Harpoon

by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

  In July 2004, Gary Osen, an attorney from New Jersey, took the lead and filed the first civil action under the Anti-Terrorism Act against the Arab Bank in Brooklyn, New York. The plaintiffs, victims of the intifada violence, alleged that the bank had aided and abetted terrorism by providing financial services to the terrorist organizations in the West Bank and Gaza. They accused the bank of administering and transferring the funds that were being solicited and paid out as a rewards program to the terrorists and the families of the suicide bombers. It was claimed this intentional provision of payments to the terrorist induced the violence and encouraged additional suicide attacks. The Arab Bank had recklessly provided its services for the terrorist rewards program while maintaining an office in Manhattan. The federal courts had jurisdiction over the case and the bank could not escape. The case created quite a stir in U.S. litigation circles. Nitsana and her colleagues served as cocounsel with Osen in a number of the civil actions filed against the Arab Bank in New York.

  In the aftermath of this first, well-publicized proceeding against a banking institution for terrorism, many law firms across the United States sprang into action and filed their own proceedings against the Arab Bank, copying the legal theory and allegations. The litigation firms understood that unlike the actions being brought against the state sponsors and the terror groups or even the Palestinian Authority, financial institutions had very deep pockets, and judgments against the banks could be easily enforced. Overnight these high-risk cases were now attracting the attention of the cowboy trial lawyers looking for the next broncos to break in.

  The Israelis suddenly saw a gold rush of big American litigators, some with even bigger egos, flying into Israel and requesting urgent meetings with them. They were members of the personal injury and mass torts bar; they believed terror-victim litigation against financial institutions was going to become the next big trend in law, and they were determined not to miss out. The publicity from the early cases and the large judgment awards had gotten their attention and set off a frenzy of American law firms that wanted in on the action. Many lawyers fearful of being in the Jewish state at the time of intifada violence hired private security guards and armed drivers to accompany them around.

  “It was really surreal. We spent days in hotel lobbies meeting with these asbestos, tobacco, plane crash, and silicone breast implant lawyers, dressed to the nines, pleading with us in their strange accents and southern drawls to work with them on terrorism cases,” Nitsana recalled. “They started to take ads out in the papers soliciting victims to join their suits. The ads seemed very crude to us; it was like out of some John Grisham novel.” Regardless of the motivation of the lawyers or the lawsuits, the fact remained that more and more cases started to get filed against the terrorists, the state sponsors, and the banks on behalf of the victims. A new area of international legal practice had been established.

  Meir Dagan and the Harpoon leadership looked at this development with great delight.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Higher Cost of Murder

  Israelis divide the year by the Jewish holidays. The New Year signals in the onset of autumn and an end to the oppressive summer heat. Hanukah is the festival of lights, and the winter holiday illuminates homes across the country with a joyous sense of miracles. Passover—or Pesach, as it’s known in Hebrew—is the holiday of freedom. Passover commemorates the story of the Exodus, and liberation from slavery in Egypt. The holiday ushers in the arrival of spring when hopes blossom throughout the country. The trees are lush and the flowers bloom during this festive season. It is a time of the year when the optimism is infectious.

  Passover is a peak season for tourism to Israel and tourism in Israel. Jews from all over the Diaspora rush to the country to spend the precious few days with family and friends, while Israelis, off from work and school, visit the country’s landmarks in massive numbers. Airlines and hotels raise prices to profit off the demand; traffic around the country is gridlocked. Tourism to Israel suffered a mighty blow during the intifada—only 718,000 foreign tourists visited in 2002, the bloodiest year of the violence, reflecting a sharp decline from the 2.7 million travelers who flocked to the nation’s hotels and eateries in 2000.1 Industries like tour guides and bus companies, as well as many hotels, had all but shut down as the suicide bombings escalated. The tourists, though, began to return. In 2006 they returned in strong numbers. The suicide bombings had become less frequent in the two previous years.

  The tourists even returned to the gritty side streets around the old central bus station in Tel Aviv, in the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood. The area had deteriorated over time, and the neighborhood had become a slum, home to scores of Romanian, Bulgarian, African, and Filipino workers who flocked to Israel as replacements for Palestinian day laborers barred from entering the country because of the intifada. The area was high-crime, and littered with bars and brothels, as well as fast food holes-in-the-wall.

