Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  “It’s the old story of many think they are called, few are chosen. In that way we are a little like the Catholic church. Those who remain, develop bonds which will carry them through life. We live by the rule of ‘I help you, you help me.’ You learn to trust people with your life. No greater trust can ever be given by one person to another.”

  By the time every man or woman who had access to the safe houses graduated to the next group, that philosophy had been engraved on their minds. They were now katsas departing on a mission or returning to be debriefed. Known as “jumpers” because they operated overseas on a short-term basis, they inevitably called the safe houses “jump sites.” Too much imaginative description was frowned upon by their superiors.

  Finally, the safe houses were used as meeting places for an informer, or to interrogate a suspect who had the potential to be recruited as a “mole.” The only indication of their numbers has come from a former Mossad junior officer, Victor Ostrovsky. He claimed in 1991 there were “about 35,000 in the world; 20,000 of these operational and 15,000 sleepers. ‘Black’ agents are Arabs, while ‘white’ agents are non-Arabs. ‘Warning agents’ are strategic agents used to warn of war preparations: a doctor in a Syrian hospital who notices a large new supply of drugs and medicines arriving; a harbor employee who spots increased activity of warships.”

  Some of these agents had received their first instructions in a safe house like the one that had been meticulously checked for bugs on that October afternoon. Later in the day, a handful of senior members of Israel’s intelligence community would meet around the apartment’s dining-room table to sanction an assassination that would have the full approval of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

  In the three years he had been in that office, Rabin had attended a growing number of funerals for the victims of terrorist attacks, each time walking behind pallbearers and watching grown men weep as they listened to the committal prayer. With each death he had conducted “a funeral in my own heart.” Afterward he had again read the words from the prophet Ezekiel: “And the enemy shall know I am the Lord when I can lay down my vengeance on them.”

  This was not the first time Rabin’s vengeance had been felt; Rabin had himself on more than one occasion participated in an act of revenge. Most notable had been the assassination of Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Khalil Al-Wazir, known throughout the Arab world and on Mossad’s Honeywell computer as Abu Jihad, the voice of holy war, who lived in Tunisia. In 1988, Rabin had been Israel’s defense minister when the decision was taken in the same apartment off Pinsker Street that Abu Jihad must die.

  For two months Mossad agents conducted an exhaustive reconnaissance of Abu Jihad’s villa in the resort of Sidi Bou Said on the outskirts of Tunis. Access roads, points of entry, fence heights and types, windows, doors, locks, defenses, the routing employed by Abu Jihad’s guards: everything was monitored, checked, and checked again.

  They watched Abu Jihad’s wife play with her children; they came alongside her as she shopped and went to the hairdresser. They listened to her husband’s phone calls, bugged their bedroom, listened to their lovemaking. They calculated distances from one room to another, found out what the neighbors did, when they were at home, and logged the makes, colors, and registrations of all the vehicles that came and went from the villa.

  The rule for preparing an assassination Meir Amit had laid down all those years ago was constantly in their minds: Think like your target and only stop being him when you pull the trigger.

  Satisfied, the team returned to Tel Aviv. For the next month they practiced their deadly mission in and around a Mossad safe house near Haifa that matched the target villa. From the time they would enter Abu Jihad’s house, it should take the unit just twenty-two seconds to murder him.

  On April 16, 1988, the order was given for the operation to go ahead.

  That night several Israeli air force Boeing 707s took off from a military base south of Tel Aviv. One carried Yitzhak Rabin and other high-ranking Israeli officers. Their aircraft was in constant touch by safe radio with the execution team already in position and led by an operative code-named “Sword.” The other aircraft was crammed with jamming and monitoring devices. Two more 707s acted as fuel tankers. High above the villa the fleet of aircraft circled, following every move on the ground through a secure radio frequency. A little after midnight on April 17 the airborne officers heard Abu Jihad had returned home in the Mercedes Yasser Arafat had given him as a wedding gift. Prior to that the hit team had set up sensitive listening devices able to hear everything inside the villa.

