After reviewing the R & D report, Dagan prepared for his first meeting of the day. It would be with two senior officers of France’s Directorate for Surveillance of the Territory (DST). The largest of the Republic’s six intelligence agencies, it employed several thousand staff and, over the years, had developed close ties with Mossad. These had been cemented when Mossad had helped the DST foil a terrorist plot to launch a jetliner into the Eiffel Tower. Since then both services had collaborated to thwart a number of al-Qaeda attacks in France. None of the details had subsequently emerged in public, but they had included a plan to assassinate President Chirac.
While France, like many European countries, publicly advocated a judicial approach to the war on terrorism, wherever possible arresting and trying terrorists; behind the scenes the DST were as ruthless as Mossad. This had followed a major overhaul in 1986 of the country’s police and its intelligence-gathering apparatus. After the 9/11 attacks the cooperation with Mossad rapidly expanded. Both services had common ground in dealing with the effects of the jihad in Chechnya, Gaza, the West Bank, and Kashmir, which had led to a radicalization among Middle East Arabs who had arrived in Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon, cities where Jewish investment and influence was well established. The al-Qaeda network in France consisted largely of North African second-generation emigrants from working-class or middle-class families. The majority were still in their early twenties and had been seduced by the messianic preaching of Osama bin Laden on a video or persuaded to become a jihadist after listening to a radical preacher in a mosque. Hundreds had made their way to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq.
The closeness of Spain to North Africa made it an important conduit for al-Qaeda to smuggle operatives into France. A document that a Mossad analyst prepared in 2005 (which the author has seen) accuses the Moroccan police of receiving payment in return for smuggling terrorists into Spain. “Al-Qaeda controls criminal networks in Spain who deal in money laundering and trafficking in drugs and prostitutes from the Balkans. Spain is still considered a safe haven for Islamic extremists even after the Madrid bombings. The current estimate is that they are linked to eighteen radical groups that Spanish intelligence has not been able to successfully penetrate.”
Information produced by Mossad’s Spanish sayanim was passed on to the DST, together with al-Qaeda’s growing presence on France’s border with Germany. The Federal Republic had itself become a fertile ground for al-Qaeda to recruit jihadists in university cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Weisbaden, Duisburg, and Munich. Though Mossad had helped to destroy the most important al-Qaeda cell in Germany, the Meliani Kommando, as it was about to launch a terrorist attack in Strasbourg against the city’s cathedral and its historic synagogue, al-Qaeda still had a sizeable network; many of its members had come from the Balkans.
To update themselves, DST officers regularly visited Tel Aviv and Mossad Station in Paris and had free access to the DST data bank. Central to this relationship was the joint monitoring of mosques and individuals across France. Warrants for wiretapping were easily granted and, since December 2005, surveillance had been extended to use video cameras in public areas and access to phone and e-mail communications of suspects. Again with the help of Mossad the DST had developed an unprecedented number of Muslim informers within the country’s Muslim communities. For Mossad the value of its ties to the DST was that it served as an intelligence data clearinghouse from other French agencies, including the national police.
Through the DST Mossad could provide evidence to the country’s judicial arm when it came to issuing arrest warrants, wiretaps, and subpoenas. These were served by a team of investigating judges who could also order the detention of suspects for an initial six days and even keep some of them imprisoned for years. In court, the suspects were judged by professional magistrates rather than under the jury system of Britain and the United States. Meir Dagan felt this approach could offer lessons to the Bush administration as it faced growing pressure and controversy over its own approach to fighting terrorism: its incarcerating suspects in its Guantánamo Bay camp, its continued rendition of suspects to secret prisons in Eastern Europe, and the doubtful legality of its military tribunals to try suspects.
The meeting with the two DST officers was conducted in Dagan’s office and not in one of the small conference rooms where he usually met senior foreign intelligence officers; the choice of venue was a further indication of the closeness between the DST and Mossad. Like agents from British and European services, the DST regularly sent senior officers to the Palestinian Territories before traveling on to see Dagan. The visits were known as “pulse taking” by the Mossad director, who saw them as another way to check the strength of Palestinian fervor. On the surface it was a means to try and expunge decades of isolation that the removal of the Jewish settlers from Gaza had done little to diminish.
