Harpoon

by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

  Go where the money is… and go there often.

  —attributed to Willie Sutton

  The goal of the Palestinian terrorists perpetrating the intifada violence was to coerce Israel to capitulate to the demands that Palestinian Authority President Arafat couldn’t achieve at the negotiation table. As the brutal bombings and shootings continued, Israel became an armed camp. Every school, every cinema, every bar and café had guards posted at their entrances. Frequently, they were the first victims of the suicide attacks. Tourism collapsed, leaving thousands of tour guides and hotel workers unemployed. Families began to avoid taking buses. Once-crowded shopping malls were empty, and diners in restaurants kept a nervous eye on the doorway. Israelis, who were once addicted to listening to the hourly news updates on radio, now dreaded tuning into the Voice of Israel, fearing what they would hear. Television broadcasts were frequently interrupted with live reports from the scene of the latest attack.

  The year 2003 was a bloody year in Israel. There were twenty-three suicide bombings in the twelve months of intifada violence; 145 Israelis died in the bloodshed, and more than five hundred were critically injured. Some of the attacks were absolutely horrific. It started off on January 5 with twenty-three people killed and another 120 wounded in a double suicide bombing near the old Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. The attack was carried out by two terrorists from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a faction of Yasir Arafat’s Fatah group that was responsible for many of the bombings. The suicide bombing of a bus in Jerusalem on August 19 resulted in twenty-three dead and more than one hundred wounded. One of the worst attacks was the Islamic Jihad suicide bombing of the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, which killed twenty-two people and wounded nearly one hundred; the bomber, a female lawyer from Jenin, looked into the eye of a small child sitting across from her before she detonated her lethal payload.1

  The battles between Israeli counterterrorist forces and the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure escalated. The IDF targeted senior terrorist leaders. Israeli intelligence maintained a determined vigil monitoring phone calls and movements, and still the bombers managed to slip through. The loss of life was numbing to Meir Dagan. He spent sleepless nights grappling with the conviction that another front had to be opened.

  The Arab Bank remained the hub behind much of the bloodshed, linking the attacks to their commanders and interlocutors overseas. But no matter how much pressure was applied against the financial powerhouse, the bank continued to do business as usual. Saudi money, donations from Muslims living abroad, money disguised as charity, all flowed into the bank and into the Palestinian areas. Dagan tried to keep the pressure on. In Harpoon meetings, Dagan and Uri L. pressed the Shin Bet and A’man representatives for any information that enhanced their understanding as to how the bank facilitated the suicide bombing campaign. On Dagan’s orders, anyone who touched the blood money was targeted—including those who enabled the transfer of funds from overseas. Europe was very problematic for Dagan. Europe hadn’t been struck hard by terrorism like the United States on 9/11 and its commitment to the war on terror, in Jerusalem’s eyes, was spotty.

  As the Mossad director, Dagan valued Israel’s strong relationships with the European intelligence services. As a Jew, and one shaped by the Holocaust, Dagan viewed European interest in Israel’s security with great skepticism. He grew frustrated by Europe’s lack of collective concern in doing something meaningful to stop the funds flowing into the territories. His personal efforts with the European Union were a failure. “Dagan and I met many dozens of times with senior officials from the European Union, as well as in European capitals, to try our best and convince these leaders to shut down the Hamas charitable foundations on the continent,” Uri recalled.2

  The niceties of European diplomacy infuriated Dagan and Uri. The two men were used to dressing casually, even in meetings with the prime minister. But to fit in inside the civilized confines of the European Union’s seat of power, the Israelis now were required to wear dark suits; they positively hated wearing jackets and ties. Still, the Israelis went, carrying attaché cases full of sanitized intelligence that implicated charities situated on the continent, funneling money from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah through branches of banks that ultimately ended up in the hands of Hamas and PIJ cell commanders.