  From his vantage point near the villa, Sword announced into his lip mike that he could hear Abu Jihad climbing the stairs, going to his bedroom, whispering to his wife, tiptoeing to an adjoining bedroom to kiss his sleeping son, before finally going to his study on the ground floor. The details were picked up by the electronic warfare plane—the Israeli version of an American AWAC and relayed to Rabin’s command aircraft. At 12:17 A.M. he ordered: “Go!”

  Outside the villa, Abu Jihad’s driver was asleep in the Mercedes. One of Sword’s men ran forward, pressed a silenced Beretta into his ear, and pulled the trigger. The driver slumped dead across the front seat.

  Next, Sword and another member of the hit team laid an explosive charge at the base of the villa’s heavy iron front door. A new type of “silent” plastic explosive, it made little sound as it blew the doors clean off their hinges. Inside, two of Abu Jihad’s bodyguards were standing in the entrance hall, too stunned by the explosion to move. They, too, were shot dead by silenced weapons.

  Running to the study, Sword found Abu Jihad watching video footage of the PLO. As he rose to his feet, Sword shot him twice in the chest. Abu Jihad crashed heavily to the floor. Sword stepped quickly forward and put two more bullets through his forehead.

  Leaving the room, he encountered Abu Jihad’s wife. She was holding her small son in her arms.

  “Get back to your room,” Sword ordered in Arabic.

  Then he and the team vanished into the night. From the time they had entered the villa to departure had taken them only thirteen seconds—nine vital seconds better than their best practice run.

  For the first time, an Israeli assassination met with public criticism. Cabinet minister Ezer Weizman warned that “liquidating individuals will not advance the peace process.”

  Nevertheless the assassinations continued.

  Two months later, South African police were finally forced to reveal a secret that Israel had pressed them to keep: Mossad had executed a Johannesburg businessman, Alan Kidger, who had been supplying high-tech equipment to Iran and Iraq that could be used to manufacture biochemical weapons. Kidger had been found with his arms and legs amputated. Johannesburg’s chief police investigator, Colonel Charles Landman, said the killing was a “clear message from the Israeli government through its Mossad.”

  Six weeks before the execution of Abu Jihad, Mossad had played an important role in another controversial assassination—that of three unarmed members of the IRA shot dead on a Sunday afternoon in Gibraltar by a team of Britain’s Special Air Services marksmen.

  In previous years, some of their colleagues from British intelligence had been secretly brought to Tel Aviv by Rafi Eitan to witness firsthand how Mossad executed Arab terrorists in the back streets of Beirut and Lebanon’s Bekáa Valley.

  Four months before the Gibraltar shootings, Mossad agents had begun their own surveillance of Mairead Farrell, Sean Savage, and Daniel McCann in the belief they were once more on a “shopping spree for Arab arms for the IRA.”

  Mossad’s close interest in the activities of the IRA went back to the time when the Thatcher government had, in the utmost secrecy, brought Rafi Eitan to Belfast to brief the security forces on the developing links between the Irish terror groups and the Hezbollah.

  “I arrived on a rainy day. It rained every day I was in Ireland. I told the British all we knew. Then I went on a tour of the province, all the way down to the border w
ith the Republic. I was careful not to cross over. Imagine what the Irish government would have said if they’d picked me up! Before I left I arranged for the SAS to come to Israel so they could see something of our methods in handling terrorists.”

  From those early beginnings a close working relationship developed between the SAS and Mossad. Senior Mossad officers would regularly travel to SAS headquarters in Hereford to brief special forces on operations in the Middle East. On at least one occasion a joint Mossad-SAS unit trailed several high-ranking IRA men from Belfast to Beirut and photographed them in meetings with Hezbollah leaders.

  In October 1987, Mossad agents tracked the tramp steamer Eksund as it made its way through the Mediterranean with 120 tons of arms, including surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, machine guns, explosives, and detonators. All had been purchased through IRA contacts in Beirut. The Eksund was intercepted by the French authorities.

  Unable to make headway with the Irish security authorities—at least one Mossad officer still believed this stemmed from Israel’s strong opposition to Ireland’s peacekeeping role in Lebanon—Mossad used Britain’s SAS as a conduit to tip off Dublin about other arms shipments heading for Ireland.

