During the day, the commission sat in a Defense Ministry meeting room and heard witnesses—soldiers, Shin Bet operatives, civilians, hostages, and the photographer Alex Levac. Then, at night, Ginossar sneaked off to meet Shalom and his inner circle at the home of the legal adviser, to fill them in on details of that day’s session and help prepare the witnesses for the next day.
This led to the second part of Shalom’s plot: framing innocent Israeli soldiers for the two murders he’d ordered. Along with Ginossar, the Shin Bet’s legal counsels, and members of the Birds squad, Shalom concocted a sophisticated plan to shift the allegations of murder from themselves to the men who had laid their hands on the Palestinians first: IDF soldiers under the command of Brigadier General Yitzhak Mordechai.
This plan was breathtaking in its treachery. It required perjury, conspiracy, and a deep, dizzying betrayal of an honorable man and friend. Ginossar and Mordechai had been close since they collaborated during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Ginossar had even awarded Mordechai a special Shin Bet decoration on June 27, 1982, as a token of recognition for helping the Shin Bet kill Azmi Zrair, the Fatah operations officer in southern Lebanon.
Ginossar spun an intricate web of lies. He well understood what the panel required. “Guys, don’t delude yourselves,” he said at one of the clandestine gatherings. “Someone has to be found guilty here. Otherwise this committee hasn’t done its job….The only person who can be made to be guilty is Mr. Yitzhak Mordechai.”
The key testimony was that of Birds commander Ehud Yatom. Shalom, Ginossar, and the others rehearsed it with Yatom over and over the night before. He told the panel, “I and the head of the Shin Bet arrived at the scene. I saw two clumps of people, about ten meters from each other. There were twenty to thirty people in each clump….[W]hen I pushed my way in, I saw a clump of people that today reminds me of descriptions of the Syrian fellahin who attacked our pilots [who were downed over Syria]. They were doing whatever they felt like with their hands and feet. When I saw the terrorist, I also gave him a slap. I was carried away by the atmosphere of mob anger.” He said that he saw no Shin Bet men in the mob, but he did see General Mordechai striking one of the terrorists with his pistol.
Yatom told the panel that when the terrorists were given to him, they were in very bad condition, and he took them to the hospital, where they were pronounced dead. The head of the inquiry, retired Major General Meir Zorea, was deeply impressed by Yatom’s honesty. He was the only witness who confessed, and he even expressed regret for slapping a terrorist. This “confession” was of course intended to cover up a much greater secret.
“Who did you see doing the hitting?” another Shin Bet official was asked during his testimony, after he described the scene he’d witnessed as a lynching. “It’s very complicated, hard to recall,” he replied. “The only person that I can single out is Itzik [Yitzhak] Mordechai. His blows cried out to the heavens.” Yet another Shin Bet witness said, “I saw Itzik hitting them on the head, serious blows,” but he could not identify anyone else. A parade of witnesses from the agency all followed suit.
The conspirators tried to get Kubi to perjure himself, too. Ginossar “came to me to make sure I’d testify that I saw Mordechai beat them to death,” Kubi said. “I told him that I didn’t see that. He went on and asked if, from my point of view, Avrum was not present while the terrorists were being beaten. I said that, actually, he had been there—and had even been the first to strike them. ‘If so,’ he said, ‘then from my point of view, you weren’t there at all.’ Afterward they sent me on a permanent mission in Italy. I realized they wanted me as far as possible from the inquiry commissions.”
The Justice Ministry’s inquiry panel, however, insisted on questioning Kubi. He was secretly flown to Israel, and, in an acrimonious meeting with Avraham Shalom, he told his boss that he would not back up his version of events. Shalom yelled, “This is treachery!”
Kubi, who had faced severe danger many times during his thirty years in the Shin Bet, said he’d never been more frightened for his life than at that moment. “I feared I wouldn’t get out of there alive,” he said. He did, but his feelings were indicative of the depths to which the Shin Bet had sunk.
In the end, a compromise was reached between Kubi and Shalom, Ginossar, and the legal counsel. Kubi testified—falsely—that he had been busy with the interrogation and he hadn’t seen who hit the terrorists.
