by Mike Kelly
Two more years would pass before Arline Duker and Len and Vicki Eisenfeld would discover the true story behind Hassan Salameh.
Six months after Hassan Salameh was captured, Len and Vicki Eisenfeld walked into the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, DC. It was Tuesday, December 3, 1996. A month earlier, President Clinton had defeated his Republican challenger, Kansas Senator Robert Dole, and won a second term. The comfortable margin of victory—almost ten points over Dole—was not just an electoral triumph for Clinton. It was a none-too-subtle confirmation that he was able to fight off criticism, largely from conservatives, that he was not tough enough to crack down on the growing problem of international and domestic terrorism.
In the months since they had watched Clinton sign the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act into law, the Eisenfelds and Arline Duker began to ponder how they might pursue a lawsuit. But as Vicki Eisenfeld first voiced in the days after she buried her son, how could either family file a lawsuit against Hamas? As both families quickly learned, Hamas was a shadowy organization, with few recognizable assets that could be claimed in a lawsuit. What about Iran, though?
Stephen Flatow was moving ahead with his own lawsuit, although he had still not filed court papers. While Flatow and his lawyer, Steven Perles, had managed to lobby Congress to strengthen the AEDPA, they still faced the problem of who could actually be targeted in a lawsuit.
It was hardly a small concern. Lawsuits cost money. Perles had already signaled that a major antiterrorism lawsuit, in a federal court and under the untested provisions of the AEDPA, might cost as much as $100,000 just to collect evidence from the Middle East and other sources and to hire expert witnesses. But without a clear target that could provide compensation to reimburse the families and the lawyers for their expenses, why move forward?
Not surprisingly, the Eisenfelds and Dukers each had different worries about what a lawsuit meant, though they shared a common bond in the deaths of Matt and Sara and the hopes both families nurtured for them. For the Dukers and Eisenfelds, that bond would become especially tight. The hoped-for wedding of Sara and Matt that would have formally joined both families would never take place, but in a tragic way both families were joined nonetheless.
After burying Matt and Sara, Len had gathered Vicki and Amy along with Arline and her two remaining daughters and declared that he hoped the two families would remain united.
“We used to be a family of four,” Len said. “Now we are a family of six.”
In contemplating a lawsuit, however, one of Arline’s primary concerns was money. As a single mother, she still had two daughters to put through college. She had some savings. But a lawsuit to pursue an international terrorist organization could drain them. In the end, what would she win? A judgment that merely blamed Hamas for the bombing that killed Sara and Matt offered little satisfaction. Hamas had already admitted that its operatives were involved in the bomb plot.
Vicki and Len shared similar concerns. Would a lawsuit achieve anything? But as Arline, Vicki, and Len discussed their next steps, they had no idea that they were missing crucial pieces of information about Iran and its connection to the Jaffa Road bombing.
Stephen Flatow faced a similar predicament. Largely with the help of Perles, Flatow learned that American intelligence officials had long felt that Iran played a behind-the-scenes role in the growth of Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But in strategizing for his lawsuit, Flatow and Perles wrestled with a difficult question: If Flatow filed suit against Iran, what sort of proof could he offer that Iran was actually involved?
That concern was on the mind of Len and Vicki Eisenfeld when they conferred with FBI officials on that Tuesday in December 1996. Was Iran actually involved in the Jaffa Road attack? With its designation by the US State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism, Iran could be sued under the provisions of the AEDPA. But lawsuits require proof. As they left the FBI offices and headed for another meeting at the Department of State, the Eisenfelds still had no answers.
Less than a week after Matt and Sara had been killed, the FBI announced it was entering the case. But the FBI had not really mounted much of an investigation at that point, and instead trusted Israeli authorities to collect evidence and interrogate suspects. If FBI officials learned anything from their Israeli counterparts, they did not share it that day with the Eisenfelds.
After meeting with the FBI, Vicki sensed that the bureau wanted to mount an investigation. Yet Vicki also left with the “sense that everyone is trying to cover their asses” and that no substantial analysis of evidence had taken place.
Len had already spoken to a lawyer at the Justice Department. Like Vicki, he felt his family was in a state of legal limbo. The murder of an American citizen in another country was considered a crime; US authorities could, if necessary, extradite a suspected murderer for a trial on American soil. But Len had the impression that the Justice Department had not even been given a list of suspects by Israeli authorities—nor was it rushing to obtain such a list. For now, the FBI and Justice Department officials said they were satisfied that the Israelis were taking the lead in catching the Hamas operatives who bombed the Number 18 bus. “They were willing to let the Israelis do their thing,” Len said of American investigators. “They were not planning to do anything. They were just collecting information and would keep us informed.”
After leaving the FBI, Len and Vicki traveled across town to meet with Kenneth R. McKune, the acting coordinator for counterterrorism at the US Department of State. Like their discussion with the FBI, the Eisenfelds’ meeting with McKune seemed uneventful. Thinking about it later, Len rated the conversation with McKune as “somewhere between a five and a six on a scale of ten.” Len found McKune to be guarded and not all that forthcoming, especially with information about Hamas and how its operatives had managed to pull together such a sophisticated bombing.
