The next afternoon, Shamir was asked by a reporter about Israel’s involvement in the targeted killing. “I heard about it,” he said drily, “on the radio.”
Abu Jihad was buried a few days later, with military honors. He had been made a martyr. Yasser Arafat walked behind the coffin with the widow, Intisar, and her eldest son, Jihad.
At the time, the Israelis considered the killing of Abu Jihad to be a tremendous success. “Rabin thanked me later for persuading him,” Moshe Nissim said. “ ‘You cannot guess how right you were,’ he told me. ‘People are cheering me, shaking my hand, giving me the thumbs-up. What joy it has brought to the nation! What a feeling of high morale, how right it was for our deterrent force.’ ”
Indeed, Abu Jihad’s death was a severe blow to the PLO. Abu Jihad was a seasoned and shrewd commander, and without him Fatah was able to launch far fewer successful attacks against Israel.
But the immediate, professed reason for killing him was to dampen the Intifada—and by that measure, the assassination failed to achieve its goal. In fact, the targeted killing had precisely the opposite effect: The elimination of Abu Jihad greatly weakened the PLO leadership but bolstered the Popular Committees in the occupied territories, which were the true leaders of the uprising. And Israel still had no reply to the waves of protesters or the growing tide of international condemnation.
With the benefit of hindsight, many Israelis who took part in the operation now regret it. Some believe that Abu Jihad’s powerful presence had a restraining and sobering effect on Arafat and that his voice would have been highly beneficial after the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority, in 1994. If the adored and charismatic Abu Jihad had been alive, Hamas might not have been able to consolidate its position and to dominate large parts of the Palestinian public.
Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who was head of AMAN at the time of the assassination, and later chief of the General Staff, said that in an ideal world, “if we had known that a short time after Abu Jihad’s elimination, the PLO would take the diplomatic course, then perhaps we would have raided his house and first of all talked with him about his attitudes toward a compromise with Israel, and only then decided whether to kill him or not. In retrospect, his absence is indeed evident to a certain extent. He could have made a significant contribution to the peace process.”
ON JUNE 23, 1988, an ABC News crew came to the Palestinian village of Salfit, on the slopes of the Samarian Hills in the West Bank.
At that point, the occupied territories were still in the turbulent throes of the Intifada. Violent protests, terrorist attacks, rocks, and Molotov cocktails were all daily occurrences. There were many dead on both sides.
The international media was attracted by the action.
In the small village of Salfit resided the Dakdouk family. One of their sons, Nizar, figured prominently on the Shin Bet’s wanted list, though he was only eighteen years old. Intelligence information indicated that he was the leader of a gang of teenagers who hurled gasoline bombs at Israeli buses. Responding to the provocation with a form of collective punishment often used at the time, the IDF had demolished the Dakdouk family home on June 16. The next day, Israeli TV broadcast an interview with Nizar and his mother, standing next to the ruins of their home. With a smile, Nizar denied all the accusations against him, but he didn’t object strongly when the interviewer suggested that he was considered a local hero. It was evident that he was not averse to media attention.
When a separate crew from ABC News arrived a week later and asked the family if it could interview Nizar, he appeared within minutes. The reporter explained that he had been impressed by the Israel TV interview with him and that he wanted to produce a major story about him. The crew suggested that the interview with Nizar take place on a hilltop overlooking the village. Nizar agreed but asked them to wait for a few minutes so he could change his shirt.
“No need,” said the interviewer, friendly as could be. “I’ve got a stock of clean shirts in the van. What size do you wear?”
Pleased as any young man would be with the attention, Nizar jumped into one of the crew’s two vans, both carrying press signs and the ABC logo. The party headed up the hill for the interview.
When Nizar failed to return home after a few hours, the family began to worry. The next morning, they called the ABC bureau in Tel Aviv. The people at the news bureau were surprised to hear that Nizar had disappeared. In fact, they were surprised to hear that anyone from the network had been in Salfit at all. A brief investigation revealed that it was not, in fact, anyone from ABC who had taken Nizar away. ABC suspected Israeli intelligence.
Roone Arledge, president of ABC’s news division, contacted Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The friendship between the two gave him access, but Arledge was furious. The action of the Shin Bet, he said, “presents grave peril to the safety of legitimate journalists.” He demanded that “an investigation be conducted immediately to ascertain who authorized such an action” and to “affirm that it is not the policy of the Israeli Government to pose as journalists for whatever reason.”
Shamir was not aware of the Salfit incident, but he realized that this was a matter that could very quickly become a scandal of major proportions, and he summoned a meeting for that evening with the heads of the military and the intelligence community.
—
THE INTIFADA WAS CHARACTERIZED by two types of Palestinian activity against the Israeli occupation: huge popular protests, and acts of terror against Israeli soldiers and settlers.
Back in 1986, Major General Ehud Barak, then the head of the IDF Central Command, together with the head of the operations department of the General Staff, Major General Meir Dagan, set up a highly secretive unit, Duvdevan (Hebrew for “Cherry”), to combat terrorists in the West Bank. The unit was now put into action.
