The Hamas commander was ushered through passport control and then brought to the business-class lounge. The Emirates air hostesses, in their tan blazers and skirts and characteristic red caps, made sure that the passengers were well attended to during the three-hour flight. The Emirates Airline flight landed at precisely 3:15 PM. One of the airport’s perks was a quick turnaround from landing to city adventure. Al-Mabhouh dragged a black carry-on bag across the polished marble floors until he reached the stand where an airport shuttle car would take him to the al-Bustan Rotana. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was at the check-in desk before 4:00. Closed-circuit television cameras taped virtually every moment of al-Mabhouh’s arrival in Dubai—from passport control to hotel check-in. It seemed every nook and cranny of Dubai was under a protective blanket of video surveillance. Ironically, it is believed that Israeli firms were the ones who put the systems in place.
There were human eyes on al-Mabhouh, as well. A significant-sized force of men and women, all young, all between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, had arrived in Dubai the previous day. Some had arrived earlier that morning. The men and women arrived on flights from Europe’s hubs of commerce—Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, and Zurich—and they carried genuine European and Australian passports. The tourists were dressed neatly, in the kind of casual clothing that young urban professionals in Europe would wear when traveling; their carry-on bags and laptop bags were top-of-the-line.
They had arrived on separate flights and ventured to separate hotels. There was some question as to where al-Mabhouh would end up, and the hit team decided to spread out throughout Dubai in anticipation of where the Hamas man might eventually check in. Some members of the team took rooms at the al-Bustan Rotana located adjacent to the airport. Surveillance footage later showed some of these young European travelers following Mabhouh from the airport to hotel check-in.
The top leadership of Hamas would never have agreed to spend a night in a hotel like the al-Bustan Rotana. It was a five-star hotel, and its lobby was a beautiful combination of dark, clean, and crisp angles, but the hotel wasn’t überluxurious by Dubai’s standard. Still, so close to the airport, it had rooms under $125 a night and it was a convenient and comfortable stop for weary travelers. The man handed the clerk his passport in the name of “Mahmoud Abdul Raouf Mohammed” and his credit card. He requested a suite with windows that could not open and one that had no balcony. He was issued two white plastic card keys and a smile from the young woman at the front desk. Mabhouh declined the offer to receive help with his bags.19 He rode up to his second-floor room with a man who, surveillance footage revealed, was wearing a fake moustache and glasses. He carried a tennis racket and watched as al-Mabhouh opened the door to Room 230. The tennis player then glanced across the hallway and noticed that the room number directly across the hall from al-Mabhouh’s was 237. A call was soon made on his cell phone to book the room.
Al-Mabhouh showered, but he didn’t change his clothes. He left his bag on a small folding table near the dresser but grabbed a small spiral notebook. (Fellow travelers in the economy section of Flight EK912 remember al-Mabhouh deep in thought as he jotted down notes in the small journal during the flight from Damascus.) Reportedly, he placed a few items in the safe located near the room’s entrance by the bathroom.
Al-Mabhouh left the hotel and walked a little more than a kilometer to the City Centre Deira shopping mall. He was still in good physical shape, and he made it to the mall in fifteen minutes. There he bought sneakers and met with two individuals. He then traveled to the Iranian consulate on al-Wasl Road for high level talks. His first discussions were with an Iranian banker, and it is believed the discussion was about the money Hamas needed from Tehran to continue its missile program. Al-Mabhouh then met with his Iranian intelligence handler from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is believed that the two men discussed the logistics of getting the Iranian-financed missile parts into the Gaza Strip. The Revolutionary Guard officer had flown in from Tehran specifically for the meeting.
Rotating surveillance teams followed al-Mabhouh’s every step during his time in Dubai.
