Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  That miracle was Golda Meir, the Mossad’s greatest fan. Harari claimed that he and Zamir acknowledged their responsibility for the debacle and that “we offered our immediate resignations to Golda. She wouldn’t hear of it. She said there were important things to be done, that we were needed, and that we must stay.” During the weeks afterward, while Harari was trying to get his people out of jail, the prime minister invited him to her modest apartment in north Tel Aviv and, Harari said, she “made me tea in her kitchen and tried really hard to cheer me up.”

  Still, the failure in Lillehammer led to a much more cautious Caesarea policy. On September 4, Harari was in charge of a wide-ranging operation by Caesarea and Rainbow in Rome, tracking a Black September squad headed by Amin al-Hindi, another of the figures on the list of eleven Israel wanted to kill because of their roles in the Munich massacre. This squad was acting on behalf of the Libyan ruler, Muammar Qaddafi, who had equipped them with six SA-7 Strela shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles, with which they were planning to shoot down an El Al airliner just after it took off from Fiumicino Airport. Harari and his team followed them as they transported the missiles to an apartment in Ostia, a suburb of Rome that was “a catapult shot from the runway,” in Harari’s words. They intended to fire the missiles from the roof of the building.

  In a nearby playground, sitting on a lawn with kids playing around their mothers, Harari and Zamir sat and argued with Meiri, who pleaded, “Let me go in. I’ll knock them all off in a minute and take the missiles.”

  But after the Lillehammer fiasco, Zamir was wary. Over Meiri’s vociferous objections, Zamir said, “Nehemia, not this time. We’ll inform Italian intelligence and let them take care of it.”

  “And what’ll we get out of that?” Meiri asked. “The Arabs will hijack an Italian plane or threaten them some other way, and they’ll let these guys go.”

  “If an El Al plane was in immediate danger, then we’d blow up not only the apartment but the whole building, but there are still many hours before they’re planning to fire the missiles,” Harari responded. “Besides, when we blasted Hamshari, we knew the bomb would hit only the lamp and the desk and his head, but here? How can I let you start a gunfight in a six-story building when I don’t know who their neighbors are and who else is likely to get hurt? Perhaps the prime minister of Italy lives in the apartment across the hall? Perhaps the prime minister’s grandmother?”

  Meiri wasn’t persuaded. His fury soared when Zamir ordered him to be the Mossad representative to go with the Italian police and point out the apartment, because he was the one who knew how to speak Italian best. “If they see me, I’ll be burned, and I’ll never be able to take part in another op,” Meiri complained.

  Harari tried to calm him. “Don’t worry, Nehemia. There are some excellent plastic surgeons in Israel. We’ll give you a new face, even better than the one you’ve got now. Go show them where the apartment is.”

  The Italians arrested all the members of al-Hindi’s squad, but, exactly as Meiri had predicted, they were freed after three months because of pressure from Qaddafi.

  Bayonet was in effect disbanded because of the Lillehammer affair. The fake Italian passport Meiri had used for the operation was exposed during the investigation by the Norwegian police, and his travels abroad were severely curtailed. He left the Mossad shortly afterward.

  THE LILLEHAMMER MESS NOTWITHSTANDING, the general mood in the defense establishment remained euphoric following Operation Spring of Youth. There was a newfound sense of confidence, and it was not limited to the Mossad, but spread through all of the Israeli leadership.

  Two days after the operation, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan climbed to the top of the mountain fortress of Masada. It was here that Jewish zealots rebelling against the Roman Empire killed themselves and their families rather than be taken captive, thus creating the nation’s major heroic myth. Dayan declared, “We shall establish a new Israel with wide borders, not like those of 1948….These days are blessed with conditions the likes of which it is doubtful that our nation has ever seen in the past.” Chief of staff Elazar, in a letter to Zamir, boasted that after Spring of Youth, “the prestige of the IDF has soared to new heights and its glory has increased.” And Golda Meir, on April 15, 1973, wrote, “Perhaps the day will come when the stories of heroism and resourcefulness, sacrifice and devotion, of these warriors will be told in Israel, and generations will recount them to those who follow them with admiration and pride, as yet another chapter in the heritage of heroism of our nation.”

