Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  During the meeting, a note was handed to Mor. He read it, then said to the attendees, “This is a Radio Lebanon report saying that Abbas Mussawi addressed the rally in Jibchit today.” A murmur ran through the room. Now there was certainty that Mussawi was in Jibchit, and high probability that he was in the convoy. But there was still some room for doubt, and Mor stressed it. The questions now were: Which car was Mussawi riding in? And were any senior Lebanese or Iranian government officials in the car with him?

  Nobody questioned whether his wife and child were with him.

  One of Mor’s officers called the Shin Bet’s VIP bodyguard division. “Let’s say that you have to guard the prime minister,” he asked, “and there are four cars in the convoy. Which one would you put him in?” There was a brief discussion at the Shin Bet, and they came back with the reply: Most likely, he would go in the third car.

  But that was only a supposition, and even if Mussawi was in the third car, it was still completely unclear who might be with him. Mor couldn’t recommend firing missiles at a target with that kind of unknown. “It is impossible to attack,” he said, ending the meeting.

  Sagie came into the room immediately after. The relationship between the two men was already tense because of other issues, and Mor didn’t mince words. “The intelligence circle is not complete,” he told Sagie. “There are too many unknowns. The majority opinion here is that there’s no room for implementation. I cannot recommend an attack.”

  Sagie rose, smiled, and said, “We’ll see.” He left abruptly and, with chief of staff Barak, went directly to the Defense Ministry to brief Arens.

  Sagie told Arens he had no doubt that Mussawi was in the convoy. It was possible that there was some other person with him, perhaps a Lebanese cabinet minister. If Israel were to kill a Lebanese minister, the damage would be very great, “but both by analysis of the circumstances and intuitively, that is not the most reasonable conclusion.” Killing Mussawi, he said, carried very little risk.

  Arens was of two minds. On the one hand, he was being offered an opportunity to eliminate an enemy leader who was, in his view, a notorious terrorist. On the other, he was being asked to make an immediate decision—Mussawi could leave the village at any minute, and there were not many hours of daylight left—without time to give it full consideration. It could be disastrous if there was some error, if the intelligence wasn’t solid, or if some extraneous detail or improbable scenario had been overlooked. He looked at Barak.

  “We’re talking about the leader of a terrorist organization and an enemy emblem. A lot of time could go by until another chance like this turns up,” Barak said. “And even if it does, there could be so many circumstances that will stop us from executing for political reasons. What we have now is a one-time opportunity, one and only.”

  Arens paused for a moment. “To kill a person whom you didn’t have to kill,” he said, “is a disaster.”

  “Minister,” said Sagie, “I have a commander’s intuition that we must act.”

  Barak, who always had a keen sense of what makes people tick, decided to try inviting Arens, an aeronautical engineer by profession, to come to the war room to see the drone’s images himself. The minister accepted and said he’d be along shortly. In the meantime, he told his military secretary, Brigadier General Yeremi Olmert, to call Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. It was 2:35 in the afternoon, and Arens was told that Shamir was at home napping after eating a lunch prepared by his wife, as he did every day.

  He couldn’t make a decision without the prime minister’s approval. But time was running out.

  Forty-five minutes passed. At 3:20, a group of people whose faces could not be identified left the home of Sheikh Harb’s widow and climbed into a convoy of four vehicles. The convoy drove a short distance, then stopped at the home of a Hezbollah activist in Jibchit. This dovetailed with another item of information: that a meeting of top officials of the Shiite organization was due to be held at that home on that Sunday. This meant there were no Lebanese ministers present, because they could not be a party to such a meeting, and they would not be left waiting in the car until it was over. The likelihood that a high-ranking figure from outside Hezbollah was traveling in the convoy and might be hit was greatly diminished, then, and the likelihood that Mussawi was there increased even more.

  Sagie told Barak that, although there could never be absolute certainty, he recommended attacking. Mor gave a more ambiguous opinion: “The intelligence circle is not complete, although all circumstances indicate that it is Mussawi. Therefore, it is now up to the commander to decide whether to attack or not to attack.”

