- 70 Billion Damages Claim. Being Issued By INL News Limited Media Group Against The Dublin City Council, Richard Shakespeare the Chief Executive of the Dublin City Council, the State of Ireland, Simon Harris the Taoiseach of Ireland, the Irish Garda, the Ripley Court Hotel, Seamus 'Banty' McEnaney, the McEnaney Group, Vincent Summerfield, Ripley Court Hotel Manager, Killian McCormack, Ripley Court Hotel Manager, Carol a Ripley Court Hotel Manager, De Paul Charity, David Carol the Chief Executive the DePaul Charity, Michelle Counciller and Orla Mary Martin Barrister for DePaul. Charity, Irish Garda Ciove Burke Irish Garda Number C94, Irish Garda Connor Regan Irish Garda Number C59, Emmer Pattern a senior manager at DePaul Charity
"..... In other words, Israeli intelligence from the outset occupied a shadow realm, one adjacent to yet separate from the country’s democratic institutions. The activities of the intelligence community—most of it (Shin Bet and the Mossad) under the direct command of the prime minister—took place without any effective supervision by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, or by any other independent external body....".. Rise and Kill First -The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assinations By Ronen Bergman
Many "leaders" are kept in line by having them indulge in horrifying occult rituals including human sacrifices, sexual orgies, pedophilia, rape, torture and murder. ( See
"Illuminati Sex Slaves Paint Horrifying Picture" and "The Root of the Problem: Illuminati or Jews?" within.)
The Illuminati goal is to degrade and enslave humanity, mentally and spiritually, if not physically. this group's influence is like a cancer that extends throughout
society. It has subverted many seemingly benevolent organizations (like charities and professional associations) and most political movements, especially Zionism, Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Neo-conservatism and Fascism. This is why society seems to be run by soulless men with pinched faces who spout platitudes and exude evil.
The "Jewish" Conspiracy- The Illuminati - The Cult That Highjacked the World
Recently, on his internet radio show, Alan Stang asked me if there is such a thing as a Jewish conspiracy. He gets e-mail from people blaming Jews, Jesuits, the Vatican, Freemasons etc.
I replied that the central banking cartel is the only group with both the motive and the means to take over the world. Consisting mainly of Cabala-believing Jews and Freemasons, it is the head of the octopus. Zionism, Freemasonry, organized Jewry, Imperialism, Jesuits, Vatican, Intelligence agencies, mass media, etc. are among countless octopus arms.
The "motive" is to protect its priceless but fraudulent private monopoly over public (government) credit (money creation.) They need a "world government" to ensure that no nation prints its own money or defaults on the "loans" the bankers spun out of nothing.
The "means" of course is their unlimited wealth funneled through their network of cartels, which allows them to own the government, mass media, education, etc. Anyone who succeeds in public life is their puppet or unconsciously serves their agenda. Their Zionist-Freemason-Communist-
3Naturally, they are trying to suppress this kind of information. The Canadian Jewish Congress has complained to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission demanding Jewish references be removed from my website, www.henrymakow.com.
As of March 2009, the CHRC is holding a "Tribunal" to investigate my writing. The excuse that I promote "hatred" is the tired pretext.
In my mind, this confirms everything I am saying. I am not a great prophet but Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Amos also criticized Jewish "leadership" and would
have been treated the same way today.
The CJC doesn't want Jews to know that the Jewish enterprise has been hijacked.Jewish leadership has perverted the ideal of a holy people chosen to advocate for morality into an elite self-chosen to take God's place. The bankers use this Jewish
Messianism as an instrument to consolidate their material, spiritual and cultural hegemony. Judaism ( with Communism & Zionism) are systems to control Jews, and
through them the human race.
The world government tyranny is the only conquest to take place without the knowledge of the conquered. In the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the author
repeats, our "countersign" is "Force and Make-believe." By "Make-believe," he means deception which is their "magic." (Protocol I)
When alien bankers control the purse strings, inevitably the State becomes synonymous with these bankers. The State is a ruse used to manipulate the masses, "public" in name only. This is the truth behind the "make-believe" face of the Communist NWO. 1his tyranny is also the first in history which cannot be mentioned for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic" and a "hater:' Trust me, the hatred is entirely on the Cabalist side.
The "Jewish" Conspiracy
Recently, on his internet radio show, Alan Stang asked me if there is such a thing as a Jewish conspiracy. He gets e-mail from people blaming Jews, Jesuits, the Vatican, Freemasons etc.
I replied that the central banking cartel is the only group with both the motive and the means to take over the world. Consisting mainly of Cabala-believing Jews and Freemasons, it is the head of the octopus. Zionism, Freemasonry, organized Jewry, Imperialism, Jesuits, Vatican, Intelligence agencies, mass media, etc. are among countless octopus arms.
The "motive" is to protect its priceless but fraudulent private monopoly over public (government) credit (money creation.) They need a "world government" to ensure that no nation prints its own money or defaults on the "loans" the bankers spun out of nothing.
The "means" of course is their unlimited wealth funneled through their network of cartels, which allows them to own the government, mass media, education, etc. Anyone who succeeds in public life is their puppet or unconsciously serves their agenda. Their Zionist-Freemason-Communist-
The ideology of world tyranny, Illuminism, derives from the Jewish Cabala which preaches that man (i.e. the bankers) can usurp the place of God and redefine truth.
About 1770, a syndicate of bankers led by Mayer Rothschild started the "Illuminati," a Satanic cult designed to subvert society. According to Edith Starr Miller, the Rothschild syndicate included Jewish financiers such as Daniel Itzig, Friedlander, the Goldsmids and Moses Mocatta. ("Occult Theocracy," p. 184.)
According to Miller, the goals of the Illuminati ( Communism and the NWO) were the destruction of Christianity, monarchies, nation-states (in favor of their world government or "internationalism"), the abolition of family ties and marriage by means of promoting homosexuality and promiscuity; the end of inheritance and private property; and the suppression of any collective identity in the spurious name of" universal human brotherhood," i.e. "diversity:' (p.185)
Naturally, they are trying to suppress this kind of information. The Canadian Jewish Congress has complained to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission
demanding Jewish references be removed from my website, www.henrymakow.com.
As of March 2009, the CHRC is holding a "Tribunal" to investigate my writing. The excuse that I promote "hatred" is the tired pretext.
In my mind, this confirms everything I am saying. I am not a great prophet but Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Amos also criticized Jewish "leadership" and would
have been treated the same way today.
The CJC doesn't want Jews to know that the Jewish enterprise has been hijacked. Jewish leadership has perverted the ideal of a holy people chosen to advocate for
morality into an elite self-chosen to take God's place. The bankers use this Jewish Messianism as an instrument to consolidate their material, spiritual and cultural
hegemony. Judaism ( with Communism & Zionism) are systems to control Jews, and through them the human race.
The world government tyranny is the only conquest to take place without the knowledge of the conquered. In the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the author
repeats, our "countersign" is "Force and Make-believe." By "Make-believe," he means deception which is their "magic." (Protocol I)
When alien bankers control the purse strings, inevitably the State becomes synonymous with these bankers. The State is a ruse used to manipulate the masses, "public" in name only. This is the truth behind the "make-believe" face of the Communist NWO. This tyranny is also the first in history which cannot be mentioned for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic" and a "hater:' Trust me, the hatred is entirely on the Cabalist side.
Recently, on his internet radio show, Alan Stang asked me if there is such a thing as a Jewish conspiracy. He gets e-mail from people blaming Jews, Jesuits, the Vatican, Freemasons etc.
I replied that the central banking cartel is the only group with both the motive and the means to take over the world. Consisting mainly of Cabala-believing Jews and Freemasons, it is the head of the octopus. Zionism, Freemasonry, organized Jewry, Imperialism, Jesuits, Vatican, Intelligence agencies, mass media, etc. are among countless octopus arms.
The "motive" is to protect its priceless but fraudulent private monopoly over public (government) credit (money creation.) They need a "world government" to ensure that no nation prints its own money or defaults on the "loans" the bankers spun out of nothing.
The "means" of course is their unlimited wealth funneled through their network of cartels, which allows them to own the government, mass media, education, etc. Anyone who succeeds in public life is their puppet or unconsciously serves their agenda. Their Zionist-Freemason-Communist-
The ideology of world tyranny, Illuminism, derives from the Jewish Cabala which preaches that man (i.e. the bankers) can usurp the place of God and redefine truth.
About 1770, a syndicate of bankers led by Mayer Rothschild started the "Illuminati," a Satanic cult designed to subvert society. According to Edith Starr Miller, the Rothschild syndicate included Jewish financiers such as Daniel Itzig, Friedlander, the Goldsmids and Moses Mocatta. ("Occult Theocracy," p. 184.)
According to Miller, the goals of the Illuminati ( Communism and the NWO) were the destruction of Christianity, monarchies, nation-states (in favor of their world government or "internationalism"), the abolition of family ties and marriage by means of promoting homosexuality and promiscuity; the end of inheritance and private property; and the suppression of any collective identity in the spurious name of" universal human brotherhood," i.e. "diversity:' (p.185)
Naturally, they are trying to suppress this kind of information. The Canadian Jewish Congress has complained to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission
demanding Jewish references be removed from my website, www.henrymakow.com.
As of March 2009, the CHRC is holding a "Tribunal" to investigate my writing. The excuse that I promote "hatred" is the tired pretext.
In my mind, this confirms everything I am saying. I am not a great prophet but Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Amos also criticized Jewish "leadership" and would
have been treated the same way today.
The CJC doesn't want Jews to know that the Jewish enterprise has been hijacked. Jewish leadership has perverted the ideal of a holy people chosen to advocate for
morality into an elite self-chosen to take God's place. The bankers use this Jewish Messianism as an instrument to consolidate their material, spiritual and cultural
hegemony. Judaism ( with Communism & Zionism) are systems to control Jews, and through them the human race.
The world government tyranny is the only conquest to take place without the knowledge of the conquered. In the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the author
repeats, our "countersign" is "Force and Make-believe." By "Make-believe," he means deception which is their "magic." (Protocol I)
When alien bankers control the purse strings, inevitably the State becomes synonymous with these bankers. The State is a ruse used to manipulate the masses, "public" in name only. This is the truth behind the "make-believe" face of the Communist NWO. This tyranny is also the first in history which cannot be mentioned for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic" and a "hater:' Trust me, the hatred is entirely on the Cabalist side.
This ruse is achieved by blaming all Jews for the machinations of a relative few.
It's as though all Italians were blamed for the activities of the Mafia. Blaming all Jews naturally makes them run interference for the Rothschilds, thus confirming
suspicions. Talk about walking into the line of fire! What would we think of ltalians if they defended Al Capone and organized crime?
Organized Jewry uses "anti-Semitism" and "hate" like a witch doctor's curse from which all shrink in horror. To neutralize this voodoo, we should wear the
badge of anti-Semite with pride, asserting that it stands for opposition to the disproportionate Jewish (and crypto Jewish) role in advancing the New World
Order. (No one is advocating or condoning genocide.) Thus, anti-Semitism will become a legitimate political (not racial) movement directed against specific Jewish
(and non-Jewish) Illuminati pawns and policies.
It's as though all Italians were blamed for the activities of the Mafia. Blaming all Jews naturally makes them run interference for the Rothschilds, thus confirming
suspicions. Talk about walking into the line of fire! What would we think of ltalians if they defended Al Capone and organized crime?
Organized Jewry uses "anti-Semitism" and "hate" like a witch doctor's curse from which all shrink in horror. To neutralize this voodoo, we should wear the
badge of anti-Semite with pride, asserting that it stands for opposition to the disproportionate Jewish (and crypto Jewish) role in advancing the New World
Order. (No one is advocating or condoning genocide.) Thus, anti-Semitism will become a legitimate political (not racial) movement directed against specific Jewish
(and non-Jewish) Illuminati pawns and policies.
WHAT BEING JEWISH MEANS TO ME
For me, being Jewish is a matter of spirit, mind, blood and culture. I have a strong sense of God as an immanent moral dimension. I believe man's purpose and duty
is to manifest this dimension. I won't ever impose my idea of good on you. But in a society that had its bearings, questions of what is true, just or beautiful would be a focus of constant debate.
For me, being Jewish is a matter of spirit, mind, blood and culture. I have a strong sense of God as an immanent moral dimension. I believe man's purpose and duty
is to manifest this dimension. I won't ever impose my idea of good on you. But in a society that had its bearings, questions of what is true, just or beautiful would be a focus of constant debate.
I am an assimilated Jew. I identify with the human race first, my countrymen second, and Jews third. I have had no Jewish education and don't regularly associate
with Jews. So far, except for the Ten Commandments and a few parts of the Old Testament, the "religion" doesn't attract me. "Know them by their fruits," Jesus said.
In contrast, I can see the civilizing effect Christ's Gospel of Love has had on society.
The first baby steps in human spiritual evolution is considering others before oneself and recognizing that all men (not just Jews) are brothers.
In his book, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion" ( 1994) Israel Shahak confirmed my suspicion that Judaism is not a religion. "Faith and beliefs ( except nationalistic
beliefs) play an extremely small part in classical Judaism. What is of prime importance is the ritual act, rather than the significance which that act is supposed to
have or the belief attached to it." (p.35)
The next step for me was concluding that Judaism is a pagan racial creed at best, and a Satanic secret society at worst. The nature of a secret society is that the
membership is fed idealistic platitudes and isn't told the real agenda.
Most Jews are unaware that Judaism largely eschews the Old Testament in favor of the Talmud and Cabala. Very few Jews read these books. If they did, they might
realize that the Talmud is full of hate and contempt for non Jews. They would discover that the Cabala is the basis of modern witchcraft, astrology, numerology, tarot
cards, black magic, androgyny, sex worship and much of the New Age movement.
It teaches that good and evil are one and that black is white and vice-versa. Cabalist Jews tell this joke privately: ''An orthodox Jew is interviewing three
applicants for a job. He asks them, 'What is 2 plus 2?' The first two applicants answer 4 and 22. He kicks them out. The third answers, "'Whatever you want it to
be.' He is hired." This is what we are up against in the NWO, an attempt to reshape truth itself according to self-interest.
The Cabala is the basis of the cult of sex worship that has engulfed the world.
Conjugal sex is a required ritual for Cabalist Jews on the Sabbath. Physical desire supposedly "increases a man's love for God;' and intercourse is "an instrument for
uniting with God.'' (1his, of course, is rubbish. You unite with God by serving Him seven days a week. Sex is a natural instinct like eating, not a sacred act.)
