Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Eight days later, six Bayonet members went to Jordan on a scouting mission, under the command of the unit’s head, Jerry. They began collecting intelligence about Mashal, age forty-one, who ran Hamas’s political bureau out of “the Palestinian Aid Center,” in a glitzy shopping mall in downtown Amman. Within a few days, the Israelis knew where he lived, how he traveled, and the basics of his daily routine. They devoted little time to following Ghosheh or Nazal, and never got to Marzook at all. When the recon team came back from Jordan, the Mossad reported to Netanyahu that they had enough intel on Mashal to move forward with a plan to eliminate him, but far from sufficient information to act against the other three.

  While Bayonet was gathering information in Jordan, operatives at Mossad HQ were figuring out how to pull off the “silent operation” Netanyahu had demanded. The killing could not cause a commotion, could not draw attention to the assassins, and, ideally, would make it look like Mashal had died of natural causes. Various options, such as a road accident, were considered and rejected, finally leaving only one: poison. Consultations over which toxic agent to use were held in the Mossad’s technological unit, in cooperation with the Israel Institute for Biological Research, a top-secret government facility located in Ness Ziona, south of Tel Aviv. They eventually settled on levofentanyl, an analogue of the powerful opioid fentanyl, which itself is one hundred times stronger than morphine. (Pharmaceutical companies that have tried to develop levofentanyl for use as a surgical anesthetic found that it could not be controlled sufficiently to avoid killing the patient.)

  The plan was to surreptitiously administer a fatal dose to Mashal. Levofentanyl is a relatively slow-acting drug—over a period of hours, Mashal would feel more and more drowsy, until eventually he’d fall asleep. Then the drug would slow his breathing, finally stopping it. His death would appear to be nothing more than a stroke or a heart attack, and levofentanyl leaves almost no signs. Unless someone tested for it specifically, an autopsy would reveal nothing. “Potion of the gods,” some in Caesarea called it.

  The next problem was how to get the substance into his system without being discovered. The Biological Institute suggested using an ultrasound device, similar to ones used to immunize children, that could inject substances without the use of a needle. This device would still require getting close to Mashal, who would likely feel a slight blast of damp air. Caesarea decided that the best place to carry out the killing would thus be in the open, on a crowded street where pedestrians occasionally jostle each other. Two operatives would approach him from behind, one would open a well-shaken can of soda, and at the same moment, the other would spray the toxin from the ultrasound instrument taped to the palm of his hand (imagine Spider-Man shooting his web). When Mashal turned to see what had wet him, there would only be two tourists with a can of fizzy soda. Because the substance was so dangerous, a Mossad doctor would be in Amman carrying the antidote, in case a drop touched one of the operatives by accident.

  The assassins were still practicing their technique—a lot of pedestrians got sprayed with Coca-Cola on Ibn Gabirol Street—in early September when three suicide bombers, one of them dressed as a transvestite to avoid inspection, blew themselves up on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall. They killed five, including a fourteen-year-old from Los Angeles who was visiting family, and wounded 181. Netanyahu, visiting the wounded at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, said he’d had enough. “I want to make this very clear,” he said. “From this moment, our path will be different.”

  The first step was to kill a Hamas leader. The prime minister ordered Mossad director Yatom to proceed immediately with Operation Cyrus, the hit on Mashal. Yatom once again tried to persuade Netanyahu to instead act first against the Hamas agents in Europe, but without success.

  All the considerable problems that were to follow, however, rose not so much from Netanyahu’s order but from the Mossad’s agreement to execute it. Operatives have the right—which they had exercised more than once in the past—to tell their commanders, or even the prime minister himself, that they think a mission “isn’t ripe” or that the risk is unreasonable. Of course, it’s not easy or comfortable to say so to a prime minister exerting pressure.

