Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  It would have been so easy to kill him. “We were 180 meters away,” Yaalon said. “At that range, with the sniper rifle that our team was holding, it’s hard to miss.” Others who were there remember that Arafat was in the sights of at least five snipers at the same time.

  One of the commanders was in radio contact with chief of staff Eitan in the command bunker in Tel Aviv, updating him on when Arafat would be out of range. “We can do it. We have him in our sights. Do we have authorization?” Eitan delayed, and the officer continued: “He’s about to go inside, in ten, nine seconds—please give us authorization—eight, seven…”

  Finally, Eitan replied in his nasal voice, audibly disappointed: “Negative,” he said. “I repeat: negative. There is no authorization.”

  Twenty-four hours later, Begin gave Habib a picture of Arafat in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle to prove that, despite the opportunity, Israel had stood by its word. By then Arafat was already in Athens, en route to the PLO’s next stop in Tunis. Begin’s goal to “wipe out Hitler in his bunker,” as he had declared to Reagan, had become watching Hitler get airlifted out of Berlin.

  SHARON HAD PROMISED TO withdraw the IDF from Lebanon as soon as the PLO departed, but he instead remained fixated on his grand plan of remaking the Middle East. With Israeli forces firmly entrenched and the Mossad exerting heavy pressure, the Lebanese parliament voted on August 23, 1982, to install the Phalange leader, Bashir Gemayel, as president. In Sharon’s fantasy, Gemayel would expel the Palestinians from Lebanon.

  More immediately, Sharon wanted to knock out what he called “the terror nucleus [PLO militiamen] and the left-wing forces [Communist and other leftist groups allied with the PLO], which are armed with heavy weaponry and remain in west Beirut.”

  Sharon knew that the United Nations would soon deploy a multinational peacekeeping force (MNF) in Beirut, and once that happened, he would no longer be able to do what he wished. At a meeting with the heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet, he wondered aloud, “How will we be able to take care of the terrorists when the MNF is active? These would be entirely different methods….We’ll have to be certain that the problem has been solved, with every step we take today making things easier then.”

  Sharon didn’t want to put the IDF into the heart of the Palestinian refugee camps, so he suggested that the Phalangists go into west Beirut “to ensure that whoever [from the PLO] was there would be killed or arrested.” Begin liked this idea and approved of giving the job to the Phalange, because “our boys won’t spill their blood on this matter.”

  The Mossad embellished this proposition. “We had a long list of names of European leftist activists who were with the Palestinians,” said Avner Azoulai, the Mossad’s liaison with the Maronite militia. “The idea was to hand it to the Phalangists so they could find them and kill them. After that, the Mossad would be able to secretly report to the European countries from which these bandits came, such as Germany, France, and Italy, that their problem was solved, and this way they would owe us a favor.”

  As it happened, Gemayel was instead murdered three weeks later, together with a large number of his associates, blown up by a bomb planted by a Syrian agent, that demolished the Phalange HQ in Beirut. In response, the Lebanese Christian militias secured permission from the Israelis to search for PLO fighters in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

  On the morning of September 16, Yair Ravid, the head of the Junction team in Beirut, was at the Phalange HQ, where the Mossad had placed its Beirut station. “All of a sudden,” Ravid said, “I saw the boys of Elie [Hobeika, the Phalange military chief] sharpening their knives, and they tell me, ‘Today it is the turn of silah al abyad,’ the white weapons, which is what the Lebanese call slaughtering with knives. They didn’t say against whom exactly, but it was clear to me they were going to cut throats. I didn’t inquire any deeper. I was just a guest of theirs.” Ravid didn’t report to his superiors what he’d seen.

  Robert Hatem, Hobeika’s executioner, recalled that when the 350 Phalangists set out on their mission, “Hobeika told us, ‘Fuck everybody there. Erase the camp.’ We even took a D9 [bulldozer] to demolish everything.”

  The camp, Hatem said, “was made up of shacks, tin shanties. When we fired, everything came tumbling down. We shot in all directions. We didn’t check to see who was behind those walls.”

