Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  Israeli intelligence has wondered, at various junctures in the long conflict with the Palestinians, whether assassinations were ever very effective. They clearly were not when an operation failed, as with Meshaal in Jordan. They might be temporarily effective, when trying to snuff out small organizations, but certainly not against large groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or the PLO, which are solidly rooted in their own societies.

  Senior intelligence professionals, regardless of their opinions about assassination as a weapon, realize that there are various sides to the issue. In the Middle East, if you do not smite your enemies, you will be seen as weak. But when you murder an enemy, the gains are often limited: at best delaying terrorist or enemy plots only for a few years.

  Several inquiry committees looked into the failure in Jordan, including an internal panel in the Mossad. Yatom first tried to sidestep his responsibility by blaming his deputy, Aliza Magen, the highest-ranking female operative ever in the organization.

  The inquiries did lead to the resignation or removal of several other managers in the agency, including the head of Caesarea.

  Yatom himself quit in early 1998, after another failure on a smaller scale. In Berne, Switzerland, five Mossad operatives from the Neviot department, tasked with break-ins, were caught by police while bugging the telephones of a Hezbollah operative. Swiss authorities were intent on prosecuting one of the men. After prolonged negotiations, the Israeli government paid a few million dollars in bond and pledged that the Mossad man would return to stand trial.

  Yatom had served for less than two years and was replaced by Efraim Halevy, who only a few months before had been smoothing King Hussein’s ruffled feathers.

  Halevy had very little personal involvement in operations—aside from disguising himself as an ultra-Orthodox Jew back in 1962, when Israel’s spies were searching for the kidnapped boy named Yossele. Still, Prime Minister Netanyahu believed that Halevy could provide stability as he navigated the agency through the troubled waters left by the Meshaal affair.

  The new Mossad chief started out badly with his Neviot and other operations officers, however. When Swiss prosecutors set a date for the trial of the Mossad man who was out on bond, Halevy felt it was a matter of honor that the operative should fly to Switzerland and take his chances in court.

  Many in the Mossad, including two élite officers who wrote to Netanyahu to complain, insisted that their colleague not be forced to go on trial. Halevy insisted, and later he was deeply relieved when the man was given a suspended prison sentence and permitted to return home to Israel.

  Years later, he wrote that in intelligence all decisions are “made in circumstances of uncertainty.” Halevy continued: “You always have to take risks and be ready to shoulder responsibility for failure, just as you are willing to revel in success.”

  While some of the broader issues about assassinations were debated in public, there was one deeper impact that never truly surfaced: the psychological and emotional effects on Kidon combatants. Who monitors their stability? What effect might there be on how they feel about their country, when it sends them out to do such things? How damaging is all this to their family relationships and home life? They need counseling sometimes, and Kidon provides it.

  The commander of Kidon in the mid-1990s, facing criticism that he felt was totally unfair, became depressed. He left the Mossad a short while after the failure of the Meshaal mission in Jordan.

  Kidon combatants are not natural born killers. They are trained. Some who have anonymously made comments truly believe, often with the strong guidance of their instructors, that they murder for good cause. Only a very few members of The Team have expressed doubts and regrets for what they have done. That occurs mostly when an operation has been botched.

  There have been numerous occasions in which Kidon teams were recalled home in the middle of a mission—for fear that they were about to be discovered and arrested or publicly exposed. Luckily for them, the poisonous experience in Jordan was the only one that went so badly wrong.

  In his novel, Ben-David describes a Kidon operative who suffers a bad conscience for failing on a mission; he then runs his own, unauthorized operation to finish the job and kill the target. It might be assumed that the story is based on the failure in Amman, and the title Beirut Duet names a different Arab capital so as to mollify Israel’s military censor.

  Yet, perhaps the former Mossad man is hinting about something else, or prophesying the possibility of some renegade behavior in the future by a Kidon combatant or commander.

  When Meir Dagan was chosen by Prime Minister Sharon to replace Halevy in September 2002, General Dagan prepared himself for the job by studying the Mossad’s practices and history. He spoke with many former Mossad officials and read books.

