The disengagement from Gaza sent a fissure into the heart of right-wing Israeli politics. In November 2005 Sharon split from the Likud Party to launch a new centrist-of-right party called Kadima, or “Forward”; his arch political rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, assumed the helm of the Likud Party. New elections were expected. Then, in January 2006, Prime Minister Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke, placing him in an irreversible coma. Ehud Olmert, his deputy and the former mayor of Jerusalem, was slated to assume the premiership.
Olmert was sworn in as the Israeli Prime Minister on April 17, 2006—hours after the lethal suicide bombing of the Rosh Ha’Ir Shawarma restaurant. “We had hoped to celebrate the Israeli democracy today in a different atmosphere,” Olmert said in response to the horrific blast scene, “and now we are again forced to cope with murderous terror.”8
Olmert would have been well within his rights to ask Meir Dagan for his resignation. Dagan, and Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin, served at the pleasure of the prime minister. But Olmert wasn’t a soldier, nor was he a steadfast ideologue. He was a politician and, as mayor of Jerusalem, he had learned pragmatism in the toughest city to govern in the world. Olmert appreciated his shortcomings. He realized that with the intifada running out of steam, there would be new threats facing the State of Israel and that he’d need the best and brightest—and the most audacious—by his side. Even though Dagan had lost his prime benefactor and cheerleader when Sharon fell ill, Olmert was a great fan of the Mossad director. What was more, the new prime minister championed Harpoon and the campaign against terror money. “Olmert liked us,” a Harpoon veteran remembered, “not only did he like what we were doing but he constantly maintained contact with us to see what he could be doing to help us.”9
A lawyer by training and practice, Olmert took a vivid interest in the legal warfare on both a professional and personal level. He enjoyed pumping the agents about the details of the litigation, the motions that were filed, and the defense’s response, as well as the blow-by-blow of the court rulings. Nitsana observed how Olmert was always asking to be updated about what was happening as the pioneer civil suits against the rogue regimes, the terror groups, and the financial institutions were being prosecuted. “He was captivated and amused by what creative private lawyers could do to wreak havoc against the terrorists and their funding networks,” she said. Every time we met with the Harpoon guys, they always told us ‘Olmert loves these lawsuits, he’s always laughing about them, he always wants to hear about every little detail and maneuver.’”
Even with Sharon gone, Dagan and his team weren’t going anywhere. Olmert wanted his intelligence chief to continue what he had started with Harpoon. The financial campaign against Hamas, while still ongoing, had been a success. Everyone knew that Hezbollah was the next target.
PART II
THE PARTY OF GOD AND THE DEVIL’S PORTFOLIO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Party of God
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
—Kahlil Gibran, “The Garden of the Prophet”
Meir Dagan sat in his office on the morning of July 12, 2006, immersed in his morning’s routine. Wednesdays were busy at Mossad HQ, and Dagan often began his day at 7:00 AM. Like his predecessors, Dagan wore a button-down shirt and a blazer to work, Israeli business casual. The spymasters needed to wear a tie only on occasions of ceremony, or when visiting their counterparts overseas.
Dagan’s office was large and spacious, an impressive room befitting a man whose legend and responsibilities were larger than life. The room was adorned with memorabilia from Dagan’s days in uniform—wooden plaques and unit banners from his time in Gaza. There were photos all over, quite a few of Dagan and Sharon and other friends and contemporaries in the intelligence world. There were also paintings, colorful oils, of Middle Eastern vistas and sheikhs adorned in colorful robes. Dagan was an amateur painter, and the Arab world was his favorite subject. The photo of his grandfather, moments before being killed by the Nazis, was the centerpiece of the office. “Dagan felt that it was his responsibility, the Mossad’s responsibility, to protect Israelis and Jews anywhere in the world. It didn’t matter where or how, the lives of Jews weighed on his conscience,” Rami Ben-Barak, head of Mossad special operations under Dagan, recalled, “and he let everyone he met know it.”1 Dagan used to brief agents in his office before they were sent overseas on difficult assignments and talk about the photograph.
