Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  The attack would come on April 20, 1985, two days after Holocaust Remembrance Day and four days before Memorial Day, one of the most significant days in the Israeli calendar, when all of Israel’s citizens stand at attention for two minutes as sirens are sounded all across the country to honor the nation’s fallen soldiers and victims of terror. Abu Jihad wanted to give the Israelis something new to mourn: “We want to turn the light of day to a dark night in Tel Aviv,” Abu Jihad told his fighters during a final briefing before they set out.

  “With the help of Allah, this Sabbath day will be a black day in the history of Tel Aviv, and so will Sunday. On this day, the whole of Tel Aviv will close down, witnessing rivers of blood, ruin, and destruction.”

  Abu Jihad spread out a map of the Israeli shoreline south of Tel Aviv, marked with three arrows showing the landing sites of the three dinghies: “We will attack their headquarters, with the help of Allah, and then we will close the streets. In one street, for instance, we will imprison five hundred people—five hundred people at one time—and then we will be able to use them as bargaining chips.”

  The supreme military commander of the Palestinian people marked out a clear goal for his fighters: “With the help of Allah, he will also send Sharon there. We know what he looks like.”

  One of the fighters chuckled, “He has a potbelly.”

  “He has a potbelly,” Abu Jihad said. “Whoever aims well will be able to hit him. May a bomb fall on his head, with the help of Allah. He [Allah] can do it, boys. There is nothing Allah cannot do.”

  Abu Jihad must have known that this was a futile wish. Sharon had been ousted as defense minister two years earlier, and the chances that on that day he’d happen to be at the ministry he’d been shamefacedly driven out of were minimal. But Sharon was the embodiment of evil in Palestinian eyes, and Abu Jihad must have thought this was the best way to encourage his men.

  —

  MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS had passed since the first Mossad kill order had been issued against Abu Jihad. He’d settled in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, after the PLO’s evacuation of Beirut in the summer of 1982. He lived in a rented villa not far from the beach, some twenty-five miles from the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage. Israeli intelligence kept tabs on him as he traveled to Syria and Jordan and other countries in the Middle East, issuing orders, organizing, encouraging his troops, and planning operations against Israel.

  As the military commander of the PLO, second only to Yasser Arafat, Abu Jihad was responsible for multiple acts of terrorism against Israelis, more than any other Palestinian actor by a wide margin. He remained imbued with nationalistic-revolutionary fervor, now bolstered by a desire to prove to Israel that the PLO was down but not out, and that it could still strike back and inflict heavy damage. To that end, he made the decision to once again begin planning attacks in Western countries, particularly in Europe, where he and Arafat had not operated since the first half of the 1970s. He put an emphasis on maritime operations—those carried out on ships, by means of ships, or in the vicinity of ports.

  To achieve this, he deployed Force 17, the well-trained special unit of Arafat’s bodyguards, alongside his own special-operations squad, the Western Sector, and Fatah’s naval division.

  An Israeli plan to kill Abu Jihad in Amman had been developed in 1983, but it was put off a few times, usually for operational reasons. The Mossad did plan operations targeting Abu Jihad’s subordinates, however. Following the restart of Fatah’s operational activities in Europe, the Mossad also resumed aggressive action against the PLO on the subcontinent.

  Since the Lillehammer disaster, Caesarea had been busy rebuilding Bayonet, its targeted killing unit. “I used to call it ‘sharpening the sword,’ ” said Mike Harari, who made a number of changes to the unit before his retirement in 1980. In the new Bayonet, the old-time Holocaust survivors and the former liquidators from the anti-British underground no longer played leading roles. The stars were now graduates of IDF combat units with rich battle experience, endowed with large stores of courage and readiness, if not eagerness, to squeeze the trigger.

  Heading the new Bayonet was “Carlos,” a Caesarea operative who had reached the Mossad via combat duty in Ariel Sharon’s Paratroopers Brigade. His colleagues said that Carlos carried out killings coldly and methodically, that his heart didn’t miss a beat.