  One of the books he read was Ben-David’s novel. The genuine new spymaster was impressed by the scenarios, methods, and tricks in the mostly made-up story. Dagan would later comment to his department chiefs: “I want you to be as imaginative as this book is.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  War, Near And Far

  Israel’s spies would indeed be imaginative and creative—they had to be—in confronting Hezbollah, their dangerous enemy just to the north. The militant Shi’ite movement in Lebanon was high on Meir Dagan’s priority list, second only to Iran. They were not truly separate issues, because Hezbollah was considered an embodiment of Iran’s regional ambitions.

  The big showdown came in July 2006, when Israeli politicians and the army felt they had to respond massively to Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two IDF soldiers along the border with Lebanon. The intelligence agencies were very active the entire time: before, during, and after what became known as the Second Lebanon War.

  The fighting lasted for 34 days. Israeli troops crossed into Lebanon, parts of that country were pounded by air strikes, and Hezbollah fought back fiercely by firing 4,000 rockets at Israeli civilians.

  The results were highly controversial in Israel. Critics charged that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a hasty decision to go to war without adequate preparation and thinking. It was a huge commitment, and one that would force more than one-quarter of all Israelis out of their homes—all for the sake of two missing men.

  Top IDF commanders were accused of lacking a clear sense of mission and being indecisive about staging a ground invasion. The day-after experts, including retired officers now fitting the mold of armchair generals, said that commando forces could have been flown deep into Lebanon—behind enemy lines—to smother Hezbollah.

  Supporters of the war saw a different picture. Israel inflicted significant damage on Hezbollah, and air raids destroyed all of that organization’s long-range missiles. Israeli jets also flattened a complex of buildings in southern Beirut that had served as the political and military base for Shi’ite power.

  After the United Nations arranged a ceasefire in mid-August, 30,000 U.N. peacekeepers moved into southern Lebanon and created a buffer zone between the Israeli border and Hezbollah forces. The Shi’ite militants were no longer allowed to move around freely, wearing uniforms and bearing weapons like a huge quasi-army.

  There also was the helpful fact that leading Sunni Muslim countries—notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Gulf kingdoms—barely said a word. They did not support Hezbollah, and they shed no tears when Israel struck hard at Iran’s proxy in Lebanon.

  Meir Dagan was able personally to feel a fresh wave of understanding. The Mossad chief, traveling without any public announcement and usually with a false name on his documents, held talks in several Arab capitals and exchanged surprisingly similar views about Iran and its hegemonic goals.

  Upon his return to headquarters at Glilot, he told his analysts that the Middle East had two worlds: the open, visible one mainly for public consumption; and the covert, underground world in which rivals rally together against common enemies.

  Israeli intelligence happily found itself unstained by the war’s aftermath, even in the findings of an
official investigatory panel. The committee did level some criticism, but that was mainly about field intelligence not being well disseminated from headquarters to soldiers at the front.

  There is no doubt, however, that strategic intelligence was excellent. That was the product of combining the humint assets of the Mossad and Aman, together with Aman’s Unit 8200 and its unrivaled sigint. Analysts in both agencies also used new names for some traditional ways of collecting data: “osint,” meaning intelligence based on open sources, such as websites, newspapers, and radio shows; and “visint,” which referred to visual intelligence from observation posts near borders, low-flying planes (including drones), and increasingly satellites orbiting Earth.

  Israel’s unique strength continued to lie in human intelligence. In the years leading up to the 2006 Lebanese war, the Mossad and Aman managed to recruit important assets inside Lebanon. Communications networks there were easily penetrated, and tapping into all manner of conversations helped the Israelis identify Hezbollah targets that ought to be hit, whenever a war might break out.

  The most impressive intelligence was identifying—with great specificity—private houses where Hezbollah hid the long-range missiles that could perhaps reach Tel Aviv. At least a hundred of what were basically domestic launching pads were constructed with the secret help of Iran’s al-Quds Force. Iranian engineers designed extensions to the houses with an innovative feature: sliding roofs like missile silos. The convertible tops could be opened to launch a surprise weapon toward Israel.