The arc of Western Civilization has gone from (ascent) belief in-God to (descent) belief-in-Satan. The apex was the so-called "Enlightenment" when the money men
decided they could take over from God. Typically, the decline into moral darkness is represented by Luciferians as light, sunrise ( eg. Barack Obama's logo.)
with Jews. So far, except for the Ten Commandments and a few parts of the Old Testament, the "religion" doesn't attract me. "Know them by their fruits," Jesus said.
In contrast, I can see the civilizing effect Christ's Gospel of Love has had on society.
The first baby steps in human spiritual evolution is considering others before oneself and recognizing that all men (not just Jews) are brothers.
In his book, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion" ( 1994) Israel Shahak confirmed my suspicion that Judaism is not a religion. "Faith and beliefs ( except nationalistic
beliefs) play an extremely small part in classical Judaism. What is of prime importance is the ritual act, rather than the significance which that act is supposed to
have or the belief attached to it." (p.35)
The next step for me was concluding that Judaism is a pagan racial creed at best, and a Satanic secret society at worst. The nature of a secret society is that the
membership is fed idealistic platitudes and isn't told the real agenda.
Most Jews are unaware that Judaism largely eschews the Old Testament in favor of the Talmud and Cabala. Very few Jews read these books. If they did, they might
realize that the Talmud is full of hate and contempt for non Jews. They would discover that the Cabala is the basis of modern witchcraft, astrology, numerology, tarot
cards, black magic, androgyny, sex worship and much of the New Age movement.
It teaches that good and evil are one and that black is white and vice-versa. Cabalist Jews tell this joke privately: ''An orthodox Jew is interviewing three
applicants for a job. He asks them, 'What is 2 plus 2?' The first two applicants answer 4 and 22. He kicks them out. The third answers, "'Whatever you want it to
be.' He is hired." This is what we are up against in the NWO, an attempt to reshape truth itself according to self-interest.
The Cabala is the basis of the cult of sex worship that has engulfed the world.
Conjugal sex is a required ritual for Cabalist Jews on the Sabbath. Physical desire supposedly "increases a man's love for God;' and intercourse is "an instrument for
uniting with God.'' (1his, of course, is rubbish. You unite with God by serving Him seven days a week. Sex is a natural instinct like eating, not a sacred act.)
The arc of Western Civilization has gone from (ascent) belief in-God to (descent) belief-in-Satan. The apex was the so-called "Enlightenment" when the money men
decided they could take over from God. Typically, the decline into moral darkness is represented by Luciferians as light, sunrise ( eg. Barack Obama's logo.)
According to Tex Marrs, the Cabala teaches that the "holy serpent is the true God; that all the evil that a person does, through alchemy is magically transformed into righteousness; and that yes, Lucifer is Lord. Satan is the true and only god. That is the essential doctrine of Cabalism." ( Codex Magica p. 426.)
I suspect the Cabala is the blueprint of the post-Christian era, the reason we are drowning in media-generated occultism, pornography, violence and fear. 5As a youth, I was told that Jews always have been hated for no reason. (1his is how the leadership controls and manipulates Jews.) My grandparents died in the holocaust and my parents bore the scars of passing as non-Jews in Nazi Europe. I was told Israel was the answer to centuries of persecution. I saw my fellow Jews in
America as a small and vulnerable community.
I now realize anti-Semitism is caused by a complex variety of reasons. The main one is that, unknown to most Jews, Judaism contains an ideology of supremacy and domination. The Illuminati Jewish leadership regards itself as God. Leon Trotsky put God on trial in Moscow in 1923 before 5000 men of the Red Army. God was found guilty of various ignominious acts and convicted in absentia. ("Berliner Taegeblatt, " May 1, 1923.)
The "Jewish World" announced Feb. 9, 1883 that, "The great ideal of Judaism is that the whole world shall be imbued with Jewish teaching and that in a Universal Brotherhood of Nations -- a greater Judaism in fact -- all the separate races and religions shall disappear:'
This sentiment plays an important part in the New World Order. It provides a support system for the central bankers and diverts blame away from them. If your ethnic or religious group is secretly being used for evil, you had better distance yourself or you will be left holding the bag.
This applies to almost everyone, not just Jews. As an ethnic Jew, I ask, does the Jewish god represent a universal moral order or a primitive tribal egregore (i.e. projection of group psyche?) Is the Jewish egregore now Lucifer? ( See within, "The God that Serves Elite Jews:')
We may be approaching a crisis. Organized Jewry and their Masonic allies are following a script based on End Times Biblical prophesies ( which they may have written or modified.) This script calls for a Third World War and mass destruction of all people including 2/3 of all Jews. The New World Order is supposed to rise
from the debris.
The human race is entering a Dark Age. As the New World Order is enacted, anti-Semitism inevitably will grow. Now is the time for Jews to awaken and take a stand. Now, there is no reward for such a courageous act, only scorn. Later if anti Semitism becomes rampant, Jews will have to circle their wagons. It will be too late.
Two final and unrelated comments: Many Jews are alienated from the concept of a loving God represented by Jesus' teaching. These Jews are metaphysical outcasts.
They feel they have to "earn" love by overachieving. Like a woman who overeats to compensate for lack of love, they seek money and power. In extreme cases (like the Rothschilds,) their quest for limitless wealth and power, their need to own and control everything, define Satan's dominion.
I used to look askance at the ability of Christians to enjoy ordinary life. "Normal" and wholesome seemed boring and ridiculous. I had to justify my life, find life's meaning. I didn't realize that life has inherent meaning when it is led according to God's loving design.
Finally, people can't discover the truth if they don't know what to look for. The truth - that mankind is controlled by Satanists -- is hard to prove conclusively. But in more than 60 articles, I show that this is the most convincing explanation for belief-in-Satan. The apex was the so-called "Enlightenment" when the money men decided they could take over from God. Typically, the decline into moral darkness is represented by Luciferians as light, sunrise ( eg. Barack Obama's logo.)
According to Tex Marrs, the Cabala teaches that the "holy serpent is the true God; that all the evil that a person does, through alchemy is magically transformed into righteousness; and that yes, Lucifer is Lord. Satan is the true and only god. That is the essential doctrine of Cabalism." ( Codex Magica p. 426.)
I suspect the Cabala is the blueprint of the post-Christian era, the reason we are drowning in media-generated occultism, pornography, violence and fear. 5As a youth, I was told that Jews always have been hated for no reason. (1his is how the leadership controls and manipulates Jews.) My grandparents died in the holocaust and my parents bore the scars of passing as non-Jews in Nazi Europe. I was told Israel was the answer to centuries of persecution. I saw my fellow Jews in America as a small and vulnerable community.
I now realize anti-Semitism is caused by a complex variety of reasons. The main one is that, unknown to most Jews, Judaism contains an ideology of supremacy and domination. The Illuminati Jewish leadership regards itself as God. Leon Trotsky put God on trial in Moscow in 1923 before 5000 men of the Red Army. God was found guilty of various ignominious acts and convicted in absentia. ("Berliner Taegeblatt," May 1, 1923.)
The "Jewish World" announced Feb. 9, 1883 that, "The great ideal of Judaism is that the whole world shall be imbued with Jewish teaching and that in a Universal Brotherhood of Nations -- a greater Judaism in fact -- all the separate races and religions shall disappear:'
This sentiment plays an important part in the New World Order. It provides a support system for the central bankers and diverts blame away from them. If your ethnic or religious group is secretly being used for evil, you had better distance yourself or you will be left holding the bag.
This applies to almost everyone, not just Jews. As an ethnic Jew, I ask, does the Jewish god represent a universal moral order or a primitive tribal egregore (i.e. projection of group psyche?) Is the Jewish egregore now Lucifer? ( See within, "The God that Serves Elite Jews:')
We may be approaching a crisis. Organized Jewry and their Masonic allies are following a script based on End Times Biblical prophesies ( which they may have written or modified.) This script calls for a Third World War and mass destruction of all people including 2/3 of all Jews. The New World Order is supposed to rise from the debris.
The human race is entering a Dark Age. As the New World Order is enacted, anti-Semitism inevitably will grow. Now is the time for Jews to awaken and take a stand. Now, there is no reward for such a courageous act, only scorn. Later if anti# Semitism becomes rampant, Jews will have to circle their wagons. It will be too late.
Two final and unrelated comments: Many Jews are alienated from the concept of a loving God represented by Jesus' teaching. These Jews are metaphysical outcasts.
They feel they have to "earn" love by overachieving. Like a woman who overeats to compensate for lack of love, they seek money and power. In extreme cases (like the Rothschilds,) their quest for limitless wealth and power, their need to own and control everything, define Satan's dominion.
I used to look askance at the ability of Christians to enjoy ordinary life. "Normal" and wholesome seemed boring and ridiculous. I had to justify my life, find life's
meaning. I didn't realize that life has inherent meaning when it is led according to God's loving design.
Finally, people can't discover the truth if they don't know what to look for. The truth - that mankind is controlled by Satanists -- is hard to prove conclusively. But in more than 60 articles, I show that this is the most convincing explanation for Based On a True Story?
If this were a movie treatment, it would be rejected as implausible. Our leaders are not chosen for their intelligence or achievement but rather because they are able to win the peoples' trust and willing to betray it. They are chosen by a small Satanic cult -Cabalistic bankers and Freemasons--that controls the world's finances and media. Our "leaders" are junior members of this international cult, called the Order of the Illuminati.
"We replaced the ruler by a caricature of a government," their Master Plan chortle,
"by a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures."
Many "leaders" are kept in line by having them indulge in horrifying occult rituals including human sacrifices, sexual orgies, pedophilia, rape, torture and murder. ( See
"Illuminati Sex Slaves Paint Horrifying Picture" and "The Root of the Problem: Illuminati or Jews?" within.)
The Illuminati goal is to degrade and enslave humanity, mentally and spiritually, if not physically. this group's influence is like a cancer that extends throughout
society. It has subverted many seemingly benevolent organizations (like charities and professional associations) and most political movements, especially Zionism, Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Neo-conservatism and Fascism. This is why society seems to be run by soulless men with pinched faces who spout platitudes and exude evil.
The Illuminati have subverted all religions and institutions including one group that fancies itself "chosen by God." In fact, leaders of this group figure prominently in
creating this Satanic dispensation. But whenever critics suggest that the "Chosen" are being misled and betrayed, they are accused of "racism" - a clever way of
quashing resistance.
Thus, attention to the most pressing problem of all time is dismissed as "prejudice."
And the Chosen continue to be pawns, scapegoats and human shields for their diabolical and deceitful "leaders:'
Like a security beam, Illuminati tyranny is invisible until you cross it. Then, doors silently close and positions of influence are denied. If you persist, you are slandered, bankrupted or even killed. In the future, truth tellers and dissenters will be denied access to credit and trade. It is amazing how easily we have succumbed to tyranny.
Public success is determined by acquiescence - witting or unwitting - in this diabolical conspiracy. The people of the West are blinkered, leaderless and feckless.
Our material and technological achievement is great, but culturally and spiritually # we are impoverished and enchained.
This sentiment plays an important part in the New World Order. It provides a support system for the central bankers and diverts blame away from them. If your ethnic or religious group is secretly being used for evil, you had better distance yourself or you will be left holding the bag.
This applies to almost everyone, not just Jews. As an ethnic Jew, I ask, does the Jewish god represent a universal moral order or a primitive tribal egregore (i.e. projection of group psyche?) Is the Jewish egregore now Lucifer? ( See within, "The God that Serves Elite Jews:')
We may be approaching a crisis. Organized Jewry and their Masonic allies are following a script based on End Times Biblical prophesies ( which they may have written or modified.) This script calls for a Third World War and mass destruction of all people including 2/3 of all Jews. The New World Order is supposed to rise from the debris.
The human race is entering a Dark Age. As the New World Order is enacted, anti-Semitism inevitably will grow. Now is the time for Jews to awaken and take a stand. Now, there is no reward for such a courageous act, only scorn. Later if anti# Semitism becomes rampant, Jews will have to circle their wagons. It will be too late.
Two final and unrelated comments: Many Jews are alienated from the concept of a loving God represented by Jesus' teaching. These Jews are metaphysical outcasts.
They feel they have to "earn" love by overachieving. Like a woman who overeats to compensate for lack of love, they seek money and power. In extreme cases (like the Rothschilds,) their quest for limitless wealth and power, their need to own and control everything, define Satan's dominion.
I used to look askance at the ability of Christians to enjoy ordinary life. "Normal" and wholesome seemed boring and ridiculous. I had to justify my life, find life's
meaning. I didn't realize that life has inherent meaning when it is led according to God's loving design.
Finally, people can't discover the truth if they don't know what to look for. The truth - that mankind is controlled by Satanists -- is hard to prove conclusively. But in more than 60 articles, I show that this is the most convincing explanation for Based On a True Story?
If this were a movie treatment, it would be rejected as implausible. Our leaders are not chosen for their intelligence or achievement but rather because they are able to win the peoples' trust and willing to betray it. They are chosen by a small Satanic cult -Cabalistic bankers and Freemasons--that controls the world's finances and media. Our "leaders" are junior members of this international cult, called the Order of the Illuminati.
"We replaced the ruler by a caricature of a government," their Master Plan chortle,
"by a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures."
Many "leaders" are kept in line by having them indulge in horrifying occult rituals including human sacrifices, sexual orgies, pedophilia, rape, torture and murder. ( See
"Illuminati Sex Slaves Paint Horrifying Picture" and "The Root of the Problem: Illuminati or Jews?" within.)
The Illuminati goal is to degrade and enslave humanity, mentally and spiritually, if not physically. this group's influence is like a cancer that extends throughout
society. It has subverted many seemingly benevolent organizations (like charities and professional associations) and most political movements, especially Zionism, Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Neo-conservatism and Fascism. This is why society seems to be run by soulless men with pinched faces who spout platitudes and exude evil.
The Illuminati have subverted all religions and institutions including one group that fancies itself "chosen by God." In fact, leaders of this group figure prominently in
creating this Satanic dispensation. But whenever critics suggest that the "Chosen" are being misled and betrayed, they are accused of "racism" - a clever way of
quashing resistance.
Thus, attention to the most pressing problem of all time is dismissed as "prejudice."
And the Chosen continue to be pawns, scapegoats and human shields for their diabolical and deceitful "leaders:'
Like a security beam, Illuminati tyranny is invisible until you cross it. Then, doors silently close and positions of influence are denied. If you persist, you are slandered, bankrupted or even killed. In the future, truth tellers and dissenters will be denied access to credit and trade. It is amazing how easily we have succumbed to tyranny.