Dagan usually learned little from the visits by MI6 officers, Germany’s BND, Spain, and the CIA. “Indeed some of their interpretations were wide of the mark,” one of his aides told the author. But the DST usually provided well-informed judgments, helped by the ability of its agents to not only speak Arabic fluently but to understand its culture. It meant a DST evaluation could be trusted enough to be matched against what Mossad’s own informers in Gaza and the West Bank reported. For Dagan it was essential to get the French view of the coming Palestinian elections and the influence wielded by Hamas at ground-roots level in its challenge to Fatah, the ruling party. Yasser Arafat had designed it to create a nationalist mythology using the symbols of his kaffiyeh, stubble, and gun, to fuel a revolutionary belief in which political struggle was heroic, fiery militance superior to mundane governance, vehement rejection better than compromise, that all opponents—especially Israel—were evil, that terrorism was cleansing, and that the eventual victory would be all the better for it. But Arafat was gone and in the past year Fatah the organization had become increasingly inured to corruption. In the Palestinian Territories the despair among the young had grown by the day, along with unemployment, social chaos, and Fatah’s seeming inability to recognize that governing required attention to the prosaic details.
Into this situation had emerged Hamas. The terrorist organization had also been founded on hatred, paranoia, and an apocalyptic vision of how Israel would be destroyed by a plentiful supply of suicide bombers and huge financial support from Iran. Hamas politics were rooted in absolutionist terms: vengeance was glorious and victory was achieved through martyrdom. Founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who became its spiritual leader, Hamas was cautiously encouraged by Israel as a means of balancing the extremists within Fatah. “Incredibly as it seems today, we thought the ‘divide and rule’ policy that had worked so well in the past would do so this time,” recalled Rafi Eitan. In August 1988, Hamas published its “charter,” calling on all Muslims to “destroy Israel and its people.” The response was swift. Yassin was killed in his wheelchair by a fusillade of rockets from Israeli gunships. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the organization’s strategist, was killed by the same method shortly afterward. In 1997, Mossad failed to kill Khaled Meshal, the head of the organization’s international branch in Amman (see chapter 17, “Bunglegate”). Salah Shehade, the architect of Hamas’s suicide-bombing strategy, was killed by Israeli F-16 jets who precision-bombed his home in Gaza. His wife and children also died in the attack. By then more than three hundred suicide attacks had claimed four hundred Israelis, many of them women and children. But Hamas had continued to attract support among Palestinians with its pledge it would control the Palestinian Territories by 2027.
For Meir Dagan on that Tuesday morning the question was: How much closer would Hamas come to achieving its eventual aim through the coming Palestinian elections? Any success would be due largely to the failure of Yasser Arafat to leave Fatah a legacy of a properly functioning government after it had been given a monopoly on power by the Oslo peace accords of 1993. Thirteen years later, Fatah had still not been reinvigorated by promoting new
young blood from within its ranks. Its leadership consisted of old men who clung to the past. The truth was that most Palestinians were worse off in 2006 than they were before the Oslo agreement. They lived inside a ring of Israeli military steel, and their economy, especially in the southern enclave of Gaza, was gradually being strangled by punitive restrictions on their movement. Would they awake in a few days’ time to a green dawn—a mass of verdant Hamas flags heralding a victory?
The indications from Mossad’s informers in Gaza and the West Bank, and its own analysts, were that Hamas would make a respectable showing at the polls—but that Fatah would be returned to office. This was echoed by the surveillance reports on Khaled Meshal in Damascus; his telephone calls to Hamas leaders in Gaza and the West Bank indicated their success in running hospitals, schools, and support agencies would, in the end, not be enough. What Dagan could not decide was whether Meshal, knowing he was being monitored, was indulging in skilled disinformation. Mossad’s analysts thought not: that Meshal also saw the coming election as only the first step on the political ladder, that Hamas would not expect to have real political power for many years to come.
