Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Dubai was the most convenient place to kill al-Mabhouh. The other areas where he spent time—Tehran, Damascus, Sudan, and China—had efficient secret services and posed far more problems for a Mossad hit team. Dubai, on the other hand, was teeming with tourists and foreign businessmen and had, the Mossad believed, much weaker enforcement and intelligence forces. Dubai was still a target country, officially hostile to Israel, but by this point the Mossad had killed a man in downtown Damascus, and a Syrian general in his own villa. By comparison, a Hamas operative in touristy Dubai would be a relatively easy target.

  Still, the operation called for a large team, divided into smaller squads, which would be able to spot the target when he arrived in Dubai and keep him under surveillance while others set up and executed the actual hit in the hotel room, making sure it would appear that al-Mabhouh had died a natural death. They would then need to remove all evidence and leave the country before the body was found, just in case foul play was suspected anyway.

  Not everyone thought that al-Mabhouh was important enough to justify the effort and risk. Some even told Dagan that he did not meet the basic conditions required for negative treatment. Everybody in the Mossad agreed that al-Mabhouh deserved to die, but in order to carry out an operation in a target country, he also had to be a serious danger to Israel, one whose elimination would have a profoundly disruptive effect on the enemy’s equilibrium. In truth, al-Mabhouh did not fit either criterion. But after all of their previous success, Dagan and other Mossad officials were so full of self-confidence that they went forward anyway.

  A team of Caesarea operatives had first trailed al-Mabhouh in Dubai in 2009, not to kill him but to study his movements and, mostly, to be certain that he was their man. Four months later, in November, the Plasma Screen crew went to Dubai again, this time to eliminate him. They poisoned a drink that was brought to his hotel room, but either they got the dose wrong or he didn’t swallow enough: Al-Mabhouh only fainted. When he came to, he cut short his visit and returned to Damascus, where a doctor attributed his fainting spell to mononucleosis. He accepted this diagnosis and didn’t suspect that an attempt on his life had been made.

  This turn of events caused profound frustration within the Mossad. People and resources had been risked, and still the job had not been finished. Holiday insisted that there would be no mistakes this time: The hit squad would not leave Dubai before they saw with their own eyes that al-Mabhouh was dead.

  One objection arose at the January 15 meeting near Meir Dagan’s office. The documentation department would have trouble preparing credible new fake passports for the entire team. There were more than two dozen people going to Dubai, and some would be entering the same country with the same identities and cover stories for the third time in barely six months. In the Mossad’s more timid days under Halevy, the operation would have been canceled for that reason alone. But Dagan and Holiday decided to take the risk. They would send the team in with the existing papers.

  Holiday didn’t expect any problems anyway. The discovery of the body was liable to arouse suspicion, and an investigation might ensue, he acknowledged, but that would happen only long after the team had returned to Israel. Zero evidence would be left for the police to work with. No secret of the Mossad would be given away. No one would be caught. The whole thing would be forgotten quickly.

  Dagan dictated the final decision to his chief assistant: “Plasma Screen—authorized for execution.” As the participants left, he added, in his deep voice, “And the best of luck to all.”

  —

  THE FIRST THREE MEMBERS of the Plasma Screen team landed in Dubai at 6:45 on the morning of January 18. Over the next nineteen hours, the rest of the team—at least twenty-seven members altogether—arrived on flights from Zurich, Rome, Paris, and Frankfurt. Twelve of their passports were British, six Irish, four French, four Australian, and one German. All were genuine, but none actually belonged to the person using it. Some were borrowed from their owners, residents of Israel with dual citizenship, some were obtained under false identities, some were stolen, and others belonged to the deceased.

  At 2:09 A.M. on the 19th, “Gail Folliard” and “Kevin Daveron” landed. They were to be the main pivots for the operation—controlling the forward command room, the communications personnel, the guards, and the lookouts. They checked into separate rooms at the Jumeirah hotel. Both paid cash, though many of the other team members used debit cards issued by a company called Payoneer, the CEO of which was a veteran of an IDF commando unit.

