Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Shortly afterward, American and Israeli satellites hovering above Syria documented the total destruction of the site. Olmert sent a secret message to Assad via Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, saying that if Assad acted with restraint, Israel would refrain from publicizing the attack. This would save Syria the embarrassment of being exposed as having acted in gross violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it was a signatory. The world also wouldn’t have to know that Syria had just gotten years’ worth of expensive military research and technology blown up by the Jewish state—a situation that would almost necessitate some sort of face-saving retaliation. Keeping the whole thing quiet was better for all involved.

  The big winner in Operation Out of the Box, as it was code-named, was Dagan, whose agency had produced the information that exposed the Syrian project and who, said CIA director Hayden, “turned out to be right, while my analysts turned out to be wrong.”

  After the success of Out of the Box, Olmert loosened the government’s purse strings still further, granting the Mossad the biggest budgetary allocations it had ever received. One senior Mossad official said, “There wasn’t a single activity that was postponed or canceled for financial reasons. The organization grew incredibly. Whatever we asked for, we got.”

  “Arik [Sharon] and Rabin were far more hesitant than I was in approving missions,” said Olmert with a satisfied smile, adding, “I okayed three hundred [Mossad] operations during my term as prime minister, and only one of them failed, and we kept the lid on that one, too.”

  —

  FROM THE TIME HE took over the Mossad, one of Dagan’s top priorities was killing Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah chief of staff. This goal was not unique to Dagan: Israeli intelligence and defense had been trying to kill Mughniyeh for almost thirty years. The enemy that had caused Israel the most damage operationally and politically in the preceding decades was Hezbollah, and Dagan thought that one man was the primary driving force responsible for its achievements. “Mughniyeh,” he said, “is a combination of chief of staff and defense minister. [Secretary General] Nasrallah may be the political leader, but he is neither a military commander nor the man who does all the real deals with the Syrians and with the Iranians. Nasrallah, at the most, says yes.”

  Mughniyeh was, in fact, an international fugitive, high on the most-wanted lists of forty-two countries. Dozens of nations had issued warrants for his arrest, and the FBI offered a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture. In Lebanon in the 1980s, Mughniyeh had killed hundreds of Americans in car bombings, and he’d kidnapped and tortured to death several high-ranking U.S. officials. “The Americans remember,” Dagan said. “They appear to be liberals”—in Israel, “liberal” also means forgiving and merciful—“but they are far from that.”

  The problem was, no one could find him. Mughniyeh was a phantom. He was aware that Western intelligence agencies were investing immense resources to locate him, so he devoted equally immense effort to eluding capture—using fake documentation even inside Lebanon, limiting his contacts to only a small, close circle of family members and trusted associates, and employing a number of extreme measures to secure his communication.

  But in July 2004, after a senior Hezbollah commander, Ghaleb Awali, was killed when his Mercedes exploded, the organization made a memorial film about him that was screened at internal gatherings. The Mossad got hold of a copy, and it was shown in December to a group of experts from Unit 8200 and the Mossad. During an all-night session, they scrutinized it in the hope of learning new details about the shadowy group.

  Late in the night, while everyone was sitting together in a room in Mossad headquarters with their eyes glued to the screen, one of the 8200 officers yelled out, “That’s him. That’s Maurice.”

  Maurice was the code name for Mughniyeh.

  The picture on the screen showed Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, in his brown cleric’s robe and black turban, looking at an enormous tabletop computer monitor upon which a map was displayed. Opposite him stood a man, his face mostly concealed, but revealed for fractions of a second as he moved: bearded, bespectacled, in camouflage uniform and a cap, pointing out different spots on the map for Nasrallah. This man was Imad Mughniyeh.

  Finally, they had at least some sort of lead. In the days that followed, various ideas were tossed around, including trying to trace the videographer in order to recruit him as an agent, or setting up a straw company for the supply of items like the tabletop computer their target was using, which could be booby-trapped and detonated when Mughniyeh was nearby.

