Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Barak said he saw the argument as “evidence of the unit’s strength. Not only superior professional soldiers, but also men with opinions, men who ask questions, who are not satisfied with the mere command to execute but also demand to know the logic behind it.”

  While the Sayeret and the Flotilla 13 marine commandos were practicing the landing, Yael and Model continued gathering intelligence. Yael picked a suitable site for the landing—the private beach of the Sands Hotel, chosen because access was restricted to hotel guests and was close to the hotel’s parking lot. Then she wandered through nearby streets, a small woman in a long skirt and sunglasses, carrying a handbag. Yael photographed the raiding party’s entire route—the beach, the streets they’d drive, the telephone junction box they’d probably have to blow up so reinforcements couldn’t be called, the buildings on Verdun Street, the concierge at the entrance.

  Yael also gathered details about the nearby police station, which was only about six hundred feet from the apartment houses, and the patrols the police conducted and how long it would take them to reach the scene if they were called.

  Before reporting to the chief of staff that the force was ready to set out, Brigadier General Emmanuel Shaked, chief infantry and paratroop officer and overall commander of the operation, insisted on meeting the Caesarea personnel who were to drive his men from the beach to the objectives and back again. Zamir, Harari, and Romi came with the Caesarea team to meet Elazar, Shaked, and Barak at a Sayeret training facility.

  Shaked described the meeting as “no less than a catastrophe.” He asked the Caesarea people to introduce themselves and describe their past combat experience. “When’s the last time you had a gun in your hand and used it?” he asked. To his horror, most of them had never held a weapon. Only some of them had even served in the IDF. Those who did have some kind of military training had done only the absolute minimum and lacked any kind of combat skills.

  Shaked exploded in anger and turned to Zamir, saying, “Get your sparrows out of the room.” Shaked told Harari that he “wasn’t prepared to let the operation go ahead with these people, who aren’t combat troops.”

  “If they had been combat troops, we wouldn’t have needed the IDF at all,” Harari responded in anger. Elazar intervened and accepted Zamir’s promise that “they are warriors of the highest order in the arena in which they are required to act, to enable the IDF soldiers to do their job.”

  On April 6, the six Caesarea operatives flew into Beirut from various European airports, carrying counterfeit German, Belgian, and British passports. They checked in separately at the Sands, rented large American-made cars, and parked them in the hotel parking lot.

  On the afternoon of April 9, the IDF troops were bused to the Israeli Navy base in Haifa. At the final briefing, Shaked told them, “You don’t shoot at your target and leave. You leave the apartment only after you make sure that he won’t get up again.”

  At 4 P.M., on a calm Mediterranean Sea, eight Israeli missile boats set sail northward. Twelve miles off Beirut, they cut their engines and dropped anchor. At 5 P.M., one of the Caesarea operatives rendezvoused with Yael at the Phoenician Hotel. She confirmed that the three targets were at home. They parted, and the operative radioed the waiting force: “The birds are in their nests.”

  From the gunwales, nineteen rubber dinghies descended, each loaded with troops: twenty-one from Sayeret Matkal, thirty-four naval commandos, twenty soldiers from the Paratroop Reconnaissance unit. These elite combat units were supported by three thousand additional personnel. It was one of the biggest targeted killing operations of the twentieth century, if not the biggest. Harari, Zamir, Romi, Elazar, and Defense Minister Dayan were in a bunker beneath the Kirya-Sarona, the old Tel Aviv Templer neighborhood that housed the IDF command, monitoring the operation. Also in the Bor—Hebrew for the “Pit,” as the bunker is informally known—was AMAN chief Eli Zeira. He knew that although almost the entire Israeli Navy was mobilized, Spring of Youth was “an operation for which there was no rescue option.”

  The dinghies glided toward the lights of Beirut. When they reached the beach, the men of Flotilla 13 carried the members of the raiding party onto dry land so that they wouldn’t get wet and their disguises wouldn’t be spoiled—taking extra care with the heavily made-up female impersonators on the team. The Mossad operatives were waiting in the parking lot of the hotel with the vehicles.

