Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  But what if airplanes didn’t need pilots? Or the multi-million-dollar munitions systems? What if, Peled wondered, the IAF could remotely pilot smaller, cheaper aircraft equipped with only cameras and communications links?

  A decade earlier, when he ran the weapons department, Peled was the first to introduce drones into the air force, although at the time it seemed a fantastical idea. He was worried about the Arab forces’ acquisition of Soviet-made surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles, and, as a result, he “wanted to fill the air with decoys that would be very cheap, and with similar profiles as fighter planes on their radar screens.” These UAVs, an Israeli improvement on an American invention, were launched by rockets, and in order to return to the ground they would eject a parachute, which a helicopter with long poles fixed to its fuselage would then sweep up. Later, the drones were also equipped with cameras.

  But after the 1973 war, Peled reached the conclusion that this was not enough. The launch and recovery systems were costly, clumsy, and very dangerous. Processing the photographed material took a long time, too. Hours elapsed between taking the pictures, developing the film, and finally transferring the photos to the intelligence analysts.

  And so, in the wake of the 1973 defeat, a new type of drone was developed. This drone could take off and land independently, it was controlled from a command caravan, and it had cameras that transmitted video footage in real time. By 1982, drones were a key element in providing real-time intelligence for the top air force brass sitting in Canary, the command post deep underground in central Tel Aviv. They also played a key role in knocking out Syrian antiaircraft missile batteries in Lebanon.

  The drone that targeted Syrian defenses was the first model of the Scout (known in Israel as the Zahavan), made by Israel Aerospace Industries. The Israeli Air Force, hoping to convince the United States to cooperate in drone development, wanted to demonstrate to the Americans how effective its miniature, pilotless planes could be. When U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger visited the Middle East—first Beirut and then Tel Aviv—he met with the top IDF and Defense Ministry officials. He was then shown a video taken by an Israeli drone of his arrival in Beirut, and the movements of his motorcade in the Lebanese capital. Weinberger didn’t much appreciate the surveillance, but the members of his entourage were very impressed with the technology.

  Weinberger’s visit to Israel paved the way for a huge deal between Israel Aerospace Industries and the Pentagon for the sale of 175 upgraded Scout UAVs, which were given the name Pioneer in the United States. They were used by the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army until 2007.

  Improvements to the drones were made over the years to allow them to carry more fuel, and to update the cameras. In 1990, Israel equipped its drone fleet with lasers so that they could emit a beam and designate a static target for warplanes.

  The upgrades to the drones were part of a larger technological push in the IDF, which in the late 1980s invested significant resources to acquire and develop precision ordnance—“smart bombs” that could hit their targets more accurately, making them more effective and less likely to inflict collateral damage. This process was accelerated when technology buff Ehud Barak, who wanted to build “a small, smart army,” became chief of staff in 1991, in effect shaping the Israeli war machine for the coming decades. Under his direction, the IAF’s Apache attack helicopters were equipped with laser-guided Hellfire missiles.

  At the same time, a meeting between the heads of the IAF operations department and Arieh Weisbrot, commander of the first IAF drone unit, Squadron 200, came up with the revolutionary idea of combining all of these technological advances into a single five-step process, to create a new and particularly deadly method of targeted killing.

  First, a drone would track a moving target, either a person or a vehicle. Second, the drone would transmit an image of the target directly to the operational command, providing a real-time connection with the decision-makers, right up until the order to fire. Third, the drone would designate the target with a laser beam that could be picked up by an Apache helicopter’s laser detector—a stage known as “passing the baton,” from the intelligence-gathering cycle to the operational cycle. Fourth, the Apache’s own laser would mark the target, which a Hellfire missile could then lock on to. Fifth, the Apache pilot would fire the missile and destroy the target.

  Combining and synchronizing both systems—intelligence and operations—was a major breakthrough. Drones already had proven themselves invaluable in gathering information. But now they’d evolved from a support role into a direct combat tool.

  Squadron 200 began training with the Apache pilots of Squadron 113, the “Wasp” squadron, in late 1991. There were skeptics in the IAF, especially among pilots who’d been trained in, and had long practiced, specific combat tactics. The idea that flying robots could be effective in war seemed, to some, preposterous.

  But in December 1991, they tried a number of “dry runs,” using vehicles on Israel’s roads as targets. Three or four drones were launched, and a vehicle selected at random for them to track with their cameras, transmitting everything to the control caravan. Then the vehicle was “lit up” with a laser beam, and after a few miles the chase was joined by two Apaches, and the whole team would practice “passing the baton” as the Apaches’ sensors would lock on to the drone’s laser beam. At the moment the Apache indicated that the target was locked, the exercise ended.

  But simulating missile fire onto cars on a friendly road was one thing. Killing a live target in hostile territory was something else altogether.

  —

  ON A ROUTINE BOMBING run in southern Lebanon in October 1986, a bomb dropped by an F-4 Phantom exploded too early and ripped off one of the plane’s wings. The two airmen ejected and landed in enemy territory. The pilot was rescued by an IAF Cobra helicopter, but not before hanging from the undercarriage, under fire from Hezbollah militiamen. The navigator, Ron Arad, could not be located.

  Israelis attach great importance to the Jewish religious injunction of redemption of captives, and it is an Israeli fixation to do everything and more to get MIAs and POWs home. Losing an airman to Hezbollah in hostile territory was a tremendous blow.

  Not surprisingly, then, the search for Arad was massive, the largest rescue operation in Israeli history. A Mossad official who was involved in Operation Body Heat (Hom Haguf), the code name for the effort to find Arad, said it was “the biggest search operation ever conducted in modern history for a single person. There was no stone that we left unturned, no source that we didn’t enlist, no bribe that we didn’t pay, and no scrap of information that we didn’t scrutinize.”

  It all came to nothing. Arad was passed from one militia to another, year after year. In 1989—three years after Arad had disappeared—Israel abducted two relatively minor Hezbollah officials in an attempt to locate the airman. One of them, Abdal-Karim Obeid, was the man who had been named to succeed Sheikh Ragheb Harb as Hezbollah’s chief cleric in southern Lebanon after Harb was killed. Their interrogation revealed nothing, and Hezbollah responded with indifference to an offer to begin negotiations for an exchange.

  The search for Arad was partially hobbled by errors and oversights, as well as simple bad luck. Mostly, though, the continuous search highlighted Israel’s inability to penetrate Hezbollah or the Iranian intelligence agencies that supported the organization.

  More broadly, the militia was now carrying out increasingly sophisticated guerrilla actions, orchestrated by its military chief, Imad Mughniyeh, inflicting casualties and severe damage to the morale of the IDF. Finally, in the summer of 1991, AMAN top brass worked out a plan to shift the balance in Israel’s favor: Israel would abduct Hezbollah secretary general Hussein Abbas al-Mussawi, or one of his two deputies, and hold him hostage until Ron Arad was returned. A concomitant goal was to stage “an emblematic operation that would reverberate and clarify who was really in charge of the situation,”
in the words of one of the Israeli officers involved.

  —

  MUSSAWI WAS ONE OF the poor Shiites the Iranians began organizing in the 1970s. He also underwent guerrilla training in a PLO Force 17 camp before becoming more devout and devoting years to studying Shi’a theology, first in Lebanon and then in Muslim colleges in Najaf, in Iraq, which were run by disciples of Khomeini, in accordance with his religious precepts. His astute mind, excellent memory, and loyalty to Khomeini, which matched his fanaticism, soon made him a well-known religious authority in Iraq and Lebanon and led him to become one of the core founders of Hezbollah. Mussawi, according to information gathered by the Israelis, was involved in the decisions that allowed Imad Mughniyeh to begin his campaign of suicide terrorism against the United States and Israel. He believed that one of Hezbollah’s main aims, although not the primary one, should be the expulsion of the IDF by means of guerrilla warfare. “The future will be for the Resistance [against the Israeli occupation],” he repeatedly declared in his speeches, “while arrogance [of the Israelis] will be defeated. It is only a matter of time.” In May 1991, he became secretary general of Hezbollah, by now already the most powerful political and military position in Lebanon.

  From the outset, it was clear that any abduction operation in Beirut would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. So efforts instead focused on obtaining information about a future visit by Mussawi to southern Lebanon, closer to the Israeli border, where he would be easier to grab.

  The head of operations for the AMAN research division’s counterterrorism section, Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Zarka, had the idea to concentrate on the village of Jibchit, where seven years earlier, on February 16, 1984, Israeli agents had eliminated Ragheb Harb. The village is located in southern Lebanon, making it a far easier place to act in than Beirut, where the Hezbollah headquarters were located.

  On February 12, 1991, AMAN received the information it was waiting for: As had become tradition, Hezbollah would hold a large political rally on the anniversary of Sheikh Harb’s death. The rally would be attended by top Hezbollah officials, including Secretary General Mussawi and the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon.

  The initial plan was merely to gather intelligence, study the rally, and plan an abduction the following year. This was crucial because of the wretched state of Israel’s intelligence on Hezbollah at the time. Indeed, at one planning meeting, it became clear that no one in the room knew even the basics of Shiite memorial rites—when the widow is visited, for instance, or when the men gather at the hussainia. (A lieutenant colonel who’d written his doctoral thesis on Hezbollah was summoned to explain.) Brigadier General Dani Arditi, head of the Special Ops Executive (SOE), was emphatic: With such tenuous intelligence, there was no way he could recommend an immediate abduction mission. Still, he was in full support of preparing for the next year’s rally at Jibchit.

  Major General Uri Sagie, the chief of AMAN, was more ambitious. “SOE does not want to do it,” he said at an AMAN command meeting on February 13. “I accept the proposal for building an intelligence model, but let’s not stop ourselves from operational thinking. We’ll carry out an intelligence model, with an ‘operational tail.’ Get some choppers ready for attack alert.”

  At this point, a critical misunderstanding crept in. Chief intelligence officer Brigadier General Doron Tamir, under Sagie in the command hierarchy, said he considered the reference to an “operational tail” to be merely part of an intelligence model. “Choppers would take off and practice the acquisition of the target, but in no circumstances would they open fire,” he said. “Just a dry training run.” The people who were supposed to assess the risks and repercussions of an operation thought so, too—which was why they didn’t prepare those assessments.

  But Sagie and his immediate associates, as well as chief of staff Barak, were thinking of something entirely different. To them, the “operational tail”—airborne helicopters armed with laser-guided Hellfire missiles—would leave the option of killing Mussawi open.

  This was not part of the original plan, but now that the opportunity had arisen, the temptation was simply too great: Eliminate a tenacious enemy while employing a brand-new targeted killing protocol, using drones and Hellfires. This was precisely what Barak, who had just been fawned over by the media during his fiftieth birthday, wanted—to see a small, smart, and lethal IDF in action.

  Unwittingly, however, two parallel plans had thus been created, without anyone’s even realizing it.

  —

  ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, the AMAN counterterrorism section issued its summary, which made it clear that Operation Night Time was intended only to gather intelligence for a later abduction. The summary contained the following details: “Mussawi’s convoy of cars usually includes three to five vehicles. Of these, two or three are escort vehicles at the head and the end of the convoy. The vehicle Mussawi rides in is a Mercedes 280 or 500. His place in the convoy isn’t fixed. Sometimes he is in the first car behind the lead escort vehicle, and sometimes in the second or third. The other vehicles are Range Rovers.”

  That same day, the air force’s intelligence wing issued its own orders, indicating an entirely different plan: “Units of the intelligence wing and AMAN will carry out a collection model in the execution zone. Later, in accordance with the intelligence collected, the operation will move into the attack stage.”

