Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  One certainty was clear. The peace talks would remain frozen. The reason was in the one statistic that ticker taped across the bottom of the television screens. Hamas had won 132 seats, leaving Fatah to cling to 43, and some of those by the slimmest of majorities, ending more than forty years of its domination of Palestinian life. Dagan would not quarrel with an Israeli radio commentator, who likened the victory to “an earthquake or tsunami.” It had changed for the foreseeable future Israel’s own relationship with the Palestinians and the Arab world beyond its borders. For better or worse? He did not know. He doubted if anyone in Israel could answer the question.

  By that Thursday afternoon, Dagan was receiving the first calls from foreign intelligence service chiefs. They wanted to know how Hamas, a terrorist organization that had continuously undercut every step toward peace, a desire sought by moderate Palestinians, had managed to persuade such a majority of them to overwhelmingly vote for Hamas. And having done so, would they ensure that Hamas would now cease to attack Israel and try to create a real Palestinian state that would come to live side by side at peace with its Jewish neighbors?

  Dagan gave them all the same response. Hamas would focus initially on issues like education, health, and social affairs: these had been the cornerstone of its election success. But for that it would need funding, including $52 million the Palestinian Authority received from Israel. While Hamas had shown by entering the democratic process that it was already on the road from being an outlawed terrorist organization to a mainstream political force, to give any lasting meaning to its new status it must renounce the mainstay of its previous existence: the destruction of Israel. Until it did so, there could be no meaningful dialogue with Hamas. Dagan had reminded his callers that traditionally it had been Israel’s hard-liners rather than the moderates who had made concessions. Menachem Begin, a terrorist turned peacemaker, had surrendered the Sinai in return for a peace treaty with Egypt. Another Israeli warrior, Yitzak Rabin, had given his own life to try and broker peace with other Arab neighbors; in the end he had been assassinated by an Israeli extremist. More recently Ariel Sharon, once the hero of the Israeli Right, had earned their fury by ending the right of Israeli settlers to occupy Gaza.

  Given Hamas’s links to Iran and Syria, Israel would have to consider very carefully how far it could trust Hamas before relaxing its vigilance. And Hamas had swept to power with its pledge to uproot corruption. Yet some of the worst abuses were in the Palestinian security forces. Created by Yasser Arafat, it consisted of a dozen separate agencies that totaled sixty thousand members, a large number to protect a total Palestinian population of less than 4 million in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel had accused the force of failing to prevent attacks on Jewish targets; Hamas had continued to proclaim during the election that the security forces were used by Israel to kill Hamas militants. The truth lay somewhere in the middle. Both Mossad and Shin Bet had its informers inside the security forces. They had been used to pinpoint targets for the Israeli air force to kill. Equally, Hamas supporters in the security forces had helped suicide bombers to be smuggled out of Gaza and the West Bank to strike inside Israel. For the majority of Palestinians, the security forces had done little to halt lawlessness in the territories. Meir Dagan believed the Hamas promise to reform the services and bring to trial its leaders, who had become multimillionaires by siphoning off millions of dollars, intended to improve security, into their numbered bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. He was prepared to use Mossad’s resources to track down those accounts. But not yet. He wanted to see what else Hamas would do.

  Mossad’s analysts, who had miscalculated so badly the Hamas victory, were understandably cautious about predicting what the future would hold. Ever since the Oslo Accords, the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships had maintained a dialogue at some level, ranging from intense peace negotiations in 2000 to the limited contacts of the past three years due to the ongoing violence. In none of those contacts had Hamas been involved—except to send its suicide bombers from Gaza and rockets from the West Bank into Israel.

  It was not only Hamas’s electoral triumph that the analysts studied; it had come at a time when Israel itself was undergoing a political upheaval. Kadima, the centrist party that Ariel Sharon had created, continued to attract members. Was this in part a sympathy vote for its founder, or was it evidence that Israelis were growing tired of the hard-line Likud Party and the indecisive Labor party? Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet and now a Labor parliamentary candidate for the coming elections in March, had said there could be no further “unilateral withdrawal from the Palestinian territories.” But the acting Labor prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had insisted that if Labor won the next election, in March 2006, he would “relinquish parts of the West Bank and maintain a Jewish majority elsewhere, but I would prefer to do this in agreement with the Palestinians.”

  Did this mean he was willing to negotiate with Hamas? He refused to say “at this stage.” But Dagan wondered if this was a piece of political doublespeak. (Kadima brokered a deal with Rafi Eitan and his Pensioners Party with its seven seats. They would join Kadima’s coalition government to ensure Olmert was elected prime minister. Shortly afterward there were attacks on Israel by a suicide bomber followed by rockets. Hamas denied any complicity in the attacks. Dagan told his Monday morning conference, “Life as usual.”)

