Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  Luckily for Israeli intelligence, it had a long record of military cooperation with Buenos Aires—a link with dictators that led to much criticism of Israel, but also one of many examples in which relationships with pariah regimes yielded fruit for Israeli intelligence.

  The Mossad simultaneously exercised its own talents. It launched a terrorizing campaign, now with Kidon up and running, aimed at European experts who supported the Condor joint venture.

  A German engineer who lived in the tiny principality of Monaco and had offices near Salzburg, Austria, was approached gently by Mossad operatives who asked him to cut his ties to the Condor project. They thought that a threat was implicit, but he simply continued his work.

  Next, his car was blown up. He was not in it at the time. He stubbornly stayed with his Condor work, so a few weeks later his Salzburg offices were set on fire. That was the German’s breaking point, and he quit the program.

  Argentina eventually succumbed to pressure by Israel, and, more importantly, by the United States government and ended the project. The Egyptians were left empty-handed and wanted to get something from their investment. They sold their part of the missile work to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

  The Iraqi dictator was a megalomaniac, constantly active on all possible aggressive fronts. Saddam was working on chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. He was also working on a wide array of delivery systems.

  In early 1990, he threatened that he would “scorch half of Israel,” wording that was interpreted by Aman analysts as a hint that he seriously intended to launch his missiles westward with chemical warheads atop them.

  All of his projects were seen by Israel as major threats, perhaps even to the Jewish state’s existence. They naturally became high-priority targets for Israeli intelligence.

  The Mossad discovered the key role of an Egyptian nuclear scientist who worked for the Iraqis, Yehia Meshad. Following its traditional pattern, the Mossad first tried to persuade him to cooperate with Israel. When he refused, a Kidon team was sent to locate him. The trail led to a hotel in Paris, a much easier place to strike than Baghdad would be. Meshad was murdered in his room in June 1980. French police found no traces of the killers and concluded that it was a professional job. That was all they ever said about it.

  The Iraqi nuclear program continued to make progress, however, and Saddam’s regime was investing heavily in ways to launch or drop the bomb he hoped to build. He was attracted by an innovative but doubtful idea: the Super Gun. This was the brainchild of an obsessed Canadian scientist, Gerald Bull, who had made a career of designing weapons for anyone who would finance his pet projects. He did some work for America’s Pentagon, for South Africa, and for other clients, and then moved his operations to Europe.

  Along the way, Bull offered his services to Israel. His ideas were deemed interesting, but not something that the Israelis needed. They already had technologically advanced delivery systems: warplanes and missiles.

  Bull’s big gun concept fascinated Saddam: an enormous rifle, to be aimed threateningly at his enemies—very, very far away. Bull was hired to start building, in an Iraqi desert, a mammoth cannon. His calculations indicated that it could even launch a payload into orbit. Pointed at Israel or other countries, the Super Gun would probably not be accurate—but if the warhead were nuclear, it would not have to be.

  Bull worked out of his home in Brussels, actually an apartment rented by his Belgian girlfriend. It was on the sixth floor of a modern building in the Uccle district of the capital.

  The Mossad, with its former operative, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir giving approval, decided to eliminate Bull. After all, he might succeed at perfecting his giant artillery, and thus he was an active danger.

  Kidon teams did thorough reconnaissance of Bull’s habits, his travels, and his home. Before long, three “Moroccan” men rented an apartment in a different wing of his building. The key they were issued would not open the entrance to Bull’s part of the block, but the building’s wings were connected through an underground garage. It was an excellent situation: The Team was easily able to get to the target, but it was not living too close to him. No one would remember any connection between them.

  One day in March 1990, told by lookouts that Bull was heading back to his apartment—and after checking to be sure that the man’s girlfriend was not at home—Kidon men with silencers screwed onto their pistols waited outside his door. As he walked up the hallway, they shot him several times in the head.

  Ironically, an Israeli lived in the same wing as Bull. Belgian police were so confused about the crime that, at least for a while, they thought that a Moroccan hit team had killed the Israeli. An assassinated Canadian seemed inexplicable. Bull’s son later told investigators that strangers had called his father several times and had warned him to stop working for the Iraqi regime.

