Spies Against Armageddon (44 page)

When word reached Amit, behind bars in Ramle Prison, that a possible prisoner exchange was brewing, his intelligence instincts again went into action. He managed to get his hands on a piece of government stationery—because the envelopes were printed in the prison—and he wrote a letter to the U.S. embassy that said he did not want to be swapped.

Israeli intelligence did mention the case, at least once, to the Americans. Yosef Harmelin, who was head of Shin Bet from 1964 to 1974 and then again from 1986 to 1988, raised the subject with the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv. The CIA officer blanched, at first, but then denied any knowledge of a Yossi Amit. Later, he did come back to say that Amit had been a walk-in, volunteering to spy for America, and that the CIA had rejected him.

Israel did not bring it up again and did not ask that Waltz be withdrawn.

Around that time, an American military attaché was caught taking photographs in Israel’s closed military zone near the Lebanese border. Some Israeli intelligence officials suggested kicking him out of the country—as a kind of revenge for America’s rough treatment of the Pollard affair. But there were no expulsions by Israel, as it did not wish to cause further damage to a relationship that was already dented.

Some American Jews felt that the most lasting impact caused by Pollard’s espionage—aside from his long ordeal in prison—was an uncomfortable rift between them and the State of Israel. They wondered if Israeli intelligence saw them as pawns in a large game devoid of any amusement.

By recruiting Pollard and taking advantage of his divided loyalties, Israelis proved themselves insensitive to the facts of life for the small Jewish minority in the United States. American Jews justly felt well accepted, overwhelmingly comfortable, and successful. They wished Israel well, and many were happy to give when asked to donate to Israeli causes. But they were, first and foremost, loyal to the United States and its interests.

With few exceptions, they certainly would not want their non-Jewish neighbors to think that American Jews loved Israel more than they loved the United States.

When spymasters in the Jewish state undermined the equanimity of life in America for Jews, Israel was taking one step too far.

Chapter Nineteen

Coverups and Uprising

Many Israelis never thought about it, but the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that began with victory in 1967 became a chronic conundrum: a millstone that the Jewish state, dedicated to democracy and human rights, could barely support.

By the late 1980s, a prolonged and destructive round of violence would break out. Perhaps it could have been prevented, if Israel’s leadership—including the intelligence community—had not viewed the Palestinians almost exclusively through the gun sights of a rifle.

Israeli officials would contend that the PLO and other Palestinian groups committed terrorism to push their demand that the Jewish state be eliminated. The Israelis said the often-icy harshness of the IDF and of Shin Bet in the territories was necessary as a form of self-defense. Israel, however, refused to talk with the PLO and urged the United States to stick with the same ban, as part of Israel’s policy of never negotiating with terrorists.

The best that anyone could say, as of early 1984, was that the West Bank and Gaza were relatively calm, with most Palestinians struggling to make a living and stay out of trouble. Israelis, generally far more prosperous, were enjoying a period of tranquility.

But in April 1984, the handling of a bus hijacking underlined how Israel’s security services regarded Palestinian militants. The gunmen were captured, and then they were treated like cockroaches. Their crime was horrible, terrorizing innocent passengers, but the justice system of a free country is not supposed to include Shin Bet savagery.

On the night of the incident, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir—who was formerly known as a man of violence, before he became a Mossad operative—was attending a meeting of his right-wing Likud party. In 1983, Shamir had succeeded Menachem Begin, whose decline and resignation were hastened by the Lebanon war he started and by the death of his beloved wife.

Facing an election to win his own term in the summer of 1984, Shamir sought to portray himself as totally firm on security issues. His party hinted that Shimon Peres, the Labor leader, was soft on Palestinian terrorism.

Shamir was interrupted by a phone call from Avraham Shalom. He was the Shin Bet director who had been involved in the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the mysterious visit to a uranium facility in Pennsylvania, and running damage control with the Americans after Jonathan Pollard was caught spying.

The prime minister thought he knew the most likely subject of Shalom’s call. Shin Bet was on the verge of cracking a case so sensitive that it could have led to a war with the entire Arab world. In this instance, the terrorists being pursued were Jewish settlers who started a murder campaign against Palestinian politicians in the West Bank and plotted to blow up the major mosques in Jerusalem. Muslims worldwide would be outraged if that plot were to be carried out.

This phone call, however, was not about the Jewish terrorists. Because Shamir had authorized Shin Bet to plant informers among the settlers, the plotters would be arrested—but sometime later.

Shalom, on this night, was reporting that an Israeli bus on line number 300, from Tel Aviv heading south, had been hijacked. The fear was that the hijackers would take the Israeli passengers into occupied Gaza and then cross into Sinai, which in 1982 had returned to Egyptian control.