  The reception clerk Sri Rahayu took their money and gave Folliard room number 1102 and Daveron 3308. Before going to sleep, Folliard ordered a light meal from room service. Daveron took a soft drink from his minibar.

  “Peter Elvinger,” the commander of the mission, landed at the airport twenty-one minutes after Folliard and Daveron, carrying a French passport. After clearing passport control, Elvinger pulled a countersurveillance maneuver (maslul in Hebrew), exiting through the terminal door, waiting three minutes, then turning around and going back inside for a predetermined meeting with another team member who had come to the airport earlier by car. All members of a hit team, as a standard procedure, constantly used maslul, frequently changing clothing and disguises, such as wigs and false mustaches. This is to make sure that one is not being followed and to enable a switch of identities between various stages of an operation.

  Elvinger and his contact spoke for less than a minute before the commander took a cab to his hotel.

  By early afternoon, the entire team was waiting tensely for the arrival of al-Mabhouh. He was expected to fly in at three o’clock, but there were still some gaps in the intelligence. The Plasma Screen team did not know where he would be staying, when and where he would be having meetings, or how he would move from place to place. The team, which couldn’t cover the whole city, might lose him, and it was impossible to plan in advance how to get close enough to kill him. “It’s the kind of hit,” a veteran operative said, “where the target dictates how and when he is to be made dead.”

  Some of the team members had deployed to three hotels where al-Mabhouh had stayed in his previous visits. Another surveillance squad was at the airport, passing time with what appeared to be idle telephone chatter. The remaining personnel, seven people, remained with Elvinger in another hotel, waiting.

  Al-Mabhouh arrived at 3:35. A team tailed him to the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel, and a message was sent to the operatives at the other hotels, telling them they were clear to leave their posts. The team members made extensive use of cellphones, but in order to avoid direct links between their numbers, they dialed a number in Austria, where a simple switchboard installed in advance put the call through, either to another phone in Dubai or to the command post in Israel.

  The crew members already in the lobby of the Al-Bustan Rotana were wearing tennis clothes and carrying rackets, though, curiously, without the usual accompanying covers. After al-Mabhouh got his room key, two of them entered the elevator after him. When he got out on the second floor, they followed at a discreet distance and noted that he was staying in room 230. One of the two men reported this, by way of a cellphone call routed through Austria, before the two returned to the lobby.

  Once Elvinger knew al-Mabhouh’s room number, he made two phone calls. The first was to the Al-Bustan Rotana, to book a room. He asked for 237, directly across the corridor from 230. Then he called an airline to reserve a seat on a flight to Munich via Qatar later that evening.

  A little after 4 P.M., al-Mabhouh left the hotel. The team trailing him noticed he was taking precautionary measures, doing his own kind of maslul. He had good reason to do this: Almost all of his comrades in Hamas since the late 1980s had died unnatural deaths. But his moves were simple and unsophisticated, and the team had no trouble keeping eyes on him.

  —

  KEVIN DAVERON WAITED IN the Al-Bustan lobby for Elvinger, who arrived
at 4:25, handed Daveron a suitcase without a word, and then went to the registration desk. The security camera clearly captured his red-covered European Union passport. After checking in to room 237, he gave the key to Daveron, again without a word, and left the hotel without his suitcase.

  Two hours later, four men came to the hotel, in two pairs. All wore baseball caps that hid their faces. They carried two large bags. Three of them were Caesarea “executioners.” The fourth was an expert at picking locks. They went directly to the elevators and to room 237. An hour after that, at 7:43, the surveillance team in the lobby was relieved, replaced with fresh eyes—four hours after they’d first arrived, the fake tennis players finally left the lobby.