  As a reward, the homeowners and neighbors would get money from Hezbollah, financed by Iran.

  That entire network of houses and missiles was destroyed by precise air strikes in the first 34 minutes of the war—reminiscent of the pivotal first three hours of the Six-Day War in 1967. The exact locations in Lebanon were provided by the Mossad and Aman. A retired chief of analysis at Aman called that “the result of years of determined, individual, gray, exhausting intelligence work, and one of Israel’s greatest successes in target intelligence.”

  The loss of Hassan Nasrallah’s most potent missiles turned his words into hollow threats. The maverick secretary-general of Hezbollah boasted, in the first days of the war, that he would hit “beyond Haifa,” meaning Tel Aviv. He no longer had the capacity to do that.

  All he had left were short-range rockets. They certainly were disruptive to normal life, and even fatal, for residents of northern Israel—about a million forced to sleep in shelters or move to safer parts of the country to the south—but the damage and casualties were far less than Hezbollah had hoped to inflict.

  Nasrallah, after the war, admitted that he regretted having provoked Israel. He told Hezbollah’s TV station that had he known “the Zionists” would react so massively, he would not have ordered the operation to kidnap the two soldiers.

  His interview was an echo of secret meetings he had with his master, the commander of the al-Quds Force, Iran’s Major-General Qassem Suleimani. Al-Quds was the special unit of the Revolutionary Guards in charge of covert action outside Iran’s borders and maintaining ties with pro-Iran militias and terrorists. The United States publicly blamed the al-Quds Force for a campaign of roadside bombs that caused many American casualties inside Iraq.

  Israeli intelligence quickly learned that Suleimani strongly scolded Nasrallah over the results of the war. He accused the Lebanese Shi’ite of not being cautious and of failing to coordinate the kidnapping of the two Israelis with him. The Iranian’s biggest complaint was that the missile launchers with the sliding roofs were no longer a secret—and no longer in existence. Iran had meant to save them for a much bigger showdown, when Iran and Israel might go to war.

  Feeling humiliated and penetrated after the war, Hezbollah launched a witch-hunt for Lebanese who had spied for Israel and claimed to have caught a handful. TV stations in Lebanon showed evidence, including camouflaged communications equipment. Some suspects confessed to having been recruited by Israel 20 years earlier. As usual on such matters, Israel maintained its silence.

  Yet, for Israel, the sum total of the Second Lebanon War was a strategic win.

  There was no greater indication of Israeli victory than Nasrallah’s disappearance. For more than five years after the war, he never dared to show his face in public. His televised rallies were all staged, trying to create the impression that he was addressing masses of supporters. He was actually exposing himself to very few people.

  His fear, of course, was that Israel might assassinate him. Indeed, Israelis questioned themselves: Why didn’t we kill Nasrallah during the war?

  It could be that it was impossible to get him, as he went into hiding as soon as the war began. But it also could be that Israeli intelligence drew upon the lesson of 1992, when Nasrallah’s predecessor in Hezbollah—Abbas Musawi—was assassinated. That led to massive retaliation in the form of a flattened Israeli embassy in Argentina.

  For Israeli intelligence, the most important target in Hezbollah was not Nasrallah. It was his “defense minister,” Imad Mughniyeh. He had been the Mossad’s most wanted man—and also on the FBI’s official list—for many years. Israel tried to kill Mughniyeh numerous times, not only at the funeral of his brother in 1994, where he did not show up.

  He was very elusive. Knowing he was a target, he changed his face, he changed his safe houses often, he changed his vehicles, and he barely traveled: only to Damascus, Syria, and to his masters in Iran. Until Dagan became the Mossad chief, those locales were out of bounds for Israeli assassination operations.

  In the end, the Mossad showed that it could be patient as a hawk waiting for its prey. Waiting and watching, for one mistake. One opportunity.