  The Mossad agents trailing the IRA commando unit in Spain quickly decided they were not there to meet Arab arms dealers, nor to make contact with ETA, the Basque terrorist group. Nevertheless, the Mossad team continued to dog the footsteps of Spain’s International Terrorism Unit, who were also following the Irish trio.

  At first there was a keep-your-distance attitude by the Spaniards. This was their operation—the first time they had become seriously involved with both MI5 and the SAS in dealing with the IRA. Understandably, the Spaniards wanted to ensure the glory, if it came, would be theirs. Mossad quickly made it clear that all they wanted to do was help. Relieved, the Spaniards were soon working together with Mossad.

  When the Spanish lost track of Mairead Farrell, it was a katsa who located her. He discovered that Farrell had hired another car, a white Fiesta, and parked it, loaded with sixty-four kilos of Semtex and thirty-six kilos of shrapnel, in an underground parking lot in Marbella.

  The fashionable resort is not only a favorite refuge from the fierce desert sun where a number of Arab notables spend their time dreaming of the day the hated Israel will be overrun; Marbella is only a short distance from the raffish marina of Puerto Banus, where many Arab petrodollar millionaires kept their luxury yachts. Mossad had long feared that the boats traveled the length of the Mediterranean to smuggle explosives and weapons to Arab terrorists. Farrell’s car was suspected of being parked for that purpose, ready to be hoisted on board a boat ostensibly bound on a cruise to the Holy Land.

  The Mossad team conducted surveillance on the car. They also spotted Farrell at the wheel of another Fiesta, the one she had used to drive McCann and Savage around Spain these past weeks. Two of the Mossad team followed the IRA unit as it drove south toward Puerto Banus. Ten minutes after leaving Marbella, Farrell passed the entrance to the marina and continued on down the coast.

  Using their car radio tuned to the police channel, the Mossad katsa alerted the Spanish police that the IRA trio were heading toward Gibraltar. The Spanish alerted the British authorities. The SAS team moved into position. Hours later Farrell, McCann, and Savage were shot dead. They were given no warning or chance to surrender. They were executed.

  A week later, Stephen Lander, the MI5 officer officially credited with running the operation—and who would later become director general of MI5—telephoned Admoni to thank Mossad for their help with the assassination.

  On that October evening in 1995, in the safe house off Pinsker Street, all was ready for the meeting to settle the next assassination.

  Selected for execution was the religious head of Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shkaki. Mossad had established that his group had orchestrated the deaths of over twenty Israeli passengers in a bus destroyed the previous January by two suicide bombers outside the small town of Beit Lid.

  The incident brought the number of terrorist attacks to over ten thousand in the last quarter century. In that time over four hundred Israelis had been killed and another thousand injured. Many of those responsible for this catalog of death and maiming had themselves been hunted down and killed in what katsa Yaakov Cohen, who had himself done his share of revenge taking, would describe as “all those back streets that have no names; where a knife can be more effective at times than a gun; where it’s either kill or be killed.”

  In this pitiless world Shkaki had long been lionized by his people. It was he who had personally granted the bombers of Beit Lid absolution from the inviolable Islamic prohibition against suicide. To do so he had combed the Koran to extrapolate a philosophical assumption that oppression makes the oppressed discover new strengths; in preparing the suicide bombers he had exploited the psychological flaws in unbalanced youngsters who, like the Japanese kamikaze teenagers in World War II, went to their own end on that January day in a state of religious fervor. Afterward, Shkaki had paid for their death notices in Jihad’s newspaper and, at Friday prayers, had praised their sacrifice, assuring their families their sons had found a place in heaven.

  In the tension of the streets where he operated, it had become a matter of honor for a family to provide a son for Shkaki to sacrifice. Those who died were remembered each day after the muezzin wailed through the crackling loudspeakers to call the faithful to prayer. In the shadowy coolness of the mosques of south Lebanon, their memories were kept alive.

