Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  “I come from another place, another culture,” Yaalon said, referring to Sayeret Matkal, which he had once commanded, “and there things are conducted differently. It was inconceivable that someone else should know something relevant to the operation and it would not be available to the commander of the force about to go into action.”

  Yaalon and Diskin decided that it was unacceptably risky to continue. They canceled the operation and put a temporary hold on all efforts to kill Batat. “In Beit Awwa, we realized that we had been totally dumb,” Diskin said. “We asked ourselves what had to be done to ensure that next time we wouldn’t be.”

  In theory, the solution was simple: Put all the necessary people in the command post so they could talk to one another and watch monitors displaying a single summary of the data. The Shin Bet, YAMAM, IDF commando units (Matkal, Flotilla 13, Cherry/Duvdevan), AMAN’s 8200, 504, and 9900, and, eventually, the air force, would all be stationed in one room—“under fluorescent lights, not in some miserable tent,” Diskin said—into which all of the available and necessary data would flow.

  However, the implementation of this solution was difficult, because of a number of issues of accountability, command, and control. The various arms of the military and intelligence services had become accustomed over the years to functioning in parallel, and because the operatives came from different units, they spoke in different professional jargons. At times, some people were also just more concerned with turf than with national security.

  Diskin, in the Shin Bet, and Yaalon, in the military, had to shatter quite a few entrenched bureaucratic procedures and navigate various interpersonal difficulties to get everyone into the second-floor space of the Jerusalem Shin Bet headquarters, which would now be called, appropriately, the Joint War Room (JWR). Especially tough was the resistance of 8200, the glamorous SIGINT unit of AMAN, who tried to insist that Shin Bet come to them instead.

  On December 11, 1999, everything was ready for action. Information reaching the Shin Bet indicated that Batat was due to go to his safe house in Beit Awwa in the next few days. The house and its environs were placed under close surveillance. As a security precaution, Batat did not carry a phone, but his driver had one, and the Shin Bet tracked it. They saw it come to the house on December 13, stopping there for a while and then moving on, apparently after dropping someone off. A camera in a drone overhead also saw the car stop and saw someone get out of it and enter the house. Information coming in from an agent indicated that Batat had posted a camouflaged lookout on the roof of the house to warn him of any danger. This intel was fed into the JWR computers, and heat sensors in the drones were then activated, which showed that there was indeed a man sitting under a shelter on the roof.

  Taking all this information into account, soldiers of the Cherry unit, disguised as Arabs, took up positions at a number of spots around the house. Four of them took cover under a little staircase along an outside wall, close enough to the entrance but hidden from the lookout on the roof.

  “Eleven o’clock at night. The village is asleep. At first, there’s adrenaline and you aren’t scared, and later, when you’re in position, the fear begins,” Alon Kastiel, one of the raiders, recounted. “We received permission to open fire from the commander of the unit….We killed Batat’s man on the roof of the house. There were some exchanges of fire….After the firing, we executed ‘freeze’ [cease fire], to get some intelligence. Then more noise from the house, and Iyad Batat comes out with a handgun. The whole force identified him and opened fire.”

  Afterward, the IDF put out a brief statement saying that one of its units had “encountered” Batat and another wanted Hamas man and killed them. The purpose of the statement was to cover up the vast intelligence activity that had taken place behind the scenes.

  But to the Israelis themselves, it was clear that the Shin Bet’s reforms and the JWR were proving effective. Over the next nine months, the JWR model was used in fifteen different arrest and targeted killing operations. This model was based on total transparency among agencies and a system of “baton passing” from one agency to the next as an operation unfolded.

  The first principle of the JWR model calls for the presence of all the “sensors”—the intelligence-gathering agencies connected to the operation—in the form of both actual representatives and real-time feeds of the information they produce. The Shin Bet put a great deal of work into integrating all of the relevant computer systems—the innumerable hardware and software elements utilized by many different intelligence and operational bodies—so that they would interface with one another and communicate with the IT equipment in the war room. The goal was to have all the data displayed in a manner that would create a single, easily digestible picture of the situation. “This intelligence superiority, the concentration of all possible sources, lies at the foundation of our ability to hit our targets,” said Yaalon.

  To implement the second principle, passing the baton, the war room was in effect divided in two. One part, under the control of the Shin Bet, was called the Intelligence War Room. It was here that the target of the operation was identified. In other words, the Intelligence War Room’s responsibility was to point out the specific location of the target and to guarantee that he was in fact the right person. This part was termed “framing.”

  Once there was a positive identification, the baton was passed on to the second part of the war room, the operational section. For the most part, this was the responsibility of the IDF, which supervised the execution of the hit. (At first, most of the targeted killings were carried out by ground forces. Later, execution passed into the hands of the air force, but the general principle remained the same.) In cases where the baton has been passed on to the operational war room, but something has happened on the ground that hinders the capability of hitting the target, such as a temporary loss of the surveillance picture, responsibility returns to the intelligence war room, and the framing procedure starts over from the beginning. And so on, until execution.

