Spies Against Armageddon (34 page)

After uncomfortable truck rides and, more typically, exceedingly long treks with all their belongings, the Jews were placed in refugee camps run by international humanitarian organizations. The Mossad knew that this arrangement was temporary, at best. A cover story for some sort of processing facility in Sudan, which was an Arab country, would have to be created.

The Israeli spies set up a travel agency in Europe and purchased a small beach resort on the Red Sea coast of northeastern Sudan. The hotel staff and the diving instructors were Mossad operatives, who entertained genuine European customers with a smile by day—and then, by night and in the off-season, became secret agents delivering Jews to the shoreline. The Ethiopians who would soon be Israelis were taken by truck to the beach, where small boats would ferry them to Israeli navy vessels. The boats headed to the Israeli port of Eilat, where instant citizenship was bestowed upon them.

The process, however, was slow and required too many steps. The number of immigrants who got to Israel was relatively low.

Prime Minister Begin ordered Hofi to find a better method. The Mossad gingerly approached Sudan’s dictator, Gaafar Nimeiri, and his security chief, General Omar el-Tayeb, and a deal was clinched. The Jews from Ethiopia could be bused to the international airport in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, and a Belgian charter airline—usually used to fly Muslim pilgrims to Mecca for the
hajj
(pilgrimage)—would fly the Jews to freedom.

Israel would raise substantial sums of money from Jewish contributors around the world to finance the operation, and a significant part of that would go into bank accounts belonging to Nimeiri and Tayeb.

The Israeli role would be kept hidden, and at Nimeiri’s insistence all flights had to go to Europe—and not directly to the Jewish state.

To the Mossad’s pleasure, the CIA was more than happy to help coordinate this modern-day Exodus. The plan had plainly touched the hearts of many officials in Ronald Reagan’s administration. Foremost among them was a former CIA director, Vice President George H.W. Bush.

The CIA station chief in Khartoum was Milt Bearden. He recalled years later that Bush had personally asked Nimeiri to facilitate the rescue of the starving Jews from Ethiopia. Sudan’s president consented, apparently not mentioning that the Israelis had already started making the necessary bank transfers.

The operation began in 1983, and Bearden recalled meeting in Sudan with Efraim Halevy, the Bitzur director who would become the head of the Mossad 15 years later. The conveyor belt for the refugees changed yet again, as Bearden helped organize a fleet of American military transport planes—apparently Vice President Bush’s idea—to take the Jews from a desert airstrip directly to Israel. It was an uncomfortable trip for a few thousand Ethiopians, waiting their turn to be crammed into aircraft not designed for passengers; but the new arrangement avoided bringing them into an unstable and unpredictable Arab capital.

Matters became more complicated when Nimeiri, while visiting the United States in 1985, was overthrown by Sudanese officers who had help from Libya. They immediately declared that the president and his secret police chief, Tayeb, were guilty of collaborating with the Mossad and the CIA in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes. This was a rare case in which claims broadcast by rebels were precisely correct.

Now the Sudanese authorities were searching for the Israelis and Americans who were involved in such perfidy. Bearden, over 20 years later, recounted how three Mossad men individually made their way—as was prearranged—to his house in Khartoum as their emergency shelter.

Bearden’s wife, Marie-Catherine, heard a knock on the door. “A young man stood there and told her: ‘I am French and I want to talk your husband,’” Bearden said. “My wife smiled at him and answered: ‘You are not French. I am French. But I know who you are. Come in and go to the second floor.’”

A month later, Bearden and his CIA colleagues felt it was safe to fly the Mossad operatives out of Sudan.

In all, from 1977 to 1985, an estimated 20,000 Jews left their villages in Ethiopia in search of food, safety, comfort, and spiritual fulfillment. As many as 4,000 died on the way, and even as a new dark-skinned minority group joined the kaleidoscope of Israeli society, the sacrifice made by parents and grandparents to move future generations to the Promised Land of ancient times was never forgotten.

After the biggest immigration projects undertaken in the name of Jewish intelligence were complete, there were growing calls—even within the Mossad—to shut down the Bitzur unit. The separate agency Nativ, after all, had withered and vanished. Perhaps Israel could now move on to protecting its own citizens at home.

