Just as Zippori had predicted, the Syrians responded to the blatant Israeli provocation. Eitan, whose forces had almost been overrun by the Syrians on the Golan Heights in 1973, took advantage of the opportunity to settle the score and ordered a counterattack in force. The Syrians also withered under the Israelis’ fire.
But along with the military victories, it very quickly became clear to Israeli cabinet ministers that the “forty-kilometer incursion” against the PLO that they were promised was becoming something completely different. Sharon ordered the IDF to keep advancing, claiming that this was necessary for various operational reasons. In the face of his charismatic and overbearing personality, the ministers raised almost no objections.
“I very quickly saw that the forty-kilometer plan was melting away, and the IDF was penetrating deeper into Lebanon,” said Begin’s military secretary, Brigadier General Azriel Nevo. “Sharon lied and misled Begin and the cabinet. Sharon’s greatness was that he knew how to describe, in the most vivid way, why it was necessary to advance another few kilometers, because otherwise tomorrow morning the Syrian Army would be sitting on some hill and endanger our troops. That’s how he managed to extract authorization from the cabinet for the creeping invasion.”
On June 25, the IDF completed its encirclement of Beirut, far beyond the range that had been agreed upon, and commenced a harrowing siege and bombardment of the city’s western neighborhoods.
Sharon had hoped that the Maronite Christian Phalangists would help fight the PLO, serving as Israel’s cannon fodder, especially in the densely populated areas. The Phalange had similar ideas, but the other way around: that the Israelis would do the fighting to establish their hegemony in Lebanon. “The Mossad, which was managing the connection with the Phalange, was absolutely wrong in the way it read the situation in Lebanon and the capability and intentions of the Christians. They led us up the garden path,” said Nevo.
The Phalange’s leaders urged the Israelis to conquer more and more territory, promising military assistance that never materialized. In a meeting with chief of staff Eitan on June 16, the Phalange leader Bashir Gemayel pleaded for the IDF to conquer Beirut. “Your declarations that you won’t enter Beirut,” Gemayel said, “don’t help, because they strengthen the fighting spirit of the Palestinians and the Muslims and obstruct the political process.” At the same time, Gemayel had advice about how to treat his hometown: “You must continue with the aerial bombardment, because artillery shelling has no effect, because they are already used to them.”
Together, Sharon, Eitan, and the Phalange were clandestinely plotting how to take Beirut in a combined operation code-named the Spark. During a meeting at Sharon’s home on August 1, attended by the heads of the IDF and the Mossad, Sharon asked Gemayel, “Can you cut off the water again?” reflecting his desire to apply as much pressure as possible to get the PLO and the Syrians to pull out.
Gemayel said, “We can, with your cover.”
“Okay,” Sharon said. “But we have to leave the water open on Monday, when [U.S. Secretary of State George] Shultz meets [Foreign Minister Yitzhak] Shamir.”
Israel’s cabinet ministers heard only afterward about Sharon’s orders to conquer, for the first time in Israel’s history, the capital of another sovereign state. Indeed, all throughout the war, Sharon never stopped assuring the cabinet, the Knesset, and the nation that “there is no intention to enter Beirut,” repeating this promise many times. But the command Sharon gave the IDF was perfectly clear: “We have to finish off the southern part” of Beirut, where the refugee camps and PLO bases were located, he said at a meeting in his office on July 11, “to destroy whatever can be destroyed…to raze it to the ground.”
—
THE FULL-SCALE INVASION OF Lebanon and the siege of Beirut would become a quagmire for Israel, an occupation that would last—at least in the south—for another eighteen years.
The whole world, even President Ronald Reagan, who had a good relationship with Begin, came out against Israel. “You are causing a holocaust in Beirut,” said Reagan in an angry phone call to Begin. “Please, Mr. President,” Begin responded, no less angry, “don’t teach me about holocausts. I and my people know very well what ‘holocaust’ means.”
The Mossad tried to balance the picture by leaking to the London Observer documents purporting to show that the PLO had stockpiles of weapons for 100,000 men, which were in fact the Soviet Union’s emergency stores in the Middle East. They also claimed that the USSR intended to send Cuban soldiers in to fight alongside the Palestinians, to conquer the Galilee, destroy the Jewish settlements, and set up an independent state there. It is doubtful that these tales contained even a grain of truth, and they certainly didn’t swing world opinion in Israel’s favor. The Middle East conflict once again was perceived as a David and Goliath story—but with Israel as the powerful and brutal giant, and the Palestinians as the pitiable underdog.
The full extent of the deception that Sharon perpetrated against the government and the public of Israel emerged only gradually. But the steadily increasing Israeli casualty count, the indistinct and fluctuating goals, and the stories of destruction and suffering in Lebanon brought home by soldiers began to arouse protests and opposition.
Sharon’s chief of staff, Eitan, realized that most of the IDF’s moves in Lebanon were being made without the approval of the cabinet, so he deliberately absented himself from the meetings of that body, claiming that he was with the fighting forces. He left the job of compartmentalization and concealment to Sharon, who simply ignored all the opposition and pressed ahead. (“He Doesn’t Stop on Red” was a song written about him by Israel’s leading rock musician, Shalom Hanoch.)
It is unclear exactly how much Begin knew about Sharon’s complicated plan. In time, Sharon would sue a journalist who wrote that he had lied to Begin and concealed information from him. Sharon lost the case.
As for the plan to do away with Yasser Arafat, there are no complete transcripts of cabinet sessions or of Sharon’s meetings with Begin, so it is impossible to say precisely what Begin and his other minister knew, if anything, about Operation Salt Fish.
Still, whatever Begin may have known about the specifics, he made no secret of his opinion about the larger need to dispose of Arafat. In a letter to Reagan on August 2, Begin wrote that he felt as if “I have sent an army to Berlin to wipe out Hitler in the bunker.” In a speech in the Knesset the same week, he again called Arafat “that despicable man with the hair on his face, the killer of our children.”
The Salt Fish task force, set up by Meir Dagan and Rafi Eitan, continued operating outside of the broader war command, and was staffed mostly by Sayeret Matkal soldiers commanded by the outgoing chief of that unit, Lieutenant Colonel Uzi Dayan. Its mission, though, was complicated by the realities of urban warfare. The team couldn’t simply send a platoon of soldiers to storm through Beirut to kill one man, a tactic that would have wreaked unimaginable havoc. “So the main task was to locate Salt Fish and put him in the air force’s bombsights,” Dayan said. “But without causing too much collateral damage.”
Colonel Yossi Langotsky, one of the founding fathers of AMAN’s technological unit, was summoned to Beirut in June to tap into all of the PLO’s communications systems. Thanks to the intercepted calls, which were cross-checked against covert deep observation carried out by Sayeret troops and information from Mossad agents, the Salt Fish teams had an abundance of information on the hideouts used by Arafat.
Still, “it was a very complicated mission,” said Dayan. “We had to collate the information from the various sources, to understand which building or cave was the right one, to pinpoint it on the map, to narrow it down to ten-figure coordinates, to transmit them to the air force, giving them enough time to put a plane in the air and bomb it.”
The long days and nights at the Salt Fish command post were mostly frustrating times as Arafat escaped time an
d again. Langotsky and Dayan would hear the bodyguards arranging Arafat’s arrival at a certain place and time and quickly give the air force the coordinates. Once they even heard Arafat himself on the phone and sent in a pair of fighter-bombers that razed the building, but Arafat had left “not more than thirty seconds earlier,” according to Dayan.
The Palestinian leader understood that it was not a coincidence that bombs were repeatedly falling at places he had just entered or just left. He told his people that Sharon, in Beirut, was acting like a “wounded wolf” and wanted to kill him in revenge for the way the war was dragging on. He began taking more precautionary measures, arranging several meetings at the same time in different places. He scattered disinformation around among his aides, suspicious that one of them might be a Mossad agent, and he moved around all the time.
“Arafat kept on breaking his routine,” said Moshe Yaalon, a Salt Fish officer. “There was no regular pattern in his behavior, nothing that could enable the preparation of a raid by land against a bunker or a house.”
