The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism

by Ami Pedahzur

  At 5:30 a.m., the terrorists sent medic Narkiss Mordechai outside the school to announce their demands to the security forces. Twenty of their comrades imprisoned in Israel were to be released and immediately flown to Damascus. The terrorists promised that when the freed prisoners arrived at the Syrian capital, a codeword would be imparted to the French and Romanian ambassadors in Israel. After the ambassadors passed the codeword on to the terrorists, half the hostages would be released. According to the plan, at this stage the abductors and the remaining hostages would be transported to a civilian airport. The second stage of the bargain would then take place in which the hostage-takers would be flown to Damascus and the rest of the hostages would be freed. The plan also included an ultimatum: If the Israeli government did not meet their demands by 6:00 p.m., five explosive devices placed in different corners of the building would be detonated, collapsing the building with all its occupants inside.

  Prime Minister Golda Meir had already received initial reports of the incident at 4:45 a.m. Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, Chief of Staff Motta Gur, and Major General Amiram Levine were all flown to Ma’alot in a military helicopter and landed in the northern town just before 7:00 a.m. Dayan, who took onsite command of the situation, opened two parallel courses of operation. First, he summoned the head of the GSS Interrogations Branch, Victor Cohen, who eighteen months earlier had led negotiations with the Black September terrorist group in Munich, to the site to try and get the terrorists to talk. Cohen was able to make contact with them and engaged in conversation with them by megaphone.

  The second course was the devising of a takeover assault. Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters lifted in dozens of Sayeret Matkal soldiers to the location. The terrorists, hearing the noise and seeing the soldiers deployed around the school, began to doubt Cohen’s sincerity. Their reaction was not long in coming. Starting at 9:00 a.m., once every half-hour, the cell’s commander, Ziad Rahim, stood five hostages in front of a classroom window and fired shots in the air to demonstrate his resolve. As the nervousness of the abductors increased, they began to shoot their guns and throw hand grenades out the windows. One of the shots killed Silvan Zerah, a soldier and resident of Ma’alot, who was observing the whole affair from a distance.

  In the late morning hours, Moshe Dayan, whose nephew Uzi served in Sayeret Matkal, flew to Jerusalem for a brief meeting with the prime minister. He used the precedent set by the successful assault on a hijacked Sabena airliner to try to persuade Prime Minister Golda Meir to support a military solution.The prime minister was not convinced and asked that the negotiation option be exhausted before any military steps were taken. Defense Minister Dayan, however, ordered Sayeret Matkal officers to continue to work on devising an assault plan in case the government gave the green light for a takeover operation. During the course of its emergency meeting, the government carefully examined both options from all sides. On one hand, the ministers tried to evaluate the future consequences of giving in to terrorist demands, especially in light of Israel’s formal policy not to negotiate with terrorists. On the other, they weighed the chances for the success of a rescue operation. During the 2:00 p.m. newscast, the citizens of Israel learned that the die had been cast. Kol Yisrael (“The Voice of Israel”) announced that the government had decided to meet the demands of the hostage takers. The terrorists were exultant when they were informed of the dramatic development and announced that they had defused the bombs in a gesture of good faith.

  While the ministers were deliberating, Dayan and Gur continued to proceed with the preparations for a combat operation. Dayan was in constant contact with Sayeret Matkal officers who were compiling information on the school building and the location of the hostages. Several plans were developed that took into account this information. The officers, however, were less convinced than the defense minister regarding the chances of success. They claimed to have warned Dayan that the information they had on the number and location of the explosive devices was incomplete. In addition, the unit’s snipers surrounding the building said it was difficult to identify the terrorists clearly and keep them in the sights of their relatively antiquated rifles.

  The Sayeret Matkal force was divided into three teams of eleven or twelve soldiers, including officers of the unit who had voluntarily reached the site. The first team, commanded by Zvi Livne, was to breach the building, kill the terrorist leader, climb the staircase leading to the hall on the floor where the hostages were being held, and secure it. The second team, led by Amiram Levine, was to penetrate immediately afterward, slip by the soldiers securing the hall, and reach the room where the children were being held. The third team planned to climb the outside wall of the building and shoot the terrorists through one of the classroom windows.

  At 4:15 p.m., the efforts by the Romanian and French ambassadors to broker a compromise ended in failure. The immense pressure of the security establishment, the need to make a decision under tight time constraints, and the general environment of uncertainty had led the government to approve the rescue plan. It authorized the defense minister and chief of staff to decide when to begin.

  One hour after the government gave its approval for military action, Motta Gur signaled the go-ahead to the forces. At 5:25 p.m., Sayeret Matkal commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Giora Zorea ordered one of the snipers to shoot the terrorist leader, who had revealed himself for a moment. The bullet hit Rahim’s shoulder and slightly injured him. At that exact moment Livne’s team broke into the schoolyard. As his soldiers ran to the staircase, they encountered the wounded Rahim. Livne threw a phosphorus grenade at him, but before it exploded the terrorist had time to fire at the soldiers, wounding three of them, and then run back to the classroom where the students were being held. Livne and Baruch Fein, another soldier who escaped injury, kept to the plan and chased after him. But more blunders followed. Amiram Levine’s team, which had entered the building when the shooting began, missed the stairway to the floor where the hostages were being held, and instead climbed to the next one up. It took a few seconds for Levine to understand his mistake and lead his soldiers back down.

