Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Then, on October 23, suicide bombers drove trucks packed with huge quantities of explosives into two facilities of the Multinational Force in Beirut and detonated them. At the U.S. Marine barracks, 241 peacekeepers were killed, and at the French paratroopers’ base there were 58 fatalities. Mughniyeh sat atop a high-rise building nearby and watched the proceedings through a telescope. Concrete fragments and body parts fell on the Shin Bet HQ in Beirut, about a mile away from the burning Marines facility.

  On November 4, 1983, Nakad Sarbukh, an Israeli border policeman who was guarding an army base in Tyre, saw a suspicious pickup truck speeding in the direction of the base. He opened fire at the vehicle, spraying it with 130 bullets, but failed to stop it. The suicide driver smashed into the base and detonated the five-hundred-kilogram bomb he was carrying. The building housing the Shin Bet’s operation on the base crumpled, and surrounding buildings and tents were also hit. Sixty people were killed, and another twenty-nine were wounded.

  If Israel had been able to write off the first Tyre attack, almost exactly a year earlier, as a technical mishap, by the time of the second bombing in Tyre this was no longer possible. Thanks to these suicide attacks, which were planned and directed by Mughniyeh, Mohtashamipur got almost exactly what he had wanted: The Multinational Force was disbanded, and Israel withdrew by stages from most of Lebanese territory, until its forces were concentrated in a shallow “Security Zone” in the south of the country.

  After the second attack in Tyre, the Israeli intelligence community also began to grasp that it was facing a new type of enemy, one that posed a significant challenge. Top members of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and various branches of the IDF began contemplating the possibility of once more employing targeted killings, this time against a new adversary.

  To the Mossad, it was clear that Imad Mughniyeh was the first priority. But they had little intelligence—only a faded photograph—and no idea where to find him. Nevertheless, the Mossad realized that the coordination between Iran and Hezbollah took place in Mohtashamipur’s Iranian embassy in Damascus, and not in Beirut.

  At the end of 1983, Mossad director Nahum Admoni gave Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir a Red Page to sign. The attached dossier included a litany of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, including the attacks against the American embassy and the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut.

  The name on the Red Page was Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, the Iranian emissary to Syria. A diplomat, officially. This was not a recommendation made casually, and Shamir signed it only after much hesitation and debate. As a rule, Israel abstained from targeting officials of sovereign states, no matter how hostile they were to the Jewish nation. But something had to be done to stop Hezbollah. Someone—someone important—had to die.

  Shamir signed the Red Page.

  —

  THE FIRST PROBLEM WAS getting to Mohtashamipur. He spent his time in either Tehran or Damascus, both capitals of target countries, where Bayonet did not operate and where Caesarea was not supposed to carry out targeted killings, except in extraordinary cases. Both capitals were considered particularly difficult arenas, crawling with suspicious police and members of the countries’ secret services. Moreover, the ambassador was always accompanied by an armed bodyguard and a driver. Every proposal that involved getting close to Mohtashamipur or into the areas he frequented—shooting him, planting a bomb, poisoning—was ruled out, for fear that the operatives would be caught.

  One option remained: a booby-trapped package, delivered by mail. But when the idea was suggested, objections were raised immediately. Israeli intelligence already had extensive experience in the use of such packages. Twice, the method had worked—in the liquidation of the head of Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza and in that of his colleague the Egyptian military attaché in Amman, Jordan, in 1956. But in all other cases—German scientists in Egypt, a Nazi war criminal in Damascus, and PLO functionaries all over the world—the parcels either were discovered in time, blew up in the wrong person’s hands, or caused only injuries and not death.

  “I told them that it was foolish, and even a little infantile,” one Caesarea veteran said, “that they chose a modus operandi that did not assure the total neutralization of the objective.” But the opposition was shut down. A postal explosive was the only option that wouldn’t put an agent in unnecessary danger.