  This was a dangerous contradiction, with one unit beginning to prepare for an attack the other hadn’t properly planned for. Yet because the operation was still officially a dry run, it wasn’t put on the agenda of the weekly “operations-and-sorties” forum, attended by the minister of defense and the chief of staff. Defense Minister Moshe Arens was totally unaware of even the existence of Operation Night Time.

  That night, a Friday, only hours after conflicting orders had been issued by Israeli officials, a squad of Islamic Jihad guerrillas slipped into an IDF field camp. Fresh recruits on a training exercise were asleep in their tents. The jihadists killed three of them with knives, axes, and pitchforks. Reporting on the attack at the end of the Sabbath, Haim Yavin, the chief anchor on Israel’s only television channel, called it “the Night of the Pitchforks.”

  The national mood sank to a new low.

  —

  ON SUNDAY, THE DAY of the operation, the small AMAN war room opened at 7 A.M. Everyone was crammed in: SOE chief Arditi and representatives of the collection department, Unit 8200, the AMAN counterterrorism section, the drone unit, and the air force intelligence wing. The actual drone operators were in a trailer near the Lebanese border.

  The Unit 504 agent who had provided the tip-off about Mussawi going to the rally reported that the target had left Beirut. Other intelligence coming into the war room indicated that “a convoy of activists left Beirut this morning, and that a ‘VIP’ had arrived in the south.” None of that was confirmation that Mussawi was in Jibchit, but it appeared likely.

  At about 10 A.M., the loudspeakers in Jibchit began calling citizens to come to the meeting place for the memorial rally, the village hussainia. At 10:30, the screen in the war room showed images, relayed from the drone, of a massive procession making its way to the site. Abutting the hussainia was a mosque, and its high minaret was clearly visible on the screen. The procession moved slowly behind a number of vehicles, apparently a Hezbollah security escort. The drone scanned the procession. At the end were two Range Rovers and two Mercedeses. “We’ve got him!” Zarka yelled.

  At around noon, chief of staff Barak returned to his office, sullen and furious. He’d been summoned to Jerusalem that morning to testify to the security cabinet about the Night of the Pitchforks.

  “Three terrorists have disgraced us,” he blurted out angrily. Barak received a brief update on Operation Night Time, and then he went to the AMAN war room. He watched the drone’s images intently.

  It was a special occasion. For
the first time, a commander in his headquarters could have his own eyes on the leader of a hostile terrorist organization in real time, with the possibility of acting on that image.

  Sagie stood next to Barak, the two of them grim-faced, tense. From their demeanor, it was clear that the original objective of Operation Night Time—simply gathering intelligence—had fallen completely by the wayside. Others in the war room got the impression that the two senior commanders were eager to make the kill. They were waiting only for confirmation that Mussawi was in Jibchit, information they could take to the defense minister for his approval.

  Barak told an aide to update the defense minister’s military secretary on the situation. “Prepare Moshe Arens,” he said, “for the possibility that he might be asked to green-light an operation.” That was the first time that anyone had taken the trouble to fill the minister in on Operation Night Time.

  Sagie took Zarka aside. “What do you think? Should we attack?” he asked. “We have a golden opportunity to take him out here.”

  “Yes,” Zarka replied. “But know that we’ll be moving up a level in fighting Hezbollah.”

  The ceremony at the hussainia ended a little after one o’clock. A massive crowd poured out and walked toward the cemetery where Sheikh Harb was buried, a short distance away. At 1:10, research division head Kuti Mor called an urgent meeting of his senior staff to formulate the division’s position.

  They were unanimous in their opposition to killing Mussawi. At the very least, they felt that a comprehensive discussion of the subject should be held before acting. Mussawi was a religious figure, the head of a political organization that happened to have a military arm, a lieutenant colonel argued. Israel had refrained from attacking such persons in the past. Besides, Hezbollah was not a one-man show, and Mussawi was not the most extreme man in its leadership. He would be replaced, perhaps by someone more radical.