Ayalon declared that “the Shin Bet is not an intelligence body, but rather a preventive body.” In other words, the agency’s purpose was not merely to gather information for the sake of collection, but rather to thwart the enemy’s intentions in real time. In order to do so, the Shin Bet had to collect intelligence and analyze it in the briefest of time spans.
Ayalon argued that the solution was to be found in advanced technologies. Tech-based sources would replace human sources, producing a multi-dimensional, real-time intelligence picture. In 1996, these were revolutionary thoughts that generated a crisis of confidence in the Shin Bet, drew harsh criticism of Ayalon, and even led many to quit the agency. But Ayalon stuck to his guns. He created a number of new teams and departments that developed cutting-edge techniques for collecting information: penetrating various data systems and intercepting emails, phone calls, and, later on, social media communications. They also developed new ways to use the information: state-of-the-art techniques for analyzing vast amounts of data and extracting the most important bits of intel.
Ayalon and his tech teams shifted the focus of the Shin Bet so that more emphasis was placed on the connections between people—more emphasis on the network, rather than on each separate individual. The Shin Bet was the first to grasp the huge potential of tracking mobile phones, first through the phone calls themselves and later through geolocation, texting, video transmissions, and online surfing.
Under Ayalon, the agency’s entire operational structure changed. It no longer relied on regional case officers, deployed geographically, who ran agents and functioned more or less independently, but instead concentrated activities around a “desk,” whose personnel sat at computer monitors, gathering information, piecing it together, and ordering operatives to gather missing pieces of the puzzle.
The makeup of Shin Bet’s personnel was also changing rapidly. Many of the agency’s old case officers left, while young men and women from the IDF’s tech units were being recruited at a quick pace. Soon, 23 percent of the agency’s personnel were operatives trained extensively in the development of innovative technologies. “We set up an entire division of Q’s,” said Diskin, referring to the tech wizard of James Bond movies. “In it, dozens of amazing startups are under way simultaneously.”
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THE FIRST PROBLEM THE newly revamped Shin Bet had to deal with was Mohi al-Dinh Sharif, a student of Yahya Ayyash’s who became the Hamas military wing’s top explosives expert after Ayyash’s assassination and who was known as “Engineer Number 2.” Ayyash and his deputy at the time, Hassan Salameh, had taught Sharif to make improvised bombs out of a very powerful explosive material, triacetone triperoxide, as they themselves had learned from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Sharif was the one who had built the bombs that were used in the four suicide attacks Hamas launched to avenge Ayyash’s death.
Like Ayyash before him, Sharif trained others in his craft, teaching a squad of men in Jerusalem how to configure remote-controlled bombs, build time-delayed fuses, and improvise explosives from readily available materials. He also taught them how to hide bombs in videocassettes. Eleven such cassettes were made in a plot to detonate them at bus stops, lottery stalls, and phone booths. One of them blew up in Netanya on February 11, 1998, wounding ten civilians. The Shin Bet identified the bomb makers before they planted the others and arrested them, thereby preventing a major disaster.
The Shin Bet compiled a thick dossier on Sharif, monitoring his movements and habits by tracking the calls and locations of mobile phones he and some of his men used. Most critically, the agency uncovered a plot to detonate a massive bomb stuffed inside a Fiat Uno on the eve of Passover, when Jerusalem’s sidewalks would be crowded with people doing last-minute holiday shopping. The Shin Bet’s operations wing, the Birds, managed to attach a detonator to the Fiat before Sharif delivered it to the suicide bomber. On March 29, 1998, when Sharif drove the car into a garage in Ramallah, away from innocent civilians, it exploded.
Even with Sharif’s demise and the arrest of many of his associates, the Shin Bet sensed that a piece was missing from the puzzle. The agency concluded that there was a “multi-tentacled octopus” at work, with “one person who was operating all of the tentacles, each one separately, independently from the others.”
