Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  But the warnings fell on deaf ears. In the Foreign Ministry and the Mossad—and in the CIA, too—officials were convinced that Merhav and Lubrani were wrong, that the shah’s rule was firm, and that Iran would remain an ally of Israel and the United States forever.

  It was a grave mistake. From his latest headquarters in Paris, Khomeini directed the mass protests of thousands, which soon became tens and then hundreds of thousands, in cities throughout Iran.

  On January 16, the shah, ailing and debilitated, decided that without American backing, he had best pack up and leave. He took a box with a few clods of Iranian soil and, along with his wife and a handful of aides, he flew to Egypt.

  The following day, the secular prime minister the shah had appointed to rule the country, Shapour Bakhtiar, turned to the new head of the Mossad station in Tehran, Eliezer Tsafrir, with a straightforward request: Would the Mossad please kill Khomeini in the Parisian suburb where he was living? The head of the agency, Yitzhak Hofi, called an urgent meeting of his senior staff at headquarters, on Tel Aviv’s King Saul Boulevard.

  The benefits for Israel were obvious: The SAVAK would owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Israelis. Furthermore, it was possible that a hit would divert the course of history and prevent Khomeini, who had made his views on Israel and the Jews quite clear, from seizing power in Iran. The attendees of the meeting discussed several points: Was the plan operationally feasible? Did the ayatollah actually represent such a grave danger? If so, would Israel be prepared to take upon itself the risks of eliminating a top clerical figure, and to do so on French soil?

  A representative of Caesarea chief Mike Harari said that from an operational point of view it was not a complicated matter, but obviously, as in all such operations, especially ones that had to be executed with such limited lead time, things could go wrong.

  One divisional head who had served in Iran said, “Let Khomeini go back to Iran. He won’t last. The military and SAVAK will handle him and his people protesting in the streets of the cities. He represents Iran’s past, not its future.”

  Director Hofi made it clear that he was inclined “to turn the request down for reasons of principle,” because he was “opposed to the use of assassinations against political leaders.”

  Yossi Alpher, the senior research analyst dealing with Iran, told the meeting, “We do not have sufficient information about Khomeini’s positions or about his chances of realizing them, and therefore I cannot accurately evaluate whether the risk is justified.” Hofi accepted Alpher’s opinion and ruled that Tsafrir should give Bakhtiar a negative reply.

  This episode was another demonstration of how the State of Israel—though often willing to use targeted killings as a tool—remains very hesitant when it comes to killing political leaders, even if they have not officially been designated as such.

  Looking back, Alpher would say that “as early as a couple of months after that meeting, I realized what he [Khomeini] was all about,” and that he was “very sorry” about the decision. If the Mossad had killed Khomeini, according to Alpher, history might have taken a better course.

  —

  ON FEBRUARY 1, KHOMEINI landed in Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport, greeted by triumphant rejoicing such as Iran had never before witnessed. By the strength of his taped voice alone, Khomeini crumbled the shah’s monarchy. The dream of an Islamic republic became reality. With almost no use of force, Khomeini and his supporters seized control of Iran, a vast country rich in natural resources, with the sixth-largest military force in the world and the largest arsenal in Asia.

  “Islam has been dying or dead for 1,400 years,” Khomeini said in his first speech as supreme leader. “We have resurrected it with the blood of our youth…very soon we will liberate Jerusalem and pray there.” As for the government of Shapour Bakhtiar, who had been appointed prime minister by the shah before he left, Khomeini dismissed it with one short, sharp statement: “I will break their teeth.”

  The United States, the “Great Satan,” as Khomeini thundered, and Israel, “the Little Satan,” saw the ayatollah’s rise as a passing episode. After all, American and British intelligence services had restored the shah to power once before, after left-wing rebels deposed him in 1953. But Khomeini’s rise was the culmination of years of foment, girded by enormous popular support and protected by seasoned, sophisticated lieutenants who identified and crushed all attempts at counterrevolution.

