Dagan’s men were polite to officers from the CIA, MI6, and other European services, and paid lip service to the atrocity’s having been committed within Kenya’s jurisdiction. But for the team, the dead and injured were Israelis. That made it their job.
In Tel Aviv, Dagan waited. He knew his operatives had melted into the region’s multiethnic population.
To this day, no one knows for certain what success the Mossad team had. But sources in a number of other intelligence services say it did kill several suspected terrorists and dumped their bodies in crocodile-infested swamps. If so, that would fit into Mossad’s way of doing things. The reality of their world is a different one from that of others.
And while his agents carried out their ruthless safari against al-Qaeda, Meir Dagan was immersing himself in the struggle against another, equally fearsome enemy: the suicide bombers who continued to terrorize Israel in the closing weeks of 2002.
The first suicide bomber had struck in Israel on a warm spring day in April 1993. Others soon followed, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Men, women, and children had died on buses, in shopping malls and cafés, and on the way to school. Each death had one common purpose: to wreck any hope of bringing peace to the region. Most of the bombers had come from a terrorist group known as the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. For Israelis, it was more feared than Hezbollah and Hamas.
Each potential bomber was recommended to the Martyrs Jihad Committee. So far the combined resources of Israel’s intelligence community had failed to locate its members. All that was known was that they communicated important decisions through handwritten notes.
Long before a candidate was approached, careful checks were made into the family background. A critical decision in the selection process was the religious standing of any bomber. The imam, the prayer leader of the mosque where a candidate worshiped, was consulted on how well the person knew the Koran, how regular was his attendance at Friday prayers. There were other preconditions before a person was accepted for martyrdom. No bomber was selected who was the sole wage earner in the family, if two brothers volunteered, only one was chosen.
Having passed those basic requirements, a candidate was invited to meet the Martyrs Jihad Committee. These meetings were often held in public places, like crowded cafés, to reduce the risk of electronic surveillance.
The first meeting focused on a candidate’s religious knowledge. Next he was questioned about his political commitment. If his answers were satisfactory, he was placed on the list of suicide bombers. No one knew its size. But it was believed to number hundreds.
Meir Dagan had found the details in Mossad files. But he wanted to know more. And so, in every spare moment, he had dug deeper into the close world of the bombers and the men who prepared them.
The preparations for martyrdom were conducted in a mosque, usually in a back room away from prying eyes. The iman was assisted by a member of the Martyrs Jihad Committee. They spent up to eight hours a day with a candidate, the time divided between silent prayer and reading portions aloud from the Koran.
An important task at this stage was to give the candidate repeated assurances, that on the Day of Judgment, he or she—for women were eligible to become bombers—would be allowed, upon entering paradise, to choose seventy relatives to also enter; that in heaven a male bomber would have at his disposal seventy-two houris, the celestial virgins who are reputed in Islamic folklore to live there.
These promises were interspersed with checks to see that a bomber’s belief in martyrdom never wavered. The imam and his assistant repeated time and again the same exhortation. “You die to achieve Allah’s satisfaction. You have been chosen by Allah because he has seen in you all that is good.”
The first sign to a bomber that he was about to go to his death came when he was joined by two “advisers” who replaced the assistant. Older men, steeped in Islamic extreme dogma, their task was to ensure that a bomber did not waver in his readiness to die. They focused on the “glory” waiting in paradise of being finally in the presence of Allah, of being allowed to meet the prophet Muhammad.
As the time grew closer to a mission, the bomber was moved to a specially prepared room. Its walls were inscribed with verses from the Koran. Between the verses were painted green birds flying in a purple sky, a reminder that they carry the souls of martyrs to Allah. The indoctrination became more focused. The bomber was told paradise was very close. When the time came, all he must do was press the detonator button to enter the promised world.
For hours the advisers and the human bomb continued to pray and fast together. In between, the practical side of his departure to paradise was taken care of. All of the bomber’s earthly debts were settled by the Martyrs Jihad Committee. He was told his family would become honored members of their community.
There were constant checks to ensure that the bomber showed no signs of fear. Reassured, the advisers then conferred on him the title al shaheed al hayy, the living martyr.
In the final stages, the bomber placed a copy of the Koran inside his clothes. Over it went the body suit. A wire to the detonator button was taped to the palm of his right hand.
The advisers escorted the bomber close to the target area. They bade farewell with the promise given to all human bombers: “Allah is with you. Allah will give you success so that he can receive you in paradise.”
Later, as the bomber pressed the button, he cried out, “Allah akbar.” Allah is great. All praise to Allah.
Almost certainly these were the last earthly words Wafa’a Ali Idris spoke.
Meir Dagan had made a close study of the young woman who had chosen to die. She was assured of her place in the pantheon of Islamic martyrdom. She was the first woman suicide bomber to launch herself against unsuspecting Israelis, doing so on a fine spring morning in 2002—the kind of morning that Israelis liked to remind themselves was why they called this troubled land the Promised Land.
