Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Since the successful hunting down of the nine terrorists who had killed the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in 1972, all subsequent assassinations had broadly observed these conditions. Almost twenty-three years to the day since Meir Amit had first formulated the rules for a state-sponsored killing, his successors headed for the safe house.

  The first to arrive was Shabtai Shavit. Colleagues unkindly said he had the manner of a front-desk clerk in one of Tel Aviv’s lesser hotels: the same carefully pressed clothes, the handshake that never maintained its grip for long. He had been in the job for three years and gave the impression he never quite knew how long he would remain.

  Next came Brigadier General Doran Tamir, chief intelligence officer for the Israel Defense Forces. Nimble and in the prime of his life, everything about him suggested the authority that came from long years of commanding.

  Finally Uri Saguy arrived, strolling into the safe house like a warrior god on his way to stardom even more glittering than his position as director of Aman, military intelligence. Soft-voiced and self-deprecating, he continued to provoke controversy among his peers by insisting that beneath its renewed bluster, Syria was still ready to talk peace.

  The relationship among the three men was, in Shavit’s words, “cautiously cordial.”

  Said Uri Saguy, “We can hardly compare with each other. As head of Aman, I tasked the other two. There was competition between us but, as long as we were serving the same aim, it’s fine.”

  For two hours they sat around the living-room table and reviewed the plan to have Fathi Shkaki murdered. His execution would be an act of pure vengeance, the biblical “eye for an eye” principle Israelis liked to believe justified such killings. But sometimes Mossad killed a person when he stubbornly refused to provide his skills to support Israel’s aspirations. Then, rather than risk those talents falling into the hands of an enemy, he too was ruthlessly terminated.

  Dr. Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist, was the world’s greatest expert on barrel ballistics. Israel had made several unsuccessful attempts to buy his expertise. Each time Bull had made clear his distaste for the Jewish state.

  Instead he had offered his services to Saddam Hussein to build a supergun capable of launching shells containing nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads from Iraq directly into Israel. The supergun’s barrel was 487 feet long, composed of thirty-two tons of steel supplied by British firms to Iraq. Late in 1989 a prototype had been test-fired at a gunnery range at Mosul in northern Iraq. Saddam Hussein had ordered three of the weapons to be built at a cost of $20 million. Bull was retained as a consultant at $1 million. The project was code-named Babylon.

  His company, Space Research Corporation (SRC), was registered in Brussels as an armaments design company. From there it had sent out a detailed requirement list to European suppliers, including twenty in Britain, to provide high-technology components.

  On February 17, 1990, a katsa in Brussels obtained copies of documents setting Babylon’s technical goals: the supergun was really going to be an intermediate range ballistics missile. The core of the weapon’s launch system would be Scud missiles grouped in clusters of eight to give the warheads a range of 1,500 miles. That would place not only Israel but many European cities in range. Bull believed it would be possible to eventually produce a supergun capable of landing a direct hit on London from Baghdad.

  Mossad’s director general, Nahum Admoni, sought an immediate meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. A former urban guerrilla leader who had ruthlessly fought the British during the dying weeks of the Mandate, Shamir was the kind of political leader Mossad liked, fully supporting the need to destroy Israel’s enemies when it was critical and all else failed. During the 1960s, when Nazi rocket scientists were working with Egypt to provide long-range weapons capable of hitting Israel from across the Sinai Desert, Shamir had been called in by Mossad to provide expertise in planning assassinations. His speciality during the Mandate rule had been devising means to eliminate British soldiers. Shamir had sent former members of his underground forces to kill the German scientists. Some of these assassins later became founding members of the Mossad’s kidon unit.

  Shamir spent only a short time studying Mossad’s file on Bull. The service had done its usual thorough job tracing Bull’s career from the time, at the age of twenty-two, he had been awarded a doctorate in physics and gone to work for the Canadian government’s Armaments and Research Development Establishment. There he had clashed with senior officials, sowing the seeds for what had become a lifelong hatred of bureaucrats. He had set up as a private consultant—“literally a gun for hire,” the file observed with a touch of black humor.

  His reputation as an armaments inventor was established in 1976 when he designed a .45-caliber howitzer that could shell targets twenty-five miles away; at that time the only comparable weapon NATO possessed had a maximum range of only seventeen miles. But once more Bull fell foul of government attitudes. NATO members were blocked from buying the new gun because the major European weapon producers had effective political lobbies. Bull finally sold the howitzer to South Africa.

  He then moved to China, helping the People’s Liberation Army develop its missile capability. Bull enhanced the existing Silkworm rockets by giving them a larger range and a greater payload of explosives. Batches of the rockets were then sold by China to Saddam Hussein. Initially Iraq deployed them in the long-running war against neighboring Iran. But a sufficient quantity of Silkworms remained at Iraqi launch sites for Mossad to believe they would eventually be used against Israel.

  Meanwhile, project Babylon was gathering pace. A more advanced prototype had been test-fired. Opponents of the Saddam regime who had been recruited as Mossad informers in Iraq reported that missile nose cones were being designed to hold chemical and biological weapons.

