Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Another Mossad man who was in Lebanon at the time said, “I saw from a distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. We were teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be. Everything that we saw later with Hezbollah sprang from what they saw had happened after these operations.”

  Dagan and Ben-Gal strongly denied that the front ever intended to harm civilians. “The targets were always military targets,” said Ben-Gal. Dagan said there was no alternative to using proxies. “I am ready to shed countless tears on the grave of a Lebanese who was killed on a mission for us, as long as no Jew’s life is endangered.” But he added that using mercenaries had its disadvantages. “You can give him explosives and tell him to go blow up a PLO headquarters somewhere, but he has his own accounts, and now he’s also got a bomb to settle them. So sometimes it happened that it went off somewhere else.”

  Arafat realized that Sharon was trying to goad the Palestinians into breaching the ceasefire so that he could launch his invasion, and Arafat made a genuine effort not to oblige him, including a partly successful attempt to stop violence in the occupied territories. In the face of this Palestinian restraint, the leaders of the front decided to move up a level.

  Sharon had Arafat returned to the wanted list—he’d been removed in 1974, when the Mossad reached the conclusion that he’d become a political figure and that therefore Israel must not harm him—and in late 1981, Ben-Gal and Dagan began planning an operation that they expected would change the course of Middle East history. Operation Olympia, code-named for a popular Tel Aviv restaurant, was a plan to bring in truck bombs loaded with something like two tons of explosives and surround a theater in east Beirut where the PLO was scheduled to hold a festive dinner in December. One massive explosion would eliminate the entire PLO leadership. But the idea was abandoned, and Olympia 1 was scrapped in favor of Olympia 2. This one called for Israeli agents to plant a massive set of bombs under a VIP dais under construction in a Beirut stadium where, on January 1, 1982, the PLO was going to celebrate the anniversary of its founding. With the push of one button would come wholesale destruction.

  Ben-Gal was no longer head of the Northern Command by the time this plan went into its operational stage. Sharon had little use for him. The general who was plotting to blow up dozens of Palestinians and who’d waged a secret war in Lebanon was, in Sharon’s view, softhearted and lacking in resolve. In December 1981, he dismissed Ben-Gal from the Northern Command and appointed someone more to his liking—a move that foreshadowed Sharon’s plans for Lebanon.

  It was at this time that Olympia 2 moved into high gear. On December 20, 1981, three agents recruited by Dagan managed to get to the VIP dais and plant large amounts of explosives underneath the place where the PLO leadership would be seated, all linked to a remotely controlled detonation device. In addition, at one of the unit’s bases, three miles from the border, three vehicles—a truck loaded with a ton and a half of explosives and two Mercedes sedans with 550 pounds each—had been prepared. These vehicles were to be driven to Beirut by three Shiite members of the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners and parked close to a wall of the stadium behind the VIP dais. They would be detonated by remote control about a minute after the explosives under the dais, when the panic was at its height and the people who had survived were trying to get away. The death and destruction were expected to be “of unprecedented proportions, even in terms of Lebanon,” in the words of a very senior officer of the Northern Command.

  In a note Rafi Eitan passed to Efraim Sneh at a meeting about the planned operation, he wrote, “If this works, we [Israel] will immediately be blamed.” This was written not in fear, but rather in hope, because, as Sneh later said, “those PLO leaders who weren’t killed by the blast in the stadium would know right away what they had to do: to attack Israel, to breach the ceasefire, and to give Sharon, who was desperate to invade Lebanon, the pretext to do that.”

  Everything was in place, but then someone leaked the plan to Saguy, who informed Deputy Defense Minister Zippori what was afoot. “Foreign diplomats are likely to be on the dais with Arafat, and in particular Alexander Soldatov, the Soviet ambassador to Lebanon,” Saguy told Zippori.

  Zippori detested Sharon and was always suspicious of his intentions, so he contacted his old commander in the pre-state underground, the Irgun: Begin. “The ambassador matter was grave enough in itself,” Zippori said. “But far more grave, much more, was that once again they were carrying out such acts without the approval of the cabinet.”

