by Dan Raviv
Chapter 15
An attempt to kill Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, in February 1984 by sending him an exploding Quran, is related by Yossef Bodansky in Terror: The Inside Story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in America (SPI Books, 1994), pp. 34-6.
The pilot of one of the Israeli helicopters that attacked Hezbollah’s leader Abbas Musawi spoke to Felix Frish, with the Israeli website NRG.com (affiliated with the newspaper Ma’ariv), February 16, 2008.
Security questions surrounding the two bombings in Argentina, the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the Jewish center in 1994, were reported by Yossi Melman, in Ha’aretz, December 25, 1997. In the article, Shin Bet director Yaakov Perry denied that he did not take seriously the dangers in South America. On the contrary, he said, “I always emphasized that South America had the potential for terrorist attacks against us, because of the proximity of Muslim immigrant communities from the Middle East.” He also said there was a thorough internal investigation, and Shin Bet was not found to have failed.
American intelligence sources shared the story of the Southeast Asian extremist, caught on a far-off Asian island and involved in the Hezbollah plot to bomb the Israeli embassy in Thailand. They revealed that an Asian security service turned over the man to the CIA, which tried to turn him into a double agent. They felt that telling the tale after 15 years would pose no harm.
The kidnapping, including the use of a female Lebanese agent, and interrogation of Mustafa Dirani was reported by Yossi Melman in Ha’aretz on April 20, 2010.
Shin Bet interrogators rejected rough methods used by Aman’s Unit 504, according to a Shin Bet man who spoke with one of the authors in June 2007.
Chapter 16
Descriptions of Marcus Klingberg, after he served prison time in Israel for espionage, are based on a visit to Klingberg in Paris by one of the authors in April 2006. See Yossi Melman, “I Spy,” in Ha’aretz, June 1, 2006.
Additional information comes from Klingberg’s memoir, written with his lawyer Michael Sfard, Ha-Meragel ha-Acharon (The Last Spy), published by Ma’ariv Books (Tel Aviv, 2007).
Various sources revealed that a Mossad agent delivered poisoned chocolates to a Palestinian terrorist leader, Wadi Haddad, and—with the motive given as his group’s hijacking of an airliner to Entebbe, Uganda, as “the last straw”—see Aaron J. Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response (Random House, 2005), pp. 207-8.
In failing to detect Klinberg’s disloyalty, “We asked the wrong questions.” So said Victor Cohen, a Shin Bet investigator, when interviewed by one of the authors in March 2003.
Chaim Ben-Ami, the Shin Bet interrogator who made Klingberg break, spoke to one of the authors in June 2005. See Yossi Melman, “The Best Keeper of Secrets in the World,” in Ha’aretz, September 21, 2007. A play written by Melman, “The Good Son,” based on the interrogation of Klingberg, was performed by Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theater in the summer of 2006.
“I agreed to work for the Soviet Union because they saved my life. And out of belief in the cause of Communism.” So said Klingberg during his extensive interview by one of the authors in Paris in April 2006.
On an anthrax vaccine that was tested on Israeli soldiers, see Yossi Melman, “Defense Attempting to Block Report About Anthrax Trial,” Ha’aretz, January 27, 2009.
The French newsletter that revealed a $200 million American investment, thanks to Israeli data on the anthrax tests, is www.IntelligenceOnline.com, number 591, April 2, 2009. It said that Israeli courts had banned publication of some details, but added that the United States wanted and received the results of tests on humans.
Chapter 17
Yitzhak Hofi was described as a man “of steel and infinite patience” and “a born commander” by another former Mossad director, Efraim Halevy, in his essay in Gilboa and Lapid (eds.), Israel’s Silent Defender, p. 289.
Details of the Mossad’s sabotage at the French port of La Seyne sur Mer in 1979 are based on interviews with Western intelligence veterans who were familiar with the incident.
The task of choosing an air route, and mapping electricity wires in enemy lands on the way to Baghdad were written about by the air intelligence officer of the attack operation in June 1981, Lt. Colonel Shamai Golan, “Aerial Intelligence for the Attack on Iraq’s Nuclear Reactor,” in Israel’s Silent Defender, pp. 101-5. Golan also writes that King Hussein reported on the Israeli jets overhead, but there was no sign of a Saudi or Iraqi response to that.