  Barak, who was dressed as one of the women in the team, was in the front seat of one of the three cars. “Go!” he ordered, but nothing happened. The Mossad driver was sweating, his whole body shivering. Barak thought he was either sick or injured. But he was just scared. “I’ve never been anywhere where there’s shooting,” he admitted. “I did a last recon of the area. Two gendarmes armed with submachine guns are patrolling the street near the buildings.” Barak and Muki Betser, a longtime Sayeret fighter, calmed the driver down, lying to him that there’d be no shooting.

  “Go!” Barak repeated, having decided not to report about the gendarmes to Shaked, who’d stayed on the command missile boat, fearing that he’d call the operation off.

  The three cars entered the upscale Ramlet al-Bayda neighborhood of Beirut. Two blocks from the target, the team got out and started walking—one man and one man in drag, paired together. It was late, around 11 P.M., but there were still a few people on the street. There were two armed cops standing there, bored, smoking. They ignored the couples who walked past them.

  Muki Betser had his arm around Barak, the two of them just another couple on a romantic walk. “It reminds me of Rome,” Betser whispered to Barak.

  In one of the buildings, al-Najjar was asleep. In the other building, in separate apartments, the other two, Adwan and Nasser, were sleeping. At the entrances to the two buildings, the couples separated and the force split up—three details to each of the three targets, and another, under Barak’s command, including a doctor, to cover the street.

  The PLO guards they were expecting in the lobbies of the apartment blocks had fallen asleep in their cars and, unhindered, the soldiers began climbing the stairs, counting the flights to themselves as they ascended so that they wouldn’t break into the wrong apartments. When each detail reached its objective, the men took up positions and placed small explosive charges next to the door, and each commander clicked three times on his radio mic. When Barak heard the three clicks from each of the three details, he replied with five clicks, which meant “Execute.” At the same time, he signaled to Shaked that the other attacks in various places in Lebanon could begin. Maintaining the element of surprise required that the apartments be breached before they started.

  The small explosive charges blew the three doors open. A woman who was woken by the pounding feet on the stairs and peeped through the eyehole of her door was killed when the blast blew her door open, too. Al-Najjar came out of his bedroom, grasped what was happening, and tried to shut himself in another room. Betser sprayed the door with automatic fire, killing him and his wife. The second target, Kamal Nasser, hid under his bed and fired his pistol, hitting one of the Israelis in the leg. The raiders turned the bed over, saw Nasser, and killed him with two long bursts of fire.

  Inside the third apartment, Kamal Adwan stepped out of his door with a loaded AK-47 in his hands but was apparently confused to see what looked like a man and a woman facing him and hesitated for a second. This cost him his life as the Israelis opened fire with Uzi submachine guns hidden under their clothing.

  At the same time, a PLO guard, who was supposed to be protecting the targets but had fallen asleep in his Renault Dauphine car, woke up and emerged from the car with his pistol drawn. Barak and Amiram Levin, one of his top officers, shot him with their silenced handguns. One bullet hit the car and set off its horn. This woke up the neighbors, who called the police. “More proof that there’s always some new surprise,” Betser says. “The unexpected is the thing that is most expected.�
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  Police from the nearby station were soon speeding toward Verdun Street, where the Israelis were still rifling the apartments for documents. Finally, the raiding parties raced downstairs, almost leaving a man, Yonatan Netanyahu, the brother of Benjamin, behind. Now they had to engage the Beirut police. Levin stood in the middle of the street, his blond wig still on his head, swinging his Uzi left and right, spraying bullets. Barak stood in the road, firing at cops. Betser shot up a police Land Rover and covered Levin. A jeep with four Lebanese soldiers rolled up and screeched into the cross fire. The Israelis shot it, and Betser tossed a grenade at it, killing three of its occupants. The driver was slightly wounded. Yael saw him from her window, sitting on the sidewalk, sobbing for hours before he was taken to the hospital.

