Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  “While we all agreed there could be no objection to the principle that to cut off the head kills the snake, it was the time frame which was our concern. All Bibi’s talk about ‘action now’ was pure bullshit. Any operation of that nature requires careful planning. Bibi wanted results as if this was a computer game, or one of those old action-hero movies he likes to watch. But it just doesn’t work like that in the real world.”

  Yatom ordered a full search of every Arab country and sent katsas into Gaza and the West Bank to discover more about the whereabouts of the shadowy figures who control Hamas. Throughout August 1997, he was summoned several times to the prime minister’s office to report on his progress. There was none. The Israeli intelligence community was rife with accounts of how the prime minister had demanded that Yatom put more men into the field and had begun to hint that if he didn’t see results soon, he might have to take “other actions.” If Netanyahu had intended this to be a clumsy threat to his Mossad chief, it did not work. Yatom simply said he was “doing everything possible.” The unspoken implication was that if the prime minister wanted to fire him, that was his prerogative; but in the public debate that would inevitably follow, there would be questions asked about Netanyahu’s own role. But the prime minister continued to press for the death of a Hamas leader—and he wanted it sooner rather than later.

  By September 1997, Netanyahu had begun to call Yatom at all hours of the night about progress. The pressurized Mossad chief bowed. He pulled in katsas from other stations. For one, “Yatom was rearranging the map as a knee-jerk to Bibi’s demands. Yatom is one tough guy. But when it came to push-and-shove, he was just no match for Bibi, who had started to talk about how quickly his brother had helped to put together the raid on Entebbe. The comparison had no meaning. But that’s Bibi all over—use anything that can push his case.”

  On September 9, news reached Tel Aviv that Hamas had struck again, this time seriously wounding two Israeli bodyguards of the cultural attaché at the newly opened Israeli embassy in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

  Three days later, shortly before the Friday Sabbath began, Netanyahu requested that Yatom join him for lunch at his home in Jerusalem. The two men sat down to a meal of soup, salad, and a fish course, washed down with beer and bottled water. The prime minister immediately raised the attack in Amman. How could the Hamas gunmen have come close enough to shoot? Why had there been no advance warning? What was the Mossad station in Amman doing about it?

  Yatom interrupted Netanyahu in midflow: There was a Hamas leader in Amman named Khalid Meshal who ran the organization’s politburo from an office in the city. For weeks Meshal had been traveling through various Arab countries, but Amman station reported that he was back in the city.

  Netanyahu was galvanized. “Then go and knock him down!” he said across the table. “That’s what you have to do. Knock him down! Send your people in Amman to do that!”

  Stung by almost six weeks of relentless pressure from a prime minister who increasingly had appeared to have no grasp of the political sensitivity of any intelligence operation, the Mossad chief delivered a sharp lesson. Eyes glinting behind his spectacles, he warned that to launch an attack in Amman would destroy the relationship with Jordan that Netanyahu’s predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, had created. To actually kill Meshal on Jordanian soil would jeopardize Mossad’s operations in a country that had yielded a continuous flow of intelligence about Syria, Iraq, and Palestinian extremists. Yatom suggested it would be better to wait until Meshal once more left Amman and then strike.

  “Excuses! That’s all you give me! Excuses!” Netanyahu was said to have shouted. “I want action. I want it now. The people want action. It’s Rosh Hashanah soon!” he added, in a reference to the Jewish New Year. “This will be my gift to them!”

  From that moment on, every move that Yatom made would be personally approved by Netanyahu. No other Israeli prime minister had taken such a close personal interest in a state-sponsored act of murder.

  Khalid Meshal was forty-one years old, a full-bearded and physically strong man. He lived close to King Hussein’s palace and by all accounts was a devoted husband and father of seven children. Cultured and well-spoken, he had remained a little-known figure in the Islamic fundamentalist movement. But the rapidly assembled data that Mossad’s Amman station had put together indicated Meshal was the driving force behind the suicide bomb attacks against Israeli civilians.

