by Michael Ross
I never met “Brazil-Nut,” for the same reasons that I didn’t care to meet “Galaxy-Quest,” which was a good thing because not long after he was deployed to Chicago, he started showing signs of dissatisfaction with his mission. Actually, dissatisfaction was a polite way of saying that he was suffering from both a crisis of conscience and latent homesickness. In his meetings with his ISA and FBI handlers in Chicago, “Brazil-Nut,” after months of operational development and Lord-knows-how-much logistical preparation costing the U.S. taxpayer a princely sum, suddenly announced that he couldn’t bring himself to spy on his fellow Muslims anymore and demanded immediate repatriation to Israel.
You can’t force someone to spy for you. Despite the imploring of both the ISA and FBI handlers, “Brazil-Nut” wasn’t going to comply. Without fanfare or recrimination, the young Islamist went back to his village without so much as a whimper.
I was right after all; the joint operations really didn’t seem to serve any other purpose except to consolidate the ISA-FBI mutual admiration society. It was after these events that I began to lobby my department head, Uri, to hand over the liaison relationship to the ISA, which to my surprise they promptly did. I was glad to be out of the whole scheme and I’d seen enough. My days playing glorified errand boy were over.
12
RAMEZ
It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.
J.R.R . TOLKIEN
Two decades before American soldiers encountered improvised explosive devices in Iraq, Hezbollah was perfecting them in southern Lebanon. Israel tried everything to detect the explosives—sniffer dogs, increased road patrols, chemical detection equipment, thermal vision cameras, drone aircraft outfitted with high-tech imaging systems, but nothing worked with much success. Having fought in Lebanon as a combat engineer, I had seen Hezbollah’s handiwork up close.
The main problem is that IEDs are difficult to detect once they’re covered with dirt and rock. The explosives can be detonated by remote control using an infrared beam, much like the kind emitted by television remote controls. But the explosive device itself is electromagnetically passive: it does not send out any telltale radio-wave signal or heat signature. Couple that with sophisticated camouflage disguising the dug-up IED pit—in some cases, featuring synthetic rocks and vegetation worthy of a film set—and detection is almost impossible. For all its technological prowess, Israel never learned how to defeat the IED scourge. During the July 2006 fighting between the two sides in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah demonstrated that even Israel’s most powerful tank, the Merkava, can be destroyed with such devices.
The man most responsible for developing this deadly weapon was Hassan Hilu Laqis, a shadowy explosives expert who operates as Hezbollah’s chief procurement officer. Laqis did more than any other individual to precipitate Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000—the only time in the Jewish state’s history that an Arab force had pushed Israel off a contested piece of real estate. The campaign is now remembered as one of the most frustrating chapters in Israel’s military history. Prior to that, the IDF mostly had fought the conventional military armies of neighboring Arab countries, but IEDs took the battle to a new level.
Although my main job at Tevel involved liaison work with the CIA and FBI, I remained engaged in Israel’s efforts to confront Hezbollah’s bomb makers through my participation in an Israeli intelligence community interservice forum on terrorist explosives and weaponry. The body included representatives from the police demolitions laboratory, the ISA’s science and technology division, the Mossad, and a major named Gadi from the IDF’s special explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) unit, which was known by its acronym, Yachsap.
In some cases, my explosives expertise overlapped with my liaison duties. In 1997, for instance, shortly after my transfer to Tevel, the CIA station in Tel Aviv brought a specialist over from Langley named Roger to help us in our efforts to dispose of TATP we’d seized from the Palestinians. TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, is a highly volatile and powerful compound that is relatively easy to produce from acetone (paint thinners), hydrogen peroxide (antiseptic or bleach), and dilute sulphuric acid (drain cleaner)—ingredients readily obtainable from hardware stores and pharmacies. Known by terrorists as Mother of Satan (due to its lethality and instability), TATP can be set off by a spark or a bump, with devastating results. Five years later, when I heard that al-Qaeda shoe bomber Richard Reid was trying to light a chunk of plastic explosives with a triacetone triperoxide detonator on board an airplane, I was horrified to think how close those passengers had come to death.