  In September 2000, two months after Diskin had been appointed deputy director of the Shin Bet and Yaalon had been named deputy chief of the IDF General Staff, the two recommended that the model they had developed for the Central Command region be replicated for the entire country—that a permanent war room be set up for implementing major operations and targeted killings. The proposal was accepted, and space was set aside inside a building under construction at the Shin Bet HQ, in north Tel Aviv.

  The timing was fortuitous. “If we had not implemented the technological revolution and hadn’t set up the special war room,” Diskin said, “it’s doubtful whether and how we would have coped with the huge challenge that was posed for us by the Second Intifada.”

  BENJAMIN NETANYAHU DID NOT wait for the final results of the elections. On May 17, 1999, shortly after the TV exit polls began indicating a clear victory for the Labor Party and its leader, Ehud Barak, Netanyahu announced his retirement from political life.

  Netanyahu had been elected because of Hamas suicide bombings, but his years as prime minister had been marked by a series of political scandals, coalition crises, security debacles like the Mashal affair, and a diplomatic dead end with the Palestinians. Barak was perceived by the electorate as Netanyahu’s exact opposite—the IDF’s most decorated soldier, a disciple of and successor to Yitzhak Rabin who had promised to get the army out of Lebanon and to bring peace. In his victory speech, Barak said that it was “the dawn of a new day” as he stood before hundreds of thousands of supporters in Tel Aviv’s central plaza, now called Rabin Square, after the prime minister who’d been assassinated there four years earlier. “Peace is a common interest, and it bears within it enormous benefits for both peoples,” Barak told the Knesset a few months later, declaring, “True peace with Syria and the Palestinians is the peak of the realization of the Zionist vision.”

  With his tremendous energy, decisiveness, and sense of purpose, Barak set
about implementing his policies. Once the master of special ops, he was imbued with self-confidence, and sure that he could plan diplomatic maneuvers the same way he had planned targeted killing operations behind enemy lines—with strict attention to detail, careful planning to anticipate all possible contingencies, and aggressive action when necessary. But it turned out that although these methods worked well on a small scale, they did not always work with complex international processes. And Barak seldom listened to the advice of his aides.

  Under America’s aegis, Israel engaged in negotiations with Syria. Acting as Barak’s emissary, President Clinton met with President Hafez al-Assad in Geneva on March 26, 2000. Clinton told Assad that Barak was willing to withdraw from the entire Golan Heights, except for some very minor border adjustments, in exchange for peace, though Clinton’s language was somewhat less enthusiastic and alluring than might have been expected. Assad, who came to the meeting suffering from a variety of ailments, including incipient dementia and exhaustion, was more obdurate than ever about getting every inch back. The encounter blew up only a few minutes after the two presidents had finished initial formalities and begun discussing the substance of the dispute.

  Barak had to keep his promise and pull out of Lebanon, but without any agreement with either Syria or Lebanon. In order to prevent Hezbollah from exploiting the retreat to kill a large number of IDF troops, however, it had to be carried out overnight and kept a complete surprise.

  Shortly before the pullout, AMAN managed to locate Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s military chief and number one on Israel’s wanted list, as he conducted tours of inspection along the confrontation lines in southern Lebanon to see whether Barak was about to keep his promise and pull out, and to prepare his militia for the day after.

  They planned to have him assassinated. But Barak, who came to the northern border and met with top military officials there on May 22 for an urgent consultation, ordered them only “to continue intelligence surveillance of the object M,” and not to strike him, in effect liquidating the entire project. Barak’s first priority was to make sure the retreat was carried out without any casualties, and he feared that assassinating Mughniyeh would provoke Hezbollah into bombarding Israeli communities or launching major attacks against Israeli targets abroad, which would require an Israeli response and make a quiet, surprise retreat all but impossible.

  Barak was right, at least in the short term. The day after the meeting at the northern border, he ordered the immediate withdrawal of the IDF from Lebanon. The entire withdrawal was carried out without any casualties.

  But Nasrallah celebrated the withdrawal as a complete victory for his side, depicting the Israelis as cowardly and fearful, running away from Mughniyeh’s army. “Israel is feebler than a spider’s web,” he crowed. “A spirit of defeatism is prevalent in Israeli society…the Jews are a lot of financiers and not a people capable of sacrifice.”

  In retrospect, the end of the Israeli occupation in Lebanon came at the worst possible moment for Barak. He saw that he couldn’t reach a deal with the Syrians, so he decided to speed up the handling of the Palestinian situation. But there were many Palestinians who saw the retreat from Lebanon as proof that guerrilla tactics and terrorism could defeat the strongest military and intelligence forces in the Middle East, and they began contemplating the possibility of applying these methods to their own arena.

  Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to Camp David in July 2000, in order to hold marathon negotiations and, hopefully, reach a peace agreement. “I knew that such an agreement had to include a Palestinian state and a compromise in Jerusalem,” Barak said, “and I was ready for that. I was sure I would be able to persuade the public in Israel that it was to our advantage, that there was no other option.”

