Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Pundak was appalled by Sharon’s tactics and complained bitterly. “I heard Sharon declare in front of all the officers, ‘Whoever kills a terrorist will get a bottle of champagne, and anyone who takes a prisoner will get a bottle of soda.’ I said, ‘Good Lord, what kind of policy is this? Who speaks like this? After all, if we do not give them a little assistance, a little prosperity, they’ll all turn to the path of terror.’ ”

  Sharon insisted that there was no hope for accommodation with the Palestinians. Terrorist attacks should be answered with force, and there was no one on the other side to talk peace with, he maintained. If the goal of Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership was to destroy Israel, what was left to negotiate?

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  THE REGULAR ARMY UNITS in Sharon’s Southern Command had other duties, like patrolling the long border with Egypt and fighting the battles that broke out during the three-year War of Attrition along the Suez Canal, so Sharon needed a unit whose sole task would be to combat terrorism. No less important, Sharon wanted to create a small, closed body of men who would report directly to him and operate under the same mindset and codes.

  When the time came to decide who could lead the new unit, Sharon’s mind immediately turned to Meir Dagan, recalling an incident in northern Sinai in mid-1969. Fatah had placed Katyusha rockets, connected to timed fuses, in the middle of a minefield and aimed them at an IDF base. Not one soldier or officer dared to approach the rockets to disarm them. But Dagan, then a young recon officer, stepped forward. He simply walked up to the Katyushas, fearlessly, and defused them. He reminded Sharon of himself when he was a young officer.

  Dagan was born in 1945. His parents had fled the Polish town of Łuków six years earlier, after a Russian officer warned them that the Germans were about to conquer the area and things would not be good for the Jews. They found refuge on the harsh plains of Siberia. At the end of the war, together with tens of thousands of other refugees, they made their way back to Poland, unaware that nothing was left of their homes or of the Jews who hadn’t managed to flee. It was on one of the freight train’s stops, somewhere in Ukraine, that Meir was born. His prospects for survival were slim in a cramped, cold freight car, but the dedicated care of his parents, plus his apparently innate physical robustness, saved him.

  “My parents never spoke of that period,” Dagan said. “It was as if someone had erased those years from 1939 to 1945 from the calendar. True, they survived and they saved us, but the war left them with broken spirits. They never really recovered.” Only once was his father prepared to tell him about the return to their destroyed hometown. He found the valley of death where the Jews had been massacred and buried in a mass grave, and he wanted to erect a monument in their memory. He paid a Polish gentile from the village to help him. This man told him that during one of the last roundups of Jews by the Gestapo, the Germans asked him to take photographs. They had forgotten to take the film when they left the area, and the man gave it to Meir’s father. When he developed it, he found that one of the pictures was of his own father, Meir’s grandfather, moments before he was shot and tossed into the mass grave.

  The grandfather, Dov Ehrlich, with his long beard and earlocks, and terror in his eyes, is seen kneeling in front of grinning German troops brandishing bayoneted rifles. “It suits us to think that it was the extreme fascists, the fanatics, who were the killers,” he said. “The truth is otherwise: The battalion that carried out this massacre was a rear-echelon Wehrmacht unit. The fighting units were at the front. These men were lawyers and merchants, ordinary, normal people. The conclusion is terrible: You can take anyone and turn him into a murderer.” Dagan’s second lesson was even more essential: “Let’s admit the truth: Most of the Jews in the Holocaust died without fighting. We must never reach that situation again, kneeling, without the ability to fight for our lives.”

  After five years in Poland, during which Meir learned the language, which he used decades later as director of the Mossad to break the ice in meetings with Polish counterparts, the family made its way to Italy, where they boarded a cattle ship that had been adapted to carry immigrants to Israel. A friend who was with Dagan on the boat says that even then, in miserable, overcrowded conditions, Dagan “behaved as if he was born to be a soldier.” On the way, the ship was almost sunk by a storm, and Meir faced death once again, waiting on the deck, wearing a life belt and clutching an orange. That was what he remembered: the fruit in his hand. “There, on board the ship, was the first time I tasted oranges,” he said, “and I remember the tremendous pride with which my father gave me the fruit, saying it was from the Land of Israel.”

