Spies Against Armageddon (35 page)

When their leader Bashir Gemayel—Israel’s great hope—was killed by a Syrian bomb planted in his office, Navot took it hard and took it personally. He rushed to the scene. “People were searching for Bashir and did not find his body. I met one of Bashir’s advisors there, who asked me, seriously, ‘Have you abducted him?’ Later I went with Bashir’s widow to the hospital, and there we identified his body.”

There were many more corpses and tons of destruction, as Israel remained in southern Lebanon until the year 2000. The involvement of the intelligence community deepened and widened. It was not only the Mossad there, but also Aman and increasingly Shin Bet. Israel’s domestic security agency, with its counter-terrorism specialty, started running more Lebanese agents than ever, arresting and interrogating suspects, and getting to know the territory as though settling in for a long occupation.

Lebanon instantly became the biggest focus for all three Israeli agencies, consuming resources budgeted for other projects. Case officers, interrogators, and researchers were taken off their projects and relocated to Lebanon. A notable example of someone who had to move was Dubi, the same katsa who was busy running an extremely important agent in Cairo: Ashraf Marwan, the Mossad’s best eyes and ears in Egypt.

Lebanon was a dangerous place that required extra guards and defenses when going to meetings with sources and agents. Ambushes and roadside bombs were frighteningly common. A thin organization, such as the Mossad, where personnel liked to move around invisibly, instead wound up in heavily armed convoys. For Aman’s Unit 504, which specialized in running agents and interrogations, Lebanon was its biggest field of play ever.

Using all three major agencies in a relatively small territory did not make sense. There was a question of organizational ego, leading to inevitable turf fights and a lack of proper division of labor. Unnecessary duplication was evident in the absurdity of the three agencies’ often running the very same agents, hiding their identities and information from the other Israelis.

Worse than that, they depended on well-established drug dealers as sources of information. Lebanon was known for decades as a hotbed for growing poppies and hashish and producing opium and cocaine, to be smuggled out of the country—often via Syria and Jordan into Egypt in one direction, and to European markets in the other.

The illegal but thriving drug trade first attracted Lebanese politicians and generals, then powerful Syrians as their country’s influence in Lebanon grew. This trend eventually generated a class of professional drug traffickers, often as a family tradition. These criminal clans learned to cooperate with every power: with the central Lebanese government; with the Syrians; and now, acknowledging their new masters, with the Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.

The Israelis welcomed those families and gangs and started using them. Part of the deal was that the agencies turned a blind eye to their business. Israeli intelligence did not notice what impression all of this would make on local residents, who became aware of the foreigners’ extending their protection to drug smugglers. The Biro family was a case in point. Muhammad Biro, the father of the family, was a Lebanese customs officer at a border crossing with Syria in the 1950s, but his real business was selling drugs.

In a 20-year period, he became one of the biggest drug traffickers in the Middle East. Biro’s business extended from Lebanon into Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Europe. He was moving tons of drugs by land and sea to supply an unending demand. By becoming rich, he also became respectable. The Israelis started paying their respects to him and his heirs.

When Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Arens, visited the area, he accepted an invitation to dine with the Biro family. He did not know the family’s true business, and Aman’s case officers who handled Biro did not tell Arens. It was no surprise that ridiculous rumors spread across Lebanon that Arens and Biro were drug-smuggling partners.

In any contacts with Arab drug smugglers, one key rule was imposed on them: If you sell to Israeli drug dealers, you have to inform on them and testify in court. The dealers, however, believed in free trade and globalization—before that term was coined—and for them there were no borders.

Ramzi Nahara, another giant in the Lebanese drug trade, cooperated with Israeli intelligence officers. While making a fortune, he furnished information to Israeli police; but he also smuggled more of his inventory into Israel behind the backs of the cops—until, one day, they decided that enough was enough and arrested him.

He was put on trial and sentenced to a long stay in an Israeli prison. Nahara continued to run his drugs business from a prison cell. He also managed to smuggle out a message to the emerging power of Lebanon—Hezbollah—telling them that he was severing his ties with Israel and now would be on their side. This would be significant in the future.

