Spies Against Armageddon (51 page)

The Mossad did not have a permanent station in Dubai, but its operatives used borrowed identities to pass through very often. They felt almost at home there.

The assassination target chosen was a shadowy Hamas operative named Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. He was well known to the Israeli intelligence community.

Mabhouh had personally led Hamas’s first lethal attack in 1989, just a few years after the organization’s establishment: the kidnappings and killings of two Israeli soldiers. In separate incidents, three months apart, Mabhouh and his men drove from Gaza into Israel. They disguised themselves as Orthodox Jews in a car with Israeli license plates. Taking advantage of the transportation habits of off-duty IDF soldiers, the Hamas attackers picked up their hitchhiking victims, then assaulted and killed them.

Though he was wanted in Israel by Shin Bet for the murders, that was not the reason the Mossad set out to get Mabhouh. The motive was not revenge. The Israelis were focused on the greater danger he had become.

After the second killing in Israel, Mabhouh had escaped to Egypt and from there to Syria. In Damascus, he rose through the Hamas ranks and became the chief of logistics and of the supply of weapons to Hamas’s military wing operating in Gaza.

Despite the religious differences between the Sunni Muslims of Hamas and Shi’ite Iran, the al-Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards became the biggest supplier of arms to Hamas. Weapons were shipped to ports along the Red Sea in Sudan, then smuggled into Egypt and on to the underground tunnels from Sinai to Gaza. Mabhouh was in charge of these supply lines, which enabled Hamas to rain home-made and Iranian rockets onto southern towns in Israel.

While Mabhouh was not in the top leadership of the political or military wings of Hamas, the Mossad and Aman considered him a key figure and an important target. The Israelis believed that getting him out of the way would disrupt the arms-smuggling conveyor belt from Iran to Gaza—at least for a while.

With relative ease, Kidon teams located Mabhouh in Damascus and put him under surveillance. The Palestinian knew that Israelis were shadowing him and tried to evade them. Granting a rare interview, he made sure to keep his face covered and claimed that Israeli intelligence had tried to kill him three times. Once, he said, he spotted assassins trying to attach a bomb to his car.

Proud of his skill, Mabhouh said, “As far as the Israelis, my hands are stained with their blood. Thank God that I am very cautious.”

In fact, he was not. The Mossad, in 2010, would help him achieve an aspiration he had declared on TV: “I hope to become a martyr.”

Israeli intelligence established that he regularly visited Dubai, where he would conduct meetings with Hamas’s Iranian suppliers in office buildings and hotels. Aman’s Unit 8200 monitored his phone calls and other communications.

Once the decision was made to eliminate Mabhouh, the Caesarea unit’s planners considered where would be best to execute the operation. Despite the few previous successes in Damascus, Dubai was judged to be a much safer place.

In early January, Dagan presented the assassination plan to Benjamin Netanyahu. Fourteen years earlier, Netanyahu—the first time he was prime minister—approved the operation to kill Khaled Meshaal of Hamas in Amman; that turned out to be a fiasco. Yet this time, he showed no hesitation in sanctioning the Mabhouh killing.

There were key differences. Israel had no official relations with Dubai, and it was not an important strategic ally like Jordan was. The plan also looked reasonable to Netanyahu, with a high chance of success.

On January 19, Mabhouh flew from Damascus to Dubai. He was using a false name and passport. Arriving in the afternoon, he checked into the Al Bustan Rotana, a five-star hotel. His bodyguards would not be arriving from Syria until the next day, so Mabhouh went out alone for a few hours. He returned with a shopping bag.

Back in his hotel room in the evening, he called his wife and went to bed. Late that night, she was unable to reach him on his cellphone or at the hotel. She alerted the Hamas office in Damascus, which then sent people to the hotel in Dubai. At their insistence, hotel managers opened the door to Room 230 and found Mabhouh. He was on the bed, dead.

A local doctor examined him and declared that the visitor had died of heart failure. Hamas seemed willing to accept that explanation. His family, however, insisted that that could not be true. He had seemed to be a healthy man.