  In August 1983, Abu Jihad sent the deputy commander of his naval unit, Mamoun Meraish, to Greece to acquire a ship and weapons to be used in a terror attack on Haifa. As he was on his way to close the deal in Athens, a motorcycle drew up alongside Meraish’s car at a traffic light. Carlos, the man on the passenger’s seat of the motorcycle, drew a silenced pistol and pumped bullets into Meraish until he was certain he was dead. All of this happened in full view of his three children, aged four, nine, and thirteen, who began shrieking with terror.

  On August 16, 1984, Zaki Hillo, a member of George Habash’s PFLP, arrived in Madrid on a flight from Beirut. The Mossad believed that he, too, was on a mission for Abu Jihad, who had enlisted him for one of his planned operations in Europe. A day later, while Hillo was walking on the street in the center of Madrid, a motorcycle passed by him, and the man on the passenger’s seat shot him several times. Hillo survived the hit but lost the use of his legs.

  Munzer Abu Ghazala, the commander of Fatah’s naval arm, had been the object of a number of Bayonet targeted killing attempts before October 21, 1986, when he parked his car in an Athens suburb, giving “Eli” enough time to do his job. Eli, an assassin with a predilection for explosive devices, slid his burly body underneath the car and attached one of his “Eli-Ears,” a lethal bomb of his own design. Abu Ghazala entered the car, and Eli, now a safe distance away, pushed a button, blowing up the car and its driver.

  In the wake of these hits, as well as other PLO operations in Europe that were thwarted after the Mossad tipped off the local police, Abu Jihad came to the conclusion that the Israelis had agents inside his European networks. He decided then on a naval operation that would be run entirely from inside his headquarters in Tunis and a training base in Algeria, under strict secrecy. This operation became the plan to seize the General Staff building and take as many hostages as possible.

  In the spring of 1985, Abu Jihad’s troops embarked on a leased 498-ton diesel-powered Panamanian-flag cargo ship called the Attaviros. Abu Jihad had plotted an extended voyage for his commandos, from the port of Oran, in Algeria, westward into the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the east coast of Africa, through Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and into the Red Sea. From there they hoped to slip unnoticed through the Suez Canal in a merchant convoy until they were in Israeli waters.

  But unbeknownst to Abu Jihad, AMAN’s Unit 504 had a network of agents within the Western Sector apparatus, Abu Jihad’s military wing. For almost a year, Israel had known that an attack of some kind was planned for around Memorial Day; on April 24, a task force of four missile boats and Flotilla 13 commandos sailed 1,800 miles and blew up a second ship leased for the operation, Moonlight, when it was empty and docked in Algeria. And when the Attaviros reached the Mediterranean on April 20, two Israeli missile cruisers and Flotilla 13 naval commando units were waiting, thirty miles off Port Said.

  The PLO operatives on the ship refused the Israeli call to surrender and opened fire on one of the Israeli vessels. In response, the Israeli forces sank the Palestinian ship, killing twenty people on board.

  Eight others were captured and taken to Unit 504’s subterranean interrogation facility, known as “Camp 1391,” north of Tel Aviv. The site is not marked on maps, and Israeli law bars the publication of its location.

  The prisoners were stripped naked and hooded, then tied to the wall. Loud music blared in their cells, making it impossible for them to sleep, and they were subject to occasional beatings.

  After four days, the prisoners confessed the details of Abu Jihad’s plan.
They described how they were planning to seize the General Staff building and take the defense minister and chief of staff hostage. Were it not for AMAN’s precise intelligence, it would have been “a disaster on a scale we had not yet known,” said Oded Raz, a senior AMAN officer.

  Relying on intelligence to merely prevent attacks already in motion was no longer an acceptable option.

