The two were taken off the bus, and after a brief interrogation by Brigadier General Yitzhak Mordechai, the chief paratroop and infantry officer, to ascertain whether there were explosives or other terrorists on the bus, they were handed over to the Shin Bet, whose personnel were gathered together in a nearby wheat field.
Micha Kubi, one of the Shin Bet’s senior investigators, was questioning both of them, but the conditions weren’t ideal. “I was trying to do things quietly,” Kubi said, “but everyone there was in a frenzy.”
And then Avraham (Avrum) Shalom showed up.
Shalom was the head of the Shin Bet, and had been for four years. The son of Austrian Jews who fled the Nazis, he’d joined the Palmach underground militia when he was eighteen. After the establishment of the state, he joined Shin Bet’s operations unit. In the early 1960s, he collaborated with Yitzhak Shamir, then head of the Mossad’s targeted killing unit, in Israel’s efforts to stop the German scientists working on Egypt’s missile program. The two became fast friends. When Menachem Begin resigned and Shamir became prime minister in 1983, “Shalom became the most important person in the security establishment,” said Carmi Gillon, who headed the Shin Bet in the 1990s. “And I think that what happened to Avrum was that he felt as if he could do whatever he wanted to do.”
Shalom ran the organization without constraints, and many of his subordinates considered him a manipulative and ruthless dictator. “Toward Avrum there was no awe,” said Yuval Diskin, an operative under Shalom who, twenty years later, would be head of the agency. “There was fear. We feared him. He was a strong man, brutal, clever, very stubborn, uncompromising, and an ass kicker.”
As soon as the storming of the bus was over, Shalom had consulted with chief of staff Levy before joining his men in the wheat field.
“Avrum [Shalom] was holding a pistol,” Kubi said. “And he brought its butt down with all his strength on the head of one of the terrorists. I saw the butt actually entering the skull.”
“He was in a frenzy,” said another Shin Bet man.
Kubi announced that he wasn’t prepared to carry on in the commotion going on at the scene and demanded that the prisoners be moved to the Shin Bet’s interrogation facility in Gaza. Members of the agency’s operations unit, the Birds, who were guarding the two prisoners, took them out of the field. Shalom signaled to the unit’s commander, Ehud Yatom, to come aside with him, and he quietly told him, “Finish them off.”
Shalom didn’t want terrorists tried in a court of law. Allowing men who hijacked a bus to receive a proper trial, he believed, would only encourage more terrorism.
Still, two criminals couldn’t be summarily executed on a public highway, in full view of soldiers, reporters, and civilians. So Yatom and his team drove the two to an empty and isolated field a few miles away. Subhi and Majdi, battered and dazed by the night’s events, were taken off the vehicle and made to lie on the ground. Yatom explained to three others what had to be done, picked up a large rock, and brought it forcefully down on Majdi’s head. The others joined in.
They beat them to death with rocks and iron bars, a brutal method chosen so that it would appear the two were murdered by enraged, renegade (and unidentifiable) soldiers and civilians immediately after the raid on the bus.
Kubi was waiting at the Gaza interrogation facility when he was informed that the terrorists had died on the way, from the beating they had supposedly received from civilians and soldiers. “I realized exactly what had happened,” Kubi said. “Avrum’s policy was that terrorists carrying out an attack should not end up alive. I wasn’t surprised when they told me that they wouldn’t be coming in for questioning. I went home to bed. I thought that the whole thing was over and done with.”
—
KUBI THOUGHT THAT BECAUSE such incidents typically were over and done with as soon as the bodies were cold. Over the years, as terror attacks multiplied, public pressure increased on the government and armed forces to adopt stricter counterterror measures. As Israel’s responses intensified, however, the checks and controls over those responses gradually weakened. Targeted killing—which had once been practiced sparingly, far from the country’s borders, and been subject to high-level authorization—had begun to be used much more frequently, much closer to home, and with far less supervision. The isolated “irregularities” perpetrated by a few unscrupulous units during and after the Six-Day War, for instance, had become an accepted practice by the mid-1970s, albeit one of dubious legality.
The Shin Bet, which was responsible for thwarting PLO attacks in the occupied territories, had used illegal tactics since the 1960s. Shin Bet interrogators feared, not without cause, that if they did not squeeze information out of their captured prisoners, more Israelis would be killed. What began as intimidation and humiliation during interrogations evolved into outright physical and psychological torture: mock executions, sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to endure painful stress positions and extremes of heat and cold. Prisoners were sometimes administered supposed “truth serums” that, the subjects were told, caused impotency.
The dark and filthy basement rooms where the Shin Bet carried out its interrogations took on such a sinister character that even “a normal person who crossed that threshold would be prepared to confess to killing Jesus,” said Gillon.
