Harpoon
Page 7
General Amos Gilad, serving then as the head of the IDF’s Intelligence Research Division, however, asserts that “Arafat waited out the initial five-year period of the Oslo Accords and then opened a bloody and cruel war against us. This was always his calculated plan. His intention was to push us into a corner and he never wanted to pursue the path of peace.”
Barak, now seen as a feckless leader, called for special elections for February 6, 2001, to select a prime minister. Ariel Sharon, running as head of the Likud, tapped his loyal friend Meir Dagan to manage his well-funded campaign.
Dagan’s job was a relatively easy one. It was almost impossible for Barak and those running on the Labor Party list to argue that the peace process had worked when violence was escalating and the massive PA security arm—lavishly funded by the West to become Israel’s partner in peace—was now a hostile Arab army. In January 2001, a failed, desperate peace summit in Taba, a Red Sea resort in Sinai, only reinforced the Israeli view of an inescapable conflict with a duplicitous and fanatic foe.
Election night was little more than a formality. Sharon won a resounding 62 percent of the vote. It was the largest landslide in Israeli political history. Sharon was sworn in as prime minister the following month. His campaign manager was by his side.
Shortly after his victory, Sharon chaired a meeting of his National Security Council. The NSC consisted of three departments—security policy, foreign affairs, and counterterrorism—and was designed to assemble, analyze, and counsel the prime minister on all issues relating to Israel’s security. The meeting, held at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, was meant to review a long agenda of issues. Topping the bill was Meir Dagan’s request to transform his old unit on terror financing into a true task force.
The politicians and generals walked into the conference room, some with their own bodyguards, carrying folders and valises; some carried maps. The roundtable included the heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet. Those who assembled were the most powerful men in Israel, yet each arrived early and, in what appeared to be a middle-aged version of musical chairs, rushed to get to the shiny oak table, determined to secure a seat next to the new prime minister. When Sharon walked into the room, the men of power stood up and then quickly sat down to review the items to be covered at the afternoon gathering.
Moments after the order of business was read and the meeting formally commenced, Dagan arrived late after Sharon was seated, and the order of business had already been read and the meeting begun. He was completely impervious to the generals who expressed their displeasure. Tardiness was unacceptable at a NSC gathering, yet Dagan didn’t apologize. He walked slowly to the sole empty chair, far across from the prime minister at the opposite end of the table. The generals and intelligence chiefs raised their eyebrows; some muttered disparaging remarks about his insolence. Sharon, too, seemed perplexed. To the shock of those present, he grinned and said, “Meir, why don’t you come and sit up here with me at the head of the table?” The room fell silent. But Dagan didn’t get up. He simply replied in his trademark low-key voice and with a devilish smile, “Mr. Prime Minister, wherever I sit is the head of the table.”10 Dagan then opened his folder. For him, at least, it was business as usual.
The men in the room were aghast—even by Israeli standards, Dagan’s chutzpah was unprecedented. But Sharon let out a hearty laugh and the meeting continued. Dagan, as a friend once said, was never just another one in the room—he was the one.11
NSC Chairman Uzi Dayan, a Sayeret Mat’kal veteran and major general, wanted the financial task force under his command. Other generals and Shin Bet commanders also wanted to lead the new entity. But the issue had been settled long before the meeting commenced, and Sharon named Dagan as the task force commander, believing in the strategy of going after the money and believing in Dagan. He announced that the new unit would report directly to the prime minister’s office.
Every new task force and working group operating within the halls of power requires a codename or numeric designation for bureaucratic purposes: It was how salaries were paid, budgets allocated, and oversight, by the State comptroller, conducted. When Dagan set up the new body, a special computer program delivered a random name for the task force that the retired general liked very much. Dagan’s financial warfare task force became known as “Harpoon.”12
When Dagan first tried to raise the task force under Netanyahu, the heads of Israel’s intelligence services and most senior IDF commanders had little interest in adding to their list of responsibilities. Targeting the money, launching operations against money changers or accountants, was unlikely to get combat officers promoted. But under the new Sharon administration, that changed. With the prime minister’s full support, Dagan insisted that Harpoon would have the teeth to empower all elements of the Israeli government to go after the money that facilitated the bloodshed.