  —

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE CONFESSIONS extracted by Unit 504’s interrogators, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the IDF to plan two operations against Abu Jihad’s base in Tunis. Rabin, who was one of the main targets of Abu Jihad’s foiled attack, wanted two options to choose from, both of which would be big and noisy. One was a large-scale land incursion that would involve forces from Flotilla 13, Sayeret Matkal, and Shaldag (the air force’s elite commando unit). Altogether, there would be about a hundred warriors under the command of Brigadier General Yitzhak Mordechai, the man whose life was almost ruined by the Shin Bet’s attempt to frame him. These men would all land on the Tunisian shore in dinghies launched from navy vessels, raid the PLO compound, and kill Abu Jihad and his men.

  The other possibility was a bombing run by Israeli aircraft. Both Mordechai and the air force began training, pending the cabinet’s approval.

  There were tactical and strategic problems with both alternatives. Tunisia is a long way from Israel—1,280 miles, farther than almost all IDF operations had reached before. For a complex, combined-ops land assault far from Israel, that meant there would be very limited possibilities for extracting the forces if things went south. Slogging through a major city also meant that the risk of casualties for the Israeli fighters would be precariously high.

  Sending in bombers, on the other hand, was also risky. Israel suffered from a dearth of intelligence on the air defenses in both Tunisia and neighboring Libya.

  Since the PLO headquarters had moved to North Africa two years earlier, Israel had asked the United States for the requisite information on the radar facilities and military and naval deployments of the two countries, but it was turned down. The Americans were justifiably worried about the repercussions of an Israeli attack outside of its immediate neighborhood.

  Since it couldn’t get the intelligence legitimately, Israel simply stole it. Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew with delusional dreams of becoming a spy and influencing the course of history, had tried to enlist in the CIA but was turned down because of “significant emotional instability.” The agency didn’t share its evaluation with other branches of U.S. intelligence, however, and Pollard was hired by the U.S. Navy, where he was considered a brilliant analyst and an outstanding employee.

  Pollard later claimed that he had witnessed “anti-Israeli attitudes among his colleagues” and “inadequate U.S. intelligence support for Israel,” so he tried to get both the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Mossad to recruit him as a spy. He was firmly rejected by both organizations but then managed to get recruited by Lakam, the Defense Ministry’s espionage arm. From the Hebrew acronym for “Bureau for Scientific Relations,” this secret body, known to only a very small group of people, was headed by Rafi Eitan, who was still bitter that he had not been made head of the Mossad. “The information Pollard gave was so good that I could not resist the temptation,” said Eitan. He said that his superiors, the prime ministers and the ministers of defense, knew about the situation but turned a blind eye in the face of the ocean of information Pollard gave them.

  From the moment he was recruited, Pollard started sneaking huge quantities of documents out of his workplace and taking them to be photocopied at a safe house in Washington, then returning them. These documents, coded “Green Material,” were then sent to Israel and stored in large safes at the Research Division of AMAN and at air force intelligence.

  In June 1985, Yossi Yagur, Pollard’s handler at Lakam, asked his spy for all available information on the PLO headquarters outside Tunis, and on Libyan and Tunisian air defense. Pollard went to the Navy Intelligence archives and borrowed all the required information, which found its way to Israel in a matter of days. Yagur passed Pollard thanks from “the highest levels of the Israeli Government” for his outstanding intelligence support for the upcoming raid.

  Although they now had the necessary intelligence, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, who were alternating as prime minister, were still hesitant to green-light the operation, as was Defense Minister Rabin. Mordechai tried to persuade Rabin to back the sea-land proposal because “there’s a difference between an air raid and the effect that you have when you come up on someone with a gun at his head.” But Rabin was afraid that something unexpected would go wrong, “and I couldn’t promise him that such a thing wouldn’t happen,” said Mordechai.