The testimonies of the other witnesses—spun by master craftsmen of subterfuge and obfuscation, practiced over many hours—all cross-checked perfectly with one another. The cumulative effect of thirteen identical narratives from ostensibly honorable men made a strong impression on the inquiry panels.
—
ON MAY 20, THE inquiry commission issued its findings: “It emerges clearly from the investigation material that the IDF forces and the Shin Bet personnel were not given any order from which it was liable to be understood that the two terrorists who remained alive should be killed or harmed.”
The inquiry gave complete credence to Avraham Shalom’s testimony, and noted that Mordechai’s testimony and claim that he was not the person who killed the terrorists “does not conform in part with a number of testimonies that we have heard and is supported in certain details by other testimonies.”
The commission did not determine who had killed the prisoners but recommended that the military police conduct an investigation against Mordechai. This led to his indictment on a charge of manslaughter. In July 1985, the Justice Ministry’s inquiry came to similar conclusions.
Shalom’s plot had worked. An innocent man would be tried for his crimes.
Mordechai vigorously denied the allegations against him, but almost no one believed him. “Any other man in Mordechai’s place would have killed himself,” said Ehud Barak.
“For two years, I and my family went through hell,” Mordechai would say.
Fortunately for him, though, a young and energetic military advocate by the name of Menachem Finkelstein, who was the military’s representative on the Justice Ministry inquiry panel, was later involved in the process of judging whether Mordechai should be indicted.
Finkelstein, an Orthodox Jew with a bent for Talmudic hairsplitting and skepticism, who would later become a prominent district court judge, examined the evidence and felt that something was wrong. “On the one hand, the testimony of the Shin Bet personnel was unequivocal,” he said. “It was inconceivable that any of them would lie. But this attempt to lay the blame on Mordechai looked odd to me.”
Mordechai had admitted that when the two terrorists were led off the bus, he struck them once each while questioning them, but a careful perusal of all the evidence clearly indicated that the Abu Jumaa cousins had been handed over to the Shin Bet in far better condition than its operatives claimed. Finkelstein fought against the Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, both of which were pressing to have Mordechai put on trial for murder, and obtained a forensic affidavit that noted that there was no possibility that Mordechai’s blows could have killed the two terrorists, who appeared to be in good condition in Levac’s photographs.
Finkelstein’s efforts could not prevent Mordechai’s indictment on two counts of manslaughter, and Mordechai had to go to trial in a special court-martial. But his meticulous legal work was instrumental in the trial itself, and after a single session and a brief hearing of the evidence, the court acquitted Mordechai.
This appeared to be the end of the Ashkelon affair. A good man was dragged through the mud and his name was tarnished, though he was cleared in the end. No Shin Bet secrets were revealed, and nobody was held accountable for their crimes.
—
THE WHOLE AFFAIR WOULD have been forgotten entirely but for three senior Shin Bet officials whose consciences gave them qualms. One of them was Reuven Hazak, the deputy director, who was scheduled to replace Shalom as head of Shin Bet soon. At first, the thre
e men tried to warn Shalom to stop lying. Peleg Raday told Shalom that “Nixon fell not because of the stupid break-in, but because of the cover-up.” Shalom did not respond. Although Hazak had been involved when the perjury conspiracy began, he later came to the conclusion that closure could be obtained only if all the conspirators, including him, resigned. Shalom refused, point-blank.
On October 29, 1985, Hazak managed to get an audience with Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who had replaced Shamir in September 1984, under a rotation agreement, because their parties had tied in the Knesset election. Peres listened attentively to Hazak, who came with a page of notes that spared no detail in their description of the killings or the cover-up. “The moral basis upon which the Shin Bet relied for performing its duties has collapsed,” Hazak told Peres.
Peres responded, “I usually think before I make a decision.”
Hazak left with a sense of relief, feeling that his indictments had been taken seriously and that an appropriate response would be forthcoming. But he was wrong. Shalom was a much more sophisticated tactician. He’d already met with Peres earlier and laid out a totally different scenario for the prime minister: This was an attempted rebellion by three lawbreakers, whose aim was to oust him and take over the Shin Bet.