The role played by Professor Uzi Even, in telling Shimon Peres about a plan to attack Iraq’s nuclear reactor, was relayed by Even to one of the authors in November 2011.
Details of the attack on Osirak, first called Operation Ammunition Hill but later known as Operation Opera, are in Shlomo Nakdimon, Tammuz in Flames (in Hebrew, Yediot Aharonot Books, 1986); and Nakdimon, First Strike: The Exclusive Story of How Israel Foiled Iraq’s Attempt to Get the Bomb (Summit Books, 1987). Nakdimon was a close advisor to Prime Minister Begin.
Relik Shafir, one of the eight Israeli pilots who bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, spoke with one of the authors in March 2005. See Yossi Melman, “War Games,” at TabletMag.com, April 15, 2010.
Details of the raid on Osirak are also in an article marking the 30th anniversary of the attack, in Israel Defense, a Hebrew magazine, December 23, 2011.
On the Reagan Administration’s official condemnation of the Israeli raid on Iraq, the national security advisor in the White House at the time, Richard Allen, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, June 6, 2010.
On Ronald Reagan saying the Israelis have “claws” and “a sense of strategy,” Richard Allen is quoted by Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option (Random House, 1991), p. 9.
Former Mossad director Shabtai Shavit told one of the authors that he regretted not assassinating Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan. See Melman and Javedanfar, The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran, pp. 151-6.
The story of the nuclear spy Mordecai Vanunu is based on the authors’ previous book, Every Spy a Prince, pp. 360-379; and on additional research, including interviews with Yehiel Horev, head of the defense security agency Malmab; and Chaim Carmon, who held a similar post overseeing Dimona security. See Yossi Melman, “Who’s Afraid of Mordecai Vanunu?” in Ha’aretz, March 19, 2004.
The authors also interviewed Mordecai Vanunu’s brother, Meir, who ran a one-man campaign for his brother’s freedom.
The claim that British newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell was a Mossad agent or sayan features prominently in Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009); and in Hersh, Samson Option, pp. 312-5. Thomas’s book goes on to highlight a somewhat absurd claim that the Mossad murdered Maxwell after he tried to blackmail the agency.
Chapter 18
Jonathan Jay Pollard’s boasts at Stanford University about being in the Israeli military or the Mossad were reported by The Washington Post, November 24, 1985.
In a letter to the authors in November 1990, Pollard said that federal authorities invented charges of quirky behavior to create “a legend of instability, to discredit and isolate me.” Prosecutors insisted he had a long record of weaving incredible tales.
The CIA’s assessment of Pollard as “a fanciful liar” was reported by U.S. News and World Report, June 1, 1987.
Pollard, when interviewed in the federal prison at Butner, North Carolina, in 1997 by Ben Caspit of the newspaper Ma’ariv, said he was especially concerned that Israel did not have U.S. information about Iraq’s chemical weapons program. See New Jersey’s Metro West Jewish News, May 22, 1997.
An official Israeli inquiry commission criticized senior political leaders for deciding not to ask what Lakam was doing. Pollard told Caspit: “[Defense Minister] Moshe Arens was deeply involved with my activities. He knew everything. He okayed everything. Arens’s fingerprints were on all of the tasking orders I received.” In the article, Arens replied that Pollard’s claim was incorrect.
Pollard’s time spent in Paris with
Rafi Eitan and other Israeli handlers is related in Wolf Blitzer, Territory of Lies (Harper and Row, 1989), pp. 90-1. The use of a Washington apartment for massive photocopying is on pp. 96, 130-1.
Anne Pollard’s final dinner with Avi Sella is on pp. 142-4.
On Ronald Reagan saying “I don’t know why they are doing it,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1985.
A longer account of the Iran-Contra affair is in Chapter 15, “The Chaos of Irangate,” in Every Spy a Prince, pp. 324-342.
The CIA’s assessment of the priorities of Israeli intelligence, including spying on the United States, is in Melman, CIA Report, p. 9.
Pollard’s own memo to the judge, about his intelligence tasking, was reported by Time magazine, March 16, 1987.
“I do not intend to be used as a scapegoat,” said Rafi Eitan, quoted in the Hebrew newspaper Hadashot, March 15, 1987.