A decision was made to keep Bitzur open as a small unit, as two Mossad officers put it in simple terms: “just in case,” and “for a rainy day.” Unpleasant precipitation arrived after 9/11, when Israel noticed an upsurge of anti-Semitism in many countries. A historic synagogue in Tunisia was bombed; and other Jewish sites were targeted by terrorists who seemed to believe that Jews and Americans all constituted the same enemy, which Islam needed to wipe out.

Bitzur operatives were assigned to perform their traditional task of helping to organize self-defense for Jewish communities around the globe. This time, however, the task was almost always performed in conjunction with local police forces.

Israel’s intelligence community could never abandon completely the duty it saw to protect Jews and guarantee a safe shelter to them. That, after all, was why the Jewish state existed.

Chapter Fourteen

Northern Exposure

No one needed the best intelligence in the world to know that Israel was poised to attack the PLO infrastructure in Lebanon in 1982.

Menachem Begin’s intentions became clear after his reelection in 1981. With a measure of reluctance and a whirlwind of controversy, Begin elevated Ariel Sharon to the post of defense minister. The feisty and ambitious retired general had a reputation as a man of action who believed in using a glove of iron—rather than velvet—in dealing with Arabs.

Another cabinet minister remarked—only half-jokingly—that if Sharon got that job, one day tanks would surround the prime minister’s office in a coup d’état. Yet Sharon, as a hero of the Yom Kippur War against Egypt, had many admirers and lobbied vigorously for the defense ministry. Begin lavished praise on Sharon as a modern-day Judah the Maccabee, but also feared Sharon as a charismatic figure who could cause trouble.

What did occur, and quickly, was that Sharon began planning an invasion of Lebanon. Military planners codenamed it “Big Pine.” The concept, in truth, also fit Begin’s strategy. The prime minister was feeling remorse over his offer of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza—part of his peace treaty with Egypt’s President Sadat in 1979. Begin now was concerned that autonomy would lead to an independent Palestinian state, which he opposed. The most effective way to derail that would be to smash the organization that embodied the Palestinians’ aspirations, the PLO.

In public, Begin kept warning that Palestinian terrorists—after being expelled from Jordan in 1971—had built a state within a state in Lebanon as a launching pad for attacks southward into Israel. He even dehumanized the enemy by referring to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat as “this man with hair on his face,” and to the PLO as “two-legged beasts.”

Even for the large circle of Israelis who were privy to the secret war plans, it was a surprise to see how trigger-happy Begin and his defense minister were when news broke in April 1982 that two Israelis had been murdered in the Bois de Boulogne park in Paris. Sharon called Begin, and suggested that this would be the opportunity to execute the pre-cooked plan to invade Lebanon.

It turned out that the corpses in Paris were those of Israeli criminals, killed in an organized crime clash. They were not victims of Palestinian terrorism.

Tranquility reigned for only two months. Late on a Thursday night, the third of June, the Israeli ambassador in London—Shlomo Argov—was shot in the head, and crippled for life, while leaving the elegant Dorchester Hotel after a banquet.

The next morning in Jerusalem, Begin’s cabinet convened for an urgent meeting. Researchers from Aman explained that the three Palestinian attackers, arrested by efficient British police, belonged to a renegade wing of the PLO named for its leader: the Abu Nidal organization. The army chief of staff, General Rafael (Raful) Eitan, immediately jumped up and said: “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal, they all are the same.” (The IDF’s top officer was not related to the intelligence operative, Rafi Eitan.)

The cabinet approved a limited penetration by Israeli forces into Lebanon, to smash PLO positions. Begin told parliamentarians in the Knesset—in Biblical terms—that the IDF operation would bring the Jewish state 40 years of peace and quiet, in which “the children of Israel will happily go to school and joyfully return home.”

On Sunday, June 6, the mighty Israeli military invaded Lebanon by land, sea, and air. Things went well, at first. Palestinian guerrilla fighters were no match for the fully trained and equipped IDF. Within six days, the Israelis encircled the sprawling capital city, Beirut.

Along the way, as tanks advanced northward from the border, the Israelis were welcomed by Druze villagers, Maronite Christians, and even Shi’ite Muslims who showered the invaders with the traditional greeting of handfuls of rice. They saw the Israelis as liberators from an oppressive PLO-Sunni Muslim coalition backed by Syria.

But the honeymoon did not last long.

The promises made by Begin and Sharon, and supported by General Eitan, for a quick victory turned out to be hollow. The invaders went far beyond the 40 kilometers (25 miles) declared by Begin as the war plan. Sharon had a grander strategy, intent upon forcing the Palestinians to leave Lebanon and make their way back to Jordan—the country he wanted to be the permanent solution for the Palestinian problem.