Its fighters were Mistaravim who would work undercover, generally posing as Arabs, deep inside Palestinian territory, and hit the people on the wanted list. The nucleus of Duvdevan comprised graduates of elite IDF units, particularly the naval commandos.
The Cherry troops exhibited exceptional operational capabilities, thanks to the long and grueling training they underwent, which included special instruction to become familiar with the Arab territories, dress, and disguise techniques. They were uniquely capable of blending in when they were in crowded and hostile Palestinian environments, even in small villages where strangers attracted immediate attention.
It was Cherry that had posed as an ABC crew and abducted Nizar Dakdouk in Salfit.
Prior to that operation, the men chosen for the mission—one of them born and raised in Canada and another from the United States—had undergone a few days of intensive training at Israel’s state-run television studios in Jerusalem. They learned how a television crew works, how an interview is conducted, how the camera is used, and how the sound man holds the boom mic. Israel’s television stations also loaned them the equipment. The Shin Bet was responsible for forging the ABC signs and logos and press credentials.
After the fake TV crew picked up Dakdouk and left Salfit, ostensibly headed toward the hilltop interview site, their van was stopped by what looked like a routine IDF roadblock but was in fact another Cherry detail. These men then handcuffed the wanted youth, blindfolded him, and handed him to the Shin Bet for interrogation.
Shamir was furious that he had not been asked to approve the Salfit operation, and he immediately forbade the use of fake media cover from that point forward—and “definitely, definitely not American” media. Major Uri Bar-Lev, the officer in charge, who in 1986 was the one who had set Cherry up, tried to calm Shamir down and explain why it had been important to use the ABC News ruse.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” said Bar-Lev, “we understood that he was just looking for a chance to talk. We knew this was the easiest way to get him out of the village without causing a commotion.”
Bar
-Lev says he brought the videotape shot by the “crew” to prove how efficient the job had been, “and gradually you could see Shamir’s crumpled turtle face becoming softer, and even that he was beginning to like it.”
Shamir smiled. “In the underground, we also had to use disguises sometimes,” he said. But he soon snapped out of the nostalgia and repeated his order: “What’s done is done. But from now on, no more use of media cover.”
“Prime Minister, we are in the middle of another operation with the same cover,” Bar-Lev said. “I am asking you not to categorically forbid the use of this modus operandi.”
After a moment’s reflection, Shamir said, “Well, okay, but I forbid the use of the cover of American journalists.”
Dakdouk was interrogated and eventually given a long jail term, but in the end he came out alive. In many other cases, however—the IDF refuses to this day, more than thirty years afterward, to release precise figures—the targets of Cherry operations ended up dead. “The essence of Cherry was to carry out low-signature killings of terror operatives,” said Yoni Koren, an officer in AMAN and a close associate of Barak’s.
“The orders of engagement are very straightforward,” observed Bar-Lev. “If the wanted person is seen with a weapon in his hands, i.e., is a danger to our troops, he is to be shot right away.”
Conversations with former members of the unit revealed that in a large number of its operations, it was clear that the suspect would be armed, and that they were therefore de facto targeted killing missions. Often, it was even obligatory to perform “dead checking”—pumping more bullets into the man after he was down. All this without giving him the chance to surrender.
The IDF denied that Cherry performed the dead-checking procedure, but proof came after a soldier in the unit, Sergeant Eliahu Azisha, was killed by friendly fire when he was mistaken for a wanted Palestinian. An IDF Criminal Investigation Division probe revealed that he had been shot multiple times to make sure he was dead.
Cherry and other units like it carried out hundreds of missions during the Intifada. Peddlers, shepherds, taxi drivers, female pedestrians on the street—just about any type of person one might have encountered in an Arab city or village at that time could have turned out to be a Cherry soldier and suddenly drawn a concealed weapon. “A terrorist trying to survive doesn’t execute attacks. Our activity put the members of the terror cells into absolute uncertainty,” said Bar-Lev. “They didn’t know where it was coming from, didn’t know who could be trusted or where they could feel safe.”
Sometimes Cherry soldiers even posed as Israeli Jews. In February 1990, the Shin Bet learned that an armed squad with ties to Fatah intended to attack IDF reservists in Manara Square, in the center of the West Bank city of Ramallah. Cherry men dressed like reservists: in sloppy uniforms, potbellies peeking out of their shirts and their rifles out of reach as they sat eating hummus in a restaurant on the square. After two weeks of waiting, the anticipated attack took place. The “reservists” sprang into action. They ripped off their latex potbellies and drew out the Micro Uzi machine pistols secreted inside them. They opened fire and killed some of the assailants. Snipers posted nearby took care of the rest.
Cherry and similar units set up by the police and the Shin Bet achieved their goal: severe damage, sometimes fatal, to Palestinian terrorist groups, thus reducing their level of activity to a significant extent.
But this success, as important as it may have been, only highlighted the larger strategic failures in the war against the popular uprising. Against the mass protests, Israel had responded with all the grace of a clumsy giant trying to repel a swarm of nimble dwarves. Soldiers rounded up thousands of protesters, and they were sent to special detention camps set up in the south of the country. Large parts of the population of the Palestinian areas were placed under lengthy curfews, the family homes of activists were demolished or boarded up, and they themselves were deported. Many schools remained shut for most of the year.
