The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism
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The murder of Bashir Gemayel and the retaliatory massacre carried out by Phalange forces in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla were a resounding defeat for both Mossad and Sharon, whose role in Lebanon earned mention in the critical report issued by the Kahan Commission. While the committee recommended that Sharon not continue to serve as minister of defense, it also stated that Mossad had failed to provide the government with a decisive warning about the potential hazardous consequences of letting the Phalange enter the refugee camps.9 During the following two decades, Mossad leaders reduced the agency’s involvement in the Lebanese sphere and left it to the GSS and Aman.
THE HEZBOLLAH CHALLENGE
In the late 1970s, while Mossad was strengthening ties with the Maronites, Aman initiated contacts with Shiite leaders in southern Lebanon. These connections facilitated the formation of a network of informers that made Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts in this area easier. The honeymoon with the majority of the Shiites, however, was short-lived. A short time after the Israeli invasion, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, Ali-Akbar Mohtashamipour, received a direct order from Tehran to assist the Lebanese Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. His mission was to establish Shiite organizations that would spread Khomeini’s Islamic revolutionary line and compete with Amal, the Shiite organization that had refused to become an Iranian proxy. Iran had tried to send paramilitary forces to Lebanon as early as 1979, but President Assad refused to let them move through Syrian territory. The Israeli invasion led him to change his mind. Mohtashamipour established the Friendship Family, a union of Islamic movements that gratefully accepted Iranian sponsorship. At this point, the Syrian president allowed Iran to station about three thousand Revolutionary Guards in the Beqaa Valley under Syrian military control. These events did not escape Israeli intelligence, but they rang no warning bells among leaders of the intelligence community.10
The seeds sown by the Iranians sprouted and within a few years flourished into a strong organization—Hezbollah, or the Party of Allah. While Israel’s intelligence and combat forces were focusing on the struggle against the PLO, strengthening ties with the Christians and paying less attention to the Shiites, the Hezbollah militants and their operators in Tehran were recruiting support in Shiite neighborhoods and villages throughout Lebanon. They kept a very low profile in their military activities, refrained from taking responsibility for attacks they perpetrated and if any responsibility was in fact claimed, names of fictitious organizations were used. The new organization was highly compartmentalized. Young people identified as potential Hezbollah fighters underwent a long process of screening and security checks in order to close breaches through which Israeli intelligence could have penetrated. Even after their recruitment, fighters were not privy to any details of the organization’s facilities, the location of its headquarters, or the identity of its leaders. Israel found itself in a paradoxical situation. Contrary to expectations, the expulsion of the PLO forces to Tunis did not diminish the threat of terrorism to the settlements in northern Israel. In place of the PLO, Hezbollah had sprung up right under the noses of the intelligence community. Interagency feuding in the Lebanese arena, especially between Aman and the GSS, impaired Israel’s attempts to cope with the threat.11
THE ERA OF INTELLIGENCE WARS
One of the first portents of the future was a confrontation played out between IDF supply-line drivers and participants in a procession commemorating the Day of Ashura—the holiest day for Shiites—in the town of Nabatiya on October 16, 1983. One day after the incident, the Shiite leader Mahdi Shams al-Din issued a fatwa calling for a public uprising against Israel. Guerilla attacks against IDF soldiers intensified. At the time, it was still not clear that only one organization was behind the attacks. Hezbollah in its more familiar form appeared when Ibrahim al-Amin read an open letter addressed to the “oppressed” Lebanese public at a rally in Beirut on February 16, 1985. In this manifesto, he spelled out the movement’s place in the worldwide Islamic nation, following Khomeini’s brand of revolutionary ideology. He also pledged armed struggle against Israel.12
