The Mossad drew up plans to eliminate some of the scientists as well, but it turned out that the pressure, the arson, and the break-ins, as well as the Mossad’s lethal reputation, obviated the need for targeted killings. The scientists departed, and Argentina and Egypt thinned out their financial participation.
In his distress, Saddam turned to a Canadian rocket scientist, formerly employed by NASA, the United States Army, and Israel, named Gerald Bull, asking him to develop missiles and a super-cannon, inspired by Jules Verne’s science fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon, that could send huge payloads enormous distances—as far as Tehran (430 miles from Baghdad) and Tel Aviv (570 miles from Baghdad). Bull assured his clients that his super-cannon would not only have an immensely long range but would also be a more accurate and effective way to fire biological and chemical agents, because the warheads would heat up less than the Scud missiles Iraq possessed.
In 1989, Bull and the Iraqis erected the cannon at Jabal Hamrayn, 125 miles north of Baghdad. Three test firings were conducted.
To his great misfortune, Bull never took seriously the threatening anonymous phone calls and letters he had received, which warned him that if he did not immediately terminate his relationship with Saddam, “we will have to take harsh action against you, your companies, and the people involved with you.”
On March 22, 1990, a Bayonet squad lay in wait for him at his home, a short drive away from his office in Brussels. Two men were hiding just behind the stairwell door. From their vantage point, they could see Bull walking toward his apartment, fumbling in his pockets for his keys. As soon as he passed and his back was to them, they leapt out from behind the door with their silenced Makarov pistols drawn. One of them fired two bullets into Bull’s head and three into his back, while the other remained behind him, securing the area. Bull was dead before he hit the floor. The assassin whipped out a camera and took several pictures of the scientist’s shattered head. One was a close-up, and another showed Bull lying on his belly in a huge pool of blood.
The pictures were sent that day to the staff at Space Research Corporation, Bull’s company. “If you go to work tomorrow,” they wrote in an accompanying note, “you’ll end up like this.” No one turned up at the office the next day, and the company was soon terminated. The Mossad made sure that all of Bull’s straw companies got the message as well.
The project was dead in the water. On April 2, after Saddam learned from his intelligence services that Gerald Bull had been killed, he addressed his nation and vowed to “make the fire eat up half of Israel.”
Indeed, the death of Bull only slowed down Saddam’s effort to obtain long-range delivery tools and did not impede his nuclear project in any way. It turned out that the intelligence agencies of Israel and other Western nations were utterly ignorant of the major part of Saddam’s military R&D efforts.
“This huge and very sophisticated network operated right under everyone’s noses,” said Brigadier General Shimon Shapira, of AMAN’s research division. “This was without a doubt one of the biggest failures in the history of Israeli intelligence.”
Israel, said Shapira, “had more luck than sense.” Saddam Hussein made a mistake by invading Kuwait in August 1990, assuming that the United States and the rest of the world would sit by, arms folded, in the face of his aggression. He was wrong. He brought upon himself a broad international coalition, one that included some Arab states, that kicked him out of Kuwait and forced him to accept stringent international inspection.
UN inspectors then found what the Mossad had missed completely: By the time Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait was launched, in January 1991, Saddam was only a few years away from full nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capability, as well as the ability to manufacture missiles and warheads that could deliver those weapons to Israel.
Even after the end of the war, when President Bush decided not to invade Iraq and to leave Saddam in place, IDF chief of staff Barak still believed that Saddam remained a clear and present danger to Israel. Saddam would certainly try again to develop weapons of mass destruction, and there was no possibility of entering into any sort of negotiation with him.
On January 20, 1992, Barak ordered “the formation of a team to examine the possibility of striking at the target [Saddam].” Two months later, on March 12, the team, headed by Amiram Levin, reported to the chief of staff on the plan’s progress. Barak told the team, “The target is among the most important that has ever faced us in any pinpoint operation,” and he ordered that preparations be made for execution of the plan in July of that year.
Barak spoke to both Prime Minister Shamir and to Rabin, who replaced him in 1992, and tried to persuade them that the assassination weapon should be used for the first time against the leader of a sovereign state.
“In retrospect,” Barak said years later, “just imagine how we could have saved the world an entire decade with this terrible man. History would have looked different.”
The two premiers both gave him the go-ahead to plan the hit. Many ideas were put forward: crashing an Israeli aircraft or even a satellite somewhere in Iraq, preferably in Baghdad, waiting for Saddam to come and inspect the wreckage, and then blowing it up with him and his entourage; setting up a straw company in Europe that would sell Saddam a new and modern television studio from which to broadcast his speeches to the nation, fitting it with equipment that would broadcast to Israel, and blowing it up while his face was on the screen; switching a monument to one of his revolutionary comrades with a booby-trapped substitute and detonating it as Saddam stood with his head bowed before it at a memorial ceremony—and many other schemes for disposing of the Iraqi dictator.
In the end, it was decided to strike at Saddam at the only place outside of prohibitively well-guarded Baghdad where everyone could be sure that he himself, and not one of his doubles, would be: his family’s plot in the cemetery at Tikrit, for the funeral of someone very close to him. That someone would be his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, the man who had raised him, who was very ill.
The Israelis closely followed the treatment Tulfah was receiving in Jordan and waited for news of his death. But he kept clinging to life, so an alternative plan was decided upon. Instead of Tulfah, the Mossad would eliminate Barzan al-Tikriti, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations.
Sayeret Matkal commandos would be flown to Tikrit in helicopters that would land some distance away and then proceed to the cemetery in jeeps that looked exactly like the ones the Iraqi army used but were in fact equipped with a special system that turned the roof of the car upside down and pulled out guided missiles. When Saddam came to attend the funeral, they would launch the missiles and kill him.
If this plan succeeded, many of those involved believed, chief of staff Ehud Barak would go into politics and become a candidate with a good chance of becoming prime minister. This would be only natural for a man who was marked for greatness from the time he was a young lieutenant.
At the huge Tze’elim training camp, in Israel’s Negev Desert, Sayeret Matkal built a model of the Hussein family’s cemetery and practiced the operation. When they were ready, on November 5, 1992, the IDF’s top brass came to watch a dress rehearsal. The hit team with the missiles took up positions, with members of the unit’s intelligence and administrative staffs playing Saddam and his entourage.
But because of serious planning flaws and weariness from the long training schedule, the men with the missiles mistook what was supposed to be a dry run, with the soldier posing as Saddam waving at the invisible crowds, for the wet run, in which the live soldier would be replaced by a mannequin. Things were so disorganized that the same code words, “Send a cab,” were used for both the dry and wet runs.
The commander of the force, believing that this was the dry run, gave the order: “Send a cab.” But the commander of the firing jeeps thought that the wet run had begun. “Launch missile one,” he orde
red, and one of his men pushed the button and began guiding the missile toward the target. When approaching it, he noticed that something was wrong, and according to some witnesses he yelled, “What’s this? I don’t understand why the dolls are moving.”
But it was too late. The missile landed right in the middle of the entourage. Seconds later, the second missile hit the ground a few yards away, but it did almost no damage, because all of the men in the target area were already lying on the ground, dead or wounded. The commander realized that something had gone terribly wrong. “Cease fire!” he yelled. “Cease fire! I repeat: Cease fire!”
Five soldiers were killed, and all the others in the target area were wounded.
Embarrassingly, the man playing Saddam was among the men who were only wounded. The incident became the cause of a fierce political storm and an ugly quarrel between Barak and some other generals over who was responsible.
The accident at Tze’elim put an end to the plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Later, it turned out that, contrary to Barak’s expectations, Saddam had not, in fact, resumed his attempts to obtain nuclear weapons after Operation Desert Storm.
In any case, Israel by now was facing new enemies, much more dangerous ones.
ON MARCH 13, 1978, a luxury executive jet took off on a secret flight from Tehran, carrying two worried passengers: Uri Lubrani, Israel’s ambassador to Iran, and Reuven Merhav, the Mossad station chief in Iran. They were on their way to meet His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Cyrus Pahlavi Shah, who was at his vacation residence on the island of Kish, ten miles off the Iranian shore in the Persian Gulf.
The shah was Iran’s omnipotent ruler, a ruthless, megalomaniacal despot who wanted to transform his country rapidly into a land “more developed than France.” He invested Iran’s huge oil revenues in the establishment of a powerful army, the construction of up-to-date infrastructure, and a modern economy. He imposed an accelerated process of Westernization on his subjects, something that many of them, from the merchants in the Great Bazaar of Tehran to the Muslim clerics, found offensive and detrimental. But their objections didn’t faze the shah, and he ordered the army and his brutal secret service, SAVAK, to suppress any opposition with an iron fist.
The shah’s foreign policy was based on close political, military, and civil links with the United States. He also formed an intimate intelligence alliance with Israel. This led to Iran acquiring a great deal of military weaponry and equipment from the Jewish state, in exchange for both cash and oil. He also allowed the Israelis to stage a number of important operations against Arab states from Iranian soil.
But Lubrani and Merhav had good reason to be perturbed. While Iran’s links with the United States and Israel were as strong as they’d ever been, the shah’s rule over his country was beginning to crumble. The demonstrations against him were getting more intense by the day, and protest movements from all sides—merchants, Communists, right-wingers, Islamists—were gaining power. The White House, which had hitherto turned a blind eye to the shah’s human rights violations, was now run by liberal president Jimmy Carter and began to display increasing discomfort at the use of force against protesters, which led to the shah’s being reluctant to deploy his army against them.
Iran’s royal family and leadership did not put any checks on their lavish lifestyle, however. Soon after landing on the island of Kish, Lubrani and Merhav were witness to this. The island was the shah’s favorite residence, the location of his headquarters during parts of the year. “It was the playground for all the top people,” says Merhav. “Evidence of the astonishing corruption was everywhere. We were shocked by the hedonistic atmosphere, the extravagance.”