President Clinton nearly released Pollard, according to George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (Harper Collins, 2007), pp. 66-72. Memoirs by President Bill Clinton and Middle East mediator Dennis Ross confirmed Tenet’s threat to resign; although leaders of the American Jewish community say Tenet, for some reason, vehemently denied to them that he had blocked Pollard’s freedom by threatening to quit. See Marc Perelman, “Former CIA Chief Changes Tune on Pollard Story,” Forward, May 18, 2007.
The story of Yossi Amit, who was nearly recruited by the CIA, is recounted in Chapter 15, “Drug Deals,” in Yossi Melman and Eitan Haber, The Spies: Israel’s Counter-Espionage Wars (in Hebrew, Yediot Aharonot Books, 2002), pp. 245-256. The senator who apparently referred to Amit, although not by name, was David Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota.
Chapter 19
The Shin Bet scandal stemming from the Bus 300 hijack in Gaza in 1984 has been the subject of many Israeli newspaper articles, TV reports, and documentaries since Raviv and Melman, Every Spy a Prince, wrote of the case in 1990, pp. 278-300. The most recent and complete was, “The Breaking Line” by Gidi Weitz, in Hebrew in the Ha’aretz supplement of September 28, 2011, pp. 14-26, based on a documentary aired four days later, on October 2, on Israel’s Channel 10.
Ehud Yatom, the Shin Bet man who admitted killing the two bus hijackers and said he was proud of it, spoke to Yediot Aharonot, quoted by, among others, British newspapers The Independent (“Shin Bet Man Proud of Murdering Two Arabs”) on July 24, 1996, and The Daily Telegraph (“Justice Minister’s Resignation Adds to Netanyahu’s Troubles”), on August 9, 1996.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem provides casualty tolls from the intifada that began in 1988. These figures are available on its website, btselem.org/statistics/first_intifada_tables.
The story of Ahmed Yasin, the PLO security official in Tunis who spied for the Mossad, was told by several Arabic-language newspapers, including A-Sharq al-Awsat of December 19, 2003.
The proposal by Rafi Eitan, in the mid-1960s, to assassinate the PLO’s Abu Jihad was related to one of the authors by Eitan in an interview in March 2012. See also Yediot Aharonot, March 23, 2012.
The assassination of Abu Jihad was recounted in Raviv and Melman, Every Spy a Prince, pp. 395-8. Also see Daniel Byman, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 54; and, in Hebrew, Moshe Zonder, Sayeret Matkal: The Elite Unit of Israel (Keter, 2000), pp. 238-240.
Chapter 20
As revealed after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the mole planted by Shin Bet in extreme right-wing circles and codenamed “Champagne” was Avishai Raviv, a young right-wing activist. It is mere coincidence that his last name is the same as one of the authors’, for they are not related.
Benjamin Netanyahu telephoned one of the authors, barely three days after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and suggested to him to write an article that would raise the question of assassin Amir’s connection to Israeli intelligence and Netanyahu’s idea of “following the money.”
The division of labor between Aman and Shin Bet when it came to monitoring the Palestinian Authority, dubbed “the Magna Carta,” is in Ephraim Lavie, “Intelligence Challenges in the Palestinian Arena,” in Gilboa and Lapid (eds.), Israel’s Silent Defender, pp. 135-9. Dr. Lavie, a retired Aman colonel, writes: “I am of the opinion that in real-time situations between Israel and the Palestinians, IDI [Israel Defense Intelligence, meaning Aman] did not provide the decision makers with early warnings and suitable assessments.”
Dov Weisglass, a close advisor to former prime minister Ariel Sharon, spoke with one of the authors and denied that Israel had poisoned Yasser Arafat. See Yossi Melman, “What Killed Yasser Arafat?” in his column, “The Arms Race,” at Haaretz.com, July 14, 2011.
Chapter 21
The views and reminiscences of Avi Dichter, director of Shin Bet from 2000 to 2005, were shared with the authors several times in the years that followed.
American officials and former officials in Washington, who preferred not to be named, told the authors of suspicions that the Israelis were “playing” America, on subjects including Iran, in the years just after 9/11.