  But the moment the Mossad agreed to immediately carry out the hit on Mashal, its personnel were obliged to forgo a series of routine preparatory steps. For example, on their recon visit, they’d posed as European tourists, personas they’d used before in other operations, which had been tested and could withstand intense scrutiny. But because they were returning to Jordan so soon, they were given Canadian papers, identities with which they were much less familiar. In addition, the operatives never went through a thorough dress rehearsal in a mock-up of the operation zone. One of the members of an internal Mossad panel of inquiry into the event said, “It isn’t that the way in which it was planned could not have ended up a dazzling success. It certainly could have. But an operation of this nature has to end in success, or at least not to fail. The idea of taking innumerable precautionary measures is not to allow unexpected events or bad luck to screw things up.”

  Furthermore, Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, who should have been asked to check and approve the operation—prime ministers have the formal authority to order Mossad operations on their own, but they usually make the final decision with another minister or two—was not even aware that it was taking place. Earlier, he had approved the intelligence gathering, but he wasn’t informed about the final go-ahead or the operation’s location. Mordechai was a former combat general and a stickler for detail, and he might very well have improved Caesarea’s preparations, as he had in other cases. But he simply didn’t know about it.

  Mossad director Danny Yatom said he was convinced that it was possible to pull the mission off “smoothly and quietly, or else I would have told Netanyahu otherwise. It may be, in retrospect, that the operations wing personnel didn’t give me correct estimations of the risks.”

  Netanyahu did not feel that his judgment or agenda were to blame: “What’s the prime minister’s duty? To set policy. The Mossad has intelligence units and an operational unit, which in my opinion, since the killing of Shaqaqi, had been quite sleepy. I said, ‘Give me targets.’ They gave me, inter alia, Khaled Mashal, who in my opinion was a suitable target. It’s not my job to be the Mossad’s internal investigator. My job was to ask, ‘Can you carry out the mission? Are you ready?’ and from the moment they said yes, I have to rely on them.”

  —

  THE FIRST TWO MEMBERS of the Bayonet team went to Jordan on September 19. A day later, Jerry and five other operatives, including one woman, checked into the InterContinental Hotel in Amman. Separately, Caesarea intelligence officer Ben-David and a female anesthesiologist, “Dr. Platinum,” also checked in. The Mossad occasionally employed Platinum for special missions. For instance, she had sedated nuclear technologist and whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu in Rome, in 1986, so he could be brought back to Israel to face trial. This time, Platinum was carrying the antidote to levofentanyl.

  The Mossad team decided to ambush Mashal at the entrance to the Hamas office, which was on the third floor of the Shamiya shopping center. To get to the office, Mashal would have to walk from his car, at the curb, through an open arcade, an arched corridor about thirty yards long. Jerry told two operatives to wait behind one of the arches and to start walking toward the entrance when Mashal was getting out of the car. They would come up behind and spray him with the poison and cola simultaneously.

  For five mornings, conditions weren’t right. Once, Mashal didn’t show up. Another time, there were too many people in the designated attack zone.

  Every morning, Ben-David and Platinum waited at the hotel until they were notified that the hit was off for that day. “Then we did what tourists do: sightseeing,” Ben-David said. “Amman is a very interesting city.”

  On September 24, the two Bayonet men on lookout duty aroused the suspicion o
f a worker at Shamiya center. Jerry realized that it was too dangerous to loiter around the area much longer. The team would have to leave Jordan the next day, whether the mission was accomplished or not. They were going to have to rush.

  But the team had not collected enough information about Mashal’s movements, and they didn’t know, for example, that sometimes he would accompany his children when his driver took them to school in the morning. That’s exactly what he did on September 25, the last possible day to execute the operation. Worse, the small children were sitting low in the backseat of the car, and the surveillance team didn’t see them at all.

  At 10:35 A.M., the car arrived at the shopping center. Jerry got out of the surveillance vehicle and signaled the two operatives waiting with the soda and the poison to begin the operation. No one was carrying any communications equipment, a precaution taken so that if something went wrong, the operatives wouldn’t have any incriminating gear on them. But that meant there was also no way to tell them to abort. Once put in motion, there was no way to abort the mission.

