Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Next day he leased a safe house half a mile from Wabersackerstrasse. He told the letting company he was expecting friends to join him for a skiing holiday.

  Danny Yatom had continued planning. He had sent a communications specialist to Liebefeld to examine the junction box. The technician had returned to Tel Aviv with a set of photographs he had taken of the inside of the box. The prints were studied in the research and development department and adjustments made to the devices being prepared. One was a sophisticated bug capable of monitoring all calls in and out of Zein’s apartment. The bug would be linked to a miniature recorder capable of storing hours of phone calls. The recorder had a built-in capacity to be electronically emptied by a prearranged signal from the safe house. There the recordings would be transcribed and sent by secure fax to Tel Aviv.

  By the first week of February 1998, all the technical plans were in place. Yatom moved to the most crucial part of the operation: choosing the team who would carry it out. The operation had two stages. The first was to gather sufficient evidence to show that Zein continued to be a key player in Hezbollah’s activities. The second part was then to kill him.

  By mid February 1998 everything was ready.

  Shortly before 6:30 A.M. on that Monday, February 16, Yatom’s Peugeot entered the parking lot in the basement of Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, and he took the elevator to a fourth-floor conference room. Waiting there were two men and two women. Seated around a table, they had already paired off as couples, the role they would assume in Switzerland. Each was in his late twenties, suntanned, and superbly fit-looking. For the past few days they had been up in the snow of northern Israel brushing up on their skiing.

  The previous evening, they had been fully briefed on the mission and had selected their cover identities. The men were to pose as successful stock-market traders taking a short break from the trading floor with their girlfriends, but never quite able to put work behind them: that would explain the laptop computer one of them would carry. The laptop had been wired to provide the link between the concealed recorder to be installed in the apartment basement and the safe house. One couple were to monitor the recorder around the clock once it began working. The other pair were from the kidon unit. Their job was to find the best means to kill Zein. They would travel unarmed to Switzerland; their guns would be provided later by the Brussels office.

  On the conference table were the listening device and the recorder. Yatom inspected them, saying the gadgets were far more sophisticated than any he had seen before. His final briefing was short. He asked each for the alias he or she had chosen from the list kept in operations. The men had selected “Solly Goldberg” and “Matti Finklestein”; the women were “Leah Cohen” and “Rachel Jacobson.” Because they were flying directly out of Tel Aviv on an El Al flight, they would travel on Israeli passports. They would resume their aliases in Switzerland, where false passports would be waiting.

  All four, in the later words of an Israeli intelligence source, had “earned their stripes.” But the truth was that, after the debacle in Jordan, there was a limited selection of agents available for such a mission. The Amman team had been the best Mossad had been able to field, and its members had been able to pass themselves off as Canadians; all had experience operating on the international stage. The quartet chosen for the Swiss mission had only operated in Cairo—nowadays a relatively safe Mossad target—and none of them had had firsthand knowledge of working under cover in Switzerland.

  That may have accounted for why, according to the London Sunday Times, Yatom ended the briefing with a reminder that the Swiss who lived in German-speaking cantons where Liebefeld was situated had a “tendency to call the police if they saw anything improper.”

  Yatom had shaken their hands and wished them luck, the standard benediction for any team leaving on a mission. The group had picked up their airline tickets and spent the next twenty-four hours in a Mossad safe house in the city.

  Next Tuesday morning, February 20, they boarded El Al Flight 347 to Zurich, obediently arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, as requested by the airline, two hours before takeoff. They joined the lines of passengers, mostly Swiss nationals or Israelis, making their way through the security checks. By 9 A.M., the two couples were in their business-class seats and sipping champagne and discussing their forthcoming holiday. In the hold of the aircraft were their skis.

  Waiting for them at Kloten Airport in Zurich was the katsa from the Brussels station with a minibus. He had assumed the role of their guide and had adopted the alias of “Ephrahim Rubenstein.”

  By late afternoon they were installed in the safe house in Liebefeld. The two women cooked dinner and they all settled down to watch television. Early in the evening two rental cars arrived from Zurich, driven by sayanim. They left in the minibus, their role over. At around 1:00 A.M. on Saturday, February 20, the team left the safe house, each couple in a separate car. Rubenstein was in the first car, leading the way to Wabersackerstrasse. Reaching there, the two vehicles parked almost directly opposite the apartment block. There was no light from Zein’s apartment. The persons who called themselves Solly Goldberg, Rachel Jacobson, and Ephrahim Rubenstein walked quickly toward the glass door of the building. Rubenstein carried a roll of plastic, Goldberg the laptop, Jacobson a carrier bag containing the listening devices. Meantime, Leah Cohen and Matti Finklestein had enthusiastically begun to act out their lookout role, pretending to be lovers.

  Across the street an elderly woman who suffered from insomnia—Swiss police would later insist on referring to her only as “Madam X”—was once more unable to sleep. From her bedroom window, she stared out at a strange sight. A man—Rubenstein—was draping plastic across the glass door to stop anyone’s looking into the apartment block opposite. Behind the sheet, she could see two other figures. Out in the street in a parked car was another shadowy couple. Just as Danny Yatom had warned, what she saw was certainly improper. The woman called the police.

