Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

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  ON SEPTEMBER 11, JIHADIST hijackers flew two airliners into the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field after the hijackers were overpowered by passengers.

  “In one swoop, the complaints against us ceased,” said Major General Giora Eiland, head of Israel’s National Security Council. “It simply dropped off the [international] agenda.”

  Decades of Israel trying to explain its drastic measures to the rest of the world were suddenly made unnecessary. Everyone, for a time, seemed to understand. Sharon immediately ordered the intelligence organizations to give the Americans all of the files for “Blue Troll,” the code name for the development of Al Qaeda in Sudan, and other relevant intelligence. Later, he ordered the Shin Bet and the IDF to share their experience with guests who came from abroad to learn from the country with the world’s best counterterror program.

  “There was a stream of people arriving here,” said Diskin, who hosted the senior guests. Sharon issued instructions, as part of his relationship with Bush, “to show them [the Americans] everything, to give them the lot, to allow access to everywhere, including the Joint War Room, even during interdiction operations.” The Americans were most interested to find out how the integrated assassination system of all the intelligence arms worked, and how Israel had developed the capability to execute a number of operations simultaneously. The very system internationally condemned only weeks earlier was now a model to be copied.

  “The attacks on 9/11 gave our own war absolute international legitimacy,” Diskin said. “We were able to completely untie the ropes that had bound us.”

  WHEN AVI DICHTER WAS a young case officer in the Shin Bet, he questioned a man named Salah Shehade, a social worker from the Gaza Strip. Shehade was twenty-four years old, from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, where he’d been a brilliant student, accepted for engineering and medical studies by universities in Turkey and the Soviet Union. But Shehade’s family was poor, and he had to settle for studying social work in Alexandria, Egypt. When he graduated, he got a job in Al-Arish, on the Sinai Peninsula, close to the border with Gaza.

  That was where Dichter first noticed him, in 1977. “He was different,” Dichter said. “Well groomed, carrying a kind of James Bond briefcase. Altogether, he made a good impression.” Dichter thought he might be able to recruit Shehade as an agent or collaborator.

  Nothing came of their meeting.

  After five years in the social services, Shehade joined the faculty of the Islamic University of Gaza, later becoming dean of students as well as serving as a preacher at one of the city’s mosques. In the course of his activities, he met Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas. The two became very close. Shehade was entranced by Yassin’s charisma, his knowledge, and his vision of establishing a Muslim theocracy in all of Palestine. In Shehade, Yassin found a man with remarkable command and management skills.

  Yassin revealed to Shehade the big secret: that beneath the cloak of welfare work and religious activity, he was planning to set up a military-terrorist apparatus to operate against Israel. Shehade was made head of this project. He was arrested in the Shin Bet’s first campaign against Hamas (which was acting under another name at the time) in 1984, convicted, and released two years later. He was arrested again in 1988, convicted of a large number of terror-related offenses, and sentenced to ten years. But even from prison, he commanded the military wing of Hamas.

  In September 1998, he completed his sentence, but he was held in administrative detention after that—a controversial measure similar to the United States’ imprisonment of detainees without trial in Guantánamo; his release, according to the Shin Bet, would be “an immediate and certain danger to the security of the region.” The long years in Israeli prisons gave him the status of a hero in Gaza.

  In 2000, the Palestinian Authority appealed to Israel to release Shehade and some of his comrades, in a bid to appear concerned for all of the state’s citizens in the eyes of the Palestinians, including those members of Hamas who enjoyed great popularity. Salah Shehade, the Palestinian Authority told the Israelis, was a pragmatic man, an administrator with a humanitarian background, unlike the more radical Sheikh Yassin.

  It was a time of great hope, just before the Camp David Summit. Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were in close touch with each other, trying to speed the peace process along. Israel wanted to make gestures of good faith so that the Palestinian Authority might win over skeptics on their side, too. Hamas activity was also at an unprecedentedly low ebb, thanks to the Shin Bet’s successes.

  Israel agreed to the request. Shehade signed a pledge that he wouldn’t go back to terrorist activity, which was customary for prisoners released by Israel, and the Palestinian Authority stood as guarantor.

  In retrospect, the Israelis who agreed to the release might seem to have been naïve, “but our feeling then was that there was really hope,” said a former Shin Bet operative.

  For four months after his release, Shehade avoided illegal activities, but then the intifada erupted and he returned to the battlefield. “Since then,” according to his Shin Bet file, “Shehade’s positions have become more extreme and he has turned to activities of incitement, direction, guidance, and involvement in the planning and execution of murderous terrorist operations and in the militant leadership of the Hamas organization.”

  Almost thirty years after Avi Dichter tried to recruit Shehade, the Shin Bet was building a thick file on the man they code-named Flag Bearer. The two had met many times during Shehade’s years of incarceration (during which, under various kinds of duress, he also informed on his fellow prisoners). Shehade was “the person who formed the principal threat to us, more than Yassin,” Dichter said. “Unlike Yassin, he was educated and had experience in management, something that gave him extraordinary operational ability.”