  Mashal got out of the car and began walking toward his office, the two Bayonet men following. The driver was supposed to continue on and take Mashal’s children to school, but his little daughter didn’t want to leave her father. She jumped out of the car and ran after him, calling out, “Ya baba, Ya baba,” Arabic for “Hey, Dad!” The driver ran after her. Jerry saw what was happening, but the hit men did not. He tried to signal them to hold back, but at that precise moment they were behind one of the arcade’s arches and couldn’t see him.

  They came close to Mashal, and one of them lifted the canister of poison taped to the palm of his hand and prepared to spray Mashal on the nape of his neck. The other one began to snap open the Coke can. Just then, the driver chasing the little girl caught sight of Mashal and thought that the man raising his arm behind him was about to stab him with a knife. He yelled out, “Khaled, Khaled!” Mashal heard him and his daughter calling and turned around. The jet of toxin hit him in the ear, instead of the back of his neck.

  The poison would still be just as effective, but their cover was blown. Mashal, finding himself face-to-face with a man who had sprayed him with something from a strange cylinder, immediately understood that his life was in danger. He began running away from the two Bayonet men. The driver picked up the little girl and ran back to the car. The hit men also ran, jettisoning the poison canister and the soda can in a garbage bin on their way to the getaway car.

  Danny Yatom said the operatives had not acted appropriately. “The basic presumption of the operation was that it would be silent, that the target would not know he had been affected. The operatives blatantly disobeyed my orders. I had made it unequivocally clear, both in writing and verbally, on the two occasions that I observed their practice runs, that if there was anyone at all next to Mashal, they must not go ahead. But they did nevertheless. That was the reason for the failure: execution out of overmotivation, in conditions that clearly indicated that there should not be execution.”

  Ideally, a second Caesarea team would have been posted nearby, waiting to create a diversion if needed. But there wasn’t. Even worse, a man named Muhammad Abu Seif, a trained guerrilla fighter and a Hamas arms and currency courier, happened to walk by as the incident took place. Abu Seif did not immediately grasp what was happening, but seeing his boss run one way and two strangers run the other was an obvious clue. He chased after the two Israelis until they got in their car and jotted down the license plate number as they drove off.

  The Israeli driver saw Abu Seif write the number down and told the two operatives. The car got caught up in heavy traffic and turned right into a side street and then right again twice. When they thought they were far enough from the scene, the operatives told the driver to stop. Since the car had been spotted, they figured it was best to get rid of it, even though, in hindsight, it was clear it would have taken the Jordanian police hours to organize a search. But the Israelis did not realize that the tenacious Abu Seif had commandeered a car and was still following them. He arrived just as the two operatives started walking away in separate directions, one of them already across the street.

  Abu Seif was an expert in hand-to-hand combat, trained in mujahideen camps in Afghanistan. He tackled the Israeli closest to him, yelling that the man was from Israeli intelligence and that he had tried to kill the leader of Hamas. The second operative sprinted back and punched Abu Seif in the head. Abu Seif was dazed and bleeding, but instead of simply running away, the Israelis stayed to strangle him into unconsciousness.

  Good fortune was on Hamas’s side that day. As it happened, a former Palestine Liberation Army guerrilla and current Jordanian security operative named Saad al-Khatib was in a passing taxi. He saw the crowd watching two foreigners choking a local and told his driver to stop and wait while he went to separate them. “One of them had picked up a big rock and was about to bring it down on Abu Seif’s head,” al-Khatib said.

  “I jumped on him, threw him down, and sat on his chest and tried to restrain him.” Then he told the two Israelis that he was taking them to the police station. Afraid that they might be lynched by the mob they’d attracted, the two operatives agreed to go without a struggle. Bystanders, meanwhile, helped Abu Seif into the taxi—al-Khatib told him to sit in front—and someone loaned him a cellphone so he could call Mashal.