The body was taken to the Dubai morgue, where an official autopsy confirmed the verdict of heart failure. By now it was known that the dead man was a Hamas official, and Dubai authorities—thriving on tourism and business without scandal—did not really want to know the truth.

The family remained dubious of Dubai and insisted on a fuller investigation. Tissue and blood samples from Mabhouh’s corpse were sent to a more trusted laboratory in France for intensive testing. More than a week later, the results showed traces of a muscle-relaxant drug, succinylcholine, in his body. In large doses, it could totally paralyze a man for a while, rendering him unable to struggle against anything.

Hamas’s version was that Mabhouh must have been sedated with that drug and then strangled or suffocated with a pillow. Because of minor burns on his chest, Hamas claimed he had first been tortured. Those red marks also could have meant that a defibrillator was used, on a maximum-voltage setting, to stop the man’s heart.

Either way, an important goal of the killers must have been to make the murder look like a natural death. That could explain not deploying the one-shot poison spray used on Hamas’s Meshaal. Pathologists might identify that as a link to Israel, now that the secret formula had been blown during the operation in Jordan.

It took the Dubai police six weeks to show some interest in running a serious investigation. Once the probe did begin, a new media star was born: General Dahi Khalfan, the Dubai police chief. He took the central role and seemed to enjoy becoming the famous face of the unfolding mystery. He would introduce even more faces.

All in all, in a series of press conference in which he starred, he showed the visages of 27 people who, he claimed, were Mossad operatives involved in murdering Mabhouh. Their faces were taken from their passports and from video cameras peppered around Dubai.

General Khalfan contacted the international police agency Interpol, asking for assistance in the investigation. Interpol asked the respective countries and concluded that all the passports were doctored or fabricated. Some of them belonged to real people, and only the photos were changed. Others were manufactured by expert forgers.

Israel’s government said nothing, but international media quickly found that there were Israelis with dual nationalities whose names and passports were used in the operation. When they were reluctantly interviewed, they explained that they had no idea how their passports found their way to Dubai.

In fact, Israeli intelligence never stole the identity of its own nation’s citizens. The Mossad, at least within Israel, was a law-abiding agency. Therefore, as in several precedents, it usually would borrow the passports of Jews who were new immigrants or Jewish students in Israel on a long stay.

Those newcomers willingly loaned their documents, though all they had been told was that the passport was needed “for the state” or “for the Jewish Agency.” They did not ask many questions, and the borrowers did not mention the Mossad. In most cases, permission was obtained.

When operating outside Israel’s borders and often in hostile nations, the Mossad could not send out its operatives only with a cover story. Israelis were not welcome. The Mossad needed to procure convincing foreign identities. It was much better to have genuine identities and not fabricate them out of thin air.

The agency preferred to rely on those borrowings, but occasionally it would run out of options and the Mossad would go to fairly extreme efforts—investing time, money, and energy—to obtain even one genuine foreign passport.

A passport scheme was uncovered in 2004 by the government of New Zealand. The Mossad had gone through a series of convoluted steps to apply for one genuine passport, using the name and personal details of a New Zealand citizen.

A mid-level operative from the Caesarea department had arrived, a few years earlier, in Australia—supposedly, to open a travel agency catering to the many Israeli young people who, just after their military service, typically traveled to the Far East and the Pacific.

His real business, serving as Mossad project manager for the procurement of passports, was supported by two other Caesarea operatives and the help of a Jewish sayan in New Zealand. The sayan helped them identify a man with cerebral palsy who was confined to his house and hardly ever went out.

The Israelis were able to get a copy of the man’s birth certificate and used it to file a passport application, using his name and a post office box address. It seemed to be a clever idea, because the passport would be mailed and there would be no contact between him and the authorities.

Everything went according to plan, until a government official became suspicious and phoned the applicant. One of the Israelis answered, but to the official the accent sounded Canadian. He asked about that, and the ridiculous answer was that the applicant had never left the country (having no passport) but used to spend a lot of time with Canadians in New Zealand.

The police and security service put the applicant under surveillance, and they were able to establish that he, the local sayan, and colleagues who had arrived from Australia were all connected. Sensing trouble, the Israeli who had filed the application fled. The two others were arrested and sentenced to short prison terms for passport fraud.

