Junction’s core personnel were “collection officers” (katsa), case officers who recruited and ran the agents. They were sophisticated professionals, skilled in manipulation.
According to Dagan, however, the collection officers also manipulated the Mossad itself. Dagan described the Junction division he encountered upon assuming his position as “a complete system of falsehood, which deceives itself and feeds itself lies” in order to convince itself and the entire Mossad of its success. “For years, they did whatever they wanted. They recruit a guy who serves tea in some office near a nuclear facility and say they have someone inside the Iranian atom project. They needed to be grabbed by the collar and given a boot in the ass.”
Dagan changed Junction’s procedures and demanded that all agents undergo a polygraph test in order to prove that they were reliable sources. Junction’s collection officers strongly protested subjecting their agents to polygraph testing. “It will express lack of trust; they’ll be insulted and won’t want to work with us again.”
The director harshly dismissed these objections. “Are you an idiot?” he asked one of them. “The man betrays his country, everything that is dear to him. You think that he won’t be willing to undergo a polygraph in exchange for money?”
Dagan said that the resistance to the polygraph was, in effect, an attempt by Junction personnel to avoid “exposing their bluff,” because they had recruited unreliable agents. He made an effort to meet each of the Mossad’s hundreds of case officers throughout the world on a frequent basis: “The agent handler, who had never seen the Mossad director, suddenly sees him every three months, and he takes an interest in him not only on the theoretical level but also in his operations, and asks him where he succeeded and why he failed. This severely hampered the ability of the man’s bosses to later pull the wool over my eyes.”
Once Dagan had put the Mossad on an effective war footing, he also narrowed its mission. He declared that the agency would have only two broad targets. One was any hostile country attempting to attain a nuclear weapon, and Iran’s nuclear project in particular. Importation of equipment and raw materials would be disrupted, stalled, and stopped, facilities already in operation would be seriously sabotaged, and nuclear scientists would be harassed, co-opted, and, if necessary, killed.
The second target was the Radical Front. There were no plans for an all-out war with Iran or Syria, but the Mossad could break the supply lines that funneled weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas and the PIJ. It could also go after individual terrorists, and it could take out the Radical Front’s senior figures, even if they were Syrian generals.
Under orders from Sharon, AMAN chief Zeevi-Farkash agreed to let his military intelligence operation cooperate fully with the Mossad, creating a joint “intelligence pool” in which all intelligence could be shared—an enormous expansion of the Mossad’s practical resources.
To coordinate this vast interorganizational effort, and to head up the Mossad’s hundreds of operations, Dagan appointed Tamir Pardo, the commander of the agency’s operational unit, Rainbow. Formerly an officer in Sayeret Matkal, he had stood next to Yonatan Netanyahu when he was hit by a bullet during the Entebbe hostage operation. Pardo was a courageous operations man with strategic vision and an irrepressible drive. Dagan named him his deputy.
In May 2003, in front of Dagan and the senior command forum of the Mossad, Pardo presented a top-secret plan—the product of an intensive four-month effort—for stopping the Iranian nuclear project. “The starting assumption is that a technologically advanced state with a wealth of resources like Iran, which seeks to attain an atomic bomb, will succeed in doing so at the end of the day,” Pardo began. “In other words, an immediate halt to the project can only be the result of a change of mind or a change in the identity of the political echelon in Iran.”
Some sighs and mumbles were heard in the room, but Pardo continued. “In this situation, Israel has three options. One: to conquer Iran. The second: to bring about a change in the regime in Iran. The third: to convince the current political echelon that the price they’ll pay to continue the nuclear project is greater than what they can gain by stopping it.”
Since the first and second options were unrealistic, only the third option remained—to take overt and covert action that would put so much pressure on the ayatollahs that they would decide to simply give up. “In the meantime, until they reach the conclusion that it’s not worth it for them,” Dagan said in summary, “we must employ a number of means to delay again and again their attainment of a bomb so that at the breaking point, they will not yet be armed with the weapon.”
