by Dan Raviv
The more interesting story that a terrorist chief had been assassinated did not come out for days, and the Israeli combatants were long gone by then. They apparently left the island by boarding a ship that had been pre-positioned nearby by the Mossad.
The death of Shkaki was the last major decision by Prime Minister Rabin, who himself was assassinated the very next week by a Jewish zealot. Had Yigal Amir evaded arrest in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence might have thought the shooting was Palestinian retaliation for the Malta hit.
For a while, Shkaki’s murder fit into the desirable Mossad scenario: that ending the life of the leader of a small group kills the group. His replacement was a Palestinian professor who taught in Florida, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah. Born in Gaza, and operating out of Damascus, he was designated a “most wanted terrorist” by the FBI in November 1995.
Shallah had no background in operations, so under him the organization was having trouble returning to its full, violent functions. Eventually, he caught on. PIJ suicide bombings resumed, so the killing of Shkaki had provided a respite of only a year or two.
For the Mossad and Israeli political leaders, that was enough to justify the assassination. They could argue that even in a relatively short period, dozens of lives were probably saved.
There was a changing of the guard in Jerusalem in May 1996, as Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister. A year later, Palestinian terrorists showed that they liked his being in power.
Netanyahu, the former Sayeret officer, had pledged to voters that he would be tough on terrorism. He did not believe in the Oslo process, and had it not been for the Clinton administration in Washington he would have stopped negotiations with the PLO. His tough stance encouraged radical Palestinians to feel that they, in turn, should be even harder on the Israelis.
In July 1997, in a brutally sophisticated terrorist attack, Hamas sent two suicide bombers to the busiest market in Jerusalem. One human bomb went off, and the second man waited around as rescue units arrived. He pushed the button on his suicide vest and caused even more casualties. Sixteen Israelis were killed and 170 wounded.
Within hours, Netanyahu summoned the Mossad director, Danny Yatom, to Jerusalem from his headquarters at Glilot. Yatom had been an army general, but he was inexperienced at the Mossad—barely a year in office after replacing Shavit. Yatom had been selected by Shimon Peres for only one reason: the murder of Rabin.
Yatom had been the top military advisor to Prime Minister Rabin, and after the 1995 assassination he claimed that Rabin had promised him the Mossad directorship. There was no supportive evidence of that, neither written nor anyone else’s memory, but Peres did not want to be depicted as dishonoring “Rabin’s will.”
Though he had been a Sayeret Matkal commando, Yatom had developed into a neat and organized headquarters officer who was nicknamed “the Prussian.”
In Netanyahu’s office just after the slaughter in west Jerusalem, the prime minister demanded a quick response against Hamas. Yatom, trying to impress his boss but perhaps not knowing how complicated intelligence operations could be, said yes without expressing any reservations.
Back at his headquarters, he instructed Caesarea and the research department to find him someone to strike. The pool of possibilities, known in the Mossad as the “bank of targets,” was limited and poor at the time. There were no suitable and operationally reachable targets available immediately among Hamas leaders.
Netanyahu was impatient and kept pressing Yatom. The Mossad director, in turn, impatiently pressed his underlings. It took a while, but they came up with a few minor targets. These were considered, but dismissed. One man was too unimportant. Another lived in a European country, and that was ruled out. A third, in the United Arab Emirates, would be very difficult to reach.
The process resembled the person who loses a valuable piece of jewelry, then searches only in places around him that are well lit. It is a lazy, but common, approach. In the Mossad’s search process, the easy solution they alighted upon was Khaled Meshaal, and the location would be Jordan’s capital, Amman.
There were two problems with this choice: Meshaal was not truly important in Hamas and certainly had no role in the group’s terrorism campaign. More significantly, Jordan was Israel’s strategic asset in the region. King Hussein had met secretly with Israelis—including dozens of times with Mossad chiefs—long before signing a peace treaty in 1994. He provided information and coordinated his political stands with Israel.