Dagan once again called on his trusted friend Uri L. to be his deputy. He also brought in experts like Lavi S. and career agents as members of the working group. Harpoon met as soon as Dagan received the thumbs-up from the prime minister. He summoned members of the Mossad, the Shin Bet, the army, the police, and other government agencies to discuss measures that Israel could employ to disrupt, dislodge, and destroy the ways in which Palestinian terror groups financed their operations against Israel.
Most generals and spy commanders knew nothing of the new task force. Dagan loved it. He did his best work in the shadows and without interference.
CHAPTER FIVE
Khalas*
Meir Dagan was called to Sharon’s sprawling Sycamore Ranch home in the south of Israel for their weekly Friday morning meeting. Whenever he had a chance, Sharon would sneak away from Jerusalem and conduct affairs of state from his 1,700-square-acre ranch in the northern Negev Desert. The ranch was Sharon’s passion. Before Dagan could even get comfortable in his seat, Prime Minister Sharon looked into his friend’s eyes and explained that he had an important mission he wanted Dagan to embark upon immediately. “Meir, your first priority is to target Arafat. I want Harpoon to locate and disrupt all his financial assets. I want you to strip him of everything he has.” Sharon explained to Dagan that Arafat’s money was used to pay for terrorist activity, and that it was of the highest national importance to relieve the Palestinian leader of as much of it as they could. Sharon knew that Dagan was the right person and would use all means necessary, and then some, to carry out the task.
Dagan was surprised by the request, though. He was convinced that the prime minister would want to focus both on Hamas and the PIJ, as they were the wild cards in the violence perpetrated by terrorist groups whose coffers overflowed with money coming in from the four corners of the world. But Dagan recognized in Sharon’s body language that he was transfixed upon destroying Arafat. The prime minister explained to Dagan that the one way to humiliate Arafat and render him irrelevant in the eyes of the Palestinian people was to impoverish him. He explained that he didn’t want to harm the Palestinian economy or make ordinary Palestinians suffer. However, the money was the source of Arafat’s power and it was how he purchased people’s loyalty and paid for blood and misery. Dagan left the ranch meeting and dialed Uri L. on his secure phone. “The PM wants to find Arafat’s money and make him lose it.” Uri replied that bankrupting Arafat was not going to be easy.
Shortly afterward, Dagan called an all-hands meeting of Harpoon in their secure compound and announced their most pressing tasks. The unit was going to have an important mission, one that had been assigned to them at the highest levels of the state’s power. He banged the table and said: “We are going to take away from Arafat every dollar, euro, dinar, and drachma [that we can].”
Many in Israel had held their breath when Prime Minister Rabin shook Yasir Arafat’s hand on the green grass of the White House lawn. Many more held their noses. To them, shaking hands with the man who personified the evil of international terror was unthinkable. Prime Minister Rabin had to be coaxed into extending his ar
m to Arafat by a glowing U.S. president who understood the historic precedence of the event on the White House lawn. When Prime Minister Netanyahu took office, he looked emotionally disgusted by having to sit across from Arafat; he looked physically ill when forced to produce a smile while shaking Arafat’s hand in front of the cameras. Prime Minister Barak had, as a commando and then later on as a general, led missions to Beirut and Tunis to assassinate Arafat’s friends and lieutenants; at the disastrous Camp David rendezvous in July 2000, his virtual manhandling of Arafat into one of the negotiating sessions was caught by video and went viral.
But Ariel Sharon would have none of this politically correct nonsense. To Sharon, Arafat was someone who should have been dead long ago; he was yet another on a long list of enemies who threatened the existence of the Jewish people.
