The Malaysian recruit, Zainal bin Talib, was tasked primarily with collecting intelligence. This surveillance may have been tied to unconfirmed threat reporting suggesting that Southeast Asian Hezbollah operatives were planning an attack in Israel in 2000. Bin Talib’s intelligence collection was so successful that Hezbollah dispatched him to Israel twice within a year, first in late 1999 and then again in summer 2000. Israeli intelligence services did not learn of his visits until long after they had occurred. Three other Indonesian recruits were selected for similar infiltration missions to Israel, though the exposure of Hezbollah’s Southeast Asian network prevented these recruits from being dispatched on their missions.42
The German operative, a convert to Islam named Stephan Joseph Smyrek (also known as Abdul Karim), was less successful. Forewarned about Smyrek by German security, Israeli authorities arrested him on arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport on November 28, 1997. Like Mikdad before him, Smyrek had a mission to open a new front in Hezbollah’s war with Israel by carrying out a suicide bombing in a heavily populated Israeli city.43
Smyrek was born in Detmold, Germany. His parents divorced when he was four years old, and when his mother remarried, Stephan moved with her and his British stepfather to England, where he attended boarding school from 1982 to 1987. After graduating he returned to Germany, serving in the army (Bundeswehr) from 1989 to 1993. Smyrek reportedly served a short prison sentence for couriering drugs before his 1994 conversion to Islam. He may have been under police protection briefly after testifying against some of his former drug-dealer associates. In Braunschweig, the Lower Saxony city where he lived, he spent time with a conservative Egyptian woman, but the romance ended badly when the woman’s father forbade her from continuing to see Smyrek. Apparently smitten, Smyrek wrote her love songs, including one hinting that he would be engaged in some kind of terrorist operation.44 He studied Arabic, worked odd jobs, frequented a Turkish-owned pizza shop, and attended a mosque. It was there, without direction in life, that Smyrek was recruited into Hezbollah.45
Germany was long a center of Hezbollah activity in Europe, and German security officials saw Imad Mughniyeh, in close concert with Iran, as the key leader of the group’s efforts related to “planning, preparing and carrying out terrorist operations outside of Lebanon.”46 Bassam Makki’s 1989 plot to bomb Israeli targets in Germany offers one stark case in point (see chapter 3), but Hezbollah’s activities in Germany did not end there. In 1994, for example, Germany issued a warning related to the possible entry into the country of “a group sent by Mughniyeh to carry out attacks against U.S. targets.”47 According to Hezbollah scholar Magnus Ranstorp, several senior Hezbollah commanders shared responsibility with Mughniyeh for the group’s “special operations abroad” in Europe, including Hussein Khalil, Ibrahim Aqil, Muhammad Haydar, Kharib Nasser, and Abd al-Hamadi.48
Over time, the Hezbollah support network in Germany would grow. According to the annual reports of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, some 800 members or supporters of Hezbollah lived in Germany in 2002. That number increased to around 850 by 2004 and to 900 by 2005. Among “Arab Islamist groups” in Germany, Hezbollah had become the second largest by 2005.49 That year, a German court deported a Hezbollah member who had lived in the country for twenty years. Though Germany had not banned Hezbollah as a terrorist group, the Dusseldorf court ruled the man was “a member of an organization that supports international terrorism” and refused to extend his visa.50 German security agencies “intensively watch” groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, German minister of interior Wolfgang Schaeuble commented in summer 2006. Clearly referring to Stephan Smyrek, he noted that one reason for his concern was that “in the past, there were attempts to recruit suicide attackers in Germany.”51
According to Israeli intelligence, Smyrek was recruited by Hezbollah spotters in Germany who saw in him “the picture of a Christian European—blond hair, blue eyes.”52 He could travel more freely in the West than a Lebanese Hezbollah operative. His recruitment, an Israeli report concluded, was “made possible by a spotting pool operated by Mughniyeh in Europe, especially in Germany. It enables Hezbollah to spot and recruit Europeans who support and identify with the organization’s goals.”53 At some point, Israeli intelligence believed, Fahdi Hamdar and his cousin Mohammed, Hezbollah talent spotters, noticed Smyrek’s “virulent [expressions of] hatred for Israel” at a Braunschweig mosque, recognized his yearning for focus and purpose in his life, and suggested he consider a trip to Lebanon to attend a Hezbollah military training camp.54