Jordanian intelligence was one of the Mossad’s best allies, to the point that they acted together against their common enemy: the Palestinians.
The Jordanians were tipping off the Mossad about terrorists, handing them over to Israel on occasion, and letting Israelis observe interrogations of radical Palestinians. Jordanian intelligence even showed a readiness to assassinate Hamas and Hezbollah militants.
Neither Netanyahu nor Yatom gave enough thought to the grave risk of jeopardizing that relationship. An assassination in Jordan, even if successful, could backfire, yet no one in the Mossad’s upper ranks seemed to recognize the danger. Everyone seemed to buy into the group-think of being yes men.
The operation was initiated hastily, and that was further hastened by another Hamas attack in early September. This time, the group sent three suicide bombers to the main pedestrian mall in Jerusalem. Five Israelis were killed, and 180 people were wounded.
The prime minister became even more pushy. Kidon did not get to practice for the planned Amman operation as much as it normally liked to do.
A lot of thinking, however, did go into the choice of weapon: not a car bomb that would cause a lot of damage in friendly Jordan’s capital; not even a silenced pistol, because, to intelligence operatives, any shooting is considered a “noisy operation.” Instead, poison was selected—yet another one prepared by scientists at Israel’s super-secret Nes Tziona biological institute. It would be loaded into a hand-held aerosol spray device.
The lethal beauty of this poison was that the victim would not appear to have been murdered. The death would seem to be natural, from a breakdown of body systems.
The Team members practiced how to use the spray. This was done on some crowded Tel Aviv streets. Israeli bystanders would find themselves suddenly approached from behind by someone who opened a Coca Cola can right by their ear. Kidon’s team was testing how people would react to the approach and a spraying sound close up.
The head of the Kidon unit would be on the scene in Amman, but most of the others he chose for the mission were not the most experienced operatives. Jordan, after all, was deemed a friendly place where risks would be lower. There were only 10 Israelis on the mission, and that did have the advantage of minimizing the chance of being noticed and caught.
All the while ignoring how Jordan might react, The Team moved into place. The intelligence on Meshaal was almost perfect: where he lived, how he got to and from the Hamas office, who was usually with him, and what the moments of vulnerability might be. Exit routes were mapped out.
An Israeli female doctor from a Tel Aviv hospital—who had done some work for the Mossad from time to time—went to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman with a top Caesarea officer. He was Mishka Ben-David, the future author of spy novels and the coordinator for the team aiming to eliminate Meshaal.
It was common for Kidon operations to have a doctor standing by. It was unusual, however, that her first aid kit included an antidote, also developed at Nes Tziona, to be used in case the Kidon members came into contact with the poison.
On September 25, 1997, two Kidon assassins were waiting with the aerosol device at the entrance to the Hamas office. Meshaal arrived by car with his driver, but also with his daughter. Her presence was unexpected.
Now things started happening fast, but not as Kidon had envisioned them. The little girl exited the car and rushed toward her father, calling “Baba! Baba!” (Arabic for Daddy). The driver seemed to be chasing her up the walkway. That was the first interruption t
o the Kidon plan.
A second team, acting as spotters, signaled to the assassins that they should attack immediately—lest the girl and the driver get in the way. The original plan had been to spray the poison into Meshaal’s ear only when he reached the office building itself. Now they did it, a few yards in front of the building. The Palestinian suddenly turned, so he was sprayed on the back of his head, rather than in the ear. Still, the poison would be effective, on any part of the skin.
Meshaal immediately collapsed. Later, he would say, “I felt a loud noise in my ear. It was like a boom, like an electric shock. Then I had a shivering sensation in my body like an electric shock.” Soon he began to vomit, and then Meshaal could not breathe on his own.
The driver, the daughter, and some bystanders rushed to him. The two Israelis walked away, with the professional calmness of practiced assassins. They got into a getaway car, driven by none other than the head of Kidon. He was acting as commander of this operation.