  At a little after 2:00 A.M., a BMW squad car arrived in the street, catching Cohen and Finklestein in midembrace. They were ordered to remain in the car. Meantime, police backup had arrived and the trio inside the lobby were asked to explain what they were doing. Goldberg and Jacobson said they had mistaken the building for one where friends lived and Rubenstein insisted he was taking down, not putting up the plastic.

  Matters then became farcical. Goldberg and Jacobson asked permission to go to their car and check the address of their friends. No policemen accompanied them. At the same moment, Rubenstein fell to the ground, appearing to have suffered a heart attack. All the policemen gathered around to help and summon medical assistance. No one moved to stop the two cars as they raced out of Wabersackerstrasse into the frosty night. Shortly afterward, the cars stopped to transfer one couple into the other car. The foursome crossed the border into France in the small hours of the morning.

  Meanwhile Rubenstein had been taken to the hospital. Doctors said he had not suffered a heart attack. He was taken into custody.

  At 4:30 A.M. Tel Aviv time, Yatom was awoken at home by the night watch officer in Mossad headquarters and told what had happened. Not bothering to call his chauffeur, Yatom drove himself to headquarters.

  After the Amman fiasco, a plan had been put in place to deal with further such disasters. The first step was for Yatom to call the senior duty officer at the foreign ministry. The officer telephoned the head of the prime minister’s office, who informed Benyamin Netanyahu. He called Israel’s ambassador to the European community in Brussels, Efraim Halevy. The English-born diplomat had spent nearly thirty years as a senior Mossad officer with responsibility for maintaining good relations with security services of foreign states that had diplomatic relations with Israel. He had also played an important role in patching up relations with Jordan after the bungled operation in Amman.

  “Fix this, and you’ll be my friend for life,” Netanyahu was later quoted as saying to Halevy.

  The ambassador had consulted th
e Filofax he carried everywhere before deciding whom to call first: Jacob Kellerberger, a senior officer at the Swiss foreign ministry. Halevy was at his diplomatic best: there had been a “regrettable incident” involving Mossad. How “regrettable”? Kellerberger had demanded. “Most regrettable,” Halevy had replied. The tone had been set, an understanding in the wind. Or so Halevy believed, until Kellerberger telephoned Switzerland’s federal prosecutor, Carla del Ponte.

  With a jutting lower lip and steel-rimmed spectacles that matched those of Danny Yatom, del Ponte was a figure within the Swiss legal system as formidable as Yatom had once been in the Israeli intelligence community. Her first question set the tone she would maintain: Why had the Liebefeld police not arrested all the Mossad agents? Kellerberger did not know. Del Ponte’s next question raised a specter he was all too familiar with: Could the Mossad operatives have had a “Tehran connection”? Since the Gulf War, Israel had repeatedly claimed that several Swiss companies were supplying technology to Iran to produce missiles. Could the operation even be somehow connected with Israel’s other preoccupation over what had become known as the “Jewish gold scandal”? Swiss banks had concealed for their own profit huge sums of money deposited in their vaults before World War II by German Jews who later became victims of the Nazis.

  Throughout the weekend of February 21–22, her questions continued while Halevy struggled to keep matters quiet.

  He had not counted on the forces arraigned against Danny Yatom in Israel. Within Mossad, as news of the incident percolated through the organization, morale plunged even lower. This time Yatom could not blame Netanyahu for what had happened in Liebefeld. The prime minister had known nothing beforehand of the operation. From within the prime minister’s office whispers began to reach the Israeli media that Yatom was now doomed. For three more days, Efraim Halevy continued to plead and argue with Kellerberger to keep the incident quiet. But Carla del Ponte would have none of it. On Wednesday, February 25, she called a press conference to denounce Mossad: “What happened was unacceptable and disconcerting between friendly nations.”

  Within hours, Danny Yatom had resigned. His career was over and Mossad’s reputation even more in tatters. In his last moments as director, he surprised staff who had assembled in the Mossad canteen. The cold Prussian image was replaced by an emotional tone: he was sorry to be leaving them at such a time, but he had tried to give them the best possible leadership. They should always remember Mossad was bigger than anyone. He ended by wishing whoever took over his place the very best of luck; he would need it. It was the nearest Yatom came to saying what he thought about a prime minister who continued to believe Mossad could be ultimately controlled from his office. Yatom walked out of the silent canteen. Only when he was in the corridor did the applause start, and it died as swiftly as it began.

  A week later Efraim Halevy agreed to take over the service after Benyamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged, the first time any Israeli prime minister had done so, “that I cannot deny that Mossad’s image has been affected by certain failed missions.”

  Ever the consummate politician, Netanyahu made no mention of the role he had played.

  Efraim Halevy became the ninth director general of Mossad on Thursday, March 5, 1998. He broke with tradition and did not summon his senior staff to hear his views on how the service should be run for the next two years. In appointing Halevy, Netanyahu had also announced that, on March 3, 2000, the new deputy director of the service, Amiram Levine, would take over running the service. The news was greeted with some surprise. No other director general had been given a fixed tenure; no other deputy had been assured he would step into the top job.