The Shin Bet’s new data-mining systems, which monitored thousands of Palestinians designated as targets, began to zoom in on one man. The Israelis singled out Adel Awadallah, who had taken over as head of Hamas’s military arm in the West Bank, the counterpart to Mohammed Deif in the Gaza Strip.
Awadallah had been on the wanted list for some time, but thanks to a Hamas support network known as “the assistance and service apparatus,” which served as a buffer between him and the cells that he ran, he wasn’t caught, even when subordinates were captured and gave away information under interrogation.
This support system, which enabled Awadallah to avoid apprehension by the Shin Bet and at the same time launch many terror attacks, was run by Adel’s younger brother, Imad, who had escaped from a Palestinian Authority prison. The two began planning the next series of terror attacks, the most ambitious of which involved five car bombs in the center of Israel’s five largest cities. According to the plan, the first one would be detonated in Tel Aviv, presumably causing heavy casualties. Then an ultimatum would be presented to the Israeli government: Free all the Palestinian prisoners or another car would explode, then another, and so on. At the same time, they laid plans for the abduction of soldiers and prominent Israeli political figures—large amounts of sedative drugs were acquired on the black market for this purpose—to use as bargaining chips. Among the men they intended to kidnap or assassinate were Ehud Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem; Rafael Eitan, the former IDF chief who had become a Knesset member and cabinet minister; and two former Shin Bet directors, Yaakov Peri and Carmi Gillon.
Awadallah was a first-class operational leader, but he was not aware of the changes in the Shin Bet, including the stringent surveillance of phone calls—who called whom, when, and precisely where both sides were at the time—so that, even though he hardly ever used the phone himself, at least some of the members of his network did, making it possible to map his movements and keep tabs on him.
And he never grasped that his main adversary was, in Ami Ayalon’s words, “the best operational chief the agency had ever had.” That man was Yuval Diskin, whom Ayalon had appointed commander of the Jerusalem and West Bank region, the areas where the brothers lived and were most active.
Diskin, born in 1956, had done his military service in the Shaked recon unit, rising to the position of company commander. In 1978, he joined the Shin Bet and served as a case officer in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon. His command of Arabic was outstanding, and he excelled at his work and rose rapidly in rank. Diskin was extremely tough and highly critical of both subordinates and superiors. It was clear that if he succeeded in smashing the Hamas terror networks in the West Bank, he’d be a good candidate for director of the Shin Bet.
“Adel was very suspicious,” Diskin said. “He relied only on his HUMINT communications network, each of whose members had undergone loyalty testing by him. Thanks to them, he survived a few years. Until the last moment, we found it very difficult to get close to him.”
Adel and Imad’s caution came from seeing the fate of Mohi al-Dinh Sharif and the arrest of many of their comrades. They suspected that a Hamas activist, perhaps even a very senior one, had been collaborating with Israel or with the Palestinian Authority, divulging secrets and, eventually, setting up Sharif.
Since no collaborator had been flushed out, the brothers assumed that he might still be active among them. Because of this suspicion, the brothers decided to approach people outside of Hamas, though still known to be loyal to the Palestinian nationalist cause, when they looked for a place to sleep and eat.
They settled on a group of activis
ts from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who, in the past, had served years in an Israeli prison for membership in a terrorist organization and illegal possession of firearms. These activists let the brothers stay in a two-story farmhouse with a large yard, surrounded by a wall, in the village of Khirbet al-Taiybeh, west of Hebron, which belonged to a member of one of their families. That house quickly became a trove of intelligence information that included the archives of the Hamas military wing, which Adel took with him from hideout to hideout, for fear they would fall into the hands of the Shin Bet. The brothers also brought with them the plans for their next major attack, which included poisoning Tel Aviv’s water supply.
The Shin Bet managed to identify one of the brothers’ contacts in this group of activists, and put heavy pressure on him to act as their agent, threatening that if he didn’t, he’d be prosecuted for collaborating with Hamas and go to jail for many years. The stick was matched by a big carrot: a hefty payment and a new and easy life abroad for him and his family if he cooperated. The man agreed.