  The lion’s share of the damage was inflicted by a group commanded by Marom Mashalani. “Its members,” Hatem said, “including the commander, took a lot of drugs, as much as it is possible to take. They didn’t distinguish between fighters and noncombatants or between men and women. They shot them all.”

  The result was a horrific massacre. The number of the dead is disputed—the Israelis say 700, and the Palestinians say 2,750. Sharon would later claim that “Lebanese forces [i.e., the Phalangists] would conform to the conventions of war when the IDF was controlling them, overseeing or coordinating their actions….The terrible outcome is in the nature of an unanticipated and unexplained breakdown.” In other words, Sharon argued that he could not have foreseen what had happened.

  Classified IDF and Mossad documents, however, prove that the barbaric behavior pattern of the Phalange had long been known by the heads of the Israeli defense establishment. The prevalent assumption was that, straight after the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut, “the Phalange would find a way to move in, to settle scores—that murder would begin in Beirut from the first day.”

  Sharon himself had spoken with contempt about any possible military contribution the Phalange could make, asserting, “Forget about them. They won’t do a thing. Maybe later, when…it’ll be possible to loot, to kill, to rape. Yes, then they will rape and loot and kill.”

  The IDF and the Mossad didn’t contribute directly to the massacre, but the patronage they extended to the Christian forces and their failure to protect the occupied Palestinians tarred Israel’s name. As soon as the Israelis discovered what the Phalangists had done, they ordered them to cease and expressed their outrage. At the same time, however, they also began counseling the Maronite militia on what to tell the legions of journalists now covering the atrocity.

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  FIERCE INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC censure followed. The leaders of the opposition, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, withdrew their support for the war when they became aware of the scale of the killing.

  Sharon’s response was typical. Testifying behind closed doors before a 1982 Knesset oversight panel on the secret services, he read from a sheaf of classified documents about the massacre of Palestinians perpetrated by the Maronites at the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in 1976, when Rabin and Peres were running the country. Sharon dwelled at length on the horrendous slaughter of children, the blades that slashed open pregnant women’s bellies.

  Peres responded angrily, “Who knew [what was going on]?”

  Sharon replied, “The Red Cross reported that during those days of the massacre, our ships prevented the entry of vessels carrying medical aid….You built the relationship and we continued it….You also helped them after the massacre. We didn’t complain to you then. And I would not have raised the matter if you did not behave the way you behaved….You, Mr. Peres, after Tel al-Zaatar, have no monopoly on morality.”

  Sharon’s menacing tone was clear. One of his aides hinted to the heads of the Labor Party that if they pushed for an official inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre, these classified documents about their actions during the Tel al-Zaatar massacre would be leaked to international media as well. The criticism from the Labor Party duly died down.

  Public protests, however, were still ramping up as the official count of Israeli troops killed in Lebanon rose every day. Demonstrations were held outside the prime minister’s residence, with protesters shouting slogans and carrying placards condemning Begin and Sharon. Every day, the protesters updated a giant sign facing Begin’s residence t
hat counted the number of dead soldiers from Sharon’s misbegotten war.

  Sharon seems to have been indifferent to the protests, but Begin was ailing. He sank deeper and deeper into what became a clinical depression, gradually losing the ability and desire to communicate with those around him, cutting himself off almost entirely from the apparatus of governance.

  “I watched Begin withering away, shrinking into himself,” said Nevo. “He realized that Sharon had hoodwinked him, that he had entered a swamp that he had not wanted to enter. The victims and the protests were killing him. The man was a very sensitive person, perhaps too sensitive.”

  His condition deteriorated so much that his aides refrained from reporting bad news to him, out of fear that he would slip over the edge.

  “I also saw him during his period of decline,” said Nahum Admoni, who became Mossad chief in September 1982. “I begin a briefing, and after a few minutes I see his eyes are shut and I don’t know whether he’s listening to what I’m saying, whether he’s asleep or awake. A very embarrassing situation, very embarrassing. I ask Azriel [Nevo], his military aide, ‘Do you think I should go on talking or stop?’…We didn’t refer the problem to anyone else, but everyone knew. Everyone knew this was the situation.”