Shamir was also informed that orders were given to the military to stop the bus. Sayeret Matkal’s hostage-rescue commandos and a Shin Bet operations team were rushing to the scene. The prime minister felt a certain sense of relief, believing that the security forces could handle this.

Soldiers at a roadblock managed to shoot out the tires of the bus and brought it to a halt in the Gaza Strip, less than six miles from the Egyptian border. Shalom himself arrived on the scene. He was a field and operations man, not a paper-pushing bureaucrat, but he had limited experience in Palestinian issues—unlike Avraham Ahituv, the Shin Bet director he replaced in 1981.

Watching the motionless Bus 300 on the road near Gaza, Shalom knew that the army and police had units specially trained to storm all types of hijacked vehicles and rescue hostages. Shin Bet’s job would be to interrogate the four Arab attackers and discover their accomplices, sources of arms, and paymasters.

The Sayeret Matkal soldiers, who had practiced the technique hundreds of times, smashed windows and were inside the bus in seconds. They opened fire immediately, killing two of the terrorists and wounding the other two. The three dozen hostages were free, except for one woman who was killed in her seat.

When Israelis woke up the next morning, they heard good news: that all four bus hijackers were killed.

“But that can’t be,” said Alex Libak, a newspaper photographer who had witnessed the shootout and vividly remembered the charred bodies of two hijackers—the bus had caught fire in the gunfight—but had also seen soldiers and men in civilian clothes pummeling two wounded terrorists with fists and rifle butts.

His newspaper violated military censorship by publishing his photo of two hijackers being led away. This challenged the official version and would create an avalanche of revelations that would expose decades of misbehavior by Shin Bet. Until that week, Shin Bet had been almost invisible: an organization that Israelis never discussed.

Puzzled by the photograph, Defense Minister Moshe Arens decided to take two steps: to use old, rarely used emergency laws to shut down that particular newspaper for four days; but also to set up an inquiry commission to look into what happened that night.

Punishing the newspaper added to the credibility of its story, and indeed the commission concluded that two of the terrorists had been alive when the battle was over. Now the question was: Who killed them?

Testimony by Shin Bet men pointed blame at the IDF’s General Yitzhak Mordechai, who had been beating the two detainees during a brief “field interrogation.”

Shin Bet provided multiple, corroborating witnesses who blamed Mordechai. It eventually emerged that this was a deception campaign directed by the agency director, Shalom. He and his close associates approached the task as thoroughly as they might have planned an assassination, but here it was a character assassination of Mordechai.

This put the decorated general in a Kafkaesque position. He knew that he did not kill the hijackers, but he faced a court martial where no one seemed to believe him—and his entire career could be ruined.

Luckily for the general, a later inquiry commission found that the two terrorists had been very badly wounded during the firefight, and that was why they died. Mordechai was found not guilty.

Around the same time, the deputy director and two other senior Shin Bet men actually turned against their boss, Shalom. At first, they had thought that the agency would get away with yet another in a long string of cover-ups. But now, they were extremely disturbed by a web of lies they felt was damaging Shin Bet.

They knew that since the Six-Day War, under two previous directors, Shin Bet had been torturing Palestinians and systematically lying to courts. The three men were part of the system. Yet now, after years of being accomplices to abuses, they were outraged by the thought of ruining an honorable general’s career. And they concluded that lies and cover-ups were poisonous for Shin Bet.

Their goal was not public exposure, as they did not particularly want citizens to know the truth about the agency that was tasked with keeping them safe. The three rebels believed, however, that a professional organization should be telling the truth to itself.

One of them went to see Shalom, who strangely insisted that the meeting not be at Shin Bet headquarters—but at Tel Aviv’s main municipal garbage dump. In a scene torn out of an old-fashioned crime novel or movie, the agency director admitted that he had given the order to his operatives to “finish off” the bus hijackers. Shalom added, however, that he was obeying instructions from Prime Minister Shamir.

The three rebels, not satisfied by the private confession, all went to see Shalom and demanded his resignation. They argued that he was ruining Shin Bet with all his cover-ups. The director refused to step down, believing that one of the three was plotting to grab his job. Shalom suspended them, and they were ostracized within the organization.

Before long, staff meetings were convened and—in the style of the Soviet KGB—the order of the day was to denounce the three renegades. According to the officially sponsored smear, they were plotting a
putsch
against Shalom. Rumors then spread that they were involved in drug smuggling from Lebanon.