It later emerged the two DST officers had echoed this view to Dagan. On that note, the Mossad chief took his senior aides to see a film.
Meir Dagan had been a young conscript in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) when in the early hours of September 5, 1972, in the city of Munich, Germany, where the Olympic Games were being staged, eight Black September terrorists used a passkey to enter an apartment block where a number of Israeli athletes slept. Twenty-five minutes later two of the sportsmen were dead, murdered in cold blood. Nine others had been captured. They would also die in the days to come. The atrocity on that warm autumn night shocked the world. In Israel, even before the tears had dried, cold anger called for vengeance even as the terrorists demanded the release of 236 political prisoners. For twenty-four hours there was a tense standoff between the hostage takers and the German police. In mounting disbelief, Israelis, including Dagan, sat glued to their television sets as rescue operations were bungled. An attempt to storm the apartment block was aborted when the Munich police realized the terrorists were watching their preparations live on television. Two more attempts failed after the Black September group demanded a jet to fly them and their hostages out of Germany. The Germans swiftly agreed to provide two helicopters to fly them to Munich airport. Waiting near the getaway aircraft was an armed police team dressed as Lufthansa staff. But only moments before the helicopters landed, the team was told to abort the mission as it was too dangerous. Posted around the area were five German army snipers to deal with eight heavily armed terrorists. When the helicopters landed a firefight ensued as the snipers tried to hit their targets. The terrorists detonated a grenade in one helicopter and raked the inside of the other with gunfire. The snipers continued to shoot. In minutes all nine surviving hostages from the initial attack on the apartment were dead, along with five of the Black September group. Three were captured. But six weeks later, on October 29, 1972, a Frankfurt-bound Lufthansa jet was hijacked. The terrorists demanded the release of the captured trio. This was swiftly agreed to by the German government. The terrorists, smiling broadly, were flown to a Black September base in the Middle East and disappeared.
There was not a man, woman, or child in Israel who could not recount what followed. Mossad was given the task of hunting down not only the Munich killers, but all those who had planned the massacre. Every Mossad director general who had come into office had made it his business in the first days of his tenure to study the files of how Mossad had carried out its mission, one that Golda Meir, then the prime minister, had called the Wrath of God. Her successors, like Benyamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon, had never tired of reading how Mossad’s kidon had sown the seeds of fear in every terrorist heart. In Barak’s later words (to the author): “The intention was to strike terror, to break the will of those who remained alive until there were none of them left.”
For two years Mossad had carried out a carefully planned, clinically executed series of assassinations. The first was shot dead in the lobby of his Rome apartment eleven times—a bullet for each Israeli athlete he helped to murder. Another died when he answered a phone call in his Paris apartment; the bomb in the receiver blew off his head. The next to die was expertly pushed under a London bus at rush hour. In Nicosia, Cyprus, a bomb exploded in a bedside lamp. Hours before they died, each man’s family received flowers and a condolence card bearing the same words: “A reminder we do not forget or forgive.” After each kidon execution, a notice about the dead terrorist was published in Arab language newspapers across the Middle East. The flowers, cards, and notices had all been sent by LAP, Mossad’s department of psychological warfare. While the kidon carried out the executions, it had required a team backup of some eight units. One group was responsible for tracking down each Black September killer. Technicians from yaholomin, Mossad’s vaunted communications unit, set up eavesdropping equipment to monitor each terrorist as he was located. Another team organized dead-letter boxes in a dozen European capitals to receive messages from informers. Safe houses were rented for secret meetings in London, Paris, and Madrid.
Now, thirty-four years later, Steven Spielberg, arguably one of the world’s most successful moviemakers, has transposed the massacre into a $65 million film. When Dagan had heard of Spielberg’s intentions, he had been surprised to learn that Spielberg had made no approach to Mossad for, if not exactly seeking cooperation, at least asking for guidance on the accuracy of the screenplay. It was based on Vengeance by George Jonas, which had been published in 1984 to be quickly dismissed by Mossad as “mostly pure fantasy.”
