Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  The Mossad was lucky that morning in Paris. One of the people in the PLO breakfast group, though not Yassin himself, asked the Mossad man about something in the paper. The Mossad recruiter congenially handed the man the paper. A conversation then developed between the Palestinians and the Mossad man, who was at pains not to pay any particular attention to Yassin. One member of the group invited the Mossad man to join them, but he refused politely and left the room, so as not to arouse suspicion by appearing too eager.

  The next morning, the Palestinian group again ran into the Mossad operative, who introduced himself as an Egyptian businessman by the name of Hilmi, and they struck up a lively conversation. Two days later, Yassin came to the dining room on his own and looked around for some company. He spoke only Arabic, and he was pleased to see Hilmi reading his green newspaper again. He asked if he could join him. Hilmi was happy to say yes.

  It was the perfect contact method. Yassin was convinced that he had initiated the relationship, and there was no reason for him to be suspicious. Hilmi said that he was in the import-export business between France and the Arab world, hinting that he made quite a bit of money from it. The rapacious Yassin asked to meet later for lunch at a nearby restaurant, and Hilmi agreed. Later, they met twice more.

  From Hilmi’s conversations and information already in the Mossad’s possession, Junction developed an understanding of Yassin’s character. It was not especially flattering. In his Junction dossier, Yassin is depicted as vulgar, uneducated, aggressive, and coarse, his chief concern being his social status and lining his own pockets. Hilmi reported that Yassin tried to get him involved in petty illegal currency deals and in smuggling contraband into Tunis. Later on, Mossad men witnessed his degrading behavior toward his wife, including one time when he slapped her in public.

  In short, he was an ideal Mossad recruit.

  Hilmi and Yassin’s friendship progressed. Eventually, Hilmi told Yassin about a friend, a businessman who was connected to the Iranian embassy in Paris. Hilmi had made a lot of money, he said, because of that friendship. But he never offered to introduce Yassin. He just dangled his connection like bait, waiting patiently for Yassin to take it. And when Yassin finally asked if he could accompany Hilmi the next time he met his contact, Hilmi demurred, like a fisherman playing out a line, not ready to set the hook. Yassin badgered, and Hilmi refused. Finally, after a month of repeated entreaties, Hilmi agreed to introduce him to his Iranian contact.

  The businessman with the Iranian connections was, of course, just another Junction operative. Playing his part perfectly, he described to Yassin a number of future business initiatives he had planned and told him that he could have a stake in some of them. In the meantime, he said, the Islamic Republic of Iran was very concerned about the plight of the Palestinians. It was important for the Iranians to know that the PLO was functioning well and “doing the correct things,” by which he meant keeping up terror activities against Israel outside its borders and stepping up the Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza. “The Islamic Republic,” he said, “will do all it can to destroy the Zionist entity and to return to the Palestinians what is theirs.”

  Any information Yassin could provide from PLO headquarters would be welcome, and handsomely rewarded.

  Junction was betting that it would be easier for Yassin to betray the PLO if he believed he was selling its secrets to Iran, rather than the enemy.

  The bet paid off. Yassin turned out to be an exceptional investment for the Mossad. In exchange for a few tens of thousands of dollars, he supplied an enormous amount of high-quality intelligence during regular debriefings in Paris. Primarily, he provided information about Hammam Chott, the PLO headquarters in Tunis, giving details about the day-to-day activities there and about the plans hatched there. Yassin outlined everything, including shifting organizational structures, who sat in which office, who met with whom, how Abu Jihad’s powers had been dispersed and reassigned, weapons transfers, how the Intifada was stoked, preparations for terror attacks, and personnel recruitment. He interspersed his detailed operational reports with quality gossip. He was the first to tell of the close relationship developing between Suha, the daughter of the Palestinian national poet, Raymonda Tawil, and Chairman Arafat, who had made Suha an adviser in his bureau. The two were married a short time later.

  Adnan Yassin also brought a plan by Arafat and one of his operatives, Jibril Rajoub, to the attention of Israeli intelligence. The plan was to kill Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon as revenge for the assassination of Abu Jihad. The designated assassin, a frustrated and debt-burdened Israeli Jew by the name of Rafael Avraham, landed in Israel in October 1992, carrying a large amount of cash and the assassination plan with him. Adnan Yassin knew about the plan because he had booked Avraham’s travel arrangements.

  Birds operatives were waiting for Avraham when he got off the plane. Rajoub was stunned: “I really did not understand how the Shin Bet got on to him so quickly. He didn’t manage to do anything. Just got off the plane and hop! He was captured.”

  Yassin was an endless fountain of information, an asset of almost unimaginable value. Through him, the Mossad was able to instantly track many of its top assassination targets, primarily because, once again, he was the man who made all their flight and hotel reservations. One such instance occurred in late January 1992, after the French authorities, via the Red Cross in France, permitted George Habash, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to visit the country for medical treatment, despite the fact that he was on their most-wanted list and those of several other countries. Acting on Yassin’s intelligence, the Israelis examined the possibility of eliminating him, but the French were taking precautions to protect him. Instead of the hit, then, the Mossad leaked the scandalous news of his visit to the media, causing considerable embarrassment for the government of François Mitterrand.

