No Mission Is Impossible

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  Chiney was forty-seven, a moshav boy, whose father had escaped his native Germany when the Nazis came to power, and landed in China. There he had wed Chai Lee, the daughter of a Russian-born Jewish woman and a Chinese man. The couple had immigrated to Israel and Chai Lee had changed her name to Leah. Young Eli had inherited her slanted eyes and his comrades at the naval officers’ academy had nicknamed him Chiney. His Asiatic features made an American paper call him the “Israeli Chinese Admiral.” He was known as an excellent officer. “The fact that Chiney looked different,” one former comrade said in a press interview, “forced him to constantly show that he was better. He became one of the best very quickly.”

  The night of the operation had been preceded by a long period of complex surveillance that combined multipronged intelligence gathering and preparations. It had all begun when some top-secret reports were delivered to the IDF intelligence headquarters. The documents dealt with a project to smuggle weapons by ship from Iran to the Gaza Strip. This wasn’t the first time the Palestinians had tried to smuggle weapons to Gaza by sea. In May 2001, the Israeli Navy had captured a small boat, the Santorini, as it sailed to Gaza from a Hezbollah base in Lebanon. On its deck, the Israelis had found a small but significant cache of weapons: Russian Strella missiles with which the Palestinians intended to bring down IAF planes. It was undeniable proof that Yasser Arafat was speaking out of both sides of his mouth, talking about his people’s desire for peace to leaders in the West and, at home, in Arabic, about jihad.

  A seemingly unimportant finding alerted the sensors of the Israeli intelligence community: the Palestinians had paid too much for an old ship. The navy head of intelligence recalled, “We realized that the ship in question had been acquired for a task that wasn’t innocent at all; they had done everything to conceal their activities. They were treating this like a secret mission, using special technology.”

  Intelligence operatives immediately began tracking the activities of the people involved in the purchase and the handling of the ship, and searching for any tiny piece of information that might lead them to crack the mystery of the Karine A. In early December, they had assembled a partial picture of the Palestinian operation: the ship had been purchased in the summer of 2001 by Palestinians using multiple straw companies. Fearing detection by the Mossad or other intelligence organizations, the Palestinians changed the ship’s name, Rim K, to Karine A. As eagle-eyed Israeli Mossad agents watched, the ship sailed from Lebanon to Port Sudan, where it was loaded with large quantities of rice, clothing, toys and household appliances, with plenty of space left over for the weapons awaiting the ship at its next destination—Kish Island, off the coast of Iran. Under the darkness of night, an Iranian ferry loaded the Karine A with eighty-containers, each holding nearly eighteen hundred pounds of weaponry.

  The ferry’s Farsi-speaking crew provided the Karine A captain with a list of the containers’ contents, as well as clear instructions for the rest of the trip. The weapons had been loaded into eighty sophisticated, buoyant, hermetically sealed containers built by Iran’s military industry. When the Karine A approached Gaza, its crew would dump the containers in the water. Each container was equipped with a compartment that could contain water or air. When the compartment filled with water, the container would submerge; a diver would later approach and turn a switch, compressed air would displace the water, and the container would float to the surface. At this stage, small boats would collect the containers and bring them to the beaches of Gaza, where they’d be collected by Palestinian police personnel and brought to the terrorists.

  After the ship was loaded, it set sail for the crucial leg of its journey. However, it was forced to dock for eleven days at the port of Hodeidah, in Yemen, because of technical problems. The stop in Yemen gave the IDF the vital time window it needed to plan and prepare for the seizure of the ship.

  The ship and its lethal cargo in the port of Eilat.

  (Jo Kot, Yedioth Ahronoth Archive)

  In Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz’s office feverish discussions started, with the participation of the Shayetet commanders and air force and intelligence personnel. Maps were spread and operational plans submitted; everyone understood that the pivotal moment was growing close.

  “What are you calling the operation?” Mofaz asked at one of the meetings.

  “Noah’s Ark,” replied the head of the navy’s operations division.