The team, growing increasingly desperate, came up with innumerable ideas. On July 3, the left-wing Israeli magazine editor Uri Avnery crossed the front line in Beirut to interview Arafat (together with reporter Sarit Yishai and photographer Anat Saragusti) in the heart of the city. The meeting was highly controversial in Israel. Arafat was seen as the country’s worst enemy, and this was his first time meeting an Israeli. “My goal was to begin paving a path to Israeli-Palestinian peace by changing the Israelis’ way of thinking,” Avnery said. The Salt Fish team didn’t particularly admire this initiative (“I won’t even begin to say what I think about Avnery and his outrageous act,” said Yaalon) but decided to take advantage of the opportunity to track the three Israelis and to let them lead a group of assassins straight to Arafat.
Among the Salt Fish team members, a discussion took place over whether it was permissible to endanger the lives of the Israelis, or perhaps even kill them, while carrying out their mission. Avner Azoulai, the Mossad representative in the Salt Fish forum, summed up the outcome of this debate: “If the conditions were right from the operational aspect, it is reasonable to assume that both Arafat and these three dear Jews would not have remained alive.”
But the ever cautious Arafat suspected that the Mossad might be keeping tabs on Avnery and the two journalists with him. Arafat’s security guards took strict deceptive countermeasures, and the Salt Fish team lost their trail in the alleys of south Beirut.
As more days went by, and the reality of a messy, fomented civil war refused to conform to Sharon and Eitan’s wildly overambitious plan to restructure an entire region of the planet, the two hawks put increasing pressure on the air force and the Salt Fish teams to get Arafat. “From the start of the siege of Beirut, the matter of killing Arafat assumed huge importance. The feeling was that it was something personal for Sharon,” said Major General David Ivri, then an air force commander. “Every now and again, people from the Mossad or AMAN would show up at Canary”—the air force command post, in a subterranean bunker deep beneath Tel Aviv—“and tell us that Arafat was here or there. Sharon or Raful would order us to bomb those places immediately.”
“I thought that it was messy, with the danger of harming civilians,” Ivri continued. “I was not ready to okay a bombing party like that without getting an order in writing from the general staff’s operations branch. I hoped that placing the matter into an organized framework of information-sharing and decision-making would lead to better judgment. In fact, many of the orders never came in writing. They just disappeared somewhere on the way.”
Uzi Dayan had the same misgivings. “Arafat was saved by two things,” he said. “His interminable good luck and me. I thought Arafat was a legitimate target, but I did not think that hitting the target justified any means. If I saw that it entailed large-scale killing of civilians, even if we knew Arafat was there, I did not agree to have a place bombed.”
“Raful used to blow up with anger,” Dayan continued. “He’d call me up and say, ‘I understand you have information on such and such a place. Why aren’t the planes in the air?’ I replied that it was impossible because there were a lot of people around. Raful said, ‘Forget about it. I’ll take responsibility for it.’ I wasn’t prepared to allow it. Raful would not teach me the ethics of war.”
Rafael Eitan would remind Dayan that he was not authorized to decide whether to drop a bomb. But as Dayan explained, “All I had to do was to report when the target was ripe from the intelligence point of view. So from that point on, each time we knew that bombing would lead to massive civilian casualties, we reported that the target wasn’t ripe from the intelligence angle.”
On the evening of August 4, Eitan asked the head of the air force operations department, Aviem Sella, to come and see him. The two had a close relationship, and Eitan had a soft spot for Sella, a highly promising officer considered a potential commander of the air force.
Eitan greeted Sella and told him that the next day he wouldn’t be working in Canary as usual, but would be “going on a trip.”
“Anything like our last trip together?” asked Sella, alluding to a visit to Beirut in May, in preparation for the invasion and the operation to assassinate Arafat.
“Something like it,” Eitan replied. “But from above. Meet me tomorrow morning at Hatzor [an air force base in the south]. You’ll fly the plane, and I’ll navigate and operate the combat systems. We’re going to bomb Beirut.” The target was a building where Arafat was supposed to be the next morning, according to information obtained by Operation Salt Fish.