Starting in the 1990s, Israeli intelligence considered whether to dismantle Unit 504, with its checkered history. The proposal was to merge it with the Mossad, to put the art of running agents under one roof. But top military commanders had doubts about the wisdom of such a move, arguing that Unit 504 case officers and agents were providing tactical intelligence that was necessary for the troops in the field. They doubted that the Mossad, with its international and strategic outlook, would be interested in filling that role so well.

Hezbollah’s birth stemmed from a long history of Shi’ite Muslim suffering, the facts of local Lebanese politics, and the Iranian Islamic revolution of February 1979. Its emergence also coincided with the Israeli invasion. The longer Israel remained in Lebanon, and the wider its activities there, the stronger Hezbollah became.

The Israeli presence gave the Shi’ite Party of God a focal point for its passion, fueled by resentment and hatred. Its first spiritual leader was Muhammad Fadlallah, a Muslim cleric who studied in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf in Iraq. Returning to Lebanon in 1966, he immersed himself in religious and educational concerns, even establishing an orphanage.

His work sowed the first seeds of Shi’ite pride in the country. For generations, his community in Lebanon and other majority Sunni Muslim countries suffered from discrimination and a lack of resources. In 1979 and 1980, with the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, Shi’ites around the world were energized by the establishment of the first Shi’ite government in modern history.

From Iran’s perspective, Lebanon was important because of the Shi’ite community—but also as a bridgehead to the Mediterranean and beyond to Europe. It could be a key base for a holy war against Israel and Western interests.

As in the French and Russian revolutions, the activists who took power quickly sought to export their ideals. The Iranians started sending emissaries to establish ties with other Shi’ite communities, and Lebanon was an obvious destination.

Iran’s point man for the Lebanese community was Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian ambassador in Syria. He found that Lebanese Shi’ites had already been spiritually inspired by Fadlallah, and now the envoy from Iran would add a large measure of political power. And money. And arms.

The day after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, an Iranian military delegation arrived in Damascus and discussed how to stir up resistance against the Israelis. The group was led by Iran’s defense minister and by the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, joined by Ambassador Mohtashemi. It was agreed to send Iranian volunteers into Lebanon, and that was the start of a significant Iranian presence in the country. The volunteers were mostly Revolutionary Guards and intelligence officers.

With the help of the Iranian professionals, Hezbollah began to organize itself on three fronts: as a Lebanese political entity, as a religious and social organization, and as a military force. They called themselves resistance fighters. The Israelis and the West labeled them terrorists.

As well as turning their guns on Israelis, they also targeted Westerners. Americans, Britons, and other foreigners working in Lebanon were kidnapped. An American TWA airliner was hijacked to Beirut in June 1985, enabling the whole world to get acquainted with a young Lebanese Shi’ite by the name of Imad Mughniyeh. The 22-year-old had just defected from the PLO to the fast growing Hezbollah, and later he would become the world’s most wanted terrorist—until the arrival of Osama Bin Laden.

A veiled war between the United States and Lebanese Shi’ite radicals had already begun. The CIA found no alternative to violence—not only because of the attack that killed sleeping U.S. Marines in their barracks in October 1983, but also the loss of the CIA’s top case officer for the Middle East, Robert Ames, the previous April, when the United States embassy in Beirut was leveled by a car bomb. Those blows at American interests would also be blamed on Mughniyeh. The CIA retaliated, in a most unorthodox and bloody way: with a massive car bomb.

That may have seemed a fitting weapon in the Middle East, land of “an eye for an eye,” but unless the explosives are sized and tailored with great expertise—as the Mossad has done repeatedly in enemy capitals—the casualties are almost sure to include many non-combatant civilians.

So it was in the southern Shi’ite district of Beirut on March 8, 1985. The target was Muhammad Fadlallah, the cleric who established Hezbollah. William Casey, then the director of the CIA, spoke with journalist Bob Woodward about it, and Woodward reported that Saudi Arabia helped organize placement of an explosives-laden vehicle, which went off in front of Fadlallah’s home. Several buildings collapsed and 80 people were killed outside an adjacent mosque, but Fadlallah survived.