It is unclear when exactly the Hamdar cousins made their pitch or how long Smyrek took to consider it, but by the time his mother visited him in May 1997, his mind was made up. Smyrek told his despondent mother that he was going on a trip and wanted to break off all contact with her. Asked where he was going, he simply replied, “You better not know where I am going or what I am going to do.” His mother had not seen him since he converted to Islam. “I didn’t recognize him,” she would later recount. “He had changed and behaved very strangely.” Within weeks, Smyrek would be in Beirut, his first stop en route to a Hezbollah training camp.55
Wary he might be an informer and keen to see him prove his commitment to the cause, Hezbollah security officials insisted Smyrek visit them in Beirut before his admission to a Bekaa Valley training camp. He arrived in Beirut in August 1997, where he was questioned at length before being accepted as a Hezbollah recruit and sent on for training. Over two months Smyrek trained in weapons and explosives in the Bekaa Valley. Then, having passed the scrutiny of Hezbollah security and completed an intense course, Smyrek was ready to be deployed.56
In November 1997, Smyrek left Lebanon and returned to Germany. His Hezbollah handlers instructed him to travel to Amsterdam, where he claimed to have lost his passport and received a new German passport bearing no evidence of his recent trip to Lebanon.57 Despite this precaution, however, German security services had already picked up on Smyrek’s radicalization, his travel to Lebanon, his return to Germany, and his intent to carry out an attack in Israel. It remains unknown at what point along his journey from German soldier to Hezbollah recruit the German security services identified Smyrek as a person of interest, but by the time he attempted to board an El Al Airlines flight to Israel at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, his name had been added to Interpol’s terrorist watch list.58 Dutch security officials detained Smyrek only briefly at the airport, but by the time they released him he had missed his flight. Dutch authorities presumably used this time not only to question Smyrek but also to warn Israeli authorities of his pending arrival. Smyrek reportedly contacted his Hezbollah handlers, who insisted that the mission go ahead. He boarded the next flight to Israel, during which he reportedly sat next to undercover Israeli officers and was arrested on arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport.59
According to Israeli police, after conducting surveillance of possible attack sites, Smyrek was to meet his Hezbollah handler in Turkey. Based on his surveillance reports (and, presumably, the handler’s assessment of his commitment to carrying out the attack), the handler would decide on Smyrek’s final target and attack plan.60
According to his confession, ever since he converted to Islam and set his heart on becoming a suicide bomber, Smyrek’s attack of preference was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv or Haifa.61 According to Israeli intelligence, Smyrek devised alternative plans, in the event he could not enter Israel, to carry out an unspecified attack targeting the Israeli embassy then in Bonn or murder Israeli diplomats abroad.62 Smyrek’s Hezbollah handlers supported his suicide bombing proposal but instructed him to collect as much information as possible about these alternative targets so that they could make a fully informed decision on the final target at their meeting in Turkey.63 As in Mikdad’s case, local facilitators were to provide Smyrek with explosives for the attack.64
Smyrek’s arrest disrupted these plans. According to Israeli polic
e, Smyrek arrived with $4,000, a video camera, maps of Israel, and unspecified “electronic communication devices.”65 Videotape in his possession when he was arrested showed footage of himself delivering the message Hezbollah requested he make denouncing Israel and proclaiming his desire to be a martyr for Hezbollah.66 Under interrogation Smyrek confessed to plotting a suicide attack, expressed no remorse, and pledged to “continue his efforts to kill Israelis” if given the chance.67 He detailed the basic code he had developed to communicate with his Hezbollah handlers based on references to books he owned.68 He was convicted by an Israeli court and sentenced to ten years in jail for aiding and abetting Hezbollah by planning a suicide attack on its behalf. State prosecutors in Hanover, Germany, also indicted Smyrek for “planning to take his own life and that of others in a bombing attack,” but Israeli prosecutors chose to try him there instead of extraditing him to Germany—a move that created friction with their German counterparts.69 Smyrek still expressed no remorse after his conviction, and declined an offer to serve his time in a German prison.70
Israeli prosecutors were unable to convince German authorities to arrest Fahdi and Mohammed Hamdar for spotting and recruiting Smyrek into Hezbollah. As one former Israeli official wistfully recalled, “The people who recruited Smyrek managed to escape capture. The Germans did not arrest them. It was pretty strange.”71