Sharon had no qualms about upsetting Near Eastern hands at the State Department who urged him to display an optimistic and hopeful peace façade so that negotiations could work. As defense minister in 1982, Sharon was the architect of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that was designed, among other objectives, to remove Arafat altogether; IDF snipers, rumor had it, had Arafat square inside their crosshairs of their rifles, but the political authorization to pull the trigger never happened.1 It was a lost opportunity, Sharon believed. Arafat’s intifada was nothing short of full-scale war. A day barely passed without some sort of murderous incident involving Palestinian security forces—forces permitted by the Oslo Accords, armed by the United States, and financed, in one way or another, by foreign aid, including monies and equipment received from the Central Intelligence Agency. Oslo was dead and Arafat, signed agreements or no signed agreements, would have to be contained or removed—but politically, the Israeli prime minister had his hands tied. The world would not sit quietly by while Israel went to war with the PA. The new American president, many in Sharon’s inner circle feared, would be unsympathetic to Israel’s actions. George W. Bush’s father had been an oil man and was viewed as generally ambivalent, if not hostile, toward Israel; James Baker, his secretary of state, had been alleged to have said, in a private conversation, “Fuck the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.”2 Sharon feared that if he acted militarily—decisively—to crush the intifada, the new U.S. administration would not stand behind it.
Harpoon was not the kind of unit that could bring about immediate results. The very notion of a counterterrorist task force that focused on money had come a long way since 1996, when Dagan faced endless bureaucratic hurdles dealing with reticent members of the military and espionage communities who believed that the emphasis on finances rather than targets was a waste of limited resources and precious time. “Although they bitched and moaned at times and clearly didn’t have their hearts in it,” a member of the team recalled, “the representatives from the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and IDF played along.”3 It was, in fact, the participants from agencies never invited to such high-level-security working groups that accepted the challenge with the greatest enthusiasm and with some invaluable insight. The representative from Israel’s Tax Authority, because of how it had to coordinate with the PA, knew more facts about the Palestinian economy than the Shin Bet and A’man, IDF’s military intelligence force, did. The police knew intimate details about Hamas and the PIJ from its own criminal investigations of stolen car rings and chop shops in the territories. Yet even in a country as small as Israel, where everyone was supposed to know everyone else, when it came down to working with one another, the various security, police, and government agencies did not like to talk or share information.
Each one of the chairs around the roundtable contributed files, statistics, ideas, and concerns to Dagan and Uri for their meeting with Sharon. The material detailed subject matter expertise on the monies flowing into Hamas and the PIJ; everything was prepared as a presentation.
Yasir Arafat likened himself to an Arab Nelson Mandela. His image—his costume, his persona, the pistol worn on his hip—was all carefully choreographed to depict a man who was a Palestinian Che Guevara, a revolutionary and a freedom fighter who dedicated his entire existence to the liberation of his people. But the propaganda hid the fact that Arafat ran a corrupt oligarchy of stolen billions. Before the establishment of the PA, Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization had several primary sources of incoming funds: official contributions, some extorted, from Arab states; a 5 percent tax on the income of every Palestinian; stipends from international organizations; extortion and protection fees; arms and narcotics deals, as well as other criminal enterprises; and profits from interest and investments.4 The revenue streams flooded in after Oslo. Halfway through 2001, the United States had already provided over $100 million to the PA; €250 million flowed in from the EU; and $400 million from the various Arab States. The Accords, for the PA, was like hitting the jackpot in a Vegas casino. But Arafat was always indignant, to the outside world at least, concerning what he did with the money. “I refused and I will never accept!” Arafat said of the conditions imposed for economic aid. “I completely refuse any controls by anybody on Palestinian Autonomy, except the Palestinians themselves. We didn’t finish military occupation to get economic occupation.”5
There were no credit cards in this world of the skim. Cash was always king. Large bundles of neatly packed bills followed the Palestinian chief and his minions wherever he went. In November 1974, when Arafat addressed the United Nations, his entourage paid for coffee and tea at the General Assembly commissary with brand-new $100 bills taken from Samsonite cases. Conservative estimates placed Arafat’s personal fortune, at the time, at $200 million. At those numbers, Forbes magazine assessed, he was the ninth-richest head of state in the world even though he had no state and most of his citizens lived in abject poverty. According to the head of Israeli intelligence, Arafat had $1.3 billion under his control, which he could use for any needs he had.6 “He was like a bizarre Robin Hood,” said a former U.S. State Department security agent stationed in Israel, who worked with Arafat and his security services after the creation of the PA. “He robbed from the poor and gave to the rich. He also robbed from the rich and gave to the richer.” According to reports, Arafat received $50 million from Saddam Hussein for the PLO’s support of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the special agent commented.
