Abu Jihad. The name was highly familiar to the IDF’s intelligence services. Abu Jihad—or “Father of Jihad,” whose given name was Khalil al-Wazir—was Yasser Arafat’s deputy, and the head of the PLO’s military wing. He was born in Ramleh, in then Mandatory Palestine, and grew up in refugee camps in Gaza. Before he was even twenty, he was organizing resistance groups composed of other Palestinian youths and was among the first to join Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. Abu Jihad had participated in the first Fatah operation in Israeli territory, planting a bomb at a National Water Carrier facility on January 1, 1965. Following the Yom Kippur War, he planned a series of lethal terrorist assaults on Israel, including a 1974 attack in Nahariya that killed four Israelis and wounded six; a raid on the Savoy hotel in Tel Aviv on March 5, 1975, which killed eight hostages and three IDF soldiers, among them Colonel Uzi Yairi; a massive bombing in the crowded Zion Square in Jerusalem by a booby-trapped refrigerator that killed fifteen people on July 4, 1975; the Coastal Road massacre of March 11, 1978, in which thirty-five were murdered; and the killing of three Israeli sailors in Limassol, Cyprus, in September 1985.
By 1988, Abu Jihad was running the first Palestinian armed rebellion—the Intifada—from afar, and in the eyes of many Palestinians, had become a symbol of the struggle against Israel. He had married Intisar al-Wazir—also known as Umm Jihad, or “Mother of Jihad”—an impressive woman who was a leader in her own right. She gave him three sons and one daughter. Expelled from Lebanon with his PLO cronies after Israel’s 1982 invasion, he was banished four years later from Jordan and settled in Tunis with the rest of the Fatah leadership.
Abu Jihad had already been marked for assassination a few years earlier; several operations had been planned but were abandoned at the last minute. However, with the Mothers’ Bus attack of March 1988, the cup runneth over. Following the attack, the head of the military intelligence department, General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, reached the conclusion that Abu Jihad should be eliminated. General Lipkin-Shahak knew what he was talking about: he was a decorated hero of Operation Spring of Youth in 1973. (See Chapter 14.)
The IDF new chief of staff, Dan Shomron, (the brain behind the Entebbe mission) approved an operation in principle and assigned its management and preparation to his deputy, Ehud Barak, the former commander of Sayeret Matkal. Outwardly, it appeared to be an incredibly complicated mission, more than 1,550 miles from home. The Mossad was asked to help. Ever since the Fatah leadership had settled in Tunis, the Mossad had been widening its effective intelligence network. Its agents in Tunis surreptitiously visited Abu Jihad’s neighborhood, Sidi Bou Said, photographed his home and even succeeded in drawing up precise blueprints of the structure and its internal layout. A Mossad female agent had visited the house under false pretexts and submitted a report on its furnishings and interior: a corridor leading from the entrance to a couch and armchair-filled guest room; a door that led to Abu Jihad’s study; another door, to the kitchen; and a staircase to the second floor, where the bedrooms of Abu Jihad, his wife, and daughter, Hanan, were located. The couple’s baby, Nidal, a two-year-old, slept in his parents’ room, while the family’s two older boys studied in the United States.
The operation was planned as follows: the commandos of Sayeret Matkal would approach Tunisia’s coast on Israeli naval ships. Members of Shayetet 13, the naval commando unit, would bring them to shore, and from there, they would reach Abu Jihad’s home with the aid of the Mossad. The Shayetet and the navy had secretly mapped Tunis’s coastline and located beaches for the Israeli landing. Air force jets were eventually dispatched for a surveillance flight, refreshing the IDF’s intelligence before the operation.
Even so, the risks remained very high. Any encounter with PLO forces, Tunisian Army units or local police could lead to disaster, and it was clear that a retreat by Israeli forces or an evacuation of wounded participants would be much harder than in countries adjacent to Israel. Abu Jihad’s neighborhood was home to many PLO leaders on Israel’s most-wanted list, and it was obvious that there would be a large presence of well-trained Fatah guards. Any misstep could end in battle or the entrapment of IDF soldiers. The operation could also lead to severe political consequences: Tunisia wasn’t an active enemy of Israel, and it would be hard to explain an attack on Tunisians. One question kept Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin particularly restless: how would it be possible to confirm that Abu Jihad was home on the night of the mission?
The Mossad had assured Rabin that it would have up-to-the-minute information about Abu Jihad’s whereabouts within his home, which it hoped to secure via intelligence reports and careful surveillance. In the meantime, final preparations were under way. An exact replica of Abu Jihad’s home was built in Israel, where Sayeret Matkal trained for the infiltration and assassination. Elite officers were selected for the operation, and each was assigned a precise role.
The team that would go up to the bedrooms and the officer who would shoot Abu Jihad were also chosen. Heading the operation would be Sayeret Matkal’s commander, Moshe Ya’alon. Bogie, who had returned to active service as a sergeant after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was now a colonel and considered one of the best Sayeret commanders. During the preparation for the mission Bogie decided to visit the area. He flew to Rome and from there, with a false passport, to Tunis. Once in Tunis, he was taken by Mossad agents on a tour near Abu Jihad’s home. The next day, Ya’alon returned to Israel via Rome and joined his men.
The force set out in four missile boats, accompanied by a submarine, on Wednesday, April 13. Two of the boats transported the Sayeret Matkal and Shayetet 13 commandos, and were protected by the other two. One of the boats, containing a sophisticated electronics center, served as the operation’s command post under Barak’s command. A fully equipped and staffed medical operation unit had been set up in the other. The flotilla initially sailed northwest, toward the Greek islands, then turned west and later south, until it reached the coast of Tunisia.
That same day, three Mossad agents had appeared at a car-rental company in Tunis bearing false IDs. Calling themselves Ayish a-Saridi, George Najib and Uataf Allem (the third was a woman), they rented three minibuses—two Volkswagen Transporters and a Peugeot.
The missile boats reached their destination on April 15. That day, Israel intercepted a transmission sent to the PLO by French agents, who warned that “the Israelis are cooking up something.” This was a cause for concern, but Barak ordered that the operation move ahead.
That night, two Boeing 707s belonging to the Israeli Air Force arrived in the skies over Tunis, one a receptor for electronic transmissions and the other providing air cover and serving as a refueling plane for the fighter jets circling in the region.
The operation commenced. The submarine drew closer to the appointed beach—A-Rouad, next to Ras Carthage—and reported that it was completely empty. Two pairs of Shayetet fighters, aboard tiny “Hazir” (“Pig”) submersibles, reached the shore, and met the trio from the Mossad, which had brought the rented vehicles. The Shayetet divers reported by radio that the beach was secure, and five rubber dinghies were immediately lowered into the sea, delivering twenty sayeret commandos to the shore. The landing point was a short distance from Sidi Bou Said. The commandos had been divided into four teams—A and B to carry out the operation, and C and D to provide protection. The fighters in A and B were armed with twenty-two-milimeter Berettas outfitted with silencers, as well as mini-Uzis. Several members of the C and D teams carried rifles and grenades. The Sayeret members wore coveralls concealing bulletproof vests and supple Palladium boots. Attached to their heads were communications devices with microphones and earphones, and their belts carried tiny pouches with ammunition and first-aid supplies. They were also equipped with surgical masks, to conceal their faces.
That evening, the Shin Bet had detained Fayez Abu Rahma, a relative of Abu Jihad who lived in Gaza. His interrogation had been cursory and unfocused, and he was released a few hours later. Actually, the arrest had a single, sec
ret objective: to cause Abu Rahma to call Abu Jihad in Tunis, which would allow the Mossad and Military-intelligence’s listening systems to confirm that the terrorist leader was in fact in the North African city.
But as H-Hour approached, a last-minute hitch occurred. While Sayeret Matkal was getting ready on the Tunisian beach, an urgent message was received from a Mossad agent. Abu Jihad wasn’t home! He was in the city, at a meeting with another Palestinian leader, Farouk Kaddoumi. The unit was forced to wait. The risk was great: an elite unit of the IDF sitting tight on an isolated beach in an enemy country, thousands of miles away from home. A nerve-wracking hour and a half passed before Yaalon received word that Abu Jihad had returned home, escorted by two bodyguards—one who remained in the car, outside, and a second who went into the house. The sayeret fighters piled up in their vehicles and immediately departed for Sidi Bou Said, passing the darkened ruins of the ancient port of Carthage, where Hannibal had set sail to Spain, launching his legendary campaign against the Roman Empire.
The soldiers reached their destination shortly before 2:00 A.M. Abu Jihad’s car was parked in front of his house, and his bodyguard was dozing off in the driver’s seat. Two fighters approached the vehicle, one disguised as a woman. The “lady” was carrying a large box of chocolates that concealed his hand, holding a silenced pistol. When they reached the car, one of them shot the bodyguard through the head. The others moved into the garden surrounding the house, while members of the A team broke through a reinforced wooden door with the help of specialized, noise-reducing equipment. The A and B teams snuck into the house; in the basement, the commandos killed the second bodyguard, as well as an unlucky Tunisian gardener who had chosen to sleep there. Members of the A team ran upstairs, toward Abu Jihad and his wife’s bedroom.
Abu Jihad wasn’t sleeping. An hour earlier, he had kissed his sixteen-year-old daughter, Hanan, good night, and after leaving her room had sat at his desk to begin writing a letter to leaders of the Intifada back in Israel. A faint noise outside startled him, and he picked up a firearm—his special silver-handled pistol—and turned toward the door. Umm Jihad realized what was going on and called, “Verdun, Verdun,” in reference to Verdun Street, in Beirut, the location of the building where terrorist leaders had been killed during Operation Spring of Youth.
Abu Jihad opened the door. Standing before him were masked men, their weapons drawn. He managed to push his wife into an alcove in the wall and raise his revolver, but the officer facing him shot an entire magazine into him, as did the rest of the group afterward. Abu Jihad collapsed in front of his wife. While the attackers still fired at the terrorist leader, Umm Jihad jumped toward her husband and bent over his body, embracing the corpse and eventually shouting at the attackers, “Enough!”
The shooters didn’t harm her nor her daughter, Hanan, who had been awakened by the sound of the shooting and burst into the room. One blurted out in Arabic, “Go to your mother!” but she saw the attackers firing at her father on the ground and, for a moment, stood opposite one of the commandos entering the room without a mask. She looked at his face—a face, she said, that she would never forget. He, too, shot her father in the head. Umm Jihad and her daughter saw a woman who had accompanied the Israeli unit; she was videotaping the entire operation. The two-year-old baby, Nidal, woke up and burst into tears. Above him stood a Sayeret commando spraying gunfire into the ceiling, but he didn’t harm the child. The PLO later claimed that the attackers had fired seventy bullets, and that fifty-two had struck Abu Jihad.
Retaking the hijacked “Mothers’ bus.” (GPO)
The commandos left the room quickly, descending the stairs, grabbing official documents and other papers they found, and ripping a small safe out of the study wall to take with them. Above them, Umm Jihad heard a woman’s voice shouting at them in French to hurry: “Allez! Allez!”
The operation had taken less than five minutes. The commandos exited and stood in front of the house, where their commanders counted them, to ensure that everyone was there. From her window, Umm Jihad looked at them and counted twenty-four people. Their vehicles sped toward the beach; inside, the commandos found crates of soft drinks prepared by the Mossad. The boats awaited them at the beach, and they ventured out into the open sea, together with the Mossad agents who had taken part in the operation. Other agents had stayed in Tunis and called the police to report that the attackers’ vehicles had been seen traveling toward the city—the opposite direction from the get-away route. Police in Tunis placed roadblocks on the roads leading out of Sidi Bou Said toward the capital, and the country’s president scrambled ground forces and helicopters, also ordering the closure of the airport and seaport. But, with the exception of the three rented vehicles abandoned on the beach, not a trace of the Israelis was found.
By the following day, the episode made front-page headlines around the world; there could be no doubt that the operation had been the work of the Israelis. Abu Jihad had been killed, but his name wasn’t forgotten. Years later, his talented wife, Umm Jihad, was appointed to serve as a minister in Yasser Arafat’s government, after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. She and her daughter would describe the assassination to Israeli writers and journalists.