Public success is determined by acquiescence - witting or unwitting - in this diabolical conspiracy. The people of the West are blinkered, leaderless and feckless.
Our material and technological achievement is great, but culturally and spiritually # we are impoverished and enchained.
The "Jewish" Conspiracy
Recently, on his internet radio show, Alan Stang asked me if there is such a thing as a Jewish conspiracy. He gets e-mail from people blaming Jews, Jesuits, the Vatican, Freemasons etc.
I replied that the central banking cartel is the only group with both the motive and the means to take over the world. Consisting mainly of Cabala-believing Jews and
Freemasons, it is the head of the octopus. Zionism, Freemasonry, organized Jewry, Imperialism, Jesuits, Vatican, Intelligence agencies, mass media, etc. are among
countless octopus arms.
The "motive" is to protect its priceless but fraudulent private monopoly over public (government) credit (money creation.) They need a "world government" to ensure that no nation prints its own money or defaults on the "loans" the bankers spun out of nothing.
The "means" of course is their unlimited wealth funneled through their network of cartels, which allows them to own the government, mass media, education, etc.
Anyone who succeeds in public life is their puppet or unconsciously serves their agenda. Their Zionist-Freemason-Communist-
The ideology of world tyranny, Illuminism, derives from the Jewish Cabala which preaches that man (i.e. the bankers) can usurp the place of God and redefine truth.
About 1770, a syndicate of bankers led by Mayer Rothschild started the "Illuminati," a Satanic cult designed to subvert society. According to Edith Starr Miller, the
Rothschild syndicate included Jewish financiers such as Daniel Itzig, Friedlander, the Goldsmids and Moses Mocatta. ("Occult Theocracy," p. 184.)
According to Miller, the goals of the Illuminati ( Communism and the NWO) were the destruction of Christianity, monarchies, nation-states (in favor of their world
government or "internationalism"), the abolition of family ties and marriage by means of promoting homosexuality and promiscuity; the end of inheritance and
private property; and the suppression of any collective identity in the spurious name of "universal human brotherhood," i.e. "diversity:' (p.185) Naturally, they are trying to suppress this kind of information. The Canadian
Jewish Congress has complained to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission demanding Jewish references be removed from my website, www.henrymakow.com.
As of March 2009, the CHRC is holding a "Tribunal" to investigate my writing. The excuse that I promote "hatred" is the tired pretext.
In my mind, this confirms everything I am saying. I am not a great prophet but Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Amos also criticized Jewish "leadership" and would
have been treated the same way today.
The CJC doesn't want Jews to know that the Jewish enterprise has been hijacked.
Jewish leadership has perverted the ideal of a holy people chosen to advocate for morality into an elite self-chosen to take God's place. The bankers use this Jewish
Messianism as an instrument to consolidate their material, spiritual and cultural hegemony. Judaism ( with Communism & Zionism) are systems to control Jews, and
through them the human race.
The world government tyranny is the only conquest to take place without the knowledge of the conquered. In the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the author
repeats, our "countersign" is "Force and Make-believe." By "Make-believe," he means deception which is their "magic." (Protocol I)
When alien bankers control the purse strings, inevitably the State becomes synonymous with these bankers. The State is a ruse used to manipulate the masses, "public" in name only. This is the truth behind the "make-believe" face of the Communist NWO.
1his tyranny is also the first in history which cannot be mentioned for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic" and a "hater:' Trust me, the hatred is entirely on the Cabalist side.
This ruse is achieved by blaming all Jews for the machinations of a relative few. It's as though all Italians were blamed for the activities of the Mafia. Blaming all
Jews naturally makes them run interference for the Rothschilds, thus confirming suspicions. Talk about walking into the line of fire! What would we think of ltalians
if they defended Al Capone and organized crime?
Organized Jewry uses "anti-Semitism" and "hate" like a witch doctor's curse from which all shrink in horror. To neutralize this voodoo, we should wear the
badge of anti-Semite with pride, asserting that it stands for opposition to the disproportionate Jewish (and crypto-Jewish) role in advancing the New World
Order. (No one is advocating or condoning genocide.) Thus, anti-Semitism will become a legitimate political (not racial) movement directed against specific Jewish
(and non-Jewish) Illuminati pawns and policies.
Recently, on his internet radio show, Alan Stang asked me if there is such a thing as a Jewish conspiracy. He gets e-mail from people blaming Jews, Jesuits, the Vatican, Freemasons etc.
I replied that the central banking cartel is the only group with both the motive and the means to take over the world. Consisting mainly of Cabala-believing Jews and
Freemasons, it is the head of the octopus. Zionism, Freemasonry, organized Jewry, Imperialism, Jesuits, Vatican, Intelligence agencies, mass media, etc. are among
countless octopus arms.
The "motive" is to protect its priceless but fraudulent private monopoly over public (government) credit (money creation.) They need a "world government" to ensure that no nation prints its own money or defaults on the "loans" the bankers spun out of nothing.
The "means" of course is their unlimited wealth funneled through their network of cartels, which allows them to own the government, mass media, education, etc.
Anyone who succeeds in public life is their puppet or unconsciously serves their agenda. Their Zionist-Freemason-Communist-
The ideology of world tyranny, Illuminism, derives from the Jewish Cabala which preaches that man (i.e. the bankers) can usurp the place of God and redefine truth.
About 1770, a syndicate of bankers led by Mayer Rothschild started the "Illuminati," a Satanic cult designed to subvert society. According to Edith Starr Miller, the
Rothschild syndicate included Jewish financiers such as Daniel Itzig, Friedlander, the Goldsmids and Moses Mocatta. ("Occult Theocracy," p. 184.)
According to Miller, the goals of the Illuminati ( Communism and the NWO) were the destruction of Christianity, monarchies, nation-states (in favor of their world
government or "internationalism"), the abolition of family ties and marriage by means of promoting homosexuality and promiscuity; the end of inheritance and
private property; and the suppression of any collective identity in the spurious name of "universal human brotherhood," i.e. "diversity:' (p.185) Naturally, they are trying to suppress this kind of information. The Canadian
Jewish Congress has complained to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission demanding Jewish references be removed from my website, www.henrymakow.com.
As of March 2009, the CHRC is holding a "Tribunal" to investigate my writing. The excuse that I promote "hatred" is the tired pretext.
In my mind, this confirms everything I am saying. I am not a great prophet but Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Amos also criticized Jewish "leadership" and would
have been treated the same way today.
The CJC doesn't want Jews to know that the Jewish enterprise has been hijacked.
Jewish leadership has perverted the ideal of a holy people chosen to advocate for morality into an elite self-chosen to take God's place. The bankers use this Jewish
Messianism as an instrument to consolidate their material, spiritual and cultural hegemony. Judaism ( with Communism & Zionism) are systems to control Jews, and
through them the human race.
The world government tyranny is the only conquest to take place without the knowledge of the conquered. In the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the author
repeats, our "countersign" is "Force and Make-believe." By "Make-believe," he means deception which is their "magic." (Protocol I)
When alien bankers control the purse strings, inevitably the State becomes synonymous with these bankers. The State is a ruse used to manipulate the masses, "public" in name only. This is the truth behind the "make-believe" face of the Communist NWO.
1his tyranny is also the first in history which cannot be mentioned for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic" and a "hater:' Trust me, the hatred is entirely on the Cabalist side.
This ruse is achieved by blaming all Jews for the machinations of a relative few. It's as though all Italians were blamed for the activities of the Mafia. Blaming all
Jews naturally makes them run interference for the Rothschilds, thus confirming suspicions. Talk about walking into the line of fire! What would we think of ltalians
if they defended Al Capone and organized crime?
Organized Jewry uses "anti-Semitism" and "hate" like a witch doctor's curse from which all shrink in horror. To neutralize this voodoo, we should wear the
badge of anti-Semite with pride, asserting that it stands for opposition to the disproportionate Jewish (and crypto-Jewish) role in advancing the New World
Order. (No one is advocating or condoning genocide.) Thus, anti-Semitism will become a legitimate political (not racial) movement directed against specific Jewish
(and non-Jewish) Illuminati pawns and policies.
WHAT BEING JEWISH MEANS TO ME
For me, being Jewish is a matter of spirit, mind, blood and culture. I have a strong
sense of God as an immanent moral dimension. I believe man's purpose and duty is to manifest this dimension. I won't ever impose my idea of good on you. But in a
society that had its bearings, questions of what is true, just or beautiful would be a
focus of constant debate.
I am an assimilated Jew. I identify with the human race first, my countrymen second, and Jews third. I have had no Jewish education and don't regularly associate
with Jews. So far, except for the Ten Commandments and a few parts of the Old Testament, the "religion" doesn't attract me. "Know them by their fruits," Jesus said.
In contrast, I can see the civilizing effect Christ's Gospel of Love has had on society.
The first baby steps in human spiritual evolution is considering others before oneself and recognizing that all men (not just Jews) are brothers.
In his book, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion" ( 1994) Israel Shahak confirmed my suspicion that Judaism is not a religion. "Faith and beliefs ( except nationalistic
beliefs) play an extremely small part in classical Judaism. What is of prime importance is the ritual act, rather than the significance which that act is supposed to
have or the belief attached to it." (p.35)
The next step for me was concluding that Judaism is a pagan racial creed at best, and a Satanic secret society at worst. The nature of a secret society is that the
membership is fed idealistic platitudes and isn't told the real agenda.
Most Jews are unaware that Judaism largely eschews the Old Testament in favor of the Talmud and Cabala. Very few Jews read these books. If they did, they might
realize that the Talmud is full of hate and contempt for non-Jews. They would discover that the Cabala is the basis of modern witchcraft, astrology, numerology, tarot
cards, black magic, androgyny, sex worship and much of the New Age movement.
It teaches that good and evil are one and that black is white and vice-versa. CabalistJews tell this joke privately: ''An orthodox Jew is interviewing three
applicants for a job. He asks them, 'What is 2 plus 2?' The first two applicants answer 4 and 22. He kicks them out. The third answers, "'Whatever you want it to
be.' He is hired." This is what we are up against in the NWO, an attempt to reshape
truth itself according to self-interest.
The Cabala is the basis of the cult of sex worship that has engulfed the world. Conjugal sex is a required ritual for Cabalist Jews on the Sabbath. Physical desire
supposedly "increases a man's love for God;' and intercourse is "an instrument for uniting with God.'' (1his, of course, is rubbish. You unite with God by serving Him
seven days a week. Sex is a natural instinct like eating, not a sacred act.)
The arc of Western Civilization has gone from (ascent) belief-in-God to (descent) belief-in-Satan. The apex was the so-called "Enlightenment" when the money men
decided they could take over from God. Typically, the decline into moral darkness is represented by Luciferians as light, sunrise ( eg. Barack Obama's logo.)
According to Tex Marrs, the Cabala teaches that the "holy serpent is the true God;
that all the evil that a person does, through alchemy is magically transformed into righteousness; and that yes, Lucifer is Lord. Satan is the true and only god. That is the essential doctrine of Cabalism." ( Codex Magica p. 426.)
I suspect the Cabala is the blueprint of the post-Christian era, the reason we are drowning in media-generated occultism, pornography, violence and fear.
As a youth, I was told that Jews always have been hated for no reason. (1his is how the leadership controls and manipulates Jews.) My grandparents died in the
holocaust and my parents bore the scars of passing as non-Jews in Nazi Europe. I was told Israel was the answer to centuries of persecution. I saw my fellow Jews in
America as a small and vulnerable community.
I now realize anti-Semitism is caused by a complex variety of reasons. The main one is that, unknown to most Jews, Judaism contains an ideology of supremacy and
domination. The Illuminati Jewish leadership regards itself as God. Leon Trotsky put God on trial in Moscow in 1923 before 5000 men of the Red Army. God was
found guilty of various ignominious acts and convicted in absentia. ("Berliner Taegeblatt," May 1, 1923.)
The "Jewish World" announced Feb. 9, 1883 that, "The great ideal of Judaism is that the whole world shall be imbued with Jewish teaching and that in a Universal
Brotherhood of Nations -- a greater Judaism in fact -- all the separate races and
religions shall disappear:'
This sentiment plays an important part in the New World Order. It provides a support system for the central bankers and diverts blame away from them. If your
ethnic or religious group is secretly being used for evil, you had better distance yourself or you will be left holding the bag.
This applies to almost everyone, not just Jews. As an ethnic Jew, I ask, does the Jewish god represent a universal moral order or a primitive tribal egregore (i.e.
projection of group psyche?) Is the Jewish egregore now Lucifer? ( See within, "The God that Serves Elite Jews:')
We may be approaching a crisis. Organized Jewry and their Masonic allies are following a script based on End Times Biblical prophesies ( which they may have
written or modified.) This script calls for a Third World War and mass destruction of all people including 2/3 of all Jews. The New World Order is supposed to rise
from the debris.
The human race is entering a Dark Age. As the New World Order is enacted, anti-Semitism inevitably will grow. Now is the time for Jews to awaken and take a
stand. Now, there is no reward for such a courageous act, only scorn. Later if anti- Semitism becomes rampant, Jews will have to circle their wagons. It will be too late.
Two final and unrelated comments: Many Jews are alienated from the concept of a loving God represented by Jesus' teaching. These Jews are metaphysical outcasts.
They feel they have to "earn" love by overachieving. Like a woman who overeats to compensate for lack of love, they seek money and power. In extreme cases (like
the Rothschilds,) their quest for limitless wealth and power, their need to own and control everything, define Satan's dominion.
I used to look askance at the ability of Christians to enjoy ordinary life. "Normal"
and wholesome seemed boring and ridiculous. I had to justify my life, find life's meaning. I didn't realize that life has inherent meaning when it is led according to God's loving design.
society that had its bearings, questions of what is true, just or beautiful would be a
focus of constant debate.
I am an assimilated Jew. I identify with the human race first, my countrymen second, and Jews third. I have had no Jewish education and don't regularly associate
with Jews. So far, except for the Ten Commandments and a few parts of the Old Testament, the "religion" doesn't attract me. "Know them by their fruits," Jesus said.
In contrast, I can see the civilizing effect Christ's Gospel of Love has had on society.
The first baby steps in human spiritual evolution is considering others before oneself and recognizing that all men (not just Jews) are brothers.
In his book, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion" ( 1994) Israel Shahak confirmed my suspicion that Judaism is not a religion. "Faith and beliefs ( except nationalistic
beliefs) play an extremely small part in classical Judaism. What is of prime importance is the ritual act, rather than the significance which that act is supposed to
have or the belief attached to it." (p.35)
The next step for me was concluding that Judaism is a pagan racial creed at best, and a Satanic secret society at worst. The nature of a secret society is that the
membership is fed idealistic platitudes and isn't told the real agenda.
