Dr. Sami Rababa, the personal physician to the Royal Court, a colonel in the Jordanian army’s medical corps, and one of the most prominent doctors in the country, was summoned. He had only a vague idea of who Mashal was, and he knew little about Hamas. “But from the bustle all around at the hospital,” he said, “and the fact that Ali Shukri was there, I understood that this was a very important guest and it was very important to the king that he be cured.”
Mashal, who was very dazed, told Rababa what had happened outside his office. As he spoke, he repeatedly nodded off, and the medical staff had to keep waking him. Then Rababa noticed that Mashal stopped breathing when he was asleep. “It was clear we had to keep him awake or he would fall asleep and suffocate,” he said.
The doctors had Mashal get to his feet and walk around, but that helped for only a short while. They dosed him with naloxone, which is used to counter some kinds of opioids, but the effect wore off quickly and weakened with each new dose. Rababa hooked Mashal up to a ventilator—if they couldn’t keep him awake, at least a machine could breathe for him.
No one wanted Mashal to die. King Hussein feared, justifiably, that the death of a Hamas leader would trigger riots in his kingdom, perhaps even a civil war. Netanyahu and Yatom knew that Hussein would then be forced to have the two prisoners tried and executed. Moreover, they knew that Jordanian intelligence suspected, correctly, that the other members of the Bayonet team were still sheltered in the Israeli embassy. A Jordanian commando battalion was standing by, prepared to attack, with Hussein’s son, Prince Abdullah, the future king, in command. King Hussein wanted to make it clear that he took the incident very seriously.
Everyone knew that such an ugly series of events would undoubtedly destroy all ties between Jordan and Israel.
“All this time,” Ben-David said, “I was walking around with the antidote, which wasn’t needed, because none of our guys was affected….Then I got a call from the commander of Caesarea. At first, because what he said was so fantastic, I thought that I had heard wrong. I asked him to say it again.”
HH told Ben-David to go to the hotel lobby, where he would meet a captain from Jordanian intelligence and go with him to the hospital. Ben-David understood that a hastily arranged deal had been made: Mashal’s life in exchange for the lives of the two Mossad operatives. In other words, Ben-David was going down to the lobby to save the life of a man whom he and his team had been trying to kill only hours before.
“We were in a tough spot,” Ben-David said. “But in situations like that, you can’t give your feelings too much room. You can’t say, ‘Oh, we screwed up and let them go to hell.’ No. You do what you have to do—you execute in the best possible way that you can, and that’s it. There’s no room for feelings in this kind of situation.”
Ben-David went to the lobby, where a captain was waiting for him. “I still remember his hostile look. But he also had his orders, and he carried them out.” Yatom had told Dr. Platinum and Ben-David to accompany the officer to the hospital and to give Mashal the injection that would save his life. But the Jordanians refused.
Platinum was taken to Rababa’s office. “She said she was part of the operation, but only if one of the operatives touched the poison,” Rababa recalled, “and that she had no idea at all what the aim of the mission was. She placed two ampoules on my desk. I ordered them to be checked in the laboratory. We couldn’t rely on what they said it was. Maybe they just wanted to finish the job.”
Rababa maintained his professional decorum toward Platinum, befitting his medical and military rank. But inside, he was furious. “To my mind, medicine should not be recruited to kill people,” he said. “And the Israelis do it again and again.”
Afterward, Mashal made a rapid recovery. Yatom returned to Israel with the two would-be assassins and Ben-David. The two men reported that they had been severely beaten but had not given up any information.
But Hussein was not content to leave it at that. He told the Israelis that the deal they’d made included only the two prisoners, and that the Israelis would have to pay a higher price in order to get the rest of the team—the six Bayonet members holed up in the embassy. In the meantime, he suspended all ties with Israel.
