Spies Against Armageddon (46 page)

A few heads at Shin Bet were chopped. Among those forced out was the agency director, Carmi Gillon, who had taken over only 18 months earlier.

The irony of Gillon’s departure was that he was a veteran of the Shin Bet unit in charge of keeping an eye on right-wing extremists. The final words in his master’s thesis on that subject for Haifa University had been that “the lone wolf” is the greatest danger: an attacker operating singly and difficult to detect.

Before departing, Gillon asked Rabin’s successor, Peres, to let him stay at the job for just a little while—to complete an operation that Shin Bet was planning. Gillon was hoping for a success so that he could leave with some glory and not only shame.

Peres agreed, and that would eventually contribute to his own political downfall in an unexpected chain reaction.

Shin Bet was pursuing the most notorious Palestinian bomb maker, Yehya Ayyash, considered responsible for the bloody deaths of dozens of Israeli civilians at the hands of suicide bombers. Ayyash, with a senior role in the military wing of Hamas, was an expert at designing explosive devices that were difficult to detect. Nicknamed “The Engineer,” he fled Shin Bet’s pursuit in the West Bank and found shelter in Gaza.

The Israelis were working on a highly innovative way to get him. They identified his principal associates and managed to recruit one of them, providing him with a cellular phone to give to Ayyash as a gift.

The Engineer took the bait, receiving a nice new “mobile.” The phone had been remanufactured by Aman’s technological toy shop, which installed high-powered explosives.

Ayyash received a cellphone call, answered, and with a loud boom his head was blown off. The Engineer had been out-engineered by an Israeli intelligence designer.

The Israeli public, widely depressed after the murder of Rabin, enjoyed reading and hearing news of the January 1996 assassination of the feared bomb maker in Gaza. But the joy was short-lived, and in the weeks and months to come the Israelis would suffer.

In a massive wave of revenge, Hamas struck back. A series of suicide bombers were sent into Israel, blowing themselves up in buses and other crowded civilian targets. In a single week in late March, 57 Israelis were killed.

The political impact seemed clear. Prime Minister Peres was losing his edge in opinion polls against Netanyahu. Fearing that he would be viewed as too soft on security issues—and thus feeling he had to do something to respond to the suicide bombings—Peres authorized a military incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah and Palestinian forces in April 1996.

The army’s campaign went astray when Israeli artillery mistakenly hit a United Nations refugee camp at Qana, in southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 civilians.

Nothing was going right for Peres. Netanyahu won the May election by a slim margin, and the right wing was back in power.

Netanyahu was far from enthusiastic about the Oslo process and decided to slow it down. The truth was that the negotiations with the PLO already had been doomed to a kind of clinical death by the three bullets fired by Yigal Amir into Yitzhak Rabin’s back.

There were sporadic efforts to revive the peace talks, but Arafat was also unhelpful. The Palestinian leader continued to pay lip service to the peace process, but it seemed that he was merely trying to deceive the world about his real intentions.

The always zigzagging Israeli political system took another turn to Labor’s zag, after three years of Netanyahu’s zig. Ehud Barak was now the Labor party leader—ironically, Netanyahu’s former commando commander in Sayeret Matkal. In the 1999 election the left-wing Barak defeated the right-wing Likud leader.

Shin Bet and Aman analysts were divided on whether Arafat was still a peace partner or simply hopeless.

President Clinton clung to his belief that a deal was possible. He was intent on overcoming the tragedy of his friend Rabin’s murder and took a last stab at negotiations in the second half of 2000—his final months in office. At his mountain retreat, Camp David, in Maryland, Clinton brought Arafat and Prime Minister Barak together. There were dramatic moments, and Clinton felt that Barak was offering unprecedented concessions, but Arafat refused to reciprocate and sign a deal that might have ended the entire historic conflict.

Arafat instead ignited a second intifada in October 2000, claiming he was provoked by an unnecessary visit by Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in east Jerusalem—holy to both Jews and Muslims.

Shin Bet, Aman, and the Israeli army—on one side—and the PLO, now supplemented by Hamas suicide bombers, were once again at the barricades. Palestinians stepped up their atrocities in the heart of Israeli urban centers. Israelis in buses, pizza places, restaurants, and shopping centers became targets for them.

