Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Getting rid of “the dog” proved to be unnecessary—Farouk soon was overthrown in a coup. And AMAN’s assumption that things would be better when he was gone turned out to be totally groundless. However, the idea that this already established Egyptian network could be employed to change the course of history in the region was simply too tempting for Israel’s leaders to let go. AMAN decided to use these local agents against the Free Officers Movement, which had just recently ousted Farouk, “aiming to undermine Western confidence in the [Egyptian] regime by causing public insecurity and provoking demonstrations, arrests, and retaliatory actions, with Israel’s role remaining unexposed.” But the whole operation ended in catastrophe.

  Despite intensive training, AMAN’s recruits were amateurish and sloppy, and all of their sabotage operations ended in failure. Eventually, eleven operatives were ferreted out by Egyptian authorities. Some were executed after short trials, and one killed himself after suffering gruesome torture. The lucky ones were sentenced to long prison terms and hard labor.

  The ensuing turmoil gave rise to a major political dispute that raged in Israel for many years, over whether AMAN had received the approval of the political establishment for these abortive operations.

  The main lesson drawn by Israel was that local Jews should never be recruited in hostile “target” countries. Their capture was almost certain to end in death, and send ripples throughout the entire Jewish community. Despite the temptation to use people who were already on the ground and didn’t need to establish a cover story, Israel almost never again did.

  However, the underlying conviction that Israel could act boldly and change history through special operations behind enemy lines remained, and was in fact cemented in place as the core principle of Israel’s security doctrine. Indeed, this philosophy—that special ops behind enemy lines should be at least one of the country’s primary methods of national defense—would predominate among Israel’s political and intelligence establishment all the way up to the present day.

  And while many of the world’s established nations kept a separation between the intelligence outfits that gathered information and the operations units that utilized that information to conduct clandestine missions, from the very beginning Israel’s special forces were an integral part of its intelligence agencies. In America, for instance, special-operations units Delta Force and SEAL Team Six are components of the Joint Special Operations Command, not the CIA or military intelligence. In Israel, however, special-operations units were under the direct control of the intelligence agencies Mossad and AMAN.

  The goal was to continually translate gathered intelligence into operations. While other nations at the time were also gathering intelligence during peacetime, they did so only to be prepared in case war broke out, or to authorize the occasional special-ops attack. Israel, on the other hand, would constantly use its intelligence to develop special-ops attacks behind enemy lines, in the hope of avoiding all-out warfare entirely.

  —

  THE FASHIONING OF AN emblem, a charter, and a military philosophy was one thing. Implementation, as Harel was soon to learn, was another thing altogether, especially when it came to aggressive action.

  The Mossad’s first major operation ended badly. In November 1954, a captain in the Israeli Navy named Alexander Yisraeli—a philandering grifter deeply in debt—slipped out of the country on a bogus passport and tried to sell top-secret documents to the Egyptian embassy in Rome. A Mossad agent working in that embassy tipped off his superiors in Tel Aviv, who immediately began to develop a plan to kidnap Yisraeli and return him to Israel for trial as a traitor.

  For Harel, this was a critical test, both for the security of the nation and his career. In those formative years, the heads of all the agencies jockeyed for power and prestige, and one significant failure could prove professionally fatal. He assembled a top-notch team of Mossad and Shin Bet operatives to grab Yisraeli in Europe. He put his second cousin, Rafi Eitan, who as a teenager had assassinated two German Templers, in charge.

  Eitan says that “there were some who proposed finding Yisraeli and killing him as quickly as possible. But Harel squelched this immediately. ‘We don’t kill Jews,’ he said, and declared this was to be an abduction operation.” Harel himself said, “It never occurred to me to issue an order to kill one of our own. I wanted him to be brought to Israel and put on trial for treason.”

  This is an important point. There is a tradition of mutual responsibility in Judaism, and a deep connection among all Jews, as if they are one big family. These values are seen as having kept the Jewish people alive as a nation throughout the two thousand years of exile, and for a Jew to harm another Jew is considered intolerable. Back in the days of the Palestinian underground, when it was effectively impossible to hold trials, eliminating Jewish traitors was deemed legitimate to a certain extent, but not after the state was established. “We do not kill Jews”—even if they were believed to be a grave danger to national security—became an iron law of the Israeli intelligence community.

  The plan unfolded perfectly at first. Eitan and three others pinched Yisraeli after he’d been stopped by another Mossad female asset at a Paris intersection. The captive was taken to a safe house, where a Mossad doctor injected him with a sedative and placed him in a crate typically used to transfer arms, before putting him on a long, multi-stop flight on an Israeli Air Force cargo plane. At every stop, Yisraeli was injected again until, just as the plane touched down in Athens, he suffered a massive seizure and died. Following Harel’s orders, one of Eitan’s men ended up dumping the body from the back of the plane into the sea.

  Harel’s people fed the Israeli press false information that Yisraeli, who left behind a pregnant wife, had stolen money and settled somewhere in South America. Harel, who was very embarrassed that an operation of his had ended in the death of a Jew, ordered that all the records on the case be secreted deep in one of the Mossad’s safes. But Harel’s rivals kept a copy of some of the documents, to be used against him someday if so required.