Dagan’s desk was large and antique, and made of wood. The desk was full of framed photos of Bina, his wife of thirty-four years, and photos of their three kids. Many of the photos were from the jeep trips that the family took on weekends. Meir Dagan worked from sunrise and often came home at midnight, five days a week. Weekends were always reserved for hiking or jeep trips in the desert or the Israeli countryside.
Dagan always kept a cup of piping-hot tea within arm’s length. The tea was always served in a glass, the way a Russian general would drink his tea. A slice of freshly cut lemon was always in the glass. He never drank coffee. Dagan had one vice—his pipe. An ashtray was buried somewhere amid the mountains of papers and folders. The smell of sweet tobacco wafted over Israel’s most sensitive secrets, files marked Sodi Be’Yoter, or “Top Secret.” Books were piled on Dagan’s desk and lined shelves; books sat on the floor, too, and on chairs not being used. Although he was in charge with Israel’s most secretive intelligence force, Dagan always surrounded himself with books, mostly historical or biographical. There was also a bank of telephones, some with straight connections to the prime minister’s office. The phones, like other items on Dagan’s desk, were all stained by the pipe smoke.
Chairs were always prepositioned for visitors. Dagan liked it when he had visitors in his office, especially men like Uri, who shared his sarcastic sense of humor. Bina Dagan recalls that Meir loved to tell off-color jokes when in the company of his friends.2
Dagan’s security detail was always outside his office. Sarah,* his secretary, was the true gatekeeper, however. She was an iron lady. She, more than others, could see the weight of responsibility carved into Dagan’s face on those nights when men and women were risking their lives in dangerous precincts far from Israel’s shores. The burden of commanding Israel’s spies was, at times, overwhelming, and it involved long hours of discussion and planning. Tension, it seemed, was a permanent guest in Dagan’s office. Sarah always made sure that the director adhered to his frenetic schedule. She, too, arrived at work at dawn and she stayed until he called it a day. Even when the director stayed at his desk well into the night, sometimes after midnight, Sarah kept her boss’s hours.3
The television monitors inside Dagan’s office were always tuned to CNN and one of the European news networks. Sky News was always popular in Mossad headquarters—more popular, at least, than the BBC, whose news tended to have an anti-Israeli bias.
The news that morning was of particular interest to Dagan. The leaders of the G-8* nations were set to meet in Russia, in the opulence of Constantine Palace, located in Strelna on the Gulf of Finland. The palace had been a favorite of the czars, and now the backdrop of gold and splendor would be used by the world’s most powerful elite to discuss the pressing issues of the day. One of the primary topics was the Islamic Republic of Iran and its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. Israeli prime ministers had pressed several American presidents to push all the diplomatic—and economic—buttons at their disposal to stymie Iran’s effort. Meir Dagan had spoken to several CIA directors and conveyed a similar request. Now the subject had come up for an international consensus. He watched the news coverage, hoping for something that was releasable prior to the conference beginning.
Mostly, though, the Mossad director watched the news that morning to hear if there were any Arab media reports from the Gaza Strip. On June 25, 2006, a Hamas squad tunneled its way under the rows of concertina wire separating the Gaza Strip from Israel and emerged on the Israeli side of the fence. The squad
attacked a tank with grenade and small-arms fire, then abducted a soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, dragging him back into the abyss of the Gaza Strip. Dagan pressed all the resources at his disposal to assemble some sort of actionable intelligence that would give the IDF the option to prepare a reasonable sort of rescue bid for Shalit, and sometimes the news offered interesting tidbits. Without pinpoint intelligence, it was unlikely that Israel would mount a rescue operation into the Gaza Strip. Covert negotiations were underway to try and figure out how Israel could get its young soldier back. Hamas knew that the State of Israel would pay a hefty price for Shalit’s return. Even though Israel had, as one of the pillars of its counterterrorism doctrine, a vow never to negotiate with terrorists, the Jewish state routinely agreed to horrifically lopsided trades to get its troops—both alive and dead—back in exchange for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of terrorists released from prison.
