They received anonymous phone calls Interview with “Sally,” September 2016. Burrows and Windrem, Critical Mass, 442, 461, 466–80.
a Canadian rocket scientist, formerly employed by NASA The Mossad file on Bull includes much of his contracts and correspondence with Iraq, mainly with General Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s brother-in-law and head of Iraq’s arms acquisition organization (author’s archive, received from “Bogart”).
erected the cannon at Jabal Hamrayn AMAN sent all the material it and the Mossad had collected about Bull to the Ministry of Defense’s Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (known by its Hebrew acronym Maf’at), and to the IDF’s artillery corps. These units examined Bull’s computations and ran a few computer models. The surprising result was that the super-cannon was scientifically feasible and that Bull was not hallucinating. Interview with Gilad, July 31, 2012.
Bull never took seriously the threatening anonymous phone calls Bayonet’s intelligence officer Moshe “Mishka” Ben-David said, “In the few cases in which we concluded that the local authorities did not intend to do anything about it, there were shipments that caught fire or exploded, and there are a few gentlemen who are no longer among us today.” Interview with “Romeo,” January 2013. Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, 306.
they leapt out from behind the door Interview with “Romeo,” one of the heads of Caesarea who coordinated the hit against Bull, May 2000.
“If you go to work tomorrow…you’ll end up like this” During the same period in which they were contending with the problem of the Condor and the super-cannon, Israel’s security chiefs also had to debate the possibility of eliminating an Israeli Jew: In 1986 a low-ranking technician at Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona, Mordechai Vanunu, who felt discriminated against because of his Moroccan, non-European origins and had espoused extreme left-wing ideas, smuggled a camera into Israel’s most secret facility and photographed, among other things, a hydrogen bomb. He sold his photographs and a trove of other information to the Sunday Times in Britain, which planned to publish the material. The Mossad heard about it from one of its oldest sources, press magnate Robert Maxwell. “You have to get Vanunu,” a leading Israeli journalist named Dan Margalit told Prime Minister Shimon Peres, during the off-the-record talk, just before he was about to interview him. “Dead or alive.” Peres firmly objected: “We don’t kill Jews,” he said. Peres told me that the Mossad had asked him for permission to eliminate the man, but he had flatly refused: “I prevented his slaying. I ordered that he be brought back to stand trial in Israel.” Margalit, a prominent commentator on current affairs, is convinced to this day that Peres was wrong: “They should have killed Vanunu abroad, or simply left him alone. ‘We don’t kill Jews’ is a racist expression. Either Israel strikes at people who are a grave danger to its national security or it does not, without considerations of race or religion.” Vanunu eventually was lured by a female Mossad operative to fly from London—where the organization was reluctant to act—with her to Rome, where he was seized, drugged, and smuggled onto an Israeli merchant ship. He was tried and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Interviews with “Sally,” February 2015, “Raphael,” May 2011, Yechiel Horev, July 2004, Benny Zeevi, February 12, 1999, Peres, January 30, 2005, and Margalit, November 17, 2016.
No one turned up at the office the next day Ronen Bergman, “Killing the Killers,” Newsweek, December 13, 2019. “The Man Who Made the Supergun,” Frontline (PBS), February 12, 1992. Burrows and Windrem, Critical Mass, 164–77.
“make the fire eat up half of Israel” “Iraq Chief, Boasting of Poison Gas, Warns of Disaster if Israelis Strike,” New York Times, April 2, 1990.
“This huge and very sophisticated network” Interview with Shapira, January 31, 2015.
“had more luck than sense” On January 16, 1990, the night after the United States and its allies launched Operation Desert Storm, Saddam ordered a barrage of missiles fired at Israel—the same missiles Israeli intelligence hadn’t known were being developed, and later on were sure would “fall into the sea like stones.” The defense chiefs proposed attacking Iraq, but under American pressure, this was ruled out, as President Bush feared for the integrity of his international coalition if Israel were to intervene. For many years, Saddam looked like the only leader in the Arab world who had dared attack Israel and had proved that its threats against him were empty. Israel’s humiliation profoundly influenced the subsequent discussion about whether plans should be made to assassinate Saddam.
UN inspectors then found what the Mossad had missed Interviews with Rolf Ekeus, September 1996, and Hans Blix, August 2000.
Saddam remained a clear and present danger to Israel Barak was relying on a psychiatric profile of Saddam Hussein drawn up by a team of psychologists and psychiatrists in AMAN, in which they stated, “Saddam perceives the world as a brutal, cold place of constant deathly danger. In this system, there is no room for moral laws and there are no behavioral codes that cannot be violated because of social norms….Saddam is not daunted by war, even a war against strong forces. On the contrary, he is likely to view a war against strong forces as proof of Iraq’s importance and power….Saddam’s aspiration to obtain nuclear arms…is connected to his psychological need to create for himself an unassailable sense of power….He never forgets and never forgives anyone who hurts him…Saddam will not hesitate to use non-conventional weapons against Israel…other costs and moral compunctions will not stand in his way.” (AMAN, Research Department, Psychological Portrait of Saddam Hussein, Special Intelligence Survey 74/90, November 1990.) Interview with Barak, July 1, 2013.
“the formation of a team to examine the possibility” CoS Barak Bureau to Amiram Levin, Deputy CoS, head of AMAN, head of Mossad, “Sheikh Atad” (Thorn Bush) [the operation’s code name], January 20, 1992 (author’s archive, received from “Julius”).
preparations be made for execution of the plan CoS Bureau to Deputy CoS, head of AMAN, director of Mossad, Commander of Air Force, and Amiran Levin, Thorn Bush, March 17, 1992 (author’s archive, received from “Julius”).
“we could have saved the world an entire decade” Interview with Barak, January 13, 2012.
Many ideas were put forward Interview with Nadav Zeevi, October 15, 2012.
The Israelis closely followed the treatment Tulfah was receiving Interview with “Zolphi,” September 2012.
they would launch the missiles and kill him On October 8, Prime Minister Rabin asked once more, “Should the State of Israel kill the incumbent leader of another country?” Amiram Levin answered: “Imagine that someone had killed Hitler in 1939.” Eventually Rabin was convinced and told the CoS, and the heads of AMAN and the Mossad, that he “approves of the target.” Azriel Nevo to CoS, head of AMAN, and head of Mossad, Computer Workshop (one of the code names for the operation), October 13, 1992 (author’s archive, received from “Julius”).
the man playing Saddam was among the…wounded Interviews with Nadav Zeevi and Eyal Katvan, the soldier playing Saddam, October 15, 2012.
a fierce political storm and an ugly quarrel Interviews with Barak, May 10, 2013, Sagie, June 3, 2012, Lipkin-Shahak, April 3, 2012, Avital, December 29, 2010, and Nadav Zeevi, October 15, 2012. A detailed account of the wars waged in the upper echelons of Israel following the accident may be found in the book by Omri Assenheim, Zeelim, 221–304 (Hebrew).
CHAPTER 21: GREEN STORM RISING
on their way to meet His Imperial Majesty Part of the story of that meeting was first published in Bergman, Secret War with Iran, 15–18.
The shah’s foreign policy was based on close…links with the United States Ibid.
intimate intelligence alliance with Israel Ibid.
“seemed to us to have significant potential dangers” Interview with Merhav, April 22, 2014.
convinced that he had been visited by the Archangel Gabriel Me
nashri, Iran Between Islam and the West, 134 (Hebrew).
Khomeini reshaped Shiite Islam Taheri, The Spirit of Allah, 27–28, 131 (Hebrew). Menashri, Iran Between Islam and the West, 131 (Hebrew).
“Please kill us” Taheri, Spirit of Allah, 132–33 (Hebrew). Interviews with Uri Lubarni, December 26, 1997, and Tsafrir, October 2, 2015.
attracted more and more students Bergman, Secret War with Iran, 13–14.
“Who do you think you are?” Bergman, Point of No Return, 50 (Hebrew).
The distribution of the Khomeini cassettes was observed Ibid., 51–52.
Only Lubrani was granted an audience Interview with Merhav, October 5, 2011.
Iran would remain an ally of Israel and the United States Bergman, Secret War with Iran, 17.
Would the Mossad please kill Khomeini? Interview with Tsafrir, October 2, 2015.
“I cannot accurately evaluate whether the risk is justified” Interview with Alpher, May 18, 2015.
This episode was another demonstration Bakhtiar himself went into exile in Paris, where a decade later he was killed by assassins sent by Iranian intelligence. Bergman, By Any Means Necessary, 316–17 (Hebrew).
The dream of an Islamic republic became reality Interview with Itzhak Segev, January 5, 2007. Bergman, Point of No Return, 74 (Hebrew). Taheri, The Spirit of Allah, 273–94 (Hebrew).
But Khomeini’s rise was the culmination of years of foment Israel also tried to exploit the Iran-Iraq war in order to preserve military relations with Iran, supplying it with a lot of weaponry (Operation Seashell is described in detail in Bergman, Secret War with Iran, 40–50). Still later, Israel and the United States became embroiled in the Iran-Contra affair, a shameful and abortive effort to get Iran to trade Western hostages taken by Hezbollah in exchange for weapons, all behind the back of Congress. Bergman, Secret War with Iran, 110–22. Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s adviser on terrorism, Amiram Nir, ran the Israeli side of the operation. He briefed Vice President Bush on the affair, and his account was liable to cast a shadow over Bush’s 1987 presidential campaign. Nir died under mysterious circumstances in Mexico in 1988 (Hungarian Octagon file in author’s archive, received from “Cherry”).
“We felt helpless in the face of this new threat” Interview with Robert Gates, November 7, 2012.
was now their bitterest enemy The failure of the bid to free the hostages in Tehran made a deep impact on the American establishment and was one of the reasons for Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s opposition to the operation to capture or eliminate Osama bin Laden in May 2011. When Gates, by then the defense secretary, was in the White House situation room and saw one of the U.S. helicopters crash in Abbottabad, he remembers, “I said to myself, there you go, the catastrophe is beginning again.” Interview with Gates, November 7, 2012.
one of Khomeini’s closest allies Bergman, Point of No Return, 147, 162 (Hebrew).
to eventually extend the Islamic revolution…to Lebanon Kramer, Fadlallah: The Moral Logic of Hizballah, 29 (Hebrew).
Almost three years after the fall of the shah Shapira, Hizbullah: Between Iran and Lebanon, 134–37.
Assad concluded from the Israeli invasion Bergman, Secret War with Iran, 58–59. Shapira, Hizbullah, 135–39.
“He built up an apparatus for squeezing blood out of Israel” Interview with Dagan, May 19, 2011.
Iran and Syria signed a military alliance Shapira, Hizbullah, 144–60 (Hebrew).
He was one of the Shiites swept up in the fervor of Hezbollah Taken from the interview with the parents conducted by a Hezbollah historian and broadcast on Al-Manar in a film on the life of Qassir in 2008, http://insidehezbollah.com/Ahmad%20Jaafar%20Qassir.pdf.
This secrecy was convenient for Israel’s defense establishment Only in 2012, and following my publication on the matter (By Any Means Necessary, 160–62), was a secret inquiry committee set up in the Shin Bet. The committee’s report determined that there was indeed high probability that this was an act of suicide terrorism perpetrated by Qassir. Despite all of this, the Shin Bet left the report’s top-secret classification in force and turned down my request to hand it over. Interviews with Tal, November 24, 2016, and Bandori, September 11, 2017.
the new militant force rising from the smoking ruins of Lebanon Interview with Raz, January 20, 2013.
“We missed the process” Interview with Yekutiel Mor, January 12, 2009.
“coming out of the office of Mohtashamipur” Interview with David Barkai, July 18, 2013. The CIA was no less surprised or uninformed about the new movement. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 390.
“joined a training camp of Force 17” Interview with al-Hajj, August 14, 2014.
Mughniyeh wanted to belong to something larger Thanks to Dr. Shimon Shapira for material on the boyhood of Imad Mughniyeh.
“an extremist, uninhibited psychopath” Interview with “Eldy,” January 2015.
“Hezbollah’s spiritual compass” This epithet was coined by Martin Kramer in his book on Fadlallah, The Moral Logic of Hizballah.
the Syrians and Iranians wanted the occupiers driven out Jaber, Hezbollah, 82.
“We believe that the future has surprises in store” Fadlallah, Taamolat Islamia, 11–12.
By “sacrifice oneself,” Fadlallah was referring The earliest precedent may well have been the biblical figure Samson, who took his own life to wreak vengeance upon the Philistines by pulling down the pillars of the house in Gaza. And, according to legend, a fanatical Muslim sect on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Hashashiyoun (“hashish users,” from which the word “assassin” derives) would drug young men and persuade them to go on murderous missions from which they would not return. The Japanese also had their kamikazes in World War II, and the Peruvian terrorist organization Shining Path employed suicide tactics as well.
detonating the ton of explosives stuffed inside Kenneth Katzman, Terrorism: Middle Eastern Groups and State Sponsors, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, August 9, 1995.
drove trucks packed with huge quantities of explosives Hala Jaber, Hezbollah, 77, 83.
241 peacekeepers were killed Robert Baer said that the CIA had evidence that Yasser Arafat was involved in the planning of the three 1983 Beirut attacks. This information, Baer says, was never published because of the agency’s desire to maintain a working relationship with the PLO. In addition, the KGB station chief in Beirut at the time, Yuri Perfilyev, said that Arafat’s moves were coordinated with Mughniyeh. Interviews with Robert Baer, August 2001, Yuri Perfilyev, October 2001 (with the help of Isabella Ginor). Bergman, Point of No Return, 164–65 (Hebrew).
body parts fell on the Shin Bet HQ in Beirut Interview with Dov Biran, January 28, 2013.
facing a new type of enemy In mid-1983, the ambassador ordered Mughniyeh to begin wielding a new and highly effective weapon: He and his Hezbollah men began hijacking planes and abducting individuals in order to achieve political and symbolic goals. The United States failed to secure the release of most of the abductees. Two high-ranking Americans were kidnapped as well—Col. William Higgins, who was serving with the UN, and William Buckley, head of the CIA station in Beirut. Later on it was learned that they had both been tortured and murdered. The frustration and sense of impotence in the United States swelled. Two Mossad sources told me that at the end of 1983, they were informally told by the CIA that “our friends in Washington would welcome” severe measures against Iran and Hezbollah leaders. “It was clear that they were urging us to carry out assassinations,” one source told me. At that time the CIA’s hands were tied by presidential executive order number 12333, but there were those in the government who were, according to these sources, asking Israel to act on their behalf. Bergman, By Any Means Necessary, 163–80 (Hebrew). Interviews with Barkai, July 18, 2013, and “Salvador,” May 2012.
“th
at they chose a modus operandi” Interview with “Sally,” June 2015.
Mohtashamipur opened the book Wright, Sacred Rage, 89.
“I hope that your health will soon return” Shahryar Sadr, “How Hezbollah Founder Fell Foul of Iranian Regime,” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, July 8, 2010.
Hezbollah wasn’t one man’s guerrilla force—it was a movement Nada al-Watan, “Interview with Hassan Nasrallah,” Beirut, August 31, 1993.
Dagan dispatched two Lebanese agents A few months later, Hezbollah arrested two Shiites from the village of Tibneen and accused them of shooting Harb. Under torture they confessed that they had been working for years for Israeli intelligence and had carried out the assassination mission. Shortly afterward, they were executed by a firing squad. Dagan said that Hezbollah caught the wrong men: “It’s no problem to nab someone and force him to confess. The people that did it were never captured.” In 2008, a Lebanese criminal living in Denmark, Danny Abdallah, admitted that it was he who shot Harb. Since then he has been on Hezbollah’s hit list and his extradition has been requested by the government of Lebanon.
sent a cable of condolences Tehran Times, February 20, 1984.
eighty people were killed and two hundred injured In his book Veil, Bob Woodward claims that the Saudi Arabians helped William Casey carry out the operation, as revenge for the suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks that Mughniyeh organized. On the other hand, Tim Weiner said that the United States was not involved in the incident and that he believes Israel was responsible. This version is supported by several other sources. A senior Mossad official said that the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, a terrorist movement established by Meir Dagan in Lebanon, was responsible. Interviews with Tim Weiner, June 12, 2016, “Pier,” December 2012, and Kai Bird, October 11, 2012. Bergman, Secret War with Iran, 73. Woodward, Veil, 407–9 (Hebrew).
Rise and Kill First Page 87