In the book Jonas claimed to “explore at first hand the feelings and revulsion and doubt that gradually came to haunt each member of the Mossad hit team and which, in the end, inexorably changed their view of the mission and themselves.” He concluded that his story—the genesis of the Spielberg movie—“will inspire and horrify. For its subject is an act of revenge that goes to the very heart of the ancient biblical questions of good and evil, or right and wrong, which ultimately remain the deepest concerns of the Jewish people and which continue to haunt ‘Avner’ and his comrades on their mission.”
But the book’s mysterious “Avner”—who was the movie’s leader of the hit team—had never worked for Mossad, let alone been selected to be a member of kidon. Even before Meir Dagan settled down for a private viewing of Munich, he knew that other members of Mossad had trashed the movie. David Kimche, the former deputy director, had castigated it “as a tragedy that a person of the stature of Steven Spielberg, who has made such fantastic films, should now have based ‘Munich’ on a book that is a falsehood.” Avi Dichter, a former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence service, had dismissed the film as “a children’s adventure story.” From all over the world other retired members of Mossad had joined in the criticism.
In the film the kidon are portrayed as increasingly filled with doubts about the morality of the mission. Conversely the terrorists are given a platform to rationalize their murders, just as the apologists for suicide bombers today defend their atrocities. All this was done with the consummate skill of a great filmmaker. What angered the real-life members of the hit team, together with current members of kidon, was that like the book, the movie did not explain Israel’s well-established justification for hunting down and executing terrorists who cannot be brought to trial by the usual means of arrest. In the movie the hit team is depicted as being isolated in the field for months. Two of its members are a forger and a bombmaker.
Rafi Eitan, the former Mossad operations chief who had played an important role in tracking down the Black September group, told the author: “It would have been unthinkable to expect a forger to produce documents under high-stress operational conditions. All the paperwork for the real operation was produced by Mossad’s forgery department. There was no bomb maker as such on the
team. The explosives were created in Tel Aviv and brought to the team in the field. The movie team did not include a woman. Yet female kidon have always been part of a hit squad. Having them there helps to get closer to a target. But where the film went totally wrong was the hit team members questioning the morality of their actions. It never happened. It could never happen. The real hit team chosen for the mission were hand-picked for their mental stability. Like all kidon, they had undergone intense evaluation by Mossad psychologists. At the mission’s conclusion, they were debriefed by the psychologists. The team showed not the slightest sign of personality disorders. For them it had been a mission that was legally supported by the State of Israel.”
But Dagan wanted to judge for himself. He brought with him to the private viewing men who had been directly involved in the operational planning and execution of the Black September killers. His verdict at the end of the 145-minute movie was succinct: “Entertainment—maybe. Accurate—absolutely not.”
It was a review Dagan doubted would ever appear in any Spielberg filmography.
On Thursday, January 26, 2006, a day that came to be known in Israel as Black Thursday, Meir Dagan watched in mounting disbelief the images on the television screen in a corner of his office. The pictures switched from Gaza City to the West Bank, to Nablus and Bethlehem, from Ramallah to East Jerusalem, from one Arab township to another, from villages that were mere dots on the map on Dagan’s wall. Each image offered the same stunning sight of the green flag of Hamas raised in triumph. It fluttered from the minarets of mosques and the rooftops of buildings and moved through the streets in a great surge of green, held aloft by the chanting crowds. Hamas had won a sweeping, historic victory, one that had mocked all the pollsters, the foreign observers, and, most important for Dagan, the analysts of Mossad. How had everyone not foreseen what had happened? How had anyone not understood that Hamas had shown itself on poll day to be a disciplined organization able to turn out the faithful in huge numbers to vote? Why had no one discovered the preparation that had gone into creating the enormous green banners now being hung on public buildings? How had Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, its military wing, marching across the television screen, firing their guns in the air, their usual masks discarded, been so well rehearsed without attracting suspicion? These were questions being asked of Dagan by Israel’s Cabinet ministers. He had no ready answers. Not a man to rush to judgment, he continued to sit and watch, as did all Israel.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 69