  The assassins held off the police, and the soldiers piled into their rented cars and rushed back to the beach. They scattered sharp little steel tripods behind them, puncturing the tires of police cars that gave chase. Barak got on the radio, calling naval commandos to pick them up. Despite the chaos, he remained composed and was able to separate himself from the moment. “I remember looking in amazement at the streets,” he said. “I had never been in such magnificent streets, I had never seen such beautiful apartment houses. It was a standard of building that we weren’t familiar with in Israel.” The wig made him hot, so he opened the window and felt a cool breeze caress his face. He relaxed. A man ran to the curb, yelling for the car to slow down. “Shoot him, Muki,” he told Betser.

  “He’s a gas station worker, not a cop.” Betser did not shoot.

  The second raiding force, the Paratroop Reconnaissance troops who were hitting a building in a different Beirut neighborhood, was less fortunate. They killed the guards at the entrance of the PFLP building they were targeting, but they didn’t know about a second guard post. A Palestinian opened fire, badly wounding three Israeli soldiers. Two of them were evacuated to a waiting car. The third, Yigal Pressler, was hit by fourteen bullets. A naval commando lifted him up and ran toward the car, but a PLFP man, apparently believing Pressler was a Palestinian, tried to rescue him, grappling with the commando. The three fell to the ground in a heap. One of Pressler’s arms was paralyzed, but he managed to cock his pistol with his teeth. The Palestinian ran away. The commando chased after him, and Pressler thought he’d been left alone. He was thinking of blowing himself up with a grenade when the commando came back and picked him up again. The air was exploding with gunfire and explosions and yelling. Lights went on in the neighboring buildings.

  Rather than withdraw immediately, the squad’s commander, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, with composure that earned him a citation from the chief of staff, ordered his men to remain and carry out their mission, attaching explosives to the building.

  “My hardest moment,” said Lipkin-Shahak, “was not during the actual combat, but when we got back to the vehicles. I was surprised to discover that the car with the wounded men wasn’t there.” He and his men, including the badly wounded Pressler, were stuck in the heart of Beirut with only two cars. The third, driven by a Caesarea operative and carrying two of the severely wounded men, had vanished. The radios weren’t working. Hurried searches found nothing.

  “It was very worrying,” Lipkin-Shahak said. He did not want to withdraw without knowing where his wounded men were, but he had no option. He gave the order to pile into the two cars and head for the beach. Just after they set out, they heard a mighty blast and saw their target building collapse. Later, they learned that some thirty-five PFLP activists were buried in the ruins.

  When they reached the beach, they found the Caesarea man sitting in his car, two of their comrades in the backseat, one already dead from blood loss. The driver was covered in sweat, smoking a cigarette with trembling fingers. “I asked him what happened,” Lipkin-Shahak said, “why he didn’t wait for us, why he didn’t wait for the unit’s doctor to treat the wounded. He was a little confused, but if I understood him correctly, he heard the gunfire at the beginning of the raid and thought we wouldn’t get out alive, so he decided to get out and go to the beach.”

  Lipkin-Shahak’s men were enraged. “It was a mistake to let people with no combat experience be involved in this,” one of them said. “That guy from Caesarea saw that we were in trouble and got shell shock. He ran away.”

  The entire team boarded the dinghies and returned to the missile boat. Another one of the wounded men died during surgery on the boat. Two of the paratroopers couldn’t restrain themselves and began yelling at the Caesarea operative that he was responsible for the deaths of their two comrades. He yelled back. One of the soldiers slapped him, he responded with a punch, and a fight broke out on the deck until the others separated them.

  But by daybreak, all of the raiders were back in Israel. When Barak got home, his wife, Nava, was still asleep. He put his pack down and lay down next to her, exhausted, with his boots on. When she woke up, she was surprised to find her husband fast asleep at her side, with makeup on his face and traces of bright red lipstick on his lips.

