Shin Bet agents and analysts from A’man and the Israel National Police entered the targeted banks carrying boxes and large white canvas bags, as did, according to one eyewitness, several men who looked as if they were accountants and bank officers.9 The spies wore black-cloth balaclavas to shield their identities from prying eyes and freelance photographers. The intelligence agents had the names and numbers of 390 accounts that funneled monies from around the world into charities that were connected to the military wings of Hamas, as well as straight into the planning and procurement coffers of the PIJ and Fatah. The accounts included those that had been used to funnel money from known terrorist factions like Hezbollah; accounts directly linked to known terrorist groups; accounts held by terrorists already incarcerated by the State of Israel that had been used to finance operations; and accounts belonging to organizations, such as charities, that had been declared illegal by the State of Israel and still directed funds into these accounts from banks around the world.10
“There were additional raids against bank branches in Jenin and Tulkarm,” Lavi S. remembered. “In some of the operations, we didn’t want to go in and burst through the main doors. We wanted the search of the accounts and the bank computers in an orderly and courteous manner.” As the COGAT representative to the Harpoon task force, Lavi operated in the Palestinian cities, and he knew the bank managers personally. He had their cell phone numbers; he knew where they lived. When Israeli forces were outside the banks, Lavi called the bank officers at home and asked them to come in and open the main door and to watch and witness what the investigators were doing.11
Computers were grabbed and files downloaded. Operation Green Lantern resulted in the confiscation of more than 40 million shekels of money destined for terror cells in the West Bank.12 Every dollar bill and shekel note seized was photographed, videotaped, and cataloged. The Israelis wanted to make sure that there could be no accusations against any of the soldiers that money had been stolen.
There were several arrests, as well, including the director of computer systems for the bank. Most of the bank customers and employees were released after their identities could be established; the managers and their technical assistants were held for a few hours longer.13 “The first thought that struck me was that it was an armed robbery,” Emil Barham, a manager at one of the banks targeted by Israeli forces operating on the Harpoon directive, told Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, “then we realized it really was an armed robbery.”14
According to one Border Guard special operations commander at the scene, “The raid was a discovery of enormous reward. It was like discovering a new element or oil. It opened up possibilities to expand our efforts to stop the money.”15
Israeli forces were in Ramallah all day. The files had to be cataloged and boxed and then taken to the regional Shin Bet headquarters, where Arabic-speaking specialists and police economic-crime analysts could review the paperwork and computer files for evidence that could be used to roll up terror networks and be used in the subsequent criminal prosecutions.
The soldiers and policemen were all debriefed at length by their commanders upon their return to base, before being dispatched to the dining hall. The cooks greeted the returning soldiers and policemen with a late dinner, though most of the soldiers simply wanted to go grab some sleep. The Shin Bet case officers, and members of the Harpoon team, however, didn’t want to leave the evidence. They stayed at headquarters all night. The captured material was that good.
The U.S. State Department weighed in on Operation Green Lantern before the commandos even had a chance to eat their meals. Richard Boucher, the veteran spokesman who had served under several secretaries of state, stated, “The Israeli action threatens to destroy the Palestinian banking system. We prefer that Israel work with the legal Palestinian authorities to stop the flow of money to terror groups.”16 The response from Foggy Bottom, however, was muted compared to what Israel received from the White House. President Bush was furious. “He was livid with what we did in Green Lantern, absolutely livid.” Uri recalled hearing that Bush lectured Prime Minister Sharon that seizing money was the kind of thing that Third World dictators did. “The U.S. president said that what we did reminded him of the ‘Wild West.’”17
Daniel C. Kurtzer, the American ambassador to Israel, demanded a full explanation—Harpoon, and the NSC, scrambled to assemble their case. An Israeli contingent met Ambassador Kurtzer and several other U.S. embassy staffers—political and economic officers—off post from the U.S. embassy, at an undisclosed location in Tel Aviv. Brigadier General Arditi and Uri led the Israeli contingent; they were joined by an operative, who was responsible for counterterrorist cooperation with the United States, and an officer who was responsible for international counterterrorist cooperation.18 Kurtzer knew all the players in the room quite well; the interaction was routine. But the ambassador’s mood was dour and he reiterated President Bush’s anger.