  After a month at sea they reached Haifa. There, Jewish Agency officials sent the passengers to a transit camp, where they slept in rickety tents, and then on to temporary housing in an evacuated British Army camp near Lod. Six families lived in each room, with only a curtain separating them. There was one shower per barrack. Beyond the difficult living arrangements, the immigrants had to contend with the humiliating attitude of the veterans. The sabras, as the native-born Israelis were called, treated the Jewish refugees with contempt. Instead of fighting back against the Nazis, the sabras charged, the Jews of Europe had filed quietly into the gas chambers, like lambs to the slaughter.

  Dagan dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and enlisted in Sayeret Matkal, the elite force that carried out secret missions over enemy lines (and was also the forge from which many of Israel’s later military and civilian leaders emerged). Of the thirty IDF recruits who volunteered for Sayeret Matkal in August 1963, only fourteen completed the grueling seventy-five-week training program. One of those who began the course with Dagan was Danny Yatom, who would later serve in a number of senior IDF positions and as Mossad chief—one of Dagan’s predecessors. Yatom remembered being alarmed when he first encountered Dagan. “He’d whip out his commando knife and chuck it at every tree trunk or telephone pole,” he said. “I thought to myself that I’d gotten to a unit of real killers—and that maybe I had no chance of surviving in such a place.” Yatom made the cut, but Dagan didn’t. “In retrospect,” Dagan said, “and this is just my guess, I think I really did not fit in there. Not a sabra. Not a kibbutznik. Not from the Valley”—the Jezreel Valley, east of Haifa, site of many kibbutzim, whence hailed a high proportion of Sayeret recruits. “They thought to themselves, ‘Who’s this odd stranger trying to push in among us?’ ”

  Dagan was assigned to the paratroopers and served in the brigade recon unit. He underwent an infantry officer’s course and was discharged with the rank of lieutenant in 1966. In the Six-Day War, he was called up for reserve duty and served as the commander of a paratroop company. He fought first in Sinai and then on the Golan Heights.

  “Suddenly we found ourselves in an unbroken string of wars,” he says. “Where did I get the feeling that Israel’s existence is not ensured? Only via my feet; only through all these battles.” After the Six-Day War, he signed up again for the regular army and was posted to Sinai as an operations officer, where Sharon first encountered him and his bravery, defusing the Katyushas.

  In 1969, he became commander of Sharon’s new special-ops unit. It was a small force, 150 soldiers at its height, and highly secret, acknowledged in internal IDF documents only as Number 5176. Unofficially, it was known as Sayeret Rimon—the Grenade Rangers—because its insignia featured a hand grenade, a knife, and paratrooper wings. For a base, Dagan took over an abandoned villa on the beach, just south of Gaza City, that had once been used by Egypt’s President Nasser.

  Dagan “had a serious malfunction in his fear mechanism,” one of his soldiers said. He was, by all accounts, exceptionally bold, focused, and aggressive. Suitably enough, then, his new force had few of the attributes usually associated with a military unit. It was free, wild, interested in only one thing: carrying out as many operations as possible. Every morning, Dagan would emerge, bare-chested, from his bedroom and head o
ut to the yard, accompanied by his Doberman, Paco. He’d draw his pistol and take potshots at the soda cans his men had left scattered around the grounds. A team of aides would then make him breakfast and polish his boots. Dagan chose his soldiers personally, culling them from other units, looking for men who were willing to follow wherever he led.

  Still in his mid-twenties, Dagan began to develop his battle doctrine, which is strikingly similar to the one the IDF and Israel’s espionage agencies still follow today. The guiding principle of the doctrine was that Israel should avoid large wars, because “the great, speedy victory of the Six-Day War will never happen again.” Going forward, he argued, Israel should not enter a full-scale military confrontation “unless the sword is at our throats.” Instead, he believed, the Arabs could be beaten in a series of limited pinpoint engagements. Accordingly, enemy leaders and important field operatives should be pursued mercilessly, hunted down, and eliminated.

