Spies Against Armageddon (22 page)

In Israel itself, Palestinians detonated bombs in markets, movie theaters, bus stations, and restaurants. One of the most publicized events took place in October 1967 inside the Zion Cinema in the heart of the overwhelmingly Jewish western part of Jerusalem. During a screening of Howard Hawks’s
El Dorado
, two Arab sisters placed a bag of explosives, wired to a clock, on the floor near their seats and hastily left. The bomb failed to go off and the attackers were arrested, but the thought of a large blast in a crowded, enclosed hall was alarming to Israelis.

The PLO soon realized the importance of the news media. “If you strike, it means you exist,” became the Palestinian leadership’s tactical philosophy.

The notion was broadened when Palestinians found that they did not actually have to act. They merely had to claim. Thus, for many years, accidents and natural disasters were attributed to “our brave Palestinian fighters.”

However baseless the propaganda, it was effective. One of the first such ploys followed an accident that befell Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. He was an amateur archeologist who showed no regard for regulations governing where and where not to dig. In 1968, during an excavation, he was trapped by a cave-in and suffered injuries to his back and ribs. The PLO claimed it had sent a commando unit to assassinate Dayan, and that was why he was nearly buried.

Nonsense of that kind occasionally made the claimants, at least, feel a bit better.

The Israeli government started to cope with issues that would be more fateful than anyone realized at the time. What was the legal status of the territories captured in the 1967 war? Were they “liberated” portions of the ancient Land of Israel, thus rightfully under Jewish control eternally? Or “occupied” acreage that belonged to the Arab residents?

In the absence of a clear and considered decision by Israeli politicians, the intelligence and security agencies were forced to enact an administrative policy. They developed a “carrot and stick” approach, designed to preserve the status quo while maintaining order as the highest priority. In an attempt to drive a wedge between the majority of the Palestinians and a dangerous minority, the Israeli chiefs decided that almost all inhabitants would be permitted to conduct their lives normally. That was the carrot.

The stick was a policy of punishing, strongly and surely, anyone participating in subversion or outright violence. Palestinians who aided guerrilla groups were clamped into prison, and their houses were flattened—usually by dynamite, in almost flamboyant explosions meant to serve as an example to others.

Losing one’s home was serious punishment, but for many Arabs the most severe penalty would be separation from one’s land, family farm, or vineyard. Thus, Shin Bet turned to expulsion as a major stick. Palestinians believed to have ties with PLO terrorists were escorted across the bridges into Jordan and banned from returning. More than anyone else, this policy was identified with Dayan.

Transforming the carrot-and-stick theory into practice was no simple task. Shin Bet officers were not prepared for it. The new territories in Israel’s hands were
terra incognita
to them: an unknown land where the agency had no men in the field and did not know the population. Shin Bet had to start from scratch.

As a first step, Harmelin’s operatives, with the help of Aharon Yariv’s military intelligence staff, used psychological warfare by spreading rumors of how tough the Israeli hard line would be. These were not so much accurate as they were chilling.

After it was clear that Israel’s determination to remain in the territories was known to their inhabitants, Shin Bet turned to the second and major stage: preventing any attempted Palestinian uprising and combating terrorism.

In no time flat, Shin Bet licked the immediate problem. Palestinians were unable to organize a broad uprising, because the Israelis were quickly able to install networks of informers and secret agents all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arabs in the territories were recruited, either by monetary payments or by various forms of intimidation. The agents often gave Shin Bet advance information of attacks planned by guerrillas.

Israeli officers, acting on tip-offs, were able to swoop down on subversive meetings and lay ambushes to capture Palestinian squads on their way to attacks. The system that permitted these successes became known as “preventive intelligence,” which is the greatest desire of every internal security service that has to deal with violence and terrorism. The ultimate aim is to avoid having to search for perpetrators after an act of violence. Instead, they should be prevented from carrying it out in the first place.