  Yet confidence can too easily slip into overconfidence, the pitfalls of which weren’t limited to Caesarea and the Lillehammer fiasco. Forty years after the raid, Ehud Barak, the leader of the Beirut hit team and later chief of staff, prime minister, and minister of defense, suggested that this hubris had disastrous consequences for the entire nation. “In retrospect,” he said, “it seems to me that we came back from Beirut that night and the country’s leaders drew the wrong conclusions from the success of the operation. It created a self-confidence that lacked foundation. It is impossible to project from a surgical, pinpoint commando raid onto the abilities of the entire army, as if the IDF can do anything, that we are omnipotent.

  “They—the prime minister, the defense minister, and all the rest—saw us, the Sayeret and the Mossad, get the order and, within a few weeks, act on it. And we acted on it well. This gave them the sense that such a capability was common to the entire military. But our successes, both in the Six-Day War and in the operations that followed it, sprang from accurate planning and optimal use of the element of surprise. We were the ones who initiated. We set the timetables as well as the outcomes.

  “And with our new sense of security came complacency as well. We did not think that they could take us by surprise, too, that they could damage us just as badly.”

  Unwavering faith in the armed forces and the belief that the three branches of the defense establishment—the IDF, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad—could save Israel from any danger whatsoever led the country’s leadership to also feel that there was no pressing need to reach a diplomatic compromise with the Arabs. Others outside Israel disagreed.

  In 1972, U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger launched a secret diplomatic initiative aimed at achieving a peace agreement, or at least a non-belligerency pact, between Israel and Egypt. He realized that as long as Israel held on to the Egyptian territories it had conquered in 1967, Egypt would do whatever it could to reconquer them, and the next conflagration in the Middle East would be only a matter of time.

  The high point of the initiative came during dramatic meetings at a CIA safe house in Armonk, New York, on February 25 and 26, 1973, between Kissinger and an Egyptian emissary. The emissary declared that Egypt was prepared to sign a peace treaty with Israel, the terms of which—Israeli recognition of Egypt’s sovereignty over the Sinai Peninsula, but retention of Israeli forces there, with a full retreat later on in exchange for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries—were unprecedentedly favorable to Israel. Yet Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, also warned that if his offer was not taken up by September, he would go to war.

  Meir refused. “We’ll pass on this,” Meir told Kissinger.

  Dayan concurred. “I prefer Sharm el-Sheikh without peace,” he said, “to peace without Sharm el-Sheikh.”

  By this time, Egypt and Syria were already feverishly engaged in preparing their armed forces for war: massive troop movement toward and then away from the front lines; air force exercises in conjunction with the advanced surface-to-air missile systems the Soviets had supplied them; training commando forces in the use of Sagger antitank missiles; and vast maneuvers to prepare for crossing the Suez Canal in great force. These were all obvious preparations for war, but without any intelligence explicitly confirming that fact, the Israeli defense establishment dismissed them as mere war games.

  Elaz
ar had been convinced that the Mossad and AMAN would be able to give Israel at least forty-eight hours’ warning before the outbreak of war, enough time to mobilize the reserves. He and his cohorts weren’t much worried, in any case, confident as they were that the Arabs were frightened of Israel and wouldn’t dare start a war. If they did, the Israelis were sure that “we would break their bones” in short order.

  They were wrong.

  On October 6, at 2 P.M., the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched massive, concerted surprise attacks against Israel. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, when Israelis, even nonreligious ones, fast and go to synagogue or stay at home, so the forces on the front lines were thinly spread. The Egyptians threw 2,200 tanks, 2,900 armored personnel carriers, 2,400 artillery pieces, large amounts of antiaircraft and antitank weaponry, and hundreds of thousands of infantry and commando troops into the battle, much of it across the Suez Canal. On the Golan Heights, the Syrians invaded Israeli territory with 60,000 troops, 1,400 tanks, and 800 guns. Both also activated the bulk of their air and naval forces. The Israeli units facing them were made up of a few hundred men, mostly reservists who’d been kept there to allow the regular forces to go home for the holy day.