  Harel also came to the conclusion that there was an urgent need for the formation of a special unit specifically designed to carry out sabotage and targeted killing missions. He began searching for “trained fighters, tough and loyal, who would not hesitate to squeeze the trigger when necessary.” He found them in the last place he would have been expected to look: the veterans of the Irgun and Lehi, against whom he had once fought a bitter struggle.

  Ben-Gurion had forbidden the employment of any former members of the right-wing underground in government departments, and many of them were jobless, frustrated, and hungry for action. The Shin Bet believed that some of them were dangerous and were liable to start underground movements against the regime.

  Harel aimed to kill two birds: to set up his special-ops unit, and to get the underground fighters into action under his command, outside the borders of the state.

  David Shomron, Yitzhak Shamir, and those of their comrades in the Irgun and Lehi who were deemed tough and daring enough were invited to Harel’s home in north Tel Aviv and sworn in. This was the establishment of Mifratz, Hebrew for “Gulf” or “Bay,” the Mossad’s first hit team.

  ISRAEL’S WAR OF INDEPENDENCE officially ended with armistice agreements in 1949. The unofficial fighting never stopped. Throughout the early 1950s, the country was constantly infiltrated by Arabs from the parts of Palestine that remained in Arab hands after the war—namely, the Gaza Strip, in the south, which was administered by Egypt, and the West Bank, in the east, which Jordan had annexed. The IDF estimated that in 1952, about sixteen thousand infiltrations occurred (eleven thousand from Jordan and the rest from Egypt). Some of those infiltrators were refugees who had fled during the War of Independence, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and were trying to return to their villages and salvage what was left of their property. But many others were militants whose objective was to kill Jews and spread
terror. They called themselves fedayeen—“those who self-sacrifice.”

  The Egyptians, despite having signed an armistice, quickly realized that the fedayeen could fight a proxy war on their behalf. With proper training and supervision, those Palestinian militants could wreak substantial havoc on Israel while giving Egypt the cover of plausible deniability.

  A young captain in Egyptian military intelligence, Mustafa Hafez, was put in charge of organizing the fedayeen. Beginning in mid-1953, Hafez (along with Salah Mustafa, the Egyptian military attaché in Jordan’s capital, Amman) started recruiting and training guerrilla squads to be dispatched into Israel’s south. For years, those squads, six hundred fedayeen in total, sneaked across the border from Gaza and laid waste to anything they could. They blew up water pipes, set fire to fields, bombed train tracks, mined roads; they murdered farmers in their fields and yeshiva students at study—altogether some one thousand civilians between 1951 and 1955. They spread panic and fear to the point that Israelis refrained from driving at night on main roads in the south.

  The proxy squads were considered a huge success. The Israelis couldn’t hold Egypt or Jordan directly responsible. They would respond instead by recruiting their own proxies, turning Arabs into informers, collecting intelligence on fedayeen targets, and then assassinating them. Those tasks were assigned, for the most part, to an IDF intelligence team known as Unit 504.

  Some of the men of Unit 504 had been raised in Arab neighborhoods of Palestine and thus were intimately familiar with the language and customs of the locals. Unit 504 was under the command of Rehavia Vardi. Polish-born, Vardi had served as a senior Haganah intelligence officer prior to the establishment of the state, and he was known for his sharp wit and blunt statements. “Every Arab,” he said, “can be recruited on the basis of one of the three Ps—praise, payment or pussy.” Whether through those three Ps or other means, Vardi and his men recruited four hundred to five hundred agents, who passed on invaluable information in the period between 1948 and 1956. Those recruits, in turn, provided Unit 504 with information on a number of senior fedayeen dispatchers. Several were identified, located, and targeted, and in ten to fifteen of those cases, the Israelis persuaded their Arab agents to place a bomb near that target.

  That was when they would call Unit 188. That was when they required the services of Natan Rotberg.

  —

  “IT WAS ALL VERY, very secret,” Rotberg said. “We were not allowed to mention the names of units; we were not allowed to tell anyone where we were going or where we were serving or—it goes without saying—what we were doing.”

  Rotberg, a thick-necked and good-natured kibbutznik with a bushy mustache, was one of a small group, only a few hundred men, who took part in forming the original triumvirate of AMAN, Shin Bet, and the Mossad. In 1951, when Rotberg was assigned to a marine commando unit called Shayetet 13 (Flotilla 13), Israeli intelligence set up a secret facility north of Tel Aviv to teach “special demolitions” and manufacture sophisticated bombs. Rotberg, Flotilla 13’s explosives officer, was appointed to run it.

  Rotberg had a large vat installed in which he mixed TNT and pentaerythritol tetranitrate and other chemicals into deadly concoctions. But though his mixtures were designed to kill people, he claimed that he did not act with hatred in his heart. “You need to know how to forgive,” he said. “You need to know how to forgive the enemy. However, we have no authority to forgive people like bin Laden. That, only God can do. Our job is to arrange a meeting between them. In my laboratory, I opened a matchmaker’s office, a bureau that arranged such meetings. I orchestrated more than thirty such meetings.”