Dagan watched the news. He read the reports. Hamas was what was known in Hebrew as a Kotz Ba’tachat: it was “a thorn in the ass,” and it wasn’t going away. There were other, more dire threats that would occupy Dagan and especially Harpoon.
Shortly after 9:00 AM on the morning of July 12, 2006, Dagan was in his office reviewing papers. He glanced at the network coverage and took a sip of tea. He held his pipe. And then the phones in his office began to ring. Sarah rushed in with a concerned, angry, look on her face; deputies and military liaisons also rushed in. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office was on the phone.
Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Party of God and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s proxy along Israel’s northern border, had launched close to one hundred fire-and-forget rockets at Israeli military positions near the border village of Zar’it, as well as on several small farming communities near the frontier with Lebanon. The barrage was nothing more than a destructive diversion. A Hezbollah direct-action team, dressed in IDF uniforms and fluent in Hebrew, crossed the frontier into Israel and attacked a patrol of two IDF vehicles with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and antitank missile and small arms fire. Three IDF soldiers were killed in the attack and two injured. Two reservists—Sergeant Ehud Goldwasser and Sergeant Eldad Regev—were hurt in the fusillade and then carried back into Lebanon. Five more soldiers were killed in the Israeli attempt to rescue the two wounded soldiers.
Full-scale combat erupted hours later as large-scale Israeli forces entered Lebanon to look for the two kidnapped soldiers. Hezbollah rockets rained down on northern Israel, wreaking havoc upon the northern towns and cities; the border had been relatively quiet for nearly six years. The Second Lebanon War had begun.
The summer of 2006 marked the twenty-fourth year that the Shiites of Lebanon were at war with the State of Israel. The Shiites, the largest of the three primary religious groups that made up the Lebanese patchwork of rival faiths and tribes, were also the poorest and most politically disenfranchised. A large percentage of Lebanon’s Shiites lived as farmers, as their parents and their grandparents had done for centuries. The Shiite population centers were in the fertile lands of the south, between the Mediterranean and the mountains, and in the eastern areas near the Syrian frontier in the Beka’a Valley. A large Shiite population also lived in the impoverished neighborhoods in south Beirut. The Shiites had suffered under Ottoman rule; their lot improved slightly at the end of the First World War under French rule. The Lebanese constitution drafted in 1943 mandated that the president of the country be a Christian, the prime minister be a Sunni, and the speaker of the parliament be a Shiite. The lopsided power share was designed to keep the peace.
Lebanon’s delicate balance of power, one secured by tribal chits and vengeance, endured four seismic shifts. The first was in 1948 when some one hundred thousand Palestinian refugees fled the fighting around Israel’s independence and headed north. Most were settled in refugee camps near the coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon, and in the slums of Beirut. The Palestinian arrivals were largely Sunnis. They came in 1971 when, following the Jordanian Civil War, the Palestinian terror factions set up their global headquarters in Beirut and a new front against Israel opened up in southern Lebanon; groups ranging from Arafat’s Fatah to the North Korean–supported Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine used the camps of southern Lebanon as launching pads for horrifically bloody attacks against northern Israel. Each attack warranted Israeli retaliation. The Shiites were often caught in the crossfire and often subjected to harsh treatment at the hands of the armed Palestinian gangs who imposed a lawless state in the countryside of Lebanon’s south.4 Farmers often had to surrender a portion of their crops, of their earnings, to local Palestinian commanders.5 South Lebanon slowly morphed into what became known as “Fatah Land.”