  On the afternoon of March 20, 1990, in the prime minister’s office, Yitzhak Shamir agreed with Nahum Admoni that Gerald Bull had to die.

  Two days after the decision was taken, a two-man kidon team arrived in Brussels. Waiting for them was the katsa who had been closely monitoring Bull’s activities.

  At 6:45 on the evening of March 22, 1990, the three men drove in a hired car to the apartment block where Bull lived. Each kidon carried a handgun in a holster under his jacket.

  Twenty minutes later, the sixty-one-year-old Bull answered the chiming doorbell of his luxury apartment. He was shot five times in the head and the neck, the kidons firing their 7.65-mm pistols in turn, leaving Bull dead outside his doorway. Later, Bull’s son, Michael, would insist his father had been warned that Mossad would kill him. He could not say who had given the warning or why his father had ignored it.

  Once the kidon team was safely back home, Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare began to feed stories to the media, strongly suggesting that Gerald Bull had died because he had planned to renege on his deal with Saddam Hussein. Now, five years later, the tactics used to execute Bull, a scientist Israel considered as much of a terrorist as Fathi Shkaki, were once more to be implemented on the direct order of another prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

  On October 24, 1995, two men in their late twenties—code-named Gil and Ran—left Tel Aviv on separate flights; Ran flew to Athens, Gil to Rome. At each airport they collected new British passports handed over by a local sayan. They arrived in Malta on a late-afternoon flight and checked into the Diplomat Hotel overlooking Valletta’s harbor.

  That evening a motorcycle was delivered to Ran. He told staff he planned to use it to tour the island.

  No one at the hotel would recall the two men having any contact. They spent most of their time in their rooms. When one of the bellboys had remarked that Gil’s Samsonite case was heavy, Gil had winked and said it was filled with gold bars.

  That evening a freighter that had sailed the previous day from the port of Haifa, bound for Italy, radioed the Maltese harbor authorities reporting it had developed engine trouble and, while it was being fixed, the ship wo
uld remain hove to off the island. On board the freighter were Shabtai Shavit and a small team of Mossad communication technicians. They established a radio link with Gil, whose suitcase contained a small but powerful radio.

  The suitcase’s locks had to be opened counterclockwise to deactivate the fuses in the two charges built into the lid. They were designed to explode in the face of anyone who opened the case after turning the keys clockwise. The radio’s rhombic antenna, a quarter of a mile of fiber-optic cable, was tightly coiled to form a disk six inches in diameter. Splitters connected the disk to four dipoles welded to the inside corner of the Samsonite. During the night Gil received a number of radio messages from the boat.

  Fathi Shkaki had arrived earlier that day on the Tripoli-Valletta ferry, accompanied by Libyan security men who had stayed on board, their responsibilities over when Shkaki came ashore alone. Before doing so, he had shaved off his beard. He identified himself to Maltese immigration officers as Ibrahim Dawish, showing them his Libyan passport. After checking into the Diplomat Hotel, he spent the next few hours in seafront cafés, sipping endless cups of coffee and nibbling sweet Arabic cakes. He made several telephone calls.

  The next morning Shkaki was returning with the promised shirts for his sons, strolling along the seafront, when two men on a motorcycle slowed beside him. One of them shot the Jihad leader at point-blank range six times in the head. Shkaki died instantly. The motorcyclists disappeared. Neither was ever found. But an hour later a fishing boat sailed out of Valletta harbor and dropped anchor in the lee of the freighter. Shortly afterward the captain informed the harbor authorities that the engine malfunction had been temporarily repaired but the ship was returning to Haifa for further repairs.

  In Iran, the spiritual home of Shkaki, the mullahs declared a day of national mourning. In Tel Aviv, asked to comment on the death, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said: “I am certainly not sad.”

  A few days later, on November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated at a Tel Aviv peace rally, close to the safe house where his order to execute Shkaki had been prepared. Rabin had died at the hands of a Jewish fanatic, Yigal Amir, who in many ways had the same ruthless qualities the prime minister had so admired in Mossad.

  Yitzhak Rabin, the hawk who had become a dove, the powerful political leader who had come to realize the only chance of peace in the Middle East was, as he once misquoted his favorite book, the Bible, “is to turn our swords into ploughshares and till the soil with our Arab neighbors,” was murdered by one of his own people because he failed to accept that his Jewish enemies would behave with the same ferocity as his old Arab foes had done—both groups determined to destroy his vision of the future.

  In 1998 there were forty-eight members in the Mossad kidon unit, six of them women. All were in their twenties and superbly fit. They lived and worked outside Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, based in a restricted area of a military base in the Negev Desert. The facility could be adapted to approximate a street or a building where an assassination was to take place. There were getaway cars and an obstacle course to negotiate.

  The instructors included former unit members who supervised practice with a variety of guns, and taught how to conceal bombs, administer a lethal injection in a crowd, and make a killing appear accidental. Kidons reviewed films on successful assassinations—the shooting of President John F. Kennedy, for example—and studied the faces and habits of scores of potential targets stored on their own highly restricted computer and memorized the constantly changing street plans of major cities as well as air and seaport layouts.