  “A nice name,” Mofaz smiled.

  In the lead-up to the final decision, Chiney explained to the chief of staff, “Everything is based on the discovery of the ship. The moment we found out about it, the rest was simply a matter of scheduling.”

  Mofaz remained uneasy. “Will you be on one of the patrol boats?” he asked Chiney.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll know how to process all the intelligence about the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll also be able to positively identify it, what’s on it, its dimensions?

  “Definitely.”

  “Were you ever in the Straits of Tiran?”

  “Many times.”

  “Now, then, how would you sail the ship through the Straits of Tiran?”

  “It’s not too complicated. All we need to know is how to start the ship’s engine.”

  Mofaz summed up his position. “I cannot risk that this mission would fail. If you see that conditions in the sea are such that it can’t be done, you must stop and think it over again; or you put this on hold temporarily, and we wait, let’s say, for a day; or we let the ship go away.”

  A few days before the operation, the team went to the home of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, presenting him with the details of the mission. Sharon listened, asked questions, requested a look at the maps and praised the operation’s daring. He then authorized it, aware that its success depended on the precise coordination between the Shayetet commandos and the pilots of the helicopters from which they’d be rappelling down. “This is like jumping onto a truck on a winding road,” a member of the Shayetet later said.

  There remained some unresolved questions: Was the ship’s crew armed? Was the hidden weaponry booby-trapped or loaded with explosive charges programmed to be operated remotely? Were there Palestinian fighters on board? The mission could become a bloodbath, if Palestinian armed terrorists were protecting the ship. To address all the contingencies it was decided that a Shayetet doctor and a medic would be part of the takeover team, and that one of the helicopters would be fully equipped for emergency surgery, if needed.

  One night, shortly before the mission, the chief of staff and the operation’s commanders watched a simulation during which Shayetet commandos rappelled onto a commercial ship from two helicopters. Mofaz was highly satisfied with the exercise. The commandos then departed to Eilat, where they would wait for the green light. But Mofaz and the intelligence experts were still preoccupied with the ultimate question: Where was the ship? Why couldn’t they locate it? They knew without a doubt that it was making its way toward the Suez Canal, but a definitive ID was missing. Only a few days later, on January 1, 2002, the chief of staff received word that the Karine A had been conclusively identified, forty miles north of Jedda, Saudi Arabia, at a distance of four hundred miles from the area where the takeover was planned. The last reports noted that the ship’s name, Karine A, was written clearly and prominently on the ship’s hull.

  On the morning of D Day, the various units began moving toward their destination. Chiney boarded a “Dvora” patrol boat, while Shayetet commander Ram Rotenberg boarded a helicopter alongside his fighters. About two hours before H-Hour, Mofaz and officers from the navy and Air force climbed onto the special Boeing that would fly them above the Red Sea area where the takeover would unfold.

  Even before the operation began, the Boeing’s passengers were glued to their monitor screens; they watched Chiney and his command team at sea, trying to identify the Karine A, which finally appeared on the radar in the middle of a group of ships twenty miles from
the takeover point. Using various indicators they attempted to determine which ship was the Karine A but without success. An IAF patrol plane was also unable to identify the target, due to a dense fog covering the waters. The navy’s small flotilla drew closer to the group of ships. So as not to be identified, Chiney grouped the vessels in a unique formation, with a patrol boat in front and a patrol boat in the back and the rubber boats in between; from a distance, they looked like a single big ship.

  The tension on the boats and in the Boeing kept growing. The window of opportunity was getting shorter—they needed to complete the mission by 4:15 A.M.; the choppers couldn’t stay in the area a minute longer.

  Chiney continued to calculate the timing and geographical issues, and decided the operation had to begin at 3:45.

  “But where is the ship?” wondered a Shayetet officer. “Where the hell did it disappear? Could it have managed to get away?”

