by Michael Ross
In this case, however, my fears were somewhat mitigated by the fact that the captors were Jordanian. Israel and Jordan fought bitter wars against each other in 1948 and 1967. Jordan had also played host to Palestinian terrorists who murdered many Israelis in the PLO’s early years. But, over time, a mutual understanding emerged between the two countries—something resembling respect, if not affection. King Hussein, who would rule until his death in 1999, was an honorable man who’d forged a strong relationship with many Israeli leaders and diplomats. He had a particularly warm relationship with Ephraim Halevy, who’d retired as deputy director general of the Mossad after negotiating the Jordan-Israel peace treaty in 1994.
Needless to say, I was somewhat distracted by Sheila’s bombshell. I found it hard to concentrate on the afternoon meetings with our American visitors; I kept looking at Uri, my department head, but he betrayed no knowledge of the day’s events. I felt sorry for him, because he was about to walk into a bunch of stormy liaison meetings with the Americans, who would no doubt be furious.
Whatever the Americans’ reaction, I knew Uri would do everything in his power to bring Washington on board in resolving the crisis. In this kind of case, U.S. help could mean the difference between getting our team back safe, and having them spend years in an Arab prison.
Uri and Harry were friendly from Uri’s stint at the Mossad station in D.C., and they agreed to meet in downtown Tel Aviv for drinks and dinner after our meeting broke up. We were all invited, and I said I’d be there—knowing full well there would be no dinner. Uri mentioned offhandedly that he’d been summoned to the office of Danny Yatom, Mossad’s director general. Once that meeting was over, I knew, neither Uri nor anyone else would be in the mood for a night out.
Danny Yatom had been parachuted into the DG’s office after the 1996 retirement of Shabtai Shavit. I liked and respected Shavit, as did most of his subordinates. He’d worked as a HUMINT case officer and head of Caesarea, and understood how an intelligence service operates. He’d also been schooled in the modern, Harvard MBA-style of business administration and management, and tried to instil in the Mossad a measure of corporate efficiency.
Yatom, by contrast, came to the Mossad as an army man. As part of his distinguished career, he’d fought with some of Israel’s most elite military units, including the legendary Sayeret Matkal (or General Staff Reconnaissance Unit). One of the unit’s responsibilities is hostage rescue. During one famous 1972 mission, Operation Isotope, Yatom and his fellow soldiers (including unit commander Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, two future prime ministers) disguised themselves as airline mechanics and successfully stormed a Sabena Airlines jet that had been hijacked by Palestinian terrorists.
The problem was that Yatom, a major general, never traded in his rank badges, and still seemed to think he was in charge of a military unit. His stern gaze, cropped short hair, and military gait were easy to pick out in the Mossad’s corridors. And his uncompromising, top-down Prussian management style often seemed out of place in an intelligence agency, where subtlety is a prized quality and colleagues can’t be rigidly categorized and valued according to the number of stripes on their shoulders.
I can imagine how Yatom exploded when he heard the news that two of his agents had been caught like common crooks. In any event, after Uri met with Yatom, our department convened in Uri’s office and he broke the news that I already knew. I locked eyes with Sheila, but otherwise didn’t betray the fact that I had advance knowledge.
The screw-up, we learned in that meeting, was part of a botched assassination attempt that had been approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Two combatants from the Kidon unit had organized an ambush of Hamas’s Jordanian branch chief, Khaled Mashaal, at the entrance to the terrorist group’s Amman offices. When Mashaal showed up, they seized him, and sprayed his ear with a lethal time-release chemical while four other team members remained in close surveillance of the building.
Noting that Mashaal’s chauffeur and bodyguard had spotted the fracas and were about to give chase, two of the combatants in the support team tried to create a diversion by staging a public shouting match. They then jumped into their rental car and took off. The bodyguard commandeered a passing car in hot pursuit.