Israel reacted by using fighter planes to bomb Hamas and PLO installations in Gaza and the West Bank. Targets for retaliation included the compound near Ramallah of Arafat’s secret service—apparently, the end of Israel’s cooperation with those gunmen. That particular air raid angered the CIA, which was doing its best to foster cooperation and still believed that the Palestinian secret service was valuable as a crusher of radicals.

In a slightly more subtle fashion, Shin Bet introduced a new wave of targeted killings, now on an industrial scale. The agency head who took over in 2000, Avi Dichter, was notably more willing to share efforts and information with the other Israeli agencies. He set up a situation room and made a point of hosting representatives of the air force and Aman, so that they together could process the latest intelligence on individuals to be targeted. Helicopters and drone aircraft firing missiles were used to assassinate Palestinians who allegedly organized terrorism.

Israeli attack planners, when considering any act of “targeted prevention,” would discuss the likely collateral damage. Definite efforts were made to avoid or minimize harm to uninvolved civilians, and attacks were sometimes cancelled when—even at the last minute—intelligence indicated that children or other innocents were with the target at his house or other attack site. Still, many unintended casualties were caused.

As both sides sank further into a whirlpool of mutual killings, the chances of rescuing the peace process dimmed to near invisibility. Israelis elected Sharon prime minister in February 2001 to restore security, not to pursue negotiations. The intelligence community, meantime, was so busy coping with violence and fighting back that it paid little attention to grievances and social trends among the Palestinians.

Disputes within and between Shin Bet and Aman about Arafat came to an end. The PLO leader was once again, in their eyes, the master terrorist.

The three men in Varash, the acronym for
Va’adat Rashei ha-Sherutim
(the Committee of the Heads of Services), took the fairly unusual step of recommending a new political strategy. Meeting with Sharon and senior cabinet members on March 28, 2002, the night after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 30 Jews at a Passover Seder meal in a hotel in Netanya, the directors of Shin Bet, Aman, and the Mossad proposed that Arafat be expelled from the Israeli-held territories.

The government decided not to turn the Palestinian leader into a globally admired exile, but Israel would instead keep him confined inside a single building in the West Bank. The presidential compound in Ramallah had been heavily bombed by the air force, and for three years, Arafat never left it.

Living in crowded conditions, with poor hygiene and no running water, his health deteriorated markedly. European peace mediators who visited him were worried about the world icon, in his mid-70s, apparently fading away from day to day. They asked the Israelis to permit Arafat to leave, so he could get medical treatment in Europe.

The intelligence chiefs in Varash convened a special meeting on the subject in late October 2004 and debated whether to grant a favor to the Palestinian leader. On one hand, it would make Israel look kind and just. But there were objections that he was not so terribly ill, and he would probably recover and then go on a worldwide propaganda tour.

The military suggested that it could forcibly evacuate Arafat: grab him, put him on a stretcher, rush him out of the building and take him to a clinic somewhere. Prime Minister Sharon rejected that, saying the hustle and bustle might kill Arafat—and that would look terrible for Israel.

The prime minister actually sided with the softer faction that leaned toward letting Arafat go. Sharon felt that leaving Arafat—certainly a celebrity and to many in the world a hero—to die in his smashed compound, without medical treatment, would do serious diplomatic damage to Israel.

So, France and Jordan were permitted to organize the Palestinian leader’s exit: on a stretcher, in a helicopter, on a wheelchair, and then onto a French military airplane. Apparently it was too late to save him. He died in a hospital in Paris within two weeks, in November 2004, but that sparked a new, mysterious controversy. What was the cause of death? The French military doctors treating Arafat refused to specify, at least in any public statement.

Rumors swirled that Israel had poisoned him, perhaps little by little adding lethal substances to the air in his compound in Ramallah or sneaking poison into his food. There also were rumors that Arafat was gay, and it might have been AIDS that killed him.

Israeli intelligence knew of indications that Arafat—who for decades had been “married to the movement”—was not intimately interested in women. This knowledge came into play during a rare encounter between Mossad officials and Israeli journalists, a few years before Arafat’s demise.

Intelligence officers invited two journalists to a private chat, mostly about Arafat. The Mossad clearly wanted to spread scandalous stories about Arafat being corrupt, including the notion that he had “stolen money from the revolution” and had millions of dollars hidden in European banks.

A third journalist, who was truly an intelligence junkie, made a point of dropping in to the coffee shop where the conversation was taking place and practically invited himself to join in. Excited by the possibility of taking part in Mossad psychological warfare, he offered to pose as a foreign writer who could approach Arafat’s wife Suha and get secrets from her—and he volunteered to sleep with Suha as part of an espionage escapade.