  At ten o’clock, the crew tailing al-Mabhouh reported that he was heading back to the hotel. Daveron and Folliard kept watch in the corridor while the lock picker began working the lock on the door to 230. The idea was to reprogram it so a Mossad master key would open the door without being logged, but at the same time not disrupt the normal functioning of the proper key. A tourist stepped off the elevator, but Daveron quickly engaged him in some innocent, distracting conversation. The tourist saw nothing, the lock was picked, and the team entered the room.

  Then they waited.

  —

  AL-MABHOUH TRIED TO ESCAPE back into the corridor. But two pairs of strong arms gripped him. A third man gagged him with one hand and, with the other, pressed to al-Mabhouh’s neck an instrument that uses ultrasound waves to inject medication without breaking the skin. The instrument was loaded with suxamethonium chloride, an anesthetic known commercially as Scoline that is used in combination with other drugs in surgery. On its own, it induces paralysis and, because it causes the muscles used in breathing to stop working, asphyxiation.

  The men maintained their grip until al-Mabhouh stopped struggling. As the paralysis spread through his body, they laid him on the floor. Al-Mabhouh was wide awake, thinking clearly, seeing and hearing everything. He just couldn’t move. Foam formed at the corners of his mouth. He gurgled.

  Three strangers stared at him dispassionately, still lightly holding his arms, just in case.

  That was the last thing he saw.

  The executioners checked his pulse in two places, as they had been instructed to do by a Mossad doctor, making sure that this time he was really dead. They removed his shoes, shirt, and trousers, placed them neatly in the closet, and put the body into the bed, under the covers.

  The entire episode took twenty minutes. Using a technique developed by the Mossad for such occasions, the team closed the door in such a way that it seemed to have been locked from the inside, with the chain slid into place. They hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle, knocked twice on the door of 237 as a mission-accomplished signal, and then disappeared into the elevators.

  Folliard left one minute later, Daveron four minutes after that, then the surveillance team in the lobby. Within four hours, most of the team was out of Dubai, and none were left twenty-four hours later.

  In Tel Aviv, a mood of self-satisfaction reigned, an atmosphere that was later described as “the euphoria of a historic success.” Everyone involved—Meir Dagan, Holiday, the hit team—believed another mission had been expertly accomplished. Dagan reported the kill to Netanyahu. “Al-Mabhouh,” he said, “won’t bother us anymore.”

  —

  HOTEL SECURITY FOUND THE body the next afternoon, after no one answered the maid’s repeated knocks throughout the day. There did not seem to be any cause for alarm, however. A middle-aged merchant dead in bed in a locked room with no signs of struggle or trauma was likely indicative of nothing more than a heart attack or maybe a stroke. Al-Mabhouh’s body was taken to the morgue, his death recorded and catalogued under the bogus name on his passport. The matter was given no more or less attention than any other dead middle-class foreigner in Dubai.

  In Damascus, however, Hamas officials were beginning to wonder why the man they’d sent to broker several arms deals hadn’t reported back as scheduled. A day later, on January 21, a local envoy asked around at police stations and morgues until he found al-Mabhouh’s unclaimed body in a refrigerated drawer.

  A Hamas official contacted the Dubai police chief, Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, and told him that the dead man with the Palestinian passport was, in fact, a top member of their organization. He told Khalfan that the death almost certainly had not been from natural causes and that, more likely than not, the Mossad had been behind it.

  Khalfan, fifty-nine years old and highly decorated, had made it his personal mission to rid his country of criminals and foreign agents who used Dubai as a base for carrying out illegal activity. “Take yourselves,” he yelled into the phone, “and your bank accounts and your arms and your fucking counterfeit passports and get the hell out of my country!”

  Still, he couldn’t have the Mossad wandering around killing people, either. Khalfan pulled the body out of the morgue for an autopsy. The results were not definitive, and it was not possible to determine whether al-Mabhouh had been murdered, but Khalfan’s basic assumption was that the Hamas official had been right.