Inexplicably, the combatants remained ignorant of the fact they were being followed—a total amateur-hour botch-up. And when the pair eventually parked the vehicle, they were arrested by plainclothes policemen, who later discovered they were carrying bogus Canadian passports. Meanwhile, the remaining four combatants (including the two who’d actually assaulted Mashaal) escaped to the Israeli embassy, where they remained holed up.
Before he headed up for another meeting with the DG to get further instructions about involving the Americans, Uri asked me to summon Stan Moskowitz and Mike from the CIA station to a meeting later that evening. The story hadn’t been broken by the media yet, and I had to hurry.
Mike was at his desk when I phoned, and he agreed to come by with Moskowitz. But when he showed up an hour later, Mike arrived alone. Moskowitz, he said, had other business to attend to. From experience, I suspected this meant he was drinking tea with Yasser Arafat, or on the golf course. But in retrospect, I think it’s possible Moskowitz was trying to tell me something.
Before Uri broke the big news, I started off by telling Mike who Khaled Mashaal was. Uri and I figured that after I’d described some of the terrorist attacks the guy had organized—including some that had killed U.S. citizens—he wouldn’t be so surprised that we’d tried to kill him.
I told Mike that Mashaal was the chief of Hamas’s political wing, which was then based in Amman. But that same office, I added, controlled and financed the Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades, the organization’s armed (i.e., terrorist) wing.14 After reeling off a list of some of Hamas’s many crimes, I hit him with the big one: “Mike, Mashaal was behind the Mahane Yehuda market attack in Jerusalem.”
I knew Mike would know exactly the incident I was talking about. The blast had taken place just two months previous, killing sixteen people and injuring 169 others. A team of FBI officers was in Israel at the time, and I’d personally taken them to the site soon after the bombing. Their visit to that awful scene was the talk of the FBI Legat for some time.
“I remember,” Mike said.
I continued. “On September 4, he authorized a suicide attack on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, in which five people were killed. American citizens were injured and killed in both attacks. One of them was a fourteen-year-old girl visiting Israel from Los Angeles.” The American government was sensitive about the welfare of its citizens abroad, and I hoped that these highlights from my short briefing would make their way up the food chain when Mike reported our request for political aid to his superiors.
I then let Uri take over, and he succinctly explained what had happened in Jordan. True to Mossad form, Uri stuck to the generalities of the mission and did not go into any operational details. Uri then requested the Agency’s assistance through their good contacts with the Jordanian security intelligence service and its head, Samih Battikhi.
Mike looked shocked, and he took a while to respond. As for me, I was feeling slightly ridiculous. A few hours earlier, we’d all been in a room together, and my team had been trying to enlist the Americans in high-risk operations against Hezbollah. Now we were admitting to Mike that we’d completely screwed up a mission against Hamas, a far less professional terrorist outfit.
Mike said he’d pass the request along, but that he really didn’t know how they’d react at Langley. The meeting broke up, and I rode with Mike to the front gate. His parting words to me were, “I hope you get your team back.” I know he meant it. Mike was that kind of guy.
In the end, after negotiations in which the Mossad was not involved (we were not exactly flavor of the month in Jordan) took place over a period of weeks, the two captured Kidon team members eventually arrived safe and sound back in Israel. In exchange, an Israeli physician had to fly to
Amman to deliver a life-saving antidote to Mashaal. We also had to free Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin, Hamas’s paraplegic “spiritual leader,” who’d been imprisoned for life by Israel in 1989 for ordering the execution of two Israeli soldiers. (Yassin should have stayed in Jordan. In 2004, after Israel reached the end of its tolerance for his “spiritual” activities—which typically involved young Palestinians exploding themselves amid Israeli crowds—he was killed by an Israeli missile as his handlers were wheeling him to morning prayers in Gaza City.)
The incident was a huge embarrassment for the Netanyahu government, which had authorized the mission. And many in the Mossad claimed that the assassination attempt had been “forced” upon the agency by politicians. I was skeptical of these excuses because I knew the Mossad was strong enough to stand up for itself and reject a mission its leaders believed was too risky.