On that Sunday morning Wafa’a was close to her thirty-second birthday. Her proudest gift was a signed, framed photo of Yasser Arafat, personally given to her by the chairman of the PLO. She had been a member of his Fatah organization since, as a teenager, she threw her first stones against Israeli soldiers on the West Bank.
At eighteen, she had married a distant cousin who was a blacksmith. Ten years later his mother forced the couple to divorce because Wafa’a had been unable to produce a child.
She joined the Red Crescent Society after the divorce, working as a paramedic for Islam’s equivalent of the Red Cross.
“She was in the thick of the fighting. She would help the injured and often carry the badly wounded and dying children,” her mother later said with pride. “At the end of a long day in the front line, my daughter would cry in my arms as she recalled the terrible things she witnessed.”
Wafa’a’s circle of friends started to change. In the back street cafés she sipped coffee with members of Hamas, founded in 1987 during the first Intifada, in which she had participated. She listened to their plans to create an Islamic state. She also began to mix with Hezbollah, an equally extreme group. They filled her mind with more fanaticism.
Israel’s Shin Bet—its internal security force—later established that she became involved with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It was another step into the world of ruthless militancy that now permeated her life. During the month of Ramadan, 2001, she met a recruiter for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
Her mother said, “Wafa’a had finally found what she wanted. A chance to show she was a true daughter of Palestine.”
Now, on that Sunday, five months after she had been accepted by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, she was ready to die for them.
On the night before, while the streets of Ramallah were filled with young discogoers, an elderly woman delivered a packet to the house where Wafa’a lived with her widowed mother. The packet contained a new bra and panties, along with a customized body suit. It was designed to conceal up to three kilos of high explosives and specially sharpen
ed nails and razor fragments. The suit was designed to fit under Wafa’a’s street clothes. It had several pockets deep enough to take sticks of explosives. They would be distributed around her upper torso. Other pockets around her waist were for the nails and razor fragments. There was a separate pouch that extended over the genital area. Later Dr. Ariel Merari, a ranking expert at Tel Aviv University on the techniques of suicide bombers, suggested the pouch was created “because the Israeli security forces never search Arab women in that area of their body.”
Wafa’a had never met the person who made the suit. He was said to come from Jenin, the Arab city that would later be destroyed by Israeli forces. To Mossad the man was known as “the Tailor of Death.” The intelligence service eventually established that he was a highly skilled craftsman who used a treble stitch to sew the suit. It was made from a cloth sold in Arab shops for making undershirts. The sewing cotton came from a similar source. Mossad technicians decided the tailor probably used an old-fashioned hand-operated Singer sewing machine. Later it would emerge that Wafa’a’s suit, like all those worn by male suicide bombers, had been designed so that the distribution of explosives was carefully balanced, and the explosive effect would cover the widest possible area.
Wafa’a may also have received advice on the choice of outer clothing. “We know that some male suicide bombers have worn wigs and been well dressed. This has helped them to gain access to upmarket cafés and restaurants, which have been among their targets,” Dr. Merari has said. Wafa’a’s mother later recalled that her daughter had laid out her body suit and clean underwear on her bed early on that Sunday morning. Then she had chosen her finest hipster jeans and a loose-fitting blouse to conceal her body suit.
She had been joined by her spiritual adviser—a male member of the Martyrs. They had prayed together. Then he had recited passages from the Koran. He had handed her a copy of the Koran, which she tucked into her back trouser pocket.
To prepare a candidate for death, contacts with the family were reduced to a minimum. This was to reduce any hesitation over severing earthly ties. He or she was constantly reminded of the new life ahead. Only when a candidate was on the eve of martyrdom was time with his or her family allowed. In part this was to test whether or not he or she would weaken in his or her resolve.
Wafa’a, for example, spent her last two days with her mother. Only when she had taken delivery of her underclothes and body suit did she let her mother know what was going to happen. “We prayed together. For Palestine. For my daughter’s safe journey to a better world,” Was-fiya Ali Idris would recall.
Wasfiya is herself a woman who sees life through the prism of Islamic extremism. Her reading is confined to the Koran, her hero is Yasser Arafat. Her dream was that her daughter was going to her death to help create a Palestinian homeland.
In some respects Wafa’a Ali Idris did not quite fit the profile of a shaheed, a Martyr. Until she had been enrolled by the Martyrs, she had not shown any strong religious feelings. “After time with the Martyrs she became a devout follower of all that I had taught her as a child. There was not a day when she did not study the Koran,” said Wasfiya.
Her anger against Israel also became a living vibrant force that sustained her during her work as a paramedic. In the year before her death, she had been injured three times by Israeli soldiers as she had tended to Arabs wounded on the streets of Ramallah. Her mother would remember. “At that time my daughter was getting more and more angry. All she was doing was trying to save lives. But the soldiers did not care. Then one day she said to me, ‘Mother, I have joined the Martyrs. It is the only way I can serve my people. All those who have died have to be avenged!’ I understood her feelings.”
