Rabin had repeatedly demanded that the PLO chairman act firmly and decisively to disrupt the suicide bombings. One of the intelligence officials who was present with Rabin during a phone conversation with Arafat remembered him rebuking Arafat harshly. When he put the phone down, Rabin “was red in the face,” complaining that Arafat and his people were doing nothing at all to rein in Hamas and the PIJ.
For his part, Arafat denied that Palestinians were even behind the attacks. A noted conspiracy theorist, Arafat had his own, completely unfounded explanation. “A secret Israeli organization by the name of OAS,” he said, “that functions inside the Shin Bet and in cooperation with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, whose aim is to disrupt the peace process, is behind these attacks and many others.”
By early 1995, the Israelis realized that any hopes they harbored of the Palestinian Authority stopping the terror attacks themselves were, at best, highly unrealistic. “Along with all the contacts, talks, requests, and demands that we raised with the Palestinians, we decided ultimately that we would rely solely on ourselves and to make every effort to combat terror,” said Gillon.
By coincidence, at the same time the two suicide bombers attacked Beit Lid, on January 22, Shin Bet chief Yaakov Peri summoned Yisrael Hasson and asked him to become head of the agency central command, which covered the entire West Bank.
Hasson, one of the Shin Bet’s most experienced operatives, said he would agree only if the agency radically altered the way it was handling Yahya Ayyash.
“If you think,” Hasson told Peri, “that it’s a local problem for the case officer in charge of Rafat [the village where Ayyash was born], you are making a big mistake. This man is derailing the political process. The only way to get to him is for the entire agency and every one of its members to get up in the morning and ask himself, ‘What can I do today to catch Yahya Ayyash?’ ”
Peri asked him what he wanted.
“I want supreme responsibility, over all other factors in the agency, for handling him,” Hasson said.
Peri, himself a skilled runner of agents who knew how to make people feel good, responded with a smile: “I hereby appoint you head of the agency for Yahya Ayyash affairs.”
“So then I want a promise that you can’t overrule me and that any decision of mine on the subject is final,” Hasson said.
Peri was confident that he’d be able to persuade Rabin to sign a Red Page against Ayyash, but he was also sophisticated enough to steer clear of organizational mines, and he only replied, “Yisrael, the entire agency is behind you. Get going, and bring us the head of Ayyash.”
Hasson took up his new post and reviewed all the intel they had on Ayyash. There was very little. It emerged that for more than a year, not one reliable Shin Bet source had been in touch with Ayyash or with any of his closest associates, and that there was no clear indication of his whereabouts, apart from one report that said Hamas had managed to help him flee to Poland, for fear the Shin Bet would lay its hands on him.
Hasson doubted the veracity of this report. “How can he be in Poland, when we are finding his fingerprints all over the suicide bombings here?” he asked at a meeting in early February. He announced then that he was changing his entire way of looking at the subject.
Until that point, the Shin Bet’s chief foes were the various member organizations of the PLO. They generally functioned in small cells, from certain locations, usually where they lived. Consequently, Shin Bet operations had been built around geographical areas—villages, towns, districts, regions—in which intelligence operatives and agent handlers gathered material on everything that was happening. Each unit acted almost entirely independently, and coordination between them was limited and implemented only at the command level. Operatives working on the same subject never met in any kind of organized manner to swap information and discuss various actions to implement.
But Hamas functioned within a completely different framework. Activists did not carry out the tasks Hamas gave them in their own place of residence, but elsewhere. With each mission, they were in a different place, while remaining under a nationwide command. Thus, a Shin Bet operative’s specialized awareness of what was happening in his specific geographical area did not yield any significant results.
Hasson was taking a new approach to Ayyash, who was given the code name Crystal. All intelligence on Crystal, he announced, was to be concentrated in his office, under his command. Operation Crystal was transformed from a localized matter handled separately by a number of operatives in the Shin Bet—each one under a different commander with his own order of priorities—into a nationwide matter, with Hasson making all the decisions. This was something of a small-scale organizational revolution: Hasson could now issue an order over the heads of the local commanders, and this aroused quite a bit of resentment.