Dagan had a bold idea for how this could be done: by asking for help from Israel’s friends, even the ones that were ostensibly enemies. He knew that while most of the countries in the Middle East were publicly anti-Israel, in private they were more accommodating and practical. “There is an intersection of interests, not a small one, between us and many of the Arab states,” he said. The interests of most of those states—Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, Morocco, and so on—did not correspond with those of radical Shiite revolutionaries or their allies in Damascus, let alone their heavily armed proxy militias. Those Arab states mostly feared the thought of Iran with a nuclear weapon, maybe more so than Israel.
From an operational standpoint, the intelligence services of those states had a number of advantages over the Mossad: Their operatives were Arabs who spoke the language perfectly, they maintained diplomatic relations with countries hostile to Israel (sometimes quite good relations, at least on the surface), and they could travel in those hostile countries relatively unimpeded. In many cases, they’d also already had spies in Syria, Iran, and Lebanon for many years, due to internal Arab power struggles.
Dagan ordered the Mossad to ramp up its secret liaisons with foreign intelligence bodies. Many of the signal achievements of Israeli intelligence during the following years—the ability to identify, monitor, and strike against terrorists in Lebanon and Syria; the intel about which Iranian embassies were dispatching terrorist cells throughout the world; the information about the ayatollahs’ nuclear project—were a result of this cooperation. While these Arab countries condemned Israel at the United Nations, they were also collaborating with the Jewish state in the most secret of missions.
Dagan’s reforms led to sharp internal opposition and, later, to the resignation of many senior Mossad officials. The Mossad is a closed, tight-lipped organization fanatically committed to keeping its secrets—any cooperation that might require divulging methods and sources to foreign agencies, especially Arab ones, was considered sacrilege. But to Dagan, this was all nonsense, merely an excuse for intellectual and operational decline.
“I thought they were wrong, that it was idiocy to oppose collaboration with other factors [Middle East intelligence agencies] who saw things the way we did,” he said. “The Mossad was obligated to mobilize whatever it could—any resource, any ally—in order to achieve its objectives. I told them to stop talking crap—let’s accumulate our own assets, blue and white, in order to do business with other intelligence agencies. I decided that anything that did not endanger ourselves or our sources could be traded, or otherwise no one would take us seriously.
“Three hundred people quit when I came to the Mossad, a massive exodus,” he said. “Incidentally, I’m glad that some of them left.”
In light of the demand for more and more operations, Dagan also abolished some of the Mossad’s operational security protocols that had been in place for a long time, some of them for decades. Before he took over, if there weren’t enough passports, credit cards, and secure means of communication for an operation, it was aborted, to stay on the safe side. A large number of operations were canceled due to these security protocols.
Not under Dagan. “He would call in the person in charge of the passports unit who had warned that the documentation was insufficiently safe an
d would not stand up to scrutiny,” said someone who attended many discussions in the Mossad chief’s office, “and tell him that if, by the next morning, there were not another five passports ready on his desk, he should have a letter of resignation there instead.”
Dagan confirmed the facts but brushed away any of the concern. “Nonsense. If you dig deep enough, you’ll always get to the shit. It’s all meises [Yiddish for “tales”], excuses for not taking action.”
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DAGAN BELIEVED IN TARGETED killings as an important and necessary weapon, but only if used consistently and as part of a broad arsenal that included other measures—clandestine, diplomatic, and financial. Any single killing could be rationalized by the enemy as a unique, one-time misfortune, and even intermittent assassinations could be dismissed as products of circumstance, a fatal result for the unguarded and sloppy. In order for targeted killings to be strategically effective, they needed to be an ongoing threat.
“Sporadic eliminations are worth nothing,” Dagan said. “Eliminations of senior operational personnel, along with striking at the leadership level as a permanent and ongoing policy, are a very good thing. When I say ‘leadership,’ I mean, of course, in the widest sense. Would I always choose to kill the number one? Not necessarily. I look for the supreme operative echelon, the one that really runs things, that has the most dominant influence on the ground.”