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  TOWARD THE END OF 1969, after about half a year of recruiting, training, and building his unit, Dagan decided it was time to go into the field. The Shin Bet handed over to him a file of wanted men in the Gaza Strip. “But the leaflet was only getting bigger,” said Avigdor Eldan, one of the first recruits of the new unit. The Shin Bet might have known who it was looking for, but with the agency’s shortage of firepower, it couldn’t get its hands on them. The file contained more than four hundred names.

  The Shin Bet divided the wanted list into two categories. “Black” targets were mostly minor operatives who did not know they were wanted for interrogation. Dagan’s men tried to sweep these targets up with what he called “identification recon” missions. A captured PLO “black” operative would be interrogated by the Shin Bet and, if he refused to cooperate, tortured. He’d then be put into a taxi, squeezed between two of Dagan’s men, who were armed with pistols, and told to point out hiding places, families that aided the PLO, routes that militants took, and more. Grenade Rangers following in jeeps acted immediately on the information divulged, arresting anyone the informer pointed out.

  “Red” targets, on the other hand, knew they were wanted, which meant they were much more wary, already on the run, and usually heavily armed. Eliminating reds generally required getting close enough to draw quickly and kill. Accordingly, Dagan sent his best men deep into Gaza’s neighborhoods, dressed as Arabs and accompanied by Palestinian collaborators, who gave them convincing cover.

  This group, set up together with the Shin Bet, was code-named Zikit (Chameleon). Eight elite combat soldiers were selected to begin with. Project Chameleon was so secret that at first, “we didn’t know what they were training us for,” said Eldan. “All we knew was they tore our asses, and don’t forget we were already fighting fit when we got there.”

  The Chameleons carried forged local papers supplied by the Shin Bet. They were able to sneak into the heart of heavily populated areas without being spotted until they drew their guns.

  “We exploited the main weak point of these terror cells,” Dagan said. “Because of their Marxist background, they practiced a very high level of ‘need to know’ compartmentalization. Each man knew only the members of his own cell and not those of other cells. If you appear as an armed local, and you can speak the target’s language, he has no way of knowing that it is in fact a trick until it is too late.”

  For example, said Moshe Rubin, a veteran member of the unit, “We realized the terrorist organizations were getting their weapons and money via ships from Lebanon. They would sail in a mother ship from Beirut and, far out to sea, off the Gaza coast, get into small fishing boats and make for the shore. We said to ourselves, ‘Why shouldn’t we also arrive in a ship from Lebanon?’ ”

  So, in November 1970, six Chameleon men boarded a fishing boat, which the Israeli Navy towed to a point off the Gaza coast.

  The team included three Jewish IDF soldiers, headed by Dagan. They were joined by two Palestinian collaborators, one of whom had escaped from the massacre of PLO men that King Hussein of Jordan had carried out two months prior and was grateful to the Israelis for saving him. The other, code-named Submarine, had murdered a relative by thrusting a dagger into his skull and had been released by the Shin Bet in exchange for his cooperation. The final member was an Israeli Bedouin IDF officer whose job was to monitor the transmissions of the microphones carried by the Palestinians, who were meant to go ahead of the others and establish contact with the wanted men and then let the others know what was happening. The Bedouin had another task as well: to inform Dagan if the two Palestinians intended to betray him.

  The Chameleon squad reached the beach and hid in the abandoned packing shed of an orchard for a number of days, with the collaborators making occasional ventures out to surrounding refugee camps. They claimed that they were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who had come from Lebanon.

  At first, no one came. “They were scared of us—not because they thought we were Israelis, but because they were convinced we were PLO men,” a member of the unit recalled. “The wanted terrorists were not always very nice to the local population. They would often extort them, demanding more and more food and raping the women. In the citrus groves, we often found bodies of Arabs who weren’t killed by us, but by the wanted men, who settled personal accounts under the pretext of executing collaborators with Israel.”