The Mossad said no, thanks.

As for claims that Israeli intelligence poisoned Arafat, there was a resonance of truth based on prior experience. In at least two cases, the Mossad had used poison to try to eliminate enemies. There were, indeed, the Belgian chocolates that killed Palestinian terrorist leader Wadia Haddad in 1978. And in 1997, Mossad men sprayed poison into the ear of a Hamas leader in Jordan. (
See Chapter 22 on assassinations
.)

Closer in time to Arafat’s death, there was another case. Shin Bet poisoned a senior Hamas military commander in the West Bank. First, the Israelis tried to kill him by their conventional method of “targeted prevention,” but when they failed to get to him they designed an alternative route: adding lethal substances to the man’s food.

As for the end of Arafat, Israeli officials denied responsibility and said he had actually died of leukemia. They did concede that he had not gotten timely and proper treatment, because he was trapped in Ramallah by Israeli forces. Israel said it had not poisoned this longtime foe, but it knew that many around the world would not believe the official story.

Arafat was succeeded by Abu Mazen, who lacked charisma and strong support from the Palestinian people. Prime Minister Sharon practically refused to negotiate with him, believing Abu Mazen lacked the clout to make a deal and referring to him as “a chick without feathers”—a potential leader who never matured.

It was a time of reflection for Israeli politicians who were interested in peace. Some thought more deeply about whether it had been short-sighted to eliminate Abu Jihad, 16 years earlier, in Tunis. He would have been Arafat’s successor. Israel had killed a charismatic PLO figure, a man who could have made daring decisions. Perhaps Israel could have patched together a peace process and a lasting deal if a strong Palestinian had still been around.

Chapter Twenty-one

At The Front Together

Avi Dichter felt no pleasure at all in harboring the biggest “I told you so” in history. What he felt was horror, and not a scintilla of satisfaction, as he watched 9/11 unfold on a TV screen in his office at Shin Bet headquarters in northern Tel Aviv.

As director of the agency, Dichter and his predecessors—as well as former security officials who had become private counter-terrorism consultants—had been trying for nearly 20 years to persuade the Americans to do more about aviation security.

Israel, having learned by trial and error, instituted unique measures that were at once simple and advanced. In 1968, after an airliner belonging to Israel’s El Al was hijacked, Israel introduced armed sky marshals and thick metal doors to protect the cockpits.

Israel also was the first to require that passengers be questioned by security personnel before the flight. The method would become more systematic, but also problematic because of privacy infringement. Many foreign tourists—and especially Israeli Arabs and Palestinians—felt they were unfairly targeted by what was clearly a “profiling” system. It was based on experience and intuition about which nationalities, age, gender, and travel history were most likely to be involved with terrorism. Only a tiny minority of Arab travelers would be dangerous in any way, but they all were hassled.

When Israeli security planners spoke of experience, they meant the memory of bloody attacks and an oath to prevent their recurrence. In May 1972, three Japanese Red Army terrorists—acting on their partnership with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—landed at Lod Airport, grabbed machine guns from their luggage, and opened fire on innocent passengers. Twenty-six were killed, most of them Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. Part of the security change at Lod was to search all luggage, pat down almost all passengers, and use X-ray machines on both bags and people.

Israel also became the first country to introduce armed officers dotted throughout the international airport. Areas closely guarded included the luggage hall for arriving passengers and the check-in desks for departures. In almost every other nation, those were practically ignored by police.

All the new security measures, using both humans and machines, were under the jurisdiction of Shin Bet. The agency established a large security department with sub-units for aviation and for shipping.

In late 2000, when Israel was suffering through the second intifada—with terrorists targeting civilians in shopping malls, restaurants, and buses—Shin Bet devised another layer of protection: compelling those places to hire private security guards, trained to Shin Bet standards.

The irony was that the machines and the technology were imported from America. There were plenty available, because manufacturers there found that the U.S. government, airlines, and airports did not want them. Israel saw the need and was the best customer for them.

Makers of such detectors, scanners, and future developments were prepared to satisfy most every Israeli need. Dichter recalled that Shin Bet would not allow El Al to fly to Bangkok, Thailand, until the airport obtained an adequate explosives-detection machine. An American company, InVision Technologies, immediately dispatched a machine to Bangkok—exclusively to meet El Al’s need.