At the time of Smyrek’s arrest, Hezbollah denied any knowledge of him and insisted the entire incident was an Israeli fabrication.72 But after six years in jail, Israel released Smyrek under the terms of a prisoner swap negotiated with Hezbollah to secure the release of a kidnapped Israeli. Before leaving Israel, Smyrek granted an interview to a German documentary filmmaker. “It is an honor to die for Islam and for Allah,” he said in the interview. “When the order comes you have to carry it out and there is no time to ask if there is a God or not, or to think what will happen after you’re dead, without feeling you simply have to lay down your life as Allah decreed.”73
Smyrek returned to Germany after his release. Though he signed a document renouncing violence as part of his early release from prison, Smyrek had told the documentary interviewer he remained eager to carry out an attack. A purportedly free man, Smyrek reportedly was still subject to police observation while in Germany.74
German security services remain concerned about the activities of the nearly thousand-strong Hezbollah support network in the country. The group’s supporters reportedly meet in some thirty cultural centers and mosques across the country, including five in the North Rhine–Westphalia region alone.75 And while their primary activities focus on raising funds for the organization back in Lebanon, they also function as a logistical support network for the group’s weapons procurement and operational activities.76 From time to time, intelligence suggests Hezbollah operatives may be plotting attacks within Germany. In August 2008, for example, Germany’s federal criminal police chief warned that Hezbollah sleeper cells might have been planning an attack in Germany. Investigators were reportedly monitoring as many as 200 suspected Hezbollah militant sleeper cells in Germany at the time, according to the police chief.77
For its part, Hezbollah has sought to normalize its presence in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. From 2002 to 2003, for example, Hezbollah officials visited Britain, Denmark, Germany, Italy (twice), and Switzerland (also twice).78 Hezbollah even reportedly attempted to purchase a building in Berlin’s Neukoelln district in June 2002. “The building was declared intended to be a cultural-social-religious center,” an Israeli intelligence report noted, “but it is actually designed to be the general headquarters for Hezbollah’s operational activity in Europe, especially Germany.”79
In the wake of the Smyrek episode, Hezbollah continued to recruit operatives and train them for infiltration missions into Israel. At the same time, the group pursued a parallel project aimed not at sending its agents into Israel but at luring Israeli targets to them. Ironically, Qais Obeid, the key person behind Hezbollah’s abduction program, was himself a citizen of Israel.
Qais Obeid: Hezbollah’s Chief Abduction Agent
The Obeid family had deep roots in the State of Israel, centered on Taibeh, a town in what is commonly referred to as the Arab Triangle, a block of Israeli Arab towns bordering the northeast corner of the West Bank. Diab Obeid served as a member of the Israeli Knesset, on the Arab List, which was affiliated with the Mapai Party (the forerunner of today’s Labor Party) from 1961 to 1973.80 These were turbulent times, including the 1967 Six Day War, which brought the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula under Israeli control and prompted a sharp upswing in Palestinian and broader Arab nationalism, as well as eventually radical Islamist extremism. As Israeli Arabs growing up amid these competing emotional and political currents, some members of Diab Obeid’s family drifted away from his liberal political leanings and toward crime and, ultimately, religious extremism.
Diab’s son, Hassan, served as deputy mayor of Taibeh in the 1980s, and both father and son were said to be well connected within Israeli political circles. The third generation of the Obeid clan also seemed to be doing well. Hassan’s five sons included a physician in Germany, a manager of the Taibeh branch of one of Israel’s largest banks, and three business owners, including Qais, the youngest, who was in the jewelry business. But in 1989 Hassan was arrested for trafficking large quantities of drugs from Lebanon and sentenced to ten years in prison. Released three years early, he died a short time later.81
How or why Hassan drifted into the underworld of drug smuggling remains unclear. What is clear is that by the time he was arrested he was no small player. Not only did the counternarcotics operation that led to his arrest reportedly involve a significant quantity of drugs, but he was arrested along with Mohammed Biro, known as the “Middle East drug lord” for his oversized role in the narcotics underworld in Lebanon.82 In a twist more common to spy novels than real life, Mohammed Biro, a onetime source for Israeli intelligence, switched allegiance and allied himself and his drug-running enterprise with Hezbollah. In 1989, Biro was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Sometime after his own release from prison, Hassan asked his sons to visit Mohammed Biro in jail, which they did. Qais returned several times and developed a relationship of his own with Biro, and through him, with Qayed Biro, Mohammed’s youngest son, and other members of the Biro family living in Lebanon.