  The operation in Brussels fit into Kidon’s fairly standard procedure, but Gerald Bull was an unusual choice of target. He was neither a Nazi nor an Arab terrorist. He was a Western scientist.

  For the Mossad and the political echelon that approves its missions, it is easier to find justification for issuing death warrants on Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. This is not precisely a racist attitude, but a pattern based on the realities of the conflict: that Israel’s most direct enemies are in those three categories.

  True, two decades earlier, the Mossad had pursued German scientists. That decision was a product of its time, when Holocaust memories were still fresh, and all of those Germans helping Nasser’s Egypt had previously served Hitler’s Third Reich.

  It is more complicated when Israel feels compelled occasionally to target citizens of nations that are basically friendly. Indeed, since Bull’s slaying, Israeli hit squads never targeted a Westerner.

  Ten months later, Saddam Hussein showed that he did not need the Super Gun to strike at Israel. As the Gulf War was raging in early 1991, he showered the Jewish state with 39 Scud missiles. Israeli leaders refrained from retaliating, because of restrictions imposed by the George H.W. Bush administration, and they felt humiliated. They believed that they somehow had to strike back—not simply for the sake of face-saving but to restore deterrence, always a key part of Israeli defense.

  IDF Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, a lover of special operations, concocted yet another plan that was truly unprecedented: a plot to assassinate the leader of a foreign country. The target would be Saddam, and the plan would involve Israeli soldiers penetrating deep into Iraq. Barak brought the idea to Defense Minister Moshe Arens. They were both very frustrated by America’s handcuffing of Israel. Arens okayed the preparations.

  Israel, except for one case, had never before considered killing the leader of a country. The exception was Egypt’s Nasser.

  As a general rule, Israel’s own leaders concluded long ago that if they started down the path of targeting the leaders of states, it would change the rules of the game. The Middle East conflict would be even uglier, and the tactic could backfire.

  Therefore, heads of state were out of bounds—even during the heyday of extreme hatred and state-sponsored terrorism.

  This deviation, trying to eliminate Iraq’s dictator, was justified by the notion that he had violated two taboos: His missile strikes tried to hit Dimona; and he had targeted the largest of civilian targets, Tel Aviv, the icon of modern Israel.

  Still, there was a great deal of hesitation on the Israeli side. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had replaced Shamir and now also held the defense ministry portfolio, was reluctant.

  Rabin found support in his skepticism from the Mossad chief, Shabtai Shavit, who succeeded Nahum Admoni in 1989. Rabin and Shavit concluded that it would be nearly impossible to get close to Saddam for a short-range hit by Kidon teams. They also knew that the Iraqi dictator rarely went out in public and often sent out body doubles instead.

  Rabin gave Barak a green light only to practice the plan being developed, but without promising an okay for its final execution.

&n
bsp; The plan, codenamed “Bramble Bush,” called for finding a day that President Saddam would be making a public appearance outdoors. Mossad and Aman collection units—which had the use of Israel’s first reconnaissance satellite—worked hard to keep track of Saddam’s schedule and movements.

  Iraqi agents working for the Mossad provided the information that he would be attending a ceremony to inaugurate a new bridge over the Tigris River. The agents found a hotel that, while quite distant, would have a clear shot at the ceremony site.

  A few Sayeret Matkal commandos were selected to be flown secretly into Iraq by helicopter, and agents would pick them up and drive them to that hotel. On a pre-chosen balcony, they would have a newly developed shoulder-fired missile dubbed “Beyond the Horizon.” Plans were made for alternate locations, as well.

  On November 5, 1992, a year and a half after the Gulf War ended, the chosen commandos gathered at a large army training base in the Negev Desert for a dress rehearsal. In the audience sat the top brass of the Israeli military, including Barak, Aman chief Uri Saguy, and many intelligence officers.