  The Rosh Ha’Ir Shawarma restaurant on Salomon Street was always packed with hungry customers who were looking for a bargain meal. On January 19, 2006, the restaurant sustained serious damage when it was the target of a suicide bomber. The bomber, sent to Tel Aviv by the PIJ’s Jerusalem Brigade, was inside the restaurant’s restroom preparing his suicide vest when a malfunction caused it to detonate prematurely, muffling the force of the explosion. Still, thirty people were wounded in the blast.

  Three months later the PIJ tried again. It was Passover. At 1:30 on the warm and brilliantly sunny afternoon of April 17, 2006, a suicide bomber attempted to enter the Rosh Ha’Ir Shawarma restaurant. A fair-skinned twenty-one-year-old from a small village near the West Bank town of Jenin, he zigzagged his way through the holiday chaos between the foreign workers and shoppers. A security guard, who had just been hired following the earlier attack, was positioned outside the establishment and challenged the young man. When he searched the young man’s bag, a thunderous explosion punched through the restaurant and the surrounding street. Storefront windows disappeared into a million razor-sharp shards.

  The guard, Benjamin Haputa, a forty-seven-year-old bachelor, was the first one to be killed. When he had taken the job, his sister asked him if he wasn’t concerned for his safety. Haputa replied: “Wherever it’s written I’ll die, that’s when I’ll die. What is the chance that a terrorist will come twice to the same place to carry out an attack?”

  The dead and the dying were eviscerated by the force of the blast and the shrapnel it spewed in all directions. By the time CNN was ready to go to air with a live report, nine people were already dead. Two more, Lior Anidzar, a twenty-six-year-old resident of Tel Aviv, and sixteen-year-old American Daniel Wultz of Weston, Florida, would die weeks later.2

  The bombing of the Rosh Ha’Ir eatery in Tel Aviv was the deadliest Palestinian terrorist attack since the April 31, 2004, double suicide bombing of two buses in the southern city of Beersheba, in which sixteen were killed and more than one hundred were seriously wounded. It was the last catastrophic suicide attack of the intifada. In 2002, the year that Harpoon fell under the Mossad’s order of battle, the Palestinian terrorist groups carried out forty-seven suicide bombings against civilians inside Israel, resulting in almost five hundred killed and thousands wounded. There were seventeen suicide bombings in 2004—sixty-four Israelis were killed in these attacks and several hundred more were seriously wounded.* By 2005, Palestinian terrorists launched nine attacks that killed thirty Israelis.

  The war wasn’t over, of course. The terrorist groups were still intent on dealing lethal blows to Israel’s population centers whenever they could. But that window of opportunity had diminished over time. The Shin Bet and A’man had undermined the Palestinian terror leadership with a relentless intelligence-gathering effort involving human assets and signals intelligence. Entire networks had been destroyed by the Israeli intelligence surge. The special operations units that hunted terrorists for a living had more targets than they could go after as a result of the incoming intelligen
ce. The most capable Palestinian lieutenants and operational commanders were dead or incarcerated; the next generation was too scared to rear their heads out in the open. The Shin Bet had a term for decapitating the terrorist leadership: It was known as “cutting the grass.”

  It had become harder for the suicide bombers to get into Israel. The government built a formidable security barrier stretching for much of the length of the West Bank. Palestinians struggled to smuggle suicide bombers across the once-invisible frontier. The separation barrier, which in some stretches was a sixty-foot-high concrete wall, mainly consisted of multitiered rows of fences, pyramid-shaped stacks of barbed-wire concertina, anti-intrusion technology, as well as adjacent patrol roads; watchtowers, manned by Israeli soldiers, dotted the barrier.

  Just as important, the terror commanders no longer had free access to the endless flow of money from overseas. Meir Dagan and his Harpoon team had redefined the cost of terror. Fewer dollars and dinars were getting through the gauntlet. Financial institutions that had earned a hefty percentage point off of every wire transfer and martyr payment were now under great scrutiny. Transactions meant to be invisible were now public. Lawsuits had been filed. Bank managers and boards of directors in the Middle East were careful to exercise fiduciary responsibility over who their banks did business with, eager to avoid the spotlight of a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan or covert measures from Israeli intelligence.