  The one certainty was that the Hamas victory had brought substantial gains by Islamic radicals in Egypt and Lebanon. In his own analysis, Meir Dagan had shown a political clarity that always surprised his people. He had told his senior staff at their Monday morning conference following the election: “There is a huge transition going on across the entire Middle East. It will be many months before we can see beyond the present unpredictability. That is the nature of big historic change. It’s simply the way it is. We must be ready to accommodate it—whatever it brings. But the truth is that neither Israel, the United States, Britain, and the countries of Europe can ignore the popular will of the Palestinian voters. Their turnout was an impressive 78 percent. No other democratic country can claim to have recently achieved such a turnout. We should see it as a sign that democracy may well have taken root. We should take this into account when making decisions. That does not mean rushing to judgment. It means being realistic.”

  On May 14, 2006, Britain’s Intelligence Security Committee issued its report on the London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller was cited as saying: “Even with the wisdom of hindsight I doubt whether MI5 could have done much better than it did, given the resources available to us at the time and the other demands placed on us. Neither can we guarantee to stop future attacks.”

  While Meir Dagan admired her honesty, he also saw it as the inevitable result of MI5’s failure to recognize the threat posed by Islamic terrorism from the end of the 1990s. It had taken what Dagan termed “the ultimate wake-up call of 9/11 to galvanize American intelligence.” He found it depressing to read Dame Eliza’s judgment that MI5 was still taking the attitude that attacks by Islamic extremists were unavoidable. “It may be realistic, but it also sounds complacent. Intelligence should not be touched by complacency,” he told his aides. They were sentiments that would guide Mossad into the future.

  CHAPTER 27

  A SECRET CHANNEL AND HEZBOLLAH ROCKETS

  On a cool morning in February 2006, eight middle-aged men were allowed to bypass the stringent security checks at Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv. Four were Israelis, casually dressed. The Arabs wore dark suits and neatly knotted neckties. Little known outside their communities, the group had been given a pivotal role on the seesaw of Middle East politics. The Arabs were senior members of Fatah and were led by Jibril Rajoud, the party’s hard line national security adviser. The Israeli quartet was headed by Uri Saguy, a trim, quiet-spoken man who had once been head of Israeli army intelligence.

  Only Meir Dagan and Ehud Olmert, soon to be prime minister of Israel, and the Pale
stinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, knew the purpose of the trip was to establish a “back door channel” between Israel and Fatah that would effectively sidetrack Hamas’s overwhelming political dominance over the Palestinian parliament.

  And, not for the first time, President George W. Bush had personally approved this secret intervention in the affairs of an elected government.

  Each man carried a bulging briefcase which contained the details of their secret mission. Success would have a dramatic effect on Israel’s relationship with Hamas and the new generation of Middle East political leaders. The men about to board the plane for their long flight to Houston, Texas, knew that any of those leaders would block what they hoped to achieve.

  One leader was Bashar al-Assad, at thirty-four-years-old, the president of Syria for the past six years. He came to office after his elder brother, Basil al-Assad, had been groomed by their father, Hafez al-Assad, the country’s long-serving tyrant, to take over. When Hafez died in June 2002, it should have been Basil who became president leaving Bashar to pursue his career as a London-trained eye surgeon where he had received his degree and met his wife. But one foggy night in January 1994, Basil crashed his Mercedes outside Damascus with fatal consequences and Bashar found himself lined up by his father to ensure the Assad dynasty continued.

  Mossad analysts decided he could become one of the “potentially more open and progressive Arab leaders who might rule with a broader vision of the world.” That hope steadily faded. On foreign policy issues above all, in his determination to cast Syria as the Arab champion of resistance to American and Israeli dominance, Bashar al-Assad had, in Meir Dagan’s words, “clearly shown he has his father’s political DNA.” Bashar al-Assad had, it was broadly assumed, approved the Syrian-inspired assassination of the former Lebanese leader, Rafiq Hariri. The murder led to violence in Beirut and had forced Bashar to pull Syria’s troops out of Lebanon. In a defiant speech in Damascus, the president made it clear the withdrawal was not permanent. His other ambition was to reoccupy the Golan Heights.

  The men on the plane suspected Iran’s president Ahmadinejad would have no hesitation in dispatching one of his death squads to murder the Fatah delegation as further proof he would do anything to ensure he remained on track for achieving his aim to “wipe Israel from the face of the earth.” The Fatah quartet had taken great care to ensure that Hamas’s volatile leader in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahhar, was unaware of what was afoot. The day before, each man had slipped quietly out of Gaza and through Ezez, the main Israeli checkpoint crossing from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Behind them they left men who smoked the shisha pipe, the water pipe smoked throughout the Middle East, and listened to the recordings of Umm Kulthoum, the region’s iconic female Arab vocalist, and dreamed of the destruction of the Jewish state. Encouraged by the Hamas election victory, it had become a living, vibrant hope.

  The Fatah group had been brought to Ben Gurion airport in a taxi provided by the Israeli government, who were aware there was also one other powerful group who would violently oppose what they hoped to achieve with that “back door channel.” It was Hezbollah. The organization represented the divide between two great branches of Islam that stretches back to the early history of the religion. While the Sunnis were the major branch throughout most of the Islamic world, the Shias had a larger number of followers in Iraq and south Lebanon and were dominant in Iran.