  Yassin also kept tabs on men the Mossad believed had been involved in the 1972 Munich massacre. Despite the fact that the Red Pages for these men had been signed by Golda Meir almost twenty years earlier, some of them remained at large. “From our point of view, the Red Pages were open-ended,” an aide to Mossad director Shavit said.

  One of the names high up on that list was Atef Bseiso, who had been a member of Black September at the time of the terror attack and, by 1992, had become a top PLO official. It was never clear exactly what role he played in the Munich attack. The PLO claimed he was not involved at all. But the Mossad insisted he was, and in any case, it made no difference—Shavit was determined to avenge Munich, and anyone connected to Black September was, in his mind, a legitimate target. Still, it was an odd distraction. At this point, the entirety of the Middle East was consumed by the Intifada. The occupied territories were in flaming turmoil. Israel had far more pressing intelligence needs than killing people for atrocities they may or may not have been involved in two decades earlier. Nonetheless, Shamir re-endorsed the Red Page for Bseiso. The reason, a Caesarea operative said, was “simply because we had access.” That access was Yassin.

  In early June 1992, Bseiso left Tunis for a series of meetings with the German and French intelligence services, as well as with the CIA’s Robert Baer. “In 1979, the Mossad assassinated Ali Salameh, who was the liaison with the CIA,” Baer said. “We were certain they did it to cut off the link with us. Hani al-Hassan and then Atef Bseiso replaced him. I arrived in Paris on that day to hold the periodic meeting with him.”

  According to a number of sources, these meetings were another primary reason the Mossad wanted to kill Bseiso. The Mossad realized he was one of the main links between the PLO and intelligence agencies in the West, including those of Germany, France, and America, and top Israeli intelligence officials believed that these ties were one more step toward the West’s bestowment of full international diplomatic legitimization upon Arafat and the PLO, and the isolation of Israel. The fact that the Palestinian liaisons were former members
of Black September only stoked the Israelis’ rage further. Their protests to the Western states fell on deaf ears, so Israel decided to convey its displeasure in a more direct manner.

  Because he had once again made the travel arrangements, Yassin knew that at the last minute Bseiso had decided to drive from Bonn to Paris, rather than fly, and that he had changed his hotel from Le Méridien Etoile to Le Méridien Montparnasse. Ironically, Bseiso made these changes because he was concerned about his safety.

  A Bayonet team was waiting for Bseiso in the hotel lobby. They tailed him up to his room and waited while he unpacked, showered, and dressed for the evening. They kept close to him as he went out for dinner with friends at the nearby Hippopotamus restaurant and then returned to the hotel. As he left the car at the entrance of the hotel and headed for the lobby, two Bayonet men shot him five times. The pistol they used was equipped with a silencer, and immediately after the killing they collected their empty cartridges in a bag, in order to make things more difficult for investigators.

  A man purporting to be a spokesman for the Abu Nidal Organization claimed responsibility for the slaying, but this claim was immediately denied by one of the organization’s real spokesmen. Arafat was quick to accuse Israel. AMAN’s chief at that time, Major General Uri Sagie, declared soon afterward that he did not know who had carried out the killing—but he added that Bseiso had been involved in the Munich massacre, the abortive attack on an El Al plane in Rome in 1978, and the attempted murder of the Jordanian ambassador in London.

  The backlash to the targeted killing of Bseiso was swift. The CIA was infuriated that the Mossad had again interfered with its ties to the PLO. The French were even more angry. To them, the hit—in front of an elegant Paris hotel—was a grave violation of national sovereignty. French agents began to rein in Mossad operatives in Paris, placing them under surveillance, breaking into their meetings, identifying and burning their sources. A judicial inquiry into the murder remains open in France.

  Killing Bseiso, in fact, served as little more than a distraction at a critical time. Israel, already pilloried internationally, needed all the allies it could get.

  On the other hand, there’s no doubt that eliminating a senior figure in the PLO who was in charge of Arafat’s contacts with Western intelligence agencies did have an effect. The targeted killing, along with other operations based on intelligence supplied by Yassin, badly weakened the PLO during this period. In mid-1990, the Mossad and AMAN’s Special Operations Executive hacked into the computer network of Al-Sammed al-Iktisadi, Fatah’s financial arm, and transferred money from one account to another inside it, in a manner that made members think their colleagues were stealing the organization’s funds, thereby sowing mistrust and confusion. Headquarters was in disarray, preoccupied with finding traitors and moles. The result was a significant reduction in the organization’s attacks against Israel.

  The biggest blow, however, was a strategic blunder made by Arafat himself, without the help of the Mossad. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein sent 90,000 Iraqi soldiers and seven hundred tanks rolling over the border into tiny, oil-rich Kuwait. The invasion was almost universally condemned, by both the West and most of the Middle East, and eventually was repelled by a massive, multinational, American-led force. Arafat and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi were the only Arab leaders who backed Saddam, and they refused to join an Arab League resolution calling on him to pull his forces out of Kuwait. Arafat likened the American-led coalition, which included many Arab states, to a “new crusade” and declared that Saddam was “the defender of the Arab nation, of Muslims and of free men everywhere.”