Undeterred, they decided to go to the new prime minister, Shimon Peres. Because of Israel’s Byzantine political system, after a near tie in the July 1984 election, Peres and Shamir had reached a unique agreement: a “rotation” coalition. Shamir was now the foreign minister, and the plan was for them to swap jobs in 1986.

Although Peres met with the three Shin Bet officials—who were practically breaking a blood pledge of absolute silence, not unlike the Costa Nostra’s
omerta
—the prime minister did nothing. He refused to be dragged into the Shin Bet’s squabble, however serious it was. He felt that the bus hijacking scandal began on Shamir’s watch, not his.

This entire dispute was played out in secret, with heavy censorship of the press preventing any morsel from reaching the public. In any event, only a small minority of Israelis would care about the deaths of two Palestinian terrorists.

Despite the realization that Israel, from top to bottom, preferred to bury this entire affair, the trio were practically obsessed with not giving up.

Later dubbed “the three musketeers,” these long-time Shin Bet men felt like victims of their own agency. They were wiretapped and under surveillance. For their own protection, they recited everything they knew into tape recorders and hid the recordings for safekeeping, to be found if they met untimely ends.

They used their old tradecraft to avoid detection and went, in the middle of the night, to see Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir and his chief prosecutor, Dorit Beinish. Zamir and Beinish were shocked, hardly believing what they were hearing, and they decided to launch yet another investigation—a full two years after the bus hijacking. Now, Prime Minister Peres had to pay attention, and he joined forces with Shamir.

When Zamir concluded that there was a basis for a criminal investigation and passed the case file to the police, Peres and Shamir responded by firing the attorney general. This was truly a coverup in the style of Nixon during Watergate.

The police kept doing their duty, however, and declared that Shalom and 11 others in Shin Bet should be indicted. It turned out that the head of the operations department, Ehud Yatom—the brother of a future Mossad director—had taken the two wounded hijackers away from the scene on that day in Gaza. Along with subordinates, Yatom headed in a vehicle toward a Shin Bet interrogation center, but on the way he took the two Palestinians out of the van and killed them with stones, sticks, and his own bare hands.

“I smashed their skulls, and I’m proud of everything I’ve done,” Yatom told a reporter years later. “On the way, I received an order from Avraham Shalom to kill the men, so I killed them.”

Yatom said his hands were “clean and moral,” adding, “I am one of the few who came away from the affair with a healthy soul.”

Peres and Shamir arranged one more extra-legal trick. They had installed an attorney general more to their liking, and they arranged for him to visit the president of Israel, Chaim Herzog. Herzog’s was primarily a ceremonial job, but, as in many countries, the president had the power of pardon. Herzog agreed to issue pardons to all 12 Shin Bet men who were under investigation—even before they were indicted, tried, or convicted. It was probably relevant that Herzog had been director of Aman: an old hand at black operations.

Most of the dirty dozen left Shin Bet, but not in disgrace. Shalom started a new career as an international security consultant, going back to his old last name, Bendor, for a small measure of anonymity. Yatom tried hard to become the principal of a high school, but the community raised a ruckus that a man who smashed skulls should be an educator. He did go on to be elected a member of Knesset for the Likud Party.

Three million Palestinians, already under occupation for two decades in the West Bank and Gaza, were unimpressed by Israeli niceties such as putting the Shin Bet house back in order. For them, Shin Bet—whether with torture writ large, or minor torturing—was an instrument of oppression.

They exploded.

The detonation of long-simmering rage was not orchestrated, with no central organizers. It was spontaneous: a popular uprising. It was an
intifada
, the Arabic term for “shaking off.”

Like other major historical events, a wide array of contributing factors can be seen, even when the precise timing defies explanation. For the Palestinians under occupation, the sad facts of life included economic decline, disappointment in the empty promises of the PLO to win their freedom, and despair from the apathy of the Arab world about their fate. Above all, they were expressing frustration—a message that enough was enough.

The spark was an unintentional tragedy in December 1987. An Israeli truck hit a group of Palestinians in Gaza, killing four and injuring others. To Gazans, it seemed to be murder: the last straw, the breaking point. They took to the streets the next morning. The protest movement spread to the West Bank, and it went on and on.

It was basically a youth movement. Young protesters refused to leave the streets. Day and night, they were out there: throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and military vehicles and at Jewish settlers’ cars, burning tires at nearly every intersection, attacking police stations, and tearing down Israeli flags and replacing them with the PLO’s national flag of black, white, red, and green. Hardly any guns were used. No terrorist bombs were set. This was a homemade and handmade rebellion.

Institutions on two sides were taken by surprise: the PLO, and Israel’s military and Shin Bet.