Arditi explained that the operation came at great political concern for stability in the PA and that American and, indeed, international concerns were taken into consideration. But Arditi stressed that there was a pressing immediacy for the Israeli action. Hezbollah, he explained, was benefiting from the emerging sense of chaos in the Palestinian territories and had managed to exploit gaps in operational coverage between the IDF and security services in the West Bank and Gaza. Arditi explained to Kurtzer that Hezbollah was able to inject support for the terror factions through three main channels: smuggling funds, drugs, and weapons across the Lebanese border; the recruitment of Israeli-Arab citizens to serve as spies and couriers who are approached during the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, or when traveling or studying abroad; and through funds deposited into the Arab Bank. Uri and Arditi stressed to Ambassador Kurtzer that not only were Hezbollah, Hamas, and the PIJ using the Arab Bank, but so was al-Qaeda and forces loyal to Saddam Hussein.
But Kurtzer, speaking on behalf of the president he served, was adamant that as far as the White House was concerned, the raid on the Arab Bank branches in particular crossed a line in the sand. The ambassador lambasted the optics of driving tanks and armored vehicles straight up to a bank entrance and simply to steal bags of cash. Kurtzer emphasized that these John Dillinger tactics should not be used again.
The Israelis explained that their intelligence officials could prove that every penny, pence, and dinar seized from Operation Green Lantern was directly related to terror. Arditi and Uri also argued that PA Finance Minister Salam Fayyad’s inaction presented Israel with little choice but to act militarily. The Israelis weren’t like Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde, Kurtzer was reassured; the Israeli Ministry of Defense pledged that the funds confiscated from the three targeted banks would be channeled back to the PA finance minister for the benefit of humanitarian aid and welfare for the Palestinians.19
The Palestinians, publicly, at least, didn’t want to hear anything about the money that Israel pledged to return. Operation Green Lantern caught the Palestinian Authority completely by surprise. Negotiators who worked with the Israelis and even the Palestinian security services that maintained communications with their counterparts in Israel, especially with the Shin Bet and COGAT, were dumbfounded by the aggressive Israeli move.
Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian prime minister, called the Israeli operation a very dangerous violation of the norms even between the two parties. “To go to the banks, to take photos of all the documents, to take the employees out, the customers of the bank, to kick them out and to take the bank. It’s like Mafia. It’s a kind of Mafia war,” Qureia said.20
There was another, and more pressing, concern that the Palestinian politicians only hinted at. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian minister for negotiations who was a mainstay on news networks around the world as a surrogate for Arafat, expressed his concern that the action could cause Palestinians to fear the stability and safety of the banking system and to pull all their cash out of the banks. “This is destructive to the Palestinian economy, and people
are really worried,” he said.21 The Palestinians were fearful that Israel was set to unravel the very threads of the Palestinian economy. Green Lantern came days after the Palestinian security services had just confirmed that Iranian money, some sent as Hezbollah wire transfers, had paid for—lock, stock, and barrel—the last two suicide bus bombings in Jerusalem that killed nineteen and wounded close to one hundred.22 The Palestinians were worried that the Israelis would target the very fabric of their lives just as the suicide bombers had targeted the very pillars of day-to-day life in Israel. The fear on the Palestinian street was that the Israelis would exact a price for the violence and that the price wouldn’t come in the form of land or symbols of nationalism, but rather from the wallets of the average Palestinian.