By December 1967, Shin Bet had chalked up an amazing record of triumph: Most of the PLO cells collapsed, and their headquarters within the West Bank were forced to retreat to Jordan. Two hundred Palestinian guerrillas were killed in battles with army and Shin Bet units, and more than a thousand were arrested.

The failure of the attempted Palestinian uprising in 1967 was not, however, due solely to the efficiency of the Israeli secret services. Credit should be shared with the Palestinian militants for being so poor at developing professional skills.

They did not adhere to the practice of compartmental-ization that is so basic in spycraft and underground movements. Instead, they organized in relatively large groups, knew one another by genuine names, and relied on local Arabs not to turn them in to the authorities. Arafat himself and his senior commanders, completely disregarding the rules of a good conspiracy, knew most of the members of the cells. Their communications system was primitive, and their codes were simple. No escape routes were planned. Their “safe houses” were not really safe. Nor were the members of guerrilla squads prepared to withstand interrogation when captured. As soon as they were picked up by Shin Bet, they would tell everything they knew.

Their codes were broken, and their weapons and explosives were confiscated. Like dominoes, the cells fell one after another. Failing to live up to Mao’s dictum that a guerrilla fighter must have the support of the population and feel “like a fish in the water,” the Palestinian fighters could not “swim” unnoticed among their neighbors, who pursued favors from the Israelis by sweeping guerrillas to the Shin Bet shore.

Motivated by Israeli carrots and sticks, the local populace shunned any armed uprising and preferred peace, quiet, and prosperity.

Full credit was given to Shin Bet. The importance of Harmelin’s agency within the intelligence community was growing, and its case officers became known as the “kings of the territories.” Almost as in a feudal regime, each Israeli operative was given his own region, generally a village or a group of villages. He had to be Israel’s eyes and ears, knowing everything that happened in his fiefdom. The officer would typically know most of the villagers by name, while they knew him only by an alias—usually an invented Arabic name, such as Abu Musa, “Father of Moses.”

If a Palestinian wanted a building permit, the military government in the occupied territories would first check with the local Shin Bet case officer. An Arab merchant who wished to export his citrus crop from Gaza or his olive oil from the West Bank was able to obtain the necessary licenses only with the assent of Shin Bet.

Palestinians felt compelled to make deals, morning, noon, and night. They would supply information, and in return Israel delivered security and fringe benefits such as jobs and travel permits.

Shin Bet’s success came at a price, however. As the years and decades went by, Israeli society was increasingly judged in the outside world by its security policies. While potential rebellions were crushed, Israel’s goodwill around the world was being squandered. Instead of continuing to be an admired favorite of international public opinion—as it was in most of the Western world’s press in June 1967—the Jewish state became the Ugly Israel.

All the good the country had done was swept aside by negative headlines. The underdog of the crisis that led up to the Six-Day War was now seen as a brutal occupier of another people’s land.

Shin Bet became the security service of an occupying power, self-confident and even arrogant. Having to cover a lot more ground, perfectionism and meticulous work gave way to hasty and often inequitable improvisation.

With Shin Bet’s growing intelligence networks, there was an urgent need to expand its manpower. A new and modern complex of buildings was built in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv to house Shin Bet headquarters, replacing the old one in Jaffa near the flea market. The recruiting criteria were made less demanding, playing down old-fashioned high standards.

Everything was done in a hurry, and the social profile of Shin Bet’s personnel changed. Arabic speakers were essential, so new staff members hired were from the Oriental, Sephardic sector of the Jewish populace. As in many Israeli institutions, that was a change from the initial domination of the European, Ashkenazic Jews filling positions of leadership.

The changed nature of the work also dictated new methods. At a time when thousands of Arabs were being detained for questioning, when booby-trapped cars were exploding, and when hotels and airliners were terrorist targets, it was felt essential to extract information as quickly as possible. The time factor became the most important element of Israel’s preventive intelligence. Fast action sometimes seemed to require brutality, without pausing for a second thought.

At first, Shin Bet found it difficult to adjust to this new reality. Harmelin once saw one of his young interrogators slap the face of a Palestinian suspect, and the agency chief fired his employee on the spot. Harmelin did not agree that physical violence was necessary as a shortcut to information.