Another surprise derailed The Team’s plan. A courier for Hamas was walking toward the office, and he saw everything. He was not a bodyguard but showed that he had the instincts of one. He noted the license plate number of the getaway car as it drove off, turned right, and vanished from sight.
The two assassins told their commander, in the car, that someone had just noticed the number. For reasons not fully explained, someone panicked and the two assassins left the car.
A third twist tangled the plot. The Hamas courier ran after the car, took the right turn on foot, and, to his surprise, saw the car parked and the two strangers hurrying off in separate directions. He immediately jumped on one of them. The second returned from his escape route and, using his martial arts skill, hit the courier and knocked him out.
The getaway car, driven by the head of Kidon, managed to leave the scene, but a crowd of Jordanians surrounded the two assassins and the Palestinian they had just rendered unconscious.
The two strangers tried to explain that they had just been mugged, that they were Canadian visitors, and that they just wanted to go back onto the tourist trail. More bad luck was added to this chain of unfortunate events when local police showed up.
While the two Israelis continued to claim that they were mere tourists, a police officer stopped a taxi that was passing and ordered the two foreigners to get inside. The Hamas courier, who was just regaining consciousness, was also loaded into the taxi.
It seemed like a scene from a slapstick movie, but this was real. And it was not funny.
In the crowded taxi, if the two “Canadians” hoped that they would be driven to safety, they were wrong. The courier next to them kept shouting, “Meshaal! Meshaal!” And the Jordanian officer in the taxi had it drive to a nearby police station.
Jordan’s police did what they should and called the Canadian embassy to report that two of its citizens were apparently in custody. A diplomat came to the police station and had a brief chat with the two men. He did not think that they were his countrymen.
Meshaal, meantime, was rushed to a hospital. He was unconscious.
Jordanian’s domestic security service sent several investigators to the police station, and the two foreigners were harshly questioned. They did not break down and stuck to their story.
The four other Kidon members, including the commander, drove to their respective hotels. They informed the coordinator, Mishka Ben-David, that the operation had not gone as planned and that the two assassins were in trouble.
Ben-David then communicated with the head of Caesarea, at Glilot headquarters. Going up Mossad’s chain of command, Yatom and Netanyahu were almost instantly privy to the bad news.
Not losing his nerve, Ben-David drove the remaining four Kidon men to the Israeli embassy in Amman. He next went to the Inter-Continental to inform the doctor and calm her down. His intuition told him not to throw away the antidote, although there was the danger of its being used as evidence.
A few hours after the botched operation, Prime Minister Netanyahu placed a phone call to King Hussein and asked him to meet with the head of the Mossad that very day. That seemed fairly routine, so the king agreed. Not yet informed of the incident, he did not know that Meshaal was in critical condition in a hospital, or that two foreigners had been detained.
Yatom, in Amman that afternoon, informed the astonished king that Israeli intelligence had tried to kill Meshaal there. To say the least, the king was very angry. He felt that Israel had betrayed him and his years of cooperation. He was well aware that Yatom and his family had just spent a relaxed weekend, as a sign of good will, in the Jordanian port city, Aqaba.
In addition, just a few days before the assassination attempt, the king had met with a senior Mossad officer whom he liked: the man in charge of Jordan for the global liaison department, Tevel. Hussein had been pleased to hand over an unusually moderate offer from Hamas: for a 30-year truce with Israel.
Hussein did not know that the Mossad, busy with the offensive strike it was planning and other matters, had not immediately transmitted the truce offer to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The king demanded that the four Israeli fugitives turn themselves in, right away, to Jordanian authorities. If not, he warned, he would send his commando soldiers to storm the Israeli embassy and seize them by force.
Taking responsibility for dealing with the crisis, Netanyahu ended up spending the whole night at Mossad headquarters. He made the highly unusual offer of providing the antidote that would revive Meshaal. The king accepted the offer.