Chapter Fifteen

A New Enemy

Israel’s intelligence community and the IDF were slow to realize that they faced a very potent enemy in Hezbollah. The wake-up blast came in November 1983: a suicide car bomb that toppled an office building used by Shin Bet as its local headquarters in the port city of Tyre. Twenty-eight Israelis were killed, as well as 32 Lebanese prisoners held inside. Shin Bet’s official history calls that the first suicide attack against an Israeli target.

That historical version is challenged, however, because an even taller building nearby—used by Shin Bet and the army—suffered a devastating explosion one year earlier. It caused the deaths of 78 Israelis and around two dozen Arab detainees. A senior military investigatory committee’s official conclusion was that the first blast was an accident caused by a gas leak, yet the Lebanese media have always boasted that it was a Hezbollah attack.

Some Israeli investigators agree with the Hezbollah version, and they reveal that part of the car and a leg of the suicide bomber were found in the rubble weeks later. Still, Israel has stuck to the official version of a gas explosion.

The Mossad and Aman intensively probed into the second blast, hoping to trace the bombers to a specific location. Before long, there was a strong focus on Iran’s ambassador in Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. They concluded that he was the key link between Iran, providing logistical support and training, and Hezbollah men carrying out terrorist operations. They suspected that the ambassador was also involved in plotting the major suicide attacks on the Marines barracks and the U.S. embassy in Beirut.

In the tradition of sending letter bombs in the 1960s to German scientists and in the 1970s to Palestinian terrorists, a parcel was mailed to Mohtashemi in February 1984 at the Iranian embassy in Damascus. It contained a booby-trapped Muslim holy book, a Quran. It exploded but failed to achieve the entire goal: Mohtashemi lost his right hand and part of his left hand, but he survived.

Ironically, in the decades that followed, the militant ambassador would become a reformist publisher and politician in Tehran, supporting pro-democracy causes in his country.

In any event, the exploding book was a waste of time and blood. Hezbollah’s growth seemed unstoppable, and it became a more sophisticated force than the PLO. The Shi’ites were better trained, with the backing of their masters in Tehran. Together they innovated a new line of booby traps and mines that were cleverly camouflaged, causing casualties and damage to Israeli forces.

Similar improvised explosive devices would be aimed against U.S. troops in Iraq after 2003, as bombs were planted along roadsides by Iranian-supported militias. Hezbollah experts, honed by their experiences in Lebanon, would infiltrate into Iraq to train their Shi’ite brethren in the anti-American resistance.

The long war in Lebanon became asymmetrical: a regular army facing a guerrilla force. The Israelis eventually realized that the best way to fight guerrillas would be to emulate their tactics. The IDF put soldiers in special small units that staged ambushes, hid explosives, and behaved in unpredictably offensive ways.

Many Israelis, not only in the intelligence community, saw the unexpected and uncomfortable truth of what was unfolding in Lebanon. Israel went into that country to get rid of one enemy—the PLO. But it stayed there, and over the years it faced a more dangerous enemy, Hezbollah.

Israelis had to fight even more fiercely, and the mutual bleeding was not confined to Lebanese soil. It spilled over into Israel.

Hezbollah introduced a new threat, courtesy of its Iranian sponsors: short-range rockets, and then longer-range missiles that could reach many Israeli towns and cities. For the first time since 1948, the civilian population in Israel might be thrust onto the front line, because the military front came to them.

Israel and the radical Lebanese Shi’ites kept hammering each other, and a new crisis would focus on one Israeli airman.

In October 1986 one of Israel’s American-made F-4 Phantom warplanes, during a bombing mission over Lebanon, was damaged when one of its own bombs exploded. The pilot and the navigator ejected and safely parachuted to the ground. The pilot was quickly picked up by an Israeli helicopter-borne rescue squad, but the rescuers could not reach the navigator, Ron Arad. Ground fire from gunmen in Lebanon did not let up, and Arad was captured by Shi’ite Muslims.

His captors were not Hezbollah militants, but members of the more traditional Shi’ite movement called Amal. Israeli leaders, pressured by heavy criticism of a lopsided prisoner exchange with a small Palestinian terrorist group two years earlier, were in no rush to offer a deal. The politicians in Jerusalem were reading intelligence analyses from Aman that suggested Arad was not in imminent danger. Meetings were held with Amal representatives in London, aimed at arranging his release. For about 18 months, Israel was certain that Arad was alive, and his family even received letters from him.