Netanyahu consulted with Efraim Halevy, a Mossad veteran who had served as deputy director of the agency and was Israel’s ambassador to the European Union at the time. The London-born Halevy, who had spent most of his time in the Mossad in the Universe foreign relations division, was a controversial man, but certainly a skilled and sharp-witted diplomat who knew how to behave with rulers and kings. He’d played a key role in hammering out the Israel-Jordan peace treaty of 1994, and he knew Hussein well. The king respected him, too.
After meeting with Hussein, Halevy told Netanyahu and Yatom that to free the six operatives, they would have to give the Jordanians a serious ransom, “enough to enable the king to be able to publicly defend the release of the hit team.” His proposal was to let Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin out of jail, where he was serving a life sentence for his role in terror attacks against Israel.
The suggestion was met with “wall-to-wall opposition, from Netanyahu down to the last of the organization’s operatives,” according to Halevy. Israelis had endured abductions and murders and terror attacks, all designed to scare them into freeing Yassin, the argument went. Now they were expected to just give in to King Hussein’s request?
Netanyahu consulted with Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon, who called in his top expert on Hamas, Micha Kubi, and asked for his opinion. Kubi responded angrily. “Don’t heed Hussein’s threats. In the end, he’ll have no choice but to let the operatives go, one way or another. If you free Yassin, who should rot in jail until his dying day, he’ll go back to Gaza and build a Hamas that will be more awful than anything we’ve known so far.”
Ayalon conveyed this message to Netanyahu. But Halevy was persuasive, and gradually, as he shuttled by helicopter between Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Amman, he convinced the prime minister that there were no other options. Netanyahu understood that he was caught in a huge crisis and, first and foremost, he had to set his priorities: He wanted to get the Caesarea men back home. The calm and confident way that Netanyahu managed the Mashal crisis, from the time he learned that the operatives had been captured, was one of his finest hours as the leader of the State of Israel.
In the end, an agreement was signed: Yassin and a large number of other Palestinian prisoners, including some who’d been involved in the murder of Israelis, were released, in exchange for allowing the six Mossad operatives to return to Israel.
The deal once again demonstrated the enormous commitment and sacrifices undertaken by Israel to bring home its men from behind enemy lines.
It came at a great cost. The botched operation in Jordan exposed a number of the Mossad’s operating methods and blew the cover of the entire Bayonet squad, which now had to be rebuilt again. It took Israel years to repair the damage caused to the delicate and important relationship with the Hashemite Kingdom. An official reconciliation between Hussein and Netanyahu took place only in late 1998, during a mutual visit to the United States. The Mashal affair also embroiled Israel in awkward diplomatic situations with Canada and other countries whose passports had been misused by the hit team. Yet again, Israel had to apologize and promise, like a scolded child, not to repeat the mistake.
The internal and external inquiry panels set up in the wake of the affair uncovered multiple contradictory accounts of who had known about, and who had authorized, the operation. Netanyahu and the Mossad insisted that they had informed all relevant personnel, but Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, AMAN head Moshe Yaalon, and Shin Bet director Ayalon all claimed they had not known about the operation in advance, apart from a general reference to the idea of killing Mashal made months earlier at a meeting of intelligence chiefs, where it was described as only one of many potential possibilities.
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sp; Ayalon was severely critical of the entire operation, even its motive: “Khaled Mashal was not part of the terrorist operational circle. He was, therefore, from the outset, not a legitimate target. Mashal was less involved in Hamas military activity than a defense minister in a democratic state.”
An internal Mossad investigation, written up by Tamir Pardo, later to become Mossad director himself, issued one of the most severe reports in the history of the organization. In harsh terms, it blamed everyone who was involved in the planning and execution of the operation. The commanders of Caesarea and Bayonet, Ben-David, the operatives, and several others all came in for their share of criticism. There wasn’t one area examined by the committee that was found to be faultless. However, the panel referred to Yatom’s role in these failures only implicitly.
The head of Caesarea, HH, resigned. Jerry, whose ambition had once served him so well, was removed from his post as head of Bayonet. Ashamed and bitter, he left the organization.
On top of everything, Yassin was now a free man. The entire point of killing Mashal had been to weaken Hamas, but instead, its founder and spiritual leader had now been released. He left Israel for the Gulf states, supposedly for medical treatment. In reality, he used his travels to raise funds. “A great confrontation” with Israel was coming, he boasted.
There was no reason not to believe him.
A FORCE OF FLOTILLA 13 naval commandos landed, undiscovered, on the beach near the Lebanese coastal town of Ansariyeh. Under cover of a moonless night, the sixteen men disembarked from their small, powerful Zaharon raiding boats and began a long march inland. It was the night of September 4, 1997, and the commandos were going to kill a man.
The mission was the twenty-seventh since Levin and Cohen had developed the IDF targeted killing protocols for midlevel Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon. Twenty of them had been successful. In this case, however, the two Northern Command officers believed the mission was unnecessary. They felt that the target, Haldoun Haidar, was minor and insignificant, and that there was no significant strategic gain to be had from killing him. But the Israelis had gathered enough actionable intelligence on him, and the system had proved itself so many times before, that in the minds of some, there was also no reason not to kill him. Still, enough Northern Command officers objected that the responsibility for the mission was transferred to the General Staff. Critics were left out of the decision-making loop.
The plan called for the commandos to march inland some two and a half miles and lay a number of roadside bombs along a route taken by Haidar every morning. They were then supposed to withdraw to their boats and sail back to Israel. When the operators of the drones circling above saw Haidar passing by, a radio signal transmitted through the drones would trigger the explosion. Metal fragments of the type used in devices made by Lebanese terrorists were packed into the bomb, to make the attack look like an internal Lebanese affair.
At first, everything went according to plan. In favorable weather conditions, the men landed, quickly crossed the Lebanese coastal road, and reached a wall on the eastern side that bordered a large area of groves and orchards. Two of the men hopped over it, broke the hinges of the gate, and opened it for the others. Most of the way was uphill, in an area difficult to navigate because of irrigation ditches and thick vegetation.
When the force reached the point marked on their coded map as G7, they hit another gate, with a road on the other side. They were supposed to cross that road and advance another quarter-mile before reaching the road that Haidar used. The commandos climbed over the gate, and the point detail crossed the road and began moving forward, combing the area for hostile elements. After the clear signal was given, the point man of the second group began crossing the road.
When he was halfway across, there was a huge blast, and then another.
In these blasts and an ensuing firefight while rescue operations were under way, twelve of the commandos were killed.
An IDF inquiry into the incident concluded that it had been a chance ambush by Hezbollah, impossible to foresee or prevent, and that the rounds the guerrillas fired had detonated the explosives the Israelis brought to kill Haidar.
That may have been the most convenient explanation to all concerned, but it turned out not to be true. In fact, Hezbollah apparently had been able to plan and coordinate the ambush because of a complete breakdown in Israeli intelligence in the weeks and even hours before the commandos set out. The video transmissions from drones that flew reconnaissance missions over the area were not encrypted, and Hezbollah was able to intercept them. Moreover, supposed Israeli intelligence assets in the South Lebanon Army were actually double agents, reporting to Hezbollah who and what their IDF handlers were interested in.
With a video of the area the IDF was reconnoitering and intel from the IDF handlers that they were targeting Haidar, it wasn’t difficult for Hezbollah to figure out where the ambush would be laid. Indeed, according to sources who served in Flotilla 13 at the time, video from a drone flight hours before the raid showed three figures loitering suspiciously at G7. If that video, which has never been released, had been analyzed in real time, the mission would probably have been postponed or canceled.
The “Shayetet (Flotilla) Disaster,” as it became known in Israel, had a deep impact on the public in Israel, mostly because the men who were killed belonged to one of the IDF’s two best units. Nasrallah intensified this effect by uploading gruesome pictures of the body parts collected at the site to Hezbollah’s website, including the head of one of the soldiers.