AMAN and the Mossad drew up a list of candidates from the Radical Front for negative treatment. The problem was, they were all in so-called target countries where, as a rule, the Mossad did not carry out such missions. But Dagan decided to change this rule, too.
“When I came to the Mossad, there weren’t real operational capabilities in the target countries,” said Dagan. In order to rectify this, he first had the Mossad create documentation systems (passports, cover stories, etc.) that would allow the operatives to withstand long interrogation if suspicions arose.
Dagan also reversed the long-standing policy of conducting only blue-and-white assassinations—those involving only its own personnel. Dagan preferred to use proxies, based on his experience from the countless liquidations he was involved in during his military service in Gaza and Lebanon. “I’m prepared to cry over the coffin of any such agent or proxy who dies and returns his soul [to his maker]. Believe me, I would shed real tears over him. But I also prefer to see them dead than my [Israeli/Jewish] operatives dead.”
Dagan also pushed the Mossad to update its technology. He didn’t personally understand much of that world, but he realized that it had become indispensable and that the Mossad lagged far behind other countries’ intelligence services, and even other agencies in Israel. He appointed “N.,” a senior operational officer who understood the needs of agents in the field, to head the Technology Division.
The changes Dagan instituted soon began to show their effects. Dagan believed that the time had come for the agency to begin operations and argued that from now on, all targeted assassinations abroad should be under his command, and that they should be run by his deputy, Tamir Pardo.
AMAN opposed this plan, and a vociferous quarrel broke out between the Mossad and AMAN’s Aharon Zeevi-Farkash and Ronen Cohen. Ultimately, Sharon made the decision: Syria was transferred to Dagan’s jurisdiction, and hits in Lebanon were to remain under AMAN’s authority.
In parallel to this secret bureaucratic process, Israel identified a troubling change in the enemy’s bureaucratic structure. The assassination of Sheikh Yassin, in March 2004, effectively removed all of the restrictions he had placed on relations with Iran. “The moment Yassin was taken out of the game, Hamas’s center of gravity was transferred out of the Israeli-controlled territories to the leadership in Syria and Lebanon, and Khaled Mashal became the organization’s strongman,” said the Shin Bet’s Yitzhak Ilan.
Mashal instructed his men, led by Izz al-Din al-Sheikh Khalil, to inform the Iranians that Hamas was now ready to receive any and all assistance from them. The Iranians were pleased: With Hamas becoming a full member, the “resistance” front was now complete. Under Khalil’s supervision, the Iranians began to send missile parts to the Gaza Strip in an effort to increase the range and lethality of the organization’s arsenal. Instructors from the Revolutionary Guard came to Gaza as well.
On September 26, 2004, Khalil got into his car next to his home, in southern Damascus. Just as he sat down, his mobile phone rang. “Ya, Abu Rami, hada Ramzi min Tubas” (“Abu Rami, this is Ramzi from Tubas,” a village in the West Bank). “Yes,” said Khalil, “how can I help you?” The line went dead. A second later, the car blew up and Khalil was dead.
Next on the hit list was Mahmud al-Majzub, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s top man in Lebanon. On May 26, 2006, at 10:30 A.M., he left the PIJ’s office in the port city of Sidon, in southern Lebanon, accompanied by his brother Nidal, who served as his bodyguard. As Nidal opened the driver’s door, a bomb concealed in the door was detonated via remote control by a lookout standing nearby, killing the two men.
“Of course, I don’t take responsibility for these events,” Dagan said of this string of killings, following Israel’s official policy of not claiming responsibility for targeted killings outside its borders. “But as a concept,” he added, “if the State of Israel is dealing with a challenge like Hamas, the PIJ, and suicide terrorism, it’s inconceivable that the Mossad wouldn’t put its shoulder to the wheel.”
The hits against the personnel of Unit 1800, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas constituted a grave loss to those organizations, but they did not change the overall picture. The Radical Front continued to present a serious threat and was still coordinating its actions against Israel.