  Their efforts met with little success. “Not only did the European Union do nothing to stem the flow of money flowing into Hamas from the continent, but they also said that the issue was ours to deal with and had nothing to do with them. Moreover, in the niceties of European diplomacy that we should cease and desist in our efforts to investigate money transfers and the continent’s banking system, as we would then be in violation of bank privacy laws.”3 Dagan and Uri were flabbergasted.

  Dagan, incensed by European inaction and the flow of terrorist money, began to finally cultivate the seed of a dramatic idea that had been ruminating in his mind for a while.

  The traditional thinking of Israeli counterterrorist operations was to attack up: Compromise a cell, use the information gleaned from physical evidence such as a phone or notes, combine it with interrogation sessions, and then press upward and forward to target the command structure—the bomb builders, the operational planners, and, of course, the financiers. Dagan wanted to change the paradigm. He wanted to strike at the top of the food chain. What Dagan was thinking required action that was raucously effective; he sought a game-changing move. He didn’t care about political repercussions. He wanted results.

  As 2003 came to a close, Dagan convened a meeting of his Harpoon roundtable. The representatives from the various agencies and units sat around the conference table and reviewed the agenda over pitchers of coffee. The Arab Bank was one of the primary agenda items. As Dagan and the assembled men and women around him discussed intelligence reports and the raw data, Dagan smiled and paused. “Why not just take over the bank and the terror-related accounts,” he asked, “just as had been done with Ghazi Qassam Issa A’juli.”4

  A’juli had appeared on Harpoon’s radar months earlier. He was one of the most prominent money changers in Ramallah and maintained vast revenues and cash assets. He moved around like a head of state, protected by heavily armed security men, but few would have been foolish enough to rob him—A’juli was connected to both Hamas and Fatah. He was a money facilitator who played a key role in financing the suicide bombing attacks perpetrated against Israel’s cities.5 A’juli was a smart businessman and didn’t trust his cash reserves solely in the floor safes he had dug under his residences throughout the West Bank, and he didn’t trust Arab financial institutions. His money was spread throughout Israeli banks, in branches in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And that was where Dagan’s force struck first. Harpoon at first froze and then confiscated his bank accounts in Israel—the Israeli Attorney General’s Office liaison to Harpoon made sure that the endeavor was legal. And then the Shin Bet and the special operations units took over.

  Late one chilly winter’s night, the Shin Bet and Israeli commandos stormed A’juli’s office in Ramallah. The forces seized A’juli’s computers and his coded list of clients, including what monies were handled, who deposited them, and where the payouts had to be made and how. The raiding party also seized cash—hundreds of thousands of dollars, shekels, British sterling, and Jordanian dinars.

  Some of the officers, including representatives from the Mossad and Shin Bet, now thought that Dagan was joking when he spoke of mounting an operation against the Arab Bank that would mimic the one carried out against A’juli. They chuckled uncomfortably, hoping not to offend the Mossad director. But Dagan was dead serious. A successful operation in Ramallah against one of the region’s most powerful money changers cemented the notion in Dagan’s head that Israel’s intelligence services and military could target the terrorist money sitting inside the banks. One of the primary West Bank money pipelines to Hamas had been shut off. Dagan wanted to replicate the A’juli model with the Arab Bank.

  There wa
s precedent for the proposed operation. In 2001, in a small raid, the Shin Bet and the IDF raided a bank in al-Eizariya, a village east of Jerusalem, after intelligence had linked an account with 37,000 new Israeli shekels in it to a terror chieftain and specific terror attacks.6 Israeli forces entered the bank and seized the account with the supervision of the branch manager and other witnesses so that there could be no accusations that Israeli forces helped themselves to cash or anything else. The raid in al-Eizariya yielded a paper trail of accounts, addresses, and phone numbers. It was a whole different concern, though, to go after a bank the size of the Arab Bank.