The fear on the streets made Meir Dagan and his Harpoon inner circle happy. He wanted there to be a price paid for the innocent Israelis killed and the families forever destroyed by the violence. Harpoon’s very mandate made it abundantly clear that any person or nation that provided anything of value to a terrorist or terrorist organization would be deemed to be providing them with material support. Money was recognized as an essential component of terrorism—the same as training, safe houses, weapons, and explosives. Money was the oxygen of the terrorist groups, and without it they could not carry out their recruitment, training, or deadly operations.
Dagan wanted the terrorists to look for money instead of targets. He wanted them poor and feckless. Dagan didn’t give a damn about the international outcry; he knew that American outrage would dissipate.* And Dagan certainly didn’t lose a moment of sleep about the negative press. He was convinced the intelligence gleaned from the operation would be so good that it would outweigh all concerns.
It took weeks for forensic accountants to decipher all the intelligence gleaned from Operation Green Lantern. Each account seized was analyzed and every transaction studied. Some troublesome realities were revealed from the boxes and boxes of paperwork, and that involved the Western Union Company. All of the Arab Bank branches that were addressed in “Green Lantern” enabled the wiring of money to and from the West Bank from any place in the world. Western Union, founded in 1866 as a telegram company, was based in Colorado. Targeting this major corporation presented Harpoon with a significant quandary. Millions of dollars that had come into the hands of Hamas commanders came through this established American institution.
But Green Lantern revealed something more valuable. Sitting inside the boxes and bags of evidence were paper trails that shattered the notion that institutions, like the Arab Bank, weren’t responsible for the funds they maintained for known terrorists. The smoking guns, as far as Israel was concerned, involved funds transferred through innocuous accounts to the families of suicide bombers. There were examples that stood out in Dagan’s mind: the Arab Bank branch in Tulkarm transferred grants to families of PIJ suicide bombers through third parties; the family of a suicide bomber who wounded thirty-four people in the March 2003 attack at the Café London in Netanya who received 15,000 Jordanian dinars for his death and the subsequent Israeli punitive operation that destroyed their home; and rounds of payments that were transferred to the Saudi Committee for Aid to the al-Aqsa Martyr Families through the Arab Bank, which averaged 20,000 Saudi rials.23
Had he been a prosecutor, Dagan knew, the material seized in Green Lantern would have been enough to sway a judge and jury. When faced with such evidence and its own internal logs and files, the Arab Bank couldn’t plausibly deny that it had facilitated the transfer of monies into accounts used to finance acts of murder—in some cases the monies transferred to the West Bank and Gaza originated from the official accounts belonging to Hamas and the PIJ. In other cases, money sent from Damascus, Beirut, Tehran, and Jeddah were transferred into Arab Bank accounts in the West Bank and Gaza that were maintained by men who were known—to the Israelis and to the PA—as members of a terrorist group.
The information seized in Green Lantern was ammunition. Dagan and the Harpoon team simply had to figure out how to use it.
CHAPTER NINE
The Letter of the Law
Intelligence that isn’t used is simply being wasted.