Cash was everywhere Arafat went. It was in suitcases, bundled into safes and rat holes, squirreled away in foreign bank accounts and in the trunks of shiny new Mercedes-Benzes, but it wasn’t in the bellies of the local villagers who wallowed in poverty in the West Bank and Gaza. Nor did the refugee camps scattered across Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon see any of Arafat’s appropriated wealth. The Israelis always thought that the disparity between rich and poor, the rampant corruption and nepotism, would be Arafat’s undoing. But the Palestinian icon managed to sell himself as one of the people. A former State Department special agent who worked the West Bank reflected, “He had lived in bunkers for most of his adult life and had slept in a different bed every night. He wore the same uniform every day. He didn’t have a palace with ornate fountains.”7
Imagery, the theatrical pantomime of the revolution, meant everything to Arafat. It was the rhythm of his rule. But like all complex political hierarchies where treachery lurked around every corner, Arafat made sure that his immediate underlings reaped the rewards of his vast fortune. Arafat’s lieutenants, their cohorts, and their mistresses lived in palaces that were worthy of an oil-rich sheikh. These men woke up every morning by stepping on floors made of polished marble and illuminated by chandeliers adorned with Czech crystal. Doling out cash was how Arafat governed and how he stayed alive. The flow of money to some very ruthless characters ensured a sense of contentment that few wanted to disrupt. A coup against Arafat would have been pointless because he—and he alone—kept all the bank account information for virtually the entire PA and the Palestinian revolution on his person. “Arafat holds all the financial strings,” former PLO executive committee member Shafik al-Hout was quoted as saying. “Only h
e can sign a check. There is no co-signature.”8 The numbers, the balances, and the passwords to dozens and dozens of bank accounts around the Middle East, Europe, and North America were all kept inside small notebooks with tattered pages that Arafat had scribbled down in different-colored inks in a handwriting that only he could decipher.9
Some of the money came from Langley, Virginia. The Central Intelligence Agency invested heavily in Arafat’s security services in the 1990s—Palestinians were trained in counterterrorist techniques and in internal security tactics by CIA paramilitary and counterintelligence officers. Jibril Rajoub, Arafat’s head of security for the West Bank, and Mohammed Dahlan, Arafat’s head of security force in Gaza, maintained close operational ties with the CIA.10 Wherever Arafat traveled, remembered one former State Department Diplomatic Security Service officer who had traveled to the area extensively during the post-Oslo years, “the forty foot containers of money followed close behind.”11
Arafat was brilliant in convincing anyone within earshot that he was on the verge of financial collapse. “Arafat for years would cry poor,” former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk remembered. “He would say I can’t pay the salaries, we’re going have a disaster here. The Palestinian economy is going to collapse.”12 Every one of Arafat’s squalls of poverty was always accompanied by a request for more money.
According to a PA report, it is believed that in 1996 alone some $326 million, roughly 43 percent of the entire Palestinian Authority budget, was lost to embezzlement by Arafat and his cronies; Arafat took close to another $100 million; another 12.5 percent went to Arafat’s own discretionary fund; close to $75 million went to the security services; and the remainder, less than 10 percent of the PA’s entire operating budget, went to basic services for the Palestinian people.13