  Israel’s security services had, at Harpoon’s lead, focused on the men carrying cash with the same zeal that they did pursuing the suicide bombers who carried their explosive payloads into Israel’s cities. The couriers, the smugglers, and the money changers found themselves under enormous pressure from police and the IDF.

  That year, the disputed prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, visited Iran and was given a $40 million advance on the $250 million pledged by the Islamic Republic, in donations for Hamas. Haniyah was unable to utilize the banking system to wire the funds home, because financial institutions now refused to operate in terror zones like Gaza. The banks’ fear of lawsuits outweighed their interest in the fees they could earn by transferring funds for the terror groups and rogue regimes. Haniyeh was forced to load the cash into twenty-five suitcases. After flying from Tehran to Sudan, the Hamas leader loaded the bags onto a leased truck and drove with an entourage of heavily armed security men across the desert into Egypt and then through Sinai to the Gaza border.

  At the checkpoint, Haniyeh was stopped by the IDF. Tipped off about his hidden treasure, Israeli forces refused to allow him to enter with the funds that they knew would be utilized for terror. Ismail Haniyeh, however, would not agree to enter the Hamas enclave without his suitcases. A standoff at the checkpoint ensued. Haniyeh demanded to be admitted with his luggage, insisting that he had diplomatic immunity. Israel refused to budge, stating that the Hamas leader could enter Gaza but the bags had to stay behind. The armed Hamas men grew impatient and wildly began to fire their weapons, shooting up the border crossing facility. Egyptian security forces fired back. At least fifteen Hamas members were injured in the fray.

  Alerted to the escalating standoff on the Gaza border, the Arab League, and its twenty-two-nation membership, stepped in to assist Haniyeh. They offered to ferry the funds to a bank in Cairo and deposit them in a designated account in their name. The Hamas leader would proceed to Gaza and the Arab League would find a way to get the Iranian donations to Haniyeh in due course. Haniyeh and his colleagues reluctantly stuffed some of the money into their pockets and crossed into Gaza, while the remaining $35 million was deposited in the Cairo Amman Bank.3

  Harpoon understood that the Arab League could interfere with their plan to keep the funds out of Gaza at all costs and decided to enlist some help of their own. A quick phone call was made to Nitsana Darshan-Leitner to see if there was a legal means to obstruct the money from getting to Hamas. There was.

  Shortly before, Nitsana and her colleagues had won a judgment against Hamas in a federal court case on behalf of terror victims; damages were in the amount of $116 million. The civil action involved a young couple who had been ambushed and killed by Hamas gunfire near Beit Shemesh, a suburb of Jerusalem, in 1996. They were returning from a wedding with their infant child when the shooting took place. The parents were killed on the spot; the baby, below the line of fire in his car seat, was saved.

  The family of Yaron and Efrat Unger were represented in the proceeding by attorneys Mordechai Haller, David Strachman, and Robert Tolchin, as well as by Nitsana. Legal proceedings were brought against the Arab League in Washington, D.C., where the group maintained an office. The suit demanded that the Arab League pay the Ungers the $35 million being held in its account in Cairo in partial satisfaction of the unpaid $116 million judgment. Counsel for the Arab League filed a motion to dismiss the proceeding, arguing that the funds were not owned by Hamas but still belonged to Iran. The proof they pointed to was the fact that the money had never crossed the border into Gaza.

  Yet, despite their public protestations, the Arab League secretly informed Ismail Haniyeh that upon the advice of their legal counsel they were restrained from moving the money from the bank account. The Hamas funds were tangled up in the American legal proceeding and they could not be moved. They would remain in Cairo for many years to come.