—
THE ANSARIYEH DEBACLE UNFOLDED just a day after a triple suicide bombing in the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, an attack that Israeli intelligence had no advance knowledge of, and only weeks before the disastrous Mossad attempt on Khaled Mashal in Jordan.
In many ways, then, September 1997 marked one of the lowest ebbs in Israeli intelligence history. Each of three different intelligence arms had racked up a number of failures. The Shin Bet had failed to protect the prime minister or to stop a wave of suicide bombings. The Mossad had not managed to target the command centers of the jihadist terror organizations abroad. AMAN’s efforts to penetrate and disrupt Hezbollah had been far from effective. And the latter two had altogether missed, as it would later transpire, the WMD projects of Iran, Syria, and Libya.
The Ansariyeh debacle, meanwhile, intensified the public controversy over the Israeli military presence in Lebanon, which some saw as comparable to the American embroilment in Vietnam. Protests demanding withdrawal were led by the Four Mothers, a movement named after the four matriarchs of the Bible, started by four women whose sons were serving in the IDF in Lebanon. The IDF and the political leadership treated them with contempt—one senior officer called them the “four dishrags”—but their protests were resonating.
Because of the Ansariyeh disaster, the targeted killings in Lebanon stopped. The IDF repeatedly put forward ideas for killing Hezbollah officers, but they were rejected by the chief of staff or by the weekly operations-and-sorties forum with the minister of defense. Hezbollah hadn’t become less of a menace, but targeting its officers had become more of a potential political liability.
The Mossad, fresh off nearly destroying diplomatic relations with Jordan, botched another operation barely five months later, this time in Switzerland. The target was Abdallah Zein, a senior figure in Hezbollah’s logistical and financial network. The Mossad’s plan was to tap his telephone, keep him under surveillance, and eventually kill him. But they made enough noise trying to install a bug in the basement of Zein’s apartment building that they woke up an old lady, who called the police. One operative was arrested. Mossad chief Danny Yatom, after one too many botched plans, resigned.
Yatom was replaced by Efraim Halevy, who had scored points with Netanyahu for the way he handled the Mashal case.
Afraid of any more fiascoes, Halevy effectively shut down Caesarea
, refusing to approve almost every high-risk operation and allowing the unit to decay.
“It can honestly be stated,” said Avi Dichter, who was deputy head of the Shin Bet at the time and would become head of that agency in 2000, “that the defense establishment was not giving the people of Israel the protective shield that they deserved.”
That would be worrisome under any circumstances. But it was especially so in the late 1990s, because Israel’s enemies were becoming more menacing. From Iran to Libya, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in Gaza and Amman, a front of adversaries had been created who were much more innovative and determined than anything the Mossad, AMAN, or the Shin Bet had grappled with before.
—
THE SHIN BET WAS the first of the intelligence agencies to regain its footing. Its chief, Ami Ayalon, and the inquiry panels he set up to find out what had gone wrong reached the conclusion that the Shin Bet had become weak and ineffective in two of its main areas of activity.
The first was the acquisition of information. For decades, the Shin Bet had relied upon intelligence obtained from human sources, but this reservoir had almost dried up. No substitute had yet been found for the hundreds of Palestinian agents that it had lost when Israel withdrew from Palestinian territory after the Oslo Accords. The Shin Bet failed to develop alternative methods and was unable to recruit agents inside Hamas, an ideological-religious movement whose members were less likely to be tempted by bribes. One of the Shin Bet inquiry panels put it succinctly—and damningly: “The organization is not attuned to the environment it works in.”
The second inadequacy was what the Shin Bet did with information once it was obtained. Ayalon visited the organization’s archives and stared incredulously at the huge containers stuffed with hundreds of thousands of cardboard binders. “We are behaving like a medieval organization,” he told the senior command forum of the Shin Bet. “An archive like this does not make it possible to construct a real-time intelligence picture. Even if all the information were to be found in the files, it wouldn’t help us at all.”
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