The Shin Bet got the message. If isolated killings didn’t work—and they didn’t—the agency needed a broader strategy to limit the capacity of Hamas and of the other terror organizations that used suicide bombers. While intelligence officers usually prefer to arrest adversaries, one of the agency’s officials told the security cabinet that when control of the territory is lacking, that isn’t an option. Consequently, “you have no choice—you are both prosecutor and defense counsel, both judge and executioner.” No one dreamed of total victory, or was even sure what that would look like, but rather sought a reasonable security situation that would ensure a relatively peaceful life for the citizens of Israel.
Agency director Avi Dichter presented the new strategy to Sharon and the government during a series of meetings toward the end of 2001. At first, the ministers were hesitant. But at a meeting after the terror attack on a bus in Haifa, in which fifteen passengers were killed, Sharon whispered to Dichter, “Go for it. Kill them all.”
UNTIL THE END OF 2001, the Shin Bet confined itself to targeting what were known as “ticking time bombs,” people who either were working on planning an attack or about to carry out an attack, or who were directly involved in such behavior—the commander and recruiter of the suicide attackers, or the bomb maker, for example.
There were a number of problems with that approach. The first was identifying targets from among the seemingly endless supply of volunteers. There were “more suicide bombers than explosive vests,” a Hamas spokesman boasted. These Palestinians fit no profile: They were young and elderly, educated and illiterate, those who had nothing to lose and those who had large families. At first they consisted only of adult males, but later on, Hamas leaders encouraged women and children to sacrifice themselves, too.
Successfully identifying an attacker, moreover, did not necessarily mean stopping an attack. The monitors, the desk officers, the interpreters, the intelligence analysts, and the technologists might all track an attack as it “rolled along”—in the agency’s professional lingo—“almost until the bang.” But they could not stop them, because Israel could not operate openly inside hostile Palestinian-controlled territory. And by the time the bomber reached Israel, it was generally too late.
There were several nervous breakdowns among these desk officers and monitors during this period. One desk officer detected a May 2001 attack on the Netanya mall and activated the entire system to try to stop it. But the bomber got into Israeli territory and could not be pinpointed until he had already killed himself and five civilians. “The desk officer sits there crying, with the TV sets around her showing the bodies being removed,” Shin Bet director Dichter said, “but by then the next alert comes in and she has to wipe away her tears and carry on working.”
Since picking off individual bombers was ineffectual, Dichter decided to shift focus. Starting at the end of 2001, Israel would target the “ticking infrastructure” behind the attacks. The person who blew himself up or planted the bomb or pulled the trigger was, after all, usually just the last link in a long chain. There were recruiters, couriers, and weapons procurers, as well as people who maintained safe houses and smuggled money—an entire organization overseen by commanders of regional cells, above whom were the main military commanders, themselves subordinate to the political leaders of the organizations.
They would all be targets. A potential death sentence was hung over the heads of all active members of the Hamas military wing, known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “They would very quickly realize that not one of them—from the regional operations officer to the taxi driver to the photographer who shoots the suicide bomber’s farewell video—was immune to getting hit,” said Yitzhak Ilan, a senior Shin Bet operative at the time and later deputy head of the agency.
Targeting suicide attackers was futile, because they were, by definition, expendable and easily replaced. The people who groomed and organized and dispatched them, however, were not. Nor, as a rule, were they nearly as eager for martyrdom as those they recruited. Israeli intelligence figured that there were fewer than three hundred people actively involved in organizing the suicide bombings, and no more than five hundred active members of all the terrorist groups combined.
They would not all have to be killed. “Terror is a barrel with a bottom,” Dichter explained to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “You do not have to reach the last terrorist to neutralize it. It is enough to reach a critical mass, and in effect you bring it to a standstill.”
The Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (DWTI) developed a mathematical model to determine the amount of “redundancy” or reserve manpower in Hamas. The results showed that taking out 20 to 25 percent of the organization would lead to its collapse. “A simple example is the automobile,” said DWTI chief Ben-Yisrael:
There are critical components, and you build it from the outset with a degree of redundancy. You have a spare wheel, not one hundred wheels. You’re driving, bang!—puncture—you change the wheel. You drive on and bang!—another puncture. Can you go on driving? Less likely. Why don’t they give you more wheels? Because it takes space and adds weight. Redundancy also has an optimal level.
Suppose we want to stop a car and we stand facing it and begin to shoot. You fire one shot, completely random. Will the car go or not? Depends where it hits. It could hit a fender, it could hit the radio. The car won’t stop. Fire again and then again. Will the car go or not? It’s clear that at some stage the car will stop, even though most of it has not been hit. Why? Because you’ll have hit one of the critical parts. And that is precisely our model.
Of course, the assassinated would quickly be replaced by those next in line, but over time, the average age dropped, as did the level of experience as younger and younger people filled the ranks. As Yitzhak Ilan said, “One day, when the commander of Islamic Jihad in Jenin was brought into the interrogation room, a man whom, by chance, we had captured and not killed, I was pleased to learn that he was nineteen years old. I realized that we were winning, that we had axed the entire chain that had preceded him.”