The invasion of Lebanon had thrown a spanner in the works with regard to the division of jurisdictional sectors among the Israeli intelligence agencies. In principle, the GSS jurisdiction was limited to the State of Israel and the occupied territories; Aman was responsible for Arab countries and the Middle East; and Mossad handled special operations and intelligence in the rest of the world. The problem with this division is that in order to enhance their reputation, prove their importance, and secure resources, intelligence organizations tend to compete with one another. Thus, when they identify a promising lead, they tend to overlook geographical boundaries. Furthermore, when an agency such as Mossad identifies a target operating on foreign soil and has been able to collect human intelligence (HUMINT) regarding its intentions, electronic monitoring is necessary. In many cases, the mission will be assigned to the relatively small signal intelligence (SIGINT) and visual intelligence (VISINT) units of Mossad instead of to Aman, whose specialization lies in monitoring signals and gathering visual intelligence. To make this even more complex, terrorist groups, as well as other targets of the intelligence community, do not necessarily adhere to a similar geographic distribution. Quite often, Palestinian groups, as well as other groups such as Hezbollah, may concurrently operate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or in Arab and other countries. Their various arms may spread to Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and they may also benefit from the collaboration of Palestinian and Arab diasporic communities, other subnational groups, or countries all over the world. The flexibility of these kinds of groups has led to a corresponding distension of Israeli intelligence organization jurisdictions and, in some cases, has led some agencies to step on the toes of other agencies.13
A short time after war broke out, Prime Minister Begin decided to have the GSS, by then experienced in gathering HUMINT in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, assist IDF forces in dealing with the challenges they faced in the unfamiliar and complicated arena of southern Lebanon. In the first stages of the war, Aman operatives accepted the presence of their GSS colleagues and were careful to cooperate with them. As the Israeli presence in Lebanon persisted, however, the relationship cooled. Aman officers who tried to strengthen their ties with the Shiites claimed that the GSS used especially aggressive methods of interrogation on Shiite detainees. On the other hand, GSS operatives complained that Aman officers were young and inexperienced and had no understanding of intelligence work. The two organizations warned of a lack of cooperation, maintaining that concomitant operations were initiated without notification and that agencies were even sabotaging each other’s efforts to collect intelligence.14
Moshe Arens, who replaced Ariel Sharon as defense minister, felt that the power struggle between the agencies was having a disastrous effect on the intelligence presented to the government. To solve this problem, he appointed Uri Lubrani, former Israeli ambassador in Iran, to coordinate government activities in Lebanon. His involvement did indeed improve the situation for a short while, but the disagreements never really ceased. In June 1985, when Israeli forces were redeployed in the security buffer zone in southern Lebanon, a new effort was made to find a solution to the internal hostilities. The IDF’s Lebanese Liaison Unit established a new intelligence body, Gathering and Prevention, that was to concentrate on guerilla forces that were attacking IDF soldiers, enabling the GSS to leave the problematic region. Collecting intelligence on the ever-strengthening Hezbollah, however, was too complicated a challenge for such a young unit, and the GSS was once again called in to give the IDF a hand. The two organizations worked from a common base in the Israeli border town of Metulla. Aman representatives, afraid that GSS handlers were regaining dominance, were not happy about cooperating with them. Confrontations between the organizations occurred on subjects ranging from which techniques to use when operating informants to inconsequential issues, like the allocation of parking spaces. Two
years later, Yossi Peled, head of the IDF Northern Command, dismantled the partnership. The quality of the intelligence it had collected was in reverse proportion to the amount of endless bickering that went on between the representatives of the two organizations. With the permission of Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin, Peled approached GSS head Yossef Harmelin and asked that his people take over responsibility for all intelligence gathering in the field. To this end, the GSS established a special unit called the Metulla District, which reported directly to the head of the agency.15
Not even the transfer of responsibility over southern Lebanon to the GSS could put an end to the territorial struggles between the two intelligence agencies. Hezbollah was extremely active beyond the “red line” of the security zone, in what was called the “gray zone,” an area outside of GSS control that was Aman’s responsibility. The decision to establish a network of informants within the gray zone aroused resentment in Aman. One of the main factors that finally led to a solution to the disagreement was the warm personal relationship between IDF Lebanese Liaison Unit officers and those of the GSS at the time. Personal relationships, however, can be transient. The appointment of Yitzhak Mordechai as head of the IDF Northern Command in 1991 was a turning point, and relations between representatives of the organizations cooled. Mordechai asked that GSS operations in Lebanon be subject to IDF authority. GSS representative Carmi Gillon opposed the initiative, and it was never approved.16
Territorial struggles and personal conflicts were not the only causes of tension between the two intelligence organizations. They also disagreed on how the information in their possession was to be analyzed and which recommendations would be presented to government leaders. In the early 1990s, with financial assistance from Iran, Hezbollah opened a network of social-welfare institutions that provided health and welfare services to the residents of southern Lebanon. To combat this, the GSS recommended that the civilian sphere not be relinquished to the organization and that an effort should be made to compete with Hezbollah in providing such services. One of its recommendations was to strengthen Amal, which at that time still saw itself as an alternative to Hezbollah. The plan was for Amal to support local village leaders who would take social measures similar to those of Hezbollah. Aman and the intelligence unit of the Northern Command rejected the idea out of hand. In their estimation, at that time Hezbollah did not have a real hold on the population, making the initiative unnecessary. Minister of Defense Moshe Arens accepted Aman’s position. Over the years, it has been proven that this assessment was far from correct. Hezbollah only grew stronger and mobilized more support. Was this just an incorrect assessment on behalf of Aman’s analysts, or did the interagency rivalry encourage them to submit a recommendation that would contradict the one offered by the GSS? I am not convinced that there is a clear-cut answer to the question. At any rate, this conflict of assessments intensified the competition between the two organizations; Aman operatives, who saw the GSS as an organization that should focus solely on thwarting terrorism, rejected its attempts to present assessments relating to the political and social situation in southern Lebanon.17
An examination of the relations among the Israeli intelligence agencies at the time shows that often the issues at the root of their disagreements have nothing to do with intelligence or operational matters at all, but are an expression of generic problems in public organizations, which tend to be highly territorial and compete over prestige and resources. These problems are far from being exclusive to Israel. One would expect that organizations experienced in fighting terrorism would be highly capable of accommodating themselves to an ever-changing reality. In reality, they tend to be conservative, close-minded, and apt to engage in struggles over territory, resources, and reputation.18
CHAPTER FIVE
NEW CHALLENGES FROM THE WEST BANK AND GAZA
WHILE THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY and the IDF were invested in an attempt to deal with the new threats that emerged from Lebanon, the first signs of unrest became apparent in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Despite the tight control of the GSS over these areas, it failed to foresee the increasing turbulence.1 Moreover, almost ten years after the failed takeover attempt in Ma’alot, the lack of clarity about the division of labor among the various elite units had not been resolved.
THE BUS 300 AFFAIR
This ambiguity of policy was manifested on Thursday, April 12, 1984. Shortly after 6:30 p.m., four Fatah members took control of the number 300 Egged bus en route from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon with thirty-four passengers on board. The abductors, armed with hand grenades, improvised explosive devices, and knives, ordered the driver, Ilan Halevy, to drive toward Gaza. During the course of the trip, the passengers got the impression that the hijackers had no clear plan. Police in cruisers who heard reports of the hijacking began to chase the bus, which broke through the IDF checkpoint at Erez and then through another improvised roadblock. The police were afraid the bus would reach Gaza City, where the chances of a successful rescue were slim, and so they opened fire on the vehicle. Two passengers were wounded, but the bullets punctured the tires, causing the bus to come to a lurching halt near the Dir al-Balah refugee camp in Gaza. Military and police forces were called in. An interrogator from the Intelligence Corps attempted to bargain with the cell’s leader, Jamal Qablan, but this led nowhere. The hijackers demanded the immediate release of five hundred prisoners who were to be taken to an Arab country. In the meantime, Yamam forces arrived and prepared for an assault. At some point, the terrorists announced that one of the passengers had been badly wounded. Ehud Yatom, head of the GSS operations branch, volunteered to provide them with a first-aid kit. This gave him an opportunity to collect visual intelligence on what was going on inside the bus, including the exact location of each of the hijackers. Information collected by GSS personnel who observed the bus through binoculars corroborated Yatom’s depiction.2
In the meantime, a Sayeret Matkal team also arrived on the scene. A senior GSS officer who was at headquarters attested to the fact that Chief of Staff Moshe Levy, backed by Infantry Corps Commander Yitzhak Mordechai, had decided arbitrarily that Sayeret Matkal would carry out the takeover. At 4:00 a.m., several fighters from this unit breached the windows and doors of the bus and attacked the terrorists with handguns. The operation took about a minute, during which two of the terrorists and one of the hostages were killed and another seven passengers were wounded. The frustration of the Yamam fighters after once again seeing Sayeret Matkal carry out a rescue operation with an unfortunate ending was so severe that some resigned from the unit.3
The drama on Bus 300 would not have become so deeply engraved in the Israeli collective memory had it not been for the events of the aftermath. The Israeli news media, which closely followed the tumultuous events, reported the next morning that four terrorists had been killed in the takeover operation. The discrepancy between what had happened the night before and the media report stemmed from the fact that two of the terrorists who were captured alive had been executed that night on a direct order from the GSS chief, Avraham Shalom. Three days later, Israeli newspapers began publishing initial reports on the more accurate version of the affair. At first, in order to bypass the restrictions of the military censor, the Israeli media quoted reports from the foreign press. Hadashot, an Israeli newspaper, put an end to the rumors when it printed a full front-page photo of the two handcuffed hijackers being taken away for interrogation by GSS operatives. The publication of that photo opened a Pandora’s box whose first casualty was the newspaper itself, which was closed for two days by an administrative order from the military censor. After that, a commission of inquiry was established yet its conclusions were distorted due to false testimonies provided by GSS operatives. In the end, the findings of a second commission of inquiry led to the GSS chief’s resignation. The ramifications of the incident, which came to be known as the “Bus 300 Affair,” were far-reaching. One of the most important outcomes was the examination of the GSS methods of operati
on at that time and the imposition of a series of legal restrictions on the organization’s activities.4
One fact related to the affair, however, was not given sufficient coverage: Avraham Shalom did not act alone. He interpreted to the best of his understanding a message relayed to him by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, which stated, “Do not take any terrorists captive.”5 The GSS, like other intelligence and thwarting organizations, operates in a twilight zone. It endeavors to translate its sometimes deliberately vague orders from policymakers, and the result can be confusing at the operational level. Covert agencies are required to do everything in their power to achieve results. If they fail, they may discover that there is no one there to back them up.
THE “MOTHERS BUS”
It was only four years later, as a result of a chance mix-up, that the Yamam got its first opportunity to prove itself. During the night of March 6 and 7, 1988, a cell of three PLO activists infiltrated Israel from Egypt, west of Mitzpe Ramon.6 The three were armed with Kalashnikov rifles, a Karl Gustav machine gun, and hand grenades. At 6:30 a.m., they took over a military vehicle, chased off its passengers, and began traveling north in the direction of Sde Boker. Reports on the incident spread through army and police communication channels, and roadblocks were set up on the vehicle’s anticipated route. At approximately 7:15 a.m., the vehicle crashed through a roadblock at the Dimona-Yeruham Junction. Police manning the roadblock took off in pursuit, while the terrorists opened indiscriminate fire. A half-hour later the car stopped at the Aroer Junction where a bus transporting workers to the nuclear facility in Dimona was passing by. The driver and most of the passengers escaped as they saw the armed young men storming the bus, but one man and ten women remained trapped inside. Meanwhile, military and police forces arrived and surrounded the vehicle. The commander of the Negev police region, Haim Benayoun, began negotiations with the hijackers, who demanded that a Red Cross representative be brought in immediately. Not far from the site, Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin, Chief of Staff Dan Shomron, and head of the IDF Southern Command Yitzhak Mordecai were assembled. Once again, both police and army takeover units had been called in, but erroneous information regarding the location of the incident had been communicated to Sayeret Matkal’s operations room. Their helicopters did not arrive in time, and the commanders in the field had no choice but to give the Yamam the go-ahead.7