The first task was to get the house wired for video and audio surveillance. Capturing the Awadallahs could wait. More important, Diskin believed, was learning precisely what the brothers were planning. The Shin Bet waited for a tip-off from their agent that the brothers were leaving the house.
The next time one of the PFLP friends brought the brothers their provisions, they told him they were in a hurry to go somewhere. They all left together, the brothers in one car and the collaborator in another.
The Birds were waiting outside, watching. When the cars were out of sight, they went into action. Using a copy of the key, they went inside the house and installed cameras and microphones in every room.
The brothers returned later that night. For four solid days afterward, every word of the head of Hamas’s military wing was recorded. Adel and Imad talked about various tactical improvements they wanted to make to their plan, and the possibility that Hamas would begin making rockets like the ones that Hezbollah was using.
The resulting documentation gave the Israelis not only details about specific plans, but also a sense of the brothers’ broader worldview. In one conversation, for example, Imad, who had suffered harsh torture at the hands of Palestinian Authority jailers, spoke with bitter hatred about Yasser Arafat’s men. “The next time they come for me,” he said, “I’ll open fire immediately.”
His brother, who had been lounging on one of the sofas, leapt to his feet. “Never!” he thundered. “We do not shoot Muslims. Do you hear me? Even if they do the most terrible things to you, you do not kill a Muslim.”
The Shin Bet informed the IDF of its impressive intelligence coup. Knowing full well that, at some unpredictable point in time, as a routine security precaution, the brothers would move to another hideout, they also requested an allocation of forces to kill them. The military, however, was not eager to assassinate another Hamas official—the aggressive response to Ayyash’s death had made them anxious. So, instead, Ayalon and the Shin Bet went to the Israel Police’s counterterror unit, the YAMAM. There was a long-standing rivalry between YAMAM and the IDF’s special-operations units, and the army rightly interpreted Ayalon’s decision to enlist the help of the police as an intentional disparagement.
Later on, a disagreement arose between Diskin and Ayalon. Diskin thought the YAMAM commando squad should break into the house and kill the two brothers on the spot. Ayalon was, in principle, willing to assassinate them, but he believed that an effort should be made to capture them alive so they could be interrogated, which he was sure would produce a valuable crop of information. In the end, a compromise was reached: If they could find a way to ensure that the two could be caught alive without endangering the YAMAM operatives, they would go for it. If not, the two would be killed.
Ayalon took the plan to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was much less decisive than he’d been when the Mossad brought him the assassination plan for Khaled Mashal. He now fully understood that every operation, even ones that seem easy and safe, can fall apart in the execution, with disastrous results for the personnel involved and for the entire nation. The hit on Mohi al-Dinh Sharif had left no Israeli fingerprints, but this time it was quite possible that the brothers would be killed in the YAMAM raid, and Israel would not be able to deny responsibility. Hamas would launch massive retaliatory attacks.
Shimon Peres had lost power because of the wave of Hamas terror in the wake of the Ayyash assassination. Netanyahu had no desire to risk his own office. He refused to sign the Red Page.
“If we are not willing to take care of the head of the military arm that is operating against us,” Ayalon argued to Netanyahu, “what are we worth? If you don’t sign the authorization, I will resign as head of the Shin Bet.”
This was a formidable threat, with repercussions that went beyond the stated position itself. The prime minister was already seen as weak for releasing Sheikh Yassin. The public generally believed that he was not doing a good job in the war on terror. If Ayalon resigned, Netanyahu was sure someone would leak the reason. It would be framed as the prime minister’s having refused to eliminate a major threat to the State of Israel and Jews everywhere. He would then be considered even weaker.
After a few hours, he signed off on the operation.
The plan was to incapacitate the Awadallah brothers before the assault. In one of his conversations picked up by Shin Bet, Imad Awadallah had mentioned his love of baklava. So on the night of September 11, 1998, Shin Bet specialists dosed a baklava with a sedative, then had it delivered to the house in Khirbet al-Taiybeh. They would wait until the brothers dozed off, then enter the house, load them into a vehicle, and take them to an interrogation facility.