That was not the way events played out. Very soon, the Israelis were perceived by most of Lebanon’s factions as an occupying force. The IDF became the target of attacks by Palestinians and by a new force: Hezbollah, or Party of God, created by the new Islamic regime in Iran to empower their Shi’ite brethren.

The major breakdown of Sharon’s strategy occurred that September. Just after being elected president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel—whose family had a long history of secret cooperation with Israeli intelligence—was assassinated by Syrian agents. Syria felt it had to crush the obvious alliance between Israel and Maronite Christians, including the Gemayels.

Retaliation followed swiftly, and it was bloody and history-changing. Either encouraged or malevolently ignored by the Israeli military, Christian militiamen entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut and massacred 800 Palestinian men, women, and children.

Israel sank even deeper into the mud of Lebanese politics: a complex and fractured mosaic of rival and often violent ethnic groups.

American, French, and Italian forces intervened, intending to stabilize the failed state of Lebanon, but they themselves became the targets of a new form of terrorism: suicidal attacks by Hezbollah. The organization glorified the Shi’ite Muslim tradition of martyrdom: giving your life for a holy cause, wiping out Islam’s enemies, while guaranteeing yourself a place in Paradise where 72 virgins would await you.

The worst attack of all was the truck bombing that brought down the United States Marines barracks, killing over 240 servicemen in October 1983. A simultaneous suicide bombing in Beirut killed 58 French paratroopers.

Israel found small comfort in the mass departure of PLO fighters, led by Arafat. Ships brought them from Beirut’s harbor to their new headquarters, far to the west in Tunisia. Israeli snipers had Arafat in the crosshairs of their gunsights, and a junior intelligence officer felt this could be an opportunity to get rid of the man viewed by Israel as a terrorist chief. Restraint prevailed, because of a ceasefire an American envoy had negotiated, so Begin and Sharon did not approve taking the shot.

The PLO left, but Israel was stuck for another 17 years in its own Vietnam.

An Israeli inquiry commission forced Sharon to resign. Begin’s mental condition deteriorated, as he felt severe pangs of conscience for the more-than 600 Israelis who ultimately were killed in the Lebanon war. The prime minister retreated into seclusion, becoming a prisoner in his official residence.

Both politicians and the Mossad were pilloried for the nation’s quagmire.

Inside Mossad headquarters at the Glilot junction, the finger-pointing was directed at Menachem (Nahik) Navot. Even 27 years after the start of the war, Navot—now retired—was perceived as the intelligence mastermind behind Israel’s conspiracies in Lebanon. “Have you seen the movie,
Waltz With Bashir
?” Navot was asked by a senior female colleague from the 1980s.

She was referring to the 2008 Oscar-nominated Israeli film that depicted the Lebanon war’s horrors from the point of view of director Ari Folman, who had been a tank crewman. She asked the question before a private screening of the animated film was arranged for Mossad employees.

After the movie, Navot lectured the crowd: “A lot of people think that I am responsible for the war. When you talk about the war in Lebanon, unfortunately, they bring up my name. That is the image that was stuck on me and the Mossad.”

Before and during the war, Navot was Mossad’s deputy director and was in charge of the Tevel liaison department. His job was to cultivate a clandestine relationship with the Christians’ armed Phalangist party in Lebanon.

In 1952, at age 21, Navot joined Shin Bet and became a bodyguard to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. He later moved to the operations department, which was shared with the Mossad, and eventually worked on foreign intelligence projects. He worked in the Shah’s Iran and facilitated Israeli military assistance to the Kurds inside Iraq. In the mid-1970s, he was the Mossad’s primary representative in Washington.

Back in Tel Aviv, he and his boss, General Yitzhak Hofi, followed in the footsteps of Reuven Shiloah, the first Mossad director, whose brainchild was the peripheral-alliance strategy. In Lebanon, the chief partners were the Christian Maronites.

The small country just to the north was not a significant threat to Israel, and an oft-told joke was that if a war broke out the IDF would send its military orchestra to the front. But Lebanon was a crossroads for infiltrations in all directions, particularly into and out of Syria. Being a relatively open and permissive society with casinos and brothels, Lebanon attracted influential élites from the Arab world. Thus, it served as a convenient field of play for collecting intelligence.