  —

  ONE DISADVANTAGE ISRAELI OPERATIVES have, in comparison with their American or British counterparts, is that they have to use fake passports. A CIA squad can easily be outfitted with legitimate U.S. State Department passports, albeit under assumed names, and they essentially have an endless supply—one identity just buried under the next as needed. American and British passports are accepted everywhere in the world and rarely draw undue attention.

  Israeli passports are not. They are useless for getting into many Asian and African countries—countries where the Mossad is occasionally interested in killing someone or conducting some other covert op. The Mossad commonly forges copies from other, less suspicious countries. In the post-9/11 world, however, counterfeiting passports had become a more complicated business.

  Documents that were sloppily made or have been used too often could endanger a mission and operatives’ lives. So when Halevy scrubbed missions for lack of enough proper papers, it wasn’t solely out of timidity. And when Dagan bullied rushed passports and identities from reluctant technicians, that was bold leadership only until it went horribly wrong.

  Dagan had allowed the Plasma Screen team to use the same identities four times in Dubai. It was not difficult for Khalfan to get a list of everyone who entered the UAE shortly before al-Mabhouh and then left right after he died. Nor was it difficult to narrow that list down by comparing it with those who came and went the previous three times al-Mabhouh visited. That gave Khalfan names, which could then be cross-referenced with hotel registries, which almost always have cameras recording the front desk. Soon the police knew who came when, where they stayed, and what they looked like.

  Assassins prefer cash, because it is anonymous; it generally cannot be traced. Credit cards—or prepaid Payoneer debit cards—can be. A cluster of calls to an Austrian switchboard will be logged and, if someone is looking, noticed. So, too, will the numbers that the switchboard calls. Reconstructing the movement of every Mossad operative in Plasma Screen and the connections among them, therefore, was not terribly difficult. It only required sifting through a lot of data.

  From multiple CCTV cameras, Khalfan assembled a video narrative of the entire operation. It included bits of clumsy maslul for good measure. For instance, the camera above the door to one hotel’s bathroom showed Daveron entering bald and coming out with a full head of hair, without even noticing that he was on camera, although it was not hidden. This was not something that would have given the team away in real time, but the sloppy execution of the identity switch certainly made things easier for the investigators.

  Khalfan then held a press conference and put the entire video on the Internet for the world to see. He called on Dagan to “be a man” and own up to the hit. He demanded international arrest warrants
for Netanyahu and Dagan, and Interpol actually did issue arrest warrants for all twenty-seven members, though under their assumed names.

  The countries whose passports Israel had used were furious. Many of them quietly cooperated with the Mossad, but not to the point of allowing their citizens, fictitious or not, to be dragged into assassination plots. Some governments ordered the Mossad representatives in their countries to leave immediately and would not allow the agency to replace them for several years. All of them cut back on their collaboration with the Israeli agency.

  It was a calamity born of hubris. “I love Israel and love the Israelis,” said one of the former chiefs of German intelligence. “But your problem has always been that you disparage everyone—the Arabs, the Iranians, Hamas. You’re always the smartest and think that you can fool everyone all of the time. A little more respect for the other side, even if you think that he’s an ignorant Arab or an unimaginative German, and a little more modesty would have saved all of us from this awkward mess.”

  On one level, none of that mattered in Israel. The harsh condemnations it was subjected to on the international stage—combined with similar condemnations the nation regularly received for its treatment of the Palestinians—produced an upsurge of patriotism. On Israel’s carnival holiday, Purim, which fell a few weeks after the story broke, a popular costume was that of a pistol-packing tennis player. Hundreds of Israelis with dual citizenship volunteered their passports to the Mossad for use in future operations. The organization’s website was flooded with inquiries about joining up.

  Things were different, however, inside the agency. The exposure and the negative attention the Mossad got was terribly damaging on an operational level, despite the fact that Khalfan never managed to prosecute any of the perpetrators. Whole sections of the Mossad’s operations were shut down, both because so many operatives had had their cover blown and because of the need to develop new procedures and methodologies, after the old ones had been all over the media.