THE FAMILY OF MIRIAM BEN YAIR, KILLED IN THE MOTHERS’ BUS ATTACK
Miriam Ben Yair’s daughter, Rachel, in tears: “When the terrorist turned toward my mother, she begged him, ‘My daughter is getting married next month; please have mercy on me.’ He shot her to death. She was on her way to the Nuclear Research Center, where she worked as an executive secretary. Invitations to my wedding that she had been planning to distribute to her friends were found in her bag.”
Ben Yair’s husband, Eliyahu: “Friends met me in the street and asked, ‘What, you haven’t heard? The Mothers’ Bus was attacked!’ I raced to Soroka hospital. My wife’s sister, Frieda, a nurse there, told me, ‘It’s over.’”
Her son, Ilan: “My mom was a pretty woman, full of joy. She knew French very well and worked at the Nuclear Research Center from the time the French built the reactor. Her family was her entire world, and she dreamed of leaving one day, to raise her grandchildren. She didn’t get to. She was forty-six at her death.”
Eliyahu: “It was Major General Yitzhak Mordechai who comforted us. He would visit us often, talk to us. He was like a member of the family.”
Rachel: “We knew that Abu Jihad was responsible for the murder. His death gave us a certain relief, but the pain remains deep and sharp, just as it was before.”
Iran has become the major supplier of weapons, mainly missiles, to the terrorist organizations in Gaza. The weapons usually leave Iran aboard innocent-looking cargo vessels; then they are either unloaded in Sudan and sent to Gaza in truck convoys via Egypt and Sinai, or left aboard the ships that traverse the Suez Canal and dumped in Gaza waters, where local Arab divers recover them. One of the most recent cases is the capture in March 2014 by Israeli commandos of the boat Klos C, carrying a concealed load of missiles. The most famous mission of this kind, however, is the capture of the weapons on the ship Karine A.
CHAPTER 23
“WHERE IS THE SHIP?” 2002
At 3:58 in the morning on January 3, 2002, two rubber Morena-type boats pulled next to the hull of the Karine A, a freighter making its way in the Suez Gulf. An electronic signal was flashed to the Shayetet 13 commandos on the Morenas, and they swiftly began climbing from the boats onto the deck of the ship. Suddenly, helicopters swooped down from overhead, and more fighters dropped out of them, sliding down on assault ropes. Quickly and without using weapons, the soldiers spread throughout the ship. They immediately started searching for a shipment of weapons purportedly sent from Iran to the Palestinian Authority.
Hovering simultaneously overhead were Israeli Air Force fighter jets; Sikorsky helicopters carrying members of Unit 669, the IDF’s airborne rescue and evacuation team; a plane equipped for intelligence gathering, surveillance photography, and refueling; and a Boeing 707
serving as the command post for IDF Chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, Navy Commander Yedidia Ya’ari, Air Force Commander Dan Halutz, and additional senior officers, who would stay in the air for approximately two hours until the start of the operation, tracking what was taking place below. “It was a long flight,” a senior officer recalled, “three hundred miles from the Israeli coast. The plane was crowded and very cold, and you could cut the tension with a knife. “
Until the last minute, the mission commanders feared that the raid would be called off because of the stormy weather. The waves were rising nearly ten feet, the winds reaching speeds of almost forty miles an hour. It was hard to sail in such conditions, and even harder to rappel down ropes from a helicopter onto the deck of a ship. But the Karine A, according to highly reliable intelligence, was in the Red Sea, en route to the Suez Canal, and the IDF needed to do everything in its power to take hold of the ship before it reached its destination.
The operation planner and field commander, Vice Admiral Eli (“Chiney”) Marom, was assisted by a superb meteorologist. Marom understood that if they waited for the ship to reach the originally planned interception point, approximately twenty-five miles south of Sharm el-Sheikh, the storm would be at full force. After additional assessments and calculations, he decided that his forces would sail to a point twice as far from Israel as the preselected location, 150 miles south of the Suez Canal. The shayetet officers who heard his suggestion didn’t believe it possible, as it carried a much greater risk that something would go wrong; they were also uncertain that the fuel supplies for the helicopters and boats would suffice. But Chiney persisted, suggesting that the fighters take with them barrels of fuel for refilling at sea, and that the helicopters, which couldn’t circle for long in the air, would act in full coordination with the naval forces to best use the window of time at their disposal. The chips had fallen, and the mission got under way.
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