  Barak decided. He ordered the air force to send the helicopters in, and, on another phone, he persuaded Arens that circumstances had changed. Arens gave his approval for the attack.

  Next, just after 3:30, Barak phoned the prime minister’s office. Still, no one had spoken to Shamir. He was asleep, and all attempts to reach him had failed. His wife was also napping, and no one answered the phone.

  Everyone was waiting for him to get back to the office, as he did every day, at around four o’clock. The problem was that every elapsed minute could make the operation impossible because of the approaching darkness. At 3:50, the convoy began leaving the village. The voice of the drone operator came over the loudspeaker: “Start of movement.”

  Tension mounted in the war room. Barak, seeing the unfolding scenario as a historic opportunity, moved one of the crew and sat in his seat, taking over radio contact with the drone command and the control caravan, directing them where to point the airborne cameras while simultaneously analyzing the possible routes the convoy might take from Jibchit to Beirut. Barak kept an open line with the air force commander, who was in Canary, several dozen feet under the war room. “Take off, all take off,” came the order to the Apaches from Canary.

  At about 3:55, Shamir reached his office. He heard a rundown of no more than one minute’s duration on a targeted killing operation about which he’d had no advance knowledge. Still, he gave it his unhesitating approval. “Let them kill him,” he said. Arens’s military secretary informed Barak, who told the air force commander, “They are all yours.”

  The convoy began moving again at 3:57. The drone watched as it traveled slowly north through Jibchit and across the bridge over the Zahrani River. Then the vehicles picked up speed, a Range Rover in the lead, the two Mercedeses following, spaced about a hundred yards apart, while the second Range Rover brought up the rear.

  At 4:05, the operator reported, “Another twenty seconds and the road curves west,” to pinpoint the precise location for the Apache pilots.

  “Approaching zone; activate [laser] designator,” the pilot in the lead attack helicopter said.

  “Designator activated,” said one of the operators in the drone command trailer.

  “I can’t see it,” one of the pilots radioed, but moments later he reported, “Designation acquired,” indicating that he could now see the drone’s laser stain on the target.

  “Positive identification of target,” came the confirmation from the Canary duty commander. At 4:09, he told the Apache pilot, “Rashai, rashai. I repeat: Rashai”—Hebrew for “You have authorization,” similar to “permission to engage” in American military dialect.

  The Apache pilot fired a single Hellfire missile.

  It struck the third vehicle in the convoy. The Mercedes exploded in a ball of flame. No one had scanned the road ahead, though, to make sure civilian cars weren’t traveling toward the target from the other direction. In fact, there was one, and it was very close to the Mercedes when it was struck by the missile. It, too, was engulfed in fire.

  A second missile was fired at the second Mercedes in the convoy: another direct hit on the target.

  Doors opened in one of the two Range Rovers, which had stopped at the roadside, and people got out and began to run away. “We were there, wa
tching every movement and passing it on to the air force’s air control unit,” recalled one of the drone operators.

  The second Range Rover picked up the casualties from the two Mercedeses and sped off in the direction of Nabatieh. “Take him,” Canary ordered the drone operators tracking the car. At 4:32, they designated it, with their laser, as a target for the second pair of Apaches, which then destroyed it. Smoke billowed from the vehicle. The Apaches then sprayed the area with machine-gun fire.

  Absolute silence fell over the war room. Barak made his way out, slapping his colleagues on the shoulders and congratulating them with the English words “Well done.”

  But was Mussawi dead? The AMAN officers waited in their respective offices for final confirmation of the kill. At around 6:00, it came. Mussawi had indeed been in the third car. So had his wife and son.

  The 504 agent who had provided the tip-off to the AMAN war room at the start of the operation later claimed that he had mentioned that Mussawi’s wife, Siham, and his son, Hussein, age six, were traveling with him in his car. Others involved in the operation denied knowing this, but Meir Dagan believed the agent. “The claim that AMAN didn’t know that at least Mussawi’s wife was in the car was concocted after the fact. They must have known, or else they are a bunch of fools. Mussawi’s wife had first-degree relatives in Jibchit, and there was no chance in the world that she would have missed the chance to go and visit them.”