  Suddenly, about 4.5 miles away, a Shayetet intelligence officer spotted a ship with a prominent smokestack, three loading cranes and a mast at its center, the distinctive characteristics of the Karine A. The report quickly climbed up the chain of command, and the excitement grew. The ship had been found.

  It was three-forty. Now they began moving closer to the ship, which was growing increasingly visible. The Israeli force raised its speed and came within very close range, almost next to it. Shaul Mofaz asked again for clear confirmation. “That’s the ship! That’s the ship!” came the answer from below.

  The moment of decision was approaching. All the senior officers on the Boeing remained glued to their monitors, where they could follow the takeover from start to finish; the process looked like a Hollywood thriller.

  At four the electronic signal flashed through the flotilla receivers. That was the go-ahead for Noah’s Ark, which began at once. From above, the officers in the Boeing could see the Shayetet fighters bursting from the sea and air onto the Karine A deck, surprising the thirteen-member crew, the majority of whom were asleep. They could make out that no gun battle was taking place on the ship, and could identify the Shayetet commanders conducting a preliminary search for the weapons. Most important of all, and unbelievably, the entire operation lasted just seven minutes.

  A sigh of relief could be heard aboard the Boeing, and Chief of Staff Mofaz hurried to call the officers below. He congratulated them without concealing his happiness: “You did wonderful work! From above, it looked amazing. What now? What’s the next stage?”

  “We’ve completed the takeover, and our forces are doing a sweep,” Shayetet Colonel Ram Rotenberg responded.

  “Are you seeing anything yet?” Mofaz persisted, seeking a smoking gun, weaponry that would prove to the world—and to the United States in particular—that Yasser Arafat was engaged in smuggling Iranian arms into the Palestinian territories.

  “Not yet—right now we’re going down into the holds. We’ll report back the moment we find something,” the commander replied.

  Chiney, who in the meantime had boarded the ship, rushed to the cargo hold with the Shayetet commander. With flashlights, they illuminated the area but couldn’t find a thing. A few minutes went by, but the search bore no fruit. They saw nothing but bags of rice, bundles of clothes and children’s toys. “We can’t see anything, not a weapon and not a mortar,” one of the searchers blurted out in despair. For a moment, an appalling doubt stole into their hearts: Had they captured the right ship? Was Noah’s Ark a failure? Had they risked their lives for nothing?

  And then came the turning point. A quick, rough interrogation of the ship’s captain, Omar Akawi, an employee of the Palestinian transportation ministry, yielded results. A commando fighter considered the Shayetet tough guy began shaking him with no excessive gentleness, and the confession wasn’t long in coming. “It’s in the forward hold,” Akawi ultimately blurted.

  The commandos hurried to the bow. “We initially thought that we hadn’t found anything,” Lieutenant Colonel G recalled. “But we discovered the first crate, then the second, and a sense of great pride overwhelmed us. It was the first time we encountered such quantities of weapons. Every Katyusha launcher that was uncovered was accompanied by a round of applause, and the guys greatly rejoiced.”

  The soldiers took over the vessel commands and the ship was turned toward the Gulf of Eilat. One of the commandos ran to his officer. “We need to raise the Israeli flag,” he said.

  “But we don’t have one,” the officer countered.

  “We do. I brought it from home,” the commando said.

  A few hours later, an Israeli flag flowing from its mast, Karine A docked in Eilat. The methodical search revealed that the ship had been loaded with sixty-four tons of weaponry, including Katyusha rockets, Sagger anti-tank missiles, Israeli-made mortars (that had been supplied to Iran before Khomeini’s takeover), rocket-propelled grenade launchers, Ra’ad missiles, various kinds of rifles and land mines. “All this was an internal Iranian affair,” a senior officer joked, “their Iranians were beaten by our Iranians, Mofaz and Halutz [both officers of Iranian origin].”

  The day after the operation, Prime Minister Sharon hosted American General Anthony Zinni at his farm. At the end of the meeting, he told him, “You can tell Yasser Arafat, when you see him today, that he needn’t worry about his weapons ship, the Karine A. We got it, and it’s in our hands.”