  On February 14, 1984, a large parcel arrived at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, ostensibly mailed by a well-known London publishing house owned by Iranians. The embassy receptionist saw that it was clearly marked PERSONAL FOR HIS EXCELLENCY THE AMBASSADOR and passed it on to Mohtashamipur’s second-floor office. The emissary’s secretary unwrapped it and saw a cardboard box containing a magnificent volume in English about Shiite holy places in Iran and Iraq. She made do with a peek at the binding, then took it into the ambassador’s room.

  Mohtashamipur opened the book, and there was an explosion. The blast tore off one of his ears, his hand, and most of the fingers on his other hand. Shrapnel destroyed one of his eyes. “If I had opened the book like this,” he later told an Iranian TV journalist, holding his hands open near his face and neck, “my head would have been blown off. But I put the book on a table and opened it like this”—here he kept his face and body away from the imaginary book—“and the blast made a hole in the wall, and my hand was there, inside the wall. And if the book had opened like this”—near his face—“my face would have been torn off, from my neck. The marks on the rest of my body are from the fragments of the explosion.”

  Another mail bomb had gone wrong. “The aim of a negative treatment operation is to kill the object,” the Caesarea veteran who had objected to the plot said. “There’s no such thing as half dead. If he remains alive, it means we have failed.” Israel did not claim responsibility, but the Iranians had no doubt the Mossad was behind the operation.

  Even worse, Mohtashamipur was now a symbol for the revolutionary cause, a maimed survivor of Khomeini’s holy war. “I was sorry about the regrettable occurrence that world imperialism has caused to happen to you,” his friend the ayatollah wrote to him. “I hope that your health will soon return and that you will continue your persistent struggle at the front of Islam and the revolution on behalf of the wretched of the world.”

  Moreover, disabling the ambassador had absolutely no effect on Hezbollah’s operations, and killing him probably wouldn’t have done much more. The attempt on his life had come too late: The ragtag army of impoverished Shiites that Mohtashamipur had begun organizing a decade earlier was by then a huge organization. Hezbollah wasn’t one man’s guerrilla force—it was a movement. The enormous enterprise that Mohtashamipur had launched in Lebanon was already up and running, having enlisted thousands of young Shiites as well as most of the important Shiite clergy in the land.

  Israel now had a powerful adversary that was both an Iranian proxy and a legitimate grassroots social movement.

  Hezbollah clerics, most of them operating and residing in the Shiite villages in southern Lebanon, knew how to combine fanatical, messianic religious fervor with a new type of Lebanese patriotism, which centered on the consolidation of the Shiites and hatred for the Zionist occupier.

  The most prominent of these local religious leaders during the founding of the movement was Sheikh Ragheb Harb, the imam of Jibchit, a town in southern Lebanon. A brilliant, fiery-eyed cleric, he had received his training in the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq, where Khomeini spent much of his exile from Iran, and upon his return he took charge of Hezbollah’s propaganda and preaching in the south of the country.

  Harb was a man of the cloth, not a fighter, but stories about him were reaching Meir Dagan, who argued that “Harb was becoming an important religious authority in the south and he was constantly advocating attacks against Israel and Israelis.”

  Dagan requested authorization to eliminate Harb. Though Harb never took part in terrorist actions against Israel
himself, he incited them constantly, and in those years Israel, mired in its battle with Hezbollah and feeling impotent, welcomed every idea for action. Dagan dispatched two Lebanese agents he’d used in past operations of the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, the proxy guerrilla movement Dagan created. On the night of Friday, February 16, two days after the blast in the Iranian embassy meant to kill Mohtashamipur, Harb was on his way home in Jibchit. The two Lebanese agents were waiting at a bend in the road, and as Harb slowed down for the curve, they sprayed his car with bullets, making sure that the young leader was dead.

  Harb was immediately proclaimed a martyr. At the religious colleges in Qom, prayers were held in his memory, and the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, one of Iran’s top clerics, sent a cable of condolences to his Shiite colleagues in Lebanon, praising Harb’s feats. To mark the hundredth day after his death, a postage stamp in his memory was issued. His portrait appeared above all the pictures of all the martyrs, whose number was gradually increasing as the years went by. His statement advocating absolute rejection of any contact whatsoever with the Israelis, “A stance is a weapon and a handshake is an acknowledgment,” has since that point been Hezbollah’s primary motto.