  Shehade initiated and oversaw the development of new combat techniques, such as firing mortar rounds at armored vehicles in a flat trajectory and using explosive devices against tanks. He came up with novel ways to deploy suicide bombers, using boat bombs and tanker truck bombs. He was also responsible for the introduction of the high-trajectory Qassam rocket, which transformed the way Hamas fought Israel. The head of the Shin Bet in the southern region understood his importance: “He himself, with his own mouth, gives concrete orders for carrying out attacks, lays down terror policies, and issues instructions for when the attacks should take place. He is the driving force; he is the attacks.”

  According to the Shin Bet file, Shehade had direct involvement in attacks that killed 474 people and wounded 2,649 between July 2001 and July 2002. He was placed under intensive surveillance, but because Shehade operated out of Gaza, it wasn’t possible for Israel to arrest him. Nor did the Palestinian Authority appear willing to enforce its guarantee that Shehade wouldn’t attack Israelis.

  So Shehade’s name was put on a Red Page, and Operation Flag Bearer was put in motion.

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  IN ANY TARGETED KILLING mission, before the trigger was pulled, the identity of the person about to be killed had to be confirmed by two independent sources in real time. The process of “framing” was designed to ensure that the right person died, “and not his friend, his brother, his double, or some passerby,” said Avi Dichter. The Shin Bet, AMAN, and the air force invested huge efforts into ensuring that there would never be any errors. “We must not allow another Lillehammer to occur,” Dichter repeated over and over again. On many occasions, JWR commanders aborted missions rather than risk hitting the wrong man.

  In practice, “framing” a target was far more difficult than it might sound. In many cases, one of the two required sources was a Palestinian agent who knew the target and had to identify him from a concealed position at the final stages of the operation. The Shin Bet and AMAN’s Unit 504 had many sources, but “these guys were not our chief rabbis,” said Dichter, i
mplying that their moral standards, as traitors to their people and their friends, left something to be desired. “We had to treat them with a great deal of skepticism.”

  The JWR also had a rule that if visual contact with a confirmed target was lost, the framing would be canceled and would have to begin again. If, for instance, a target got into a car after being positively identified but then ducked under the roof of a gas station where he couldn’t be seen, the process had to restart. This sort of situation happened many times, often because of overcast skies, and frequently meant that the hit had to be scrapped entirely.

  Due to these strict identification procedures, the Shin Bet had a sterling accuracy record. “One hundred percent accurate framings,” Dichter said. “Regrettably, not in every case was the target destroyed, but in every case where we attacked the target that we wanted to attack.” What’s more, the targeted killings were having their intended effect. By the middle of 2002, Israel’s war against suicide terrorism was beginning to show results: The number of Israelis being killed by suicide bombers was on the decline. After eighty-five Israeli deaths in March, there were only seven fatalities in July, seven in August, and six in September.

  And yet, though enormous efforts were devoted to ensuring accurate framing of the target, much less effort was put into determining that the target was alone and that there were no innocent civilians nearby. Despite the rules, safeguards, and redundancy, Israel was now executing targeted killing operations at such a scale that mistakes were bound to be made, and though there were relatively few of them, when they did happen, innocent people died.

  Sometimes, too, the decision-makers would deliberately consider whether it was permissible to kill people around the target if he could never be reached when he was alone. In such deliberations, the IDF and the Shin Bet would ask the International Law Department to send its representatives to sit with them in the Joint War Room. “It puts us ILD folks into a very complicated situation,” said Daniel Reisner, chief of that unit. “For it’s clear that if a lawyer was present and he didn’t say no, it’s as if he was saying yes.”

  The chief military advocate general was co-opted to the General Staff forum and was made a partner to top-secret security consultations. The Shin Bet made its dossiers on the targeted killing candidates available to the lawyers for as long as they wanted to study them. Reisner and the ILD were frequently present in the JWR when the hit was being executed. Their presence was “legal cover,” in Finkelstein’s words, that the security people felt they needed in case they were ever prosecuted, in Israel or abroad.

  The ILD’s main consideration was the practical application of “proportionality,” which in theory demanded that the damage inflicted by Israel would not exceed the benefits. How many innocent lives, if any, is Israel permitted to place in jeopardy in order to kill a dangerous terrorist?

  “The terrorists,” said Reisner, “fully exploited our sensitivity about harming the innocent. They used to pick up children in their arms to cross the street, surround themselves with civilians. One time, I was present in the JWR when a missile was fired at a terrorist standing on a roof. Then, all of a sudden, we saw him pick up a kid. Of course, I immediately gave an order to divert the missile into open ground.”

  The lawyers found it hard to formulate a uniform rule on the question of collateral damage and casualties. “Judge every case on its own merits,” said Reisner. “However, we had one clear rule: We were all parents; we could not approve of killing children. We never, ever signed off on an assassination operation like that.”

  Whenever intelligence showed in advance that there was “positive knowledge of the presence of children” in the hit zone, the operation was not authorized. However, the presence of a few adults who were connected in one way or another to the condemned man would not necessarily stop an operation, even if those adults had no links to terrorist organizations. The same went for wives, friends, and various kinds of transporters, like taxi drivers.