Len and Vicki both felt uneasy. Why was their government not jumping to their side to help?
As he left that day Len asked McKune if he could stay in touch. A few days later, Len telephoned McKune to thank him for the meeting. And on December 22, 1996, McKune followed up with a letter.
As he read McKune’s words, Len was stunned—and elated. The guardedness that Len felt from his meeting with McKune three weeks earlier was gone. “On a scale of one to ten,” Len said, “this letter was an eight.”
“Per your request,” McKune wrote, “I am including in this letter some thoughts on responsibility for the bombing which killed your son and Sara Duker in Jerusalem on February 25, 1996.”
McKune enumerated some facts that Len and Vicki already knew: That a suicide bomber blew up the Number 18 commuter bus on Jaffa Road; that Hamas claimed responsibility; that three US citizens had died. (Forty-nine days after the bombing, Ira Weinstein, a fifty-three-year-old butcher who had moved to Israel with his family a decade earlier and held dual American and Israeli citizenships, died from severe burns.)
McKune wrote that the “Department of State believes that the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas, carried out this bombing.” Then, he added one more morsel of insight: “We also believe that Iran provides training and financial assistance to Hamas.”
McKune cited a State Department report that had been released only weeks after Matt and Sara were killed. “Tehran currently provides Hamas with weapons and explosives training and occasional financial assistance,” the report said. “Tehran also provides the groups with monetary assistance, which we estimate averages $2–3 million per year.”
Len and Vicki studied the letter carefully. For months they had been battling two powerful emotions—their grief and their desire to find out who killed Sara and Matt. It had been difficult to focus. Or, as Len later said, “We were just so fresh in our grief.”
Now, in December 1996, Len and Vicki had what they
believed to be their first solid proof that Iran might have been involved in the bombing. They were not shocked; Stephen Flatow had already heard similar statements from State Department officials. Vicki said years later that “it was like the pieces of a puzzle were falling into place little by little. We thought it was just Hamas. We weren’t thinking of it in the broader sense.”
Still, it was one thing to be told that Iran was linked to the bombings and another thing to obtain evidence of such a link. McKune’s letter, with its reference to the State Department’s report about Iran’s support of terrorist groups, was significant. But even the report, backed up by a letter written by a key figure in America’s counterterrorism efforts, was lacking the solid confirmation that would be indisputable in a court case. Steven Perles, who was already advising the Dukers and Eisenfelds about a possible lawsuit, felt he needed to establish a more definitive connection between Iran and Palestinian terrorism. But by the end of 1996, it was not easy finding a government official in Washington, DC, who had a deeper knowledge of Iran’s terrorist strategies and who would share that insight in a courtroom. The obvious choices were the US intelligence agencies and their legions of analysts. But in general, those officials were off-limits to private lawyers looking to support a lawsuit against a foreign government.
Perles decided to look elsewhere.
In Israel, Hassan Salameh had changed his story dramatically. In his second interview with Israeli interrogators on July 2, 1996, Salameh conceded that he journeyed to Iran to learn how to build the bomb that killed Sara and Matt and the others aboard the Number 18 bus. In his first interrogation seven weeks earlier at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center, Salameh had not even hinted about his Iranian training. Why did he change his story?
Salameh dropped this revelation into the tale he told to Israeli interrogators in his second interview as subtly as he might ask for a glass of water. His Iranian trip was well funded, well organized, and included special training in tactics, weapons, and explosives at a special camp that had been built by Iranian officials. It was also not a brief visit. “We stayed three months in Iran,” Salameh told interrogators.
Israel officials seemed instantly to understand the importance of what Salameh was saying. They viewed the disclosure of his Iranian trip not just as a breakthrough in a police investigation, but as information that had military and strategic value to Israeli’s intelligence services and to Israel’s diplomatic and defense planning. And because of what they perceived to be the larger value of Salameh’s disclosures, Israeli officials labeled Salameh’s confessions top-secret and classified. Israel did not even notify US authorities at the time what it had learned from Salameh.
Why Salameh did not mention Iran in his first interrogation at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center remains a mystery. Experienced police detectives say that it often takes several conversations to convince a suspected killer to reveal all aspects of a murder. But it’s difficult to decipher why Salameh did not disclose anything about his Iranian trip in that initial interview and why he opted to discuss it so openly in the second.
Did he have a change of heart? Did he merely want to brag—as Shin Bet’s Yisrael Hasson predicted he would? Was Salameh really telling the truth when he said he was “pretty frightened” during that initial interrogation and that “maybe I forgot a few things”? Or had he undergone what Israeli authorities describe as “intensive” questioning that can include punching, slapping, sleep deprivation and isolation? Such techniques, which were occasionally used by Israeli investigators investigating terrorist incidents, had been heavily criticized in Israel and elsewhere by human rights advocates, while Israeli officials defended their use as necessary to obtain information to prevent other attacks.
Whatever the case, Salameh has never explained his change—not even when interviewed years later by this author. Nor have his Israeli interrogators offered any insight.
The transcript of Salameh’s second interview on July 2, 1996 offers no clues about why he suddenly decided to talk about his Iranian training, other than an admission that he was afraid during that initial interrogation and omitted several key details. But the differences between the first and second interviews are striking.