  In a staged operation to establish credibility, the group was “discovered” by an IDF patrol that opened fire and pretended to give chase. Dagan and his men fled to an area of sand dunes south of the Beit Lahia refugee camp.

  The engagement aroused the interest of the locals. “Submarine” managed to set up a meeting between the Chameleons and a woman who was known to be linked to senior wanted Popular Front members. The Chameleons killed a chicken and smeared its blood onto bandages that they wrapped around their throats, to explain why they couldn’t talk, and left the speaking up to the collaborator. “We have come to help you,” he told the woman. “Bring the top commanders to the dunes.”

  After a day, the terrorists showed up. “There were three of them—two men and a woman, armed, top commanders,” Dagan recalled. After exchanging salutations, Dagan whispered the code word. The three soldiers opened fire at point-blank range with the 9-millimeter Beretta pistols they were carrying, killing the two men. They were each hit fifteen to twenty times.

  “The woman wasn’t hit,” said Dagan with satisfaction.

  Eldan recalled that “then Meir slid rapidly down the high dune we were on towards them, and took the Star pistol one of them had managed to draw and had used to fire at us, and carried out ‘dead-checking’—another two bullets in the head of each of the men.” Dagan took the Star for himself and gave the holster to Eldan.

  Then they took the woman with them and handed her over to the Shin Bet for interrogation.

  —

  ON A WARM SATURDAY morning in early January 1971, a thirty-year-old advertising executive named Bob Aroyo took his family for a hike in the hills overlooking the Bardawil Lagoon, on the Mediterranean coast of the Sinai Peninsula. Born in Malta and raised in England, Aroyo had moved to Israel in 1969 with his wife, Preeti, and their two children, Mark and Abigail, and settled into a small suburb east of Tel Aviv. The kids were still young—Mark was seven, Abigail five—so Aroyo planned a short, gentle hike; they’d drive south for a day in the sun and fresh air, then head home for an early dinner. Both children were strikingly beautiful, and their faces were familiar sights in Israel, because their father used them in some of the advertisements he designed.

  By 3 P.M. the Aroyos had finished their hike and climbed back into their Ford Cortina, bound for home. They drove north through Al-Arish before entering the Gaza Strip, where they passed Palestinian villages and refugee camps along the main highway. At that time, Israelis heading for Sinai would still often drive through the Strip, as it was the shortest and easiest rout
e, and until then had been quite safe.

  Just north of the city of Gaza, near a 7Up factory, they were stopped at a makeshift roadblock. A young teenager ran up to the car and tossed a hand grenade into the backseat. The explosion blew out most of the interior of the car, which erupted in a fireball. Aroyo, wounded, crawled out and begged two young men standing nearby to call for help. But they just laughed and jeered. Abigail died in the car. Mark died in the hospital. Preeti’s wounds left her severely handicapped for the rest of her life. Two days later, the Aroyo children were buried in a single grave in Jerusalem’s ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, in a ceremony attended by tens of thousands of Israelis. The chief chaplain of the IDF, Major General Rabbi Shlomo Goren, offered a eulogy. All of Israel mourned.

  Two weeks later, the Shin Bet captured the perpetrators. The kid who had lobbed the grenade was a fifteen-year-old named Mohammad Suleiman al-Zaki, from Gaza’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood; his two accomplices were sixteen and seventeen. All three were students at the city’s Falastin High School who had been recruited for the operation by a senior Fatah operative. The attack on the Aroyo family had not been their first mission.

  The murder of Mark and Abigail Aroyo marked a turning point in the response to the flood of terrorist attacks that followed the Six-Day War. “We decided that things could not go on this way,” Meir Dagan said. “After those kids were murdered, Arik [Sharon] took the matter of terror in the Gaza Strip personally.” Sharon was no longer content to receive reports from Dagan, though he still had full confidence in him. From that point forward, Sharon “would turn up at our villa often and get involved in the planning of our missions and patrols, down to the tiniest detail.”