Most Jews are unaware that Judaism largely eschews the Old Testament in favor of the Talmud and Cabala. Very few Jews read these books. If they did, they might
realize that the Talmud is full of hate and contempt for non-Jews. They would discover that the Cabala is the basis of modern witchcraft, astrology, numerology, tarot
cards, black magic, androgyny, sex worship and much of the New Age movement.
It teaches that good and evil are one and that black is white and vice-versa. CabalistJews tell this joke privately: ''An orthodox Jew is interviewing three
applicants for a job. He asks them, 'What is 2 plus 2?' The first two applicants answer 4 and 22. He kicks them out. The third answers, "'Whatever you want it to
be.' He is hired." This is what we are up against in the NWO, an attempt to reshape
truth itself according to self-interest.
The Cabala is the basis of the cult of sex worship that has engulfed the world. Conjugal sex is a required ritual for Cabalist Jews on the Sabbath. Physical desire
supposedly "increases a man's love for God;' and intercourse is "an instrument for uniting with God.'' (1his, of course, is rubbish. You unite with God by serving Him
seven days a week. Sex is a natural instinct like eating, not a sacred act.)
The arc of Western Civilization has gone from (ascent) belief-in-God to (descent) belief-in-Satan. The apex was the so-called "Enlightenment" when the money men
decided they could take over from God. Typically, the decline into moral darkness is represented by Luciferians as light, sunrise ( eg. Barack Obama's logo.)
According to Tex Marrs, the Cabala teaches that the "holy serpent is the true God;
that all the evil that a person does, through alchemy is magically transformed into righteousness; and that yes, Lucifer is Lord. Satan is the true and only god. That is the essential doctrine of Cabalism." ( Codex Magica p. 426.)
I suspect the Cabala is the blueprint of the post-Christian era, the reason we are drowning in media-generated occultism, pornography, violence and fear.
As a youth, I was told that Jews always have been hated for no reason. (1his is how the leadership controls and manipulates Jews.) My grandparents died in the
holocaust and my parents bore the scars of passing as non-Jews in Nazi Europe. I was told Israel was the answer to centuries of persecution. I saw my fellow Jews in
America as a small and vulnerable community.
I now realize anti-Semitism is caused by a complex variety of reasons. The main one is that, unknown to most Jews, Judaism contains an ideology of supremacy and
domination. The Illuminati Jewish leadership regards itself as God. Leon Trotsky put God on trial in Moscow in 1923 before 5000 men of the Red Army. God was
found guilty of various ignominious acts and convicted in absentia. ("Berliner Taegeblatt," May 1, 1923.)
The "Jewish World" announced Feb. 9, 1883 that, "The great ideal of Judaism is that the whole world shall be imbued with Jewish teaching and that in a Universal
Brotherhood of Nations -- a greater Judaism in fact -- all the separate races and
religions shall disappear:'
This sentiment plays an important part in the New World Order. It provides a support system for the central bankers and diverts blame away from them. If your
ethnic or religious group is secretly being used for evil, you had better distance yourself or you will be left holding the bag.
This applies to almost everyone, not just Jews. As an ethnic Jew, I ask, does the Jewish god represent a universal moral order or a primitive tribal egregore (i.e.
projection of group psyche?) Is the Jewish egregore now Lucifer? ( See within, "The God that Serves Elite Jews:')
We may be approaching a crisis. Organized Jewry and their Masonic allies are following a script based on End Times Biblical prophesies ( which they may have
written or modified.) This script calls for a Third World War and mass destruction of all people including 2/3 of all Jews. The New World Order is supposed to rise
from the debris.
The human race is entering a Dark Age. As the New World Order is enacted, anti-Semitism inevitably will grow. Now is the time for Jews to awaken and take a
stand. Now, there is no reward for such a courageous act, only scorn. Later if anti- Semitism becomes rampant, Jews will have to circle their wagons. It will be too late.
Two final and unrelated comments: Many Jews are alienated from the concept of a loving God represented by Jesus' teaching. These Jews are metaphysical outcasts.
They feel they have to "earn" love by overachieving. Like a woman who overeats to compensate for lack of love, they seek money and power. In extreme cases (like
the Rothschilds,) their quest for limitless wealth and power, their need to own and control everything, define Satan's dominion.
I used to look askance at the ability of Christians to enjoy ordinary life. "Normal"
and wholesome seemed boring and ridiculous. I had to justify my life, find life's meaning. I didn't realize that life has inherent meaning when it is led according to God's loving design.
Finally, people can't discover the truth if they don't know what to look for.
The truth - that mankind is controlled by Satanists -- is hard to prove conclusively.
But in more than 60 articles, I show that this is the most convincing explanation for
mankind's morass.
mankind's morass.
Also read:
Rise and Kill First
The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assinations
By
Ronen Bergman
Random House New York
A Division of Penquin Random House LLC
Hardback ISBN 9781400069712
Ebook ISBN 9680679604686
"..On September 29, 1944, David Shomron hid in the gloom of St. George Street, nit far from the Romanian Church in Jerusalem. A church building was used as officer's lodgings by the British authorities governing Palestine, and Shomron was waiting for one of those officers, a man named Tom Wilkin, to leave.."
Rise and Kill First
The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assinations
By
Ronen Bergman
Random House New York
A Division of Penquin Random House LLC
Hardback ISBN 9781400069712
Ebook ISBN 9680679604686
Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph
A Note on the Sources
Prologue
Chapter 1: In Blood and Fire
Chapter 2: A Secret World Is Born
Chapter 3: The Bureau for Arranging Meetings with God
Chapter 4: The Entire Supreme Command, with One Blow
Chapter 5: “As If the Sky Were Falling on Our Heads”
Chapter 6: A Series of Catastrophes
Chapter 7: “Armed Struggle Is the Only Way to Liberate Palestine”
Chapter 8: Meir Dagan and His Expertise
Chapter 9: The PLO Goes International
Chapter 10: “I Have No Problem with Anyone That I’ve Killed” Chapter 11: “Wrong Identification of a Target Is Not a Failure. It’s a Mistake.”
Chapter 12: Hubris
Chapter 13: Death in the Toothpaste
Chapter 14: A Pack of Wild Dogs Chapter 15: “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal”
Chapter 16: Black Flag
Chapter 17: The Shin Bet Coup Chapter 18: Then Came a Spark Chapter 19: Intifada
Chapter 20: Nebuchadnezzar
Chapter 21: Green Storm Rising Chapter 22: The Age of the Drone Chapter 23: Mughniyeh’s Revenge Chapter 24: “Just One Switch, Off and On”
Chapter 25: “Bring Us the Head of Ayyash”
Chapter 26: “Sly as a Snake, Naïve as a Little Child"
Chapter 27: A Low Point Chapter 28: All-Out War
Chapter 29: “More Suicide Bombers Than Explosive Vests”
Chapter 30: “The Target Has Been Eliminated, but the Operation Failed”
Chapter 31: The Rebellion in Unit 8200
Chapter 32: Picking Anemones Chapter 33: The Radical Front Chapter 34: Killing Maurice Chapter 35: Impressive Tactical Success, Disastrous Strategic Failure
Photo Insert Dedication Acknowledgments
Notes Bibliography
Other Titles About the Author
If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first. THE BABYLONIAN TALMUD, TRACTATE SANHEDRIN, PORTION 72, VERSE 1
A Note From The Source's
THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY guards its secrets jealously. Its near-total opacity is protected by a complex array of laws and protocols, strict military censorship, and the intimidation, interrogation, and prosecution of journalists and their sources, as well as a natural solidarity and loyalty among the espionage agencies’ personnel. All glimpses behind the scenes have, to this day, been partial at best. How then, it might reasonably be asked, to write a book about one of the most
secretive organizations on earth? Efforts to persuade the Israeli defense establishment to cooperate with the research for this project went nowhere. Requests to the intelligence community that it comply with the law by transferring its historical documents to the State Archive and allowing publication of materials fifty years old or more were met with stony silence. A petition to the Supreme Court for an order forcing compliance with the law was dragged out over years, with the complicity of the court, and ended with nothing but an amendment to the law itself: The secrecy provisions were extended from fifty to seventy years, longer than the history of the state. The defense establishment did not merely sit with folded arms. As early as 2010, before the contract for this book was even signed, a special meeting was held in the Mossad’s operations division, Caesarea, to discuss ways of disrupting my research. Letters were written to all former Mossad employees warning them against giving interviews, and individual conversations were held with certain ex-staffers who were considered the most problematic. Later in 2011, the chief of the General Staff of the IDF, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, asked the Shin Bet to take aggressive steps against the author, claiming that I had perpetrated “aggravated espionage” by having in my possession classified secrets and “using classified material in order to disparage me [Ashkenazi] personally.” Since then, several actions have been taken by various bodies to stop publication of the book, or at least large parts of it.
The military censor requires the Israeli media to add the words “according to foreign publications” whenever it mentions secret actions attributed to Israeli intelligence, primarily targeted assassinations. This is to make it clear that the existence of the publication does not constitute official acknowledgment of Israel’s responsibility. In this sense, then, this book must be taken as a “foreign publication” whose contents do not have any official Israeli confirmation.
None of the thousand interviews upon which this book is based—with sources ranging from political leaders and chiefs of intelligence agencies to the operatives themselves—were approved by Israel’s defense establishment. Most of the sources are identified by their names. Others understandably feared being identified and are therefore referred to by their initials or nicknames, in addition to any details about them I was able to provide while still keeping their identities secret.
I have also made use of thousands of documents given to me by these sources, all of which are referenced for the first time here. My sources never received# permission to remove these documents from their places of employment, and certainly did not have permission to pass them on to me. This book is thus about as far as possible from an authorized history of Israeli intelligence.
So, why did these sources speak with me and supply me with these documents?
Each had his own motive, and sometimes the story behind the scenes was only a little less interesting than the content of the interview itself. It is clear that some politicians and intelligence personnel—two professions highly skilled in manipulation and deception—were trying to use me as the conduit for their preferred version of events, or to shape history to suit themselves. I have tried to thwart such attempts by cross-checking with as many written and oral sources as I could.
But it seemed to me that there was often another motive, which had much to do with a particularly Israeli contradiction: On the one hand, nearly everything in the country related to intelligence and national security is classified as “top secret.” On the other hand, everyone wants to speak about what they’ve done. Acts that people in other countries might be ashamed to admit to are instead a source of pride for Israelis, because they are collectively perceived as imperatives of national security, necessary to protect threatened Israeli lives, if not the very existence of the embattled state.
After a time, the Mossad did manage to block access to some of my sources (inmost cases only after they had already spoken to me). Many more have died since I met them, most of natural causes. Thus, the firsthand accounts that these men and women have given for this book—men and women who witnessed and participated in significant historic events—are in fact the only ones that exist outside the vaults of the defense establishment’s secret archives. Occasionally, they are the only ones that exist at all.
Prologue
MEIR DAGAN, CHIEF OF the Israeli Mossad, legendary spy and assassin, walked into the room, leaning on his cane. He’d been using it ever since he was wounded by a mine laid by Palestinian terrorists he was fighting in the Gaza Strip as a young special-ops officer in the 1970s. Dagan, who knew a thing or two about the power of myths and symbols, was careful not to deny the rumors that there was a blade concealed in the cane, which he could bare with a push of a button. Dagan was a short man, so dark-skinned that people were always surprised to hear that he was from Polish origins, and he had a potbelly with a presence of its own. On this occasion he was wearing a simple open-necked shirt, light black pants, and black shoes, and it looked as if he’d not paid any special attention to his appearance. There was something about him that expressed a direct, terse self confidence, and a quiet, sometimes menacing charisma. The conference room that Dagan entered that afternoon, on January 8, 2011,
was in the Mossad Academy, north of Tel Aviv. For the first time ever, the head of the espionage agency was meeting with journalists in the heart of one of Israel’s most closely guarded and secret installations. Dagan had no love for the media. “I’ve reached the conclusion that it is an insatiable monster,” he would tell me later, “so there’s no point in maintaining a relationship with it.” Nevertheless, three days before the meeting, I and a number of other correspondents had received a confidential invitation. I was surprised. For an entire decade I had been leveling some harsh criticism at the Mossad, and in particular at Dagan, making him very angry. The Mossad did everything it could to give the affair a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere. We were told to come to the parking lot of Cinema City, a movie theater complex not far from Mossad HQ, and to leave everything in our cars except notebooks and writing implements. “You will be carefully searched, and we want to avoid any unpleasantness,” our escorts told us. From there we were driven
in a bus with dark tinted windows to the Mossad headquarters complex. We passed through a number of electric gates and electronic signs warning those
entering what was permitted and what forbidden inside the perimeter. Then came a thorough scanning with metal detectors to make sure we hadn’t brought any video or audio recording equipment. We entered the conference room, and Dagan came.in a few minutes after us, walking around and shaking hands. When he got to me, he gripped my hand for a moment and said with a smile, “You really are some kind of a bandit.”
Then he sat down. He was flanked by the spokesman of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the chief military censor, a female brigadier general.
(The Mossad is a unit of the prime minister’s office, and, under. national law, reporting on any of its activities is subject to censorship.) Both of these officials
believed that Dagan had called the meeting merely to bid a formal farewell to the people who had covered his tenure, and that he would say nothing substantive.
They were wrong. The surprise was evident on the face of the prime minister’s. spokesperson, whose eyes got wider and wider as Dagan continued speaking.
“There are advantages to having a back injury,” Dagan said, opening his address. “You get a doctor’s certificate confirming that you’re not spineless.” Very quickly, we realized that this was no mere wisecrack, as Dagan launched into a vehement attack on the prime minister of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, Dagan claimed, was behaving irresponsibly and, for his own egotistical reasons, leading the country into disaster. “That someone is elected does not mean that he is smart” was one of his jibes.
This was the last day of Dagan’s term as the Mossad’s director. Netanyahu was. showing him the door, and Dagan, whose life’s dream had been to hold the
position of Israel’s top spy, was not going to stand by with folded arms. The acute crisis of confidence between the two men had flared up around two issues, and both of them were intimately connected to Meir Dagan’s weapon of choice: assassination.
Eight years earlier, Ariel Sharon had appointed Dagan to the Mossad post and put him in charge of disrupting the Iranian nuclear weapons project, which both
men saw as an existential threat to Israel. Dagan acted in a number of ways to fulfill this task. The most difficult way, but also the most effective, Dagan believed, was to identify Iran’s key nuclear and missile scientists, locate them, and kill them. The Mossad pinpointed fifteen such targets, of whom it eliminated six, mostly when they were on their way to work in the morning, by means of bombs with short time fuses, attached to their cars by a motorcyclist. In addition, a
general of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who was in charge of the missile project, was blown up in his headquarters together with seventeen of his men.