—Meir Dagan
Meir Dagan expected that the Americans would be irritated by the Israeli action, though he could not understand the extent of the outrage. Sometimes the Americans were baffling to the Israelis; Dagan was certain the Israelis baffled the Americans, as well. But President Bush’s sincere outrage over an Israeli military operation that didn’t result in any casualties was a litmus test to the limitations of America’s resolve. Israel realized that it had restrictions in what moves it made, especially going after banks and Arab economies. Some in Israel said that Americans simply lacked the creativity to be successful at combating terror. “What do Americans know about counterterrorism?” the commander of a special operations unit operating along Israel’s border with Gaza once scolded a group of visiting U.S. police chiefs during the intifada. “You don’t have to live with this day in and day out.”1
The lackluster international interest in targeting the money puzzled the Israelis to no end. Early on, for example, Harpoon had discovered that Hezbollah in Lebanon had set up an operation to counterfeit United States currency. Harpoon officials met with law enforcement agencies around the world to inform them of the threat of international security posed by a terrorist outfit that had the means to successfully counterfeit a major global currency. As a Harpoon member recalled, “We were passed from agency to agency and no one cared. We said we are talking about fake U.S. dollars, the super bill, being printed up by the dangerous Hezbollah terrorists, but people didn’t seem to care. One American law enforcement agency asked us how much money Hezbollah was printing, and we responded $50 million. ‘That’s all?’ was their response. It was like it didn’t matter. But we told them, ‘This is money for terrorism. Do you know what terrorists can do with $50 million?’”2
Meir Dagan sat in his chair and smiled as he reviewed the classified reports detailing what was learned from Green Lantern. As director of Mossad, he had a schedule that ran from dawn to dusk, but he always had time for Harpoon business. He reviewed the information seized with great interest; Dagan discussed the findings from Uri and his counterparts in the Shin Bet and A’man. The trove of data showed a highly detailed trail of money from point of origin to detonation on an Israeli bus and inside a crowded café. From Harpoon’s perspective, the evidence linking money that traveled through the Arab Bank and the salaries and pensions of dead or convicted terrorists was irrefutable. The files were cataloged and stored in subfolders inside other subfolders, inside a folder on a government server. And that was where they stayed. And that infuriated Dagan to no end.
Dagan believed that intelligence that wasn’t used somehow was wasted material. “It was collected for a reason,” he once told a Harpoon representative during a meeting of the roundtable, “so it was up to the spies to use it.”3 Many Israeli intelligence officials were horrified when Dagan dispatched Uri and Shai around the world to friendly nations to share files, albeit watered-down versions. Letting outsiders glimpse Israeli intelligence files was considered sacrilegious to these veterans. They believed that maintaining absolute secrecy about the information in their possession was critical to Israel’s security. The stalwarts argued that Israeli intelligence’s means and methods for gathering information were compromised the more people saw it. Dagan would have none of it. Still, the information failed to spark the interest of the allied nations involved in the war on terror. Dagan was dumbfounded and frustrated. In fact, he was continuously thinking of novel approaches to use the Green Lantern bounty in the most innovative ways—ways that the Americans would understand and, begrudgingly, admire.
There was a new battlefield in the war against terrorist finances that was gaining traction and grabbing headlines that didn’t involve spies or soldiers. In fact, it involved lawyers. When Dagan and Uri sat down together in the director’s office to exchange id
eas and talk about operational matters, the conversations could last for hours. The two men fed off one another, like scientists in a lab on the verge of a monumental breakthrough, and together they conceived plans and complex missions that were daring and quite imaginable. The two men also talked about academic matters that touched on Middle Eastern issues. Sometimes, the two men spoke about the limits of Israeli power. Green Lantern highlighted the reach of Israeli might, as well as its constraints.
In one of the meetings when Dagan and Uri spoke shop, the director discussed an idea that was taking place in the war on terror about going after the banks in a new type of battlefield where lawyers, rather than commandos, would do the fighting. What if the victims of terror sued the banks for damages? Some lawyers in Israel and the United States had already filed suits against the PLO and other terror groups, as well as the outlaw regimes that sponsored them. The financial institutions that allowed this money to flow could be next. The media attention of such a legal onslaught would be humiliating and damaging to the banks’ owners. Suing for damages could even result in the banks’ collapse, denying Hamas, the PLO, and the PIJ with their financial lifeline.
There was no recourse in Israel for such a litigious idea. The State of Israel did not have the legal power or jurisdiction to bring the Arab Bank—or the other financial institutions used by the terrorists—to court. The International Court in the Hague, the Netherlands, wasn’t an option, either. Public opinion wasn’t very pro-Israel, and the world body didn’t have enforceable laws on the books—or the political will to compel them—to make banks in the Arab world cease and desist the use of their financial institutions to fund the bloodshed. Its jurisdiction was extremely limited as well. The answer was in the United States and, more specifically, in the 1992 Anti-Terrorism Act.
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