The two Israelis had come to Kish to meet the shah and his close advisers, in order to evaluate the strength of the regime in the face of the mounting opposition. Fueling their concern was the fact that extremist Shiite elements, the most important component of the opposition, had linked up with their brethren in Lebanon and had begun training in camps set up for them by Yasser Arafat. “That combination,” said Merhav, “between what was then perceived as the main terrorist force operating against us—Arafat’s PLO in Lebanon—and the extremist Shiites, seemed to us to have significant potential dangers.”
The most prominent leader of the religious opposition was Ruhollah Khomeini, who bore the hereditary title sayyid, meaning “lord,” used only by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and had earned the highest Shiite clerical rank, Grand Ayatollah. As a young man in his family’s hometown of Khomein, the future revolutionary was a well-known preacher, acutely expert in the intricacies of the faith, but lacking in charismatic oratory. In 1962, however, at age sixty, Khomeini underwent a dramatic change: After a period of seclusion, he emerged from his bedchamber convinced that he had been visited by the Archangel Gabriel, God’s special messenger, who had told him that Allah had destined him for great things.
To accomplish his mission, Khomeini transformed. He abandoned his hitherto complex style and began to speak simply, never using more than two thousand words, and repeating certain phrases over and over again until they took on the sound of magical incantations. “Islam is the solution” was one of his favorites. He began to portray the world as a clash between good and evil. The evil must be uprooted and destroyed, a duty that had to be performed by the good, who were both judges and executioners. His followers among the poor found this persuasive.
Later on, Khomeini reshaped Shiite Islam to conform with the leadership role he had designed for himself. He shook off the basic separation of civil and religious authority that had always prevailed in the Muslim empires, and declared that there was no longer a need for a king advised by religious sages. The government should be in the hands of the sages themselves. All of the monarchies and the other regimes in the Muslim world that were not manifestly religious—the presidents of Egypt and Syria, the king of Saudi Arabia, and the shah of Iran—were illegitimate and had to be replaced. “Islam is the only solution,” he decreed.
Khomeini’s attitude on the issue of martyrdom was also meant to prepare the ground for his assumption of power. He explained to his supporters that the highest sanction in the hands of the state was the power to execute its citizens. Take this sanction away, by changing death to a desired reward, and the state becomes powerless. “Please kill us,” Khomeini proclaimed and wrote. “For we, too, are going to kill you!” He would later instruct the bereaved families of martyrs and their neighbors to hold joyous celebrations to mark the deaths of their sons in Iran’s holy war.
Khomeini’s next step was to shatter the most important traditional custom of Shiite theology. He allowed the believers—even encouraged them—to call him “imam,” a term in the Shiite tradition that is largely similar in meaning to the Judeo-Christian concept of the Messiah, whose advent heralded the End of Days.
In 1963, a short time after formulating his new doctrine, Khomeini launched an open campaign against the shah from Qom, Iran’s holiest city. The shah couldn’t risk killing the ayatollah, so instead he was exiled. Khomeini found refuge in Turkey, Iraq, and finally France.
The lessons he taught there attracted more and more students. During the 1970s, he became, from afar, the most powerful of the shah’s opponents. By the time Lubrani and Merhav came to Kish, Khomeini had already flooded Iran with an estimated 600,000 cassette tapes of his sermons. In the mosques and the markets, in rural regions and on the mountains surrounding Tehran, in the bazaars and even, very quietly, in government offices, many millions were listening to the incendiary preaching of the fanatical, stern-faced cleric.
They heard him say things like “the despised shah, that Jewish spy, the American snake, whose head must be crushed with a stone,” or “The shah says that he is giving the people freedom. Listen to me, you puffed-up toad! Who are you, to grant liberty? It is Allah who grants liberty. It is the law that grants liberty, it is Islam that grants liberty, it is the const
itution that grants liberty. What do you mean when you say you have granted us liberty? What gives you the ability to grant anything at all? Who do you think you are?”
The distribution of the Khomeini cassettes was observed, of course, by the watchful eyes of the SAVAK, the shah’s secret service. The organization’s leaders asked the shah for permission to raid the ayatollah’s distribution centers. But the request was refused, because of President Carter’s pressure to refrain from violating civil rights and the weakness and confusion that the shah was suffering from due to the cancer treatment he was undergoing. Lubrani and Merhav were not aware of the shah’s illness, which was a well-kept secret.
—
ONLY LUBRANI WAS GRANTED an audience. The shah welcomed him warmly, but the ambassador soon realized that the conversation would go nowhere. Lubrani left the magnificent, gilt-decorated chamber in a somber mood. “The shah is detached from reality, living in a world of his own, almost delusional,” he told Merhav. “He is surrounded by sycophants who don’t tell him the truth about the situation in the country.” Merhav’s meetings with the heads of Iranian intelligence led him to the same conclusions.
Soon after the visit, the two transmitted a warning to the Israeli security establishment: The rule of the shah was crumbling. The rare coalition established between secular and religious opponents of his regime, along with the flagrant corruption and the monarch’s obliviousness to the outside world, were leading to the imminent demise of the Pahlavi dynasty.
Rise and Kill First Page 43