Roger wasn’t a spook like Pete and myself. He came across more as an outdoorsy, professorial type, the sort of young palaeontologist I imagine you’d find hovering around a dinosaur dig in Montana. From the way he talked about explosives and bombs, it was obvious he had a real interest in the subject. During his visit, I offered to show him and some of the CIA’s Tel Aviv personnel the EOD’s bomb museum at the Sirkin army base.
Few countries can lay claim to Israel’s level of expertise on the subject of explosives: the Jewish state has been attacked by just about every combustible substance known to man. Roger examined the unit’s “museum of contemporary explosives” as if he were a kid in a candy store. Pete was fascinated too, but for a different reason: the old-school devices reminded him of the ones he’d seen in Vietnam during his stint there with the Agency.
Gadi gave them a talk about the types of explosives the IDF was encountering in the disputed territories and in Lebanon. He intimated that some of the better Palestinian “engineers” had learned their craft at the feet of Hezbollah’s specialists and their Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps supervisors. Gadi also went into detail about how his unit trains and operates. Yachsap is constantly defusing IEDs planted by Arab terror groups. The soldiers who perform this work are professionals who undergo an intensive training course in addition to their special forces regimen. It is dangerous work, and these men have suffered their share of casualties.
Roger was struck by the level of sophistication of the Hezbollah explosives featured, as well as by the props used to camouflage them. I clearly remember him lifting what looked exactly like an ordinary rock. His hand jerked up suddenly, as he was unprepared for the object’s feathery lightness. He gasped as he realized that the “rock” was actually made of Styrofoam. In this regard, Hezbollah has turned murderous terrorism into an art form.
In addition to the IEDs, we had also been contending with Hezbollah’s entrance into the suicide bombing market previously monopolized by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist cells.
The first incidence occurred in the spring of 1996 and involved Mohammed Hussein Miqdad, a Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah who was taught the fine art of explosives by IRGC operatives working out of the Iranian embassy in Beirut. Apparently Mr. Miqdad, who entered Israel on a forged British passport under the name of Andrew Newman (I often remarked to my colleagues that it should have been Alfred E. Newman) hadn’t paid attention in class, because as he was packing a one-kilogram explosive device into a Sony radio, it went off prematurely in his Jerusalem hotel room. Thanks to Israel’s expertise in dealing with trauma cases, Miqdad survived his ordeal, except he was now minus both legs, his eyes, and one of his hands. I watched him interviewed by the ISA on a tape from his long sojourn in the hospital. He was unrepentant, so I had very little sympathy for his work-site accident.
The second attempt (that we knew of) was in May 1997. A source in Europe informed us that a German national named Steven Smyrek had been recruited by Hezbollah and was going to take a little trip to Israel. As we only had a few days before his departure, we promptly put a surveillance team on him with the cooperation of the German Bundesamtes für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), their domestic security service. It was a big operation and involved myself, my CIA counterparts, the Mossad’s counterterrorism department, the Mossad liaison officer working the German counterterrorism desk, a
nd half of the ISA’s Arab Affairs Division. The plan was to have the Germans follow Smyrek to his El Al flight from Frankfurt and then seat him on the plane next to two ISA aviation security specialists who would in turn hand him off to the surveillance team of the ISA’s operations division. I strongly advocated that we not arrest him until we had clearly identified who he was going to meet with and what he was going to do. But the ISA got cold feet and informed us just before his arrival that they were going to have the Israel National Police arrest him upon touchdown at Ben Gurion Airport (the ISA, like MI5 and CSIS, has no powers of arrest and must rely on law enforcement to do the dirty work).
“This is our first chance to see what these fuckers are up to!” I told Menachem from the ISA’s counterterrorism department. “We can’t take the risk,” he replied. “What if he blows up a bus or something bigger and kills a bunch of people?” The ISA was mandated with defending Israel’s home soil but, by not seeing what Smyrek did once on the ground, we were putting off the inevitable. The ISA was concerned that if their surveillance team lost him, and a lot of people died in a terrorist attack, then it would be on their heads.