  The soldiers in Muki Betser’s team, who were supposed to shoot at the terrorists through the window, were surprised to hear shots coming from the two other teams, and the confusion slowed them down. Mickey Arditi, the soldier highest on the ladder, jumped down before he reached the window. He later explained that errant bullets from Sayeret Matkal snipers were hitting the wall and prevented him from continuing. Betser ordered another soldier to climb up, but before he could carry out the order, heavy gunfire came from inside the classroom window. The team was forced to find cover behind the wall of the building, thus ending its role.

  In the meantime, the other two assault teams were chasing Rahim. He reached the tiny classroom, immediately opened automatic fire on the children, and threw in a grenade. The hostages sitting in the front of the room collapsed and hit the floor, lying in their own blood. Eighteen of them died on the spot, and five more were wounded. The remaining hostages ran to the window and jumped into the yard. By the time the soldiers reached the classroom the sound of shots had ceased. Rahim’s weapon had jammed, and he was left standing in the middle of the room. The soldiers shot both him and the second terrorist. The third was killed as soon as the hostages identified him.

  On May 20, 1974, a commission of inquiry was appointed to investigate the events at Ma’alot, with Major General Amos Horev appointed as its head. Commission members examined the incident from several perspectives and issued a report listing a long series of mistakes that were the joint responsibility of the political and security echelons. For our purposes, especially important was the conclusion that the Sayeret Matkal soldiers were not sufficiently trained in hostage rescue.1

  In order to prevent similar mishaps, commission members called for the establishment of a distinctive police antiterrorist response unit specializing in siege and hostage rescue missions. The government adopted the recommendation that could have led Israe
l to shift toward the criminal justice model, and in February 1975 it established the Yamam as a company within the Border Police. With the appointment of Assaf Hefetz as commander of the unit in 1978, it made a quantum leap in capability and became an independent takeover unit.

  Unlike soldiers of Sayeret Matkal, who are conscripts of the regular (mandatory service) army and complete their duty after serving for three and a half years, police officers of the Yamam may remain in the ranks for many years. A significant number of them are recruited in their early twenties after serving in a military combat unit, and they commonly retire from the police only after a ten-year stint and sometimes even longer. The typical training course of a Yamam fighter lasts for twelve months. In the first eight months, all cadets go through basic training in counterterrorism warfare, which includes a familiarity with specialized firearms, land navigation, and structure- and vehicle-takeover exercises. In the next four months, trainees are divided into five fields of specialization: sniping, dynamic entry and use of explosives, negotiation, dog handling, and rappelling. The officers who undertake rope-descent techniques learn how to enter buildings through the windows while hanging from ropes, thus earning themselves the epithet “terror monkeys.”2

  THE SAVOY HOTEL

  A little less than a year after the tragedy at Ma’alot, and before the security apparatus implemented the recommendations of the Horev Commission, the PLO mounted another hostage-taking incident, this time in the heart of Tel Aviv. On May 5, 1975, at 11:15 pm, two Zodiac speedboats landed on the Tel Aviv beach. The eight terrorists on board quickly unloaded their weapons and ammunition and sped toward the city. Police patrolling the area caught sight of them and opened fire, but they were not able to halt the terrorists’ progress. The eight reached a wedding hall on Yona Hanavi Street and opened fire inside. From there they continued to a nearby movie theater but failed to breach the doors. Their final target was the Savoy Hotel. The terrorists penetrated the hotel while shooting in all directions, and within a short time had taken control of the building and seized eight hostages. At first they rounded up the terrified hostages in the attic. A short while later, they changed their minds and brought them back down to the third floor of the building. By midnight police and army forces surrounded the building. An IDF officer, Ruby Peled, began to negotiate with the terrorists assisted by Kochava Levi, a hostage fluent in Arabic. Similar to the Ma’alot incident, the terrorists demanded the release of ten prisoners who would be flown from Israel to Damascus, this time together with the ambassadors of Greece and France. Again, as in the past, the terrorists threatened to execute the hostages if their demands were not met by a certain hour—in this case, 7:00 a.m. During the night the terrorists used explosives and trip wire to booby-trap the floor of the room where the hostages were being held, ensuring that any attempt to rescue them would end tragically.3

  Outside the hotel, the chief officer of the IDF Central Command, Yonah Efrat, supervised the planning for the takeover. Prime Minister Rabin followed the events from the Ministry of Defense high command headquarters in Tel Aviv. The duty officer in Sayeret Matkal’s operations room received the order to dispatch the on-call unit to the Savoy site, but the drivers transporting the teams got into two minor accidents on the way, delaying their arrival. When they finally reached the hotel vicinity, they were forced to go from officer to officer before they could discover who was in charge of the operation. They received their first briefing only a short while before their deployment in preparation for the assault. At that stage, there was still no clear intelligence giving an idea how many terrorists there were and where they were located. Because the soldiers were not carrying communication devices, from the time they took their positions until the operation began it was impossible to communicate updated information to them.4

