Based on that directive, Dagan did as he pleased. At the SLR headquarters in Marjayoun, he and a number of intelligence and operational personnel set up a secret organization that reported directly to him. “I gave his secret operations complete freedom,” Ben-Gal said. “Meir loved to be involved in secret, small-scale warfare, in shadows and dark places, in espionage activities and in weaving conspiracies, small or big. That’s his forte. He’s a very brave guy, very creative, very opinionated, who’s ready to take huge risks. I knew what he was doing but ignored it. Sometimes you have to turn a blind eye.”
David Agmon was head of the Northern Command staff, one of the few who were in on Dagan’s secret ops. “The aim,” he said, “was to cause chaos amongst the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity.” In order to leave no Israeli fingerprints, Dagan and his crew recruited Lebanese locals, Christians, and Shiite Muslims, who detested Arafat and were infuriated by the way the Palestinians treated Lebanon and its people, as if it were their own land. Using those “operational squads,” as they were called, Dagan’s SLR began a series of targeted killings and sabotage operations in southern Lebanon.
“Raful and I used to okay missions with a wink,” Ben-Gal said. “I used to tell him, ‘Raful, we’ve got an op to do.’ He’d say, ‘Okay, but nothing in writing. It’s between me and you, personal….I don’t want it to become known.’ We didn’t act through the military bureaucracy, because we both did and did not carry out these actions. We used them [the locals] as proxies, mercenaries. We put motivation into them—Christians and Shiites and Sunnis—and we played them against one another.”
The primary method used for those attacks was explosives concealed in cans of oil or preserves. Since the activity was not officially sanctioned by the IDF and had to be hidden from the rest of the army, Ben-Gal asked the secretariat of Kibbutz Mahanayim, where he was living at the time, for permission to use its Diyuk metalworks. (“Of course, we gave him the keys and total backing,” one of the secretaries said. “This was the head of the command. He was like a king to us.”)
The explosives were provided by the IDF’s bomb disposal unit, whose commander had been ordered by Eitan to cooperate without knowing what the purpose was. The unit specialized in neutralizing old, unexploded ordnance—rockets, mines, and grenades, including spoils taken by the Israelis. By using such explosive material, the IDF was able to greatly minimize the chance that any connection with Israel might be revealed if the explosive devices fell into enemy hands.
“We’d come there at night,” Ben-Gal said, “Meir and I and the rest of the guys, with the Northern Command’s chief engineer, who brought the explosives, and we’d fill those little drums and connect the fuses.” Those little drums were then dispatched to couriers in large backpacks, or, if they were too big, on motorcycles, bicycles, or donkeys. Soon the bombs began exploding at the homes of the PLO’s collaborators in southern Lebanon, killing everyone there, as well as in PLO positions and offices, mostly in Tyre, Sidon, and the Palestinian refugee camps around them, causing massive damages and casualties.
For Ben-Gal and Dagan, the stealth measures—manufacturing bombs in a kibbutz in the dark of night, deploying Lebanese irregulars—were necessary to keep their operations secret not just from the PLO but also from their own government, and even their own colleagues in the IDF. They had launched a covert and unsanctioned campaign on foreign soil. The Northern Command reported to AMAN, which was supposed to be involved in such matters, as well as the Operations Directorate of the General Staff, which was supposed to approve them. “But we kept them absolutely out of the loop,” Ben-Gal said. According to Dagan, AMAN “interfered with us all the time. They didn’t understand what a clandestine operation was and how important this activity was.”
To be more precise, the military intelligence branch disagreed about the importance of these unsanctioned killings. The head of AMAN at the time, Major General Yehoshua Saguy, was a cautious man who doubted the effectiveness of the kind of operation Dagan was conducting. He didn’t see the situation in Lebanon in black-and-white, as Eitan did, and he repeatedly warned that Israel could become embroiled in something too big for it to handle there. “Ben-Gal even tried to bar me from entering the Northern Command headquarters or to visit the region,” Saguy recalled.
“There was a constant struggle with the Northern Command,” said AMAN’s Amos Gilboa. “They bypassed us, worked behind our back; Yanosh [Ben-Gal] lied to us all the time. We did not believe any of their reports. What made it even more grave was that it was being done with the approval of the chief of staff, who kept the activity a secret from the General Staff. This was one of the ugliest periods in the history of the country.”
According to Ben-Gal, Saguy “realized that something irregular was going on,” and he tried to ferret out the facts. Saguy ordered his field security unit, Vulture—normally responsible for ensuring that soldiers didn’t give away military secrets on insecure lines—to tap into the Northern Command’s phones. “But my command communications officer caught them connecting to my switchboard, and I tossed them into the lockup,” Ben-Gal said, proud of having discovered “AMAN’s plot.”
Ben-Gal had an encrypted connection set up between his office in Nazareth and Dagan’s command posts on the northern border and inside Lebanon. “This was the first thing he showed me,” recalled Efraim Sneh, who was a senior officer in the Northern Command at the time, describing the first time Ben-Gal informed him of the covert activity. “He pointed at that certain handset and said, ‘That’s so that Yehoshua [Saguy] won’t be able to listen in, and AMAN can go jump in the lake.’ ” Sneh said that Ben-Gal and Eitan “were right in their attitude to Saguy, who was a stool pigeon and tried to squelch any original initiative.”
Not long after, Saguy went to Prime Minister Begin to complain that Ben-Gal had told Dagan to booby-trap the corpses of terrorists who’d been killed in firefights, in order to take out their comrades when they retrieved the bodies. Ben-Gal concluded from this that AMAN had apparently managed to tap his encrypted phone.
“Then we had no option,” he said. “To keep our secrets, we had to hold all of our discussions in person.” From time to time, usually once a week, Eitan would drive from Tel Adashim, the agricultural village where he lived, to the nearby Northern Command headquarters near Nazareth, to meet Ben-Gal and plot the next moves in their shadow war.
Even still, not everything could be kept secret. Early in 1980, various elements in the IDF, headed by Saguy, began informing Deputy Defense Minister Zippori that Ben-Gal was conducting rogue ops inside Lebanon. They turned to him because they knew that he was the only politician who dared to speak out about what was going on there. “They tell me about the explosions in Lebanon and even that Yanosh was mining roads taken by IDF troops, to make it look as if the PLO was behind it.”
In June, Zippori heard that women and children had been killed in an operation two months earlier, when a car bomb was exploded on a main road in the Western Sector of southern Lebanon, with the aim of hitting PLO personnel. “Raful had not submitted it upstairs for approval, because we feared that we wouldn’t get authorization for a thing like that,” said Ben-Gal. Both in internal army reports and publicly, the Northern Command claimed that the operation had been carried out by one of the local South Lebanese militias, something that was feasible but was in fact totally untrue.
“One of the cars managed to get away. Two cars caught fire and blew up. Can I tell you there were any big stars there? No, there weren’t. But we zapped a few operatives,” said Ben-Gal.
“I thought it was a terrible thing,” said Zippori. He demanded that Begin, who was serving as defense minister (Weizman having resigned in May), throw Ben-Gal and Dagan out of the army. “Menachem, we are a sovereign state. Everything the army d
oes, it can do only with the authorization of the cabinet. And in the cabinet, if such a thing came up for discussion, I would express my opinion. But it has not come up, and no one authorized it.”
Ben-Gal was summoned to the defense minister’s bureau in Tel Aviv, where Begin, Zippori, Eitan, and Saguy were waiting for him. “You are carrying out unauthorized actions in Lebanon. In these activities, women and children have been killed,” Zippori charged.
“Not correct,” Ben-Gal replied. “Four or five terrorists were killed. Who drives around in Lebanon in a Mercedes at 2 A.M.? Only terrorists.”
Zippori immediately protested. “The head of the Northern Command, who is doing things without the approval of the general staff, must be dismissed,” he said. “I am deputy minister of defense, and I knew nothing. You, Mr. Begin, are prime minister and minister of defense, and you knew nothing. The chief of staff didn’t know.”
Ben-Gal made small movements with his hand, signaling to Eitan that he should stand up and say everything was done with his approval. But Eitan, realizing that he couldn’t implicate himself, ignored him, playing with his wristwatch, which he had taken off and was turning over and over.
Finally, Begin spoke. “General Ben-Gal,” he said, “I want to ask you, as an officer and on your word of honor: Did you obtain approval for the operation from anyone above you?”
“Yes, Prime Minister. I obtained approval.”
“I believe the head of Northern Command. A general in the army would not lie,” Begin said. “The matter is closed. I hereby end this meeting.”
Was Begin aware of what was going on around him? Zippori, who still saw Begin as a venerable commander and an esteemed leader, believed that the military men deceived the prime minister time and again, exploiting his romantic attitude toward generals. Others believe that Begin, a seasoned politician, fully grasped the situation but preferred to retain plausible deniability of the egregious activities. Either way, the top brass realized there was no point in asking the prime minister to rectify the situation.
Though the infighting between AMAN and the Northern Command continued, and AMAN later learned from its sources in Lebanon about the Northern Command’s car and donkey bombings, eventually they decided to let go of the issue. “There were a lot of ops that were seen as small, kind of tactical, so we decided to drop it,” said Gilboa. “We said, ‘Perhaps it is better we don’t know, as long as it isn’t causing political damage.’ Something like ‘Let the young men arise and play before us.’ ”
Gilboa’s quote is from the Bible, 2 Samuel 2:14, and it means, basically, “Let the kids have their fun.” Ben-Gal’s targets were low-level PLO operatives, and his missions little more than tactical skirmishes. None of the PLO leadership was touched in his secret war. The operations, he said, were a kind a game for Dagan. “Just as he has a hobby of painting—and he paints very nicely—that’s the way it was with these ops,” Ben-Gal said. “They were Meir’s hobby.”
“It was convenient for me that the activities took place in a gray area,” Ben-Gal continued. “Sometimes one does not have to know. There are subjects about which you don’t have to be a worm like Zippori, and investigate the truth all the way to the end. Just let things flow, and know how to back Dagan up if things go wrong. True, Dagan was a wild man, but a wild young horse that jumps the fences and sometimes breaks a leg is better than some mule that you have to beat with a whip to make him take two paces forward.”
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ON AUGUST 5, 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin appointed Ariel “Arik” Sharon as defense minister of Israel. Begin had a deep admiration for the former general—“a glorious commander of armies,” he called him, “an international strategist”—though he was somewhat apprehensive about Sharon’s aggressiveness and his unwillingness to accept the authority of his superiors. “Sharon is liable to attack the Knesset with tanks,” Begin had half-joked two years before.
Still, Begin believed he was the right man to oversee the withdrawal from the Sinai in the wake of the peace treaty with Egypt, a task that, despite some violent demonstrations by settlers and the far right, Sharon accomplished without bloodshed.
At the same time, though, Sharon exploited the powers of his position to build more Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which, as occupied territories, fell under the jurisdiction of the Defense Ministry. He also instilled a pugnacious, enterprising spirit throughout the defense establishment. Sharon and Eitan, who in the 1950s had served as an officer under Sharon’s command in the IDF’s Paratroopers Brigade, both saw supreme importance in combating the PLO and its bases in Lebanon, and they ordered the military to start planning a major military campaign there.
“Sharon’s plans were revealed to us very, very slowly,” said Efraim Sneh. “At first, he ordered us to prepare a limited military penetration [to Lebanon], and only later on to draw the maps for a massive invasion, up to the Beirut-Damascus road.” David Agmon, Northern Command chief of staff, said that at a later stage, Sharon ordered him to plan the occupation of the whole of Lebanon and even parts of Syria. “It was clear to us that we didn’t know everything,” said Sneh, “and that the government knew even less than we did.”
But even Sharon realized that Israel could not simply invade Lebanon and occupy parts of it. In July 1981, President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, Philip Habib, mediated a ceasefire between Israel and the PLO in the Lebanese arena. Sharon and Eitan fiercely opposed the agreement, which did not include an undertaking by the PLO to refrain from attacks against Israelis in other places, like the occupied territories or Europe. To Sharon, a grenade thrown at a synagogue in Paris should have been considered a breach of the ceasefire. Furthermore, Begin and Sharon saw Arafat as responsible for any act by any Palestinian anywhere in the world, even if they belonged to organizations that were not affiliated with the PLO. But the outside world saw things differently, and Habib made it clear to the Israelis that the United States would back a land incursion into Lebanon only in response to a gross provocation by the PLO.
Sharon thought, correctly, that every day that went by peacefully gave Arafat and his people a gift of time to consolidate their position in Lebanon and improve their military deployment there. He decided to speed things up a little so he could execute his plan, and to activate Dagan’s secret apparatus in the Northern Command. “The aim of the second phase of this activity,” according to Sneh, “was to sow such chaos in the Palestinian areas of Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut that there would be a genuine and cast-iron reason for an Israeli invasion.”
Sharon also dispatched Rafi Eitan as a personal emissary to keep an eye on the clandestine activities in the north. Eitan—the slayer of the Tel Aviv Templers, the captor of Eichmann, and commander of the operations against the German scientists in Egypt—had left the organization in a huff when he was passed over for the directorship. In 1981, he was serving as the prime minister’s counterterrorism adviser and as the head of Lakam, an espionage arm of the Defense Ministry that dealt mainly with military technology.
By mid-September 1981, car bombs were exploding regularly in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities. One went off in the Fakhani quarter of Beirut on October 1, killing eighty-three people and wounding three hundred, including many women who were trapped in a fire in a clothing factory owned by the PLO. Another one exploded next to the PLO headquarters in Sidon, killing twenty-three. In December 1981 alone, eighteen bombs in cars or on motorcycles, bicycles, or donkeys blew up near PLO offices or Palestinian concentrations, causing many scores of deaths.
A new and unknown organization calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners took responsibility for all of these incidents. The explosives were now packed in Ariel laundry powder bags so that if the cars were stopped at roadblocks, the cargo would look like innocent goods. The Israelis in some cases enlisted women to drive, to reduce the like
lihood of the cars being caught on the way to the target zone.
The car bombs were developed in the IDF’s Special Operations Executive (Maarach Ha-Mivtsaim Ha-Meyuchadim), and they involved the use of one of the earliest generations of drones. These drones would relay the beam that would set off the detonation mechanism of the device. One of Dagan’s local agents would drive the car to the target, under aerial or land observation, park it there, and then leave. When the observers identified the moment they were waiting for, they’d push a button and the car would explode.
Sharon hoped that these operations would provoke Arafat into attacking Israel, which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or at least make the PLO retaliate against the Phalange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defense of the Christians.
The Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners also began attacking Syrian installations in Lebanon, and it even claimed responsibility for operations against IDF units. “We were never connected to activities against our own forces,” said Dagan, “but the front took responsibility in order to create credibility, as if it was operating against all of the foreign forces in Lebanon.”
Yasser Arafat was not hoodwinked by this ploy. He accused the Mossad of being behind the blasts and the “front.” That was not quite right, either, however. The Mossad was in fact vehemently opposed to what Ben-Gal and Dagan were doing.
“With Sharon’s backing,” one Mossad officer of the time said, “terrible things were done. I am no vegetarian, and I supported and even participated in some of the assassination operations Israel carried out. But we are speaking here about mass killing for killing’s sake, to sow chaos and alarm, among civilians, too. Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?”
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