As planned, Smyrek was arrested at the airport. He sat in prison until 2004, when he was released in a prisoner swap with Hezbollah. Smyrek worried the hell out of me because he represented something new: a white, European Westerner who could easily fly under the counterterrorism radar. His stepfather had even been an officer in the British army serving in Germany.
Miqdad and Smyrek were Iran and Hezbollah’s clear attempts to bring terrorist attacks to Israeli soil, but there may be more in the offing. When I presented Miqdad to Andy, I pointed out that during his interrogation, Miqdad said that he was one of seven Lebanese Shiites trained at an IRGC facility near Janta, in the Bekaa Valley. All the suicide bombing moles were chosen for their foreign-language skills and outward appearance, enabling them to pass as Western tourists. When I concluded my briefing, I looked at Andy squarely and said, “None of Miqdad’s classmates have yet been accounted for. They’re still out there.”
It was during this period that a new colleague named Sheila arrived on the counterterrorism desk in Tevel’s North America department. She came from the Mossad’s counterterrorism department and formerly had been both a Hezbollah analyst and naval intelligence specialist. She was bright, charismatic, and a devoted mother of twin boys. As a bonus, she came with a Mossad pedigree: her father had become a legend in the Mossad during the post-Munich era for tracking down and eliminating the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Olympic Games massacre.
We were having a staff meeting in Uri’s office one day when Sheila announced unexpectedly, “Don’t you think the Americans would like to know they have a Hezbollah agent wandering around in between their legs?”
She had been investigating a certain lieutenant of Laqis named Fawzi Mustapha Assi. “Ramez,” as Assi was code-named, operated out of the large Arab-American community in Dearborn, Michigan. His day job, Sheila told us, was working as an engineer at the Ford Motor Company’s famous River Rouge plant, which Henry Ford had established in 1915 just west of Detroit. Off-hours, however, he spent his time procuring the export-restricted technology Hezbollah needed to create IEDs and other weapons. Because of the technical nature of Ramez’s work at Ford, his day job provided the necessary cover to perform his illicit procurement duties.
Aside from his Hezbollah affiliation, Ramez was by all accounts an unremarkable Lebanese immigrant to the United States. He had arrived some twenty years earlier at the age of eighteen, then married and divorced, leaving three children in the custody of their mother. Like all good sleeper agents, Ramez gave the outward appearance of living an ordinary workaday life.
Sheila hauled out a sheaf of transcripts from intercepted telephone calls between Ramez and Laqis that she’d plucked out of the SIGINT chatter—intelligence gleaned from intercepted communication transmissions.12 Because of the nature of the intercept, we only got Laqis’s side of the conversation. But that was damning enough. The Hezbollah honcho was running down a list of goodies Ramez was supposed to buy and send back to Lebanon—including thermal imaging equipment, night-vision goggles, electronic components, Kevlar bulletproof vests, and global positioning satellite modules. The total value, we calculated, was about three hundred thousand dollars—more money than your typical Ford engineer has in his checking account.
Sheila and I went upstairs to the Hezbollah branch of the Mossad’s counterterrorism department for a consult and stopped by Etti’s office on the way. An institution in the Mossad, Etti then sat as the branch head for terrorist attack alerts and acted as a clearing house for counterterrorism-related intelligence and its dissemination to foreign services. Though only in her early fifties, she was already a certified spinster—part of that middle-aged female cohort in the Mossad married to their jobs. I ended up working closely with Etti until the end of my career and grew immensely fond of her.
We hovered at the entrance to her office, where she was puffing away on one of her forbidden cigarettes (Mossad HQ has a strict but unenforced no-smoking policy) and talking on a red secure phone with someone in military intelligence. She signed off by saying, “If your dick were half as impressive as your intellect, you’d be a girl.”
“Army putzes,” she muttered as she waved us in. “What do you toads want? Look at you both—you should breed.”
I filled her in on what we knew about Ramez. The story intrigued her—but only a little.