  In November, a mob of angry student supporters of Khomeini broke into the U.S. embassy in Tehran, occupied it, and took the diplomats and other workers there hostage. They also seized a vast trove of American intelligence material. The ensuing crisis and the abject failure of a rescue attempt (Operation Eagle Claw) humiliated the United States and contributed to Carter’s failure to win reelection. “We felt helpless in the face of this new threat,” said Robert Gates, at the time a senior official at the Office of Strategic Research of the CIA (and later CIA chief and secretary of defense).

  It was clear to both Washington and Jerusalem that what was once their closest ally in the Middle East was now their bitterest enemy.

  It also soon became clear that Khomeini’s vision was not restricted to the Islamic republic that he declared in Iran. Rather than clinging tenuously to power, the ayatollah was determined to spread his Islamic revolution throughout the Middle East.

  He intended to begin with Lebanon.

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  ONE OF KHOMEINI’S CLOSEST allies during his years in exile, a Shiite cleric named Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, was given the mission of spreading the revolution. He first met Khomeini when studying in Najaf, a city holy to Shiites in Iraq, where the ayatollah had found refuge after being expelled by the shah. He accompanied him throughout his years of exile both there and in France. In 1973, Khomeini had sent him, together with a group of other loyal associates, to the Middle East to establish links with Muslim liberation movements in the region. It was Mohtashamipur who wove the alliance with the PLO that led to the acceptance of Khomeini’s men into the training bases of Force 17.

  At the training bases, PLO experts taught young men the arts of sabotage, intelligence operations, and terror tactics. For Arafat, having Khomeini’s men train at his bases was a way to acquire support for the Palestinian cause and to make himself into an international figure. But for Khomeini and Mohtashamipur, it was part of a long, focused strategy: to eventually extend the Islamic revolution they were fomenting in Iran to Lebanon, a small country in the heart of the Middle East, with a large population of impoverished Shiites ripe for incitement. Khomeini wanted to stake out “a forward strategic position that brought us close to Jerusalem”—Lebanon’s border with Israel. By 1979, hundreds of Shiites were being trained as a guerrilla army.

  When Khomeini returned to Iran and seized power, Mohtashamipur took a central role in the formation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force that preserved Khomeini’s rule inside the country.

  Before the Iranian Revolution, the ideal of an Islamic state was an abstract desire, remote from reality. But now, men who had spent their lives in the extremist Muslim colleges of Iran and training camps in Lebanon had become the lords of the land.

  Almost three years after the fall of the shah, with the revolution firmly established in Tehran, Khomeini named Mohtashamipur Iran’s ambassador to Syria. That post came with two roles. Overtly, he was an emissary of his country’s foreign ministry, like all other ambassadors. Covertly, he was also a senior member of the Revolutionary Guards, receiving direct orders from Khomeini and commanding a huge number of personnel and a budget of millions of dollars per month. That second, secret role was by far the more important of the two.

  At the time, though, much of Lebanon was controlled by the Syrian military. In order for his revolutionary forces to operate effectively, then, Khomeini needed to broker a deal with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. That was Mohtashamipur’s job: fi
nessing the diplomacy that would allow a military alliance.

  Despite their common enemy—Israel—Assad initially was wary of Mohtashamipur’s overtures. The Iranian ambassador was imbued with an unbridled revolutionary zeal. Assad, a secular Arab, feared that the Islamist rage Mohtashamipur was inciting would ultimately prove uncontrollable and be turned against his own regime. The potential repercussions seemed to outweigh any immediate benefit.

  But after Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, Assad recalculated.

  The war was a catastrophe not only for Israel but also for Assad. In the confrontation with Israel, the Syrian forces were dealt a knockout blow. The most devastating damage was sustained by the Syrian air force, a source of pride for Assad, who had commanded it in the past and had continued nurturing it. A total of eighty-two Syrian warplanes were destroyed in forty-six hours, while Israel lost just one plane.

  Assad concluded from the Israeli invasion that Syria would have no chance against Israel on the traditional battlefield and that it would have to try to inflict damage indirectly. Israel played right into his hands by leaving its forces inside Lebanon. Israel’s intent was to ensure quiet for its communities in the north, but in so doing it merely created another front for itself, exposed and vulnerable to guerrilla attacks.