  Details of Meshal’s movements had been furnished, together with a photograph the Mossad head of station had surreptitiously taken. With his report was a personal plea that Yatom should once more try to persuade Netanyahu not to go ahead with an assassination in Amman. Such a reckless action would jeopardize two years of important counterespionage work Mossad had done with Jordan’s cooperation.

  Netanyahu had rejected the plea, saying it sounded like a prediction of failure, something he would not tolerate.

  Meantime, an eight-man kidon squad had been preparing: a two-man team would actually carry out the hit in broad daylight; the others would provide backup, including car support. The team would all drive back into Israel, crossing over at the Allenby Bridge near Jerusalem.

  Mossad’s weapon of choice was unusual, not a gun, but an aerosol filled with a nerve agent. It would be the first time a kidon hit team had used this method of killing, though it had long been perfected by the KGB and other Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies. Russian scientists recently emigrated to Israel had been recruited by Mossad to create a range of deadly toxins, including tabun, sarin, and soman, nerve agents that were all outlawed under international treaties. The substances were intended to produce death that could be instantaneous or lingering; in all cases the victim lost control over his internal organs and suffered pain so excruciating that death itself would be a merciful release. This form of killing had been selected as appropriate for Meshal.

  On September 24, 1997, the kidon unit flew into Amman from Athens, Rome, and Paris, where they had been positioned for several days. Some members traveled on French and Italian documents. The hit men had been given Canadian passports in the names of Barry Beads and Sean Kendall. They told staff when they checked into the city’s Intercontinental Hotel they were tourists. The other katsas bedded down in the Israeli embassy a short distance away.

  Beads and Kendall joined them the next day. The two men once more inspected the aerosol. No one knew which nerve agent it contained. The agents speculated that it could induce anything from hallucinations to heart failure before death. They were briefed on the latest movements of Meshal by the station chief.

  He had been in London in September 1978 when a Bulgarian defector, Georgi Markov, had been killed by a nerve agent. A passerby had jabbed him in the thigh with the tip of an umbrella. Markov had died an excruciating death caused by ricin, a deadly poison made from the seeds of the castor-oil plant. The passerby had been a KGB agent who had never been caught.

  On that optimistic note, Beads and Kendall returned to their hotel shortly before midnight. Each ordered a room service breakfast of coffee, orange juice, and Danish pastries. Next morning, at 9:00 A.M., Beads appeared in the lobby and signed for the first of two rented cars, a blue Toyota. The second, a green Hyundai, arrived shortly afterward and was claimed by Kendall. He told one of the front-desk staff that he and “his friend” were going to explore the south of the country.

  At 10:00 A.M. Meshal was being driven by his chauffeur to work; in the back of the car with him were three of his young children, a boy and two girls. Beads followed at a discreet distance in his rented car. Other team members were out on the road in other cars.

  As they entered the city’s Garden District, the chauffeur informed Meshal that they were being followed. Meshal used the car phone to call in the make and number of Beads’s car to Amman police headquarters.

  As the rented Toyota drove past, Meshal’s children waved at Beads, as they had done to other motorists. The Mossad agent ignored them. Next Kendall’s green Hyundai pulle
d ahead of the chauffeur and both cars disappeared into the traffic.

  Moments later an officer at Amman police headquarters called Meshal to say the car was rented to a Canadian tourist. Meshal relaxed and watched his children once more waving at passing motorists, their faces pressed close to the windows. Every morning they took turns riding with their father to work before the chauffeur dropped them off at school.

  Shortly before 10:30 A.M. the chauffeur pulled into Wasfi Al-Tal Street, where a crowd had gathered outside the Hamas office, with Kendall and Beads among them. Their presence caused no alarm; curious tourists often came to the office to learn more about Hamas’s aspirations.

  Meshal quickly kissed his children before leaving the car. Beads stepped forward as if to shake him by the hand. Kendall was at his shoulder, fumbling with a plastic bag.

  “Mr. Meshal?” asked Beads pleasantly.