  His next recruits chosen, their target selected, Shkaki would hand the youths over to his bomb makers. They were the strategists who could study a photograph of a target and decide upon the quantity of explosive needed. Like ancient alchemists, they worked by experience and instinct, and their language was filled with the words that brought death: “oxidizer,” “desensitizer,” “plasticines,” and “freezing point depressants.” These were Shkaki’s people. Borrowing a phrase once used by a leader of his hated enemy, Israel, he told them all: “We fight, therefore we exist.”

  On that October evening when his fate was about to be settled in the Tel Aviv safe house, Shkaki was at home in Damascus with his wife, Fathia. The apartment was strikingly different from the squalor of the refugee camps where he was venerated. Expensive carpets and wall hangings were gifts from the ayatollahs of Iran. A gold-framed photograph of Shkaki with Mu’ammar Gadhafi was a present from the Libyan leader. A coffee service made of silver was a gift from the Syrian president. Shkaki’s clothes were far removed from the simple gown he wore on his crusades among the impoverished masses in south Lebanon. At home he wore robes cut from the finest cloth available from London’s Savile Row and his feet were shod in custom-made shoes bought in Rome, not the bazaar sandals he wore in public.

  Over his favorite meal of couscous, Shkaki reassured his wife he would be safe on his forthcoming trip to Libya to seek further funds from Gadhafi; he hoped to return with one million dollars, the full amount he had requested in a fax to Libya’s revolutionary headquarters in Tripoli. As usual the money would be laundered through a Libyan bank in Valletta on the island of Malta. Shkaki planned to spend less than a day on the island before catching the flight home.

  News of the stopover in Malta had prompted his two teenage sons to give him their own shopping order: half a dozen shirts each from a Malta store where Shkaki had shopped previously.

  Fathia Shkaki would recall: “My husband insisted if the Israelis were planning a move against him, they would have done so by now. The Jews always respond quickly to any incident. But my husband was very certain in his case they would do nothing to make Syria angry.”

  Until three months before, Shkaki would have correctly judged the mood in Tel Aviv. Early in the summer of 1995, Rabin had turned down a Mossad plan to firebomb Shkaki’s apartment in the western suburb of Damascus. Uri Saguy, then chief of military intelligence and effectively Israel’s intelligence supremo, who had authority even
over Mossad, had told Rabin he detected “a sea change in Damascus. Assad is still on the surface our enemy. But the only way to overcome him is to do the unexpected. And that means giving up the Golan Heights, give it up completely. Move every one of our people out of there. It’s a huge price. But it is the only way to get a proper lasting peace.”

  Rabin had listened. He knew how much the Golan had personally cost Uri Saguy. He had spent most of his military career defending its rugged terrain. He had been wounded four times doing so. Yet he was prepared to put all this behind him to see Israel have real peace.

  The prime minister had postponed Mossad’s plans to eliminate Shkaki while Saguy continued to explore the reality of his hopes.

  They had withered in the heat of the region’s summer, and Rabin, who was now a Nobel Peace Prize winner, had ordered Shkaki’s execution.

  Shabtai Shavit, in his last major operation as Mossad’s chief, ordered a “black agent” in Damascus to resume electronic surveillance of Shkaki’s apartment. The agent’s American equipment was sophisticated enough to override the defense circuit breakers in Shkaki’s Russianbuilt communications system.

  Details of Shkaki’s forthcoming visit to Libya and Malta were sent to Tel Aviv.

  Now, on that October evening in 1995, the heads of Israel’s three most powerful intelligence services made their way through the crowds strolling along Pinsker Street. Each one supported the conditions for executing a self-proclaimed enemy of Israel that Meir Amit had so clearly defined when he had been director general:

  “There would be no killing of political leaders. They needed to be dealt with politically. There would be no killing of a terrorist’s family. If its members got in the way, that was not our problem. Each execution had to be sanctioned by the prime minister of the day. And everything must be done by the book. Minutes kept of the decision taken. Everything neat and tidy. Our actions must not be seen as some act of state-sponsored murder but the ultimate judicial sanction the state could bring. We would be no different from the hangman or any other lawfully appointed executioner.”