  Two hours after the hit, Barak held a meeting in his office to try to anticipate Hezbollah’s possible reactions and retaliations. Security alert and public relations steps were discussed. Shortly afterward, Israel TV opened its newscast with an item about the attack, which it called “a daring operation.” Defense Minister Arens took the trouble to go to the studio to appear on the news. “This is a message to all terrorist organizations,” he said, “that whoever opens an account with us, that account will be closed by us.”

  That is, until another one is opened and it, too, needs to be closed.

  ABBAS MUSSAWI’S CHARRED CORPSE was extricated from the burned-out Mercedes. Because of its condition, it was impossible to observe Hezbollah’s usual rites and hold an open-casket funeral. Instead, the remains were cleaned, wrapped in a shroud, and placed in a magnificent coffin that was specially constructed out of carefully carved wood, then painted blue-gray and given silvered metal fittings.

  The heads of Hezbollah did not hasten to carry out the burial within the first twenty-four hours, as is customary. For one thing, there were security problems. The shock over the aerial attack on the secretary general’s motorcade was so great that Imad Mughniyeh feared that the funeral could also become a killing field. Moreover, the funeral had to be delayed to allow high-level Iranians to attend. Hezbollah had been founded by Iran, and its leaders were under the influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in their day-to-day conduct, and followed the religious authority of the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran. Iran, for its part, saw Hezbollah as its main ally in the Middle East.

  The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, who had replaced Khomeini when he died, in June 1989, declared, “The martyrdom of Sayyid Abbas is a turning point in the course of resistance,” and dispatched a delegation to help stabilize and calm the organization, to display public support during its difficult hour, and to select a new secretary general immediately.

  In Israel, there had been no serious discussion before the hit took place about what would happen in the aftermath of Mussawi’s death. From their perspective, there were no significant differences between the various members of Hezbollah, and no one had bothered to ask who was likely to replace Mussawi, and whether the replacement might be better or worse for Israel. “From our point of view,” said an officer serving in AMAN at the time, “they were all painted in black.” After the killing, AMAN’s best guess was that the Iranians would appoint Mussawi’s well-known and popular deputy, Subhi al-Tufayli.

  They were wrong.

  Immediately after Mussawi was interred, the Iranian delegation took part in a meeting of the Shura Council, Hezbollah’s twelve-member supreme religious leadership council, where they delivered a message from Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, recommending a successor. Soon afterward, the council announced its decision to appoint a pious thirty-two-year-old cleric, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah.

  If the Israelis had any illusion that Hezbollah would be tempered by the killing of Mussawi, Nasrallah’s promotion quickly disabused them of it. Compared with Mussawi, Nasrallah was a wild-eyed radical. It turned out that even black has its shades. Nasrallah was blacker than black.

  Nasrallah was born in 1960, the eldest of nine siblings, in the Shiite Bourj Hammoud neighborhood northeast of Beirut. Although the family was not very religious, as a child, when the other boys in his Beirut neighborhood were playing in the streets or at the beach, Hassan displayed an affinity for the faith and spent most of his time in the mosque, studying.

  With the outbreak of the civil war, in 1975, the family relocated to southern Lebanon, where, in a mosque near Tyre, Nasrallah caught the exacting eyes of several Shiite clerics with ties to Khomeini. They sent him to Najaf, Iraq, for higher religious studies, and there he got to know Abbas Mussawi and became his star disciple. When the two returned to Lebanon in 1978, after Saddam Hussein expelled the Lebanese Shiite students, Mussawi set up a study center, and Nasrallah became one of its head teachers, attracting large numbers of admirers. In 1982, with the founding of Hezbollah, Nasrallah and his disciples joined en masse and began taking an active role in the guerrilla warfare. Nasrallah spent the ensuing years alternating between commanding a Hezbollah unit and furthering his higher religious studies in Iran.