These operations and many others initiated by the Mossad, some in collaboration with the United States, were all successful, but Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, had begun to feel that their utility was declining.
They decided that clandestine measures could no longer effectively delay the Iranian nuclear project, and that only a massive aerial bombardment of the Iranians’ nuclear facilities would successfully halt their progress toward acquiring such weapons.
Dagan strongly opposed this idea. Indeed, it flew in the face of everything he believed in: that open warfare should be waged only when “the sword is on our throat,” or as a last resort, in situations in which there was no other choice.
Everything else could and should be handled through clandestine means.
“Assassinations,” he said, “have an effect on morale, as well as a practical effect.
I don’t think there were many who could have replaced Napoleon, or a president. like Roosevelt or a prime minister like Churchill. The personal aspect certainly plays a role. It’s true that anyone can be replaced, but there’s a difference between a replacement with guts and some lifeless character.”
Furthermore, the use of assassination, in Dagan’s view, “is a lot more moral” than waging all-out war. Neutralizing a few major figures is enough to make the
latter option unnecessary and save the lives of untold numbers of soldiers and civilians on both sides. A large-scale attack against Iran would lead to a large-scale.conflict across the Middle East, and even then it likely would not cause enough damage to the Iranian installations.
Finally, from Dagan’s point of view, if Israel started a war with Iran, it would be an indictment of his entire career. History books would show that he had not fulfilled the task that Sharon had given him: to put an end to Iranian nuclear acquisition using covert means, without recourse to an open assault.
Dagan’s opposition, and similar heavy pressure from the top military and intelligence chiefs, forced the repeated postponement of the attack on Iran. Dagan
even briefed CIA Director Leon Panetta about the Israeli plan (the prime minister alleges he did so without permission), and soon President Obama was also warning Netanyahu not to attack.
The tension between the two men escalated even higher in 2010, seven years into Dagan’s tenure. Dagan had dispatched a hit team of twenty-seven Mossad operatives to Dubai to eliminate a senior official of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. They did the job: the assassins injected him with a paralyzing drug in his hotel room and made their getaway from the country before the body was discovered. But just a short while after their departure, due to a series of gross errors they made—forgetting to take into account Dubai’s innumerable CCTV cameras; using the same phony passports that the operatives had previously used to enter Dubai in order to follow the target; and a phone setup that the local police had no trouble in cracking—the whole world was soon watching video footage of their faces and a complete record of their movements. The discovery that this was a Mossad operation caused serious operational damage to the agency, as well as profound embarrassment to the State of Israel, which had once again been caught using fake passports of friendly Western countries for its agents. “But you told me it would be easy and simple, that the risk of things going wrong was close to zero,”
Netanyahu fumed at Dagan, and ordered him to suspend many of the pending assassination plans and other operations until further notice.
The confrontation between Dagan and Netanyahu became more and more acute until Netanyahu (according to his version) decided not to extend Dagan’s tenure, or
(in Dagan’s words) “I simply got sick of him and I decided to retire.”
At that briefing in the Mossad Academy and in a number of later interviews for this book, Dagan displayed robust confidence that the Mossad, under his leadership, would have been able to stop the Iranians from making nuclear. weapons by means of assassinations and other pinpoint measures—for instance, working with the United States to keep the Iranians from being able to import critical parts for their nuclear project that they could not manufacture themselves.
“If we manage to prevent Iran from obtaining some of the components, this would seriously damage their project. In a car there are 25,000 parts on average. Imagine if one hundred of them are missing. It would be very hard to make it go.”
“On the other hand,” Dagan added with a smile, returning to his favorite modus operandi, “sometimes it’s most effective to kill the driver, and that’s that.”
—
OF ALL THE MEANS that democracies use to protect their security, there is none more fraught and controversial than “killing the driver”—assassination. Some, euphemistically, call it “liquidation.” The American intelligence community calls it, for legal reasons, “targeted killings.” In practice, these terms amount to the same thing: killing a specific individual in order to achieve a specific goal—saving the lives of people the target intends to kill, averting a dangerous act that he is about to perpetrate, and sometimes removing a leader in order to change the course of history.
The use of assassinations by a state touches two very difficult dilemmas. First, is it effective? Can the elimination of an individual, or a number of individuals, make the world a safer place? Second, is it morally and legally justified? Is it legitimate, both ethically and judicially, for a country to employ the gravest of all crimes in any code of ethics or law—the premeditated taking of a human life—in order to protect its own citizens?
This book deals mainly with the assassinations and targeted killings carried out by the Mossad and by other arms of the Israeli government, in both peacetime and wartime—as well as, in the early chapters, by the underground militias in the pre-state era, organizations that were to become the army and intelligence services of the state, once it was established.
Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world. On innumerable occasions, its leaders have weighed what would be the best way to defend its national security and, out of all the options, have time and again decided on clandestine operations, with assassination the method of choice. This, they believed, would solve difficult problems faced by the state, and sometimes change the course of history. In many cases, Israel’s leaders have even determined that in order to kill the designated target, it is moral and legal to endanger the lives of innocent civilians who may happen to find themselves in the line of fire. Harming such people, they believe, is a necessary evil.
The numbers speak for themselves. Up until the start of the Second Palestinian Intifada, in September 2000, when Israel first began to respond to suicide bombings with the daily use of armed drones to perform assassinations, the state had conducted some 500 targeted killing operations. In these, at least 1,000 people# were killed, both civilians and combatants. During the Second Intifada, Israel carried out some 1,000 more operations, of which 168 succeeded. Since then, up until the writing of this book, Israel has executed some 800 targeted killing operations, almost all of which were part of the rounds of warfare against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2008, 2012, and 2014 or Mossad operations across the Middle East against Palestinian, Syrian, and Iranian targets. By contrast, during the
presidency of George W. Bush, the United States of America carried out 48 targeted killing operations, according to one estimate, and under President Barack
Obama there were 353 such attacks.
Israel’s reliance on assassination as a military tool did not happen by chance, but rather stems from the revolutionary and activist roots of the Zionist movement, from the trauma of the Holocaust, and from the sense among Israel’s leaders and citizens that the country and its people are perpetually in danger of annihilation and that, as in the Holocaust, no one will come to their aid when that happens.
Because of Israel’s tiny dimensions, the attempts by the Arab states to destroy it even before it was established, their continued threats to do so, and the perpetual
menace of Arab terrorism, the country evolved a highly effective military and, arguably, the best intelligence community in the world. They, in turn, have developed the most robust, streamlined assassination machine in history.
The following pages will detail the secrets of that machine—the fruit of a mixed marriage between guerrilla warfare and the military might of a technological powerhouse—its operatives, leaders, methods, deliberations, successes, and failures, as well as the moral costs. They will illustrate how two separate legal systems have arisen in Israel—one for ordinary citizens and one for the intelligence community and defense establishment. The latter system has allowed, with a nod and a wink from the government, highly problematic acts of assassination, with no parliamentary or public scrutiny, resulting in the loss of many innocent lives.
On the other hand, the assassination weapon, based on intelligence that is “nothing less than exquisite”—to quote the former head of the NSA and the CIA, General Michael Hayden—is what made Israel’s war on terror the most effective ever waged by a Western country. On numerous occasions, it was targeted killing that saved Israel from very grave crises.
The Mossad and Israel’s other intelligence arms have done away with individuals who were identified as direct threats to national security, and killing them has also sent a bigger message: If you are an enemy of Israel, we will find and kill you, wherever you are. This message has indeed been heard around the world.
Occasional blunders have only enhanced the Mossad’s aggressive and merciless reputation—not a bad thing, when the goal of deterrence is as important as the goal of preempting specific hostile acts.
The assassinations were not all carried out by small, closed groups. The more complex they became, the more people took part—sometimes as many as hundreds, the majority of them below the age of twenty-five. Sometimes these young people will come with their commanders to meet the prime minister—the only one authorized to green-light an assassination—in order to explain the operation and get final approval. Such forums, in which most of the participants advocating for someone’s death are under the age of thirty, are probably unique to Israel. Some of the low-ranking officers involved in these meetings have advanced over the years to become national leaders and even prime ministers themselves. What marks have remained imprinted on them from the times they took part in hit operations? The United States has taken the intelligence-gathering and assassination
techniques developed in Israel as a model, and after 9/11 and President Bush’s decision to launch a campaign of targeted killings against Al Qaeda, it transplanted some of these methods into its own intelligence and war-on-terror systems. The command-and-control systems, the war rooms, the methods of information gathering, and the technology of the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now serve the Americans and their allies were all in large part developed in Israel. Nowadays, when the same kind of extrajudicial killing that Israel has used for decades is being used daily by America against its enemies, it is appropriate not only to admire the impressive operational capabilities that Israel has built, but also to study the high moral price that has been paid, and still is being paid, for the use of such power.
RONEN BERGMAN
Tel Aviv
....
Chapter One - Blood and Fire
ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1944, David Shomron hid in the gloom of St. George Street, not far from the Romanian Church in Jerusalem. A church building was used as officers’ lodgings by the British authorities governing Palestine, and Shomron was waiting for one of those officers, a man named Tom Wilkin, to leave. Wilkin was the commander of the Jewish unit at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the British Mandate for Palestine, and he was very good at his job, especially the part that involved infiltrating and disrupting the fractious Jewish underground. Aggressive, yet also exceptionally patient and calculating, Wilkin spoke fluent Hebrew, and after thirteen years of service in Palestine, he had an extensive network of informants. Thanks to the intelligence they provided, underground fighters were arrested, their weapons caches were seized, and their planned operations, aimed at forcing the British to leave Palestine, were foiled. Which was why Shomron was going to kill him. Shomron and his partner that night, Yaakov Banai (code-named Mazal —“Luck”), were operatives with Lehi, the most radical of the Zionist underground movements fighting the British in the early 1940s. Though Lehi was the acronym for the Hebrew phrase “fighters for the freedom of Israel,” the British considered it a terrorist organization, referring to it dismissively as the Stern Gang, after its founder, the romantic ultra-nationalist Avraham Stern. Stern and his tiny band of followers employed a targeted mayhem of assassinations and bombings—a campaign of “personal terror,” as Lehi’s operations chief (and later Israeli prime minister), Yitzhak Shamir, called it.
Wilkin knew he was a target. Lehi already had tried to kill him and his boss,
Geoffrey Morton, nearly three years earlier, in its first, clumsy operation. On January 20, 1942, assassins planted bombs on the roof and inside the building of 8 Yael Street, in Tel Aviv. Instead they ended up killing three police officers—two Jews and an Englishman—who arrived before Wilkin and Morton and tripped the charges. Later, Morton fled Palestine after being wounded in another attempt on his life—that one in retribution for Morton having shot Stern dead.
None of those details, the back-and-forth of who killed whom and in what order, mattered to Shomron. The British occupied the land the Zionists saw as rightfully theirs—that was what mattered, and Shamir had issued a death sentence against Wilkin.
For Shomron and his comrades, Wilkin was not a person but rather a target, prominent and high-value. “We were too busy and hungry to think about the British and their families,” Shomron said decades later.
After discovering that Wilkin was residing in the Romanian Church annex, the assassins set out on their mission. Shomron and Banai had revolvers and hand grenades in their pockets. Additional Lehi operatives were in the vicinity, smartly dressed in suits and hats to look like Englishmen.
Wilkin left the officers’ lodgings in the church and headed for the CID’s facility in the Russian Compound, where underground suspects were held and interrogated. As always, he was wary, scanning the street as he walked and keeping one hand in his pocket all the time. As he passed the corner of St. George and Mea Shearim Streets, a youngster sitting outside the neighborhood grocery store got up and dropped his hat. This was the signal, and the two assassins began walking toward Wilkin, identifying him according to the photographs they’d studied. Shomron and Banai let him pass, gripping their revolvers with sweating palms.
Then they turned around and drew.
“Before we did it, Mazal [Banai] said, ‘Let me shoot first,’ ” Shomron recalled.
“But when we saw him, I guess I couldn’t restrain myself. I shot first.”
Between them, Banai and Shomron fired fourteen times. Eleven of those bullets hit Wilkin. “He managed to turn around and draw his pistol,” Shomron said, “but then he fell face first. A spurt of blood came out of his forehead, like a fountain. Itwas not such a pretty picture.”
Shomron and Banai darted back into the shadows and made off in a taxi in which another Lehi man was waiting for them.
“The only thing that hurt me was that we forgot to take the briefcase in which he had all his documents,” Shomron said. Other than that, “I didn’t feel anything, not even a little twinge of guilt. We believed the more coffins that reached London, the closer the day of freedom would be.”
—
THE IDEA THAT THE return of the People of Israel to the Land of Israel could be achieved only by force was not born with Stern and his Lehi comrades.
The roots of that strategy can be traced to eight men who gathered in a stifling one-room apartment overlooking an orange grove in Jaffa on September 29, 1907, exactly thirty-seven years before a fountain of blood spurted from Wilkin’s head, when Palestine was still part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The flat was rented by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a young Russian who’d immigrated to Ottoman Palestine earlier that year. Like the others in his apartment that night—all emigrants from the Russian empire, sitting on a straw mat spread on the floor of the candlelit room —he was a committed Zionist, albeit part of a splinter sect that had once threatened to rend the movement.
Zionism as a political ideology had been founded in 1896 when Viennese Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). He had
been deeply affected while covering the trial in Paris of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer unjustly accused and convicted of treason.
In his book, Herzl argued that anti-Semitism was so deeply ingrained in
European culture that the Jewish people could achieve true freedom and safety only in a nation-state of their own. The Jewish elite of Western Europe, who’d managed to carve out comfortable lives for themselves, mostly rejected Herzl. But his ideas resonated with poor and working-class Jews of Eastern Europe, who suffered repeated pogroms and continual oppression and to which some of them responded by aligning themselves with leftist uprisings.
Herzl himself saw Palestine, the Jews’ ancestral homeland, as the ideal location for a future Jewish state, but he maintained that any settlement there would have to be handled deliberately and delicately, through proper diplomatic channels and with international sanction, if a Jewish nation was to survive in peace. Herzl’s viewc ame to be known as political Zionism.
Ben-Zvi and his seven comrades, on the other hand, were—like most other Russian Jews—practical Zionists. Rather than wait for the rest of the world to give them a home, they believed in creating one themselves—in going to Palestine, working the land, making the desert bloom. They would take what they believed to be rightfully theirs, and they would defend what they had taken.