Moreover, Caesarea was fully capable of a simple job like this one. In my view, the screw-up lay not with the decision to kill Mashaal, but with the plan for doing so. I remember discussing this with Charles shortly after the affair, and we both agreed that it made no sense to perform the operation with Kidon, whose combatants had no experience operating in Arab countries. We speculated that the unit was used only because it was the favorite of Caesarea’s deputy head, who happened to be a former Kidon unit commander. He’d long argued that Kidon could be used in hostile countries, despite its combatants’ lack of deep-cover skills.
Netanyahu’s government had to do the grovelling without American help: the CIA didn’t give us any assistance. Ultimately, Ephraim Halevy saved the day by flying to Jordan and calling in a favor from his friend King Hussein. It was a master stroke by Halevy, and it was no surprise that he took over as Mossad director general when Yatom finally resigned in February of 1998.
With the combatants safely back in Israel, a three-man state commission was mandated to investigate what became known as the “Mashaal Affair.” Many of my colleagues were called to testify, and some volunteered to put in their two cents’ worth. The mission became a spy-world byword for amateurish bungling.
At the time, Tevel managed a productive two-way intelligence flow with the Jordanian intelligence service, and my colleagues who were responsible for this relationship were particularly angry at seeing all their hard work and earned trust go up in smoke. Our department also had to contend with the Canadians for “borrowing” their passports. (For the record, Canada was not aware of the operation and had no supporting role. The job was strictly “blue and white.” In fact, assassination missions like this one are so compartmentalized that even the Mossad’s other operational divisions were unaware of it until it blew up.) Interestingly, however, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service was sympathetic, and it was business as usual with them at Tevel despite the diplomatic flap. During a liaison exchange by our counterterrorism officers to Canada soon after the Mashaal affair broke, many CSIS members mentioned that their only regret in the whole matter was that we didn’t succeed.
As for Khaled Mashaal, he survived his brush with the long arm of Israeli justice. In 2004, he was appointed the “world leader” of Hamas and took to hiding out in Damascus, where he now issues fiery manifestos against Israel and does his level best to undermine moderate Palestinian elements. Many analysts believe he ordered the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in June 2006, specifically to sabotage the efforts of some of his Hamas political colleagues who were inching toward reconciliation with Israel.
Whenever I see his name in the news, I think back to September 1997 and remember what might have been—if only two Mossad combatants operating in Amman had taken the time to look in their rear-view mirror. I suggest Mashaal keep an eye out. One way or another, the Mossad will complete its mission.
14
THE OSLO SHELL GAME
I may not have been the greatest president, but I’ve had the most fun for eight years.
BILL CLINTON
The most enduring image arising from Bill Clinton’s failed effort to bring peace to the Middle East was the former president’s threeway handshake on the White House lawn with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Behind the scenes, however, it wasn’t Clinton who led the peacemaking effort, but a mild-mannered, middle-aged American diplomat named Dennis Ross.
As part of my liaison work with the Mossad in the 1990s, I met Ross on various occasions, and found him to be intelligent and thoughtful. At the time, much was made of the fact that Ross is Jewish. But by my observation, he was impeccably even-handed. If the peace envoy had any flaw, it was that he was too gullible when it came to swallowing Yasser Arafat’s cynical promises. As I will demonstrate, neither Ross nor Clinton was willing to acknowledge the truth about the inveterate terrorist, even when Israel’s intelligence establishment presented them with the plainest evidence imaginable.
By 1998, Palestinian terrorism had become a common feature of the post-Oslo Accords landscape. These attacks were conducted with a wink and a nod from Arafat. But Ross, along with the rest of the West’s diplomatic corps, insisted they were the handiwork of marginal radicals—and that the best way to thwart them was to prop up Arafat as a “moderate” alternative.
For the cameras, Ross put on a brave front. But when I met him in person, he usually looked tired and frustrated. In private conversation, he conceded that Arafat was maddening to deal with. Most of us at the Mossad saw Ross as a well-meaning diplomat with a near-impossible mandate.