It didn’t quite work. Imad was overjoyed by the baklava and gorged himself on it. Soon he was overcome by sleep and began to snore. But the Shin Bet wasn’t aware that Adel hated baklava and wouldn’t touch it. When it became clear from the video surveillance that Adel was not under the influence of the drug and did not intend to go to bed soon, the YAMAM was given the order to storm the house. The squads surrounding the building moved in from several directions, accompanied by an attack dog. They climbed the wall and broke in.
Adel went for his rifle, fired, and hit the dog, but was immediately cut down. Imad, woken by the shooting, tried to reach his weapon and was killed by a long burst of automatic fire. After the YAMAM gave the all-clear, a Birds team entered the house and soon found the archive, hidden in one of the rooms.
Ayalon called Netanyahu to tell him that the operation had succeeded and the Awadallahs were dead. To forestall a violent Palestinian reaction, Netanyahu instructed Ayalon to drive to the Mukataa, the Palestinian Authority’s governmental compound in Ramallah. When he arrived, Arafat was awake and waiting. Ayalon told Arafat that Israel had killed the brothers. “Before he could deny knowing who they were, I said, ‘Please don’t ask me, “Awadallah shu?” We know that you know who they are and what they have done,’ ” Ayalon said. “ ‘In the name of the State of Israel, I demand that you do everything to ensure that Hamas doesn’t begin to run wild.’ ”
Arafat asked to have the news of the slayings held up for four days so he could get organized. Ayalon informed him that there was nothing he could do to delay the news, and that he believed that the Palestinians had no more than four hours before the media got hold of the story.
“Please give Jibril [Rajoub] and [Muhammad] Dahlan”—the two heads of the Palestinian security apparatus, who were sitting on either side of Arafat—“the order to act now,” Ayalon said. “They know what has to be done. If that doesn’t happen and there’s a terror attack, Israel will react in the harshest possible manner, including an absolute stop to the peace process.”
Arafat told his two lieutenants to act decisively. That same night, the leading activists of Hamas were rounded up and held in detention, and the organization was put on notic
e that any activity against Israel would draw a severe response from the Palestinian Authority. Rajoub and Dahlan did everything they could to assure the Israelis that this time Arafat was serious about carrying out his threats.
Meanwhile, Shin Bet desk officers and analysts immediately began poring over the Hamas military archives, plugging names and dates into their computers—all part of “an intensive effort aimed at the rapid scrutiny of the archive documents in order to act before the members of the military wing could regroup and go into hiding.” Units from the IDF, the YAMAM, and the Shin Bet itself began rounding up dozens of suspects—“senior commanders, explosives experts, procurers of weapons and materials for bomb manufacture, training and support staff, including liaison personnel and members of the Dawah,” the social-civilian arm of Hamas.
The archives the Awadallah brothers had guarded so closely would now be used to bring Hamas’s military infrastructure to the brink of collapse.
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ONE OF THE NAMES gleaned from the Hamas archive was Iyad Batat, a senior military operative focused on attacks inside the West Bank. The records showed that he had been involved in ambushing IDF soldiers on a number of occasions.
After several months, the Israelis eventually tracked him down to a safe house in the village Beit Awwa. An operation—code-named Dungeons and Dragons—was drawn up to kill him.
Moshe Yaalon, who had ended his term as head of AMAN and was now serving as head of the IDF’s Central Command, came to the operation’s forward command post, a large and musty tent near the village Beit Jubrin, not far from Beit Awwa, on October 19, 1999. Though his operatives had already had three days to plan, he immediately realized that they had only a fraction of the intelligence they needed. No one from Unit 8200 (AMAN’s SIGINT arm) was there, nor anyone from Unit 9900 to operate the drones. Even if they had been there, there were no monitors on which the information could be presented. The Shin Bet’s relevant intelligence officer was in another area, and access to him depended on the fluctuating quality of his cellphone reception.
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