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  OPERATION FLAG BEARER WAS a particularly thorny case. At least twice, according to Shin Bet records, authorization for a hit on Flag Bearer was withheld for fear of harming innocents. The first time was on March 6, 2002. Shehade had been placed with a high degree of certainty in a south Gaza apartment, but because of the presence of a large number of civilians in the same building, along with the knowledge that his wife, Leila, and possibly also his fifteen-year-old daughter, Iman, were with him, the attack was called off.

  Three days later, a suicide bomber sent by Shehade blew himself up in Café Moment, near the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, killing eleven civilians.

  On June 6, another attempt on Shehade was called off, for similar reasons. Twelve days after that, a suicide bomber from the Hamas military wing killed nineteen passengers on a bus in Jerusalem.

  The frustration in the Israeli security establishment was palpable. As IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon said, “I told my American counterparts about this business, and it exasperated them. I told them that at first we held back because his wife was with him, that he never moved without her. From their angle, that was insane. ‘What,’ they asked me, ‘because of his wife you didn’t attack?’ Their criteria regarding collateral damage was very different from the suspenders that we’d tied our own hands with.”

  In July 2002, the defense minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, approved another plan to kill Shehade, this time by blowing up the apartment. However, in this case, the restrictions regarding civilian casualties were different.

  Once again, “if there are women or children close to said apartment,” Ben-Eliezer wrote, “the operation is not authorized.” But Shehade’s wife was now an exception. If she happened to be in the apartment at the time, the operation could still go forward. Men, whether they were neighbors or passersby, guilty or innocent, were also an exception. They would all be allowed to die.

  “In the end, we had no choice,” Yaalon said. “There was nothing else we could do. You saw more Jewish blood being spilled, again and again, as time went by. I did not delude myself that [Hamas] without him would stop carrying out terror attacks, but his ability to have terrible attacks executed—because of his experience, because of his know-how, because of his connections—was unparalleled.”

  Shehade moved often, but he was spotted on July 19 in a three-story building in the densely populated Al-Daraj neighborhood of northern Gaza City, populated mainly by refugees.

  Intelligence from human sources indicated that the ground floor was made up of empty storerooms, which made it a perfect building on which to drop a bomb. It just had to be done quickly, before Shehade moved again.

  Deputy director Yuval Diskin was not eager to go ahead. He demanded that the intelligence desk officers gather more information. Even if the target building was empty, it was surrounded by tin shanties that likely had entire families living in them. He wanted the feasibility of a ground operation—a sniper, for instance—to be gamed out. Performance research (the air force department responsible for forecasting the outcome of attacks) estimated that there would be “heavy damage” to the shanties.

  Serious doubts had been raised in IDF discussions as well. The head of the General Staff Operations Directorate recommended waiting forty-eight hours, “to clear the tin shacks and make sure there’s no one living there.” Deputy chief of staff Gabriel “Gabi” Ashkenazi also expressed reservations about executing the operation before more information was known.

  But the pressure to eliminate the elusive Shehade was too great. A Shin Bet southern region commander rejected Diskin’s appraisal, because his own intelligence reports suggested that at night the tin shanties abutting Shehade’s building were not inhabited. He appealed to Shin Bet chief Dichter, who approved the immediate assassination of Shehade by a bomb from an air force fighter.

  AMAN chief Aharon Zeevi-Farkash supported this decision. “If we do not get rid of people
like Salah Shehade, more and more Israelis will get hurt,” he later said, recounting the decision. “In situations like this, Palestinian civilians are liable to get hurt.” He added, “When you have to decide between two children, I prefer that the Jewish Israeli child won’t weep.”

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  THE PILOT CLIMBED INTO his F-16 fighter, sitting on the tarmac at Hatzor, the air force base in south-central Israel. His plane was armed with a one-ton bomb. Two half-ton bombs would have limited the damage and contained the blast area, but it was impossible to know exactly where in the house Shehade would be. There was no point in destroying just the second floor if he was sleeping near the door to the street. A bigger bomb would make sure he was dead.

  The operation had been canceled three times already, first because the nineteenth was a Friday and the Muslim day of rest, when the streets would be crowded, and again on the next two nights, the twentieth and twenty-first, because Shehade’s daughter was believed to be with him.

  On the evening of July 22, however, the team was divided. Although everyone agreed that Shehade’s wife was at the apartment, and that the orders permitted them to continue on with the operation anyway, only some of the team believed that the intelligence indicated that the daughter was not at home.

  Yuval Diskin, who was directly in charge of the targeted killing operation, was not entirely convinced by the estimation that there was a low likelihood of Iman being in the apartment.

  Diskin phoned Dichter and told him about his doubts, and recommended calling off the attack, but, according to an official inquiry, “the director of the Shin Bet weighed all of the data and estimations and reached the conclusion that there was a very high probability that Iman was not in the house, and accordingly he ordered that the operation be executed.”