Ben-David then met with a Jordanian intelligence counterpart. The Mossad man suggested that they go to the hospital with the Israeli doctor to administer the remedy. The Jordanian, not trusting the Israelis and perhaps fearing that they would try to finish off the job, refused the offer and took the antidote away.
The life of a Hamas leader, nearly extinguished by a fairly complex Israeli operation, was now saved by his sworn enemies.
Still, there was the matter of six Mossad team members, trapped in Jordan. A former Mossad deputy director, Efraim Halevy, was summoned from his ambassadorial post in Brussels: first to the agency’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, and later to Amman. For many years, as head of Tevel, he had been the key go-between for King Hussein and Israeli prime ministers.
Halevy declared to longtime Mossad colleagues that Israel would have to find a way to make Hussein a hero in the eyes of Palestinians. Halevy suggested that Prime Minister Netanyahu free some of the most senior Hamas men who were held in Israeli prisons. Mossad analysts hated the idea and suggested alternatives, such as providing night vision equipment for Jordan’s tank force and upgrading King Hussein’s military jets.
Netanyahu said, though after strong reluctance, that he would consider freeing the spiritual leader and founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Halevy flew to Amman, to start bargaining with and mollifying the king.
Hussein explained, in detail, why he was angry at Israel. But he let Halevy leave, by helicopter, with the four Israelis who had felt trapped inside their embassy.
Another ten days of negotiations ensued, launched by Netanyahu himself after a tense 20-minute nighttime helicopter flight from Jerusalem to Amman. Apparently sending a petulant message, the Jordanians did not illuminate the royal helipad, so an Israeli military chopper containing the prime minister and a raft of senior aides flew back and forth over Jordan’s capital for a further half an hour. “One mistake,” Halevy commented later, “and the whole mission could have ended in national tragedy.”
The fate of the two Mossad assassins, jailed by the Jordanians and still claiming to be Canadians, hung in the balance. The deadlock was broken by Ariel Sharon.
Sharon, for many years, was feared by the king. The veteran general and cabinet minister had long thundered that Hussein’s family should be forced out of power and replaced with a Palestinian state—as a better solution, in Sharon’s eyes, than letting Arabs have sovereignty on the West Bank of the Jordan River.
In almost Maf
ia style, Sharon made an offer he thought Jordan could not refuse. He hinted to the king that if a solution were not found quickly, Israeli spies would return and strike in Amman again.
The good-guy bad-guy combination worked. A solution was found, but it was a painful one for Israel—and especially for Netanyahu. Yassin, the Hamas founder, was released. And so were the two “Canadians” held by Jordan.
Meshaal recovered fully, the near-death experience serving him well. He had been a small figure in Hamas, but now he would be considered an icon and a leader.
The crisis triggered by the assassination attempt was over, but hard feelings remained. King Hussein—who would die three years later in Amman, after lengthy treatments for cancer at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota—never forgave or forgot what he considered Israel’s treachery.
The Canadian government was also furious over the Mossad’s use of genuine Canadian passports. These had been loaned to the Israeli government, or to Jewish Agency representatives, by innocent students from Canada who were visiting Israel. Some of the passports were doctored by changing the photographs.
That was exposed as a standard procedure for Mossad: “borrowing” passports, thus taking advantage of the goodwill of Jews and other visitors in Israel.
Israel promised Canada that it would not happen again, but that promise was not kept. Intelligence operations require their own evaluation system, sometimes weighing truth and honor against necessity.
The release of Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin was patently humiliating to Israeli authorities, as he gave a series of speeches to huge crowds in Gaza and praised suicide bombers heading into the Jewish state. He had a major role in stirring up the second intifada that began in 2000.
Yassin would be killed in March 2004, targeted by the Israeli air force in Gaza. That was eight months before Yasser Arafat’s death. Two major leaders passed from the scene in the same year, but no major impact for good or for ill was noticed.