  There was political risk in targeting a bank, but the Amman-based Arab Bank posed unique sensitivities. Israel did not want to harm its relationship with Jordan, one of the two Arab nations that had diplomatic relations and a peace treaty with the Jewish State. King Abdullah II, the Jordanian monarch and a former commando officer, was one of the few world leaders who understood the tactical necessities of bold steps in the fight against terror. But the Arab Bank was a financial pillar in the Hashemite Kingdom and a key to economic stability in the country, and stability—while a terrorist war raged against Israel and the United States led by an international coalition to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq—was critical. More than 60 percent of the Jordanian population was Palestinian or of Palestinian descent and now hundreds of thousands of refugees were pouring into the country from Iraq. A stable Jordan was critical for Israeli security. The Americans, too, Dagan knew, would weigh in against any unilateral Israeli operation against a bank that was so intrinsically linked to the day-to-day lives of the Palestinian population. President Bush had always made it clear that Israel’s war should be against the terror factions and not against the Palestinian people, and doing anything that could topple the Palestinian economy would evoke the ire of the American president, even one who was so outspokenly pro-Israel as George W. Bush.

  Dagan could have sent Uri to Washington, D.C., to plead Israel’s case and measure the American administration’s feelings about an operation against the Arab Bank. But Dagan decided against it. There wasn’t time to shake hands and beg for permission. Iran, Harpoon would learn, made a serious effort to wield influence over the Hamas and PIJ cells planning and perpetrating the bombing campaign by flooding the West Bank with money. The Iranian cash, most of which came into the PA via the Arab Bank, was in a series of accounts that were centered in the bank’s branch in Ramallah; other accounts were in branches of the Cairo Amman Bank, a forty-four-year-old financial institution based in Amman with twenty-one branches throughout the West Bank.

  As many arguments as there were advising against a strike on the Arab Bank, the most compelling argument supporting an operation was the fact that the bloodshed continued without letup.

  The New Year brought even more terror attacks. On January 29, 2004, once again a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian policeman from Bethlehem named Ali Yusef Ja’ara, boarded the No. 19 bus in Jerusalem. Ja’ara wore civilian clothes and carried a bag weighed down by a powerful combination of high explosives and metal shards collected from a construction site. Ja’ara paid his fare and then moved toward the rear of the crowded bus.

  The bus ferried passengers between the two main Hadassah Hospital campuses, one in Jerusalem’s city center and one on Mount Scopus. Shortly after 9:00 AM, as the bus reached a crowded intersection near the prime minister’s residence, Ja’ara triggered his device. The seven kilograms of explosives he carried chewed through the bus, blowing out the windows and punching a gaping hole through the side of the vehicle. The force of the blast ripped the roof open like a can of sardines; the ensuing inferno incinerated victims and plastic seats.

  The suicide bombing killed eleven and left more than fifty seriously wounded. One of them was Canadian-born therapist Scott Goldberg, who had opted not to take his regular bus to work. That morning, for reason unknown, he took the No. 19 en route to his clinic, where he treated at-risk kids. He never made it. He left behind a wife and seven children, aged two to sixteen.

  A few weeks later, on February 22, another al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem. This time eight people were killed and sixty wounded.

  Although Dagan no longer cared about the repercussions of going after the Arab Bank, the Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz did. Naturally reticent and new to the job, Mazuz wanted to make sure that Israel was in full compliance with the law. A member of Mazuz’s staff was assigned to Harpoon, but Dagan and Uri had decided to meet with Mazuz directly and present him with the compelling legal argument, showing the attorney general the sensitive intelligence that prompted them to propose so controversial an operation.

  Dagan and Uri were a convincing team. Mazuz gave them the green light they sought. Once the planned strike received the legal thumbs-up, Dagan took his idea to Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who also endorsed it. The final word, however, belonged to Prime Minister Sharon. There was a blind trust between Dagan and Sharon, and the Mossad director knew deep down inside that the operation would be authorized. Sharon, like Dagan, cared little for political fallout when the question of action or inaction involved Israeli lives.