This put the practical Zionists in immediate conflict with most of the Jews already living in Palestine. As a tiny minority in an Arab land—many of them
peddlers and religious scholars and functionaries under the Ottoman regime—they preferred to keep a low profile. Through subservience and compromise and bribery, these established Palestinian Jews had managed to buy themselves relative peace and a measure of security.
But Ben-Zvi and the other newcomers were appalled at the conditions their fellow Jews tolerated. Many were living in abject poverty and had no means of
defending themselves, utterly at the mercy of the Arab majority and the venal officials of the corrupt Ottoman Empire. Arab mobs attacked and plundered
Jewish settlements, rarely with any consequences. Worse, as Ben-Zvi and the others saw it, those same settlements had consigned their defense to Arab guards —who in turn would sometimes collaborate with attacking mobs.
Ben-Zvi and his friends found this situation to be unsustainable and intolerable.
Some were former members of Russian left-wing revolutionary movements inspired by the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya), an aggressive anti-tsarist guerrilla movement that employed terrorist tactics, including assassinations.
Disappointed by the abortive 1905 revolution in Russia, which in the end produced only minimal constitutional reforms, some of these socialist revolutionaries, social democrats, and liberals moved to Ottoman Palestine to reestablish a Jewish state.
They all were desperately poor, barely scraping by, earning pennies at teaching jobs or manual labor in the fields and orange groves, often going hungry. But they
were proud Zionists. If they were going to create a nation, they first had to defend themselves. So they slipped through the streets of Jaffa in pairs and alone, making their way to the secret meeting in Ben-Zvi’s apartment. That night, those eight people formed the first Hebrew fighting force of the modern age. They decreed that, from then forward, everything would be different from the image of the weak and persecuted Jew all across the globe. Only Jews would defend Jews in Palestine.
They named their fledgling army Bar-Giora, after one of the leaders of the Great Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, in the first century. On their banner, they paid homage to that ancient rebellion and predicted their future. “In blood and fire Judea fell,” it read. “In blood and fire Judea will rise.”
Judea would indeed rise. Ben-Zvi would one day be the Jewish nation’s second president. Yet first there would be much fire, and much blood.
—
BAR-GIORA WAS NOT, AT first, a popular movement. But more Jews arrived in Palestine from Russia and Eastern Europe every year—35,000 between 1905 and
1914—bringing with them that same determined philosophy of practical Zionism.
With more like-minded Jews flooding into the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine was called, Bar-Giora in 1909 was reconstituted into the larger and
more aggressive Hashomer (Hebrew for “the Guard”). By 1912, Hashomer was defending fourteen settlements. Yet it was also developing offensive, albeit
clandestine, capabilities, preparing for what practical Zionists saw as an inevitable eventual war to take control of Palestine. Hashomer therefore saw itself as the
nucleus for a future Jewish army and intelligence service.
Mounted on their horses, Hashomer vigilantes raided a few Arab settlements to punish residents who had harmed Jews, sometimes beating them up, sometimes executing them. In one case, a special clandestine assembly of Hashomer members decided to eliminate a Bedouin policeman, Aref al-Arsan, who had assisted the Turks and tortured Jewish prisoners. He was shot dead by Hashomer in June 1916. Hashomer did not recoil from using force to assert its authority over other Jews, either. During World War I, Hashomer was violently opposed to NILI, a Jewish spy network working for the British in Ottoman Palestine. Hashomer feared that the Turks would discover the spies and wreak vengeance against the entire Jewish community. When they failed to get NILI to cease operations or to hand over a
stash of gold coins they’d received from the British, they made an attempt on the life of Yosef Lishansky, one of its members, managing only to wound him.
In 1920, Hashomer evolved again, now into the Haganah (Hebrew for “Defense”). Though it was not specifically legal, the British authorities, who had been ruling the country for about three years, tolerated the Haganah as the paramilitary defensive arm of the Yishuv. The Histadrut, the socialist labor union of the Jews in Israel that was founded in the same year, and the Jewish Agency, the Yishuv’s autonomous governing authority, established a few years later, both headed by David Ben-Gurion, maintained command over the secret organization.Ben-Gurion was born David Yosef Grün in Pło´nsk, Poland, in 1886. From an early age, he followed in his father’s footsteps as a Zionist activist. In 1906, he migrated to Palestine and, thanks to his charisma and determination, soon became
one of the leaders of the Yishuv, despite his youth. He then changed his name to Ben-Gurion, after another of the leaders of the revolt against the Romans. Haganah in its early years was influenced by the spirit and aggressive attitude of Hashomer. On May 1, 1921, an Arab mob massacred fourteen Jews in an# immigrants’ hostel in Jaffa. After learning that an Arab police officer by the name of Tewfik Bey had helped the mob get into the hostel, Haganah sent a hit squad to dispose of him, and on January 17, 1923, he was shot dead in the middle of a Tel Aviv street. “As a matter of honor,” he was shot from the front and not in the back, according to one of those involved, and the intention was “to show the Arabs that their deeds are not forgotten and their day will come, even if belatedly.”
The members of Hashomer who led the Haganah at the outset were even willing to commit acts of violence against fellow Jews. Jacob de Haan was a Dutch-born Haredi—an ultra-Orthodox Jew—living in Jerusalem in the early 1920s. He was a propagandist for the Haredi belief that only the Messiah could establish a Jewish state, that God alone would decide when to return the Jews to their ancestral homeland, and that humans trying to expedite the process were committing a grave sin. In other words, de Haan was a staunch anti-Zionist, and he was surprisingly adept at swaying international opinion. To Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, by now a prominent Haganah leader, that made de Haan dangerous. So he ordered his death.
On June 30, 1924—just a day before de Haan was to travel to London to ask the British government to reconsider its promise to establish a Jewish nation in
Palestine—two assassins shot him three times as he emerged from a synagogue on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem.
Ben-Gurion, however, took a dim view of such acts. He realized that in order to win even partial recognition from the British for Zionist aims, he would have to
enforce orderly and more moderate norms on the semi-underground militia under his command. Hashomer’s brave and lethal lone riders were replaced after the de
Haan murder by an organized, hierarchical armed force. Ben-Gurion ordered Haganah to desist from using targeted killings. “As to personal terror, Ben-
Gurion’s line was consistently and steadily against it,” Haganah commander Yisrael Galili testified later, and he recounted a number of instances in which Ben-Gurion
had refused to approve proposals for hits against individual Arabs. These includedthe Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husseini and other members of the ArabHigher Committee, and British personnel, such as a senior official in the Mandate’s lands authority who was obstructing Jewish settlement projects.
Not everyone was eager to acquiesce to Ben-Gurion. Avraham Tehomi, the man who shot de Haan, despised the moderate line Ben-Gurion took against the British and the Arabs, and, together with some other leading figures, he quit Haganah and in 1931 formed the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the “National Military Organization” whose Hebrew acronym is Etzel, usually referred to in English as IZL or the Irgun. This radical right-wing group was commanded in the 1940s by Menachem Begin, who in 1977 was to become prime minister of Israel. Inside the Irgun, too, there were clashes, personal and ideological. Opponents of Begin’s agreement to cooperate with Britain in its war against the Nazis broke away and formed Lehi. For these men, any cooperation with Britain was anathema.
These two dissident groups both advocated, to different degrees, the use of targeted killings against the Arab and British enemy, and against Jews they
considered dangerous to their cause. Ben-Gurion remained adamant that targeted killings would not be used as a weapon and even took aggressive measures against those who did not obey his orders.
But then World War II ended, and everything, even the views of the obstinate Ben-Gurion, changed.
—
DURING WORLD WAR II, some 38,000 Jews from Palestine volunteered to help and serve in the British Army in Europe. The British formed the so-called Jewish Brigade, albeit somewhat reluctantly and only after being pressured by the Yishuv’s civilian leadership.
Unsure exactly what to do with the Brigade, the British first sent it to train in Egypt. It was there, in mid-1944, that its members first heard of the Nazi
campaign of Jewish annihilation. When they were finally sent to Europe to fight in Italy and Austria, they witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand and were
among the first to send detailed reports to Ben-Gurion and other leaders of the Yishuv.
One of those soldiers was Mordechai Gichon, who later would be one of the founders of Israeli military intelligence. Born in Berlin in 1922, Gichon had a father who was Russian and a mother who was the scion of a famous German- Jewish family, niece of Rabbi Leo Baeck, a leader of Germany’s Liberal (Reform)Jews. Gichon’s family moved to Palestine in 1933, after Mordechai had been required in his German school to give the Nazi salute and sing the party anthem.
He returned as a soldier to a Europe in ruins, his people nearly destroyed, their communities smoldering ruins. “The Jewish people had been humiliated, trampled,# murdered,” he said. “Now was the time to strike back, to take revenge. In my dreams, when I enlisted, revenge took the form of me arresting my best friend
from Germany, whose name was Detlef, the son of a police major. That’s how I would restore lost Jewish honor.” It was that sense of lost honor, of a people’s humiliation, as much as rage at the Nazis, that drove men like Gichon. He first met the Jewish refugees on the border between Austria and Italy. The men of the Brigade fed them, took off their own uniforms to clothe them against the cold, tried to draw out of them details of the atrocities they had undergone. He remembers an encounter in June 1945 in which a female refugee came up to him.
“She broke away from her group and spoke to me in German,” he said. “She said, ‘You, the soldiers of the Brigade, are the sons of Bar Kokhba’ ”—the great
hero of the Second Jewish Revolt against the Romans, in A.D. 132–135. “She said,
‘I will always remember your insignia and what you did for us.’ ” Gichon was flattered by the Bar Kokhba analogy, but for her praise and gratitude, Gichon felt only pity and shame. If the Jews in the Brigade were the sons of Bar Kokhba, who were these Jews? The soldiers from the Land of Israel, standing erect, tough, and strong, saw the Holocaust survivors as victims who needed help, but also as part of the European Jewry who had allowed themselves to be massacred. They embodied the cowardly, feeble stereotype of the Jews of the Diaspora—the Exile, in traditional Jewish and Zionist parlance—who# surrendered rather than fought back, who did not know how to shoot or wield a weapon. It was that image—in its most extreme version, the Jew as a Muselmann, prisoners’ slang for the emaciated, zombie-like inmates hovering near death in the Nazi camps—that the new Jews of the Yishuv rejected. “My brain could not grasp, not then and not today, how it could have been that there were tens of thousands of Jews in a camp with only a few German guards, but they did not rise up, they simply went like lambs to the slaughter,” Gichon said more than sixty years later.
“Why didn’t they tear [the Germans] to shreds? I’ve always said that no such thing could happen in the Land of Israel. Had those communities had leaders worthy of
the name, the entire business would have looked completely different.”
In the years following the war, the Zionists of the Yishuv would prove, both to the world and, more important, to themselves, that Jews would never again go tosuch slaughter—and that Jewish blood would not come cheaply. The six million would be avenged.
“We thought we could not rest until we had exacted blood for blood, death for death,” said Hanoch Bartov, a highly regarded Israeli novelist who enlisted in the Brigade a month before his seventeenth birthday.
Such vengeance, though—atrocity for atrocity—would violate the rules of war and likely be disastrous for the Zionist cause. Ben-Gurion, practical as always, publicly said as much: “Revenge now is an act of no national value. It cannot restore life to the millions who were murdered.”
Still, the Haganah’s leaders privately understood the need for some sort of retribution, both to satisfy the troops who had been exposed to the atrocities and also to achieve some degree of historical justice and deter future attempts to slaughter Jews. Thus, they sanctioned some types of reprisals against the Nazis and their accomplices. Immediately after the war, a secret unit, authorized and controlled by the Haganah high command and unknown to the British commanders, was set up within the Brigade. It was called Gmul, Hebrew for “Recompense.” The unit’s mission was “revenge, but not a robber’s revenge,” as a secret memo at the time put it. “Revenge against those SS men who themselves took part in the slaughter.”
“We looked for big fish,” Mordechai Gichon said, breaking a vow of silence among the Gmul commanders that he’d kept for more than sixty years. “The senior
Nazis who had managed to shed their uniforms and return to their homes.”
The Gmul agents worked undercover even as they performed their regular Brigade duties. Gichon himself assumed two fake identities—one as a German civilian, the other as a British major—as he hunted Nazis. In expeditions under his German cover, Gichon recovered the Gestapo archives in Tarvisio, Villach, and Klagenfurt, to which fleeing Nazis had set fire but only a small part of which actually burned. Operating as the British major, he gleaned more names from Yugoslavian Communists who were still afraid to carry out revenge attacks themselves. A few Jews in American intelligence also were willing to help by handing over information they had on escaped Nazis, which they thought the Palestinian Jews would use to better effect than the American military.
Coercion worked, too. In June 1945, Gmul agents found a Polish-born German couple who lived in Tarvisio. The wife had been involved in transferring stolen Jewish property from Austria and Italy to Germany, and her husband had helped# run the regional Gestapo office. The Palestinian Jewish soldiers offered them a stark choice: cooperate or die.
“The goy broke and said he was willing to cooperate,” said Yisrael Karmi, who interrogated the couple and later, after Israel was born, would become the commander of the Israeli Army’s military police. “I assigned him to prepare lists of all the senior officials that he knew and who had worked with the Gestapo and the SS. Name, date of birth, education, and positions.”
The result was a dramatic intelligence breakthrough, a list of dozens of names. Gmul’s men tracked down each missing Nazi—finding some wounded in a local hospital, where they were being treated under stolen aliases—and then pressured those men to provide more information. They promised each German he would not be harmed if he cooperated, so most did. Then, when they were no longer useful, Gmul agents shot them and dumped the bodies. There was no sense in leaving them alive to tip the British command to Gmul’s clandestine mission.
Once a particular name had been verified, the second phase began: locating the target and gathering information for the final killing mission. Gichon, who’d been
born in Germany, often was assigned that job. “No one suspected me,” he said.
“My vocal cords were of Berlin stock. I’d go to the corner grocery store or pub or even just knock on a door to convey greetings from someone. Most of the time, the people would respond [to their real names] or recoil into vague silence, which was as good as a confirmation.” Once the identification was confirmed, Gichon would track the German’s movements and provide a detailed sketch of the house where he lived or the area that had been chosen for the abduction.
The killers themselves worked in teams of no more than five men. When meeting their target, they generally wore British military police uniforms, and they typically told their target they had come to take a man named so-and-so for interrogation. Most of the time, the German came without objection. As one of the unit’s soldiers, Shalom Giladi, related in his testimony to the Haganah Archive, the Nazi was sometimes killed instantly, and other times transported to some remote spot before being killed. “In time we developed quiet, rapid, and efficient methods of taking care of the SS men who fell into our hands,” he said.