Hasson ordered various Shin Bet units to try to recruit a number of Palestinians who could possibly help. He also ordered operatives to re-interrogate dozens of Hamas activists in Israeli prisons. Following those operations, another thirty-five Hamas activists were arrested and interrogated. They were put together in cells at night, in different groupings, and their conversations were taped. In addition, Palestinian prisoners recruited to act as Shin Bet agents—Muppets, they were called—were planted in their cells to get them to talk.
They quickly discovered that Ayyash was exceptionally clever. Long before it was widely known that law enforcement and intelligence agencies could secretly collect a large amount of information from private telephones, Ayyash took pains not to use the same cellphones or landlines regularly, and to constantly change his sleeping places. Most important, he seemed to never trust anyone.
Eventually, though, the efforts to locate Crystal bore fruit. It turned out he was not in Poland, and never had been. He was in the northern West Bank, operating in the vicinity of Qalqilya, in an area partly under the control of Israel and partly under the PA—right under the Shin Bet’s nose. “It is impossible to lay the blame for his not being captured only on the shoulders of the PA,” said Carmi Gillon, who had taken over from Peri as head of the Shin Bet. “It was our failure, and we’ve got to admit it.”
In April, four months after the Red Page was signed, the Shin Bet got a tip that Ayyash was going to attend a Hamas meeting in Hebron. Hasson thought that acting then was too risky, and that the intelligence penetration of Hamas had to be improved, but the pressure from Prime Minister Rabin to hit Ayyash was too great to withstand. Disguised as Arabs, the Birds team lay in wait for him close to the meeting place, in the heart of a very hostile and crowded location. “To his good fortune and to our good fortune, he never turned up,” said Hasson. “I doubt that we would have been able to get all of our people out of there alive. It was an absolutely insanely dangerous mission, but because of the danger that this terrible individual represented, we had decided to go ahead with it nevertheless.”
Ayyash didn’t turn up anywhere else that was strategically convenient, either. In May, it emerged that he had managed to slip away to Gaza, by identifying and exploiting loopholes in the Israeli security system around the Strip. “That, too, was a failure of ours,” said Gillon.
For months, Shin Bet operatives tried to track him in the Gaza Strip, where they knew he was operating but where Israeli authorities were not authorized to make an arrest. They searched for patterns in his behavior, routines, lapses in field security—any weakness to exploit.
Finally, in late August, the Shin Bet learned that on rare occasions, Ayyash made some phone calls from the home of a follower and a childhood friend of his, Osama Hamad, who lived in the town of Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip. Using Hamad’s phone, he would speak with Iran and Lebanon, and with a number of his subordinates in Hamas. Also, every time he visited Hamad, he would have a lengthy phone conversation with his father, in the West Bank.
This was valuable information.
But Hasson thought that the hit against Ayyash should be part of a larger, comprehensive operation in which the Shin Bet would implement a much deeper intelligence penetration of Hamas and gain control of the smuggling routes in and out of the Gaza Strip. “But the guys’ pants were on fire,” said Hasson, implicitly criticizing Avi Dichter, the head of the southern region (and the man who would triumph over him five years later, when they both ran for the director’s post). “They wanted above all to have this achievement under their belts. They said, ‘First of all, let’s eliminate him, and then see what happens.’ Pity.”
A plan to assassinate Ayyash was presented to Dichter. Ayyash always made his calls from a room adjoining the living room of the Hamad family. When there was no one home, members of the Birds would enter the house and hide an explosive device, along with a camera that would transmit images. When Ayyash sat down there, and his voice was heard on the wiretapped phones, the device would be detonated.
“But here’s the dilemma faced by a country that wants to thwart terror in a surgical manner and remain faithful to moral principles,” said Dichter. “It was very easy to ensure that Ayyash would be blown sky-high. But we knew that he was in a house with children in it, and we had no way of ensuring that they would not be harmed by the explosion. The whole operation had to be changed because of this.”
The Shin Bet needed a smaller bomb, one measured in grams, lethal enough to kill Ayyash but not so powerful as to put others at risk. One, perhaps, that Ayyash would hold to his head.
