Bus on Jaffa Road

by Mike Kelly

  He had ten instructors—“all Iranians,” he said. Salameh learned how to assemble explosives, how to plant mines in the dirt, how to organize an ambush. His instructors taught him how to throw a grenade and operate a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. They took him regularly to a shooting range where he fired a wide variety of weapons including “Iranian rifles, Uzis, Russian Garinos, and large machine guns.” They also taught him how to gather intelligence.

  But what might be his most daunting morsel of information came at the end of his description of his Iranian sojourn. As something of a postscript, he added: “We learned how to take apart mines.” Two years later, Salameh would use the explosives from a land mine that had been planted on the Egyptian-Israeli border to assemble the bomb that destroyed the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road.

  Salameh said he took a circuitous route back to the Gaza Strip, stopping in Malta, then Libya and then driving across Egypt. He did not pass through an official border checkpoint to return to the Gaza Strip. Carrying an AK-47 rifle, he set out on foot through the desert between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, looking for a secluded spot to cross into Gaza unnoticed. But he said Palestinian Authority police spotted Salameh and arrested him.

  Despite his connections to Hamas or perhaps because of them, Salameh was sent to a Palestinian prison. It’s not clear what crime he was charged with, though illegal border entry and weapons possession are two possibilities. When he was set free sometime in the spring of 1995—probably in the weeks after Alisa Flatow’s killing—Salameh quickly reconnected with Hamas. As he described in his first interview, Salameh’s link in Hamas was Mohammed Deif.

  Unlike in that first interrogation at the hospital, Salameh was much more talkative in his second session in offering background on Deif. Salameh acknowledged that he had known Deif “from before” and that Deif “slept at my house.” From the transcript, it appears that Salameh and Deif formed a loose-knit confederation of Hamas operatives in 1995. It’s not clear at this point in the interrogations whether this group was in direct contact with Yahya Ayyash, who had also sneaked into the Gaza Strip around this period from the West Bank to visit his family. But Salameh left no doubt that his group was heavily influenced by Ayyash’s call to organize more terrorist attacks.

  In one portion of his second interrogation, Salameh indicated that a “Muhammed Ayesh” came to live with him for an undisclosed amount of time, along with another Hamas operative, Adnan al-Ghoul, who had been linked to Ayyash and to the April 1995 bombing that killed Alisa Flatow. But the different and somewhat confusing spellings of names in the transcript of the interrogation do not offer conclusive proof.

  Ayyash had been hiding in a variety of homes in the Gaza Strip in the months after Salameh was released from prison. So it is possible Ayyash could have sought refuge with Salameh, especially in light of the fact that Ayyash’s deputy commander, Mohammed Deif, was already hiding with Salameh.

  Another factor is the desire by Deif and Salameh and others to learn more about bomb-making. Salameh, of course, had already received three months of explosives training in Iran. And with Ayyash now inside the Gaza Strip and trying to organize other bomb attacks against Israeli targets, it would not be unusual for all of these operatives to find a way to contact each other. But in that second interrogation, Salameh did not say whether he actually met Ayyash. The transcript does not indicate whether he learned anything from Ayyash, even indirectly. There is also no indication that Israeli interrogators asked him about it.

  What seems apparent from the transcript is that Ayyash’s assassination by Israeli counterterror agents greatly affected Salameh and his desire to organize attacks against Israelis. Just after Ayyash’s death during the first week of January 1996, Salameh confirmed (again) what he disclosed to his interrogators in his first interview—that Mohammed Deif ordered him to mount a “major attack in revenge.”

  One piece of Salameh’s story still remained missing in that second interrogation, however. After leaving the Palestinian jail in the spring of 1995, what did he do in the Gaza Strip for the next six or seven months before he left for Jerusalem and the bombing of the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road?

  Salameh said little about that period in his second interview—or in a third session in August 1996. What Salameh was holding back was a secret connection he had forged with Yahya Ayyash.