With Peres’s full backing, Shalom dismissed the three whistleblowers. They departed in disgrace from the service they had given their lives to, estranged from all their colleagues, who were given to believe that they were traitors.
But the whistleblowers fought back. Late at night on March 9, 1986, the three came to the Ministry of Justice’s almost deserted main bureau, in East Jerusalem, and entered the office of Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir.
The meeting lasted three and a half hours, and the three whistleblowers laid out the entire story—not only the killing of the Palestinians and the attempt to frame Mordechai, but also the extrajudicial executions, the torture, and the perjury that had been practiced by the Shin Bet for decades.
The deputy state attorney, Dorit Beinish, found it difficult to believe that Peres had heard the story and failed to act: “At your meeting with the prime minister, did you speak about the cover-up?”
“Everything came up,” Hazak said.
“I felt as if the sky had fallen down,” said Yehudit Karp, the deputy attorney general for special duties. “It is not possible to exaggerate what happened there. It was a gross undermining of the rule of law, and corruption of all the systems. I do not remember an event of similar gravity in the history of the State of Israel.”
Two new inquiries were then launched: a police investigation into the Ashkelon affair and a broader probe of the Shin Bet’s practices by a committee headed by Karp.
For Shalom, this was a disaster. He’d survived two inquiries through perjury and sheer mendacity, and he’d gotten the three whistleblowers dismissed. But the two dead Palestinian hijackers kept coming back to haunt him, and now that the full conspiracy had been opened up, it would be much harder for him to persuade the investigators with another concocted scenario.
Still, Shalom and his allies did not retreat. Instead they launched “a broad campaign of lies, gossip, and mud-slinging against the three whistleblowers and against the Justice Ministry,” Karp said. Ministry officials were placed under surveillance and their phones were tapped, in a bid to collect information for blackmail and try to outmaneuver their opponents. Anonymous threats were leveled at the ministry officials in the dark of night, and Zamir was given round-the-clock bodyguards. One night, an intensive-care ambulance was dispatched to his home, even though he was perfectly healthy, and a funeral wreath was sent there as well. Journalists were told by Shin Bet sources that one of the whistleblowers was having a romantic affair with Deputy State Prosecutor Beinish.
“The astonishing thing that came out during that time was the untrammeled powers of the Shin Bet,” said Beinish. “Only when we were dealing with it did we grasp that this power could be aimed at anyone, even the legal system, and if necessary also at the political echelon. We found ourselves besmirched, exposed, menaced.”
But Beinish, Karp, and the police investigators did not back down. The inquiries continued into April and May of 1986, despite the smears and attempts at intimidation.
Eventually, Shalom resorted to simply lying under oath. Questioned by the police, he first claimed that Defense Minister Moshe Arens had ordered him to kill the Ashkelon hijackers. When Arens met with him on April 16, 1986, and emphatically denied this, Shalom apologized and said, “I had the impression that you’d given such an order, but now that I am speaking with you I see that I was wrong and it was not so.”
Next he blamed Shamir, who had been the prime minister at the time. Shalom claimed that Shamir had in fact given the order to beat the Palestinians to death, and then ordered, or at least approved of, the cover-up that followed. Shamir, too, denied any such thing. Caught again, Shalom dissembled further. Shamir, he claimed, had told him in a November 1983 meeting that captured terrorists should be killed. Shamir denied that, too. In the end, Shalom was reduced to insisting that he’d been given blanket authority to decide what to do with terrorists—even before an attack—if he could not reach the prime minister for guidance.
By May 1986, Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir was insisting on prosecuting all those involved in the affair on charges of murder, perverting the course of justice, perjury, and any number of additional counts.
Shalom was backed into a corner. He had only one card left to play.
—
IN LATE MAY, SHALOM had met with Yossi Ginossar and their legal counsels in Ginossar’s room at the Grand Beach Hotel, in Tel Aviv. Together they began compiling a list of the dead. They worked from their files and from memory, writing down the names, places, and dates of people killed by the Mossad, AMAN, and the Shin Bet in the years before the Ashkelon hijacking.