The notion of shared democratic values and strategic interests that bound the United States and Israel is fully discussed, with both examples and counterexamples, in Melman and Raviv, Friends in Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance.
Critics of the America-Israel relationship who garnered significant attention included two professors, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
Vigorous responses to the Mearsheimer-Walt contention that American political leaders were manipulated by Israel and not acting in the best interests of the U.S. included articles by another professor, Alan Dershowitz, who called The Israel Lobby “illogical and conspiratorial.” Also, see a book by the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Chapter 22
Most of the material in this chapter is based on interviews with senior Mossad and Aman people associated with—or with knowledge of—the principal episodes discussed in this chapter. They refused to be named.
The attacks on German scientists working for Egypt in the 1960s are not known for certain to have killed anyone, but one scientist, Heinz Krug, vanished from his office in Germany in 1962—apparently after receiving threats.
The Israeli raid on Entebbe airport, that rescued around a hundred hostages, is told in Chapter 12 of this book.
The story of Palestinian terrorist Wadia Haddad, poisoned by chocolates, is told by Aharon Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre And Israel’s Deadly Response (Random House, 2005). The authors have received a slightly different version from sources.
On the assassination of Fathi Shkaki in Valetta, Malta, see (in Hebrew) Yossi Melman, Ha’aretz, October 30, 1995.
On the attempt to assassinate Khaled Meshaal in Jordan, numerous articles and books have been written. The quote of Meshaal is in Alan Cowell, “The Daring Attack That Blew Up in Israel’s Face,” New York Times, October 15, 1997.
King Hussein’s anger at Israel, and the Hamas truce proposal he handed to a Mossad officer days before the attack on Meshaal, are told by former Mossad director Efraim Halevy, who heard it from Hussein himself. See Halevy’s memoir, Man in the Shadows (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), pp. 164-175.
On Halevy’s insistence that a Mossad operative fly to Switzerland to stand trial: Man in the Shadows, pp. 185-9.
Chapter 23
On “one of Israel’s greatest successes in target intelligence,” in the Lebanon war of 2006, see General Amos Gilboa, “Intelligence and the Lebanese Arena,” in Gilboa and Lapid (eds.), Israel’s Silent Defender, pp. 118-9.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, assassinated by the Mossad in Dubai in January 2010, earlier had granted an interview to Al-Jazeera Television, in which he claimed he was “cautious” but hoped to become a martyr. It was br
oadcast only after his death. See “To Israel, I am Stained With Blood,” at AlJazeera.net, posted February 7, 2010.
Details of what occurred in Dubai, and the Mossad’s reaction to what the local police and others were saying, were gleaned from Israelis who were close to the decision-making, and from American officials who spoke later with the Israelis.
On official British anger, see London’s The Daily Telegraph, March 24, 2010. On Australia’s anger, see the same newspaper on February 26, 2010.
Chapter 24
Israel has continued to be secretive about the decisions that led to bombing Syria’s nuclear reactor project in September 2007, but interviews conducted by one of the authors in the United States in 2010 and 2011 revealed details of the planning and the operation. Israeli and American officials asked for anonymity.
Meir Dagan’s reminiscences about his command of the Sayeret Rimon commandos in the Gaza Strip were partly in his testimony in a court case, when a former soldier was accused of murder and claimed that killing had been commonplace under Dagan; as reported by Ynet.co.il on November 8, 2011.
Dennis Ross, former advisor to five American presidents, spoke of Israel’s “ethos” in an interview with one of the authors in March 2012.
Remembering Ehud Olmert’s request that the United States bomb the Syrian reactor project: George W. Bush, Decision Points (Crown, 2010), p. 421.
Bush’s vice president also wrote about his own recommendation that the United States strike the Syrian building: Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (Threshold, 2011), pp. 470-2.
Yehuda Gil, long considered a star within the Mossad but then imprisoned for faking reports about Syria, told his story to one of the authors at Gil’s home in October 2009 and unconvincingly claimed Mossad director Danny Yatom had framed him. See Yossi Melman’s “Inside Intel” column at Haaretz.com on October 26, 2010. Further details are in Yatom’s memoir in Hebrew, Shutaf Sod (Privy to Secrets: From Sayeret Matkal until the Mossad) (Yediot Aharonot, 2009), pp. 42-52.