  Israel was a “cancerous growth, this contaminating germ,” he said in a television interview, “a forward imperialist garrison in the heart of the Arab and Islamic world. It is a society of war, a warlike society of warriors, men and women alike. There is no civil society in this entity.” The meaning was clear: All Israelis, whatever age or gender, were a legitimate target for jihad.

  Gradually, a sharp ideological rift grew between Nasrallah and his former teacher. Mussawi advocated further cooperation with the Syrians, the most important political and military force in Lebanon, who welcomed Hezbollah’s actions against Israel and even agreed to allow the Iranians to send large consignments of weaponry through Syria to the organization’s militia. But Nasrallah was opposed to any form of cooperation with the regime of the Assad family, who were Alawites, an Islamic sect that he regarded as pagan heretics.

  The two men also differed in their attitude toward Israel. Mussawi regarded it as a secondary issue and believed that most resources should be devoted to attempts to take control of the governmental machinery in Lebanon. Nasrallah argued that the guerrilla war against Israel should be prioritized.

  Nasrallah lost the argument—Mussawi was made secretary general, and Nasrallah was exiled to serve as Hezbollah’s envoy in Iran. He returned to Lebanon only after declaring that he was giving up his opposition to ties with Syria and that he accepted Mussawi’s authority in the matter of the struggle against Israel.

  All this changed in February 1992.

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  IRONICALLY, BEFORE MUSSAWI WAS killed, Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors had been more concerned with consolidating their position as a social and political force in Lebanon than with attacking Israel. Though there were guerrilla attacks against the Israelis during the 1980s, largely at the urging of the extremist faction in Hezbollah led by Nasrallah, they were not a high priority and were in no way indicative of the full damage the organization could have inflicted.

  But after the targeted killing, priorities shifted. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards began to prefer Nasrallah’s approach, and they came to believe that dealing with their enemy to the south had to be their top priority. They now felt that Hezbollah would not su
cceed in transplanting the Khomeini revolution to Lebanon without first getting rid of the Israeli occupation.

  The man Nasrallah ordered to implement the new policy was Hezbollah’s military chief, Imad Mughniyeh, “the extremist, uninhibited psychopath” who’d been kneecapping Beirut hookers and drug dealers thirteen years earlier, the guerrilla ideologue who’d created Islamic Jihad and sent suicide bombers to destroy barracks and apartment houses occupied by American, French, and Israeli troops and diplomats, the ghost on the grainy photograph the Israelis hadn’t been able to kill or even locate in the early eighties. “He was responsible for building Hezbollah’s military strength, and not Nasrallah, with all due respect to Nasrallah’s excellent television appearances,” said Meir Dagan. “Because of him, and a group of operatives close to him, the organization became a strategic threat to the State of Israel.”

  Mughniyeh had already been a tactical annoyance for years. To defend its northern border, Israel in 1985 had created a Security Zone, a strip of territory inside southern Lebanon controlled by the IDF. The aim was to keep hostile forces as far as possible from Israel’s civilian settlements and to confine the confrontation with them exclusively to Lebanese territory. In addition, to spare the lives of its own soldiers, Israel established a proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), made up mostly of Christians and Shiites from the villages in the region, who were sworn enemies of the Palestinians in Lebanon and Hezbollah. The use of the SLA allowed the Israelis to see Hezbollah as merely an occasional threat to its border, rather than as a guerrilla army waging an asymmetrical war. A few soldiers, mostly SLA men, were killed from time to time, but the status quo, from the IDF’s perspective, was preferable to a full-scale confrontation with the Hezbollah forces.

  But now Mughniyeh was unleashed by Nasrallah, and retaliation for the assassination of Mussawi was swift. As soon as the funeral for the murdered leader was over, Hezbollah fighters launched a barrage of rockets into western Galilee. For five days, they bombarded the communities of northern Israel, which was brought to a standstill, most of its residents confined to bomb shelters. It was more firepower than Hezbollah had used against Israeli civilian communities in its entire history up to that point.