It’s no secret that Clinton’s determination to bring peace to the Middle East was not motivated only by geopolitical goodwill; it was also a bid to burnish his presidential legacy and win the Nobel Peace Prize. And so he used every available tool at his disposal to accomplish the goal—including the CIA. The Agency’s station in Tel Aviv was staffed with thirty-plus officers, far more than were needed for standard intelligence functions. At Tevel, it was common knowledge that the majority of these agents were doing quasi-political liaison work with the myriad warlords and Arafat lieutenants who were the real power behind the ostensibly democratic Palestinian Authority.
As a naive West would finally find out when Arafat launched his allout terrorist war against Israel in 2000, Clinton’s no-questions-asked approach to Palestinian nation-building was misguided. One of the most deadly consequences was that the techniques the CIA taught the PA security apparatus—covert operations and counterterrorism, in particular—served to professionalize an organization that would soon be openly at war with Israel.
In order to make a success of Oslo before the end of Clinton’s second term in 2001, Ross and the other Americans I dealt with turned a blind eye to the growing evidence that Arafat had no intention of pursuing a peaceful two-state solution. But Israeli leaders were more concerned with protecting Israel than winning international awards. And eventually, there came a time when we had to start showing the Americans the facts they didn’t want to see.
One of these instances came in the spring of 1998, when I got a call from the head of the ISA’s Arab affairs division, Silvan. He told me the ISA had something that Stan Moskowitz, the CIA’s chief of station, needed to see.
I headed out to the ISA office to see what Silvan had in mind. When I arrived, he was with the ISA’s counterterrorism chief, Menachem. They had with them a small file box, from which they produced a set of Arabic documents issued by the Palestinian Authority.
“ We brought some visual aids,” said Menachem, a dark, bespectacled fellow who’d spent years at the sharp end of the ISA’s campaign against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. “This is evidence linking Arafat and one of his security chiefs with shooting attacks against Israeli civilians.”
After a few minutes of Menachem’s show-and-tell, I knew that what I was hearing was a bombshell. In 1998, the world—and even many Israelis—still saw Arafat as an erstwhile killer who’d made a genuine, if imperfect, conversion to peaceable statesman. Just four years earlier, he and Yitzhak Rabin had shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, everyone knew Arafat was playing a do
uble game politically, saying one thing in English and another in Arabic in order to appease militant Palestinian factions. But no one then suspected that Arafat was reverting to full-bore terrorism, orchestrating killings of Jewish civilians from his government offices in Ramallah.
Later, we came back to Mossad HQ, and I set the pair up in a conference room equipped with a video projector. Soon thereafter, Moskowitz’s white Mercedes pulled up. I came outside and greeted him, then gave an Arabic greeting of “Ahalan wa Sahalan” to Ezra, his Circassian driver. The security guards opened the gates and bomb barrier, and Moskowitz’s limo glided into the compound.
Moskowitz was clearly irritated to have been taken away from whatever he’d been doing at his stylish apartment in Jaffa, but he maintained the outward forms of diplomacy; the presence of Silvan, a division head, meant this was no run-of-the-mill briefing. I got Ezra a drink as he waited in the car, and took Moskowitz into the meeting room.
The chief of station took his seat, and I sat next to him while Menachem turned on the overhead projector. He began the presentation by asking Moskowitz if he’d ever heard of Ghazi Jabali.
“He’s the police chief in Gaza,” Moskowitz responded in a bored voice.
This was true. But everyone in the room knew that the term police had a different meaning in the Palestinian Authority than in Israel or the United States. As in the West, police in the PA settled neighborhood disputes and caught petty criminals (when they felt like it). But they also constituted a well-armed paramilitary force that Arafat could deploy as his personal enforcers. Jabali himself was a notoriously corrupt Fatah apparatchik. Until this point, however, we had little reason to believe he was directly involved in anything worse than standard shakedown operations.