Sella knew that Eitan had a pilot’s license for light aircraft, but he still was convinced he wasn’t hearing right. “It was totally insane,” he said. “I was in shock. If someone had told me that the chief of staff, who isn’t really an airman, was taking the head of the air force operations department for a break in the running of the war while they bombed Beirut for fun, I would never have believed it.”
But chief of staff Eitan was obsessive about killing Arafat. The next day, the two met at Hatzor. They were part of a quartet of Phantoms on an expedition to bomb the al-Sana’i office block, in west Beirut, where Arafat was supposed to be attending a meeting. “Raful’s functioning was so-so; I think he was feeling a little bit sick. I did my own navigation. He operated the munitions systems, which by today’s terms were rather primitive. We made two bombing runs over the target, and then another one to see if we’d hit it. Raful was happy, and we flew home to Israel.”
Arafat was once again saved by a miracle: The bombs wrecked part of the building just before he arrived. Sella returned from Hatzor to Tel Aviv to manage the operations of the air force, and Eitan took a helicopter ride to Beirut. “In the evening,” Sella recalls, “I saw him on TV, being interviewed on the outskirts of Beirut. He declared that Israel was refraining from bombing targets in civilian surroundings—which was exactly what he had been doing himself that morning.”
—
THE PROBLEM WITH OPERATION Salt Fish, for Sharon and for Israel, was that the entire world was watching. With each failed assassination attempt, Israel looked more and more like a military power overrunning a sovereign nation in a monomaniacal quest to kill a single man. Arafat, rather than being seen as a bloodthirsty terrorist, was now the hunted leader of a nation of refugees trampled by the Israeli war machine. Sharon had achieved precisely the opposite of what he wanted.
Its main target now an object of global sympathy, the invasion sank deeper into a swamp of military misadventure. The stalemate had to be broken, a quasi-victory salvaged. On August 1, the IDF began exerting heavy pressure on the PLO forces in Beirut (Operation King Kong), with an unbroken seventy-two-hour artillery bombardment aimed at persuading Arafat to withdraw from Lebanon. The Israeli Air Force carried out more than a hundred expeditions in a ten-hour period. The barrage from the air, land, and sea continued after that as well and
reached a climax on August 12, which became known as Black Thursday because of the vast devastation wrought.
The pressure worked. On August 13, with the Americans mediating, Arafat agreed to evacuate Beirut with his forces. Uzi Dayan departed the city and left the Salt Fish team under Yaalon’s command, with mixed feelings. “I didn’t spend the rest of my life mourning, but I thought then and I still believe today that it’s a pity the mission was not executed,” he said. “On the other hand, the war was a very distressing affair from a humanitarian point of view. We watched the Lebanese population around us, the poverty, the destruction caused by the fighting. Among us, among the fighting forces, there was a great argument. I knew friends, comrades in arms, who really believed that someone should go and kill Sharon, who actually contemplated assassinating him, to save the State of Israel. I had supported the war from the outset, but I also understood that there was deadlock, that the war wasn’t going anywhere. Sharon and Raful were deceiving everyone. I left Beirut with a feeling of great relief.”
On August 21, the PLO forces evacuated Beirut by sea. Israel’s relationship with the United States was very tense, considering the invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut. Prime Minister Begin was eager to calm things down. When the evacuation agreement was signed, he promised the American mediator, Philip Habib, that no harm would be inflicted on the evacuees. Keeping this promise was important to Begin, and he firmly instructed Sharon to drop any plans that had been made to exploit the withdrawal as a way to settle scores with Arafat.
The Salt Fish team remained in Beirut and on August 30 took up positions, together with Shin Bet and Mossad officers, on the adjacent roofs of the Lebanese national oil and power companies, overlooking the port. “From a distance we saw a large convoy of vehicles,” one of the Shin Bet operatives remembers. “All of a sudden, we saw the famous kaffiyeh on the famous head of the number-one wanted man coming out of one of the cars. He stood among a crowd of people, as if surrounded by a swarm of bees.”
Rise and Kill First Page 31