The solution came when the Shin Bet managed to find a link between Hamad and an Israeli collaborator. His uncle was a wealthy builder named Kamal Hamad, who had been in contact with Israeli officials in the past. Shin Bet approached Kamal, got his cooperation, and asked him to find a convincing pretext to give his nephew a gift of a new cellphone, a Motorola Alpha with a folding mouthpiece.
The assumption was that it would eventually be used by Ayyash.
“We concealed a small transmitter in the phone, so we can listen in to the calls,” they told Kamal, who was given a package of benefits allowing him and his family to relocate to the United States after the operation.
The Shin Bet handlers were lying. Instead of a transmitter, the phone contained a fifty-gram explosive charge with a remotely triggered detonator. On October 28, two days after the slaying of Shaqaqi, Ayyash came to visit Hamad, who gave him the new cellphone and left the room, allowing the commander to make his calls alone. The Shin Bet’s technological capabilities at the time were quite meager, and it took a special air force plane to pick up the phone’s transmissions. The plane relayed the calls to the Shin Bet’s southern region headquarters, where an experienced monitor familiar with Ayyash’s voice was listening in. When he identified “the Engineer,” he gave the signal to trigger the device.
The monitor began to remove his headphones in order to avoid exposure to the deafening blast that was about to come, but instead the conversation went on as if nothing had happened. The sign was given again, but still Ayyash continued talking. “You press once, you press twice,” said Dichter, “but the coffee stays in the machine.”
The tiny bomb had failed, but at least it had not been discovered. Kamal later told his nephew that there was a problem with the billing and he needed the phone for a couple of days. The Shin Bet lab fixed the problem, the phone was returned to Hamad, and everyone waited for Ayyash to return.
—
ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, a senior member of the VIP protection unit of the Shin Bet, responsible for the safety of the prime minister, made an encrypted phone call to a colleague, Yitzhak Ilan, who was in charge of intelligence collection for the agency’s southern region. “The day after tomorrow in the evening,” the caller told Ilan, “there’s going to be a huge rally in Tel Aviv’s Kings of Israel Square, in support of the government and the peace process. Rabin will be speaking. Since the hit on Fathi Shaqaqi, have you got any info on whether Islamic Jihad aims to avenge their leader by trying to kill the prime minister?”
Ilan replied that there was no specific information, but there was a lot of agitation in the area in the wake of the Shaqaqi assassination, and although Israel hadn’t taken responsibility for it, the PIJ had no doubt who was behind it. Ilan’s chief concern was that there might be a car bomb at the rally, and he recommended clearing the whole area around the square of vehicles. After their conversation, the VIP protection unit decided to put on extra precautions.
The peace rally was organized by left-wing groups as a counter to the angry protests the right had been staging, which had become spectacles of vicious incitement against Rabin. Pictures of him were set aflame, he was depicted in the uniform of the Nazi SS, and coffins bearing his name were carried along. At some of these protests, demonstrators had tried, and almost succeeded, to break through the security cordon and attack him. Shin Bet chief Gillon warned that Jewish terrorists might try to harm a government leader, and he even asked Rabin to travel in an armor-plated car and to wear a flak jacket. Rabin, who didn’t take Gillon’s warnings seriously, recoiled at the latter idea, and complied only on rare occasions.
The rally was a great success. Although Rabin had doubted that the supporters of the left would come out and demonstrate, at least a hundred thousand crammed into the square and cheered for him. They saw Rabin, generally a very introverted man, showing rare emotion. “I want to thank each one of you for standing up against violence and for peace,” he began his speech. “This government…has decided to give peace a chance. I’ve been a military man all my life. I fought wars as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is now a chance for peace, a great chance, and it must be taken.
“Peace has enemies, who are trying to harm us in order to sabotage peace. I want to say, without any ifs or buts: We have found a partner for peace, even among the Palestinians: the PLO, which was an enemy and has ceased terror. Without partners for peace there can be no peace.”