  That came in February 2008 in Damascus.

  Syria was a dangerous place for Mossad operatives. The government had a large security apparatus, unusually adept at spying on its own people. Foreigners, too, were under constant watch. When the Mossad wanted to operate in Damascus, it would be highly unlikely that Israelis would pose as citizens of a Western country—the usual technique in most places. It would be wiser to melt into Syrian crowds on the streets. And a Kidon team managed to do that.

  The Mossad had done it, in fact, four years earlier in Damascus. Izzedin el-Khalil, a senior operative in the military wing of Hamas—the Palestinian Islamic movement—was killed by a bomb planted under his car in September 2004. That was an important operational landmark. For the first time, the Mossad proved that it could execute a lethal mission in a front-line enemy capital other than Beirut, even in such a tightly controlled police state as Syria.

  That mission gave the Kidon unit a great deal of confidence that it could carry out such strikes under the most challenging conditions imaginable. That was fully in accord with the undeclared motto of the Mossad, that everything is do-able.

  Piecing together humint and telephone intercepts, Israeli intelligence managed to learn a great deal about Mughniyeh’s private life and tracked his movements, finally aware of his post-plastic surgery appearance. They took advantage of two human weaknesses, quite uncharacteristic for a master terrorist on the run.

  First, hosted by Syrian intelligence in one of its guest apartments, and in constant contact with Iranian “diplomats,” Mughniyeh felt totally comfortable in Damascus. Living for decades with the assumption that he was an assassination target, he must have craved a place to feel safe. He let down his guard when in Syria, moving around with full self-confidence and no fear.

  He also permitted himself to do, in Damascus, what he did not do at home in Lebanon: fool around with women. That, too, meant that he was literally a man about town, in moving cars more than a cautious man would be. Spies for the Mossad took note of routes that he repeatedly took.

  A Kidon team, acting with great care in an enemy capital, managed to plant a bomb in or on Mughniyeh’s Japanese four-wheel-drive vehicle on February 12, 2008. The terrorist’s career ended with a blast. His body parts were scattered, but no one else was killed.

&nbs
p; This was a triumph for the men and women of Israeli intelligence. They had accomplished the nearly impossible. Their feeling was similar to the satisfaction Americans would enjoy, three years later, when Navy Seals found and killed Osama bin Laden.

  In Beirut, Nasrallah was paralyzed with shock. He and Mughniyeh had practically grown up together, running Hezbollah hand in hand for 16 years. Mughniyeh had been in charge of the organization’s clandestine dealings with Syria and Iran. He coordinated the acquisition of missiles and other weapons from those two countries, and he plotted all of Hezbollah’s terrorist attacks.

  Mughniyeh had also been responsible for the personal security of the secretary-general. One can only imagine what went through Nasrallah’s head when he heard of the violent death of his closest confidant.

  The message of this flawless hit, which left no traces, was clear: If the Israelis could get Mughniyeh in Syria, they could get Nasrallah in Lebanon.

  Eliminating Mughniyeh did have a strong impact on the military capabilities of Hezbollah. When debating the plusses and minuses of assassinations, Israeli intelligence typically felt frustrated when the head of a large, well-established terrorist group could be replaced quickly by a deputy.

  Yet, in this case, the removal of Mughniyeh truly made a difference. The fear factor—the impact on Nasrallah—was strong. He would now waste a lot more time and energy on protecting himself, and on searching for Israeli spies in Hezbollah.

  Furthermore, no one man was able to manage all of Mughniyeh’s roles. His duties were divided among four men, who formed a kind of collective that directed Hezbollah’s “military” operations. The strongest of them was Mustafa Bader al-Din, a brother-in-law of Mughniyeh, who was clearly a man of violence. He had been indicted for the murder of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, a pro-Western billionaire killed by a huge car bomb on the orders of the Syrian government in 2005.

  The next known assassination by the Mossad was, compared with eliminating Mughniyeh and Khalil in Damascus, like a stroll in the park. At least, that was the expectation.