As anyone who has ever gotten into a pickup truck knows, a person hoisting himself up into one braces his foot on the rear running board, leans forward under the canvas canopy, and sort of rolls in. The man lying in wait inside the truck would take advantage of this natural tilt of the body.
The minute the German’s head protruded into the gloom, the ambusher would bend over him and wrap his arms under his chin—around his throat—in a kind of reverse choke hold, and, carrying that into a throttle embrace, the ambusher would fall back flat on the mattress, which absorbed every sound. The backward fall, while gripping the German’s head, would suffocate the German and break his neck instantly.
One day, a female SS officer escaped from an English detention camp next to our base.
After the British discovered that the officer had escaped, they sent out photographs of her taken during her imprisonment—front and side view—to all the military police stations. We went through the refugee camp and identified her. When we addressed her in German, she played the fool and said she only knew Hungarian. That wasn’t a problem. A Hungarian kid went up to her and said: “A ship carrying illegal immigrants from Hungary is about to sail for Palestine. Pack up your belongings quietly and come with us.” She had no choice but to take the bait and went with us in the truck. During this operation, I sat with Zaro [Meir Zorea, later an IDF general] in the back while Karmi drove. The order Karmi gave us was:
“When I get some distance to a suitable deserted place, I’ll honk the horn. That will be the sign to get rid of her.”
That’s what happened. Her last scream in German was: “Was ist los?” (“What’s going on?”). To make sure she was dead, Karmi shot her and we gave her body and the surroundings the appearance of a violent rape.
In most cases we brought the Nazis to a small line of fortifications in the mountains.
There were fortified caves there, abandoned. Most of those facing their executions would lose their Nazi arrogance when they heard that we were Jews. “Have mercy on my wife and vhildren!” We would ask him how many such screams the Nazis had heard in the extermination camps from their Jewish victims.
The operation lasted only three months, from May to July, during which time Gmul killed somewhere between one hundred and two hundred people. Several historians who’ve researched Gmul’s operations maintain that the methods used to identify targets were insufficient, and that many innocents were killed. On many occasions, those critics argue, Gmul teams were exploited by their sources to carry out personal vendettas; in other cases, operatives simply identified the wrong person. Gmul was closed down when the British, who’d heard complaints about disappearances from German families, grasped what was going on. They decided not to investigate further, but to transfer the Jewish Brigade to Belgium and the Netherlands, away from the Germans, and Haganah command issued a firm order to cease revenge operations. The Brigade’s new priorities—according to the Haganah, not the British—were to look after Holocaust survivors, to help organize the immigration of refugees to Palestine in the face of British opposition, and to appropriate weapons for the Yishuv.
—
YET, THOUGH THEY ORDERED Gmul to stop killing Germans in Europe, the Haganah’s leaders did not forsake retribution. The vengeance that had been haltedin Europe, they decided, would be carried on in Palestine itself.
Members of the German Tempelgesellschaft (the Templer sect) had been expelled from Palestine by the British at the beginning of the war because of their nationality and Nazi sympathies. Many joined the German war effort and took an active part in the persecution and annihilation of the Jews. When the war ended, some of them returned to their former homes, in Sarona, in the heart of Tel Aviv, and other locations.
The leader of the Templers in Palestine was a man named Gotthilf Wagner, a wealthy industrialist who assisted the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo during the war.
A Holocaust survivor by the name of Shalom Friedman, who was posing as a Hungarian priest, related that in 1944 he met Wagner, who “boasted that he was at Auschwitz and Buchenwald twice. When he was in Auschwitz, they brought out a large group of Jews, the youngest ones, and poured flammable liquid over them. ‘I asked them if they knew there was a hell on earth, and when they ignited them I told them that this was the fate awaiting their brethren in Palestine.’ ” After the war, Wagner organized the attempts to allow the Templers to return to Palestine. Rafi Eitan, the son of Jewish pioneers from Russia, was seventeen at the time.
“Here come exultant Germans, who had been members of the Nazi Party, who enlisted to the Wehrmacht and SS, and they want to return to their property when
all the Jewish property outside was destroyed,” he said.
Eitan was a member of a seventeen-man force from the Haganah’s “special company” sent to liquidate Wagner, under a direct order from the Haganah high# command. The Haganah chief of staff, Yitzhak Sadeh, realized that this was not a regular military operation and summoned the two men who had been selected to
squeeze the trigger. To encourage them, he told them about a man he had shot with his pistol in Russia as revenge for a pogrom.
On March 22, 1946, after painstaking intelligence gathering, the hit squad lay in wait for Wagner in Tel Aviv. They forced him off the road onto a sandy lot at 123
Levinsky Street and shot him. Haganah’s underground radio station, Kol Yisrael (the Voice of Israel), announced the following day, “The well-known Nazi Gotthilf Wagner, head of the German community in Palestine, was executed yesterday by the Hebrew underground. Let it be known that no Nazi will place a foot on the soil# of the Land of Israel.”
Shortly thereafter, Haganah assassinated two other Templers in the Galilee and two more in Haifa, where the sect had also established communities.
“It had an immediate effect,” Eitan said. “The Templers disappeared from the country, leaving everything behind, and were never seen again.” The Templers’ neighborhood in Tel Aviv, Sarona, would become the headquarters of Israel’s armed forces and intelligence services. And Eitan, an assassin at seventeen, would
help found the Mossad’s targeted killing unit.
The killing of the Templers was not merely a continuation of the acts of revenge against the Nazis in Europe, but signified a major change in policy. The lessons that the new Jews of Palestine learned from the Holocaust were that the Jewish people would always be under the threat of destruction, that others could not be relied upon to protect the Jews, and that the only way to do so was to have an independent state. A people living with this sense of perpetual danger of annihilation is going to take any and all measures, however extreme, to obtain security, and will relate to international laws and norms in a marginal manner, if at
all.
From now on, Ben-Gurion and the Haganah would adopt targeted killings, guerrilla warfare, and terrorist attacks as additional tools—above and beyond the# propaganda and political measures that had always been used—in the effort to achieve the goal of a state and to preserve it. What had only a few years before been a means used only by the outcast extremists of Lehi and the Irgun was now seen by the mainstream as a viable weapon.
At first, Haganah units began assassinating Arabs who had murdered Jewish civilians. Then the militia’s high command ordered a “special company” to begin “personal terror operations,” a term used at the time for the targeted killings of officers of the British CID who had persecuted the Jewish underground and acted against the Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. They were ordered to “blow up British intelligence centers that acted against Jewish acquisition of weapons” and “to take retaliatory action in cases where British military courts sentence Haganah members to death.”
Ben-Gurion foresaw that a Jewish state would soon be established in Palestine and that the new nation would immediately be forced to fight a war against Arabs
in Palestine and repel invasions by the armies of neighboring Arab states. The Haganah command thus also began secretly preparing for this all-out war, and as part of the preparations, an order code-named Zarzir (or Starling) was issued, providing for the assassination of the heads of the Arab population of Palestine.
—
WHILE THE HAGANAH SLOWLY stepped up the use of targeted killings, the radical undergrounds had their killing campaign in full motion, trying to push the British
out of Palestine.
Yitzhak Shamir, now in command of Lehi, resolved not only to eliminate key figures of the British Mandate locally—killing CID personnel and making numerous attempts to do the same to the Jerusalem police chief, Michael Joseph McConnell, and the high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael—but also Englishmen in other countries who posed a threat to his political objective. Walter Edward Guinness, more formally known as Lord Moyne, for example, was the British resident minister of state in Cairo, which was also under British rule. The Jews in Palestine considered Moyne a flagrant anti-Semite who had assiduously# used his position to restrict the Yishuv’s power by significantly reducing immigration quotas for Holocaust survivors.
Shamir ordered Moyne killed. He sent two Lehi operatives, Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, to Cairo, where they waited at the door to Moyne’s house. When Moyne pulled up, his secretary in the car with him, Hakim and Bet-Zuri sprinted to the car. One of them shoved a pistol through the window, aimed it at Moyne’s head, and fired three times. Moyne gripped his throat. “Oh, they’ve shot us!” he cried, and then slumped forward in his seat. Still, it was an amateurish operation.
Shamir had counseled his young killers to arrange to escape in a car, but instead they fled on slow-moving bicycles. Egyptian police quickly apprehended them, and Hakim and Bet-Zuri were tried, convicted, and, six months later, hanged.
The assassination had a decisive effect on British officials, though not the one Shamir had envisioned. As Israel would learn repeatedly in future years, it is very hard to predict how history will proceed after someone is shot in the head.
After the unmitigated evil of the Holocaust, the attempted extermination of an entire people in Europe, there was growing sympathy in the West for the Zionist cause. According to some accounts, up until the first week of November 1944, Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, had been pushing his cabinet to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He rallied several influential figures to back the initiative—including Lord Moyne. It is not a stretch to assume,
then, that Churchill might well have arrived at the Yalta summit with Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin with a clear, positive policy regarding the future of a Jewish state, had Lehi not intervened. Instead, after the Cairo killing, Churchill labeled the attackers “a new group of gangsters” and announced that he was reconsidering his position.
And the killing continued. On July 22, 1946, members of Menachem Begin’sIrgun planted 350 KG explosives in the south wing of the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem, where the British Mandate’s administration and army and intelligence offices were housed. A warning call from the Irgun apparently was dismissed as a hoax; the building was not evacuated before a massive explosion ripped through it.
Ninety-one people were killed, and forty-five wounded.
This was not the targeted killing of a despised British official or a guerrilla attack on a police station. Instead, it was plainly an act of terror, aimed at a target with numerous civilians inside. Most damningly, many Jews were among the casualties.
The King David Hotel bombing sparked a fierce dispute in the Yishuv. Ben-Gurion immediately denounced the Irgun and called it “an enemy of the Jewish people.”
But the extremists were not deterred.
Three months after the King David attack, on October 31, a Lehi cell, again acting on their own, without Ben-Gurion’s approval or knowledge, bombed the British embassy in Rome. The embassy building was severely damaged, but thanksto the fact that the operation took place at night, only a security guard and two Italian pedestrians were injured.
Almost immediately after that, Lehi mailed letter bombs to every senior British cabinet member in London. On one level, this effort was a spectacular failure—not a single letter exploded—but on another, Lehi had made its point, and its reach, clear. The files of MI5, Britain’s security service, showed that Zionist terrorism was considered the most serious threat to British national security at the time— even more serious than the Soviet Union. Irgun cells in Britain were established, according to one MI5 memo, “to beat the dog in its own kennel.” British intelligence sources warned of a wave of attacks on “selected VIPs,” among them Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and even Prime Minister Clement Attlee himself.
At the end of 1947, a report to the British high commissioner tallied the casualties of the previous two years: 176 British Mandate personnel and civilians killed.
“Only these actions, these executions, caused the British to leave,” David Shomron said, decades after he shot Tom Wilkin dead on a Jerusalem street. “If
[Avraham] Stern had not begun the war, the State of Israel would not have come into being.”
One may argue with these statements. The shrinking British Empire ceded control of the majority of its colonies, including many countries where terror
tactics had not been employed, due to economic reasons and increased demandsfor independence from the native populations. India, for instance, gained its independence right around the same time. Nevertheless, Shomron and his ilk were firmly convinced that their own bravery and their extreme methods had brought about the departure of the British. And it was the men who fought that bloody underground war—guerrillas, assassins, terrorists—who would play a central role in the building of the new state of Israel's Armed Forces and Intelligence Community.
.......
Chapter Two
A Secret World Was Born
ON NOVEMBER 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to divide Palestine, carving out a sovereign Jewish homeland. The partition wouldn’t go into effect until six months later, but Arab attacks began the very next day. Hassan Salameh, the commander of the Palestinian forces in the southern part of the country, and his fighters ambushed two Israeli buses near the town of Petah-Tikva, murdering eight passengers and injuring many others. Civil war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews had begun. The day after the bus attacks, Salameh stood in the central square of the Arab port city of Jaffa. “Palestine will turn into a bloodbath,” he promised his countrymen. He kept that promise: During the next two weeks, 48 Jews were killed and 155 wounded. Salameh, who led a force of five hundred guerrillas and even directly attacked
Tel Aviv, became a hero in the Arab world, lionized in the press. The Egyptian magazine Al-Musawar published an enormous photograph of Salameh briefing his forces in its January 12, 1948, issue, under the banner headline THE HERO HASSAN SALAMEH, COMMANDER OF THE SOUTHERN FRONT. Ben-Gurion had prepared for such assaults. To his thinking, Palestine’s Arabs
were the enemy, and the British—who would continue to rule until the partition took formal effect in May 1948—were their abettors. The Jews could depend only on themselves and their rudimentary defenses. Most of the Haganah troops were poorly trained and poorly equipped, their arms hidden in secret caches to avoid confiscation by the British. They were men and women who had served in the British Army, bolstered by new immigrants who had survived the Holocaust (some of them Red Army veterans), but they were vastly outnumbered by the combined forces of the Arab states. Ben-Gurion was aware of the estimations of the CIA and other intelligence services that the Jews would collapse under Arab attack. Some of his own people weren’t confident of victory. But Ben-Gurion, at least outwardly, displayed confidence in the Haganah’s ability to win. To bridge the numerical gap, the Haganah’s plan, then, was to use selective force, picking targets for maximum effectiveness. As part of this conception, a month into the civil war, its high command launched Operation Starling, which named twenty-three leaders of the Palestinian Arabs who were to be targeted.
The mission, according to Haganah’s commander in chief, Yaakov Dori, was threefold: “Elimination or capture of the leaders of the Arab political parties;
strikes against political centers; strikes against Arab economic and manufacturing centers.”
Hassan Salameh was at the top of the list of targets. Under the leadership of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and spiritual leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Salameh had helped lead the Arab Revolt 1936, in which Arab guerrillas for three years attacked both British and Jewish targets.
Both al-Husseini and Salameh fled Palestine after they were put on the British Mandate’s most-wanted list. In 1942, they joined forces with the SS and the Abwehr, the Nazis’ military intelligence agency, to plot Operation Atlas. It was agrandiose plan in which German and Arab commandos would parachute into Palestine and poison Tel Aviv’s water supply in order to kill as many Jews as possible, rousing the country’s Arabs to fight a holy war against the British occupiers. It failed miserably when the British, having cracked the Nazis’ Enigma code, captured Salameh and four others after they dropped into a desert ravine near Jericho on October 6, 1944.