Afterward, Rabin shook hands with the people on the platform and headed for the armor-plated car waiting nearby, accompanied by his bodyguards. Shin Bet security personnel saw a young, dark-skinned man standing in the prime minister’s path. But because of his Jewish appearance, they did not try to move him out of the way. The young man, Yigal Amir, a law student close to the extremist settlers in Hebron, slipped past Rabin’s bodyguards with astonishing ease and fired three shots at the prime minister, killing him.
Lior Akerman, from the Shin Bet’s investigation division, was the first to receive Yigal Amir at the Shin Bet’s interrogation facility: “He arrived with a smirk that remained stuck on his face for many hours. He explained to me that Rabin had betrayed the homeland and that someone had to stop him. ‘You’ll see,’ he said to me. ‘My shots will stop the peace process and the handing over of territory to the Palestinians.’ ”
The murder hit Israel like a thunderclap. As in America after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, everyone would remember exactly where they were when the news was broadcast. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis went out into the streets, lit candles, and wept. The shock was all the greater because it had occurred to almost no one—including the people responsible for guarding the prime minister—that a Jew might kill the leader of the Jewish nation. The Shin Bet had failed horrifically, two different times: first by not knowing about the terror cell run by Amir, and then by allowing him to get close to Rabin with a gun in his hand. A mood of despondency spread through the organization.
But Ayyash was still alive, and Shimon Peres, who replaced Rabin as prime minister and minister of defense, signed the Red Page against Hamas’s “Engineer.” The head of the Shin Bet, Carmi Gillon, decided not to resign immediately after the assassination of Rabin but to continue on until Ayyash had been eliminated, so that his term would not be seen as an entirely embarrassing failure.
And there was still a bomb in a mobile phone. On the morning of Friday,
January 5, 1996, Ayyash returned to Osama Hamad’s house from where he’d been hiding the night before, a cellar in the Jabalia refugee camp. At 9 A.M., his father, Abd al-Latif Ayyash, called Hamad’s cellphone, the one he’d gotten from his uncle Kamal. “I gave Ayyash the phone and heard him ask his father how he was,” Hamad said. “I left the room to leave him alone.”
Ayyash told his father how much he loved him and was missing him. It was enough for the voice recognition expert to give the sign. This time, the signal reached the phone, via the aircraft, and detonated the charge.
“Suddenly the line went dead,” said Abd al-Latif Ayyash. “I thought there was no reception, and I tried dialing again, but it was dead. That afternoon, I was told he’d been killed.”
Ayyash was buried in Gaza the next day, in a funeral attended by thousands. That night, Hamas operatives started recruiting suicide bombers in the West Bank. A Hamas spokesman said, “The gates of Hell have been opened.”
BY THE TIME THE Shin Bet caught up with him, Yahya Ayyash was responsible for the death and maiming of hundreds of people and had done incalculable damage to the State of Israel and to the peace process.
At the time, there were several other senior commanders at the top of Hamas, in charge of regional forces in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and they, too, were responsible for bloody attacks against Israelis. But there was a substantial difference between Ayyash and the rest. Most of them operated inside the occupied territories, mainly in firearms ambushes against soldiers on the roads. Ayyash was primarily responsible for the suicide bombings that took place inside Israel itself, directed against civilians.
Ayyash’s revolutionary work outlived even his untimely death. In the last months of his life, he trained a group of Hamas activists in the art of building small, lethal explosive devices for suicide bombers, and in the methods of recruiting and prepping them. One of those men was Mohammed Diab al-Masri. After he made the Shin Bet’s wanted list, he became known in Hamas as Mohammed Deif, which means “Mohammed the Guest” in Arabic, because each night he would sleep in a different place. He was born in 1965 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, in the Gaza Strip, to a family that had fled from a village near Ashkelon in the 1948 war. Deif joined Hamas soon after it was established in 1987. In May 1989, he was arrested for the first time and sentenced to sixteen months for being a member of the military wing of Hamas, but he returned to activity immediately after being released and participated in the workshops Ayyash was secretly teaching on the sand dunes outside Gaza. In November 1993, he was put in charge of Hamas terror operations inside the Strip.
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