Now that a coherent strategy had been developed, they had to figure out how to find and kill these targets. The Shin Bet informed Prime Minister Sharon that, with so many assassinations under consideration, all the relevant resources of the State of Israel would be required.
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PALESTINIANS IN THE OCCUPIED territories had long been used to seeing drones buzzing across the sky. “They flew around there all the time,” said Moshe Yaalon, the deputy chief of staff at that time. The unmanned aerial vehicles were gathering intelligence via their high-definition cameras. “Just like there’s a sun and a moon,” Yaalon said, “there was the noise and view of the UAVs.”
But most civilians, Arab and Israeli alike, did not know how far drone technology had advanced in the decades since Israel first used them. They were now larger, they could stay in the air longer (up to forty-eight hours), and they carried more advanced optics and heavier payloads—up to a ton of precision-guided missiles.
In an August 2001 war game simulating combat with Syria, the IDF realized that it could effectively fight what was then seen as its most pressing military challenge—the Syrian Army’s arsenal of tanks, which numbered in the thousands—using only drones. “We had more bombs than there were targets in the Middle East,” said Yaalon.
As the United States had, in Operation Desert Storm and the Balkans, Israel could wage war from afar. But Israel’s capabilities were even more advanced than those of the United States. Not only did they have precision weaponry, like guided missiles and rockets, but they also had aircraft that could get very close to their targets and had an exceptionally high probability of hitting them, because the drones could adjust themselves midflight in response to the moving targets.
The IDF and the air force both preferr
ed to keep their capabilities secret until an all-out war. But when the military protested Sharon’s demand to use the drones against human targets and thus expose them to the Palestinians, the prime minister banged his fist on his desk. “He decided that this weapons system, instead of snoozing on the shelf waiting for the war it was made for and that was not happening, should be used against the present enemy,” said General Yoav Galant.
The air force set up a special squad to retrofit the drones, both in munitions and targeting technology. Identifying a Syrian tank on the battlefield is different from following a man on a donkey who is trying to evade Israeli assassins, and destroying an armored vehicle requires a different missile from the kind used to kill one or two people without annihilating a city block. The air force settled on a warhead that sprayed hundreds of three-millimeter tungsten blocks that could rip through thin metal and cement blocks but that, because of their density, would be contained to an area sixty feet in diameter.
With the proper weapons appropriated from the military, the Shin Bet now needed its intelligence as well. Sharon instructed AMAN, which was several times larger than the Shin Bet, and the Mossad, whose relations with the Shin Bet were patchy at best, to put themselves at the Shin Bet’s disposal for as long as they required.
Unit 8200, the SIGINT arm of AMAN, underwent the biggest change. Previously, it had dealt mainly with Israel’s external enemies, mainly Syria. Now, many of its powerful antennas, surveillance facilities, and code-breaking and computer-hacking departments were focused on the war against suicide terror. Turban, one of the unit’s listening bases, which had been close to shutting down at the beginning of the peace process, was converted and put entirely at the disposal of the Shin Bet. It became Unit 8200’s largest base, and effectively a production line for targeted killings.
AMAN and the air force put their fleet of observation aircraft—and, eventually, the spy satellites Israel placed in orbit—to work for the Shin Bet. That fleet, which had originally been built to provide real-time battlefield information to fighting units, was given responsibility for observing targets during an operation. “Very many Israeli citizens owe their lives to information derived from VISINT—visual intelligence—and, by the same token, very many terrorists owe their death to that same information,” said Yitzhak Ilan.
The result of all of this was “intelligence fusion,” Moshe Yaalon said, which was “far more than mere integration of the material.” Putting all the people from all the agencies around the table in the JWR was a catalyst for the creation of more intelligence. “All of a sudden,” said Dichter, “the 8200 representative, a man who does not work in the Yiddish language”—in other words, whose job, as a monitor of enemy phones, required a command of Arabic—“hears a Shin Bet case officer talking in Arabic to a Palestinian source, and chips in with a question of his own. And then the lookout on the ground reports that the bad guy has entered Abu Hassan’s grocery store, and the question of who this Abu Hassan is comes up, and whether he shouldn’t also be painted in the bad guys’ colors on the computer, and so on. And that’s how the JWR, by itself, in the course of the operations, began to be a source in which a very great amount of intelligence was created.”
Real-time IT had become particularly vital, because the targets had learned their own lessons and were taking precautions to evade the assassins. They moved around rapidly, changing vehicles and sometimes wearing disguises. “Target shelf life” was the technical term for the time in which it was possible to identify a particular target and to zero in on him. It was becoming very short—never any more than a couple of hours, and often just a few minutes. Only very rapid transmission of data could enable successful assassinations of such quick-moving targets.
Beyond the JWR, the counterterror targeted killing system encompassed thousands of participants: case officers, systems analysts, camouflaged infantry soldiers conducting ground lookout duties, observation drone operators, killer drone operators, interpreters, explosives experts, and snipers.