But Aman’s reading of the situation was wrong. In fact, Amal was sinking quickly in the constellation of Lebanese factions and could not hold on long to its prize captive. Hezbollah paid Amal and took possession of the prisoner. Ron Arad vanished into a black hole.

His mysterious disappearance would haunt Israeli intelligence, the military, politicians, the press, and the public for decades. It is assumed that he died. It is also assumed that his captors, whether Hezbollah or Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, did not want him to die, as he could be a precious trading asset. For the operatives and chiefs of Aman and the Mossad, it was truly a low point that an Israeli imprisoned behind enemy lines could not be traced.

Realizing that there was no consistent framework for dealing with such cases, the two agencies created permanent units called Shon, a Hebrew acronym for
Shvu’yim v’Ne’edarim
(Prisoners and Missing). The units would be directed by senior officers, to emphasize the importance of locating anyone who was lost—rooted in the Israeli ethos of leaving no soldier behind.

Among the steps recommended for the Arad case was to kidnap senior members of Hezbollah, so as to have bargaining chips. This was modeled on a success in 1972, when Sayeret Matkal commandos kidnapped five Syrian military officers along the Syria-Lebanon border and exchanged them for Israeli pilots held by Syria.

In July 1989, armed with excellent intelligence, Sayeret Matkal soldiers went into action again inside Lebanon. In the middle of the night, they kidnapped Sheik Abdul Karim Obeid from his home. He was ostensibly a spiritual leader in Hezbollah, but according to the Israelis he directed many acts of violence.

Once again, in the complex Lebanese kaleidoscope, Israeli intelligence was confused by all the facets. Hezbollah stubbornly offered nothing in exchange for Obeid. Either he was not sufficiently important in their organization, or the group had no idea where Arad was—and did not wish to reveal that it did not know. Israel was stuck with Obeid for 15 years and faced international criticism for holding a hostage without trial.

With no progress made on the Arad front, Israeli intelligence and the political echelon decided to escalate. If Obeid turned out to be merely a tail, now Israel would aim at the snake’s head. A decision was made to kidnap Abbas Musawi, who only recently had become secretary-general of Hezbollah. Teams of Sayeret Matkal and naval commandos—known as Flotilla 13—practiced various scenarios: grabbing Musawi from an office, from a home, or from a car.

The commander of Aman, General Uri Saguy, spotted an opportunity in February 1992: a newspaper item that said Musawi would visit a Shi’ite village in southern Lebanon. The Israelis would not be far away.

When Musawi was driven southward out of Beirut in a convoy on February 16, the line of vehicles was watched constantly by an Israeli air force drone flying undetectably high above. The pilotless plane transmitted real-time pictures to a command center in the Kirya in Tel Aviv. General Saguy and his analysts realized, to their disappointment, that there were too many cars and people around Musawi, so a snatch operation would be too dangerous.

Without much deliberation, the chief of staff, General Ehud Barak—with General Saguy reluctantly agreeing but some other officers opposed—decided, on the spot, to eliminate the Hezbollah leader. American-made Apache helicopters, on standby at a base in northern Israel, were summoned. Not knowing which car contained Musawi, the pilots were ordered to destroy the entire convoy.

One of the Israeli pilots later spoke of making his own decision, while airborne, to hit the procession of “good-looking black Mercedes cars” and one Land Rover far from any buildings to reduce civilian casualties.

He was not told beforehand who the main target would be, and he said “professional behavior” meant not asking questions. “We knew they weren’t sending us out for nothing,” he said. The five-minute attack was like a shooting gallery. Four helicopters fired missile after missile to liquidate all the Hezbollah targets. The gruesome results, shattered and smoking remnants of expensive German- and British-made vehicles, formed a killing field.

The death toll included Musawi, his wife, their son, and at least five security guards. This was the first assassination by Israeli attack helicopters, several years before the practice—officially aimed at blocking future terrorism—became legalized by an attorney general as “targeted prevention.” America would come to call the method “targeted killing,” when aimed against al-Qaeda years later.