Television footage of the violence led to greater decline in Israel’s international standing and an increase in pressure, now from President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, to sit down and negotiate with the Palestinians.
But despite the mounting international criticism, domestic discontent, and the need to send more and more troops to quell the protests, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his Likud-led government refused to hold talks with the PLO over the occupied territories. Shamir and his right-wing ministers continued to view the organization as the force behind the Intifada, and continued to believe the Intifada could be quelled by targeting the mob leaders in the occupied territories as well as Arafat’s men in Tunis. The fact that the assassination of Abu Jihad had done nothing to quiet down the popular uprising did not sway them from this view.
The prime minister ordered the Mossad to remain focused on gathering intelligence on the PLO and figuring out how to kill its operatives. Mossad director Shabtai Shavit, whose politics were very similar to Shamir’s, happily complied. In fact, he wanted to go even further: With the Intifada whirling, Shavit requested permission to settle old scores and eliminate former members of Black September.
The PLO, however, had dramatically tightened its internal security. The Israeli Air Force’s strike on Tunis in 1985 and the subsequent commando raid on Abu Jihad led to the establishment of a number of Fatah inquiry panels to locate the leak that provided intelligence to the Israelis. Those investigations came up empty, but nevertheless, stringent precautions were instituted at PLO facilities—background checks for candidates trying to join the organization, strict compartmentalization, polygraph tests administered by Tunisian intelligence—making it very difficult for the Mossad to spy on them.
There was no way for the Mossad to recruit agents in Tunis. The local authorities were enraged by the Israeli actions in their territory, and they provided open assistance to the PLO, helping it to tighten its security.
So instead, as it had done in many of its recruitment operations, the Mossad looked for likely agents among Palestinians traveling in so-called base countries, those states in which operatives and case officers could function in relative freedom and where Israel had diplomatic representation.
The most convenient country for these activities was France, through which most PLO officials passed after leaving Tunis. Many of them stayed at Le Méridien Montparnasse, in Paris, an established, respectable hotel popular among Middle Eastern business travelers. To the surprise of the Mossad personnel, as soon as they began investigating the hotel, they discovered that El Al, the Israeli national airline, enjoyed a corporate discount at the same hotel, and pilots and cabin crews spent their layovers there. Each morning, Mossad surveillance crews watched as senior members of the PLO munched croissants and sipped café au lait in the same cafeteria as El Al pilots, many of whom were officers in the Israeli Air Force reserves, all purely by coincidence.
Among the PLO men who frequented the hotel was Adnan Yassin, a midlevel activist who was responsible for logistics and security at the Tunis HQ. Yassin also assisted his bosses with their personal comforts, coordinating their vacations, arranging their medical care, and procuring luxury goods: sports cars shipped in containers from Marseille, expensive perfumes, Cuban cigars, and alcoholic drinks. Life in exile, far from the hardships of their people in the occupied territories, had made some of the PLO officials exceedingly corrupt.
Yassin took care of his own comforts, too. During the late eighties, many of the senior officials in the organization dipped their hands into the coffers, enjoying the good life at the expense of the Palestinian revolution. In the Mossad, these men were referred to mockingly as midawar—Arabic for “loafers”—or as the “Champs-Élysées Revolutionaries.”
Besides his PLO duties, Yassin also frequented Paris because his cancer-stricken wife received chemotherapy there. The couple always stayed at Le Méridien Montparnasse. Yassin had a
reliable address, a basic routine, and a wealth of PLO intelligence. In late 1989, Avi Dagan, the head of the Mossad’s Junction division, green-lit Operation Golden Fleece to recruit Adnan Yassin.
—
ONE MORNING IN MARCH 1990, Adnan Yassin sat down to breakfast with some of his PLO colleagues at the hotel. At a nearby table, a well-dressed man of Middle Eastern appearance, his room key on the table, read a newspaper printed on pale green pages. These items—the key, the paper—were not there by chance. Rather, they were props of a Junction recruiter trying to establish initial contact with a potential agent. This is a delicate stage, requiring discipline and patience. “Most important at this moment,” a Junction case officer who was involved in Operation Golden Fleece explained, “is to try to cause the other side to make the first move and initiate contact. Or, at least, not to look as if you are trying too hard, not to act with suspicion-arousing aggression. For example, you might well be suspicious of a person who comes to the bus stop after you, but much less so of someone who was already there when you came. If I enter an elevator and someone hurries in after me and then gets off at the same floor as I do, that looks suspicious. If he was there already, much less so. We are talking about innumerable delicate nuances, the aim of which is to allow a situation to flow naturally along. Only rarely will you meet someone sufficiently corrupt for you to wrap things up by handing him a suitcase full of cash. For everyone else, you need real craft, great patience.”
The room key on the table was there to create a feeling of familiarity, to indicate that the man sitting there was also a guest at Le Méridien. The newspaper with the green pages was well known to any Arabic reader who traveled abroad: Al-Shark al-Awsat, published in London by a member of the Saudi royal family and considered relatively moderate.
Rise and Kill First Page 39