“Those fucking Amerikakim [her charming way of compounding the Hebrew word for shit with ‘American’] will probably lose him the first chance they get. What a bunch of useless schlemiels.” Etti was incredibly profane in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish.
“They can all go to hell,” she added, then absent-mindedly went back to her computer and began typing at what seemed like a thousand words per minute. I thought to myself: “How could anyone not love this woman?”
We then met with Nissim, a dark-featured Arabic-speaking Hezbollah specialist who was working the Iran desk with a small cadre of other analysts. He agreed to let us have access to the complete dossier of communications between Hezbollah’s Lebanese commanders and Ramez, knowing full well that we would then share some of the contents with the FBI. It was a significant moment: To my knowledge, this was to be the first ever joint FBI-Mossad operation in history.
While working for Tevel, I always took a smug satisfaction in surprising my U.S. colleagues with stunning revelations about an enemy operative working clandestinely in their own backyard. The combination of gratitude, respect, and humility that my counterparts exhibited on those occasions was one of the things that made the job worthwhile.
In this case, our plan was to avoid running the operation through our hopelessly out-of-the-loop FBI contacts at the Tel Aviv Legat, and instead work through Sarah, a Mossad liaison officer working in the Washington station. Before going to her, Sheila and I met with Paul and Wayne to ensure that the Legat had a heads-up on what we were doing. I had anticipated that their noses would be out of joint, but they actually appeared relieved to remain on the sidelines. As it turned out, they had more than enough files on the go to keep themselves busy. Plus, a secretary had screwed up their computer system so badly that a technician had to be flown in from D.C. to fix it. And to top things off, Bill Clinton’s people were starting to act like peacemaking busybodies during this period, which meant the FBI had to deal with various Palestinian factions and warlords on non-intelligence related matters.
Without further ado, we sent Sarah a package of material to take to FBI HQ, along with our recommendations on how best to proceed. We emphasized that the Mossad should retain as much control as possible, even though the operation was going to take place on U.S. territory. It was an ambitious request but, since we were the ones bringing the Americans the intelligence, we figured they owed us one.
A short time later, Sarah told us that her FBI contacts were stunned by our intelligence and eager to tak
e up the chase. Within another day or two, they’d procured FISA warrants that allowed them to eavesdrop on Ramez’s phone calls. FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1978 law that sets out the procedures the FBI and other government agencies must (theoretically) follow before spying on the movements and communications of individuals suspected of being agents of a “foreign power.” FISA was a fairly obscure statute until December 2005, when the New York Times broke the story that the Bush administration was ignoring FISA, and had given the National Security Agency (NSA) carte blanche to spy on domestic phone calls.
Many of the Bush administration’s critics have argued that the NSA’s so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program is not only illegal (a U.S. District judge ruled it unconstitutional in August 2006), but unnecessary as well—since it’s always been fairly easy for law enforcement agencies to get FISA authorization for surveillance. I can’t comment on that as a general principle, but I definitely was amazed at how fast the FBI got its FISA mandate against Ramez. I later learned that the newly appointed chief of the international terrorism section at the FBI’s National Security Division, a man named Dale Watson, was enthusiastic about the operation, and had given instructions that we were to have at our disposal all the resources necessary to bring Ramez and his procurement operation down.
Ramez, we all discovered from the ensuing surveillance, was traveling all over the United States, methodically seeking to locate and purchase military equipment for Hezbollah. We listened to his calls for almost a year, generating almost thirteen hundred transcripts, which the FBI and Mossad shared.
In our reading of the translated intercepts we received, we kept hoping that Ramez would tip us off to other Hezbollah operatives and networks in the United States, but it became clear he was operating as a “singleton,” or lone operative. Being a former combatant myself, I could relate to his compartmentalized modus operandi (if not his murderous ideology). Unlike some of the amateurish operations that have been busted in Western nations since 9/11, Hezbollah is not a ragtag group of fanatics. Thanks to all the help they get from their sponsors in Tehran, they are adept at foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations.