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THE ISRAELI PUBLIC HAS always been particularly affected by abductions of IDF soldiers. Nasrallah, who well understood this particular sensitivity, ordered his men to conduct as many abduction operations as possible, and he advised his partners in the front to do the same. Some attempts failed. Those that succeeded caused great damage to Israeli morale.
In October 2000, under Mughniyeh’s orders, a special Hezbollah unit abducted three Israeli soldiers patrolling the Israel-Lebanon border. In order to secure the return of the abducted soldiers, Israel consented to a humiliating prisoner-exchange deal with Hezbollah.
The Islamic Jihad prisoners released in the deal resumed terrorist activity immediately upon their return to Gaza, launching a horrific campaign of suicide bombings. These freed prisoners managed to direct eight suicide attacks, in which thirty-nine civilians were killed, before the Shin Bet and the IDF were able to kill them or arrest them once again.
On June 25, 2006, seven Hamas fighters climbed out of a tunnel. They had spent long months digging it in secret, all the way from a well inside the Gaza Strip, under the border fence, and up to a nearby Israeli village. In a daring operation, they crept up behind an IDF encampment, killing two of the soldiers there, wounding others, and dragging one soldier, Gilad Shalit, on the road with them toward Gaza. They hung Shalit’s flak jacket on the fence between Israel and Gaza, sending a message of defiance.
The Shin Bet and the IDF were completely unable to locate the imprisoned Shalit. Though the Shin Bet and AMAN were usually exceptionally effective at both intelligence gathering and operations within Gaza, the guidance Hamas received from Iranian intelligence proved itself. Throughout the entire five years of Shalit’s captivity, Israel had no idea where he was being held.
By the time of the raid, Hamas had already matured into a governing institution: Six months earlier, with Iranian backing, the political wing had won the elections in the Palestinian Authority. Ismail Haniyeh, the elected prime minister—who had survived a number of Israeli attempts on his life, including the 2003 bombing of the conclave of the Hamas leadership (the Dream Team)—traveled to Tehran, where he was promised $250 million in aid. “Iran is the Palestinians’ strategic depth,” he declared during that visit. “We
will never recognize the Zionist regime. We will continue the jihad until Jerusalem is liberated.” He returned to Gaza with $35 million in cash, packed into a number of large suitcases.
Israel responded to the killing of its soldiers and the kidnapping of Shalit with a heavy bombardment on Gaza, killing more than two hundred Palestinians. It also conducted raids in the West Bank, abducting a number of Hamas government ministers. But the organization did not blink: It demanded that Israel release one thousand Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the one Israeli soldier.
Two weeks after Shalit was captured, on July 12, the Radical Front turned up the heat. Hezbollah guerrillas abducted two soldiers patrolling Israel’s northern border. For the Israelis, this was one attack too many, and the new prime minister, Ehud Olmert (the successor of Sharon, who had suffered a stroke), told his associates that he was going “to fuck” Hezbollah once and for all. Arik Sharon had never hesitated to use force, but he had been skeptical of the IDF’s capability to win such a war against Hezbollah’s guerrillas. Olmert was sucked in by the assurances of the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, who was certain that Hezbollah could be defeated from the air, without endangering ground troops. “Except for a donkey carrying a Katyusha here or there,” he believed the air force’s fighter-bombers could cripple the organization’s capacity to strike at Israel.
This was a fatal error, which cost Israel dearly and ended Halutz’s military career. Although the aerial bombardment of Hezbollah’s positions did cause significant damage, its array of bunkers, launchers, and concealed communications systems held up. Israel knew very little about this array, which it called “the nature preserves,” set up under the supervision of Hassan al-Laqqis, on orders from Imad Mughniyeh, using advanced equipment obtained from Iran and Syria. Hezbollah rockets continued to rain down on northern Israel. Eventually, on July 29, the IDF launched a hesitant and ineffectual land invasion. It destroyed some of Hezbollah’s positions, but the IDF also suffered heavy losses before shamefacedly withdrawing two weeks later.
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