  After the story went public, the United States cut its ties with the Palestinian Authority for an extended period. President Bush was furious that Arafat had lied to him, and that was one of the reasons the Americans would soon give their approval to Operation Defensive Shield.

  SHAUL MOFAZ, THEN IDF’S CHIEF OF STAFF, LATER MINISTER OF DEFENSE

  “The story of the Karine A, beyond the smuggling of fifty tons of weapons and terror supplies from Iran to the Palestinians, is about the agreement between them, according to which the Palestinians, in exchange for the weapons they received, would give the Iranians a foothold within the Palestinian Authority. Its significance was the entry of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards into the cities of the West Bank.

  “When we received the intelligence about this, it was clear that we needed to take control of the ship in order to capture the weaponry and—no less important—to expose Arafat’s true face as a terror leader to the world.

  “After the Shayetet and the air force’s amazing operation, Prime Minister Arik Sharon decided to send me to the White House to present Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, with all the intelligence that we’d acquired and to reveal the deal reached between Arafat and the Iranians. She looked over the material, astonished, and ran with it to President Bush. She asked if I could stay in Washington; I said that I could not because the Intifada was at its worst. This material led to President Bush’s famous declaration that the Palestinian Authority is a terror organization.

  “The central dilemma during the operation had been conclusively identifying the ship. The fear was that if we couldn’t identify it with one hundred percent certainty, we might mistakenly capture another country’s ship, something that could cause great trouble. Consequently, when I boarded the Boeing command post, the first thing I asked for was to see the ship’s identification on the radar.”

  In 1993, Israel and the PLO have signed the Oslo Accords, hoping to reach a peace solution soon. Unfortunately, the accords fail and a new wave of terrorism sweeps Israel. After a stunning increase in suicide bombings by Palestinians, Prime Minister Sharon and Defense Minister Benyamin Ben Eliezer launch a large-scale operation in the West Bank, targeting the terrorist organizations. The operation is directed by Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz.

  CHAPTER 24

  HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY IN THE NABLUS QASBAH, 2002

  On the rainy, stormy night of March 29, 2002, an IDF force entered Ramallah, the capital of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. The troops’ raid on his headquarters, the Mukataa, was carried out on foot, and wasn’t met by particularly intense Palestinian resistance. Avi Pel
ed, the commander of the Egoz Commando Unit, later remarked, “We knew that, for the Palestinians, the Mukataa was the end of the line, the holy of holies. We were sure that they would fight us till the last bullet. But apparently our entrance into the Mukataa and the Palestinian Preventive Security headquarters in Beitunia had broken them psychologically, and their resistance collapsed everywhere.”

  That was the start of Operation Defensive Shield, one of the IDF’s largest-ever operations in the West Bank, territories also referred to by Israelis as Judea and Samaria. The goal was to strike at the area’s terrorist organizations and to stop a wave of terror attacks that had reached unprecedented numbers. During the preceding month, referred to as Black March, 135 Israelis had been killed by terror attacks, eleven of them suicide bombings within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The low point was a terrorist attack on a Passover seder in the Park Hotel, in Netanya: a suicide bomber entered the hotel undetected and killed thirty guests and wounded 140 others celebrating around the Passover table.

  The horrifying images broadcast in Israel and around the world that night melted American objections to an Israeli military response. The next day, the government authorized Operation Defensive Shield and mobilized thirty thousand reservists. Called up for the operation were the Golani, Nahal, Yiftach and paratrooper brigades, as well as both regular soldiers and reservists in the infantry, armored and engineering corps. At the Knesset, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained the goals of the operation: “The IDF’s soldiers and their commanders will go into cities and villages that have become shelters for terrorists, to capture and detain terrorists and, above all, those who dispatch them, to seize and confiscate weapons and fighting supplies intended to hit Israel, and to uncover and wipe out terror installations, terror laboratories, weapons-creation factories and hideouts.”