  By 1999, Yatom had found himself a niche in Israel’s thriving arms industry. He became a salesman for one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of arms; the company not only provides a range of weapons for internal use but has a thriving export industry to Third World countries. Yatom makes regular visits to African countries and South American nations. From time to time he turns up in Washington.

  Like Meir Amit, Levine had no previous intelligence experience, but he had commanded with distinction the Israeli army in northern Israel and south Lebanon.

  Halevy’s first task was to reduce the tremendous tension and resentments inside Mossad that had so seriously damaged its image both within Israel and beyond. In routine congratulatory telephone calls from both the CIA and MI6, the new director had been told those services would prefer to wait and see how he dealt with the crisis within Mossad before wholeheartedly committing their own services to no-secrets-based collaboration. One factor would be how Halevy dealt with the hard-liners in the Israeli government, especially its prime minister.

  Would the urbane Halevy, only a year away from his pension and, by many years, the oldest to be given the office, be able to keep Netanyahu at a proper distance? And for all Halevy’s undoubted diplomatic skills—he had played a central role in the negotiations that led to the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan—he had been away from the coalface of intelligence for several years. Since his time with Mossad the agency had increasingly shown signs of being out of control as senior officers had tried to stake their own claims for promotion. Most of those middle-aged men remained in office. Could Halevy deal firmly with them? Would the new director have the essential hands-on skills to raise morale? Mingling on the cocktail circuit in Brussels had hardly been the best preparation for the task of leading agents away from the brink of resignation. Critically, Halevy had no personal operational field experience. He had always been a desk man in his previous time with Mossad. And what could he really achieve in two years? Or was he really there to rubber-stamp what Netanyahu wanted done, or, for that matter, what Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, wanted done? Speculation continued within the Israeli intelligence community over the part she had played in the removal of Yatom, a man to whom she had never warmed.

  Halevy found a way to charm her. He presented Sara with a microchip that Mossad research scientists had developed. It could be implanted under her skin and allow her to be rescued in the unlikely event she ever fell into the hands of terrorists. Using natural body energy, the bleep was linked to one of Israel’s new space satellites, enabling a person who wore it to be swiftly tracked to his or her hiding place. No one knows if Sara has had the implant inserted in her body.

  But soon there were more pressing matters than beguiling the prime minister’s wife. The first major operation Halevy had enthusiastically approved, an attempt to set up a spy base in Cyprus, came disastrously unstuck. Two Mossad agents, posing as teachers on vacation, were swiftly unmasked by the small but efficient Cypriot security service. They raided the apartment the agents had rented and discovered it was filled with high-tech equipment, capable of spying-out Cypriot plans to stiffen its defenses against neighboring Turkey.

  Halevy sent his deputy to Cyprus to negotiate the release of the two men. He might well have wished he had gone himself. Israel’s president, Ezer Weizman, was a close personal friend of the Cypriot president, Biafcos Clerides (in their youth both men had served together in the Royal Air Force). Weizman dispatched his chief of staff to “eat humble pie in Cyprus” and then lambasted Halevy in a manner that even Netanyahu would have hesitated to have used against Yatom.

  Further public embarrassment followed when, having approved a plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein during a visit to his mistress, it was canceled after details were leaked to an Israeli journalist. Netanyahu learned what had happened when the reporter called his office for comment. Once more the hapless Halevy found himself facing a severe dressing-down.

  For weeks the mercurial prime minister avoided all but essential contact with the Mossad chief, until late November 1998. Then the Turkish prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, telephoned Netanyahu and asked if Mossad would help capture Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader, long designated as a terrorist by other countries. Turkey held him responsible for 30,000 deaths on its soil. For over twenty years Ocalan’s Kurdish Workers Party,
the PKK, had waged a guerrilla war to get autonomy for Turkey’s 12 million Kurds who have no minority rights such as education or permission to broadcast in their own language.

  Ocalan had constantly evaded Turkey’s own security service with effortless ease. He was a leader who inspired messianic fervor in his people. Whether a man, woman, or child, they were ready to die for him. To many he was the epitome of the legendary Scarlet Pimpernel; his deeds of derring-do endlessly recited where two or more Kurds met. There was a raw passion about his speeches, an unnerving defiance in his challenge to Turkey.

  That November—after flitting through Moscow—Ocalan turned up in Rome. The Italian government refused to extradite him to Turkey—but also refused his request for political asylum. Earlier Ocalan had been arrested on a German warrant for traveling on a false passport. He was freed when Bonn withdrew its extradition demand for fear of inflaming its large Kurdish communities. That was the moment that Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit telephoned Netanyahu.

  For Israel, a close working relationship with Turkey is an important element in its strategic and diplomatic survival in the region. Netanyahu agreed and ordered Halevy to find Ocalan. It would be a “black” operation—meaning Mossad’s own involvement would never surface publicly. If successful, all the credit would go to Turkish intelligence.

  The plan was given the code-name “Watchful.” It reflected Halevy’s own concern to do as little as possible to disturb his own running operation inside Iraq. There, Mossad katsas were working alongside Kurdish rebels to destabilize Saddam’s regime.