  When Rehavia Vardi and his men had identified a target, they would go to Rotberg for the bomb. “At first we worked with double-bottomed wicker baskets,” Rotberg said. “I would cushion the bottom part of the basket with impermeable paper and pour the concoction in from the vat. Then we’d put on a cover and, above that, fill it up with fruits and vegetables. For the [triggering] mechanism, we used pencils into which we inserted ampoules filled with acid that ate away at the cover until it reached the detonator, activated it, and set off the charge. The problem with the acid was that weather conditions affected the time it took to eat away [the cover], producing nonuniform timing. A bomb in the Gaza Strip would go off at a different time than one in the West Bank, where it is generally colder. We then switched to clocks, which are much more accurate.”

  But Rotberg’s bombs were hardly enough to solve the fedayeen problem. According to several sources, explosives killed only seven targets between mid-1951 and mid-1953, while in the process killing six civilians.

  The attacks continued unabated, terrorizing Israeli civilians, humiliating the Israel Defense Forces. Vardi and his men, talented as they were at recruiting agents, managed to glean only sparse information about the identities of the fedayeen handlers, and even when the unit did ferret out specific targets, the IDF was unable to find or kill them. “We had our limitations,” says Yigal Simon, a Unit 504 veteran and later on its commander. “We didn’t always have intelligence, we couldn’t send our agents everywhere, and they didn’t appreciate us enough in the IDF. It was important to the high command to show that the IDF—Jewish hands—could execute these actions.”

  Regular IDF units did try several times to penetrate the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and Jordan to carry out retaliation attacks, but they repeatedly failed. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion accordingly decided to develop whatever capability the IDF lacked. At a secret meeting on June 11, 1953, the Israeli cabinet approved his recommendation that it “authorize the minister of defense”—Ben-Gurion himself—“to approve…acts of reprisal against the attacks and murders [committed by] those coming from beyond the Israel-Jordan armistice lines.”

  Ben-Gurion used the authority vested in him to act a short time afterward. Two guards at Even Sapir, a settlement near Jerusalem, were murdered on May 25, and he ordered that an ad hoc secret detail be set up in order to do away with a Palestinian arch-terrorist by the name of Mustafa Samweli, who had been behind the slaying of the guards.

  Now Ben-Gurion just needed the right man to lead it.

  —

  ARIEL SCHEINERMAN—BETTER KNOWN AS Ariel Sharon—was a twenty-five-year-old student in the summer of 1953, but he already had extensive combat experience. He’d established himself as a leader from his days as a teenaged youth-movement counselor and had proven his courage during the War of Independence, during which he had been badly wounded. Arik, as he was also known, was charismatic and authoritative, a warrior in top physical condition, and he didn’t hesitate when the IDF General Staff recruited him to eliminate Samweli. “My father immediately said yes,” wrote Sharon’s son Gilad, in a biography of Ariel. “He was confident that with seven or eight good men, friends who’d served with him in the war and afterward, and with the right kit, he could do it.”

  On the night of July 12–13, Sharon and a squad made up of reservists managed to get inside Samweli’s village in the West Bank and blow his house up. But the intelligence they were given was flawed, and Samweli wasn’t at home. The force got entangled in a firefight and made it out by the skin of their teeth.

  The high command saw the operation as a success—deep penetration of enemy territory, demonstration of its ability to hit a target, and returning to base without casualties. Sharon, by contrast, came back exhausted and totally dissatisfied. His conclusion was that such operations have to be carried out by professionals, something completely different from the random group of buddies he had taken with him that night. He told his superiors that there was a need for an elite commando unit. On August 10, Unit 101 came into being.

  “This unit was set up for the purpose of operations across the border, those non-standard missions that demand special training and high-level performance,” according to the “101 Operations Procedures,” written by Sharon himself.

  Sharon was given free rein
to select his own men, from reservist soldiers redrafted to the army as well as regular soldiers. He wanted to put them through a grueling, yearlong training program. His fighters learned how to handle explosives, how to navigate over long distances, and how to fire accurately and precisely while on the run over mountainous terrain, exercises that both developed their skills and instilled a sense of pride and confidence.

  The young leader made sure his men stood apart from the IDF regulars, arming them with a different personal weapon from the outdated bolt-action Czechoslovak rifle in use at the time. Instead they were issued Carl Gustav submachine guns, and they were also the first to try out the new and still secret Israeli-made Uzi.

  Sharon also relaxed the rules of both dress and conduct; at their secret base in the Jerusalem mountains, the men of Unit 101 often worked entirely in civilian attire. To Sharon, the outward trappings of military order were of marginal use; more important was that his men believed they were special, better, the best. And that they trusted their commander: Sharon’s operational briefings were precise and unequivocal, and he fought at the front of his battalion, often in the most vulnerable position, embodying the well-known motto of IDF commanders: “Follow me!”

  Sharon was imbued with a limitless and unrestrained motivation to go on operations, and he grasped that if he had to wait for precise intelligence from AMAN to carry out a targeted killing, he might never do anything.