  Arafat, for his part, did not want to come, and he agreed only after Clinton promised him that he would not be blamed if the talks failed.

  During this time, Israeli intelligence indicated that ferment among the Palestinians had reached new heights. The Palestinian Authority was reported to be making preparations for an armed confrontation with Israel in order to pressure it into making far-reaching concessions.

  “We were not preparing, and we did not intend to start, a confrontation with Israel, but ‘hope is by nature an expensive commodity,’ ” said Jibril Rajoub, quoting Thucydides. Barak told his associates, “We’re on a giant ship that’s about to collide with an iceberg, and we will manage to divert it only if we succeed at Camp David.”

  The atmosphere at the meetings was festive. Barak was ready for concessions that left the American participants “open-mouthed and overjoyed,” including a major compromise that would have given the Palestinians parts of East Jerusalem and international rule over the Temple Mount, the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. No Israeli leader had ever agreed to give away so much, or to make compromises on matters that until then had been considered taboo.

  But Barak hadn’t done enough in advance to prepare the ground for the meeting; he hadn’t tried to get the broader Arab world to press Arafat to compromise on Palestinian principles like the right of return of refugees. He also behaved in a manner that was perceived as bossy and conducted the negotiations with Arafat via emissaries, even though his cabin was no more than a few hundred yards away.

  Arafat refused to sign, perhaps because he thought he would get better terms from Israel if he held out, or perhaps because he simply didn’t see any Arab leader ever backing a compromise with the great enemy. Clinton blew up in anger. He ended the summit and broke his promise to Arafat not to blame him for the failure. “If Clinton had adopted Carter’s strategy and knocked their heads together until they agreed to a compromise, history would have been different,” said Itamar Rabinovich, one of Israel’s top Middle East scholars and diplomats.

  In the ensuing two months, attempts were made to bridge the gaps. But by now the tension and suspicion between the two sides had passed the point of no return. “We were living with the feeling that we were breathing gunpowder,” said one of Barak’s close associates.

  And wherever there is gunpowder, there’ll be a pyromaniac to set it alight. This time the pyromaniac was Ariel Sharon.

  —

  WHAT THE JEWS CALL the Temple Mount and the Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary is perhaps the most sensitive place in the world today. Located inside Jerusalem’s Old City, it is revered as the site of the rock from which God created the world, and where he called upon Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is also where the First and Second Jewish Temples stood, where Jesus walked and preached, and where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad took off on his flight to Heaven with the angel Gabriel. The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque stand there today.

  Over the years, many confrontations have flared up there. In 1982, a group of Jewish terrorists plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, “to remove the abomination,” as they put it, in the hope that the act would lead to a world war, thus hastening the coming of the Messiah. Though they failed in their mission, their strategy was not entirely off-base: Any incident on the Temple Mount would be a snowball that could quickly set off an avalanche.

  Ariel Sharon was aware of all this. As the leader of the opposition to Barak’s administration, he decided to defy, in the most flagrant manner possible, Barak’s readiness to give up Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount. On September 28, he led a group of Likud politicians, surrounded by hundreds of police officers, to a demonstration at the holy site. He declared, “It is the right of every Jew in Israel to visit and pray on the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount is ours.”

  The Palestinians who were there at the time called out to him, “Butcher of Beirut…murderer of children and women,” and very soon they clashed with the police who were guarding Sharon.

  By the time of the next morning’s prayers, Radio Palestine broadcasts and sermons in the mosques were already sharply condemning what they said was an Isr
aeli attempt to harm Islam’s holy places. A crowd of twenty thousand mostly young men angrily awaited the commencement of prayers at Al-Aqsa. Many of them were armed with rocks and other objects, and they began to hurl them at police and down onto the Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. In those riots, seven Palestinians were killed, and more than a hundred were wounded. The next day, the violence had spread across the occupied Palestinian territories and the Arab-populated areas of Israel. Twelve Israeli Arab men and boys were killed (along with a Palestinian and an Israeli Jew). Within a short while, the local clashes had become a war.

  Inside Israeli intelligence, the argument over what was going on in Yasser Arafat’s mind flared up once again. The heads of AMAN and the IDF, especially Moshe Yaalon, believed that the intifada was part of a sophisticated and preplanned strategy of Arafat’s and that he “controlled the height of the flames” from his office, at first with “spontaneous” demonstrations organized by his people, then with gunfire at Israeli troops from inside the crowds, then with planned shooting attacks against soldiers and settlers, and finally with suicide bombings inside Israel. Arafat was “trying to attain diplomatic achievements by means of spilling Israeli blood,” said the chief of staff at the time, Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz.

  On the other side, the Shin Bet believed that Arafat had never had any such strategy and that the war had begun as a spontaneous outburst by students frustrated by a number of issues—some of them intra-Palestinian—who were then egged on by local leaders. The demonstrations led to a sharp response by the IDF, which was “overprepared” for the outbreak of violence. That response left a large number of Palestinians dead or wounded and led to further deterioration. Arafat, the Shin Bet claimed, was being dragged along by the tide of events.