  Dagan shot them all down. The Mossad wasn’t ready yet. “Don’t worry,” he told the staff. “His day will come.”

  —

  THE BREAKTHROUGH CAME THANKS to the persistence and inventiveness of Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, in AMAN. The former commander of 8200 had spurred the development of more and more methods to deepen the SIGINT penetration of the enemy. Together, Zeevi-Farkash’s AMAN and Dagan’s Mossad jointly devised a new operating system called HUGINT, a combination of HUMINT and SIGINT—in other words, a way of using the Mossad’s agents in order to improve the capability of 8200 to intercept the enemies’ messages, and vice versa.

  One of the developers of the HUGINT method was Yossi Cohen (the director of the Mossad at the time of this writing), who is known by his colleagues as “the Model” because of the care he takes with his grooming and appearance. In 2002, Cohen was appointed head of the special-ops department of Junction, the Mossad’s agent-recruitment division. Cohen was considered one of the most brilliant recruiters in the agency’s history, one of the few who ever managed to break into Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and recruit Mossad agents from among their numbers. While under cover as various European businessmen, he was able to use his vast general knowledge and insights into human nature to enlist a huge number of agents, perfecting the Mossad’s HUGINT methodology in the process. In recognition of these achievements, Cohen was awarded the Israel Security Prize, the country’s highest decoration for defense-related achievements.

  In 2004, Dagan nominated Cohen to be chief of the Mossad’s Iranian operations. Thanks to Cohen’s agents and HUGINT, 8200 succeeded in cracking parts of the Iranian government communication systems, allowing Israel to penetrate deeper into the dense network of communications between commanders of the Radical Front. This generated more information about Mughniyeh: more clues, more eavesdropped computer communications and cellphone calls, more agents who had heard or seen something relevant.

  The top men of the Radical Front, the Israelis eventually learned, preferred to hold their meetings in Damascus, where, under the protection of the Syrian secret services, they felt secure. After Hezbollah’s victory in the 2006 war, Mughniyeh believed that Israel would greatly increase its efforts to kill him and Nasrallah. So he surrounded the secretary general with an elite crew of bodyguards and persuaded him not to make public appearances or to appear live on television, and also to spend as much time as possible in Hezbollah’s command bunker, underneath Beirut’s Dahiya quarter.

  As for himself, he relocated from Beirut to Damascus, both for security reasons—he felt safer in a city that was under the control of the Syrian intelligence services, which were considered tough and professional—and because much of his business was conducted in the Syrian capital.

  Although the protection of Suleiman’s “shadow army” was very strong, “Mughniyeh did not suddenly become any less cautious in Damascus,” Dagan said. He allowed only a close circle of people to know that he had moved to Damascus, and even fewer knew where he lived, how he moved around, and what name was written in his fake passport.

  Nevertheless, Israel managed to get an agent inside that close circle around Suleiman, and “it was in Damascus that we knew more about him than when he was in Beirut,” Dagan recalled.

  Damascus was, however, the capital city of a target c
ountry and, along with Tehran, the most dangerous place for the Mossad to operate. It was clear that the numerous arrivals and departures of Mossad operatives in and out of the country, necessary for them to plan and prepare for an operation, would expose them to too much scrutiny, whatever their cover. And because of the extremely sensitive nature of the information, Dagan decided that this time he could not use Arab informants.

  So once again, Dagan decided to ignore a long-held, ironclad rule of the Mossad—he turned to another country to assist with an assassination. He invited himself to another meeting with Hayden.

  The CIA, however, is forbidden to carry out or support assassinations, under Executive Order 12333. While both countries believed it was permissible to kill people, they had somewhat different legal perspectives. The United States would not normally participate in the execution of someone in a country with which America was not at war or involved in an armed conflict.

  Ultimately, the CIA legal advisers came up with a solution whereby it would be legal to strike Mughniyeh in Syria, based on the principle of self-defense, since Mughniyeh was sending his men from Syria to Iraq to spur the Shiite militias to carry out terror attacks against American personnel.