  At 5:15 a.m., the signal was given. Four teams breached the building at different points. The terrorists expected the assault and activated the explosive devices they had placed during the night, collapsing the stairway leading to the upper floors of the hotel and thus neutralizing the force that had stormed the main entrance to the building. The other teams had more luck. Within twelve minutes after the signal was given they were able to gain control of the building—or so they thought. During their search they found that one of the wounded terrorists was still armed. This man shot and killed Colonel Uzi Ya’iri, who had reached the area on his own initiative. Faulty tactical intelligence led the unit’s soldiers to believe that there were seven terrorists, so after seven bodies had been identified they announced that the area was secure. Musa Ibn Jouma Abu Hassan, however, was left uninjured. During the night he had prepared a hiding place on the terrace of a third-floor room and on hearing the first shots took cover there. In the hours after the operation, police took part in a room-to-room search of the hotel. The commander of the Yarkon police region, Moshe Tiomkin, was ordered to search the terrace where Hassan was hiding and was surprised when the terrorist appeared from behind a wooden panel and opened fire. However, the shots were not accurate, and Hassan was caught. In this fashion, another hostage-taking incident ended in only partial success.5

  Many soldiers of Sayeret Matkal and other elite units have often risked their lives to rescue hostages. The problem is that the counterterrorist training received by the soldiers in these units is minimal, specifically, three weeks to a month at the IDF School for Counterterrorism Training, whereas hostage rescue missions demand an extremely high level of expertise. In any siege situation the terrorists have inherent advantages. They are armed, the hostages are under their complete control, and they can open fire whenever they suspect they are losing control of the situation. In contrast, rescue forces must act quickly and effectively in order to take optimum advantage of the element of surprise. The assault teams are usually not familiar with the environs where they have to rescue the hostages. They may not know how many terrorists they will have to contend with, where they are located, how they are armed, and how determined they are to kill the hostages in the event of a rescue operation.6 A high level of professional training can partly compensate for the inherently inferior position of the takeover forces, but policymakers have refused to internalize this fact thus preventing the Yamam from using their capabilities to the full.

  ENTEBBE

  Even in the rescue mission of the hostages at Entebbe, Israel’s most illustrious operation in its struggle against terrorism, there was only a very fine line separating triumph from failure. On Saturday, July 3, 1976, the tension inside the air terminal at the Entebbe airport in Uganda had reached new heights. One week after hijacking Air France Flight 139 en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, the abductors nervously awaited the response of the governments of Israel, Kenya, Germany, Switzerland, and France. The hijackers had demanded the release of fifty-three terrorists from the prisons where they were being held, and their ultimatum was to expire the next day. If their demands were not met, they threatened to execute the 104 hostages. The terminal was shrouded in a state of gloom. The hostages who had even considered the idea of being rescued by Israeli forces understood that the chances were very slim. One of them, a former navigator in the Israel Air Force, calculated that approximately 1,870 miles separated Israel from Entebbe. This distance would in all probability make an aerial operation impossible simply because the planes would not be able to carry enough fuel in their tanks.

  Dr. Yitzhak Hirsch, as well, felt completely helpless. All he could do was wait until dawn broke and hope that he would not be among the first to be executed. Exactly one week earlier, he had been serving in the reserves as a regimental doctor somewhere in the northern part of Israel. His thoughts at the time were only about the dream vacation that he and his wife, Lily, would soon spend in Sweden and Norway. According to the original plans, both of them were supposed to fly to Paris, rent a car at the airport, and then travel north to Scandinavia. At an early morning hour on Sunday, June 27, 1976, the Hirsch couple arrived at the Ben-Gurion Airport in Lod. After checking the
ir luggage at the Air France counter, they were informed that the plane would make a brief stopover at Athens, but this short delay certainly did not dampen their high spirits.7

  At 8:57 in the morning, Flight 139 took off as scheduled. After less than three hours, it landed at Athens. During the short stopover, several passengers got off and others took their place. Among the new travelers was twenty-seven-year-old Wilfried Böse, a tall, blue-eyed, light-haired German, accompanied by twenty-five-year-old Brigitte Kuhlmann, also German. Kuhlmann was of medium height, bespectacled, her hair cut in bangs.

  Before boarding the plane, the young Germans, both members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), underwent a security check. The fact that they had just arrived on a flight from Bahrain without leaving the terminal enabled them to take the quick-check lane. All they had to do was pass their hand luggage through an X-ray machine. At this point, they had a stroke of luck: The Greek security man who managed the machine was concentrating on a flower he held in his hand and not on the monitor. If he had just been a little more alert, the events of that same day might have taken a completely different turn.