  Almost incredibly, considering their long track record of stunning successes, a fatal mix-up occurred. A missile that was supposed to be a harmless dummy, for what trainers called “a dry run,” was mistakenly the “wet run” missile. It exploded within a group of Sayeret Matkal soldiers, killing five of them.

  The tragedy for Israel’s secretive commandos put an end to the plan titled Bramble Bush. Details started to leak out, as this accident was so major that censorship could not keep a lid on it. Non-Israeli newspapers reported that commandos died while planning to kill Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon. Within a few months, it became known that the intended target was Iraq’s Saddam.

  Prime Minister Rabin had never given the green light for the assassination mission, and the idea was dropped. Israel, since then, has not gone after national leaders—not even Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who publicly advocated wiping Israel off the map.

  Israel’s intelligence community returned to its long-term assassinations playbook: pursuing and targeting senior Palestinian planners of violence. That was the strategy after the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and another catalyst for lethal action came in 1976.

  While Sayeret Matkal troops brilliantly ended the hijacking of the Air France plane to Entebbe, Uganda, the Mossad could not rest until it figured out who had formed the team of Arab and German hijackers. The answer turned out to be Wadia Haddad, head of the small Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

  Haddad seemed certain to be planning more attacks on Israelis, and they intended to erase him first.

  Caesarea, the Mossad’s operations department, struggled to find ways to get at Haddad. He had based himself in Baghdad and seemed to travel only between Iraq and Yemen. By late 1977, the Mossad recruited one of Haddad’s trusted assistants to spy for Israel. He was the man who delivered the poisonous chocolates to the terrorist chief with the fatal sweet tooth.

  The Mossad made a point of watching for whether his faction—which had broken away from Yasser Arafat’s mainstream PLO—would continue without Haddad. To the Mossad’s delight, it did not. Airplane hijackings became a nuisance of the past.

  In the view of Israeli intelligence, it is worthwhile to kill “the snake’s head” when an organization is basically a one-man show. Eliminate that one man, and a group that is small and dependent on its mastermind will most likely collapse.

  That lesson was almost immediately put into practice again, this time on the French Riviera. In July 1979, Kidon assassins waited with their silenced pistols outside Zuheir Mohsen’s apartment near a casino in Cannes and then shot him in the head.

  The target was the leader of a Syrian-sponsored Palestinian group that in 1975 sent terrorists onto the beach in Tel Aviv. The Arab attackers holed up in a hotel, and in a furious firefight with Sayeret Matkal soldiers, 11 hostages and seven of the Palestinians were killed.

  At least according to the official Israeli view, the Kidon gunmen in Cannes were not meting out revenge for past atrocities. Mohsen had to be eliminated, because he would almost surely organize more such spectaculars.

  Now, his chapter in the region’s bloody history was over. As in the case of Haddad’s splinter group, Mohsen’s was buried with its founder. Their two organizations were never heard from again, thanks to assassinations.

  The same expectation lay behind an assassination plan hatched by Shabtai Shavit. He had the almost-perfect career of a good Israeli intelligence officer. In his military service, he fought in Sayeret Matkal. Then he joined the Mossad; and that included a spell, undercover, in the Shah’s Iran as a case officer who was running agents inside Iraq.

  Later, Shavit would head the Caesarea department and became strongly linked with the “special tasks” in the official name of the Mossad.

  The special target for October 1995 would be Fathi Shkaki, the leader of a deadly, diminutive terrorist group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). PIJ was established in Gaza in the 1980s, combining a PLO-linked nationalism with a strong emphasis on radical Islam.

  Despite its limited size, PIJ proved very effective during the first intifada and, even more so, in the wave of suicide bombings following the 1993 Oslo peace accords. PIJ often seemed in competition with its larger Islamic soulmate, Hamas, to recruit Palestinians willing to give their lives for the cause—killing more Israelis, with the eventual goal of destabilizing the Jewish state.

  Shkaki, despite leading a Sunni Muslim organization, was an enthusiastic supporter of Iran’s efforts to spread a Shi’ite Muslim revolution.