  By contrast, an air bombardment would pose relatively little danger to the airmen, especially with the high-quality information Pollard had supplied, but Israel shared the Americans’ strategic concerns. Tunisia had no border with Israel and no present conflicts. Invading an ostensibly neutral country, by air or land, could have serious international repercussions.

  There was another, external factor for the delay as well. Targeted killings, especially those involving high-profile targets such as Abu Jihad, are not merely military or intelligence operations. They are also political tools, and as such they are often driven by political concerns, a useful method to either assuage or rally public opinion. In 1981, for example, polls were predicting a handsome majority for the leftist Labor Party in an upcoming election until Prime Minister Begin, from the right-wing Likud, ordered the bombing of the nuclear reactor near Baghdad where Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons. This was enough to tip the balance in Likud’s favor.

  At the moment, however, domestic politics were stable. There was no election campaign that required rousing the public with flashy militarism, nor was there any demand from the public for immediate vengeance. A delay of indefinite length, then, seemed to be the obvious choice, since the tactical and diplomatic risks of the operation were too high, and the opportunities too uncertain.

  But all that would change just a few months later.

  —

  ALL THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, both the PLO and Israel were especially active in Cyprus, and in the sea between that island and Lebanon. Abu Jihad used Cyprus as the main route for the transfer of his fighters back to Lebanon and as a logistics base for the whole Mediterranean zone. The small island became a hive of terrorist activity, smuggling, espionage, and then, of course, targeted killings.

  The Mossad took advantage of the mutiny declared by some Fatah elements, who received backing from Syria in their fight against Arafat and his leadership, and began executing a clever sting hit operation, in which one of its operatives would pose as a Palestinian who wanted to take revenge against Arafat and offered his services to Syrian intelligence. The Mossad man gave the Syrian intelligence station in Larnaca, Cyprus, information about Palestinian fighters returning to Lebanon. “The Syrians, who were then in control of the sea and airports of the country, waited for the Palestinians to arrive, picked them up, and then they were never seen again,” said Yoni Koren, an AMAN officer at the time. “It was a remarkably successful operation. The Syrians were so pleased that they began to pay us by the head. We managed to get rid of about 150 PLO people.”

  Some of the ships sailing from Cyprus to Lebanon were stopped by the Israelis themselves. On September 9, 1985, intelligence came in that a group of high-ranking Palestinians would set sail from Limassol for Lebanon the next day, on a ship named Opportunity. Aboard this vessel was a man whom Israel had long wanted to eliminate: the deputy head of Force 17, Faisal Abu Sharah. He had been involved in a number of terrorist attacks, the most serious of which, had it materialized, would have taken place in November 1979. Force 17 was planning to use a shipping container departing from the port of Piraeus, Greece, for Haifa, carrying several tons of raisins, to deliver a hug
e quantity of explosives that would go off when the container was unloaded. Abu Sharah sent one of his top aides, Samir al-Asmar, to take charge of the operation. But the Mossad’s Junction division got wind of it and located the container and the Palestinian team. A Bayonet squad went to Piraeus and killed al-Asmar. A month later, on December 15, Bayonet disposed of another member of the team, Ibrahim Abdul Aziz, after he arrived in Cyprus, and a member of the PLO diplomatic mission there who was hosting him, Samir Toukan. Abu Sharah was supposed to have been with them, but his life was saved thanks to a change in his schedule of meetings that day, and he continued operating for five more years, until the Israelis found him on the Opportunity.

  Flotilla 13 commandos boarded the ship off the coast of Lebanon and captured Abu Sharah and three other senior Force 17 men. They then took the prisoners to Unit 504’s Installation 1391. “They made me stand with my hands on my head, pulled my hair, bashed my head against a wall,” Abu Sharah said later. “They told me to crawl on the floor, stripped almost completely naked, and to lick the floor. I remained naked and they poured cold water over me, hit me on my testicles, and whipped them with rubber cords.” According to medical documents submitted to the court, the beatings and kicks that he sustained were so hard that his scrotum burst.