  The next morning in Beirut, surrounded by the wreckage of the previous night, no one paid attention to the skinny woman who came to the post office on Madame Curie Street. Yael had written a letter to her case officer that showed her trauma over what she had seen from her apartment window.

  Dear Emile,

  I’m still shaking from last night. Suddenly in the middle of the night I was woken up by the sound of many very loud explosions….I was panic stricken—the Israelis are attacking!…It was horrible….This morning it all just seemed like a bad dream. But it wasn’t. Those terrible Israelis were really here….For the first time I can see why there’s so much hatred for that country and for the Jews….Really this is such a nice, peaceful, residential area with gentle, very kind people.

  Yael told “Emile” that she wanted to come see him for a vacation to calm down and that “I do miss you (more than I expected).” In invisible ink, she added, “It was a great show last night. Hats off!”

  In order to avoid attracting suspicion, Yael remained in Beirut another week, despite the mounting fear that she was liable to be exposed due to the stringent security measures put in place after the raid. “When the plane took off and the wheels left the ground, I relaxed in my seat. I felt the stress of holding my cover character close to every one of my body’s organs and my soul gradually weakening, torn off me piece by piece. When I landed at Heathrow, my arms were flaccid and it was hard to get out of my seat. I needed a few more seconds before I could leave the plane.”

  Back in Israel, Spring of Youth was considered a dazzling success. All of its objectives had been achieved. Three top PLO officials were killed, along with some fifty others, almost all of them PLO members. Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), the supreme commander of Black September, was saved by chance because shortly before the raid he left one of the targeted apartments where he often spent time. Four buildings and workshops for manufacturing weapons were destroyed. The seizure of a large number of documents from Adwan’s apartment was deemed a catastrophe by the Palestinians. They supplied the Shin Bet with details about PLO cells in the occupied territories and led to a number of arrests, effectively wrecking the Fatah network there.

  Because of this success, no attention was paid in Israel to the unprofessional conduct of the two Mossad drivers, both members of Harari’s elite Caesarea unit, and the fact that they had prevented medical treatment from being given to two men who died of their wounds, and could have caused an even greater disaster.

  The operation left Lebanon in shock. The Lebanese government resigned because of its impotence in the face of the “Israeli aggression.” The Arab world was in an uproar, and in Egypt, the leading daily, Al-Ahram, commented that the goal of the operation had been “to drive into the Arabs’ hearts the sense that Israel was in control of the region.” Thanks to Spring of Youth, the myth that the Mossad could strike anywhere and at any ti
me began to gain credence in the Arab world.

  —

  THE RESOUNDING SUCCESS OF Operation Spring of Youth did not mean a letup in the string of Mossad targeted killings in Europe.

  In the final days of preparation for the Beirut raid, Meiri and another operative were in Paris, waiting for Basil al-Kubaisi, a law professor at Beirut University and a low-level activist in the PFLP, to finish with a prostitute before they shot him dead. (“I decided that, just as they give a condemned man a last request, this guy also deserved some sex before he died,” Meiri related.)

  Then, only hours after the Spring of Youth forces returned to Israel, Harari, Meiri, and five additional operatives traveled to Athens, where they killed Zaid Muchassi with a bomb planted in the mattress of his hotel bed. Muchassi had just been appointed the Fatah representative in Cyprus, where he replaced Hussein Abd al-Chir—whom the Mossad also had killed, on January 24, with a bomb in a Nicosia hotel mattress.

  On June 10, information came in indicating that Wadie Haddad had sent two of his men to Rome, to carry out an attack on the El Al airline office. The information came from a Junction agent deep inside Haddad’s organization. This new and promising recruit, who would be described in AMAN’s annual report as “an outstanding source with excellent and exclusive access to the Haddad organization,” and who agreed to spy in exchange for money, was given the code name Itzavon, Hebrew for “Sadness.” A team commanded by “Carlos,” a Bayonet operative, began following the two men, who were driving around Rome in a Mercedes with German registration plates.