While al-Mabhouh was meeting with his Iranian contacts, additional surveillance teams, most in disguise with poor-fitting hairpieces and fake glasses, staked out the lobby of the al-Bustan Rotana. One member of the crew had already checked into Room 237. Four members of the team, men who appeared to be the muscle on the closed-circuit TV surveillance, had made a copy of the key card to enter al-Mabhouh’s room.20 The killers sat silently and waited for the Hamas commander to return to his room. The four men, reportedly, wore rubber gloves and masks to shield their DNA.21
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was last seen alive on CCTV cameras as he returned to the hotel at 8:24 PM. It is believed that he was overpowered in his room, given a muscle relaxant, and then suffocated to death. He was still wearing the same checkered shirt, jacket, and blue jeans when he returned, though the assassins quickly stripped him down to his black jockey shorts and placed him on the bed and under the covers. There were no reports of a scuffle, and the intruders took great care to make sure there were no signs of a struggle to be found in the neatly arranged hotel room.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s killers left the room unnoticed. It is still unexplained how they managed to exit the room and still leave it locked on the inside. Over the next few hours, twenty-seven men and women checked out of their Dubai hotel rooms and headed for Dubai International Airport. The al-Bustan Rotana was an ideal place for a team of intelligence agents to carry out a stunning hit and then escape the country in a hurry. The hotel was a stone’s throw from the departure areas where one could grab flights to anywhere in the world twenty-four hours a day.
Some took flights to Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and Frankfurt; others traveled to other hubs in Europe, where they doubled back, perhaps carrying new passports. Apparently, everyone involved in the operation made it back home safely.
The operation’s success depended on al-Mabhouh’s death being made to look as if he died of natural causes. Past assassinations attributed to the Mossad, such as those responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre, were carried out with silenced .22 Beretta pistols and bombs placed in cars under the driver’s-side cushions. Dubai wasn’t a safe city for a Blue and White, or purely Israeli, operation; there was no Israeli embassy where the team could hide if the local authorities came after them. It was imperative for the team to depart the UAE before word of al-Mabhouh’s death was revealed and be safe outside the UAE, en route back to Israel, according to reports.
The maids, women from Pakistan and the Philippines, knocked on Room 230 for a good ten minutes at just about noon the following day. The night crew had tried to get into the room the evening before. Turn-down service was common, but the hotel was used to passengers, some from the Gulf States, who frequently called a service for female companionship, and who craved privacy. A DO NOT DISTURB notice was on the doorknob. But Mabhouh was supposed to stay only one night, and at noon the cleaning staff still couldn’t get into the room with the master key. The hotel security officer was summoned. The lifeless body of the man in possession of the Syrian passport in the name of “Mahmoud Abdul Raouf Mohammed” was found under the covers. His body was cold. He had been dead for several hours. The hotel immediately called the police. When detectives searched the room, they found al-Mabhouh’s fake passport and his clothing; a white bag and a pair of brand-new Adidas running shoes were on the floor.
The briefcase that al-Mabhouh had brought with him from Damascus was nowhere to be found.
At first, the Dubai Police assumed that the man, who had expired sometime between six o’clock on the evening of January 19 and noon the next day, had died from natural causes. A heart attack was suspected. But when investigators dug deeper, and realized that the decedent was actually a high-ranking Hamas commander, an autopsy was ordered and a criminal investigation was launched. According to some with close ties to the security services inside Dubai and the UAE, the Jihaz amn a-Dawleh was furi
ous that al-Mabhouh and the Iranians were using the emirate as a meeting place.22
Al-Mabhouh’s killers would most certainly have known that every step they took in Dubai was covered by CCTV surveillance. The cameras didn’t seem to bother anyone involved. Still, the Dubai Police force, famous for having vehicles such as the Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4 and the Ferrari FF on patrol, did an extraordinary job of piecing together what must have looked like a Hollywood epic’s worth of footage to build a case that nearly thirty men and women were involved in the al-Mabhouh assassination.
