in December 1988 of 270 people, when a Pan Am jumbo jet was blown up over Scotland by Muammar Qaddafi’s Libyan agents, did not prompt the Americans to do much. Some Israeli privateers benefited from the Lockerbie disaster by being hired by airlines as consultants, but they soon realized that the American corporations were refusing to introduce the necessary measures to make the system safer.

  Then came 9/11, and everything changed.

  The Twin Towers were destroyed, the Pentagon was hit, and a fourth airliner crashed in Pennsylvania; all told, 3,000 innocent Americans died. The United States immediately launched a war in Afghanistan to chase the al-Qaeda perpetrators.

  Shin Bet’s Dichter, having watched all that from afar, did not want to cause offense with a loud “I told you so,” but after a decade he calculated that a trillion dollars was spent, and many thousands of lives were lost—and it all could have been easily prevented.

  It all came down to that day, on the four domestic flights. Nineteen terrorists, unarmed except for box-cutters, passed through the existing system unmolested. They did not seem suspicious, and their hand luggage was not deemed dangerous.

  They turned the airplanes themselves into massive weapons. “That’s a suicide terrorist’s dream,” Dichter said, “piloting a missile filled with 50 tons of fuel moving at high speed.” They were able to accomplish their goal for one surprisingly simple reason: There were no sky marshals.

  Israeli-style armed marshals and metal-reinforced cockpit doors most probably would
have stopped the 19 from hijacking the planes and then causing America’s worst calamity.

  Until that September day, the U.S. aviation security concept was to rely on one circle of defense: intelligence collection to get advance information of plots aimed at American airlines. But that was not enough. The CIA and the FBI, for an entire decade, were aware that al-Qaeda wanted to attack America; and there was some specific information about a few of the hijackers that the agencies did not share with each other.

  Not knowing precise attack plans meant that airports and airplanes were defenseless on 9/11 itself.

  The Israeli doctrine, designed by Shin Bet, worked very differently. The intelligence circle was very important, but there was also a second one: the security circle, on the spot. That was like having a back-up.

  The second circle had various layers. Israel used sophisticated machines for scanning luggage, and computerized tomography (CT) machines which could detect all types of explosives, including the plastic kind. Yet there was—and is—no equipment for detecting intentions. There is no mind-reading machine, and there probably never will be one.

  The second circle was meant to compensate for failures of intelligence or inaccurate information. On-the-spot security—the armed guards, the questioning, the machines, and the sky marshals—would further increase the odds of preventing any attempt to hijack planes or down them.

  Israeli aviation officials knew that their country’s airplanes and facilities would be high-priority targets for terrorists. But Shin Bet was able to engineer a situation in which the least likely airline to be attacked was El Al, because so many attempts had failed. Terrorists would turn to softer targets, which, unfortunately, often meant that havoc was unleashed on the airlines and airports of other countries.

  Even in Israel occasionally there were calls, by government financial officials, to save money by cutting out sky marshals. But Dichter’s reply was both emphatic and futuristic. The Shin Bet chief declared that even if all passenger planes became pilotless to save money, and everything was self-service so that flight attendants would no longer be employed, there would still have to be armed sky marshals on board.

  Finding itself in asymmetrical wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and against loosely linked jihadist terrorist networks around the world, America had to build up a set of war doctrines from scratch. Naturally, it turned to any source that had the knowledge and experience at this. Israel clearly fit that bill.

  CIA counter-terrorism experts, special operations commanders, and FBI interrogators traveled to Israel to learn from the oracles on unconventional warfare.

  In 2003, Dichter hosted Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and some of his assistants. In an unprecedented gesture by Israel, which usually did not like to expose its secretive and unique methods, Mueller was allowed to enter one of the holies of holies: the situation room built by Shin Bet at its high-security headquarters close to Tel Aviv.

  He was shown video footage taken by drone aircraft and helicopters, depicting targeted killings by the Israeli air force against terrorists, mainly in Gaza. There were many such Israeli attacks at the time, practically on an industrial scale, and the aerial video often showed Palestinian cars and individuals being identified, chased, and then struck.

  What Mueller, visitors from the CIA, and American special operations officers learned is that Israel made a great effort to be accurate, avoiding collateral damage. That could be achieved only by having advance, precise intelligence about the movements and plans of terrorists. The Americans could see that Israeli intelligence often had an agent on the scene to warn of problems that could prompt cancellation of the lethal missions.

  The United States adopted and adapted the use of drones for elimination missions, especially along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but would or could not match the Israeli method of having agents in the strike zone. Missions were flown, with controllers—in effect, ground-based pilots doing just what they would do if playing a high-tech video game—sitting comfortably as far away as New Mexico.

  Under President Barack Obama, the United States reached its own industrial scale of targeted killings. Drones fired missiles at al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in the border zone, but also in other countries beset by Islamist radicals, such as Yemen and Somalia. Sometimes tragic mistakes were made, causing the deaths of children and other non-combatants.