The Israeli government apologized very publicly and pledged that it would not happen again.

That promise was reminiscent of another pledge made in 1996, after the botched attempt to assassinate Meshaal in Jordan. At that time, the Mossad used Canadian passports; when that was revealed, Canada’s government was very angry. Israel promised that its spies would never again hide under a Maple Leaf identity.

Indeed, in the Dubai police chief’s list of fake passports, there were no Canadians. It was quite a motley crew, however: 12 British, six Irish, four French, four Australian, and one German.

In the international media, in foreign intelligence agencies, and among the Israeli public, this appeared improbably sloppy. Twenty-seven operatives, endangering themselves by being seen on security cameras in the airport, opening and closing sliding doors, riding up and down elevators, posing as pudgy tennis players, changing eyeglasses and wigs, and pretending to be talking on the cellphone to somebody? Acting like bulls in a china shop seemed amateurish, and in contradiction with the image of the Mossad.

From Dagan’s point of view, however, the scene looked quite different. There had been a lot of impressive successes. First, Israeli intelligence had collected precise information on Mabhouh and his movements. A Kidon operative had managed to follow Mabhouh on his flight from Damascus to Dubai.

The fact that Dubai was a modern “smart city,” covered to its teeth with cameras, was well known to the Mossad from earlier reconnaissance trips. Visual security systems were a modern fact of life, and the Israeli operatives were all changing their glasses, facial hair, wigs, and clothing so that none would ever be readily identified.

Some Israelis, seeing the photos and video clips released by Dubai police in newspapers and on TV, claimed that they recognized some of the Mossad men and women. But, overall, there was an impressive sense of patriotism that kept everyone’s mouth shut. Perhaps they gossipped about it at Friday night dinners, but no one spilled any names to the foreign press or foreign governments.

As assessed by the Mossad, the mission was a success. Mabhouh was dead. All the combatants returned home safely. Their real names were totally unknown.

General Khalfan, with all the limelight he enjoyed, ended up frustrated. Early in the probe, he had vowed to find and arrest the Israelis involved. But now, perhaps inspired by a B-movie he had seen, he publicly called out to Mossad director Dagan by name: “Be a man, and admit what you did.”

Dagan, in his third-floor office at headquarters in Glilot, was amused by Khalfan’s melodramatic act. Around that time, he happened to be speaking with an official of another country, who mentioned that he would be traveling to Dubai and would see the police chief.

When Dagan was asked if he would like some message to be passed to Khalfan, the Israeli said: “No, just give him a kiss on the forehead on my behalf.” Dagan certainly did not seem worried at all by Khalfan’s bluster.

The police chief had been exaggerating, anyway. His very public line-up of the 27 mugshots was fattened by Mossad operatives who had visited Dubai at other times. They may have been involved peripherally in the Mabhouh operation, but there were not so many in Dubai on the day of the killing.

The size of The Team sent to the Arab emirate was not much different from other Mossad assassinations. Between eight and 16 Kidon and Caesarea members were typically needed for tasks that included warning of anything unexpected about to occur, and perimeter security to ensure that escape routes were available.

The only troubling fallout for the Mossad, it seemed, could be the ire of foreign governments over the use—and forgery—of their passports. Ireland, Britain, and Australia protested. A security guard from Israel’s embassy in Dublin was expelled.

London was a far more significant capital, so the reaction of the British was taken more seriously. After all, the Mossad had felt the wrath of Britain in the past, after blunders that included an Israeli official courier stupidly losing a sack full of United Kingdom passports.

After the Dubai caper, the British government expelled the Mossad station chief, and indeed seemed very angry, with members of parliament lined up to protest publicly the violation of Her Majesty’s sovereignty.

But very soon, clandestine intelligence ties returned to normal. A new station chief was accepted, and—around the time that Dagan retired in December 2010—Dagan paid a friendly visit to London to introduce his successor, Tamir Pardo, to MI6 and MI5. Both Israelis were hosted by the heads of the two British secret services.