  Within the first few days, the Arab armies scored notable victories against the Israelis, who, in addition to being taken by surprise, also read the other side’s tactics incorrectly. The Egyptians established a formidable beachhead on the Sinai side of the canal, and the Syrians penetrated deep into the Golan Heights and were threatening to sweep down into the Jordan Valley and the Galilee.

  However, by dint of massive effort and sacrifice, the Israelis managed to stem the invasions and, after nineteen days of counterattack, turned the tables on the enemy. The Egyptians were expelled from almost the entire beachhead. Israeli units crossed the canal and, after surrounding the enemy forces on the western side of the waterway, advanced toward Cairo, reaching a point only sixty miles from the Egyptian capital. The Syrians were driven out of the Golan, and Israeli forces advanced until they were within artillery range of Damascus.

  But the victory came at a heavy cost. More than 2,300 Israeli soldiers died in the Yom Kippur War, a war that could have been prevented through negotiation, or at least prepared for with adequate prior intelligence.

  A wave of protest swept through Israeli society, which led to the establishment of a commission of inquiry and the forced resignation of chief of staff Elazar and AMAN chief Zeira, along with other top officers. The war dispelled, at least temporarily, Israelis’ sense of military and espionage supremacy and, thus, their sense of security. Although the panel did not explicitly blame Meir or Dayan, due to heavy public pressure, the prime minister tendered her resignation on April 11.

  —

  A MONTH LATER, AT around 4:30 A.M. on the morning of May 13, 1974, three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a PLO splinter group not connected with the PFLP, sneaked across the Lebanese border into Israel. They hid in a cave until nightfall. An Israeli Border Police patrol found their footprints but did not manage to track them down. Under cover of darkness, the three began making their way toward Maalot, a town about six miles from the frontier populated mostly by new immigrants. On the way, they ambushed a vehicle carrying women on their way home from work, killing one and wounding another. IDF troops called to the scene failed to apprehend the terrorists.

  At 3:30 A.M., the three came to a house on the outskirts of the town. Two of them were natives of Haifa and could speak Hebrew, and they told the people inside the house that they were police looking for terrorists. When the door opened, they burst inside and murdered Yosef and Fortuna Cohen and their four-year-old son, Moshe, and wounded their daughter, Bibi. They did not notice sixteen-month-old Yitzhak, a deaf-mute who didn’t make a sound. As they left the house, the Palestinians ran into Yaakov Kadosh, an employee of the local government, and demanded that he tell them the way to the school. He did so, and then they shot and injured him.

  The three arrived at the Netiv Meir school, intending to lie in wait for the children arriving the next day. They did not expect to find eighty-five teenagers, aged fifteen to seventeen, and ten adults already sleeping there. The children were from a religious school in Safed, and they were on an overnight field trip in the Maalot region. When security forces arrived on the scene, the terrorists shouted that if twenty of their comrades in Israeli prisons were not released by 6 A.M., they would kill all their hostages.

  The normally aggressive Golda Meir, who had not yet been replaced as prime minister, was prepared to concede to the terrorists’ demands. After the shock of the Yom Kippur War, the conclusions of the inquiry, and the angry protest demonstrations against her, Meir did not want her last act as prime minister to be one that endangered the lives of children. The cabinet endorsed her recommendation. However, Minister of Defense Dayan, also about to be replaced, disagreed. The fallout from the Yom Kippur War had had the opposite effect on him: After thousands of protesters in Tel Aviv had demanded his resignation, Dayan saw his political career on the brink of a humiliating conclusion, and he wanted to project determination and authority. “The only way to handle terrorists is to not give them what they want and not let them get out of here alive. We have to kill them,” he urged the prime minister. Eventually, Meir gave her consent. At 5:15 A.M., the order was given for Sayeret Matkal to break into the school.