Qais was facing difficulties at the time of his meetings with Biro. His jewelry business had taken a turn for the worse, leading him to dabble in several other ventures, some shady, including a check-cashing scheme. Qais slipped in and out of debt, regularly relying on his family to bail him out but never fully finding his footing. In 1996, Qais and Ofer Schneitman, his Jewish-Israeli partner who also owned a gun shop, were arrested on charges of conspiring to sell ammunition to Palestinians in the West Bank. Qais’s accomplice was sentenced to thirteen months in prison for selling 2,000 rounds of ammunition to an undercover Shin Bet agent posing as a Palestinian. Qais got a lucky break and was released after a month’s detention. A short time later, Qais was rearrested on charges of carrying a gun without a permit and spent about a year and a half in prison.83
As he stumbled from failed business endeavors to debt to criminal activities, Qais Obeid grew closer to the Biro clan. Qais and Qayed Biro met several times in Europe, providing—investigators would later surmise—Qais’s entrée to Hezbollah. Over time, Qais found in the service of Hezbollah the meaning and success that eluded him as a businessman and criminal. For a few months, maybe a little over a year, he operated covertly out of Israel. Later, in September 2000, just as the second Palestinian intifada was breaking out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Qais left Israel and turned up in Beirut, where he assumed a senior leadership position in Hezbollah’s newly minted Unit 1800, which was responsible for supporting Palestinian terrorist groups and abducting Israelis.84
Qais Obeid’s first attempt to kidnap Israelis on Hezbollah’s behalf took place in July 2000, while he
was still in Israel. That month, Obeid met with Gaza businessman Faiz Shohan and Nasser Ayad, a member of the Palestinian Authority special operations Force 17, to iron out a plan to smuggle $100,000 worth of cocaine from Lebanon, to Europe, and onward to Israel’s Ashdod port. Shohan would use his shipping permit to transport containers from Ashdod to Gaza. At the time, the three also considered kidnapping Israelis and smuggling weapons into Gaza. Then the second intifada erupted. Although Qais fled to Lebanon, Ayad and Shohan revised their plan, with Obeid providing input and oversight from abroad in his new position with Hezbollah’s Unit 1800. By December 2000, the plan was for Obeid to coordinate the smuggling of weapons—fifty Kalashnikov and M-16 rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition—into Israel from Lebanon. Shohan would earn $30,000 for using his shipping license to move the container of weapons to Ashdod and from there to Gaza.85
But the plot would be altered once more, this time by Obeid and his friend Qayed Biro, who devised a plot to kidnap an Israeli soldier or civilian hitchhiker and use the captive as a bargaining chip to negotiate the release of Qayed’s father, Mohammed. The profile of their target victim was a hitchhiker in his or her early twenties, a common sight in Israel. The pressure to secure the release of a young Israeli, especially a soldier, would be immense for any Israeli government, maximizing the plotters’ negotiating leverage. After sedating the victim, they planned to stuff the victim into a container and smuggle the container through the Karni checkpoint into Gaza. From there the victim would be transferred to a fishing vessel to be met at prearranged coordinates by a boat from Lebanon carrying Qayed Biro and Qais Obeid along with drugs and weapons. The drugs and weapons would be taken back to Gaza, while Biro and Obeid would accompany the prisoner to Lebanon. The plot never came off, however, because Israeli commandos detained Nasser Ayad in January 2001. Within days, an Israeli targeted rocket attack killed Iyad’s father, Col. Mansur Iyad, a senior Force 17 official who was recruiting cells in Gaza to carry out attacks at Hezbollah’s behest. That same month, Faiz Shohan was arrested as well.86
Hezbollah Page 37