Even Avraham Shalom said he was shocked by what he saw when he visited the Hebron detention facility as head of the Birds and witnessed the grilling of “an Arab who in my eyes was elderly. He was fifty-five then, the Arab, but looked much older. And our guy, who knew Arabic, was shouting at him, ‘Why are you lying?’ The Arab was dilapidated, old, wretched, and I began to feel sorry for him. I asked, ‘Why is he shouting at him?’ And finally the interrogator took a chair, and he broke the chair on the floor, took one of the legs of the chair, and smashed his hand. He said, ‘Put your hand on the table,’ and he smashed all of his fingers.” On another occasion, said Shalom, “I saw an interrogator kill an Arab. Not with blows. He flung him from one wall to another, from wall to wall, wall to wall…then he took his head and almost broke the wall with that Arab’s head. A week later, the Arab died from a cerebral hemorrhage. It was blurred over.”
Some prisoners died while being tortured, and some were driven to suicide. In other cases, PLO activists who were detained for questioning were found dead without even reaching a detention facility.
Every now and again, a PLO activist would simply disappear. Their families would suspect they were in Israeli custody, and they would ask the police for assistance. The police would then publish a photograph of the missing person in a newspaper—standard procedure in such cases—and they would ask the Shin Bet if they had any information. “We used to have a fixed formula then,” said Yossi Ginossar, a senior Shin Bet official. “It went: ‘There is no information in the security establishment as to the whereabouts of this person.’ This is what we told the police every time they asked us, although we knew very well what hole he was buried in.”
Some of those disappeared people were killed as part of the secret program code-named Weights. In one Weights operation, Abu Jihad had his men smuggle large amounts of weaponry into the occupied territories, which were stored in caches until other Palestinian operatives could deliver them to attack squads. Sometimes the Shin Bet discovered the location of the cache, placed it under surveillance, waited for the pickup team to arrive, and captured them. On multiple occasions, however, the Shin Bet rigged the caches with powerful explosives, which would be remotely detonated when the pickup squads showed up.
“The basic idea behind Weights,” said a Shin Bet source, “was taken from the concept imported from [the Israeli military activity in] Lebanon, which said that there are times when it’s not worthwhile to take prisoners. Doing that is both a greater risk for our forces and also makes the other side want to take hostages for bartering exchanges. And in any case, they deserve to die. The way we s
aw things then, whoever came to a weapons cache to take the arms and use them to kill Jews, it’s better if they have a work accident.”
Weights operations—summary executions of suspects who posed no immediate threat, a violation of the laws of Israel and the rules of war—were not renegade acts by rogue operatives. They were officially sanctioned extrajudicial killings, proposed to the head of the Shin Bet by his senior commanders, approved by him and then by the prime minister, first Rabin and then Begin and Shamir.
Some of the detonations in Weights operations were carried out from afar by means of a ray or a beam code-named Plate, considered to be a cutting-edge technological innovation at the time. “That’s all very well in theory,” said a senior Shin Bet operative who took part in these operations, “but these caches were sometimes concealed only very superficially, under a heap of construction debris or under a big rock. Sometimes it was a PLO man who came to collect the stuff, but sometimes a shepherd would lift the rock, or a couple on a romantic stroll in the countryside who got curious. More than a few innocent people were killed in incidents like that.” The IDF Chaplains Corps would remove the bodies at night and take them to be buried in the graveyard for enemy fallen.
The Shin Bet implemented a strict policy of telling the truth inside the organization and institutionalized lying to the outside world. Prisoners complained in court that they’d confessed only after being tortured, but it didn’t matter. When the interrogators were called to testify, they would execute what was called, inside the Shin Bet, the “Let him look me in the eye” maneuver. Asked if they had struck the prisoner or tortured him in any way, they would look at the judge, and then at the prisoner, and then back at the judge, and say, “I did not touch him. Let him look me in the eye now and say we did anything to him.”
“We denied everything,” said Arieh Hadar, the head of the interrogation department then. “The judges believed us, of course. Because some of the Arabs tended to exaggerate in their descriptions of what we did, refuting it all was no problem at all.”
Hadar and every other member of Shin Bet interviewed for this book insisted that the material produced by the interrogations saved the lives of many Israelis by averting terror attacks. They also repeatedly claimed that only the guilty were abused. “We never fabricated evidence,” he said. “We never invented facts we did not believe to be true. We never came to court if we were not one thousand percent convinced that the person was really guilty.”
The Weights program was canceled on April 8, 1979, after a flawed bomb killed a Shin Bet operative. Avraham Shalom was appointed to head Shin Bet in 1980, and he immediately reinstated the campaign, at an increased clip.
—
SHALOM’S SHIN BET EMPLOYED aggressive tactics against the Palestinians in the occupied territories and Lebanon, but he was well aware that, ultimately, the occupation was a problem that could not be solved by force. “All we did was control the war,” he said. “We could keep the flame at a certain level so the state could do what it wanted, and that was important. But it didn’t solve the occupation problem.”
He was not alone in this opinion. Almost all the heads of the intelligence community held liberal leftist views on the Palestinian issue and backed a political solution entailing a compromise that would produce an independent Palestinian state. But if they ever spoke out about this, it was in a very soft voice. Despite his own personal opinions about the occupation, Shalom did not push back against his superiors, but merely continued to implement, very efficiently, the policy of preventing terrorism.