  “Assad, Sr.”—that is, Hafez, the father of Bashar, who would succeed him—“was, to my great regret, a clever man,” says Meir Dagan, who commanded the Israeli forces in Lebanon at the time. “He built up an apparatus for squeezing blood out of Israel without paying a penny.”

  That apparatus was the Iranian-backed Shiite militia that Mohtashamipur was so eager to establish. In July 1982, Iran and Syria signed a military alliance that allowed the Revolutionary Guards under Mohtashamipur’s command to operate in Lebanon. In the open, they gave civilian assistance to the Shiite population, building social and religious institutions, such as schools and mosques. They provided welfare aid to the poor and other needy folks, like drug and alcohol addicts, and a relatively high-level health system. Iran was supplying the Lebanese Shiite public with everything that the government of Lebanon, dominated by a combined Sunni and Christian majority, had never given them.

  In secret, they began to train and arm a guerrilla force that filled the vacuum left by the PLO and, within two decades, would become one of the dominant political and military forces in the Middle East. Sensing the historic importance of the nascent movement, Mohtashamipur gave it a grandiose name.

  He called it Hezbollah—the Party of God.

  —

  AHMAD JAAFAR QASSIR WAS a sixteen-year-old boy born to a poor Shiite family in the tiny Lebanese village of Deir Qanoun al-Nahr. His parents said that as a child “he was alert and perceptive, characteristics which led him to develop into a self-starting and independent youth.” As early as four years old, he would run past his father to a patch of farmland in order to pick some vegetables and return home before his father had barely set out on the chore. The local mosque soon became his home away from home as Ahmad frequently went there to pray and read the Koran.

  He was one of the Shiites swept up in the fervor of Hezbollah, and in the autumn of 1982 he was recruited into a covert military division known as Islamic Jihad. Ahmad secretly carried out several military operations against the Israeli enemy. He also used his resourcefulness to move armaments from Beirut to “wherever they were necessary to confront the enemy [Israeli] troops.”

  On the morning of November 11, just before seven o’clock, he drove a white Peugeot packed with explosives toward a seven-story building the IDF used as a regional military and government headquarters in the southern city of Tyre. When he got closer, Qassir stepped hard on the accelerator and aimed for the base of the building.

  Then he blew himself up.

  The blast destroyed the building and killed seventy-six Israeli soldiers, border police, and Shin Bet operatives, as well as twenty-seven Lebanese: workers, civilians requiring various permits from the army, and prisoners. It was the first Islamist suicide terrorist attack outside of Iran, and it killed more Israelis than any other such attack before or since.

  For years, Hezbollah kept its involvement and the identities of those involved a secret. Only later did the militia build a memorial monument to Qassir in his village, publish a letter of appreciation that Supreme Leader Khomeini had written to the family, and declare the date of his death the annual Martyrs’ Day.

  This secrecy was convenient for Israel’s defense establishment, which quickly tried to cover up its own enormous negligence in allowing the suicide attack to happen. The head of the Shin Bet on the northern front then was Yossi Ginossar, whose unit was responsible for collecting information and preventing attacks like Qassir’s suicide bombing. Ginossar, together with some of his subordinates and senior officers of the IDF, misled the inquiry into the disaster, steering it away from the truth until it came up with the conclusion that the blast had been caused by “a technical fault in the gas canisters in the kitchen” and not a daring operation by the new militant Shiite organization.

  But while Ginossar might have been grossly self-serving in this instance, on a larger scale, Israeli intelligence was indeed unaware of the new militant force rising from the smoking ruins of Lebanon. The first terrorist attacks carried out by Hezbollah—gunfire attacks and roadside bombs aimed at military vehicles—were dismissed by AMAN and Shin Bet as “no more than a tactical nuisance to IDF troops.”

  “We began to grasp everything only after a time,” said Yekutiel (Kuti) Mor, a senior AMAN officer and later the military secretary to Defense Minister Rabin. “We missed the process. Instead of hooking up with the Shiites, we kept up the link with the Christians, and we made the majority of Lebanese our enemies.” Even worse, no one at the time recognized the connection between the Iranians and Lebanon’s Shiites—that the balance of power was being tipped by Khomeini’s revolutionaries, allied with Assad. “For a long time,” said David Barkai, of Unit 504, “we never realized that the significant activity was coming out of the office of Mohtashamipur in Damascus.”