The Dubai Police, in fact, counted twenty-seven suspects who they believe were involved in the killing. Twelve of them carried British passports. Six of the alleged perpetrators carried Irish passports; four of them carried French travel books, four carried Australian passports, and one entered the country on a German passport. Sixteen of the passports belonged to names of dual citizens who lived in Israel but whose identities had been cloned and borrowed.
There were close to 684 hours of CCTV to review and analyze.23 Perhaps the Mossad, or whoever carried out the operation, had underestimated the ability and the sophistication of the Dubai Police to collate and review the CCTV footage from so many diverse sources and create a singular time line24 that linked the twenty-seven foreign visitors to the events that transpired inside and outside of Room 230. Perhaps, if it was the Mossad behind the operation, the Israelis really didn’t care what the fallout would be.
The Dubai Police were able to triangulate the cellular phone traffic, all through an exchange in Austria, of the participants, as well. There was also an incriminating American connection discovered. Thirteen of the twenty-seven suspected individuals used prepaid MasterCards from a prepaid credit card company based in New York City called Payoneer;25 the CEO of the company, Yuval Tal, was reportedly a former member of the Israeli special operations community.26 Payoneer produces customized and prepaid MasterCard credit cards that companies can issue to their employees. The cards used in Dubai were drawn on MetaBank, a financial institution based in the Midwestern United States.27 The prepaid credit cards were used to pay for flights and hotel stays.
The intelligence-gathering capabilities that the Dubai Police displayed in assembling this matrix were, indeed, impressive. According to one Palestinian security expert, the men who worked for the Dubai Police reviewing the CCTV footage were all foreign—expatriates, mainly retirees, working as contractors in the emirate city after they had completed successful investigative careers for Scotland Yard or some of the other English-speaking nations where tax-free retirement often coincided with freelance security work.28
But the al-Mabhouh assassination wasn’t the first time an intelligence service had carried out a hit operation in Dubai. On March 30, 2009, Sulim Yamadayev, a former Chechen general, was shot and killed by anonymous assailants as he left a car park in Dubai, where he had been living in secret for several months under an assumed identity; his brother had been shot and killed in Moscow months earlier. Dubai police apprehended two assassins, an Iranian and a Tajik, who they believed were working on behalf of the Russian government and its FSB intelligence service.29 But, clearly, the al-Mabhouh “hit” was the most spectacular murder to ever be perpetrated in the city.
Police chief Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim, commander of general security for the Emirate of Dubai, was the point man leading the investigation into al-Mabhouh’s death. Correspondents from all over the world rushed to Dubai to cover the assassination, and the fifty-nine-year-old police commander relished the media spotlight. General Tamim joined the force in 1970 when the emirate city was a small and forgettable dusty fishing village, and now he led the law enforcement force responsible for protecting one of the world’s most important international business centers. A born actor with a dramatic flair, he appeared in press conferences in a wide array of costumes: In one briefing, he wore neatly pressed khaki fatigues displaying his rank, a chest full of medals, and the swagger of a man who ruled with an iron fist, and in other gatherings of the press he wore traditional gray Bedouin garb showing that he was a man of the desert.
Tamim’s presentations to the international media were polished and highly impressive. In one case, he broadcast an eleven-minute compilation showing the alleged Mossad agents arriving in country and assembling in some of the city’s other hotels, as well as in a shopping mall, and, of course, the same hotel where al-Mabhouh was staying. In one press conference, he said, “Israel must not carry out assassinations on our land. This is an insult to Britain and to Australia and to Germany and to New Zealand. If the Mossad dipped their hand in blood and wiped it on European passports, our treatment of Europeans will remain the same. In the future those who we suspect of carrying dual nationality will be treated very carefully.”30 The investigation and accumulating details were turning into a freewheeling circus.