  Dichter conceded later that cooperation with the United States was not a one-way street. Shin Bet and Israel’s air force actually learned a great deal from the Americans, even about the tactic of targeted killings that was considered to be Israel’s innovation.

  It became known that one of the first targeted killings was carried out by the United States, in Yemen in November 2002, when Israel was still toying with making that method a regular part of its campaign during the second intifada. In the radically transformed post-9/11 world, countries large and small would have to shatter old conventions.

  The first U.S. assassination-by-missile was the achievement of a Predator drone remotely piloted by the CIA. The Agency soon started flying its own fleet of unmanned attack aircraft—independently of the American military.

  In this regard, there was a bureaucratic difference. In Israel, drones were flown only by the military. The intelligence community gave up any idea of running its own drones or paramilitary units. There did not seem to be any need for that.

  Even as rules of warfare, retaliation, and intelligence-gathering were rapidly re-written in the weeks after 9/11, America seemed unsure of how to fight back most effectively. A mighty nation had been awakened from the complacency of believing that vast oceans protected it from Middle East terrorism. But, President George W. Bush naturally wondered, now what?

  Invading Afghanistan was a no-brainer, as that is where Osama Bin Laden resided when he sent the hijackers to America. The British and some other U.S. allies joined in that war—as the world quite justly rose up against a ruthless enemy—but Israel, as usual, was excluded from a Washington-led coalition. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, liked Israel and admired its skills, but consorting with the Jewish state would inevitably prompt Muslim and some other nations to shun the coalition.

  The Bush-Cheney team hardly hid its intention to start a second war by attacking Iraq. The Americans declared that Saddam Hussein was refusing to open his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs to international inspectors.

  The Mossad was consulted for its analysis of what might occur next in the region. While claims were made later that Israel and its supporters in the United States clamored for a war against Iraq, the truth is that Israeli leaders had no reason to do that. In their view, Saddam’s nose had been bloodied in the Gulf War of 1991, and he seemed nicely contained.

  On balance, Israeli intelligence said, Iraq probably did have chemical and biological weapons; and the Mossad’s suspicion was that some of those might have been smuggled across the border into Syria for safekeeping.

  Yet, the Israelis did not share President Bush’s absolute certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they expressed concern that Iraq was distracting from the real enemy, Iran.

  The Americans, again with the British and a few partners, invaded Iraq in March 2003 and provoked a painful headache that lasted almost a decade. By the classic measure of Middle East trends, Israeli strategists had reasons to be cheerful: In and around Iraq, there were now Arabs battling Arabs and Muslims killing Muslims. And the loudly anti-Israel dictator Saddam was out.

  Israeli intelligence could see, however, that a miasma of confusing and rapid events added up to a net gain for the Islamic Republic of Iran. That, in a region of rival hegemons, threatened to be a net loss to Israel.

  Iran seemed to be achieving a strong partnership with its fellow Shi’ite Muslims in Iraq—and even a measure of dominion over them. They had been suppressed by Saddam, and while Iraqi Shi’ites had hardly any attention or energy to direct toward Israel, they had many reasons to pledge
allegiance to Iran’s religious leaders.

  By the end of 2003, while battling an insurgency in Iraq that had separate but potent al-Qaeda and Shi’ite elements, American strategic planners were coming around to the notion that neighboring Iran was a major trouble-maker. Senior officers at the Pentagon spoke of Iranian operatives, known to be part of the Revolutionary Guards, crossing into Iraq to deliver and plant bombs that were killing United States soldiers.

  Israel had already been fighting its largely secret war against Iran and its clients, notably Hezbollah, for two decades. The Israelis thus were prepared to tell the CIA and the U.S. military a great deal about the al-Quds Force élite of the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

  Very much unlike the Israel pattern, however, U.S. forces were constrained by their political masters from crossing into Iran to deal the al-Quds men—their unit using the Arabic name, “the Holy,” for Jerusalem—the blow they richly deserved.

  The Mossad had its opening now to highlight the dangers posed by Iran both to Israel and to the United States, to its oil suppliers in the Arabian Gulf, and even to American allies in Europe who could soon be within the range of Iranian missiles.

  This was around the time that Meir Dagan, whom Ariel Sharon appointed as director of the Mossad in 2002, was completing his dramatic re-direction of priorities: away from Palestinian issues, and focusing instead on Iran.

  Dagan and a Mossad department known as Nabak—an acronym for Neshek Bilti-Conventzionali (Non-Conventional Weapons)—were building up huge dossiers on the sites within Iran where nuclear enrichment had begun. International inspectors already suspected, in 2003, that the Iranians were hiding a lot of uranium.

  Based in part on their own experience, secretly developing a nuclear arsenal with materials acquired in unorthodox ways, the Israelis were even more suspicious than the International Atomic Energy Agency. Dagan himself became a frequent traveler to Washington, where he presented evidence to the CIA, to the Pentagon, and to members of Congress. The Mossad wanted the United States, as distracted as it was by wars in Afghanistan and now Iraq, to accept that Iran was trying to build nuclear weapons and must be stopped.