This very large and complex system nevertheless had a clear and strict hierarchy, with the Shin Bet at the top, running the show. An internal Shin Bet document noted, “The General Security Service [the Shin Bet’s official moniker] is in charge, inter alia, by the terms of the GSS Law, of preserving the security of the state….[O]ne way in which this goal is achieved is the interdiction and prevention of terrorist attacks by means of preemptively striking the objective.”
In general, a targeted killing operation began with field operatives gathering intelligence and pinpointing a target. Typically, the target would be a prominent figure in a terror organization—“someone who deserves his ticket on the train to elimination,” as Dichter put it—or another individual worth the investment of resources required to kill him. An intelligence dossier on the target would be compiled, and that dossier would be handed to the deputy director, who would then decide whether the man was indeed a suitable candidate for elimination. If the deputy director and then the director both endorsed the assassination, a Red Page would be presented to the prime minister.
After the prime minister signed, the intelligence arms that dealt with the geographical area and terror organization in question would be instructed to pay special attention to information that would facilitate the hit. This information was different from intel about what the target was planning, for example, or who his accomplices were. It was confined specifically to intel that might help determine whether there was “operational feasibility” for the hit, and it had to be gathered around the clock.
The moment an opportunity to execute arose, the prime minister would be contacted again, to authorize the killing at that specific time. Once the second go-ahead was obtained, the IDF General Staff’s Operations Directorate determined the “executing body and the method of execution and select[ed] the type of munitions.” After the chief of staff approved the plan, the JWR needed positive identifications of the target from at least two separate sources—the framing stage.
The baton was then passed to the implementing body, usually the air force.
Schematically, much of the new targeted killing system wasn’t fundamentally new at all: The intelligence echelon gathered information, the prime minister authorized, and the field forces executed the hit, just like in the 1970s and ’80s in Europe and Lebanon. But there were important differences. As one seasoned intelligence officer said, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan, “The scalability is the message,” meaning that the use of advanced technology in itself created a completely new reality. Enlisting the entire intelligence community, assisted by the best communications and computer systems in the world, along with the most advanced military technology developments, drastically increased the number of assassinations that the system could carry out simultaneously. Until then, “it took the Mossad months, if not years, to plan and implement one hit,” said a Shin Bet officer. But now, “from the Joint War Room, we could run four or five a day.”
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OPERATIONS RUN OUT OF the JWR killed twenty-four people in 2000, eighty-four in 2001, one hundred one in 2002, and one hundred thirty-five in 2003. Unlike sporadic Mossad killings abroad, it wasn’t possible—or at least plausible—for Israel to deny that it was behind the assassinations.
“We could not claim that these operations were executed by the government of Finland,” said Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser, head of AMAN’s research division. Also, there was physical evidence: Palestinians had salvaged a number of missiles that hadn’t exploded because of technical failures and found stamped on them the Hebrew word MIKHOLIT (“brushlet”), the antipersonnel variant of the Mikhol (“brush”) antitank missile.
Criticism of the targeted killings inside and outside Israel had also made it necessary to justify each one, disclosing details of the victims’ misdeeds to establish that Israel had sufficient cause to respond. Gradually, what had once been considered highly damaging—acknowledging
responsibility for an assassination—eventually became official policy.
“Continuing to try not to take responsibility would have been ridiculous,” Dov Weissglass explained. “Minutes after a hit, the Palestinians would be taking fragments of a missile bearing the name of an Israeli company out of the car. More than that, we wanted a deterrent effect. Every buzz in the sky over Gaza and you’d see thousands fleeing in all directions. They never had a minute’s peace. The population of Gaza reached a state where anything that contained electronic radiation, from a cellphone to a toaster, looked to them like something that could attract Israeli missiles. Absolute panic.”
The IDF began putting out statements after each hit. Simultaneously, the Shin Bet, which until the start of the intifada had been extremely reluctant to maintain contacts with the media, distributed excerpts of the relevant Red Page—summaries of material about the dead man’s actions—to various news outlets. Israel was now completely rearranging its communications policy—fighting, in effect, a propaganda war.
Explaining, even highlighting, what had long been state secrets required new language and new euphemisms. “Intifada,” with its overtones of a popular uprising, for instance, was replaced with “war of suicide bombers.” The deaths of innocent civilians during an assassination operation became known as nezek agavi—“accidental damage”—which, over time, became the acronym NAZA.
“ ‘Assassination’ or ‘elimination’ or ‘killing’ or—perish the thought—‘murder’ were all very jarring, not appropriate for us to use,” said a senior official in the prime minister’s office. “So we looked around for terms that are one step removed, free of emotion, sterile, which expressed the evil that we were trying to prevent by doing what we did.” At first they used “PAAMON,” which means “bell” but also is an acronym for “preventive action,” but that wasn’t catchy enough. After that, a few more proposals were discarded, including the code words long used by the intelligence community, like “negative treatment.” Finally, they picked the term sikul memukad—Hebrew for “targeted preventive acts.” The phrase, which in Hebrew has a kind of high-tech, clean sound to it, communicated everything that the defense establishment wanted to signal to the outside world.
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