General Tamim used to be criticized for being aloof to the local media, but now with cameras all over the world following his every word, the Dubai Police chief became a star. He enjoyed, in the papers at least, the appearance that he could go toe to toe with Meir Dagan. Tamim urged Meir Dagan to “be a man” and admit that Israel and the Mossad were behind the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, according to the Emirati newspaper al-Khaleej.31
Pundits in Israel, columnists for the nation’s vibrant press, and even some former members of the country’s intelligence and special operations community, claimed that “if” Israel was involved in al-Mabhouh’s killing, then the operation was sloppy and errant. Amir Oren, a columnist for the left-of-center Ha’aretz, called for Meir Dagan’s resignation. Ben Caspit, from the Ma’ariv newspaper, described the incident as “a tactical operational success, but a strategic failure.”32 No one in the country cared that al-Mabhouh himself had met an untimely death; privately, many wished that the man with blood on his hands suffered like the two soldiers he had killed in cold blood. Most concerning was the diplomatic fallout over the use of forged and genuine foreign passports in the execution of a targeted assassination operation.
Israeli ambassadors were called to the carpet in Berlin, Paris, and London; Israeli diplomats were even expelled in a public show that the Mossad—or any intelligence service—would not be able to carry out espionage activity on the back of forged and genuine indigenous passports. Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, was harshest in his criticism of Israel. “As a longstanding friend of Israel, I repeat what I said before, any state, any state, which uses or forges Australian passports let alone uses or forges Australian passports for the purpose of assassination is of the deepest concern to Australia, and we will not let the matter rest,” Rudd expressed during a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.33 The politicians had to huff and puff for the benefit of the cameras to show the Arab world that they would not tolerate the abduction of genuine identities for the convenience of an intelligence operation. Al-Mabhouh wasn’t a man who was going to be missed by any of the countries whose passports had been used. Once the furor over the passport issue died down, the matter was soon forgotten.
Meir Dagan chuckled when asked if he thought the “Dubai Job” was a disaster for Mossad. “I never heard of any Israelis being arrested,” he joked.34
From a clearly end-result perspective, it’s hard to label the Israeli operation as a failure. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was buried in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus on January 29, 2010.35 It was a cold and windy Friday morning when his coffin, draped in the green Hamas flag, was lowered into the ground at Martyrs Cemetery. The Syrian intelligence services saw to it that there was a decent turnout at the burial.
From a regional perspective, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and al-Quds Force operatives who set up shell companies in Dubai for the purposes of supporting groups like Hezbollah and Hamas thought twice before sending a representative to a hotel bar or a Russian-populated strip club in the city without constantly looking over their shoulders. That constituted the sort of preemptive deterren
ce that an agency like the Mossad was famous for.
Hamas would have to find someone who possessed al-Mabhouh’s experience and knowledge of the financial and armament pipeline that flowed from Tehran to the Sudan to Sinai and Gaza. The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement would have to find someone capable who knew that his predecessor had been spectacularly killed and that now he himself would be stepping into the enemy’s crosshairs. Men like al-Mabhouh were not replaced with a job posting on craigslist.
The al-Mabhouh assassination sent the powerful message that even those merely involved with the financing of terrorist operations no longer enjoyed safe harbor. They would be aggressively hunted down and eliminated just the same as those that built the bombs and carried out the attacks. The al-Mabhouh assassination operation—the size, the scale, and the investment into the operation—exposed the irrefutable fact that obstructing the flow of money had become a national intelligence service priority, one as crucial as targeting the terrorist chiefs. Despite the media storm that would ensue, the al-Mabhouh operation was a game changer. His murder gave those who moved money for terror reason for pause. Those players were now on notice. Their seemingly innocuous role in facilitating terror had become a very high-risk profession.
It took Hamas nearly four years to recover from al-Mabhouh’s death—four years for the organization to find a replacement that had his network, experience, and ability to coordinate Iranian money and smuggling routes into a cohesive and effective rockets and armaments program. Those four years were a period of relative peace and quiet along Israel’s southern border with Gaza. They were four years in which Israeli civilians weren’t killed by rocket attacks and suicide bombers. From that perspective, regardless of who gave the order, the operation in Dubai was a rousing success.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Harpoon Page 28