  Meshal looked at him uncertainly. At that moment Kendall produced the aerosol and tried to spray its contents into Meshal’s left ear.

  The Hamas leader recoiled, startled, wiping his lobe.

  Kendall made another attempt to spray the substance into Meshal’s ear. Around him the crowd were beginning to recover from their surprise, and hands reached out to grab the agents.

  “Run!” said Beads in Hebrew.

  Followed by Kendall, Beads sprinted to his car, parked a little way up the street. Meshal’s chauffeur had seen what was happening and began to reverse back down the street, trying to ram the Toyota.

  Meshal was staggering around, moaning. People were trying to support him from falling. Others were shouting for an ambulance.

  Beads, with Kendall sprawled beside him and still clutching his half-used aerosol, managed to avoid the chauffeur’s car and was accelerating up the street.

  Other cars were in pursuit. One of the drivers had a cell phone and was calling for roads in the area to be blocked. The chauffeur was using his car phone to contact police headquarters.

  By now backup members of the kidon team had arrived. One of them stopped and waved for Beads to transfer to his car. As the two Mossad men jumped out of the Toyota, another vehicle blocked their path. From it emerged a number of armed men. They forced Beads and Kendall to lie on the ground. Moments later the police arrived. Realizing there was nothing they could now do, the remaining members of the kidon team drove away, eventually making their way undetected back to Israel.

  Beads and Kendall were less fortunate. They were taken to Amman central police quarters, where they produced their Canadian passports and insisted they were victims of some “horrendous plot.” The arrival of Samih Batihi, the formidable chief of Jordanian counterintelligence, ended the pretense. He told them he knew who they were; he had just gotten off the phone with the Mossad station chief. Later, according to Batihi, the spymaster had “made a clean breast. He said they were his people and Israel would deal directly with the king.”

  Batihi ordered that the two Mossad agents be locked in separate cells but that they not be harmed in any way.

  Meantime, Meshal had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Amman’s main hospital. He complained of a persistent “ringing” in his left ear, a “shivery feeling like a shock running through my body,” and increasing difficulty with breathing.

  The doctors put him on a life-support system.

  News of the operation’s failure reached Yatom in a secure telephone call from the station chief in the Israeli embassy in Amman. Both men were said to be “beyond rage” at the debacle.

  By the time Yatom reached Netanyahu’s office, the prime minister had received a telephone call from King Hussein on the hot line installed between the two leaders to deal with a crisis. The flavor of the call came later from an Israeli intelligence officer:

  “Hussein had two questions for Bibi. What the fuck did he think he had been playing at? Did he have an antidote for the nerve gas?”

  The king said he felt like a man whose best friend had raped his daughter and that if Netanyahu was thinking of denying everything, he had better understand his two agents had made a full confession on video, which was now on its way to Washington for Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, to review. Netanyahu sat there hunched over his phone, “as white as anyone caught with his hand in the till.”

  Netanyahu offered to fly at once to Amman to “explain matters” to the king. Hussein told him not to waste his time. The intelligence officer recalled:

  “You could hear the ice crackling on the line from Jordan. Bibi didn’t even protest when Hussein told him that he now expected Israel to release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin [the Hamas leader Israel had held in prison for some time], as well as a number of other Palestinian prisoners. The call lasted only a few minutes. It must have been the worst moment in Bibi’s political life.”

  Events now took on their own momentum. Within an hour, an antidote to the nerve gas had been flown to Amman by an Israeli military plane and administered to Meshal. He began to recover and, within a few days, was well enough to stage a press conference in which he ridiculed Mossad. The Amman station chief and Samih Batihi had a short meeting during which they also spoke to Yatom on the phone. The director general fervently promised there would never be another assassination attempt carried out by Mossad on Jordanian soil. Next day Madeleine Albright made two short calls to Netanyahu; she made it clear what she thought of what had happened, her language at times as salty as King Hussein’s.