  Early on the morning of December 31, a day before Olympia 2 was scheduled to take place, chief of staff Eitan called Dagan. “All of a sudden, I hear that Sharon is ordering us to go to the prime minister in order to present the plan and get his final approval to act,” Dagan recalled. “It was a very rainy day. Raful informs us that in order to maintain secrecy, he would come to Northern Command headquarters to pick me up and fly us together to Begin.”

  In Begin’s office, the prime minister stared at them inquiringly. “They say that it’s possible that the Soviet ambassador will be there on the platform,” Begin said.

  “That’s simply incorrect,” Dagan said. “There’s a very low probability that he or any other foreign diplomat will be there.”

  Begin asked Saguy what he thought. Saguy said it was likely that a Soviet diplomat would attend. “If something happens to him,” he said, “we are liable to get into a very grave crisis with the USSR.”

  Years later, Saguy said, “My duty as head of AMAN was to take care of not only the operational-military aspects, but also the diplomatic aspect. I told Begin that it was impossible to kill a whole stadium just like that. And what would happen the next day after such a massacre? The whole world would pile on top of us. It would make no difference if we never admitted responsibility. Everyone would know who was behind it.”

  Dagan, Eitan, and Sharon tried to persuade Begin, saying this was an opportunity that would not come again. But the prime minister took the danger of a Russian threat seriously and ordered them to abort.

  “In the end, of course, it turned out that I was right and there was no Soviet ambassador or any other foreign diplomat there,” Dagan said. “But what could we do? The PM said abort, so we abort. There was a very complicated business afterward, getting the explosives out.”

  Begin quickly green-lit another operation, one that carried little risk of harming either diplomats or civilians. Surveillance of the top PLO leaders had revealed that once a month, on a Friday, they left Beirut in a convoy of seven or eight luxury Mercedes sedans and sped toward Syria, and from there to Jordan, where they held leadership meetings. It was both business and pleasure, and Arafat often joined the delegation.

  One night in early February 1982, a squad of Caesarea operatives came to one of the main junctions the convoys passed through each month. They dismantled the top of one of the traffic lights and replaced it with one manufactured in the Mossad’s technological department. It contained a camera to transmit images to Mossad HQ. On Friday, March 5, at 3 A.M., a few hours before the PLO convoy was due to pass by, another, larger Caesarea squad arrived at the junction, with a large amount of explosives that they began planting in ditches along the sides of the road, connected by a detonating cord and linked wirelessly to headquarters. According to the plan, the Mossad personnel would leave the scene after setting up the bombs and return to Israel. The convoy would be watched by local agents after it departed Beirut. When it passed a certain point, marked on one of the trees and clearly visible in the transmitted images, the bombs would be detonated and the PLO leadership would be liquidated.

  Everything went well until dawn, when a local policeman saw the two vehicles the Israeli team had arrived in, and the men kneeling near them. “What are you doing there?” the cop asked in Arabic. “We’ve been to a wedding and they served bad food,” one of the Mossad agents told him. “We’ve al
l got the runs. We stopped to empty our stomachs.” Two of the team had already surreptitiously drawn their pistols and cocked them. But the cop decided to go on his way.

  The operatives wondered whether he had believed them or if he’d gone for reinforcements. HQ decided not to take any risks. The prime minister and the defense minister agreed that the mission should be aborted, and the team returned to Israel. Once again, the iron law that any mission must be sacrificed if it could allow operatives to fall into captivity was strictly observed.

  What would have happened if Begin had allowed Dagan to go ahead with Olympia, or if the Arab policeman hadn’t driven by? History, Dagan argued, would have run a completely different course. “If they had permitted us to act and the PLO leadership been put out of play,” he said, “we all would have been spared the Lebanon War six months later, and any number of other troubles.”

  It’s impossible to know for sure. Others feel that Sharon and Eitan would not have been satisfied even then, and that they had a grand strategy to create a new order not only in Lebanon, but in the whole of the Middle East.

  For now, they kept silent, waiting for the inevitable pretext for war.