  And yet, though nearly everyone around Begin knew he was hardly functioning, let alone fit to run a country at war, instead of moving to replace him, they decided to cover for him, and his aides worked to conceal his true condition from the Israeli public. The secretaries in his bureau went on typing out the prime minister’s schedule every day, but it was empty. “And so, to conceal it, I told them to classify the schedule ‘Top Secret’ so that no one could see it,” said Nevo, adding that he believed that he and the other bureau staff “were criminals, and we perpetrated a grave offense. You can’t hide the fact that the prime minister is actually not functioning, and acting as if he is. It calls to mind benighted regimes.”

  With Begin all but absent, Sharon was now free to do what he wished with the military. During this whole period, in fact, Sharon was effectively running the country, unconstitutionally and without any restraints. He even took charge of the Mossad, although it formally came under the prime minister’s jurisdiction. “He was practically commander in chief of the military, giving orders over chief of staff Eitan’s head,” recalled Aviem Sella, head of air force operations. “No one could stand up to him.”

  “Sharon dominated the meetings [of the cabinet],” Admoni said. “He never gave an accurate or full picture either at cabinet plenums or at sessions of the inner cabinet [which was supposed to decide defense issues]. There were also times when Sharon would introduce a subject, the cabinet would discuss it, make a decision, and Sharon would call us out after the meeting—the chief of staff [Eitan], me, the other officers—and say, ‘They decided what they decided. Now I’m telling you to do this or that,’ which was not exactly what they had decided.”

  With his well-deserved but also carefully cultivated image of a George Patton–like war hero, and his freedom from doubts or misgivings about getting what he wanted on a personal or national level, Sharon was known in Israel as “the bulldozer.” Cynical and ruthless, sometimes menacing, but more often charming and congenial, he had no qualms about twisting the truth when he deemed it necessary. “Arik, King of Israel,” his supporters used to sing about him, and during this time he did obtain almost monarchical rule.

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  YET DESPITE HIS NEWLY amassed power, Sharon was also a realist, and he quickly grasped after the death of Bashir Gemayel that his aspirations for Lebanon were not to be.

  Amin Gemayel, who was elected president instead of his brother, Bashir, was far less connected and committed to Israel, and after a short time he annulled the peace pact that Israel had forced him into. He was not a particularly strong leader: He lacked the charisma and aggression of his brother, as well as the ability or desire to drive all the Palestinians out of Lebanon.

  Sharon’s plans to kill Yasser Arafat, however, never faltered for a second. After the battles in Beirut were over and the PLO leaders and forces had been evacuated from Beirut, “Arik and Raful [Eitan] were dying, simply dying, to kill him,” said then–Brigadier General Amos Gilboa, head of AMAN’s Research Division.

  Sharon realized that by this point, Arafat was such a popular figure that an open assassination would only make him a martyr to his cause. So he instructed the intelligence organizations to intensify their surveillance of Arafat and to see if they could find a more subtle way to dispose of him.

  Operation Salt Fish morphed into Operation Goldfish. But the mission remained the same, and Sharon ordered that it be given top priority. Every day, and sometimes twice a day, the Goldfish team gathered in Eitan’s office. “We had a thousand matters that were a hundred times more important,” said Gilboa. But Sharon insisted.

  At that time, any intelligence about the PLO leader’s movements was partial at best. Wartime isn’t an ideal place to gather information, and because the PLO had not yet found a permanent base to replace the one in Beirut, its officials and militiamen were moving constantly, living out of suitcases all over the Middle East and Europe. Arafat was traveling frenetically, meeting leaders, mobilizing support, giving interviews, and shifting funds around. “When someone’s on that kind of routine, and yet under heavy protection, it’s hard for us to plan a hit operation against him,” one of Caesarea’s intelligence officers told the Goldfish forum.