  The unit worked in teams of four who regularly flew abroad on familiarization trips to London, Paris, Frankfurt, and other European cities. There were also occasional trips to New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. During all of these outings a team was always accompanied by instructors who assessed their skills in setting up an operation without drawing attention to themselves. Targets were chosen from local sayanim volunteers who were only told they were taking part in a security exercise designed to protect an Israeli-owned facility; a synagogue or bank were usually given as the reason. Volunteers found themselves pounced upon in a quiet street and bundled into a car, or had their homes entered in the middle of the night and awoke to find themselves peering down a gun barrel.

  Kidons took these training exercises very seriously, for every team was aware of what was known as the “Lillehammer Fiasco.”

  In July 1973, at the height of the manhunt for the killers of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mossad received a tip that the “Red Prince” Ali Hassan Salameh, who had planned the operation, was working in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer as a waiter.

  Mossad’s then director of operations, Michael Harari, had put together a team not drawn from the kidon unit; its members were scattered across the world chasing the remaining terrorists who had carried out the Munich killings. Harari’s team had no field experience, but he was confident his own background as a katsa in Europe was sufficient. His team included two women, Sylvia Rafael and Marianne Gladnikoff, and an Algerian, Kemal Bename, who had been a Black September courier before being browbeaten by Harari into becoming a double agent.

  The operation had run into disaster from the outset. The arrival of a dozen strangers in Lillehammer, where there had not been a murder for forty years, aroused speculation. The local police began to watch them. Officers were close by when Harari and his team shot dead a Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki, who had no connection to terrorism and did not even physically resemble Salameh. Harari and some of his squad managed to escape. But six Mossad operatives were captured, including both women.

  They made full confessions, revealing for the first time Mossad’s assassination methods and other equally embarrassing details about the service’s clandestine activities. The women, together with their male colleagues, were charged with second-degree murder and received jail sentences of five years each.

  Returning to Israel, Harari was fired and the entire Mossad undercover network in Europe of safe houses, dead-letter boxes, and secret phone numbers was abandoned.

  It would be six years before Ali Hassan Salameh would finally die in the operation masterminded by Rafi Eitan, who said, “Lillehammer was an example of the wrong people for the wrong job. It should never have happened—and must never happen again.”

  It did.

  On July 31, 1997, the day after two Hamas suicide bombers killed 15 and injured another 157 people in a Jerusalem marketplace, Mossad chief Danny Yatom attended a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The prime minister had just come from an emotional press conference at which he had promised that he would never rest until those who planned the suicide bombings were no longer a threat.

  Publicly, Netanyahu had appeared calm and resolute, his responses to questions measured and magisterial; Hamas would not escape retribution, but what form that would take was not a matter for discussion. This was the “Bibi” from Netanyahu’s days on CNN during the Iraqi war, when he had earned repeated praise for his authoritative assessments of Saddam Hussein’s responses and how they were viewed in Israel.

  But on that stifling day, away from the cameras and surrounded only by Yatom and other senior intelligence officers and his own political advisers, Netanyahu offered a very different image. He was neither cool nor analytical. Instead, in the crowded conference room adjoining his office, he frequently interrupted to shout he was going to “get those Hamas bastards if it’s the last thing I do.”

  He added, according to one of those present, that “you are here to tell me how this is going to happen. And I don’t want to read in the newspapers anything about ‘Bibi’s’ revenge. This is about justice—just retribution.”

  The agenda had been set.

  Yatom, well used to the mercurial mood swings of the prime minister, sat silently across the table as Netanyahu continued to bluster. “I want their heads. I want them dead. I don’t care how it’s done. I just want it done. And I want it
done sooner rather than later.”

  Tension deepened when Netanyahu demanded that Yatom provide a list of all Hamas leaders and their present whereabouts. No prime minister had ever before asked for sensitive operational details at such an early stage. More than one person in the room thought that “Bibi was sending a signal he was going to be hands-on for this one.”

  It deepened the unease among some Mossad officers that the service was being forced to come too close to Netanyahu. Perhaps sensing this, Yatom told the prime minister that he would provide the list later. Instead, the Mossad chief suggested that it was “time to look at the practical side of things.” Locating the Hamas leaders would be “like searching for individual rats in a Beirut sewer.”

  Once more Netanyahu erupted. He didn’t want excuses; he wanted action. And he wanted it to start “here and now.”

  After the meeting ended, several intelligence officers were left with the impression that Bibi Netanyahu had crossed the fine line where political expediency ended and operational requirements took over. There could not have been a man in the room who did not realize that Netanyahu badly needed a public relations coup to convince the public the act-tough-on-terrorism policy that had brought him into office was not just empty rhetoric. He had also gone from one scandal to another, each time barely wriggling clear by leaving others to carry the blame. His popularity was at an alltime low. His personal life was all over the press. He badly needed to show he was in charge. To deliver the head of a Hamas leader was one surefire way.

  A senior Israeli intelligence officer undoubtedly spoke for many when he said: