The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism

by Ami Pedahzur

  A Yamam intelligence officer interrogated the women who escaped from the bus and gathered tactical intelligence regarding the precise number of abductors involved and their location in the vehicle. Unit sharpshooters deployed around the bus monitored the terrorists’ activities with their binoculars. The information collected by the officer and the sniper surveillance provided the unit commander, Alik Ron, with enough information to prepare an assault plan and present it to the district police commander. Meanwhile, negotiations were proceeding very slowly, with the terrorists making unrealistic demands, including the release of all the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. When the terrorists realized the negotiators were trying to kill time, they announced that they would begin executing the hostages at half-hour intervals. To prove the seriousness of their intentions, they shot the male hostage, Victor Ram, and Miriam Ben-Yair, one of the female hostages. The order came from military headquarters to carry out the takeover at once. Yamam snipers opened fire on the terrorists while the fighters breached the windows and doors of the bus. The raid took about thirty seconds. Before they were eliminated, the terrorists had time to shoot and kill one more hostage.8

  In retrospect, this was one of the most complicated rescue missions in Israel’s history. The abductors were better armed and more determined than their predecessors. This proof of Yamam’s capabilities, however, did not put an end to the decision makers’practice of also calling in Sayeret Matkal during hostage-taking incidents. The initial logic of activating multiple units is clear. A hostage-taking incident can quickly deteriorate, and it is good policy to have adequate forces in place so that, if necessary, they can respond to the worsening situation. What is less logical was the absence of an official policy establishing that whenever both units arrive at a hostage situation, Yamam would carry out the takeover and Sayeret Matkal would act as backup.

  ABU JIHAD

  One day later, on March 8, 1988, the security cabinet convened to decide on an appropriate response to the hijacking. The intelligence organizations were asked to provide possible targets. Five weeks later, the Israeli government unanimously approved a recommendation to assassinate Khalil al-Wazir, better known as Abu Jihad, the head of the PLO’s military arm and Arafat’s deputy. Similar to the Spring of Youth operation, this was a complex, high-risk mission involving special forces from the air, land, and sea, as well as Mossad operatives.The painstaking planning of the mission included obtaining information on the layout of Abu Jihad’s home in Tunis, the access roads to it, and the target’s daily routine. Based on this information, a model of Abu Jihad’s house was built in Israel, and special forces teams used it for dry runs through the assassination.9

  The contingent that ultimately embarked from Haifa Port on April 13, 1988, consisted of two Saar 4.5 class missile boats, which served as a security force; two Saar 4 class boats, which carried the Sayeret Matkal and Shayetet 13 commandos; and a submarine. The boats had Zodiac dinghies onboard that would ferry the commandos to shore and Bell 206 helicopters in case an urgent departure was required. A Boeing 707 airliner accompanied the ships, serving as both transmission station and electronic signal scrambler. Deputy Chief of Staff Ehud Barak commanded the mission from the control room of one of the boats. Sayeret Matkal Commander Moshe (Bogi) Yaalon led the assassination force.10

  On April 15, the elite force, which by this time was already positioned opposite the Tunisian shore, received the final approval to proceed. Twenty Sayeret Matkal soldiers came ashore. As in the Beirut operation fifteen years earlier, Mossad operatives awaited the commandos on the beach. The forces quickly boarded three cars—two Volkswagen Transporters and one Peugeot 305—that Mossad had rented a few days earlier. That night, Abu Jihad’s family returned to their home in the Sidi Bou-Said neighborhood at 11:30 p.m. Abu Jihad’s wife and children retired to their beds shortly thereafter, while he went to his study and worked until 1:00 a.m. before heading off to sleep.An hour later, the forces,which had split into four teams, received the order to move into action. Teams A and B approached the building while teams C and D stood guard. Two fighters from team A, one of them dressed as a woman, approached the car in which Ali Abed al-Awal, Abu Jihad’s bodyguard, was dozing, and shot him in the head. The commandos also shot a Tunisian maintenance man in the garden. Then they broke into the house and rushed, single file, upstairs to the rooms. Team A went straight to the first-floor bedroom of Abu Jihad, who had been aroused by the noise. He got as far as the doorway, where a hail of bullets met him. One of the commandos later described the “unnatural” sight of Abu Jihad’s bullet-riddled body standing upright for several seconds before it finally collapsed. Only then did the officer call for his men to stop firing.

  Abu Jihad’s wife, Umm Jihad, related afterward that other soldiers who passed her husband’s body continued to fire at him, until she yelled at them in Arabic, “Bas!”—Enough! Immediately following the shooting, a senior officer entered the room and asked the soldiers to show him the body. The officer bent down and saw Abu Jihad, who was lying face down. He turned the body over with his foot and shot him once more in the head. During this time, the other commandos raided Abu Jihad’s study and collected documents. They also confiscated his safe and telephone answering machine. Five minutes later, the teams met the cars that had been waiting for them near the house and sped back to the beach, where the naval commandos awaited them. The Sayeret fighters and Mossad agents then abandoned the cars and boarded the Zodiac dinghies for the journey back to the boats.11

  The Israeli government continually denied any involvement in the operation. Two days after the assassination, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was asked if he knew something about the attack on Abu Jihad’s house, he replied, “I heard about it on the radio, just like you.”12 Even so, the flood of rumors that reached the world press left no doubts as to the identity of the assailants.

  The main questions were why had Israel chosen to go back to targeting senior Palestinians and why was Abu Jihad singled out? Although he had been a central figure behind the establishment of Fatah’s paramilitary frameworks in Jordan and Lebanon, he had lost most of his power after the destruction of the Lebanon-based PLO infrastructure during the First Lebanon War with Israel. Local cells of young people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank had initiated the riots and violent activities, including the hijacking of the bus that triggered the assassination. The exiled PLO leadership was left playing a secondary role.13

  The answer to these questions is that most of the leaders in Israel were aware of the futility of the assassinations policy, even from the time of Operation Wrath of God in the mid-1970s. As mentioned earlier, the overwhelming majority of the assassinations did not strike significantly at the organizations’ ability to operate against Israel, and they certainly did not reduce their motivation to do so. This supports the hypothesis that the assassinations were dictated by the aspirations of politicians to raise public morale, appease Israeli public opinion, and recruit support for the government. No less important was the element of vengeance. Despite the tendency by many to view political decisions as a product of the calculated thought and measured considerations of the costs versus the anticipated results of each operation, one cannot rule out the significance of a basic human instinct that also affects policymakers—the passion for revenge. One of the questions that remain unresolved is whether these assassinations justified exposing hundreds of Israel’s most elite fighters to harm as well as mobilizing so many forces from the various branches of the armed forces.14

  While Israel was risking its most elite units in questionable operations, it also reintroduced the old concept of histaarevut. As political unrest in the occupied territories mounted, the Duvdevan, Shimshon, and Yamas special forces were created. The first was designated to operate in the West Bank. The second, which was later dismantled, was assigned to the Gaza Strip, while Yamas was to operate wherever deemed necessary. In light of experience, together with training in the fields of microwarfare and histaarvut, t
he fighters also learned Arabic, including the local dialects. This made it much easier for them to circulate in Palestinian areas. During their training, novice soldiers were required to associate with Palestinian youths and sometimes even take part in protests against the IDF. The operations of the special-forces soldiers sometimes led to amusing situations. During the first intifada (1987-1993), demonstrations mounted by the shabibeh, the young people, gained widespread media coverage. One day, the popular Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a photograph of young Palestinians throwing rocks at an Israeli military vehicle in one of the Gaza Strip refugee camps. The newspaper photographer was not aware of the fact that the local youths were in fact soldiers from the Shimshon Unit. Those units stood in the forefront of the counterterrorism effort during the years of the first intifada.15

  THE INTIFADA AND EMERGENCE OF HAMAS

  While Hezbollah was establishing itself in Lebanon, political changes were taking place in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well. Young activists who had been born and raised under the Israeli occupation were filling the upper ranks of the leadership of the Palestinian national struggle. At the same time, the Islamic religious organizations that were groomed in the 1970s by the military administration and the GSS as a counterweight to the Palestinian national movement assumed a political character—the largest of which was Hamas. Throughout the 1970s, Israel was hoping that the Muslim Brothers would serve as a counterforce to the increasing political influence of the PLO in the occupied territories. The broad consensus within the GSS that the Muslim Brothers denounce any kind of violent activity opened the door to allowing local Muslim associations and charities to act freely and acquire substantial political influence, especially at the local level.

  The first intifada, which broke out on December 9, 1987, kept GSS handlers and departments busy around the clock. The agency had to cope with violent riots in various towns and villages headed by young people who initially refused to accept the authority of the PLO leadership in Tunis. Thus, instead of the familiar, organized Palestinian enemy, the security establishment was now faced again with local gangs, amorphous social networks whose surveillance and penetration required intensive HUMINT sources.16

  Hamas, which adhered to the Muslim Brotherhood’s worldview, initiated a process similar to the one that had taken place in Lebanon a few years earlier. It took advantage of the smokescreen created by the events of the intifada to tighten its hold on Palestinian society, mainly by providing welfare services, for which there was an ever-growing demand. At the same time, Hamas’s political ambitions were kept far from prying eyes and ears. The GSS, whose main efforts were concentrated on dealing with the popular uprising, had to make do with a remote surveillance of the Islamic charity organization. The turning point only came more than a year after the outbreak of the intifada, when two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and murdered. Avi Sasportas disappeared on February 16, 1989, near the Gaza Strip, and Ilan Saadon was abducted two and a half months later. The kidnappers, who identified themselves as Hamas activists, prompted the GSS to invest greater efforts in gathering intelligence on the movement, which had become one of the main forces to fan the flames of the intifada.17

  Due to Israel’s tight control over the territories and prior acquaintance with the heads of the Islamic charity associations, most of whom had once been welcome visitors to the military administration’s offices, the Hamas leadership was identified and charted relatively swiftly. Concurrently, the HUMINT gathering process on the people in charge of the Hamas movement and its operating methods was also intensified.18

  The kidnapping and murder of the border policeman Nissim Toledano near Jerusalem on December 13, 1992, provided an opportunity for the Israeli government to deport 415 Hamas members, whose identities had been determined in advance by the GSS.19 The activists were taken across the border to Lebanon in the hope that this would break the organization’s backbone and root out the revolutionary Islamic threat from the Palestinian political arena. These hopes were soon dashed.

  The Lebanese government refused to accept the deportees into its territory and left them in a tent encampment near the village of Marj al-Zuhur. The deportees’ struggle against the harsh Lebanese winter focused world attention on their plight. While world coverage granted the Hamas activists moral support, various organizations, primarily Hezbollah, provided for their material needs. Despite the ideological gaps between Hamas and Hezbollah, the former being Sunni and the latter Shiite, strong ties developed between the deportees and members of the supportive organizations. In addition to the military know-how they conveyed to the Hamas exiles, Hezbollah shared the vast experience it had accumulated in establishing a multifaceted political organization. One year after the expulsion, heavy American pressure on Israel resulted in the gradual repatriation of Hamas deportees to the occupied territories. The political reality to which they returned had changed. The Oslo Accords signed between the Israeli government and the PLO in September 1993 had turned yesterday’s enemies—PLO members—into Israel’s allies, while the former recipients of favors, supporters of Islamic organizations who strenuously opposed conciliation with Israel, became the main enemy.20

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE GLOBAL CHALLENGE OF IRAN AND HEZBOLLAH

  IN 1985, THE ISRAELI Defense Forces (IDF), engaged in a war of attrition in Lebanon, withdrew from the Lebanese heartland and redeployed to the “security zone” in southern Lebanon. One of the goals of redeployment was to create a buffer zone between Hezbollah forces, which operated from villages in southern Lebanon, and the settlements in northern Israel. This reflected an initial understanding among policymakers in Israel that the struggle with Hezbollah required the adoption of a defensive model. Nevertheless, the war model was still much more prominent.

  ABDUCTIONS

  The crews of the two Israeli Air Force Phantom jets that took off on the afternoon of Thursday, October 15, 1986, from Ramat David air base in northern Israel did not anticipate any irregularities. As they approached the first target of their mission near the village of Maghdoushe in Lebanon, they heard a loud explosion, and the plane leading the formation suddenly began to lose altitude. It later turned out that one of the 360-kilogram Marck-55 bombs attached to the fighter jet had prematurely detonated. The pilot, Ishay Aviram, and his navigator, Ron Arad, quickly realized that the fate of their plane had been sealed. Both men activated their ejection seats. The pilot landed in a ravine far from the mission’s target and hid there until an Israeli combat helicopter rescued him. Arad, however, was not as fortunate. The moment he touched the ground, Amal militiamen seized him and whisked him off to Beirut.

  In early 1988, more than a year after Arad’s capture, the Amal organization split up. Mustafa Dirani, who had been in charge of the organization’s internal security, left with a small group of supporters and founded a militia called the Resistance of the Believers. Dirani’s men kidnapped Arad and held him in a hideaway apartment in the village of Nabi Chit. Dirani had hoped to hand over Arad to Hezbollah in exchange for the organization’s sponsorship of his new group. Whatever happened to Arad after that is shrouded in mystery. He was last seen alive on the night of May 5, 1988. On that night, there were skirmishes between IDF forces and Hezbollah militants near Nabi Chit. According to one of the versions of the events that reached Israel, Arad attempted to escape during the chaos and was shot by his guards. Other sources stated that he managed to escape but fell into a nearby ravine and died.1

  Immediately after Arad’s capture, Israel worked frenetically for his release. Uri Lubrani, coordinator of Israel government activities in Lebanon, represented Israel in negotiations with businessman Jamal Said, who mediated for and had close ties with the Amal organization. Despite Israel’s high expectations, the negotiations never developed into an agreement. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin was still smarting from the harsh public criticism against the government over the 1985 Jibril Exchange. In this swap, which was Israel’s most distinctive dev
iation from its official policy not to negotiate with terrorist groups, it released 1,150 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in exchange for three captured Israeli soldiers. Rabin was apprehensive about surrendering to Amal’s excessive demands, which included the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. The kidnapping of Arad by Dirani’s men put an end to the negotiations. In early 1989, Israel renewed diplomatic efforts to obtain information on the missing navigator. A window of opportunity opened when UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar appointed a special envoy to handle the release of Westerners being held by Hezbollah. The envoy, Giandomenico Pico, formulated a deal that included Israel’s release of Lebanese prisoners held by the South Lebanon Army (SLA) in exchange for two Western hostages being held by Hezbollah. That deal, too, did not lead to the disclosure of any significant information about Arad.2