  Brigadier General Danny Arditi, the head of the Counterterrorism Bureau, was quickly summoned. Arditi was a veteran of Sayeret Mat’kal and had participated in the legendary commando raid to free Israeli and Jewish hostages on a hijacked French airliner in Entebbe in July 1976. He had served as the coordinator for Israeli special operations and understood the value of lightning raids in rewriting the counterterrorist narrative. The commanders of Israel’s most secretive units as well as Shin Bet and IDF operations officers were summoned to work out the details. The operation was codenamed “Green Lantern.”7

  The army cooks at the Binyamin Territorial Brigade, the IDF formation responsible for security operations around the Ramallah area, were up well before dawn on the morning of February 25, 2004. In addition to the normal breakfast rush they were asked to feed close to a hundred counterterrorist commandos, soldiers, and Border Guard paramilitary policemen who would muster at the base for an operation later that morning. The soldiers filed into the dining hall quietly, weapons slung across their shoulders, and grabbed available seats for a quick fill of eggs and cheese and the obligatory Israeli chopped vegetable salad that completed every military breakfast. The soldiers and police officers bantered with one another and laughed; most of the jokes centered on the horrible coffee. The soldiers checked their watches and hurried up to finish what was on their plates. The briefings were at 0700.

  Every mission, regardless of size, was always preceded by lengthy and often exhaustive briefings by divisional commanders, the brigade staff, unit commanders, and team leaders. These men, the generals and colonels, used PowerPoint presentations, topographical maps, aerial photographs, and blackboards with different-colored chalk scribbles to address each and every aspect of the morning’s counterterrorist operation. The intelligence heads, the men who ran spies and those who analyzed the data, were always present. They were, after all, the brains behind the firepower. The operations began with them, and they were always present to connect the dots for the men who would be bursting through doors and taking hostile fire. Israel’s counterterrorism strategy was predicated with intelligence work—from small-scale operations involving a case agent and a human source, meeting in a safe house, to large-scale operations involving a hundred commandos.

  At 0940 a small armada of vehicles and armored personnel carriers departed the brigade’s headquarters for three targets in Ramallah. Members from the Border Guards’ undercover unit, known as the Ya’mas, had already been positioned inside Ramallah, deployed at strategic locations throughout the city to assist the task force; the undercover operatives, disguised as Palestinians, were used to operating deep behind enemy lines. The Green Lantern convoy headed north at full speed toward the Palestinian capital, and then the vehicles split into several different c
ontingents. One force headed toward the Central Bank of the Palestinian Authority. Another rushed toward the city’s main branch of the Cairo Amman Bank. The largest contingent raced toward the main Arab Bank branch in Ramallah, as well as four other smaller branches in the area. Drones flew overhead, providing the intelligence chiefs and the divisional commander with a bird’s-eye view of real-time intelligence; the small yet invaluable unmanned aerial vehicles were, for the most part, piloted by nineteen-year-old female conscripts. Israel Air Force attack helicopters flew cover overhead.

  At precisely 1000 the commandos raced out of their vehicles, rushing to the main doors of the targeted banks.8 They breached the fortified doors and secured the teller stations and the rear offices, making sure no armed men were present. Dagan wanted the banks to be raided during business hours to deliver the message that Israel could and would reach into the lives and the pockets of the Palestinians involved in paying for the blood across the Green Line, the demarcation frontier from the pre–1967 War borders. There was a message to be sent in displaying the military might. But the assaulting teams were under strict orders to treat the customers and employees inside with the greatest respect. Arabic-speaking specialists explained to the bank managers the nature of the operation.

  Infantrymen and Border Guard policemen protected the outer perimeter, keeping Palestinian Authority security personnel far from the operation. But the soldiers and policemen were met by a steady barrage of rocks and Molotov cocktails thrown from young Palestinian men who had gathered to respond to the Israeli incursion. Arabic-speaking Israeli police officers pleaded with the crowds to disperse, explaining that the bank operation had nothing to do with law-abiding residents, but violence ensued. The Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets to keep the protesters away. Several of the Palestinians were wounded, as were some of the Israeli soldiers. Ramallah was Area A under Oslo, and even after Operation Defensive Shield, Israeli forces were not supposed to operate inside the city.