  In January 1995, two of his followers blew themselves up in the middle of a crowd of off-duty Israeli paratroops—killing 20 of them. This was during the heyday of the Oslo reconciliation with the Palestinians, and the Israeli public was very shocked.

  That attack inside Israel, more than anything else, sealed Shkaki’s fate. As was his habit, he granted interviews and boasted about his achievement.

  Yet, as usual, the Mossad’s decision to assassinate him was not a matter of revenge. The goal truly was to decapitate PIJ. Eliminating Shkaki would kill his organization, since there were no deputies to recruit or direct dangerous followers.

  The Mossad and Aman, consulting their constantly updated target files, knew almost everything about Shkaki, his personality, his thinking, and his associates. Yet, one important component was missing—his movements. Actually, he hardly ever went anywhere. Shkaki sat in the safe environs of Damascus, sucking at the twin financial teets of Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad and of Iran.

  Syria was not unknown territory for Mossad and Aman special operatives. They sometimes entered parts of Syria for intelligence-gathering purposes. Yet, careful study by the two agencies concluded that it would be very difficult to reach Shkaki in his Damascus lair.

  Caesarea’s operational planners would have to wait for an opportunity. That was provided by—of all people—Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi.

  In the autumn of 1995, Qaddafi invited the leader of one of Shkaki’s rival radical Palestinian groups to the Libyan capital, Tripoli. It seemed that the erratic dictator would be offering large amounts of money to his latest favorite.

  At Mossad headquarters in Glilot, Caesarea’s planners—acting on pure intuition—figured that Shkaki would want his slice of the Libyan pie. Important to the operation was the fact that since 1988, when Libyan agents blew-up a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, international sanctions blocked all civilian air connections with Libya. One of the very few routes to get there was to take a ferry boat from the island nation of Malta.

  If Caesarea’s guess was correct, Shkaki would have to leave Damascus and fly to Malta. All the Mossad would have to do would be to watch the airports and passenger lists.

  Waiting for a target was an old but innovative method of the joint Mossad-Shin Bet operations department, going back to chasing Soviet-bloc spies in Israel in the 1960s: �
�the Comb.” Lacking a large number of operatives to shadow suspects, the Israelis learned to wait in a particular area after anticipating the target’s next move.

  Aman intercepted a telephone call between Damascus and Tripoli, discussing details of Shkaki’s forthcoming travel. Libya was fairly well covered by Israeli intelligence, and Qaddafi was worth watching. He supported a wide array of radical Palestinian groups. In addition, Libya was believed to be acting on his ambitions of acquiring non-conventional weapons. Israel would have to know about such threats.

  When it came to Shkaki, the Mossad’s gut feeling was panning out. The Palestinian did, indeed, leave his nest in Damascus. He flew to Valetta, the capital of Malta, heading to Libya in hopes of a handout from Qaddafi for terrorism organizations.

  That was the moment that Israeli operatives sprang into action. They knew that he had been in Malta before, on a similar trip, and his personal security habits there were lax. The Mossad figured that he would stay in the same hotel as before—and he did. Shkaki also used the same Libyan passport, under a fake name, as he had previously.

  Upon arrival, he felt so unafraid that he went out on a shopping trip. Even terrorists have to buy things for the folks back home. This gave Israeli teams an excellent chance to keep tabs on Shkaki.

  The assassins acted as they were taught during their long training. On October 26, 1995, with no apparent hesitation or panic, two of the Israelis got on a motorcycle and headed for Shkaki as he was walking. One of the gunmen shot Shkaki in the head, again showing the much-practiced skill of shooting accurately from a moving motorcycle. The attack took barely 20 seconds.

  The Israelis sped off and left hardly any evidence. The motorcycle was untraceable: not bought or stolen locally, but imported onto the island by the Mossad. Its license plate was forged.

  The assassins also benefited from the Maltese police announcing only that a Libyan merchant—Shkaki’s fake identity—had been mysteriously shot dead. Perhaps Malta was trying to protect its reputation as a tourist destination, rather than a battleground for Palestinians and Israelis.