  Likewise, Israel’s formidable intelligence apparatus was unaware of the shadow army forming around it, made up of both new recruits and seasoned guerrillas such as Imad Mughniyeh. Born in 1962 to devout Shiites, Mughniyeh grew up in the poor and crowded neighborhoods south of Beirut. “His father was a worker at a candy factory in Beirut,” recounted Israel’s spy Amin al-Hajj (Rummenigge), himself a Shiite. “We were in touch when we were kids. He was very naughty. Later on, I heard he’d dropped out of school and joined a training camp of Force 17, and the connection between us was broken.”

  In mid-1978, Mughniyeh became a member of Force 17, Yasser Arafat’s guards and the Fatah’s elite force. Ali Salameh took Mughniyeh under his wing until he was killed by the Mossad in 1979. Mughniyeh wanted to belong to something larger than a local gang in south Beirut, and he wanted action. Salameh and his successors saw in him an able and intelligent person, charismatic and uninhibited. Although they were Palestinian Sunnis and Mughniyeh was a Lebanese Shiite, the interests of both sides intersected. At the time, Khomeini’s followers—poor, exiled Iranians and their Lebanese allies—were grateful to the PLO for their hospitality and support.

  Mughniyeh was acting under the auspices of Force 17, but he also acquired a reputation as the boss of a gang of thugs enforcing Islamic laws and modest conduct in the streets of Beirut, which was then perceived as a bastion of liberal European customs in the heart of the Middle East. Around this time, Israeli intelligence began receiving reports of “an extremist, uninhibited psychopath” who was kneecapping hookers and drug dealers in Beirut.

  Three years later, when the PLO evacuated Beirut, Mughniyeh and his brothers, Fouad and Jihad, decided to remain in Lebanon and join up with what they rightly saw as the next rising force, Hezbollah. Mughniyeh immediately became one of the organization’s most important operatives. Fo
r half a year, he headed the detail that guarded Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, the supreme Shiite authority in Lebanon, and “Hezbollah’s spiritual compass.” He also represented the sheikh at meetings in Mohtashamipur’s office in Damascus, where senior Iranian officials and Syrian intelligence personnel plotted a strategy for Lebanon. The south was occupied by Israel, and some of the rest by the Multinational Force—American, French, and Italian soldiers who had been deployed there to try to bring an end to the horrendous civil war ravaging the country.

  Both the Syrians and the Iranians wanted the occupiers driven out, but neither could afford—or win—a direct military confrontation. In those meetings, they agreed on a stealth campaign of sabotage and terror.

  Mughniyeh was put in charge of organizing it. He, along with Mohtashamipur, created Islamic Jihad, which recruited Qassir, the boy who blew up the IDF headquarters in Tyre. It was a devastating inaugural strike, and it was only the beginning. Sheikh Fadlallah hinted at what was coming in an article published in a collection of religious essays in February 1983. “We believe that the future has surprises in store,” he wrote. “Jihad is bitter and harsh; it will well up from inside, by virtue of effort, patience, and sacrifice, and the spirit of willingness to sacrifice oneself.”

  By “sacrifice oneself,” Fadlallah was referring to the religious sanction given by Khomeini to his young soldiers, some no more than children, who’d been brainwashed into marching forward into certain death through minefields laid by invading Iraqis. Fadlallah took it a step further, granting approval for intentional suicide in the service of jihad. Hezbollah began carrying out suicide operations in Lebanon, and before long Mughniyeh and Hezbollah had perfected the method, turning it into something of an art.

  On April 18, 1983, one of Mughniyeh’s men drove a van through the front door of the American embassy in Beirut, detonating the ton of explosives stuffed inside. The entire front of the building was demolished, and sixty-three people were killed, including almost all of the members of the CIA station in Lebanon, as well as the agency’s senior Middle East expert, Robert Ames.