  The Mossad told Sharon that under these circumstances, it was impossible for them to get to Arafat. At best, they could report on his whereabouts in whatever country he was visiting that day or whatever flight he was on the next. AMAN told the defense minister that Arafat often used an executive jet provided by Saudi Arabia and that the two pilots were carrying American passports. There was no question of shooting it down. “Nobody,” said AMAN’s Amos Gilad, “touches Americans.” The bottom line was that AMAN saw no possibility of assassinating him at that time. “We have to wait until he settles down in a permanent place,” said an AMAN representative at the Goldfish forum, “and then to begin planning an operation there.”

  But Sharon was in a hurry. And Arafat sometimes used other, private aircraft, too. Occasionally he even flew commercial. To Sharon’s thinking, blowing an aircraft out of the sky, especially over deep water, where the wreckage would be hard to find, was a perfectly acceptable way to deal with the issue.

  The next problem was how to be sure Arafat was on a certain flight. General Gilboa demanded that a number of operational steps be taken in order to ascertain whether he was: “From my point of view, it would be positive identification only if we could prepare in advance, before his arrival at an airport, and have someone there standing at the door to the plane to tell us, ‘That’s him; I saw him with my own eyes.’ Then I could say, ‘The bells are ringing,’ ” an intelligence phrase meaning near total certainty.

  Once the basics of the plan were settled, Sharon pushed hard to get the mission rolling. He instructed air force commander General Ivri to keep fighter planes ready to intercept Arafat’s aircraft. Ivri grasped the potential for disaster in such an operation and once again informed chief of staff Eitan that he was not prepared to take orders directly from Sharon, and that IDF regulations required that all orders come via the Operations Directorate of the General Staff. This was not much of an obstacle for Sharon, and the orders that soon came down through the proper channels were largely the same, although words such as “shoot down,” “destroy,” and “eliminate” had been omitted.

  Finally, they found their opening in Greece. Arafat occasionally flew through Athens, with the consent of the locals. “The Greek authorities did not take rigorous measures against terrorism,” says Admoni, “and the PLO did more or less whatever it wanted to there.”

  On October 22, 1982, two Junction agents reported that Arafat would take off the next day in a private plane from Athe
ns to Cairo. The Mossad immediately dispatched two Caesarea operatives to find out more details. The two operatives took advantage of lax security at the Athens airport and reached the area where private planes were parked, looking for Arafat.

  Back in Tel Aviv, Sharon kept up constant pressure for the operation to move ahead. The air force put two F-15 fighters on alert for immediate takeoff from the Tel Nof air force base, southeast of Tel Aviv. But Ivri, ever cautious, briefed the airmen himself. He understood the stakes. It was clear to him how disastrous it would be if Israel shot down the wrong aircraft. “You don’t fire without my okay,” he told the fighter crews. “Clear? Even if there’s a communications problem, if you don’t hear my order”—he emphasized that part: hear my order—“you don’t open fire.”

  At 2 P.M., one of the Caesarea operatives in Athens called Mossad HQ and said, “He’s here. Positive ID.” His excitement was audible. He reported that he had watched the PLO leader and his men making final preparations to board a DHC-5 Buffalo (a Canadian-made twin-engine cargo plane) with a tail painted blue with brown marks, and the registration number 1169.

  To Ivri, something seemed off. “I didn’t get this whole story,” he said. “It wasn’t clear to me why Arafat would be flying to Cairo. According to intelligence, he had nothing to look for there at the time. And if he was going there, why in that kind of a cargo plane? Not at all dignified enough for a man of his status. I asked the Mossad to verify that he was the man.”

  The two operatives insisted that they were certain. “The objective has grown a longer beard to mislead,” they reported, but they reconfirmed their positive identification.

  At 4:30 P.M., they reported that the plane had taken off. Ivri was informed, as was Eitan, who ordered it shot down. Ivri told his pilots to take off. The Buffalo is a very slow aircraft, especially when compared with the F-15, but the flight path was some distance away over the Mediterranean, out of the range of Israeli radar. The jets took off and headed for the anticipated interception point, but at a certain distance from the Israeli coastline they had to rely only on their onboard radar, with its limited range.