  Meanwhile, Dagan also targeted Mohammed Saad, one of Harb’s close associates and another prominent Shiite figure in the south. Saad was a frequent participant in guerrilla activities against Israel and had amassed a huge quantity of weaponry and explosives in the hussainia, a place of prayer separate from the mosque, that he managed in the village of Marakah. On March 4, 1985, Dagan’s agents blew up Saad’s weapons cache. He and one of his men were killed in the blast along with thirteen others.

  The attempt on Mohtashamipur’s life and the elimination of Harb and Saad reveal much about the operational difficulties Israel faced when confronting Hezbollah. The Mossad generally took pains for its targeted killings to be “blue and white” (the colors of the Israeli flag) or carried out by Israeli operatives, but local agents were used in the killings of Harb and Saad, and the Mossad had to resort to the postal bomb method, long considered inefficient and liable to harm innocent bystanders, in order to try to dispose of Mohtashamipur. These three victims were not senior Hezbollah commanders, either. There was almost no information about the top target, Imad Mughniyeh.

  An attempt to do away with the “spiritual compass” of the organization three days later was no more successful. On March 8, 1985, a car bomb exploded near the home of Sheikh Fadlallah in Beirut.

  Fadlallah was unhurt, but eighty people were killed and two hundred injured, most of them worshippers at the mosque where Fadlallah preached. Some of the sheikh’s bodyguards were killed as well, including Imad Mughniyeh’s brother Jihad.

  Still, Israel continued to try to solve its Lebanon problem through targeted killings. In 1986, Israeli intelligence discovered that Ahmed Jibril, the commander of the Popular Front–General Command Palestinian terror organization, was working with and assisting Hezbollah. On the strength of this information, coupled with Israel’s long-standing desire to eliminate Jibril, Shamir signed a Red Page for him. Gathering the intelligence took a long time. Eventually it was established that Jibril often visited his organization’s headquarters, in a warren of caves at Naameh, on the Mediterranean coast north of Lebanon’s border with Israel. On the night of December 8, 1988, the IDF launched a large-scale land operation aimed at killing Jibril and destroying the network of caves.

  Operation Blue and Brown (Kachol Ve’hum) was an embarrassing flop. The intelligence about the target area was dangerously incomplete. The soldiers ran into unexpected natural obstacles, and a lookout post they did not know about spotted them, depriving them of the element of surprise.

  One of the commanders of the assassination force, a lieutenant colonel, was killed. Four soldiers went astray and had to be extricated later in a complicated air force operation. In addition, a trained dog, which was loaded with explosives and was supposed to run into one of the caves, where the device on its back would be exploded by remote control, was frightened by the shooting and ran away. Hezbollah later found the animal, which exposed the IDF’s secret Sting (Oketz) canine unit. Most embarrassingly, Ahmed Jibril wasn’t even there that night at all.

  By the late 1980s, then, Hezbollah had far better intelligence, critical in waging a guerrilla war. One of the reasons for the absence of sufficient intelligence on the Israeli side was that Hezbollah gave Lebanon’s downtrodden and beleaguered Shiites a community and a cause. Every attack against it drew its followers closer to the organization, strengthening the distinction between the good guys and the bad in their eyes. This, in turn, made it especially difficult for Israel to recruit live agents. Shiites willing to work for money grew fewer and farther between. Nobody wanted to betray Hezbollah.

  Imad Mughniyeh used this superior intelligence to devastating effect. Backed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Intelligence Ministry, Mughniyeh honed and perfected Hezbollah’s battlefield tactics. Suicide bombs and roadside explosions and carefully staged ambushes wreaked havoc on the large and unwieldy IDF forces. The price of having almost zero information about the Shiite militia was paid with the blood of Israeli soldiers. Between 1984 and 1991, there were 3,425 operations against the IDF and the South Lebanon Army, the pro-Israel Lebanese militia set up by the Israelis. Most of these attacks were carried out by the Shiite organization. In these attacks, 98 Israeli soldiers and 134 Lebanese allies were killed, and 447 Israelis and 341 Lebanese were wounded. Two Israeli MIAs were later discovered to have been killed as well.

  Frustrated by their weak position, in 1991 Israel’s intelligence operatives began looking for what they termed “the tiebreaker,” the symbolic attack that would rock Hezbollah to its foundation and give Israel back its edge.

  THE IMAMS IN THE village of Jibchit began calling people to the hussainia at ten o’clock in the morning. The hussainia is a Shiite meeting hall, named for the Imam Hussein, the son of Ali, cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, and founder of Shi’a Islam. Shiites believe that Ali was the true heir to Muhammad and that his inheritance was brutally usurped by the Sunnis. The Shi’a became a sect that was oppressed and discriminated against. In the hussainia, they would hold their religious rites in secret, for fear of the Sunnis.

  But on that day in Jibchit, there was no longer any need for secrecy. Iran had become the first country in the world ruled by Shiite clergy. In Lebanon, the extremist Shiite Hezbollah, founded by Iran, was the predominant political and military force. The hussainia in Jibchit, abutting the imposing village mosque on the main street, had been renovated and expanded, its walls lined with shining white marble.

  For seven years, the call had come from the loudspeakers on the mosque’s minarets every February 16, the anniversary of the death of Sheikh Ragheb Harb, the first spiritual leader of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. By assassinating him in 1984, Israel had unintentionally created a martyr, and the leaders and commanders of Hezbollah made annual pilgrimages to his memorial, before attending a political rally.

  By 10:30, the main street was crowded with men and women, all of whom had set aside whatever they were doing, locked up their homes or stores or offices, and made their way to the hussainia. They moved slowly, following two SUVs, one gray and the other black, apparently a Hezbollah security escort.

  At about 9,500 feet above the streets of Jibchit, a camera in the nose of a small, quiet aircraft panned the length of the procession. There was no pilot, but rather an operator controlling the plane from a trailer on the northern border in Israel. The images from the camera, in high resolution and real time, were beamed to a screen in the small AMAN war room overlooking a rose garden outside the Defense Ministry, in Tel Aviv. It was, in 1992, a marvel of intelligence technology: a drone that put Israeli eyes on a surveillance target without risking any Israeli personnel.

  The drone’s camera continued the length of the procession. At the end,
four vehicles were clearly visible—two Range Rovers and two Mercedes sedans. In Tel Aviv, intelligence officials watched as those four slipped away from the crowd, passed the hussainia, and stopped in a parking lot behind the building.

  “We’ve got him,” one of the analysts watching the video feed said. Two hundred miles away, intelligence operatives had a clear view of a target. “Suddenly,” an internal review of that morning later reported, “the scent of a hunt was in the air.”

  —

  EVER SINCE THE OPENING offensive of the Yom Kippur War, which had taken the Israelis completely by surprise, Major General Benjamin “Benny” Peled, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, had been haunted by failure. At the beginning of the war, in 1973, the air force had received more than half of the defense budget, and yet it completely collapsed during the initial Egyptian and Syrian attack. Peled believed that one of the main reasons for the failure was that important intelligence had reached him too late. If he’d known Egyptian forces were launching—if he could have seen, in real time, the preparations—his own forces would have been better able to respond.

  In the aftermath of that assault, Peled decided to develop a network of secret communications and real-time intelligence-gathering systems. It would be designed to serve the air force independent of the “Greens” (as the “Blues” of the IAF somewhat condescendingly called the ground forces, because of their olive drab uniforms). Using aircraft for that end would have been the obvious plan, but that was complicated by another trauma of the Yom Kippur War: The IAF had lost more than a quarter of its warplanes, and many of the rest were damaged and unfit for action. Furthermore, many of the IAF’s airmen, who until then had enjoyed an aura of invincibility, had been shot down and taken prisoner or killed.