Lebanon’s bloody civil war was the third blow to the mosaic of coexistence that had miraculously endured a weak central government compromised of heavily armed factions beholden to one of the region’s more powerful nations. The civil war redefined the Middle East’s definition of carnage: More than fifty thousand civilians were killed in the bloodletting. Most of the fighting pitted the Sunni factions, especially the Palestinians, against the Israeli-backed Christian militias. The Shiites were not active combatants in the civil war, though the power vacuum in Beirut coincided with a new sense of Shiite pride and devout religious faith. Religious universities in Iraq, such as those in Najaf, fueled a new breed of clerics whose sermons were aflame with honor and a demand for political and social justice. Sayyid Musa al-Sadr was the spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Shiites. He vanished, never to be seen again, during a trip to Libya in August 1978. Iran’s new Islamic revolutionaries—and the emissaries they sent—sensed an opportunity to extend their influence, and their extremist ideological insurrection soon filled the void.
The Shiites and the State of Israel were, at first, beneficiaries of the ancient Middle Eastern axiom that “the enemy of my enemy is my ally.” Israel had supported a Christian militia in southern Lebanon that attracted many Shiite volunteers. This was a type of proxy force that acted as a stoppage against the increasingly aggressive PLO. When the IDF entered Lebanon on June 6, 1982, to launch Operation Peace for Galilee and rid the country of the twenty thousand armed Palestinian fighters that had become its de facto rulers, the Shiite villagers of southern Lebanon greeted the advancing Israeli soldiers as liberators. Israeli soldiers were blanketed with rice and sweets thrown by the appreciative Shiite villagers. The affection and gratitude were short-lived, however. On November 11, 1982, a Shiite suicide bomber drove a Peugeot crammed with explosives through the Israeli military headquarters complex in the Lebanese port city of Tyre. The blast killed seventy-five soldiers, Border Guard policemen, and Shin Bet agents.
For the next eighteen years, Israeli forces in Lebanon found themselves at war against fanatic suicidal Shiite militias. Hezbollah, Arabic for “the Party of God,” became the most powerful and prominent. Handsomely subsidized by the Islamic Republic of Iran and a global network of smugglers, drug merchants, and other criminal pursuits, Hezbollah was able to match Israeli forces on the battlefield and develop into one of the most powerful of all the Arab armies. Israeli forces, like many counterinsurgency forces, operated in southern Lebanon out of a series of outposts and fortifications that became easy targets for Hezbollah IEDs and attacks. Casualties mounted. Many inside Israel viewed the continued and costly Israeli presence in southern Lebanon as pointless.
In May 2000 Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered the IDF to unilaterally withdraw from the quagmire. Hezbollah was determined to have the last word. In October 2000, Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers patrolling the fence along the border with Lebanon; there were subsequent accusations that United Nations peacekeepers assisted the terrorists in the operation.6 The bodies of the three soldiers were returned four years later in an exchange of live Party of God prisoners for the three coffins. Many in Israel now referred to the north as “our Iranian border.”
As Israel fought the intifada against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,
Hezbollah prepared for its own war against Israel—one that it intended to fight on the Israeli side of the fence. Hezbollah’s army consisted of suicide squads armed with explosive vests and small arms; there were missile batteries, some firing advanced Iranian-supplied rockets, that were capable of hitting the major population centers of northern and central Israel. Hezbollah’s missiles and rockets were hidden inside densely populated areas, in the hope that Israeli retaliation would result in heavy Lebanese casualties that could be presented to the international community as war crimes against civilians. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s Beirut-born and Iraqi-educated leader, was a savvy tactician who did not mind sacrificing his own people for the political and battlefield advantage. This was a direct page out of the ideological teachings of his Shiite hero, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the eyes of world opinion, in trying to mobilize the Arab street, Nasrallah knew that the images of women and children killed by the Israel Air Force would play well on the carnivorous Arab news networks seen twenty-four hours a day.
Israel responded to the Hezbollah rockets with air and artillery strikes, just as Nasrallah predicted. Israel then imposed an air and naval blockade on Lebanon.7 The IAF cratered the runways at Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport to prevent arms from being flown in and Hezbollah commanders from fleeing. Bridges and tunnels throughout southern Lebanon were also struck in an effort to close off escape routes for the team that abducted the two Israeli reservists. There were fears that Hezbollah would try to fly the two captured Israeli soldiers out of the country.
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