  A day after Len and Vicki Eisenfeld met in Washington, DC, with FBI officials and with the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, Kenneth McKune, Hassan Salameh spoke again with Israeli interrogators. It was December 4, 1996, Salameh’s fourth interrogation session by police in Israel. Len and Vicki had no idea that Salameh was talking to his captors six thousand miles away as they tried to convince US officials to tell them more about the killers of Sara and Matt. They had still not been informed that Salameh had been arrested.

  In that fourth interrogation on December 4, Sergeant David Cohen of the Israeli police repeated the same instructions to Salameh as he had heard from other interrogators. “You are not required to tell me anything unless it is your wish to do so,” Cohen said. “However everything you say will be written down and used as testimony.”

  Salameh said he understood the statement and, after signing it, he began to talk about his life after he left the Palestinian jail in the spring of 1995.

  Not long after his release from prison, Salameh said seven men visited him. Salameh said he already knew six of the men. All were from his hometown of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. They included Mohammed Deif and Adnan al-Ghoul who had played a role two months earlier in the bombing of Alisa Flatow’s bus. The seventh man was Yahya Ayyash.

  Even though Samameh had mentioned Ayyash’s name in previous interrogations, he had never disclosed that he actually met him. Now, in the fourth session, Salameh again changed his story—adding Ayyash’s name to the Hamas operatives he became linked to.

  Ayyash’s arrival in the Gaza Strip was viewed by Israeli intelligence officials as a factor in helping to unify disparate elements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. While the two Palestinian paramilitary groups had the same goal of attacking Israel, each considered the other a rival in the quest for ultimate power within Palestinian society, especially in the Gaza Strip where increasing numbers of operatives distrusted Yasser Arafat’s Fatah Party. Ayyash had also begun to teach operatives such as Mohammed Deif and Adnan al-Ghoul how to assemble explosives, especially those used by suicide bombers.

  With his Iranian training in weapons and explosives, Salameh was likely viewed as a new and valuable asset in the group of operatives that Deif and Ayyash were organizing. Salameh told Sergeant Cohen that he was “repeatedly in contact” with Deif while he was serving his prison sentence. After his release, Deif approached Salameh with a question. Would Salameh “be interested in planning an attack” near Khan Yunis or in other coastal areas along the Gaza Strip that were still controlled by the Israelis?

  Salameh agreed. The group soon selected a target—the Gush Katif “block” of Israeli settlements along the Gaza coast that included the community of Kfar Darom and the road where Alisa Flatow had been killed.

  For this mission, Deif obtained the explosives from antitank mines. Salameh would extract the explosive materials from the mines and build a bomb. Salameh was also assigned the task of recruiting a suicide bomber.

  The operation would turn out to be a rehearsal of sorts for the bombing of the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road.

  One of Deif’s associates, a man named “Bara,” obtained seven antitank mines. Using his Iranian training, Salameh dismantled the mines, extracted the explosive materials, and reassembled them into the kind of deadly bomb that could be carried by a suicide attacker.

  Meanwhile, Salameh said he recruited several militants to spy on the comings and goings of Israeli soldiers to the Gush Katif settlement block. One militant, a fisherman named Omar, turned out to be especially helpful. Omar knew the area well and afte
r scouting several potential targets told Salameh that a bus filled with soldiers usually drove into Gush Katif each day around one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Salameh decided to attack the bus.

  “Deif told us that he prefers to do the attack as a suicide bombing,” Salameh said.

  Deif showed Salameh where to hide the extra explosives that would not be used in the attack. Salameh then assembled the bomb.

  “I took two mines to my house,” Salameh said. He gave the five extra mines to Omar for use in later attacks. “I connected the two mines, back to back, glued them together,” Salameh continued.

  He attached two detonators and hooked up two, nine-volt batteries to the detonators. To finish the job and to make sure a suicide bomber could easily set off the explosion, Salameh attached another device. “Two switches to push, to cause an explosion,” he said.

  Then he put the bomb in a green suitcase.

  “Where did you learn to make such explosives?” Sergeant Cohen asked.