  President Bush then granted Dagan’s request for assistance, but only on the condition that it be kept a secret, that Mughniyeh alone would be killed, and that Americans would not be the ones to do the actual killing. Prime Minister Olmert himself guaranteed this to the president. (Even years after the event, Hayden refused to say anything about the American involvement.)

  The United States still had an active embassy in Damascus, and American businessmen could enter and exit Syria relatively freely. This enabled the CIA, with assistance from the NSA, to send in its own people and use its local agents for the mission.

  As one of the commanders of the operation put it, “This was a gigantic, multi-force operation, with crazy resources invested by both countries and, to the best of my knowledge, the most ever invested to kill a lone individual.”

  With help provided by the Americans, Mughniyeh was eventually located. They discovered that he often met with his comrades from the Radical Front at various intelligence installations: office buildings heavily guarded by Syrian police officers and soldiers, and safe houses with undercover plainclothes guards. They also found out that Mughniyeh regularly visited three good-looking local women whom Suleiman had supplied for his rest and relaxation.

  Mughniyeh never took his bodyguards along on these visits to the women, which exposed him to surveillance and to his adversary’s operational activities in a place that wasn’t under his control. They were “a significant field security error,” said one of the commanders of the operation. “At the end, after so many years, even the most careful of men becomes full of confidence that nothing can happen to him.”

  But an operation in any one of these places would make it very difficult for the Israelis to keep their promise to the Americans not to harm anyone else but Mughniyeh, not to mention the enormous risks that would have to be taken by the actual operatives.

  Mossad planners came up with a number of ideas, but all were ruled out. There was only one real possibility: to strike Mughniyeh on his way from one of the sites to another. There were still a number of serious difficulties, though. It was unclear how they would be able to follow him and eliminate him while he was riding or walking, since he was almost constantly accompanied by bodyguards and traveled on different routes and at different times, which the Mossad could not predict in advance. It was also unclear how the operators would be able to make their getaway before the airfields and ports were alerted and shut down.

  The deliberations dragged on for months, as Dagan rejected plan after plan. Then, in November 2007, the head of the Mossad’s technological division, N., came into Dagan’s office with a proposal for an operation that would eliminate Mughniyeh using a bomb detonated by remote control. This bomb would ostensibly kill only Mughniyeh, with no collateral damage, and would also give the operatives on the ground enough time to escape the scene. Dagan said he was prepared to give the plan the go-ahead, though he believed that the chances of its succeeding were very slim.

  The basic assumption of N.’s plan was that it would be impossible to follow Mughniyeh around Damascus, so instead they would have to find a way to place the explosive device into something that was frequently physically close to him. A cellphone, like the one that killed Yahya “the Engineer” Ayyash in 1995, was always an option, but that was ruled out because Mughniyeh kept changing them regularly. The one item he used consistently was his vehicle, at the time a luxurious silver Mitsubishi Pajero SUV.

  The Mossad knew that both Mughniyeh and his bodyguards frequently examined the inside and the bottom of the car to see if it had been tampered with. But there was one place they never checked: the spare tire cover clamped onto the back of the vehicle. With American aid, the components of a sophisticated explosive device were smuggled into Syria, as well as a tire cover identical to the one on Mughniyeh’s car.

  After months of preparations and meticulous surveillance, in early January 2008, Mossad operatives managed to get close to the parked SUV while Mughniyeh was paying a nocturnal visit to one of his paramours. They took out the spare tire and replaced the cover with a new one, with the bomb inside. They also planted a number of miniature cameras and a transmitter so that Mossad operatives in Damascus could see what was happening just outside the car.

  The Mossad’s explosives experts promised that if the bomb was detonated right when Mughniyeh was about to enter the car, the explosion would kill him. But in order to be completely sure, they suggested that the bomb be detonated when the car was parked alongside other vehicles, so that the blast would bounce off them and cause considerably more damage.