  The division extended to the terror organizations. Osama bin Laden is a Sunni, al-Qaeda is predominantly Sunni and continues to be financed by Saudi Arabia, which is a Sunni society. Hezbollah is a Shia organization, which relies heavily on organizational support from Iran, who continues to supply it weapons. In the wake of Hamas’s political victory, Iran had further fostered its common cause against Israel with Hezbollah. While Jibril Rajoud was secretly meeting with Uri Saguy in safe houses provided by Mossad, Mahmoud Zahhar met with Hezbollah’s leader in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, the chief power-broker of the 1.4 million Shia community in the country. Intelligent, charismatic, and a born street orator, Nasrallah’s entire career had been shaped by Israel’s repeated interventions in Lebanon from the civil war in the mid-1970s to when the Israeli Defense Force had unilaterally withdrawn from southern Lebanon after years of failing to subdue Hezbollah.

  Just as his brother’s death had led to Bashar al-Assad becoming Syria’s president, it was an assassination that had paved the way for Nasrallah’s rise to absolute power. In 1992 an Israeli gunship killed Nasrallah’s mentor, his predecessor Abbas Moussawi. Since then Nasrallah has survived similar attempts by Mossad to kill him with explosives planted in both his home and his office in Beirut. Each failure to assassinate him has enhanced his status across the Arab world. Feted in Damascus and Tehran by its leaders, his photograph was displayed in the teeming streets as an example “of being able to take the blows dished out by Israel and remain standing” (he told the author).

  Born in August 1960, the eldest of nine children, Nasrallah aspired to be a cleric from an early age. In his teens he was sent to the great Shia theological center in Najaf in Iraq. During his two-year study he met Moussawi and became an early disciple. He returned to Lebanon during the Israeli invasion of the country in 1982 and became a commander in Hezbollah. He showed an aptitude for military tactics, which went with his by now well-honed political skills. When Israel withdrew in May 2002, Nasrallah was by then firmly established as Hezbollah’s leader and was hailed in the Muslim world as the Arab warlord who had triumphed over Israel. In 2005, he orchestrated Hezbollah gaining twenty-nine seats in the Lebanese parliament following the departure of Syrian troops twenty-nine years after they had first arrived in the country.

  Tehran launched a propaganda campaign to make him a living legend. Feature films, television “documentaries,” and books were devoted with one simple message: while secular ideologies, from pan-Arabism to Arab socialism, had failed to liberate an inch of Arab territory, Islamism—in its Iranian Khomeinist version—working through Hezbollah, had achieved “total victory” over Israel in Lebanon.

  Now, on that February day in 2006, Hezbollah, working with Hamas, was preparing to launch an even greater assault on the Jewish state. For the eight men ensconced in their first class seats on the way to Houston, the hope was that they could thwart that attack.

  The seating arrangement on the plane was a reminder of the deep divisions that divided their people and why they had agreed to make their long flight to Houston. The four Israelis sat on one side of the cabin, the Fatah group on the other. During meals and visits to the bathroom, they exchanged little more than polite conversation. But for the most part, they either dozed or studied the documents in their briefcases.

  During the past weeks there had been discreet contacts with Edward P. Djerejian, the sixty-five year-old former United States ambassador to Israel and Syria. He had been approved by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to act as moderator for the discussions that would take place at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston. It is widely regarded as one of the most secure think tanks within the United States. The choice of Djerejian was also an astute one. An experienced Arabist and also trusted by Israel, he was calm and his authority was accompanied by a sense of humor. He had told Dr. Rice, to whom he would report progress, that “it’s going to be like chairing the United Nations.” One of Djerejian’s first tasks would be to tell the two teams that he would be totally impartial. It was a necessary reminder: for the past several decades the centerpiece of America’s Middle East policy had revolved around its relationship with Israel. While there had been what former CIA director, George Tenet, had called “blips on the radar,” the combination of Washington’s unwavering support for Israel, and its own efforts to spread democracy through-out the region, had inflamed Islamic opinion. In Arab capitals the bond between the two countries was seen as based on shared strategic interests and the demands promoted by the powerful Jewish lobby within the United States. Even though other special-interest groups h
ad some effect on aspects of U.S. foreign policy, none had managed to convince Americans, as the lobby had, that America’s interests and those of Israel were essentially identical.

  That fusing began after the October War in 1973 when Israel had been seriously threatened by superior Arab forces. To ensure that could never happen again, Washington had provided the Jewish state with a level of support far greater than it had given to any other nation. Since then, Israel had received over $3 billion in direct assistance—worth about $500 a year for every Israeli man, woman, and child. The largesse was particularly striking as Israel was, by the new millennium, a wealthy industrial country with a per capita income equal to that of Spain or South Korea. Other countries in receipt of U.S. foreign aid tend to receive the money in quarterly installments. Israel, on the other hand, gets its entire appropriation at the start of each fiscal year. This enables Israel to earn valuable interest on the stock markets of the world using money it will only later drawdown.