  “I learned in Iran,” Salameh said.

  Sergeant Cohen asked Salameh to draw a diagram of his bomb.

  Salameh actually drew two diagrams on the handwritten report of his interrogation that he signed for the Israeli police. The first diagram looks like a doughnut with three arrows pointing outward from the center hole—wires from the detonator that he had inserted in a hole in the circular mine. The second diagram is much more detailed and shows how the wires connect to the trigger button. The diagram was virtually identical to the diagram he would later draw to describe how he assembled the bomb for the Number 18 bus.

  After finishing the sketch, Salameh told Sergeant Cohen how he found a suicide bomber. Actually, Deif had already been working to find one, too. Deif received a note from a contact in Khan Yunis about two Palestinians in their early twenties who wanted to volunteer, said Salameh. As with the diagram of the bomb, the process of recruiting the bomber was hauntingly familiar to the one Salameh would later use in the Jaffa Road bus bombing.

  Salameh brought one of the men to his home. Deif wrote a speech for the man to recite as part of a final videotape. Salameh found an Israeli-made Galil rifle and gave it to the bomber to hold as he spoke the words Deif wrote. Salameh handled the video camera.

  “The speech included passages from the Koran,” Salameh said.

  Salameh did not mention Alisa Flatow or the bombing of her bus during his interrogations. But the plan that he conceived with Deif was remarkably similar in many ways to the attack that killed Alisa except for one key element: how the bomb would be delivered to its target. Instead of a pickup truck similar to one that blew up next to Alisa’s bus, Salameh wanted the suicide attacker to place the bomb on a bicycle and to detonate it as he rode up to a bus carrying soldiers.

  The suicide attacker had other ideas, though. Salameh said he “insisted on doing it with his brother’s donkey and cart.”

  Salameh agreed. He selected June 25, 1995, as the date, less than three months after the suicide attack on Alisa Flatow’s bus and just a month after another suicide attack with a donkey cart that killed the bomber and donkey and injured an Israeli soldier.

  Around 11 a.m., Salameh’s bomber drove a donkey cart to an intersection on a road near Gush Katif not far from the Israeli army headquarters for the region. To passersby, the cart would have been just another vegetable wagon pulled by a donkey—a common sight in the Gaza Strip. As an Israeli army jeep approached, the cart’s driver pushed a button. The cart blew up, killing the driver and donkey and hurling vegetables across the landscape. Three soldiers who had been riding in the jeep were wounded.

  “I heard an explosion at approximately 11 a.m.,” Salameh said, adding ruefully: “I heard on the news that this bombing failed.”

  On January 20, 1997, President Clinton stood on the steps of the US Capitol to begin his second presidential term. With US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist presiding, Clinton first recited the oath of office, then stepped to a podium and spoke for almost twenty-three minutes about his hopes for a second term.

  Like most inaugural addresses, Clinton’s did not offer a specific agenda as much as a set of goals as the nation looked to the twenty-first century. He said he hoped America’s “old democracy” would remain “forever young” and “guided by the ancient vision of a promised land” with “our sights upon a land of new promise.” He urged the nation “to shape the forces of the information age and the global society” and “to unleash the limitless potential of all our people, and yes, to form a more perfect union.”

  Clinton mentioned “terror” only twice in the 2,200 words that he spoke that day. The first reference was linked to racial prejudice; the second, to international terror—but only in an oblique way. “We will stand mighty for peace and freedom and maintain a strong defense against terror and destruction,” he said.

  On the next day, January 21, Kenneth McKune, wrote another letter to Len and Vicki Eisenfeld from his office at the State Department.

  McKune explained that since he had last spoken with the Eisenfelds on December 3, 1996, and after writing a letter on December 21 in which he mentioned that Iran was a prime supporter of Palestinian terrorism, he “queried our embassy in Tel Aviv and our consulate general in Jerusalem regarding the status of the suspects associated with the terrorist bombing which killed your son and Sara Duker.”