  For six long weeks, the hit team followed Mughniyeh, reporting to a special war room isolated from the rest of the Mossad, where only a select few were permitted to enter. Again and again—thirty-two times in total—the circumstances were almost right, but each time the operation was called off at the last second, either because Mughniyeh was accompanied by someone else or because there were other people nearby or because he got in the car too quickly—the bomb was effective only if he was outside the car.

  On the morning of February 12, Mossad operatives watched Mughniyeh approach the car with another man. “Hey, look, it’s Suleimani,” one of the operatives yelled out. Suleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard strongman, was leaning on the Pajero, standing very close to Mughniyeh. It was clear from watching them talk (there was no audio feed) that the two were very friendly with each other. Excitement about the opportunity to kill both men ran through the war room. But first they had to get approval. Dagan was at his home, in Rosh Pina, mourning the death of his mother, who had died two days earlier. But I, the Mossad official commanding the operation, called Dagan, who in turn called Prime Minister Olmert. Olmert, however, refused to let them proceed. The explicit promise given to the president of the United States had been unequivocal—to kill Mughniyeh, and Mughniyeh alone.

  That same day, at around 8:30 P.M., Mughniyeh arrived at a safe house in the upscale Kafr Sousa neighborhood of Damascus, just a few hundred yards from one of the most important headquarters of Syrian intelligence. He met with several aides of General Suleiman and two Hezbollah officers and, at about 10:45, left the meeting before it had ended. He exited the building, alone this time, and walked up to his Pajero in the parking lot. As he moved between his vehicle and another car parked alongside it, right before he opened the door, the order to execute was given.

  The bomb exploded. Imad Mughniyeh, thirty years a phantom, was finally dead.

  —

  THE SYRIANS WERE IN shock. A guerrilla fighter and tactical master who for three decades had managed to evade the intelligence and military resources of Israel, the United States, and forty other countries had been assassinated literally ri
ght beneath their intelligence headquarters—some of the building’s windows were shattered by the explosion.

  “Just think what this does to the Syrians,” said Dagan. “Right in the heart of the most guarded place in Damascus. Think of what it does to Assad, what it does to Hezbollah, when they grasp that they’re not safe even in Damascus.”

  “You give the adversary a sense of total intelligence penetration, a sense that you know everything, both about the organization and about the host country,” he added.

  President Assad realized the magnitude of the disaster and wanted to keep as far away as possible from the whole affair. He sent condolences to Nasrallah but suggested that no mention of the attack be made in Syria. He even suggested that the wrecked Pajero, with the body placed in it, be transferred under cover of night to Beirut, to make it look as if Mughniyeh had died there.

  Nasrallah refused. He was furious with the Syrians for failing to look after his comrade. Some Hezbollah members—as well as Mughniyeh’s wife—even accused the Syrians, wrongly, of being involved in the killing. Assad was forced to deny and apologize over and over again. Nasrallah issued orders that no Syrian representatives be invited to the funeral in Beirut.

  Mughniyeh’s funeral was held in pouring rain. The procession of Shiite mourners encountered Sunnis who had just taken part in a memorial for their beloved leader, Rafik Hariri, who had been murdered on Mughniyeh’s orders exactly three years before. Such is life in Lebanon.

  Thousands managed to cram into the enormous hangar in south Beirut where Hezbollah occasionally held its larger rallies. Tens of thousands were left outside. Mughniyeh’s casket was carried to the podium while the mourners reached out and tried to touch it, to be blessed by his honor and holiness on his final journey. An honor guard of Hezbollah militiamen in khaki uniforms flanked the casket on the podium, together with the sober-faced leaders of the organization, dressed in their black robes. On the walls, and in the hands of the mourners, were thousands of posters bearing the last photograph of Mughniyeh, which only now, after his death, was allowed to be revealed. The caption read, “The great martyred hero.” The crowd cried out in grief for revenge.