In that first interrogation at the hospital, Salameh said he left the Gaza Strip in early 1993 and embarked on a journey of almost two years that took him to Jordan, Sudan, Syria, and Lebanon, including attempts to visit his brothers in Lebanon and training for an unspecified period with weapons and explosives in Syria by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
In his second interview, Salameh said his military training did not end in Syria. Before returning to the Gaza Strip in late 1994, he said he took a flight to Iran with a cadre of other Hamas activists where he embarked on intensive training.
In that second interrogation, Salameh mentioned Iran with the same matter-of-fact speaking style that was apparent in his first interview at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center when he described how he recruited Majdi Abu Wardeh as the suicide bomber who boarded the Number 18 bus with Matt and Sara. But in addition to referring to his three-month sojourn to Iran, Salameh disclosed another secret about himself: The bombing of the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road was not his first murder.
“Now let me tell you what happened in 1992,” he began.
Salameh said that he was recruited into Hamas in 1992 by Jamil Wadi, a leader of the group’s al-Qassam military wing who was killed the following year in a gun battle with Israeli soldiers. Wadi had a specific job for Salameh—to recruit other young Palestinian men. Salameh said he found five others, all from Khan Yunis. Together, they formed a cell. “I was the head of the cell,” Salameh said.
Salameh’s cell had nothing to do with attacking the Israeli military or promoting Hamas’s political strategies. Nor did Salameh and his compatriots seem to engage in the myriad social service projects that made Hamas so popular among poor Palestinians, especially those living in the crowded refugee camps in the Gaza Strip.
Salameh was an enforcer. The primary focus of his cell, he said, was to hunt down and punish Palestinians who were believed to collaborate with the Israelis in the Gaza Strip.
Labeling someone as a collaborator did not involve a court or other independent legal authority. Often, the accusation was based on rumors and sometimes fueled by personal grudges and jealousies.
With their large network of contacts on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agents often looked to ordinary Palestinians for information about upcoming Hamas activities, including protests, possible attacks and the whereabouts of reputed terrorist leaders and bomb-makers. In some cases, ordinary Palestinians were suspected of being collaborators if they merely sold property to Israelis or formed the most basic of business deals or partnerships with Jews.
One of Salameh’s first targets was a Khan Yunis resident named Rabi al-Saadi. Salameh said that “in the course of our mission,” his cell members “interrogated” al-Saadi. Salameh does not describe why al-Saadi was singled out as a collaborator. But the man was punished nevertheless. “We beat him with pipes and cut him with knives,” Salameh said. “I had a knife and cut him. They beat him with chains and pipes. Eventually, we killed him.”
Salameh’s cell members “beat other suspects but none of them died,” he claimed. At least two of the suspected collaborators were women—or as Salameh described them, “a girl from the Abu Moussa family” and “a girl from the Abu Sharat family.”
“We visited them and threatened them with knives and axes,” he said.
In 1993, Israeli police arrested one of Salameh’s cell members. “I knew he would identify me,” Salameh said.
Fearing he might be arrested by the Israelis, Salameh said he left Khan Yunis and “escaped to Jordan.” By his own account, Salameh simply crossed the Jordan River from the Israeli-controlled West Bank into Jordan via the the Allenby Bridge.
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sp; In his second interrogation, Salameh essentially confirmed what he said during the first session when he described the early portion of his journeys. He stayed a week in Jordan with relatives, then traveled to Sudan where he worked for three months as a guard at the Hamas office. From there, he journeyed to Syria for weapons training with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Salameh’s story offers not only a look into his life as a Hamas operative but was considered by Israeli authorities at the time to be one of the most extensive descriptions of how Hamas was able to connect with other militant groups throughout the Middle East.
While in Sudan, he met a group of eighteen Hamas “fugitives” who after escaping from the Gaza Strip traveled through Egypt, where they were arrested and imprisoned. After their release, the eighteen operatives made their way to Sudan. According to the transcript, Salameh provided his Israeli interrogator with the names of each of the eighteen Hamas operatives.
“They asked to be trained in military procedures by Hamas,” Salameh said. “They were sent by Hamas to Iran for training.”
Whether Salameh traveled to Iran with this group or with another is unclear. But shortly after arriving in Sudan, Salameh left for Iran. “First we took a Sudanese plane to Syria,” he said. “We met Iranians there who got us an Iranian flight to Tehran.”
In Iran, he said he met Osama Hamdan, whom he described as the “head of Hamas in Iran.” Hamadan would go on to become a key figure in Hamas, eventually ending up in Lebanon where he was regarded as the group’s representative there. Whether Israeli authorities realized it or not at the time, Salameh’s revelation that he met with such a high-ranking Hamas official in Iran—and that eighteen other Hamas operatives went to Iran, too—offers some measure of credence to the overall concern among Israeli and American intelligence officials of a strong connection between Palestinian militants and Iran.
In Tehran, Salameh said Iranians officials did not stamp his passport—a common technique to conceal a travel itinerary. From the airport, Salameh said he was taken to a military base where his training began in earnest.