  The Mossad operatives were confident that their cover identities would hold up under questioning. At the police station, they showed their Canadian passports and told the police that they were tourists who’d come to enjoy Jordan’s attractions when all of a sudden, in the middle of the street, they had been pounced upon by “this nutcase,” pointing at Abu Seif, who began beating up on them.

  But then they were searched, and the authorities found, on the arm of one of the operatives, bandages that were not covering any wounds—the adhesive strips that had held the ultrasound device. They were arrested. They used their prison phone calls to contact “relatives abroad.”

  Two hours after their arrest, the Canadian consul in Amman came to the station. He entered their cell and asked where they had grown up, and some other questions about Canada. After ten minutes, he came out and told the Jordanians, “I don’t know who they are. Canadians they are not.”

  Mashal, still at his office, called his two colleagues in Hamas, Musa Abu Marzook and Muhammad Nazal. They decided to put out a statement saying the Mossad had tried to kill Mashal, and that the Jordanian Royal Court was complicit in the plot. While they were talking, Mashal began to feel very weak and drowsy. The poison had seeped into his bloodstream. His colleagues and some bodyguards rushed him to a hospital.

  In a few hours he would be dead.

  —

  THE CALLS THE ARRESTED Bayonet men made were, of course, to their Mossad teammates. One of them, a female operative, immediately proceeded to the InterContinental to report to Ben-David, who was sitting in a swimsuit next to a magnificent pool in the hotel’s vast courtyard, reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. “From her face I could tell that something was very wrong,” he said. “We exchanged a few words, and I realized that a grave incident had occurred.” According to the original plan, the team was supposed to fly out of Amman to different destinations, but after what had happened, it was certain that the Jordanians would keep a close eye on the airport.

  Ben-David called Mossad headquarters, in Tel Aviv, and was instructed to collect all the members of the team from their hiding places and bring them to the Israeli embassy.

  By coincidence, news of the operatives’ arrest reached Mossad headquarters while the prime minister was already there, wishing the organization’s staff a happy Rosh Hashanah. Netanyahu was due to give a speech, and many hundreds were gathered together waiting for the ceremony to begin. Meanwhile, Yatom reported the bad news to the prime minister.

  The two men decided to proceed as if nothing had happened. Almo
st all of the Mossad staff was unaware of the crisis, and Netanyahu wanted to convey a message of business as usual. He spoke briefly, thanked the staffers warmly for their contribution to the security of the country, then hurried with Yatom to the director’s office.

  He ordered Yatom to fly immediately to Amman and tell King Hussein what had happened. He was to do “everything necessary” to secure the release of the two operatives. “And if it is necessary to save Mashal’s life,” Netanyahu told Yatom, “then let them do so.”

  Yatom was received by the king. Hussein was stunned and stalked out of the room in anger. Yatom recalled that “it was [Jordanian intelligence chief General Samih] Batihi who got the king angry, because he was personally offended by me. Without him, we would have been able to finish the matter much more quietly with the king, and at a much lower price.

  “During the discussions, Batihi started complaining to me for not telling him, saying that we could have planned the operation together, et cetera, et cetera. That’s pure nonsense. We asked the Jordanians many times to curb Hamas and they did nothing. Rabin criticized them severely several times, but it didn’t help. It is therefore obvious why we never shared our plans for Mashal with them.”

  By that time, Mashal was rapidly deteriorating, and doctors at the Islamic Hospital were at a loss. King Hussein’s director of the Private Office, Ali Shukri, came to ask how he was, and Mashal’s colleagues berated him, accusing him of being part of a murder conspiracy. Ordered by the king to make sure everything was done to save Mashal’s life, Shukri had him transferred to the Royal Wing at Queen Alia Military Hospital. Mashal’s comrades refused at first, fearing that Hussein was planning to finish killing Mashal, but eventually they assented to the transfer, as long as they could stay by his bedside, surrounded by Hamas security, and have every detail of his treatment explained to them.