  EVERY SPRING IN LONDON, the De La Rue company, a British-based currency-printing and security-system firm, hosts a black-tie dinner for diplomats and business executives in the city. In 1982, it was held on the night of June 3 at the posh Dorchester Hotel. Eighty-four ambassadors and CEOs from all over the world feasted, networked, and swapped gossip.

  When it was over, shortly after 10 P.M., and the guests began to wander out, Israel’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Shlomo Argov, stopped in the hotel lobby to chat with another diplomat. They discussed the gifts their respective countries would give to the first child of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who was due to be born in two weeks. Then, right at the exit, Argov shook hands with the press mogul Robert Maxwell and thanked him for his papers’ friendly attitude toward Israel.

  The Shin Bet’s VIP protection unit wasn’t allowed to operate in the United Kingdom, so Argov was protected by a British bodyguard, Detective Colin Simpson. The two men stepped out of the hotel and quickly walked the thirty feet to an armor-plated ambassadorial Volvo sedan. Simpson opened the back door for Argov.

  Neither one of them saw the assassin on the sidewalk until it was too late.

  Hussein Ghassan Said was part of a secret cell of the Abu Nidal terror group. He and two comrades had been waiting, watching the front door of the Dorchester for an hour and a half. “The day before the operation,” Said said, “Russan, our commander, came to me and told me that tomorrow would be a great day for the Palestinian nation, that we were going to kill an important Zionist.”

  Carrying a Polish-made WZ-63 miniature submachine gun, he approached Argov from behind. “I came close to him,” he said, “and he began getting into the car. I took my weapon out of my bag and held it with both hands, as I had been taught. The other man opened the door for him. I came closer, until I was only a few meters away, and then I fired at him, one shot in the head.”

  Simpson pushed Argov into the car and told the chauffeur to drive to the hospital. The ambassador was gravely injured. Then Simpson chased Said, who was fleeing up Park Lane toward a car in which two friends were waiting for him. The detective testified later that at the corner of South Street, several blocks from the Dorchester, Said turned and fired at him. He missed, and the bullet hit a car belonging to a member of the royal family, whose clothes were covered by shattered glass. At almost the same moment, Simpson fired his .38 pistol and hit Said in the neck just below the right ear, bringing him down. “I began running toward the car,” Said said. “My weapon jammed. Suddenly I felt a terrible blow to my neck and I fell down to the ground.”

  Said’s companions were caught forty minutes after the incident. British intelligence had a double agent inside the Abu Nidal cell, but they missed his tip-off about the planned assassination bid and realized too late what was happening.

  Argov survived but was paralyzed and suffered from grave ailments that led to his death in 2003. Shortly after the assassination attempt, Israeli intelligence learned that Abu Nidal, Arafat’s sworn enemy, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, “had ordered the attack on behalf of Barzan al-Tikriti, the head of the Iraqi intelligence services,” said Yigal Simon, a former commander of Unit 504, who at the time was serving in the Mossad’s London station.

  Barzan’s half brother and boss, the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, hoped that the assassination would bring about a large-scale military clash between Syria and the PLO and Israel, his three bitter Middle Eastern rivals, and perhaps even embroil the biggest rival of all: Iran.

  As it happened, Saddam and Sharon’s cadre of hawks had similar interests. At the Israeli cabinet’s meeting on the morning of June 4, 1982, Prime Minister Begin declared that “an attack on an ambassador is tantamount to an attack on the State of Israel, and we will respond.” He wouldn’t listen to his own intelligence personnel, who tried to tell him that the PLO had been behaving for a year, since the American-initiated ceasefire of the previous summer, and that Argov had been shot by a member of a dissident fringe Palestinian group, which itself wanted to eliminate Arafat. “They’re all PLO,” Begin proclaimed. Chief of staff Eitan was less refined: “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal. We’ve got to whack the PLO.”

  The cabinet approved a massive aerial bombardment of Beirut and PLO bases. Clearly, Arafat could not let this pass without reacting. Soon after, twenty-nine northern Israeli communities had come under heavy PLO artillery fire.