Since the 1950s, Aman case officers from Unit 154 (later 504) had Lebanese agents who spied on all kinds of people passing through. These agents also provided safe houses and transportation for Israeli operatives, when necessary.

As part of the spycraft of that era, even for the simplest tasks an agent would be needed. Some of the Lebanese then on the Israeli payroll had to endanger themselves, almost every day, for such mundane tasks as bringing Beirut’s newspapers south to the border and handing them to Israeli intelligence analysts. There was no internet. There was no embassy in Beirut. And open-source information has always been a vital part of espionage.

In addition, Israelis frequently went undercover into Lebanon. Unit 154 men developed close relationships with the two leading Christian families, the Chamouns and the Gemayels.

The patriarchs of the two families met secretly with Israeli leaders. One of the Lebanese, Camille Chamoun served as president of his country. Here was a head of state of an Arab country who had no hesitation in mutually beneficial cooperation with the Jewish state. Senior Israelis were friendly with Pierre Gemayel despite his sympathy with fascism, as his own Phalange militia had been formed based on Mussolini’s template. As in the cases when tactics called for cooperation with ex-Nazis served Israel’s needs, Israeli intelligence had no compunctions against cooperating with Phalangists.

Responsibility for maintaining contact with the Lebanese minorities eventually was transferred from military intelligence to the Mossad’s Tevel unit. The secret liaison advanced further in the 1970s, against the background of a vicious civil war in Lebanon, when the Mossad started coordinating the supply of weapons to Phalangist militiamen—and Israel created the South Lebanese Army.

The growing cooperation, however, blasted cracks within the Israeli intelligence community. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who met with both the Chamoun and Gemayel clans, decided that the role of Israel should be limited to helping the Christians to support themselves. After Begin’s election in 1977, that approach began to change. With his Holocaust obsession, Begin believed that the Christian minority in Lebanon was facing possible destruction by the majority Muslims and Palestinians.

Sharon saw the Christian story as one more element in his strategy to install a compliant government in Lebanon on the sharp points of Israeli bayonets. Military intelligence analysts at Aman opposed his grand schemes and believed that the Phalangists aimed to drag the Israelis deeper into Lebanon: to manipulate Israel into fighting their wars for them.

In the Mossad itself there were divisions. Hofi believed in Rabin’s concept of limited aid. His lieutenants, Navot and David Kimche, favored widening the Israeli role—and they did so.

Eventually, Kimche’s deep involvement in Lebanon and his belief in the alliance with the Christians led to his downfall. Hofi, who suspected that Kimche was operating behind his back, forced Kimche to resign—ending, after 30 years, the British-born spy’s aspirations of becoming the agency director.

Lebanon also brought down Hofi’s designated successor, Yekutiel (Kuti) Adam, a decorated army general and an experienced agent-runner as head of the Mossad’s Tsomet department. Just before the invasion in 1982, Begin selected Adam to be the next Mossad director. As the tanks rolled in, in June, Adam rushed to the front—motivated by little more than the excitement of combat—and the unlucky general was killed by a Palestinian ambush.

The partial blindness of some Mossad operatives such as Navot and Kimche could be explained by the excessive warmth of their reception by Lebanese Christians—fine restaurants and nightclubs, at beauty spots along the Mediterranean coast. The Mossad seemed not to see the dark side of the alliance. The agency helped the Phalangists and the SLA restructure themselves along Israeli lines: with combat strategies, shadowy prisons, and interrogation teams. The added Lebanese elements included torture and executions without trial.

Outrageous behavior by Christian allies, more than once, backfired on Israel. Phalangists at a roadblock during the 1982 war kidnapped four Iranians, including three diplomats, and then murdered them and dumped their bodies. (Years later, when Israel wanted to arrange a swap with Hezbollah—of prisoners and corpses of soldiers—negotiations were prolonged by a demand that Israel deliver the remains of the four Iranians. Israel responded that it had no way of doing so, as a building had been constructed on the suspected burial site.)

However, Navot saw the entire drama in a very different, insider’s context. “I was sitting with Hofi and his chief of staff in Mossad headquarters, when the news about the assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London reached us. All of us said, ‘
Oy va voy
[oh, woe!], we are going into a war!’”

Navot feared that Lebanese Christians would not be reliable allies when fighting began. “We knew that the Christian Phalangists wanted us to conquer all of Lebanon for their sake,” Navot reminisced.