To grasp the power of martyrdom for such people, you need go no further than the Ramallah mosque where one of the imams explained (to the author): “First you must understand the meaning of the spirit. It draws us upward while the power of material things tries to hold us back. But when you are filled with a true desire to be a martyr, the material influence recedes. Only if you are a true believer will you begin to understand that. To all nonbelievers it is impossible to comprehend. But for those who have chosen to die, they know they are close to eternity. They have no doubts of the wonderful world that awaits them. Each and every one understands the legitimacy of what they are about to do. They have each made an oath on the Koran to carry out their noble action. It is the oath of jihad. We call it bayt al ridwan, named after the Garden of Paradise for the true prophets.”
In Ramallah suicide bombers are heroes. There are posters for the “Martyr of the Month.” They are celebrated in song and verse. They are remembered in Friday prayers in every mosque in the West Bank and Gaza City.
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, said: “Love of martyrdom is something deep inside the heart. But these rewards are not in themselves the goal of the martyr. The only aim of the true believer is to win Allah’s satisfaction. That can be done in the simplest and speediest manner by dying in the cause of Allah. And never forget it is Allah who selects the martyrs.”
In March 2004, the sheikh was assassinated by an Israeli gunship as he left a mosque in Gaza City. His sermon had contained a familiar refrain: the need for more young men and women to sacrifice themselves.
There is no shortage of volunteers to follow Wafa’a Ali Idris.
Shortly after noon on that Sunday in March 2002, she blew herself up in a crowded Jerusalem street. She killed an eighty-one-year-old man and injured more than one hundred other men, women, and children. The explosives blew off her head and one arm and left a gaping hole in her abdomen. An hour later the radios in Ramallah proclaimed her to be “a true heroine of our people.”
Wafa’a had been manipulated in the name of religious extremism by the dark and dangerous world of Islamic fanaticism, which would ultimately lead to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and all the other suicide bomber attacks across the Middle East, in Pakistan, and in the Philippines.
Since Wafa’a died, more young women have experienced similar fates. Between them they have killed or injured close to 250 more Israelis.
Their actions are described as “sacred explosions.” The act of suicide is forbidden in Islam. But the spin doctors of the Martyrs are well versed in the black art of propaganda.
For families who have allowed their children to be sacrificed, the financial rewards are good. Each family receives a pension for life. While it varies, it is said to be a minimum of twice the income they received before their son or daughter died.
The money comes from Iran. It is laundered through the central banks from Damascus to Athens. From there it is electronically transferred to an account in Cairo. Then it is couriered to Gaza City for distribution by the Jihad Committee.
Meir Dagan made it a priority to trace the final destination of the money in the hope it could lead Mossad to the men who prepared the bombers. But it was a daunting task. The Martyrs operate on a small-cell basis. Often there are no more than two or three persons in a cell. In the closed world of the refugee camps, informers for Israeli intelligence are hard to recruit. Those discovered are executed. For them death can be agonizingly slow, preceded by unspeakable torture. For their families there is the odium of having bred a traitor to Islamic extremism.
But for the suicide bomber there was only glory. In the world they inhabited there was little enough of that. For them death was perhaps all too often a welcome relief.
After Wafa’a died, a leaflet with her photo was circulated throughout the West Bank. It read “We do not have tanks or rockets. But we have something superior—our Islamic human bombs. In place of a nuclear arsenal we are proud of our arsenal of believers.”
The one certainty is that other young men and women will blow themselves—and many others—into eternity. Meir Dagan knew that the further Israel was from the last suicide bomber, the nearer it was to the next.
That was the fearful reality of life and death in the
Holy Land.
CHAPTER 19
AFTER SADDAM
By January 2003, five months after he had walked from the Mossad headquarters canteen to thunderous applause, Meir Dagan had become a hero to his staff and a man feared by Israel’s enemies. Even the most bitter of them acknowledged that Mossad was once more the most effective and ruthless spy service in the Middle East, and beyond. Dagan knew more about the secrets of Arab security services than did the Arab political rulers. Indeed, he had placed new agents in the private offices of senior government officials in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Under his watchful eye, Mossad had infiltrated with new vigor all sectors of Arab political life, its business communities, and other areas of Muslim society.
In the past four months since taking command, he had studied the sins and mistakes that had led to a collapse of morale in Mossad. He had rectified this by ensuring that those who were responsible were culled from the ranks of Mossad. Replacements had been brought in from the army; some were also recruited from Shin Bet and Israel’s other intelligence services. Dagan made it clear that he had chosen them because they would follow his rules—not the rule book. For their part, they had shown they would serve him purely out of the conviction that he was the man they wished to follow.
He worked eighteen-hour days, and longer, at his desk. He sometimes slept on his couch. Life was hard. He came and went like the proverbial thief in the night. He went to Mombasa and places beyond to follow the trail of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Other intelligence chiefs would not have left their office. But that was not his style. He had always led, from the front.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 44
