Harpoon
Page 9
Tamimi bid farewell to her companion a few feet from the busy eatery and walked back toward the eastern half of the city. Al-Masri walked into the pizzeria with the weight of the guitar case causing him discomfort. Abdullah Barghouti, a Hamas bomb building engineer, had inserted five kilograms of explosives, along with nails, screws, and bolts, into al-Masri’s guitar. He glanced around the busy restaurant and saw parents eating with their children, and hungry travelers enjoying a slice, and then detonated his lethal payload.
Fifteen were killed in the powerful blast that tore through the restaurant. Five members of the Schijveschuurder family—parents Mordechai, age forty-three, and Tzira, forty-one, along with half of the family’s children: Ra’aya, fourteen, Avraham Yitzhak, four, and Hemda, two—were killed. One American, thirty-four-year-old Judith Greenbaum of Passaic, New Jersey, was also killed.22 Another victim, Chana Nachenberg from New York, had a screw, one of the bomb’s lethal pieces of shrapnel, lodged into her brain and remains in an irreversible coma at the time of this book’s writing.
Tamimi was arrested by Israel and eventually sentenced to sixteen life sentences after pleading guilty to her involvement in the suicide bombing. She insists she had no regrets and stressed she would, given the opportunity, do it again. “It was a calculated act, performed with conviction and faith in Allah,” Tamimi said in an interview posted on the Hamas website. “Jihad warriors are always ready to die as martyrs, to be arrested, or to succeed.”
After these two bombings there was a consensus in Israel that the country was embroiled in a total war. Israel responded with largely symbolic actions. Police squads shut down a Palestinian office in East Jerusalem, and F-16 fighter-bombers attacked a Palestinian police station in Gaza, but the moves fell far short of popular opinion looking for Prime Minister Sharon to eviscerate the PA and its use as a safe haven for groups like Hamas and the PA.
There were strong words from Washington, D.C. U.S. President George W. Bush condemned the attacks but held back from allowing Israel to reenter the territories it had turned over to Arafat as part of the Oslo Peace Accords. The United States and Europe continued to press Sharon to show restraint.
The world changed one month later. For the first time in United States history, a catastrophic terrorist event—the largest and costliest in world history—had taken place on American soil. The September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States were a turning point in history. The United States could never again be ambivalent to one nation’s struggle against fundamentalist terror. Israel no longer had friends in Washington, D.C.—it now had a full-fledged ally.
Hours after the Twin Towers fell, as the Pentagon burned, news cameramen filmed Palestinians reveling in the streets of Ramallah. Candy and treats were handed out at an intersection to celebrate the American terror attacks; women in black ululated, barely able to contain their joy. Arafat ordered his security forces to arrest cameramen filming the adulation; their videotapes were to be confiscated. As a gesture of his solidarity with the American people, Arafat gave blood. Weeks later, during his last visit to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, Arafat was humiliated when President Bush refused to grant him an audience. Arafat left his Waldorf Astoria suite days earlier than planned. The United States never looked at him the same way again.
Prime Minister Sharon declared a day of national mourning to honor the victims of the September 11 attacks. Shortly after the dust settled in lower Manhattan and the magnitude in Jerusalem, Sharon convened an emergency meeting of his security staff. The State of Israel was determined to do what it could to help the United States in the war on terror.
And, with American support, the effort to bankrupt the terror armies that threatened Israel could now become a global effort.
CHAPTER SIX
Money Kills
By the time mothers around Israel were putting the final touches on the dishes that would adorn their festive Passover tables in March 2002, 361 Israelis had already been killed in the seventeen months of the intifada. More than seven hundred had been seriously wounded. March had been the bloodiest month of all. In the first three weeks of the month, Israel’s cities had endured seven suicide bombings, including a particularly horrific attack in the Café Moment in Jerusalem that left eleven dead and scores more wounded; earlier in the month, a Palestinian sniper had shot and killed seven soldiers at a checkpoint in the Valley of Thieves between Ramallah and Nablus. By the time fathers around Israel motioned for the youngest child at the Seder table to ask the traditional four questions concerning why this night was different from all others, thirty Israelis would be dead. Another 150 were rushed to hospitals fighting for their lives.
At just after sunset that Passover night on March 27, a Hamas suicide bomber disguised as a woman walked into the Park Hotel in the city of Netanya, a coastal town halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and detonated a powerful explosive device that had been meticulously hidden inside his female disguise. The bomber had managed to get past the hotel security guard and walked straight past the lobby toward the dining room, where hundreds of people had gathered to enjoy the Passover feast. The powerful device punched a fiery hole through the crowded hall; the blast chewed up everything and everyone in its path. The first responders were overwhelmed by the scale of the devastation.
The New York Times described the crime scene at the Park Hotel as a bloodbath.1 White tablecloths were soaked in red. The banquet hall floor was littered with the dead and the dying. Thirty people were killed and 140 were wounded in the bombing. The Passover Massacre was the bloodiest attack of the second intifada and, for Israel, a point of no return. As forensic detectives and Shin Bet agents scoured the remnants of the Park Hotel dining room for clues to help identify the bomb builder and the cell commanders that dispatched him on his homicidal mission, Prime Minister Sharon convened his national security cabinet.
The Passover Massacre was the intifada’s 9/11 moment. The IDF had been preparing for a large-scale operation back into the West Bank and Gaza Strip for years, with $150 million allocated to prepare the military for counterinsurgency operations in areas that Israel had just returned as part of the Oslo Peace Accords.2 Sharon immediately declared a state of emergency and mobilized twenty thousand reservists. On March 29, IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz ordered the soldiers in.
The IDF assault against areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority was known as Operation Defensive Shield. Supported by F-16 fighter bombers and attack helicopters, Israeli armor and infantry units rolled into the West Bank cities of Jenin, Bethlehem, Nablus, Qalqilya, and Ramallah. One of Operation Defensive Shield’s primary objectives was to surround and isolate Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters, the Muqata. Merkava main battle tanks stormed into the center of Ramallah and quickly ringed the headquarters, laying siege to the fortress. Arafat claimed that he wished a martyr’s death for himself,3 but the Israelis weren’t about to let him off so easy. Israeli forces cordoned off most of the Muqata and forced Arafat and his aides into a few rooms; the electricity was cut for much of the time, and the Israelis saw to it that the toilets didn’t flush. U.S. State Department officials who visited Arafat described the stench inside the headquarters as overwhelming. Arafat would remain holed up in the Muqata for two more years, until he was rushed to France for medical treatments in 2004 shortly before his death.
Less than one hundred meters south of Arafat’s buttressed bunker was the office of Fuad Shubaki, the PA president’s trusted chief procurement and finance officer. Israeli special operations officers raided Shubaki’s office and uncovered a large cache of weapons, including Russian-made light machine guns and RPG antitank rockets—all forbidden under the Oslo Accords. Sophisticated suicide vests were also found in Shubaki’s office that were destined for the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Islamic-fueled terror faction that Arafat used as a rival to the other fundamentalist groups with spectacular suicide bombings.4 Israeli forces also uncovered hundreds of thousa
nds of counterfeit Israeli money in denominations of 50, 100, and 200 shekels; and $100,000 in counterfeit U.S. dollars along with the plates to print more.5
Shubaki had been fired, allegedly, by Arafat months earlier following intense American pressure for his role in an attempt to smuggle twenty million dollars’ worth of Iranian arms into Gaza and the West Bank courtesy of the Karine-A, a Tongan-registered merchant ship that had sailed from Iran to the Sudan. Israeli naval commandos stormed the Karine-A in Operation Noah’s Ark in January 2002 seizing weapons, the ship’s Palestinian crew, and intelligence linking Shubaki and Arafat to the arms purchase. After being presented by Israel with the evidence of Arafat’s involvement in the weapons smuggling effort, President George W. Bush decided to sever ties with the Palestinian leader and an unannounced policy of isolation by the Americans was put in place. The seizure of counterfeit currency, some of the bundles of cash that Arafat was using to wage the intifada, was one of the many intelligence by-product dividends of Operation Defensive Shield.
The Israeli military incursion into the West Bank following the Passover Massacre was launched to eradicate the Palestinian terrorist state that had been established as a safe haven for terror. Israeli forces battled hard-core Hamas and PIJ units, fighting street to street, alley to alley, house to house, and room to room. The heaviest fighting was in Jenin, where Hamas, the PIJ, and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade used the population as human shields in close-quarter urban warfare. Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand. Israeli forces arrested hundreds of wanted terror suspects, uncovered scores of bomb-building labs and safe houses, and seized tons of weapons—some America supplied to the PA security apparatus—and explosives. Vast terror networks were crushed under the weight of armor forces, and D9 bulldozers were used to flatten buildings where terrorists were hiding.
The IDF assault was lightning fast but its achievements were temporary. The Israeli government had no plan on remaining inside the West Bank cities, and the IDF did not receive orders to take over the PA. Once the objectives of the operation were met, Israeli forces were poised to redeploy to lines established by Oslo. But the Shin Bet had no intention of abandoning the cities. Israel’s intelligence services had been forced out of Area A under Oslo and forced to rely on intelligence shared by Arafat’s services; the intelligence was sanitized, colored, and often spotty, as the Palestinian security chiefs were determined not to spy for the Israelis.6 Israeli intelligence officers were not allowed in Area A. Handlers from the Shin Bet and A’man’s Unit 504, the military intelligence force that ran human assets, could not meet with sources freely, severely hampering intelligence operations. The human contact between handler and asset was critical in the spy game. Operation Defensive Shield changed the intelligence equation back to Israel’s favor. The files, computers, and cellular phones that IDF combat units seized provided a king’s treasure of information from secret Hamas ties with Hezbollah agents to money transfers. For Dagan and his task force, the choice was operational—how could they attack the vast financial resources flowing in from around the world as well as the shekels, dollars, and dinars that financed what appeared to be the incessant bloodshed?
A misnomer persisted in the counterterrorism world—one perpetrated by those who never spent time on the front lines and in the trenches—that suicide bombers were a poor man’s cruise missile. It was written that the bombing of a café or a bus constituted nothing more than storebought materials, perhaps only $150, especially since the terrorist commanders didn’t have to invest in an escape plan for the attacker.7 In fact, the suicide bomber was but the final link in a long supply chain of men, machines, and infrastructure that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
In the case of Hamas, there was an entire overt political operation behind the very secretive military wing. The political wing controlled the money and they alone controlled the military wing’s expenditures. Running the political wing was expensive. Hamas officials earned salaries; their wives and children required medical care, food, shelter. The political chiefs needed cars and clothes. Even though these men bled with the people and the faith they swore to serve, there were monetary perks to being a member of the Hamas political apparatus. For every school, mosque, clinic, and apartment building Hamas financed, the political bureaucrats earned kickbacks from the cost of concrete poured and pipe laid. These men controlled hundreds of millions of dollars. Temptation and corruption were natural by-products of this reality. The top Hamas political leaders, individuals dedicated to serving Islam, became incredibly wealthy men.
Running the military wing was very expensive, as well. A group like Hamas and the PIJ ran on much more than mere faith. Terror was a lucrative skill set, and the most talented in the pool required top dollar: Commanders had to be paid and their families had to be sheltered and looked after. The military commanders controlled coffers that had to procure the talents of many men and yield spectacular results.
In order for a cell to be operational, a recruiter had to be hired and paid. The men who worked for the Recruitment Section were responsible for selecting and vetting new recruits and investigating a volunteer’s background and motivation. The Training Section was responsible for teaching all operatives how to use military equipment and improvised explosives. The training syllabus also included the A to Z’s of booby traps; assassinations and cold killing; and kidnapping techniques and hostage taking. The men who trained others had to earn salaries, as well. Money had to always be set aside with escrow cash to be paid to their families should the “soldiers” in the organization be captured or killed.
The suicide-bombing campaign was expensive and required a constant flow of cash. Safe houses had to be rented; cars had to be purchased. These buildings were either turned into weapons caches or bomb-building factors. Quartermasters were responsible for the acquisition of weapons, as well as the raw materials for bombs, such as nuts, bolts, nails, rat poison to dip the shrapnel into, and the acetone and hydrogen peroxide for the witches’ brew of explosives.8 Bomb-making engineers had to be hired to build the suicide vests and knapsacks crammed with homemade explosives and shrapnel. The military wing had to employ intelligence officers to figure out the best ways a bomber could negotiate the roadblocks and security gauntlets and make it to a point where he could be smuggled across the invisible barriers of the 1967 line. A guide had to be hired to drive a bomber from his or her home to the target in Israel. Invariably the guide was an Arab citizen of Israel because they possessed Israeli identity papers, and Israeli license plates, and they spoke Hebrew—given the risk, the guides could sometimes earn tens of thousands of shekels for each mission.
Hamas employed men to staff the Indoctrination and Ideological Guidance Section. These operatives were the ones who recruited the bombers and sold the line about the virtues of martyrdom and the rewards of the seventy-two virgins in paradise. The recruiter had to be slick and charismatic—part salesman and part travel agent shepherding a young soul to the afterlife—and had to travel to mosques and schools looking for that shining star who would strap the explosives to his body and not have second thoughts. Video recorders and men to produce professional propaganda accompanied each cell. The bomber’s “living will” had to be produced and filmed; the film, which depicted the bomber standing in front of a Hamas flag, explaining to a camera why he or she had decided to become a “martyr in the Islamic war against the Jewish infidels,” then had to be handed to press offices, CDs had to be printed, lavish music-scored videos had to be uploaded to pro-Hamas websites. Finally, when the intelligence on a target was assembled, a bomb built, and a bomber selected, a minder had to be summoned to sequester the bomber in the rented safe house and keep him from any contact with the outside world, lest he have second thoughts.9 The process was complex and ongoing. Every element of it cost money.
In life, the suicide bomber was the least expensive element of the equation. But after the bomber was dead, Hamas had to pay for a lavish spread to celebrate the martyr’s death—lam
bs had to be slaughtered and pastries purchased. The bomber’s family would need to be taken care of financially, of course, for the rest of their lives. The balance sheet by which Hamas could analyze the cost benefit of a particular attack as part of this enormous investment was measured by the number of Israelis killed and maimed in a particular attack.
Major General Giora Eiland was a veteran airborne officer who had participated in the stunning Entebbe rescue, he was the head of the IDF Planning Branch, and he participated in many of the tense political negotiations during the peace process, often accompanying Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in his meetings with Arafat. Eiland understood the expensive infrastructure that groups like Hamas and the PIJ had been allowed to establish in the West Bank and Gaza under Arafat’s protection and tacit support. “Each and every one of the suicide bombings cost upward of tens of thousands of dollars,” he said. “It was a well-oiled machine that couldn’t be stopped by military strikes alone. If you stopped that mechanism and dried up the money you stopped the machine.”10
The man who ran the machinery responsible for the Passover Massacre was Abbas al-Sayyid. Al-Sayyid didn’t look like a master terrorist. Chubby and bookish, the American-educated biomedical engineer had a soft-spoken demeanor and a salt-and-pepper coif that made him look more like a professor, or an artist, than one of the most dangerous terrorist field commanders in the West Bank. Al-Sayyid, however, was a senior commander in the Hamas political wing. In that capacity, he spoke at Hamas functions and politicked openly. But al-Sayyid was also the military commander for the Tulkarm area. He planned operations, received instructions from operatives in Lebanon and Syria, and was responsible for financing a great deal of bloodshed.11 This duplicitous reality enabled al-Sayyid to maintain communications with Hamas offices in Lebanon and Syria through which money and instructions were funneled to the territories. According to reports, monies from overseas, believed to be more than $10,000 a month, were transferred into al-Sayyid’s personal bank accounts; in order to avoid suspicion, he even opened bank accounts in the West Bank under fake American-sounding names.12