“We sat there for a long time. Everything went into the document, with Avrum’s approval,” said Ginossar.
On the list, there were the four Iranian diplomats the Mossad had allowed to be tortured and executed in Beirut by the Phalangist butcher Robert “the Cobra” Hatem. There were the targets of AMAN’s Unit 504, who “died naturally by swallowing a pillow” and were buried facedown. There was the operation by the Shin Bet in June 1984 in the village of Bidya, where fifteen operatives arrived in three Mercedes sedans at the garage owned by the local Shiite commander, Murshid Nahas, who was pulled into one of the cars and was told, according to an eyewitness, “You can choose how to die.” His bullet-riddled body was later found on the outskirts of the village. The names of people who’d simply disappeared from the occupied territories were written down, as were those of all the men killed in the Weights program.
It was by no means a complete list—just three pages and sixty-seven names long—and it covered only deaths in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. But it was a devastating compilation.
Ginossar called it the Skulls Dossier. Ostensibly, it was a legal document, meant to demonstrate that Shalom’s order to kill the two Ashkelon hijackers was both routine and acceptable, part of a sanctioned program of extrajudicial killing. In reality, it was pure blackmail, an implicit threat that if Shalom and his allies were indicted, they would take others with them, including prime ministers.
“We understood very well the significance of the Skulls Dossier that they laid on the table,” a former cabinet minister said. “It was clear to us that we had to stop the general hysteria and make sure that the Shin Bet personnel involved did not have to go to court.”
It was a shocking maneuver, but an effective one. “I offered my resignation to Shamir” (the foreign minister and part of the trio running the state), Shalom said. “He told me, ‘Don’t you dare.’ He feared that if I did, he would have to also. So he [Shamir] went to see [Prime Minister] Shimon Peres and Rabin, who was defense minister, and said, ‘You also gave such approvals. So if
you abandon us, the Likud, we’ll drag you down with us.’ ”
Ultimately, a dubious agreement, first proposed by a very influential attorney who was advising both the prime minister and the heads of the Shin Bet, was made. The state president, Chaim Herzog, would hand down all-encompassing pardons to the implicated Shin Bet personnel, covering all of the proceedings against them. Eleven men were thus exonerated before they’d even been indicted. No one would be called to account for the Ashkelon killings, or any of the others. In return, the only requirement was that Shalom resign from the Shin Bet.
Even after walking away scot-free, Shalom clung to his fabrications. He wrote that he had acted “with permission and with authority,” sticking to his claim that it was Shamir who gave the order to kill the Palestinian hijackers. In the wake of the affair, it was decided that all meetings between the heads of the intelligence services and the prime minister would be attended by his military secretary and by a stenographer who would record the proceedings.
The day after Herzog signed the pardons, the daily Hadashot provided an account of what had happened: “So this bunch of folks sat down and, in an act similar to the meeting of a junta in some remote Latin American state, removed the noose from around their necks.” President Herzog, a former head of AMAN, defended the action in a statement to the media, but only a few grasped what he was hinting at: “The process of investigating the affair would have necessitated uncovering the modus operandi of the Shin Bet over the years. That way, perhaps sixty to eighty affairs from the past would have emerged. Would that have been good for the country?”
AT A CAMP NOT far from the PLO headquarters in Hammam Chott, a Tunisian resort town, twenty-eight of Abu Jihad’s best guerrillas trained for almost a year for a spectacular attack. The plan was to sail in a mother vessel from Algiers to the sea off Tel Aviv, then travel in rubber dinghies to the beach at Bat Yam, a suburb south of Tel Aviv. They would come ashore at first light, hijack a bus or two, and force the drivers to take them to the IDF General Staff headquarters, in Tel Aviv’s Kirya government compound. They would gun down the sentries at the gate and storm the compound, rushing toward the offices of the chief of staff and the minister of defense, killing as many people as they could along the way. Then they would capture one of the buildings or block the entrance and exit to one of the streets of the compound and hold as many hostages as possible, threatening to kill them if their demands—the release of PLO terrorists from Israeli jails—were not met.
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