  The terrorist leadership paid a price for the Harpoon-led vigilance. The cost of doing business increased significantly. “Bringing in suitcases full of cash from Lebanon or Gaza, or smuggling it across the Allenby Bridge inside cargo or inside someone involved greater risk, and risk cost money on the street,” a COGAT officer assigned to Harpoon remembered. “Bringing in $100,000 into the West Bank now cost $200,000. Bringing in money through the Gaza Strip was incredibly difficult, and expensive. Many Palestinians suspected that the Egyptians didn’t confiscate money they captured; they stole it. Egyptian Border Patrolmen and intelligence officers made a fortune off the bundles of cash destined for Gaza that had to take its circuitous route through Sinai.”4

  On February 14, 2005, a high-level U.S. Department of the Treasury delegation traveled to Israel for top-secret meetings with the heads of the National Security Council and representatives from Harpoon.5 The American delegation was led by Stuart A. Levey, the Department of the Treasury’s first Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. A native of Akron, Ohio, Levey was a Harvard Law School graduate who had worked at the Department of Justice before moving over to Treasury. He was appointed to his position in 2004 by President George W. Bush and tasked with creating a U.S. counterterrorism response to 9/11 and unraveling the intricate web of terrorist financing that had enabled al-Qaeda to present a clear and present danger to the United States and the world. Levey’s office, known by the acronym of TFI, was President Bush’s point man in the money side of the global war on terror; Levey’s responsibilities also included dealing with the dollars and dictators from rogue states like Syria, North Korea, Libya, and, of course, Iran.

  From their first meeting together, Meir Dagan and Levey hit it off. The Mossad director recognized in the American a kindred spirit and a man of action. Below Levey’s runner’s physique and calm outward appearance was an iron determination and tough-as-nails resolve. The Treasury official was constantly trying to push the envelope in the financial war. The Harpoon guys all thought highly of him, as well. Levey was joined by other Department of Treasury deputies, as well as Internal Revenue special agents, and members of the U.S. Secret Service.

  Brigadier General Danny Arditi led the Israeli team. Most of the Israeli representatives were from the IDF and A’man. Uri L. and Shai U. represented Harpoon. The Americans didn’t know that Dagan’s unit was called Harpoon—they referred to Uri and Shai as belonging to the “Counterterrorism Financing Bureau.”6 The meeting was held in Ramat HaSharon, an affluent suburb north of Tel Aviv.

  The Americans and the Israelis reviewed recent events on the ground in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Press
ure from the United States convinced the Saudis to stem the flow of unregulated NGO funding to the territories. The end of Saudi money was a dire blow to Hamas, but still funds came in. Hamas, the principals discussed, still received a $3 million stipend annually from the Iranians; additional funds still came in from wealthy oil sheiks in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

  Most of the discussions centered on Iran and Hezbollah. The Israelis wanted to coordinate efforts with the Americans to target the Islamic Republic and their Party of God proxy in Lebanon. They discussed stopping the banks in Lebanon that facilitated the laundering of Hezbollah money. Shai U. shared some intelligence that the Israelis had gathered: The Arab Bank, involved in a make-or-break lawsuit in lower Manhattan for its role in helping fund Palestinian terror, was now openly dealing with Hezbollah.7

  Both sides tried to figure out a coordinated strategy—the Americans with political moves and the Israelis through COGAT—to siphon money destined for Hamas away from the terrorist group and into the coffers of Palestinian social service agencies and legitimate charities.

  Later that year, Prime Minister Sharon surprised most Israelis—and much of the world—and announced that Israel was abandoning the Gaza Strip. The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, in the late summer of 2005, was one of the final acts in office for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and one of the most controversial. Sharon had known what a headache Gaza was and how impossible it would be for the IDF to seize the narrow, densely populated sliver of land again without unacceptable casualties in combat that would certainly be close-quarter. Sharon had kicked around the idea of Israel just pulling stakes and departing the Strip on its own terms for two years. By September 2005 the “disengagement” had been completed: A total of twenty-one settlements, some there since the 1967 War, were evacuated despite fierce emotional and riotous protests; eight thousand settlers were relocated to other towns throughout Israel. Israeli forces controlled all access points in and out of the Gaza Strip. A mighty Israeli presence remained along the frontiers; the Palestinian Authority was given control over day-to-day government in the Strip except for the borders, the airspace, and the territorial waters. Israeli forces still continued the campaign of preventing the smuggling of arms and money in the hundreds of tunnels that had been built underneath the Philadelphi route along the Strip’s southern border.