  This infuriated the surrounding Gulf states, upon whose cash the PLO, with its now insatiable pit of corruption, relied. By mid-1992 the organization was broke. The PLO, for years Israel’s nemesis, finally had been pushed to the wall.

  At the same time, the Intifada was still fully aflame, a struggle that was increasingly wearying the Israeli public. The IDF deployed tens of thousands of troops in the occupied territories; in total, throughout the uprising, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, most of them eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old conscripts, were charged with policing the Palestinian population. Instead of fighting to defend the country’s borders, the putative central mission of the Israeli Army, they were assigned to duties like suppressing demonstrations, searching men and women at roadblocks, and chasing down kids who’d thrown rocks at them, all part of the Sisyphean task of suppressing the Palestinian uprising against the occupation.

  When these young soldiers came home on short furloughs, they brought with them a sense of the hopelessness of the job, and the political debate in family living rooms and workplaces between worried parents and siblings revolved around the question “Why are we there at all?”

  Over four years, the Intifada morphed from an isolated disturbance on the nightly news into a seemingly endless crisis that affected hundreds of thousands of Israeli families. Adding to the growing unease about the situation in the occupied territories was the anxiety and anger injected by a series of stabbing attacks by Palestinians inside the “Green Line” borders of Israel proper. The most significant of these was the murder of a young girl by the name of Helena Rapp, in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, in May 1992. It led to stormy protests against the government and to a feeling that Shamir was incapable of ensuring the safety of the citizenry. At the same time, Shamir became embroiled in an angry confrontation with the American administration over the continued construction in the occupied territories, and President George H. W. Bush refused to approve financial benefits sorely needed by Israel for the absorption of a million Jewish immigrants pouring in from the disintegrating Soviet Union.

  The Intifada and the severe financial crisis eventually brought down the Shamir government. On June 23, 1992, Yitzhak Rabin, who was perceived by the electorate as a pillar of security but also someone who would make genuine efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians, was elected prime minister by a significant majority—a win by the center-left more decisive than any Israel has seen since.

  Rabin, who had served as defense minister during the Intifada, was himself deeply affected by the conflict with the Palestinians, and had reached the conclusion that a compromise must be reached.

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  HOBBLED BY ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE operations and reeling from his Iraqi debacle, Yasser Arafat once again resorted to his tried and tested survival technique. Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh described it as “hurub ila al-amam”—running away by running forward.

  Backing an illegal invasion had made him a pariah, even among his wealthy Arab sponsors. On the other hand, even if he hadn’t initiated and couldn’t control the Intifada, he was still perceived as the Palestinian leader, the one man who might be able to negotiate a peace. It was Arafat’s gift to exploit the latter crisis to cover up—run away from—the former crisis.

  Arafat permitted his people to open a secret back channel with a group of Israeli academics, first in London and later in Oslo. Initially, the Israeli professors acted on their own, but later they brought in Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, who reported directly to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

  When Peres informed Rabin about the contact with the Palestinians, the premier instructed him to drop it immediately, but shortly afterward he changed his mind and decided to give the initiative a chance.

  The negotiations, however, were kept secret, even from the heads of Israel’s military and intelligence organizations. Rabin instructed Unit 8200, which eavesdropped on Palestinian communications, to report anything they heard about the discussion directly and solely to him. Officially, this was for operational security—any leak that got out to the various Palestinian factions could derail the talks. Unofficially, Rabin wasn’t entirely certain that men who’d spent years trying to kill Arafat and his minions, who ran agencies that had invested enormous effort in the war on Palestinian terrorism, could make t
he mental adjustment necessary to see a former enemy as a partner in peace.

  Rabin knew that any diplomatic process with the PLO could end in agreement only if it included territorial concessions. A large segment of the Israeli population, however, was bitterly opposed to any such compromise, for ideological and religious reasons. Any leak disclosing that secret negotiations were under way—emanating, say, from sources inside the defense or intelligence communities who thought that it was a strategic error—would have revealed the possibility of territorial concessions and thereby killed the negotiation instantly.

  This exclusion of the military and intelligence from the negotiation process created an odd situation, however. While the highest levels of the Israeli government were trying to negotiate peace, the country’s intelligence agencies continued fighting a covert war, unaware that anything had changed.

  The Mossad had invested heavily in Adnan Yassin and Operation Golden Fleece, and it was still paying dividends. In the spring of 1993, more than four years after Yassin had first been targeted as an asset, he told his case officer of a conversation he’d had with Amina, the wife of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the PLO’s second in command, who was also in charge of the organization’s diplomatic activities. Her husband was badly overweight, she’d told him, and suffering from severe back pains. She knew Yassin could get hold of almost anything, and she thought an orthopedic chair from Europe might help Abbas.

  “Of course,” Yassin told her, asking if she needed anything else for the office. She requested an especially bright lamp, as Abu Mazen’s eyesight was weakening. Yassin promised to do what he could.

  The Mossad jumped at the opportunity and supplied Yassin with a luxurious leather office chair and a decorative table lamp, both fitted with microphones and transmitters.