  This time, the Sayeret proved inadequate to the task. The sniper who fired the first shot only slightly wounded his target, and a force commanded by Amiram Levin entered the wrong room on the wrong floor. The terrorists responded by firing and tossing grenades into the classroom where the hostages were being held. Because the hostages were devoutly religious, they were sitting separately—the boys along the walls and the girls in the middle—and the girls took most of the fire. In the thirty seconds before the Sayeret managed to reach the terrorists and kill them, twenty-two children—eighteen of them girls—four adult hostages, and one soldier were killed. Sixty-eight people were wounded, including every surviving hostage.

  It was a dismal end to Meir’s political career. On June 3, 1974, she was replaced by Yitzhak Rabin, the Six-Day War chief of staff and former ambassador to the United States. Rabin was fifty-two, the youngest person to serve as prime minister at that point, and the first Israeli-born sabra in that position. He was also utterly different from Meir in that, while she refrained almost entirely from interfering with the recommendations of her military and intelligence advisers, Rabin involved himself in the minutest details of all military and counterterror operations.

  And there were many such operations to come.

  —

  THE MAALOT ATTACK WAS the beginning of a new round of terror, yet another reverberation from Operation Spring of Youth.

  The PLO had undergone a number of organizational and structural changes following the deaths of their three leaders in Beirut. The Mossad believed that the operation had had a chilling effect. “It instilled in them great fear,” said Shimshon Yitzhaki.

  “It obliged them to hide and run,” added Harari. “We managed to disrupt them. It was not for nothing that Arafat didn’t sleep in the same bed for two nights running.”

  On the other hand, Spring of Youth had also strengthened the hand of Abu Jihad. Most of his internal rivals were now out of the way, thanks to the efforts of Israel. After Spring of Youth, Arafat and Abu Jihad decided to terminate the activities of Black September and put a stop to attacks on targets outside Israel and the occupied lands. Some journalists and historians, including prominent Palestinians, believe that they did so because they realized that acts of terror against Israelis or Jews in Western countries ended up harming the Palestinian cause more than helping it. They also undoubtedly realized that the moment they committed acts of terror in Europe, they bestowed legitimacy upon Israel’s targeted killing operations against their own people on that contine
nt, making the price of each terrorist attack very high.

  Others credit the fact that the PLO obtained international standing in 1974, when Arafat was invited to address the UN General Assembly. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

  Either way, as the head of the PLO’s Supreme Military Council, Abu Jihad ordered all terrorist attacks to be targeted inside “the occupied motherland.” Militants slipped into the country through airports and seaports from Europe, came over the Jordan border or, like the three terrorists who attacked Maalot, launched raids from Lebanon.

  The Maalot attack, orchestrated by the DFLP, reflected Abu Jihad’s strategy. It was the most lethal attack by the Palestinians since Munich and the worst that had ever been launched across the border into Israeli territory. But it was not the last, merely an indication of what was yet to come.

  At around 11 P.M. on March 5, 1975, eight of Abu Jihad’s men sailed into Israeli waters on a ship disguised as an Egyptian merchant vessel. Under the dark of a moonless night, the terrorists climbed into a rubber dinghy and landed on a beach in Tel Aviv. They walked through the sand toward the street, then sprayed the Herbert Samuel Esplanade with automatic fire.

  Their ship was made to look Egyptian because the terrorists wanted to sabotage an upcoming visit to the region by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had not given up on his attempts to bring peace between Israel and Egypt.

  The terrorists seized the Savoy Hotel, a down-market establishment a block away from the beach. The men burst into the lobby, killed the reception clerk, and herded all the guests they found into one room.

  This was “the first time terrorists had succeeded in getting a squad into the heart of the country,” said a secret military report on the incident shortly after it ended. The terrorists were so close to the Kirya compound, the former Templer neighborhood where Israel’s military and intelligence outfits were headquartered, that a stray bullet from an AK-47 flew through a window and landed in a meeting room where the IDF’s top commanders were gathered.