  McKune mentioned a series of Palestinian names and offered a few sentences of description.

  First on his list was Mohammed al-Deif, the Hamas military commander who “is believed to have been involved in providing logistical support to suicide bombers.” McKune said that Deif “is believed to be at large in the West Bank or Gaza and is considered a fugitive by the Palestinian Authority.”

  After Deif, McKune cited four other Palestinians. Three were still fugitives. The fourth—Mohammad Abu Wardeh—was already known to the Eisenfelds as the man who helped to recruit his own cousin as the suicide bomber aboard the Number 18 bus.

  Before signing off, McKune mentioned one more name. “Hassan Salamah has been imprisoned by Israel,” he wrote, using an alternative spelling of Salameh’s name.

  McKune said nothing more about Salameh’s significance—just those seven words in a single sentence, then signed off. “I hope you find this additional information useful,” McKune wrote.

  It was the first time that Len and Vicki Eisenfeld had seen the name, “Hassan Salameh.”

  As they read the letter, the mention of Hassan Salameh or that he had been arrested meant nothing to them. It was just a name of another Palestinian “imprisoned by Israel.” With such a nondescript, matter-of-fact reference in McKune’s letter, Len and Vicki assumed that Salameh was just a small player in the plot that killed Matthew and Sara. Almost twenty more months would pass before they discovered that Salameh played a far more significant role or that he had been telling Israeli authorities about his Iranian training.

  Five weeks after McKune’s letter arrived at the Eisenfeld home, Stephen Flatow stepped before a bank of microphones in room HC-7 at the US Capitol. It was noon. The Senate and the House of Representatives had recessed for lunch. Standing by Flatow’s side was US Senator Frank Lautenberg, the liberal Democrat from New Jersey.

  In the past year, Flatow and Lautenberg had grown to admire each other immensely. Both were Jewish and viewed themselves as ardent supporters of Israel. And both rose from working-class roots to different levels of success in the business world—Flatow as a lawyer who grew up in Queens and now ran a business that specialized in real estate title searches; Lautenberg, who escaped the harsh poverty of Paterson, New Jersey, during the Great Depression to build a multimillion-dollar data-processing firm before entering politics.

  Like almost all members of the Senate and House of Representatives, Lautenberg supported the antiterrorism bill signed into law the previous year that allowed US citizens to file
lawsuits against a select group of state sponsors of terrorism. But as Flatow and Steven Perles discovered, most legislators—and the White House, as well—did not realize that the clause allowing for the lawsuits was essentially toothless.

  The AEDPA clearly allowed families to file lawsuits against state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran. But only small compensatory damages could be collected. Judges were barred from imposing large financial penalties on those nations—so-called punitive damages up to hundreds of millions of dollars that were viewed by legislators as a potential deterrent to terror-sponsoring nations. Lautenberg stepped in with a solution. He pushed through a new clause in the law, known as the “Flatow Amendment,” which allowed victims to file for high punitive damages.

  It was February 26, 1997—a year and one day since Sara and Matt had been killed. As he stood with Lautenberg before a group of journalists inside the US Capitol, Flatow sensed he was embarking on an uncharted legal path. Punishing terrorists was seen as a job for the police or the military. Now Flatow was asking a judge to treat the terrorist murder of his daughter as the equivalent of a negligent homicide, not unlike those cited in civil lawsuits argued each day in courtrooms across America.

  Flatow knew his case was not easy. But he was willing to take the risk and wanted to be the first to test the new antiterrorism law and the amendment that carried his name. He also knew that other families of victims, including Arline Duker and Len and Vicki Eisenfeld, were considering lawsuits, and they would be paying close attention.

  Lautenberg, who was joined by two New Jersey Republican congressmen at the press conference, James Saxton and Frank LoBiondo, said “there is no doubt that the funding spigot for international terrorism starts in Iran.”

  Then Steven Flatow stepped forward. He said he hoped he might collect $150 million in damages from Iran. But that figure was just an estimate. What Flatow most wanted was to send a message.