  In London, Said was sentenced to thirty years in prison. In telephone interviews and letters, he said he didn’t believe his shot had started the Israeli war in Lebanon. “It would have happened anyway,” he said. “It may have affected the timing of the invasion, but Raful and Sharon wanted to conquer Lebanon in any event. They used what I did as an excuse.”

  He was probably correct. In any case, the war in Lebanon was on.

  —

  ARIEL SHARON PRESENTED THE Israeli cabinet with a plan to avenge the shooting of Argov and silence the PLO forces on June 5. He called it Operation Peace for Galilee, a name designed to give the impression this was an almost reluctant mission of self-protection. It would be a limited incursion, Sharon told the cabinet, aimed only at removing the threat PLO artillery posed to Israeli communities. The IDF would advance into Lebanon no more than forty kilometers, the range of the PLO’s biggest guns at the time.

  The only minister who opposed the plan was Mordechai Zippori, now serving as minister of communications. He suspected that Sharon had much greater goals. With his military background, Zippori also grasped that a thrust of such depth, along the flank of the Syrian forces in Lebanon, would by necessity lead to a clash between the Israeli and Syrian forces. But Begin rebuffed Zippori’s objections and declared, “I have said that we will not attack the Syrians.”

  Zippori’s suspicions, however, were once again entirely justified. This was indeed only the beginning of Sharon’s actual plan. Along with his chief of staff, Eitan, he had a secret agenda that was far more grandiose: He intended to use the IDF’s tanks to remake the whole of the Middle East. In his vision, Israeli forces and their Phalange allies would conquer Lebanon from the border to Beirut, destroying all PLO forces and inflicting serious damage on Syrian units deployed there. With the capital secure, the Israelis would install the Phalange’s leader, Bashir Gemayel, as president, thus transforming Lebanon into a reliable ally. Next, Gemayel would expel the Palestinians to Jordan, where they would be a majority able to establish a Palestinian state in place of the Hashemite Kingdom. This, Sharon reckoned, would eliminate the Palestinian demand for a state in Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—which thus would become part of Israel.

  In that fantastical plan, there was one more critical element: killing Yasser Arafat. Sharon believed that in a war against a terrorist organ
ization, emblems and symbols were as important as body counts. To send a signal, to crush the Palestinians’ spirit, he and Eitan were determined to get to Beirut, find Arafat’s lair, and kill him.

  To this end, a special task force was set up, code-named Salt Fish. Sharon appointed his two experts on special ops—Meir Dagan and Rafi Eitan—to run it. “I thought that hitting him would change everything,” Dagan said. “Arafat was not only a Palestinian leader, but a kind of founding father of the Palestinian nation. Killing him would unleash a large part of the internal conflicts inside the PLO and significantly hinder their capability to make any strategic decisions from then on.”

  The AMAN chief, Major General Yehoshua Saguy, and the head of the Mossad, Yitzhak Hofi, formerly an IDF general, both firmly opposed invading Lebanon, because they knew that behind Sharon’s and Eitan’s promises of “an incursion of no more than forty kilometers” there was another, hidden plan that would place Israel in a damaging situation. “I knew them both,” said Hofi, “and I knew that they had not given up their ambition and that somehow they would try to achieve what they always wanted”—to reach Beirut and kill Arafat. Hofi warned Begin that an invasion of Lebanon “would be the Yom Kippur War of the Likud,” Begin’s party—a disaster for the state and for his own career, just as the 1973 conflict had ended the hegemony of the Labor Party.

  But Begin dismissed the intelligence organizations’ objections, and on June 6 the IDF stormed into Lebanon.

  An army of 76,000 troops, 800 tanks, and 1,500 armored personnel carriers advanced northward on three axes, with a fourth force landing from the sea.

  The beginning was promising, from Sharon’s point of view. The Israeli forces achieved most of their objectives, thanks to their vastly superior firepower but also to the top-grade intelligence that AMAN and the Mossad had supplied them after penetrating deep into the deeply corrupted PLO. The militiamen performed even worse than AMAN had predicted. Most of the senior commanders fled, leaving their men to perish.