At that time, Shin Bet was finding it difficult to handle an outbreak of terrorist acts against IDF troops in Lebanon, a land where the agency was not subject to any laws, and accordingly employed particularly brutal methods. “Lebanonization affected the Shin Bet,” said Shimon Romah, who headed the agency’s operations in that country. “With no civilians or journalists moving around, the sense of work freedom without it all getting into the media was great, and that had an effect.”
That freedom of action affected Avraham Shalom. “There was a process of corruption at all levels because of Lebanon,” said Yossi Ginossar. “So it could be that Avrum, who was involved in what was going on in Lebanon in the most intimate way, gave instructions that he could get away with in Lebanon but did not work in the Israeli reality.”
By the time of the Ashkelon attack, Shalom had already been overseeing operations at the Shin Bet with impunity for four years. There was no reason to suspect that another couple of dead Palestinians would cause a problem.
But one of the people who had rushed toward the bus when the rescue operation began and who was standing right next to it when it ended was an Israeli press photographer named Alex Levac.
In the commotion that ensued, Levac photographed everyone around him. He saw two burly men leading a shorter, black-haired young man away. At first, he didn’t see that he was handcuffed. “When I snapped that shot, I didn’t know who he was. At first I thought he was one of the rescued passengers,” Levac told an investigative panel. “But when one of the escorts stormed at me in a fury, I thought he objected to their being photographed because the man was a secret operative.” In fact, it was Majdi Abu Jumaa, along with two Birds operatives.
“We dragged him,” one of them testified. “After a few meters, there was a flash. One of the escorts shouted, ‘Get the film!’ ”
Levac had not yet grasped exactly what was happening, but he realized that there was something important in his last picture, so in the time before the Birds operative reached him and demanded the film, he quickly switched the rolls in his camera and shoved the exposed roll into one of his socks.
The IDF announced that the “terrorists had died when troops attacked the bus at dawn today, ten hours after it was taken over on the coastal highway.” Editors at the newspaper Levac worked for, Hadashot, realized they had a scoop and wanted to print the picture, but the military censor stopped them. Someone leaked it to foreign papers, however, including the German weekly Stern, which printed it. Subsequently, Hadashot defied the censor and ran the story anyway, quoting The New York Times and then showing the photograph as well.
Majdi Abu Jumaa was identified by relatives and neighbors in the Gaza Strip as the man in the photograph. No wounds are visible, his eyes are open, he is handcuffed, and the agents do not appear to be supporting him, indicating that he is standing on his own.
The publication of the photographs after the official announcement that all the terrorists had been killed during the raid caused a public uproar that coincided with a lack of confidence in the authorities created by the Lebanon War, and led to a general assault on the government by several liberal media outlets.
Prime Minister Shamir and Shalom were opposed to an inquiry into the affair, but their appeals fell on deaf ears. Defense Minister Moshe Arens ordered the establishment of an inquiry panel and, later, another one was instituted by the Justice Ministry.
—
ON APRIL 28, TWO days after the first inquiry was announced, Avraham Shalom ordered ten of his associates—the Birds personnel who took part in the killings, the agency’s legal advisers, and other top officials, including Yossi Ginossar—to gather in an orange grove near Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. He chose an isolated spot where no one would see them, far from the Shin Bet installations, which were covered with listening devices. Those devices usually served the purposes of the organization. Now, though, Shalom feared they might disrupt his plans.
That night, underneath the stars, Shalom and his men took an oath never to reveal the truth, and to do whatever it took to paper over the affair, because if they didn’t, Shalom told them, “grave damage would be caused to state security and the Shin Bet’s secrets would be bared.”
They knew that if they told the truth, or if the truth were to be uncovered by these inquiries, they could be tried for torture, even for murder. “They simply
swore to one another that they would never let this thing out,” said Reuven Hazak, Shalom’s deputy. “Not the matter of the Krenk [‘Sickness’ in Yiddish, the code name for the killing], nor the matter of the cover-up.”
In the orange grove and at subsequent meetings at their homes, they crafted a plan that Hazak, who attended some of the meetings, described in retrospect as “a preplanned campaign against the institutions of law and government of the state.”
The plan had two interdependent parts. First, Shalom suggested to Arens and Shamir that a representative of his be made a member of the inquiry committee, so that “the Shin Bet’s position would be represented and to make sure that the organization’s secrets would not be harmed.” This apparently innocent proposal was accepted, and Yossi Ginossar was named a member of the Defense Ministry inquiry.
Ginossar would serve as Shalom’s Trojan horse. He was one of the men who took the secret oath in the orange grove, and he himself was personally offended by the very existence of the commissions. “What happened? Two terrorists who hijack a bus and kill its passengers died,” he would protest later. “For this you bring down a whole world? Hypocrisy! For years we were cleaning out Israel’s sewage, and everyone knew more or less how the sewage was cleaned.”
Ginossar said, “I neither had nor have any moral problem with the slaying of the terrorists.” His problem was “with the facts on the ground. That so many actors outside of the Shin Bet were there.” His solution: “The supreme rule after a failed op is the erasure of the fingerprints of the State of Israel. Not telling the truth is an integral part of removing the problem.”
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