Shin Bet operatives learned the hard way what the occupation meant. Theirs was dirty work in the service of a perhaps noble cause. Harmelin and his deputy, Avraham Ahituv—who would be the next head of the agency in 1974—did manage to suppress terrorism, but they had to do it by introducing what their men called “the System.”

The security methods were indeed systematic in creating a double standard of justice. One, democratic by nature, applied to Israeli citizens; an entirely different one, operating in the gray area between the permissible and the forbidden, was used against Palestinian troublemakers and suspects in the territories.

The System and its double standard created a new frontier that could be dubbed “Shin Bet Country.” In Shin Bet Country, the agency had its own detention centers for Palestinian detainees. The police and national prisons authority never took a look at what was occurring in the cells behind those walls.

Arabs accused of terrorism faced coercive interrogation. Physical blows were rare, but there were other forms of harsh treatment that left no marks. Once the gates of Shin Bet closed behind a Palestinian prisoner, he typically had his head covered by a black sack, and then he would be left, exposed to the hot Israeli sun or winter cold, waiting for the interrogators. The questioning then went on for hours. Suspects were usually deprived of sleep and sometimes soaked with freezing water.

After failing to ignite an uprising in the territories, Palestinian militants shifted their battle to other locales. Israeli intelligence received fragmentary reports in 1968, from friendly secret services in Europe, indicating stepped-up efforts by Palestinian groups to attract volunteers from radical left-wing circles in Europe. Most of the recruiting was done by George Habash, who led a Marxist-Leninist wing of the PLO known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Peripatetic emissaries—on behalf of Arafat, Habash, and others—hopscotched across Italy, Holland, France, and West Germany, using ideological comradeship and financial incentives to persuade young Europeans to come to the Middle East and fight “the Zionist occupation” and “its imperialist allies.” Dozens of highly motivated volunteers answered the PLO call. They were brought to Jordan and Lebanon, trained in guerrilla camps, and in some cases went on to hijack airplanes and stage other attacks against Israel.

Even as Israeli intelligence tried to figure out what the Palestinians had in mind by being so active outside the Middle East, Habash’s radicals sprang a surprise by targeting Israel’s national airline. In July 1968, three Arabs hijacked an El Al airliner on a flight from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced the plane to land in Algeria.

The passengers and crew were held prisoner in Algiers for three weeks, and only when Israel agreed to free a dozen wounded guerrillas from jail did the first Palestinian hijacking end with the release of the hostages.

That was the last successful hijacking of an Israeli airliner. Israeli decision makers quickly drew lessons from the humiliation of succumbing to blackmail. They vowed never again to surrender to the demands of terrorists, but the Israelis also knew that defiant statements of intent are insufficient in such matters. Rather than words alone, they would need a new and muscular art: counterterrorism.

Palestinian gunmen and bombmakers, however, seemed to have seized the initiative. In December 1968, two PFLP men threw hand grenades and opened fire at an El Al airplane at Athens airport, killing one Israeli passenger and wounding two female flight attendants. An almost identical attack took place at Zurich airport the following February, when four PFLP gunmen killed an El Al pilot and wounded five passengers. Other airlines flying to Israel became targets of hijackings and bombings, as the entire Earth seemed to be transformed into a global terrorist village. No target, especially if connected to Israel or Jews, was off limits.

It took a while for Shin Bet to get fully up to speed, but the agency was close on the Palestinian militants’ heels when they moved abroad. This sparked some interagency rivalry in the intelligence community, as the Mossad preferred to protect its near monopoly over foreign operations. The Mossad did, however, acknowledge that Shin Bet had the legal and professional responsibility to expand its activities abroad in the hot pursuit of terrorism.

Shin Bet officers were either attached—on loan—to Mossad stations, or were assigned to Europe independently by Shin Bet. In what became an undercover, no-holds-barred war fought with innovation and improvisation, Israeli operatives played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Palestinians.