Barak did manage to get an okay by telephone from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Defense Minister Moshe Arens, around a minute before the rockets struck. The political level did adhere to tradition by taking responsibility for an assassination.

This particular killing would lead to terrible blowback for Israel, a mere 30 days later.

First, it rapidly became clear that Hezbollah would not be caving in. Musawi was replaced by a new leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who turned out to be much more charismatic, vigorous, wily, and dangerous. Nasrallah would become one of Israel’s bitterest enemies, causing a lot of trouble for the Jewish state—including starting a war in 2006 that disrupted normal life for Israelis.

According to Israeli intelligence, the new leader consulted with his Iranian masters—the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hashemi Rafsanjani—and together they decided to avenge Musawi in a big way. And they had the capability to do that, far from the expected field of battle.

Israeli security agencies were prepared for some level of retaliation. There was the fairly standard shower of Katyusha rockets fired into northern Israel by Hezbollah gunners. Then, when the security officer at the Israeli embassy in Ankara was killed by a car bomb on March 7, Israelis naturally considered that to be Hezbollah’s response to the death of Musawi.

There were, however, conflicting claims of responsibility for that blast in Turkey. Hezbollah never made a habit of publicly announcing its operations outside Lebanon, and Iranian intelligence certainly never declared anything.

Yet, without doubt, it was the two of them—Hezbollah and Iran—that committed a much more astounding act aimed against Israel. Their agents blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. They chose Argentina because Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) already had assets in South America, including sleeper cells that had melted into friendly Shi’ite communities in several countries.

A truck laden with explosives was detonated by a suicide bomber in front of Israel’s embassy, in an elegant neighborhood, on March 17. Twenty-nine people, including four Israeli diplomats, were killed.

Yaakov Perry, the head of Shin Bet, had just been in Buenos Aires—as part of a tour of Israeli and Jewish facilities in South America with the head of the agency’s security department. They met with Argentine counterparts to discuss the dangers of Middle Eastern terrorism, but they thought they had no reason to think that Argentina would be targeted within a few days.

Separate and joint investigations by the Mossad, the CIA, and Argentina’s state intelligence agency SIDE found that the attack was a joint project of Hezbollah with Iranian government agents. MOIS officers, under diplomatic cover at Iran’s embassy, had activated local sleeper cells and arranged the logistics: procuring the truck and delivering the explosives in diplomatic pouches from Tehran.

A few more Iranian intelligence officers had flown into neighboring countries, Brazil and Paraguay, and the operation was planned and executed with impressive speed.

People in Israel were truly shocked. This was the first time that one of its embassies had been destroyed. Israeli intelligence began to reconsider whether killing Musawi had been such a good idea.

An even bigger blow—again in Buenos Aires—two years later drove home the message that Israel was involved in a war that it barely understood. No one can mess blithely with the Iranians, who are proud to be leading what they see as a historic rise of Shi’ite Islam. They have very long memories. They plot in complex ways. They get even, and sometimes doubly so.

In 1994, yet again, it was a truck bomb. This time the target was in a working-class neighborhood of small markets: the seven-story headquarters of AMIA, Argentina’s national Jewish organization. On July 15, an explosion brought down the entire building. Eighty-five people were killed and over 300 injured.

The driver was vaporized, and no pieces remained of him to put together. There were no documents, no clothing, and no fingerprints. But the Mossad managed to piece together a logical conclusion that he was from a Shi’ite village in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, because a plaque was quickly erected to honor a Hezbollah fighter killed on that particular date. And a pro-Hezbollah television station in Lebanon announced that Musawi’s killing by Israel in 1992 had now been avenged.

Having destroyed an Israeli embassy, Hezbollah fell in love with the tactic as a stunning blow to the Jews and their sovereign state. Hezbollah would plot similar bombings, time and again.

In 1996, Aman received a piece of intelligence that seemed to be a secret message between a terrorist in the Middle East and a partner overseas. A junior intelligence officer in the military’s counter-terrorism unit—who happened to be good with hunches—tried to identify the person who was far away. Sticking with it beyond where others would have quit, he located a suspect in a Southeast Asian country.