  Learning how its passports had been compromised, Canada recalled its ambassador to Israel—a move that fell just short of breaking off diplomatic relations.

  When details began to emerge, Netanyahu received a roasting in the Israeli and international press that would have driven other men to resign.

  Within a week, Sheikh Yassin was released and returned to a hero’s welcome in Gaza. By then Kendall and Beads were back in Israel, minus their Canadian passports. These had been handed over to the Canadian embassy in Amman for “safekeeping.”

  The two katsas never returned to the kidon unit; they were assigned to nonspecific desk duties at Mossad headquarters. As an Israeli intelligence officer said: “That could mean they would be in charge of security in the building’s toilets.”

  But Yatom had become a lame-duck chief. His senior staff felt he had failed to stand up to Netanyahu. Morale within Mossad slumped to a new low. The prime minister’s office leaked the view that it “is only a matter of time before Yatom goes.”

  Yatom tried to stem what one Mossad senior officer likened to “the tidal wave of dejection in which we are drowning.” Yatom adopted what he called “his Prussian pose.” He tried to browbeat his staff. There were angry confrontations and threats to resign.

  In February 1998, it was Yatom himself who resigned in an attempt to head off what he acknowledged was “a near mutiny.” Prime Minister Netanyahu did not send his fallen intelligence chief the customary letter of thanks for services rendered.

  Yatom left office with the first ripples of a sensation beginning to emerge over the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A dedicated Israeli investigative reporter, Barry Chamish, had privately gathered medical and ballistics reports and eyewitness accounts from Rabin’s bodyguards, his widow, surgeons, and nurses, together with members of the Israeli intelligence community he had spoken to. Much of it was evidence given in closed court.

  By 1999 Chamish, at risk to himself, had begun to publish his findings over the Internet. They are an eerie replay of the doubts raised about a lone gunman in the John Kennedy assassination in 1963. Chamish’s closely argued conclusions are, if nothing else, intriguing. He has concluded, “The gunman theory, accepted by the Israeli Government’s Shamgar Commission into the Rabin assassination, is a cover-up in what was to be a staged, unsuccessful assassination to rekindle Rabin’s flagging popularity with the electorate. Yogal Amir had agreed to perform the lone gunman function for his controller or controllers in the Israeli intelligence community.

  “Amir fired a blank bu
llet. And he fired just one shot, not the alleged three. Israeli police lab ballistic tests on a shell casing found at the scene do not match Amir’s gun. No blood was seen coming from Rabin. Then there is the mystery of how Rabin’s car got lost for eight to twelve minutes on what should have been a forty-five-second drive to hospital on clear streets cordoned off by police for the peace rally Rabin had been attending.”

  Chamish’s most explosive allegation—like all the others he has made, this one has yet to be refuted by any Israeli official in authority—claims: “During that strange drive to hospital by a very experienced chauffeur, Rabin was shot twice by real bullets and they came from the handgun of his own bodyguard Yoram Rubin. His gun disappeared at the hospital and has never been found. Two bullets retrieved from the prime minister’s body went missing for eleven hours. Rubin later committed suicide.”

  Chamish spoke to the three operating room surgeons who fought to save the prime minister’s life. The reporter discussed the testimony of police officers who had been present when Amir fired. The officers had all testified that when Yitzhak Rabin was placed in the car, he showed no visible wounds. The surgeons were adamant. When the prime minister finally reached the hospital, he showed clear signs of having sustained a massive chest wound and severe damage to his spinal cord in the lower neck area. The surgeons insisted there was no possible gunshot wound that would have allowed Rabin to leave the attack site showing no evidence of a wound and arrive at the hospital with multiple damage.

  The Shamgar Commission concluded it had found no evidence to confirm those wounds had occurred. Subsequently the doctors have refused to discuss the matter.

  Outside Chamish’s own investigation, there is independent sworn testimony to support his contention that “what happened is deep and is conspiratorial.”

  At his arraignment hearing, Amir had told the court: “If I tell the truth, the whole system will collapse. I know enough to destroy this country.”