Israel was the poster boy for U.S. and Western manufacturers of security gadgets. Nothing sells like success, and Israel exemplified the best aviation security. None of its airliners was hijacked since 1968, and numerous attempts to detonate bombs in mid-air or to attack check-in counters were foiled.

Some of these conspiracies by Arab terrorists were very clever. In April 1986, a Jordanian of Palestinian ancestry—hired by Syrian intelligence—tried to send a human bomb aboard an El Al flight from London. He had met an Irish hotel chambermaid, got her pregnant, and promised to marry her in his hometown in the Holy Land. He told her to fly ahead of him, so she could meet his family, and he gave her a piece of hand luggage for the trip.

The British security at Heathrow Airport did not notice anything odd about the bag. Only the thorough security checks by the Israeli guards at the El Al boarding gate discovered that the bag had a false bottom, concealing a bomb so powerful that it could bring down a jumbo jet.

Had the attack not been foiled at Heathrow, Israel certainly would have launched an all-out war against Syria. The deaths of 400 people on an El Al plane would have felt like a 9/11, in such a small country as Israel.

When Israeli experts tried to sell their knowhow to U.S. air carriers and the Department of Transportation, the Americans refused to invest the kind of financial resources needed to enhance security. They argued that Israel was small, so it was relatively cheap.

The airlines feared that their profit margins, in an already precarious industry, would shrink to nothing. They also pointed out that Israel’s national airline was getting a huge government subsidy in the form of a security system. That was not going to happen in the United States.

The Americans also came up with the claim that U.S. aviation would grind to a halt if every passenger and piece of luggage were subjected to security.

Even the deaths in December 1988 of 270 people, when a Pan Am jumbo jet was blown up over Scotland by Muammar Qaddafi’s Libyan agents, did not prompt the Americans to do much. Some Israeli privateers benefited from the Lockerbie disaster by being hired by airlines as consultants, but they soon realized that the American corporations were refusing to introduce the necessary measures to make the system safer.

Then came 9/11, and everything changed.

The Twin Towers were destroyed, the Pentagon was hit, and a fourth airliner crashed in Pennsylvania; all told, 3,000 innocent Americans died. The United States immediately launched a war in Afghanistan to chase the al-Qaeda perpetrators.

Shin Bet’s Dichter, having watched all that from afar, did not want to cause offense with a loud “I told you so,” but after a decade he calculated that a trillion dollars was spent, and many thousands of lives were lost—and it all could have been easily prevented.

It all came down to that day, on the four domestic flights. Nineteen terrorists, unarmed except for box-cutters, passed through the existing system unmolested. They did not seem suspicious, and their hand luggage was not deemed dangerous.

They turned the airplanes themselves into massive weapons. “That’s a suicide terrorist’s dream,” Dichter said, “piloting a missile filled with 50 tons of fuel moving at high speed.” They were able to accomplish their goal for one surprisingly simple reason: There were no sky marshals.

Israeli-style armed marshals and metal-reinforced cockpit doors most probably would have stopped the 19 from hijacking the planes and then causing America’s worst calamity.

Until that September day, the U.S. aviation security concept was to rely on one circle of defense: intelligence collection to get advance information of plots aimed at American airlines. But that was not enough. The CIA and the FBI, for an entire decade, were aware that al-Qaeda wanted to attack America; and there was some specific information about a few of the hijackers that the agencies did not share with each other.

Not knowing precise attack plans meant that airports and airplanes were defenseless on 9/11 itself.

The Israeli doctrine, designed by Shin Bet, worked very differently. The intelligence circle was very important, but there was also a second one: the security circle, on the spot. That was like having a back-up.

The second circle had various layers. Israel used sophisticated machines for scanning luggage, and computerized tomography (CT) machines which could detect all types of explosives, including the plastic kind. Yet there was—and is—no equipment for detecting intentions. There is no mind-reading machine, and there probably never will be one.

The second circle was meant to compensate for failures of intelligence or inaccurate information. On-the-spot security—the armed guards, the questioning, the machines, and the sky marshals—would further increase the odds of preventing any attempt to hijack planes or down them.

Israeli aviation officials knew that their country’s airplanes and facilities would be high-priority targets for terrorists. But Shin Bet was able to engineer a situation in which the least likely airline to be attacked was El Al, because so many attempts had failed. Terrorists would turn to softer targets, which, unfortunately, often meant that havoc was unleashed on the airlines and airports of other countries.

Even in Israel occasionally there were calls, by government financial officials, to save money by cutting out sky marshals. But Dichter’s reply was both emphatic and futuristic. The Shin Bet chief declared that even if all passenger planes became pilotless to save money, and everything was self-service so that flight attendants would no longer be employed, there would still have to be armed sky marshals on board.

Finding itself in asymmetrical wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and against loosely linked jihadist terrorist networks around the world, America had to build up a set of war doctrines from scratch. Naturally, it turned to any source that had the knowledge and experience at this. Israel clearly fit that bill.

CIA counter-terrorism experts, special operations commanders, and FBI interrogators traveled to Israel to learn from the oracles on unconventional warfare.

In 2003, Dichter hosted Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and some of his assistants. In an unprecedented gesture by Israel, which usually did not like to expose its secretive and unique methods, Mueller was allowed to enter one of the holies of holies: the situation room built by Shin Bet at its high-security headquarters close to Tel Aviv.

He was shown video footage taken by drone aircraft and helicopters, depicting targeted killings by the Israeli air force against terrorists, mainly in Gaza. There were many such Israeli attacks at the time, practically on an industrial scale, and the aerial video often showed Palestinian cars and individuals being identified, chased, and then struck.

What Mueller, visitors from the CIA, and American special operations officers learned is that Israel made a great effort to be accurate, avoiding collateral damage. That could be achieved only by having advance, precise intelligence about the movements and plans of terrorists. The Americans could see that Israeli intelligence often had an agent on the scene to warn of problems that could prompt cancellation of the lethal missions.

The United States adopted and adapted the use of drones for elimination missions, especially along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but would or could not match the Israeli method of having agents in the strike zone. Missions were flown, with controllers—in effect, ground-based pilots doing just what they would do if playing a high-tech video game—sitting comfortably as far away as New Mexico.

Under President Barack Obama, the United States reached its own industrial scale of targeted killings. Drones fired missiles at al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in the border zone, but also in other countries beset by Islamist radicals, such as Yemen and Somalia. Sometimes tragic mistakes were made, causing the deaths of children and other non-combatants.

Dichter conceded later that cooperation with the United States was not a one-way street. Shin Bet and Israel’s air force actually learned a great deal from the Americans, even about the tactic of targeted killings that was considered to be Israel’s innovation.

It became known that one of the first targeted killings was carried out by the United States, in Yemen in November 2002, when Israel was still toying with making that method a regular part of its campaign during the second intifada. In the radically transformed post-9/11 world, countries large and small would have to shatter old conventions.

The first U.S. assassination-by-missile was the achievement of a Predator drone remotely piloted by the CIA. The Agency soon started flying its own fleet of unmanned attack aircraft—independently of the American military.

In this regard, there was a bureaucratic difference. In Israel, drones were flown only by the military. The intelligence community gave up any idea of running its own drones or paramilitary units. There did not seem to be any need for that.

Even as rules of warfare, retaliation, and intelligence-gathering were rapidly re-written in the weeks after 9/11, America seemed unsure of how to fight back most effectively. A mighty nation had been awakened from the complacency of believing that vast oceans protected it from Middle East terrorism. But, President George W. Bush naturally wondered, now what?

Invading Afghanistan was a no-brainer, as that is where Osama Bin Laden resided when he sent the hijackers to America. The British and some other U.S. allies joined in that war—as the world quite justly rose up against a ruthless enemy—but Israel, as usual, was excluded from a Washington-led coalition. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, liked Israel and admired its skills, but consorting with the Jewish state would inevitably prompt Muslim and some other nations to shun the coalition.

The Bush-Cheney team hardly hid its intention to start a second war by attacking Iraq. The Americans declared that Saddam Hussein was refusing to open his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs to international inspectors.

The Mossad was consulted for its analysis of what might occur next in the region. While claims were made later that Israel and its supporters in the United States clamored for a war against Iraq, the truth is that Israeli leaders had no reason to do that. In their view, Saddam’s nose had been bloodied in the Gulf War of 1991, and he seemed nicely contained.

On balance, Israeli intelligence said, Iraq probably did have chemical and biological weapons; and the Mossad’s suspicion was that some of those might have been smuggled across the border into Syria for safekeeping.

Yet, the Israelis did not share President Bush’s absolute certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they expressed concern that Iraq was distracting from the real enemy, Iran.