Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Faithful to the wishes of his departed comrade, Nasrallah remained in his bunker and did not appear at the funeral. Giant screens transmitted his eulogy to the masses, inside and outside the hangar. In solemn words, he eulogized his top fighter, “who devoted his life to martyrdom, but waited many years to become a martyr himself.”

  He mentioned the assassination of his predecessor as secretary general, Abbas Mussawi, which had only strengthened the resistance and led to more and more humiliation for Israel. “The Israelis do not realize what the blood of Sheikh Abbas did for Hezbollah, the emotional and spiritual uniqueness that it gave us,” he said. “Let the world write down, and upon my responsibility, that [with Mughniyeh becoming a shahid] we have to historically mark the beginning of the fall of the State of Israel.”

  The crowd responded, “We are at your service, O Nasrallah.”

  Nasrallah ended with a threat. “You crossed the borders, Zionists. If you want an open war”—a war outside of the borders of Israel and Lebanon—“let it be an open war anywhere.”

  Nasrallah and the Iranians appointed at least four people to take over Mughniyeh’s duties. But the open war never came to pass. The same intelligence penetration that had allowed a bomb to be planted in Mughniyeh’s Pajero also allowed Israel to stop all of Hezbollah’s planned attacks. Only one succeeded, a suicide terrorist who blew himself up next to a busload of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, killing six and wounding thirty.

  In his death, the legends about Mughniyeh proved to have been true. “His operational capabilities were greater than those of the entire quartet that replaced him taken together,” said Dagan. Mughniyeh’s absence was made especially conspicuous by the organization’s inability to respond to the assassination. “If Mughniyeh was around to avenge his own death,” an AMAN officer said, “the situation would likely have been completely different. Lucky for us, he wasn’t.”

  —

  IN LESS THAN SIX months, General Suleiman had lost a nuclear facility he’d managed to keep secret for five years, and a close confidant and ally who’d cheated death for decades. Humiliated and furious, he ordered Scud missiles, some armed with chemical warheads, prepared for launch into Israel. He demanded that Assad strike back with aggression.

  Assad refused. He understood his general’s rage, but he also understood that an open attack on Israel—to say nothing of a chemical attack—was not in Syria’s best interests. This behavior “took discipline,” Olmert observed in a meeting with House Minority Leader John Boehner. “Bashar is no dummy.” Olmert told his close advisers that “Assad, the man we all love to hate, is displaying moderation and pragmatism in his response.”

  Like Assad, Olmert was forced to moderate his underlings, many of whom believed Assad should be killed, too. After all, he had aligned himself with terrorists and Iranians. “All the stories about the progressive Western eye doctor had turned out to be wishful thinking,” one high-ranking AMAN officer said. “We have here an extremist leader. And unlike his father, he’s unstable, with a tendency for dangerous adventures.”

  But Olmert rejected the idea. “It is precisely with this man,” he said, “that a peace agreement can be reached.”

  Suleiman was a different case. “Suleiman was a real shit, with a remarkable capability for organization and maneuvering,” Olmert said. In many respects, Suleiman was the second-strongest man in Syria, with an office across the hall from Assad’s in the presidential palace and, as a top-secret NSA memo noted, “a hand in three primary areas: internal Syrian issues connected to the regime and the party; sensitive military issues; and Lebanon-related issues through which he was apparently connected both to Hizbollah and to others in the Lebanese political arena.”

  This time, though, the Israelis knew there was no chance the United States would get involved. Mughniyeh, who had killed hundreds of Americans, was one thing. A Syrian general, the high-ranking official of a sovereign state, was something entirely different. On their own, then, the Israelis began planning a way to dispose of Suleiman.

  After the Mughniyeh operation, security arrangements in Damascus had been stepped up, and any idea of conducting the operation there was ruled out. Suleiman was closely guarded and constantly escorted by a convoy of armored vehicles, so the possibility of using an explosive device was also rejected. Meir Dagan reached the conclusion that the Mossad would need assistance, and, as it happened, the IDF was eager to take on the job. The glory bestowed on the Mossad after Mughniyeh’s killing had stoked the military leaders’ desire to carry out the assassination of a key figure themselves, so that “the finger on the trigger would be of a soldier, not a Mossad man.”

  On Friday, August 1, 2008, at about 4 P.M., Suleiman ended his day’s work at the palace earlier than usual and set out northward in his secure convoy. He was heading to the summer residence he had built on the Mediterranean coast, near the port city of Tartus. It was a spacious villa with a large patio of polished stone, overlooking the sea. That evening, the general invited a number of local dignitaries to dine with him and his wife, Rahab, and his close advisers. They were attended by a staff of servants and, of course, bodyguards.

  The party was sitting at a round table, with a magnificent view of the sun setting into the sea. Suleiman’s wife sat to his left, his chef de bureau on his right. Two men smoked fat Cuban cigars.

  Suddenly the general lurched back in his chair, then hurled forward and fell facedown onto his plate. His skull was split open, fragments of bone and flecks of brain matter and blood splattering all over Rahab. He’d been shot six times, first in the chest, the throat, and the center of his forehead, then three times in the back. Only Suleiman was hit. He was dead before his face hit the plate.

  Within thirty seconds, the two Flotilla 13 snipers who had fired the shots from two different spots on the beach were already on rubber dinghies, headed to a navy vessel. Back on the beach, they had left behind some cheap Syrian cigarettes, part of a disinformation campaign to make the assassination look like an internal Syrian affair.

  As a frantic search for the shooters got under way in the villa, the commander of Suleiman’s bodyguards called the presidential palace to notify Assad that his closest adviser had been killed. Six bullets, from two directions, and no one ever saw the assassins. Assad listened, and remained silent for a minute. “What has happened has happened,” he said firmly. “This is a military secret of the highest level. Bury him now, straight away, without telling anyone. And that is that.” The funeral was held the next day, in utmost secrecy.

  “This was the first known instance of Israel targeting a legitimate government official,” the NSA concluded.

  —

  MEIR DAGAN WAS NOW the head of a completely different Mossad from the one he had inherited six years earlier. No longer the timid institution unnerved by its own failed and sloppy operations, Dagan’s Mossad had infiltrated Hezbollah and Suleiman’s shadow army, disrupted the transfer of weapons and advanced technologies between members of the Radical Front, killed Radical Front activists, and even assassinated the long-sought Imad Mughniyeh.

  Dagan had also developed a plan to stall Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which thus far had proven remarkably successful. It was a five-pronged approach: heavy international diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, support to Iranian minorities and opposition groups to help them topple the regime, the disruption of consignments of equipment and raw materials for the nuclear program, and, finally, covert ops, including the sabotage of installations and targeted killings of key figures in the program.

  The idea behind this integrated effort, “a series of pinpoint operations meant to change reality,” in Dagan’s words, was to delay the project as much as possible so that before Iran could build an atom bomb, either the sanctions would cause a grave economic crisis that would force Iran’s leaders to drop the project or the opposition parties would be strong enough to overthrow the governme
nt.

  In support of these efforts, the quadrilateral collaboration between the CIA, the NSA, the Mossad, and AMAN was finally formalized by way of a cooperation pact between Bush and Olmert that included revealing sources and methods (“total mutual striptease,” in the words of one of the prime minister’s aides).

  American intelligence agencies and the Department of the Treasury, together with the Mossad’s Spear unit, launched a comprehensive campaign of economic measures to impair the Iranian nuclear project. The two countries also embarked on an effort to identify Iranian purchases of equipment for the project, particularly items that Iran could not manufacture itself, and to stop the shipments from reaching their destination. This continued for years, through the Bush administration and into that of Barack Obama.

  But the Iranians were tenacious. In June 2009, the Mossad, together with U.S. and French intelligence, discovered that they had built another secret uranium enrichment facility, this one at Qom. Publicly, three months later, President Obama made a dramatic announcement and condemnation, and the economic sanctions were tightened further. Covertly, joint sabotage operations also managed to produce a series of breakdowns in Iranian equipment supplied to the nuclear project—computers stopped working, transformers burned out, centrifuges simply didn’t work properly. In the largest and most important joint operation by the Americans and the Israelis against Iran, dubbed “Olympic Games,” computer viruses, one of which became known as Stuxnet, caused severe damage to the nuclear project’s uranium enrichment machinery.

  The last component of Dagan’s plan—the targeted killing of scientists—was implemented by the Mossad on its own, since Dagan was aware that the United States would not agree to participate. The Mossad compiled a list of fifteen key researchers, mostly members of the “weapons group” that was responsible for developing a detonation device for the weapons, as targets for elimination.

  On January 14, 2007, Dr. Ardeshir Hosseinpour, a forty-four-year-old nuclear scientist working at the Isfahan uranium plant, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement of his death noted that he had been asphyxiated “following a gas leak,” but Iranian intelligence is convinced that he was a victim of the Israelis.

  On January 12, 2010, at 8:10 A.M., Masoud Alimohammadi left his home in an affluent North Tehran neighborhood and walked toward his car. He had been awarded a doctorate in the field of elementary particle physics in 1992 by Sharif University of Technology, and became a senior lecturer there. Later, he joined the nuclear project, where he was one of the top scientists. As he opened his car door, a booby-trapped motorcycle that was parked nearby exploded, killing him.

  The slaying of scientists—people working in government positions for a sovereign state, who were not involved in terrorism in any way—did not go without an internal debate in the Mossad. At one of the operational approval meetings in Dagan’s office, an intelligence officer working under the deputy director, Tamir Pardo, stood up and said that her father was a top scientist in Israel’s nuclear program. “Going by the way of thinking prevalent here,” she asserted, “my father would be a legitimate target for elimination. I think that this is neither moral nor legal.” But all such objections were rebuffed.

  The Iranians, for their part, realized that someone was killing their scientists and began guarding them closely, especially the chief of the weapons group, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was considered the brains behind the project. The Iranians posted cars full of cops around their homes, making their lives a nightmare and pitching them and their families into profound anxiety.

  The series of successful operations also had an additional effect, one that Israel did not initiate but that ended up working to its great benefit: Each member of the Radical Front began to fear that Israel had penetrated their ranks, and thus started devoting huge efforts to locating their leaks and trying to protect their personnel against the Mossad. The Iranians also became paranoid about the possibility that all the equipment and materials they’d acquired on the black market for their nuclear project—for very large sums of money—were infected, and they examined and reexamined each item over and over. These efforts greatly slowed down other aspects of the nuclear project, even bringing some to a standstill.

  Dagan’s Mossad was now once again the Mossad of legend, the agency that historically had been either feared or admired, but never dismissed. The staff were proud to be serving there. Dagan had introduced a boldness to the agency that would have been bravado had it not been so completely and utterly effective.

  MAHMOUD AL-MABHOUH ENTERED THE lobby of the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel just before 8:30 in the evening, one of many guests coming and going at the hotel. Like them, he was captured by the closed-circuit camera over the entrance. He had black hair, a slightly receding hairline, and a thick black mustache. He wore a black shirt and a coat a little too large for him. It was a relatively cold night in Dubai, which is usually very warm.

  He’d been in Dubai for less than six hours, but already he’d met with a banker who was helping him arrange various international financial transactions required to purchase special surveillance equipment for Hamas in Gaza. He’d also met with his regular contact from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who flew in to coordinate the delivery of two large shipments of weapons to the extremist Islamic organization.

  Al-Mabhouh did a lot of business in Dubai. When he flew into the little city-state on January 19, 2010, it was at least his fifth visit in a little less than a year. He traveled on a Palestinian passport—the emirate was one of the few places that recognized papers issued by the Palestinian Authority—which listed a fake name and a fake occupation. In reality, he was a top Hamas operative and had been for decades: Twenty years earlier, he’d kidnapped and murdered two Israeli soldiers, and more recently, after his predecessor, Izz al-Din al-Sheikh Khalil, had been disposed of by the Mossad in Damascus, he’d been in charge of stocking Hamas armories.

  A step or two behind al-Mabhouh, there was a man with a cellphone, following him into the elevator. “Coming now,” the man said into his phone. Al-Mabhouh might have overheard, but he didn’t seem to notice. There was nothing unusual about a tourist in Dubai telling a friend he was on his way.

  Al-Mabhouh was by nature an extremely cautious man. He knew that the Israelis wanted to kill him. “You have to be alert,” he’d told Al Jazeera in an interview the previous spring. “And me, praise Allah, they call me ‘the fox’ because I can sense what is behind me, even what is behind that wall. Praise God, I have a highly developed sense of security. But we know what the price of our path is, and we have no problem with it. I hope that I get to die a martyr’s death.”

  The elevator stopped at the second floor. Al-Mabhouh stepped off. The man with the phone stayed on, going to a higher floor. Definitely a tourist.

  Al-Mabhouh turned left and walked toward his room, 230. The hallway was empty. Out of habit, he quickly scanned the frame of his door and the lock mechanism, looking for nicks, scratches, any hint of tampering. There was nothing.

  He entered the room, closed the door behind him.

  He heard a noise and turned to see what it was.

  Too late.

  —

  THE PLAN FOR THE assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had been approved four days earlier, on January 15, during a hastily arranged meeting in the large conference room near Meir Dagan’s office, after Israeli military intelligence had hacked into the email server used by al-Mabhouh and discovered that he’d reserved a flight from Damascus to Dubai on January 19.

  In that meeting, there were some fifteen people seated around a long table, including representatives of the Mossad’s intelligence, technology, and logistics wings. The most important person at the conference, after Dagan, was “Holiday,” the head of Caesarea. Holiday, who is bald and stocky, had taken it upon himself to personally command Operation Plasma Screen.

  Al-Mabhouh had long been o
n the Israelis’ kill list. A year earlier, the situation on the Gaza Strip border had deteriorated so badly that on December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a large-scale attack to stop Hamas from raining Qassam and Katyusha rockets down on Israeli communities. Hamas was able to fire a great deal of ordnance from the Gaza Strip, thanks to al-Mabhouh’s weapons acquisition and transportation network, and the assistance it received from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

  Israel’s intelligence about Hamas had improved greatly in recent years, and the operation began with the air force’s huge aerial bombardment, code-named Birds of Prey, on the silos where Hamas’s rockets were concealed. The Mossad had learned that the network al-Mabhouh managed had been replenishing the Hamas weapons stockpiles. The weapons were shipped from Iran to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, and from there smuggled via Egypt and Sinai into the Gaza Strip via the multiple tunnels used to avoid the Egyptian border guards and patrols. The Mossad kept track of the shipments at sea and when the trucks left Port Sudan. In January 2009, the Israeli Air Force carried out four long-range raids and destroyed the convoys and the men escorting them.

  “Activities like these did a lot of damage to the smuggling routes from Iran to Hamas,” Dagan said. “Not an absolute impact, not enough to win outright, but a significant reduction.”

  For some reason, however, al-Mabhouh did not travel that day with the trucks, but instead left Sudan by another route. To rectify this, Dagan requested and obtained approval from Olmert for a negative treatment operation against al-Mabhouh. When Benjamin Netanyahu took over from Olmert, in March 2009, he renewed the approval.