After World War II, the British released al-Husseini and Salameh. The Jewish Agency’s Political Department, which oversaw much of the Yishuv’s covert activity in Europe, tried to locate the former and kill him several times between 1945 and 1948. The motive was partly revenge for the mufti’s alliance with Hitler, but it was also defensive: Al-Husseini might have been out of the country, but he was still actively involved in organizing attacks on Jewish settlements in northern Palestine and in attempts to assassinate Jewish leaders. Due to a lack of intelligence and trained operational personnel, all those attempts failed.
The hunt for Salameh, the first Haganah operation to integrate human and electronic intelligence, began promisingly. A unit belonging to SHAI, the Haganah’s intelligence branch, and commanded by Isser Harel, tapped into the central telephone trunk line that connected Jaffa with the rest of the country. Harel had a toolshed built on the grounds of the nearby Mikveh Israel agricultural school and filled it with pruning shears and lawn mowers. But hidden in a pit under the floor was a listening device clipped to the copper wires of Jaffa’s phone system.
“I’ll never forget the face of the Arabic-speaking SHAI operative who put on a set of headphones and listened to the first conversation,” Harel later wrote in his memoir. “His mouth gaped in astonishment and he waved his hand emotionally to silence the others who were tensely waiting….The lines were bursting with conversations that political leaders and the chiefs of armed contingents were conducting with their colleagues.” One of the speakers was Salameh. In one of the intercepted calls, SHAI learned he would be traveling to Jaffa. Haganah agents planned to ambush him by felling a tree to block the road on which his car would be traveling.
But the ambush failed, and it was not the last failure. Salameh survived multiple assassination attempts before falling in combat in June 1948, his killer unaware of his identity. Almost all of the other Operation Starling targeted killing bids also failed, because of faulty intelligence or flawed performances by the unskilled and inexperienced hit men.
—
THE ONLY OPERATIONS THAT did succeed were all carried out by two of the Haganah’s elite units, both of which belonged to the Palmach, the militia’s only well-trained and fairly well-armed corps. One of these units was the Palyam, the “marine company,” and the other was “the Arab Platoon,” a clandestine commando unit whose members operated disguised as Arabs. Palyam, the naval company, was ordered to take over the port in Haifa, Palestine’s most important maritime gateway, as soon as the British departed. Its task was to steal as much of the weaponry and equipment the British were
beginning to ship out as possible, and to prevent the Arabs from doing likewise.
“We focused on the Arab arms acquirers in Haifa and the north. We searched for them and killed them,” recalled Avraham Dar, one of the Palyam men.
Dar, who was a native English speaker, and two other Palyam men posed asBritish soldiers wanting to sell stolen gear to the Palestinians for a large amount of cash. A rendezvous was set up for the exchange near an abandoned flour mill on the outskirts of an Arab village. The three Jews, wearing British uniforms, were at the meeting place when the Palestinians arrived. Four others who were hiding nearby waited for the signal and then fell upon the Arabs, killing them with metal pipes. “We feared that gunshots would wake the neighbors, and we decided on a silent operation,” said Dar.
The Arab Platoon was established when the Haganah decided it needed a nucleus of trained fighters who could operate deep inside enemy lines, gathering information and carrying out sabotage and targeted killing missions. The training of its men—most of them immigrants from Arab lands—included commando tactics and explosives, but also intensive study of Islam and Arab customs. They were nicknamed Mistaravim, the name by which Jewish communities went in some Arab countries, where they practiced the Jewish religion, but were similar to the Arabs in all other respects—dress, language, social customs, etc.
Cooperation between the two units produced an attempt on the life of Sheikh Nimr al-Khatib, a head of the Islamic organizations of Palestine, one of the original targets of Operation Starling, because of his considerable influence over the Palestinian street. The Mistaravim could move around without being stopped by either the British or the Arabs. In February 1948, they ambushed al-Khatib when he returned from a trip to Damascus with a carload of ammunition. He was badly wounded, left Palestine, and removed himself from any active political roles.
A few days later, Avraham Dar heard from one of his port worker informants that a group of Arabs in a café had been talking about their plan to detonate a vehicle packed with explosives in a crowded Jewish section of Haifa. The British ambulance that they had acquired for this purpose was being readied in a garage in Nazareth Road, in the Arab part of the city. The Mistaravim prepared a bomb of their own in a truck that they drove into the Arab district, posing as workers engaged in fixing a burst pipe, and parked next to the wall of the garage. “What
are you doing here? No parking here! Move the truck!” the men in the garage yelled at them in Arabic.
“Right away, we’re just getting a drink, and we need to take a leak” the Mistaravim replied in Arabic, adding a few juicy curses. They walked away to a waiting car, and minutes later their bomb went off, detonating the one in the ambulance as well, and killing the five Palestinians working on it.
—ON MAY 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the new state of Israel and became its first prime minister and minister of defense. He knew what to expect next.
Years earlier, Ben-Gurion had ordered the formation of a deep network of sources in the Arab countries. Now, three days before the establishment of Israel,
Reuven Shiloah, director of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, the agency’s intelligence division, had informed him that “the Arab states have decided finally to launch a simultaneous attack on May 15….They are relying on the lack of heavy armaments and a Hebrew air force.” Shiloah provided many details about the attack plan.
The information was accurate. At midnight, after the state was declared, seven armies attacked. They far outnumbered and were infinitely better equipped than the Jewish forces, and they achieved significant gains early on, conquering settlements and inflicting casualties. The secretary general of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, declared, “This will be a war of great destruction and slaughter that will be remembered like the massacres carried out by the Mongols and the Crusaders.”
But the Jews—now officially “Israelis”—rapidly regrouped and even went on the offensive. After a month, a truce was mediated by the United Nations special envoy, Count Folke Bernadotte. Both sides were exhausted and in need of rest and resupply. When fighting resumed, the tables were turned and, with excellent intelligence and battle management, along with the help of many Holocaust survivors who had only just arrived from Europe, the Israelis drove the Arab forces back and eventually conquered far more territory than had been allocated to the Jewish state in the UN partition plan.
Though Israel had repelled superior armies, Ben-Gurion was not sanguine about the embryonic Israel Defense Forces’ short-term victory. The Arabs might have lost the first battles, but they—both those who lived in Palestine and those in the Arab states surrounding Israel—refused to accept the legitimacy of the new nation.
They vowed to destroy Israel and return the refugees to their homes. Ben-Gurion knew the IDF couldn’t hope to defend Israel’s long, convoluted borders through sheer manpower. From the remnants of the Haganah’s SHAI intelligence operations, he had to begin building a proper espionage system fit for a legitimate state.
On June 7, Ben-Gurion summoned his top aides, headed by Shiloah, to hisoffice in the former Templer colony in Tel Aviv. “Intelligence is one of the
military and political tools that we urgently need for this war,” Shiloah wrote in a memo to Ben-Gurion. “It will have to become a permanent tool, including in our
[peacetime] political apparatus.”
Ben-Gurion did not need to be persuaded. After all, a large part of the surprising, against-all-odds establishment of the state, and its defense, was owed to the effective use of accurate intelligence.
That day, he ordered the establishment of three agencies. The first was the Intelligence Department of the Israel Defense Forces General Staff, later commonly referred to by its Hebrew acronym, AMAN. Second was the Shin Bet (acronym for the General Security Service), responsible for internal security and created as a sort of hybrid between the American FBI and the British MI5. (The organization later changed its name to the Israeli Security Agency, but most Israelis still refer to it by its acronym, Shabak, or, more commonly, as in this book, as Shin Bet.) And a third, the Political Department—now belonging to the new Foreign Ministry, instead of the Jewish Agency—would engage in foreign espionage and intelligence collection. Abandoned Templer homes in the Sarona neighborhood, near the Defense Ministry, were assigned to each outfit, putting Ben-Gurion’s office at the center of an ostensibly organized force of security services.
But nothing in those first months and years was so tidy. Remnants of Haganah agencies were absorbed into various security services or spy rings, then shuffled and reabsorbed into another. Add to that the myriad turf battles and clashing egos of what were essentially revolutionaries, and much was chaos in the espionage underground. “They were hard years,” said Isser Harel, one of the founding fathers of Israeli intelligence. “We had to establish a country and defend it. [But] the structure of the services and the division of labor was determined without any systematic judgment, without discussions with all the relevant people, in an almost dilettantish and conspiratorial way.”
Under normal conditions, administrators would establish clear boundaries and procedures, and field agents would patiently cultivate sources of information over a period of years. But Israel did not have this luxury. Its intelligence operations had to be built on the fly and under siege, while the young country was fighting for its very existence.
—THE FIRST CHALLENGE THAT Ben-Gurion’s spies faced was an internal one: There were Jews who blatantly defied his authority, among them the remnants of the right-wing underground movements. An extreme example of this defiance was the Altalena affair, in June 1948. A ship by that name, dispatched from Europe by the Irgun, was due to arrive, carrying immigrants and arms. But the organization refused to hand all the weapons over to the army of the new state, insisting that some of them be given to still intact units of its own. Ben-Gurion, who had been informed of the plans by agents inside Irgun, ordered that the ship be taken over by force. In the ensuing fight, it was sunk, and sixteen Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers were killed. Shortly afterward, security forces rounded up two hundred Irgun members all over the country, effectively ending its existence. Yitzhak Shamir and the Lehi operatives under his command also refused to accept the more moderate Ben-Gurion’s authority. Over the summer, during the truce, UN envoy Bernadotte crafted a tentative peace plan that would have ended the fighting. But the plan was unacceptable to Lehi and Shamir, who accused Bernadotte of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II and of drafting a
proposal that would redraw Israeli borders in such a way—including giving most of the Negev and Jerusalem to the Arabs, and putting the Haifa port and Lydda airport under international control, as well as obliging the Jewish state to take back 300,000 Arab refugees—that the country would not survive.
Lehi issued several public warnings, in the form of notices posted in the streets of cities:
ADVICE TO THE AGENT BERNADOTTE: CLEAR OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.
The underground radio was even more outspoken, declaring, “The Count will end up like the Lord” (a reference to the assassinated Lord Moyne). Bernadotte ignored the warnings, and even ordered UN observers not to carry arms, saying, “The United Nations flag protects us.”
Convinced that the envoy’s plan would be accepted, Shamir ordered his assassination. On September 17, four months after statehood was declared, and the day after Bernadotte submitted his plan to the UN Security Council, he was traveling with his entourage in a convoy of three white DeSoto sedans from UN headquarters to the Rehavia neighborhood of Jewish Jerusalem, when a jeep blocked their way. Three young men wearing peaked caps jumped out. Two of them shot the tires of the UN vehicles, and the third, Yehoshua Cohen, opened the door of the car Bernadotte was traveling in and opened fire with his Schmeisser MP40 submachine gun. The first burst hit the man sitting next to Bernadotte, a
French colonel by the name of André Serot, but the next, more accurate, hit the count in the chest. Both men were killed. The whole attack was over in seconds—“like thunder and lightning, the time it takes to fire fifty rounds,” is the way the Israeli liaison officer, Captain Moshe Hillman, who was in the car with the victims, described it. The perpetrators were never caught.
The assassination infuriated and profoundly embarrassed the Jewish leadership.
The Security Council condemned it as “a cowardly act which appears to have been committed by a criminal group of terrorists in Jerusalem,” and The New York
Times wrote the following day
, “No Arab armies could have done so much harm [to the Jewish state] in so short a time.”
Ben-Gurion saw Lehi’s rogue operation as a serious challenge to his authority, one that could lead to a coup or even a civil war. He reacted immediately, outlawing both the Irgun and Lehi. He ordered Shin Bet chief Isser Harel to round up Lehi members. Topping the wanted list was Yitzhak Shamir. He wasn’t captured, but many others were, and they were locked up under heavy guard. Lehi ceased to exist as an organization. Ben-Gurion was grateful to Harel for his vigorous action against the underground and made him the number-one intelligence official in the country.
A short, solid, and driven man, Isser Harel was influenced by the Russian Bolshevik revolutionary movement and its use of sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and assassination, but he abhorred communism. Under his direction, the Shin Bet kept constant surveillance and conducted political espionage against Ben-Gurion’s political opponents, the left-wing socialist and Communist parties, and the right- wing Herut party formed by veterans of Irgun and Lehi.
Meanwhile, Ben-Gurion and his foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, were at loggerheads over what policy should be adopted toward the Arabs. Sharett was the most prominent of Israel’s early leaders who believed diplomacy was the best way to achieve regional peace and thus secure the country. Even before independence, he made secret overtures to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Lebanon’s prime minister, Riad al-Solh, who would be instrumental in forming the coalition of invading Arabs, and who already had been largely responsible for the Palestinian militias that exacted heavy losses on the pre-state Yishuv. Despite al-Solh’s virulently anti- Jewish rhetoric and anti-Israel actions, he secretly met with Eliyahu Sasson, one of Sharett’s deputies, several times in Paris in late 1948 to discuss a peace agreement.
“If we want to establish contacts with the Arabs to end the war,” said Sasson when Sharett, enthusiastic about his secret contacts, took him to report to the cabinet,
“we have to be in contact with those people who are now in power. With those who have declared war on us…and who are having trouble continuing. ”Those diplomatic overtures obviously were not effective, and Ben-Gurion, on December 12, 1948, ordered military intelligence agents to assassinate al-Solh.
“Sharett was vehemently opposed to the idea,” recalled Asher (Arthur) Ben-Natan, a leading figure in the Foreign Ministry’s Political Department, the arm
responsible for covert activities abroad. “And when our department was asked to help military intelligence execute the order, through our contacts in Beirut, he
countermanded the order, effectively killing it.”
This incident, plus a number of other clashes between Harel and Sharett, made Ben-Gurion’s blood boil. He considered diplomacy a weak substitute for a strong military and robust intelligence, and he viewed Sharett, personally, as a competitor who threatened the prime minister’s control. In December 1949, Ben-Gurion removed the Political Department from the control of the Foreign Ministry and placed it under his direct command. He later gave the agency a new name: the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations. More commonly, though, it was known simply as “the Institute”—the Mossad.
With the establishment of the Mossad, Israeli intelligence services coalesced into the three-pronged community that survives in more or less the same form
today: AMAN, the military intelligence arm that supplies information to the IDF; the Shin Bet, responsible for internal intelligence, counterterror, and counterespionage; and the Mossad, which deals with covert activities beyond the country’s borders.
More important, it was a victory for those who saw the future of the Israeli state as more dependent upon a strong army and intelligence community than upon diplomacy. That victory was embodied in real estate: The former Templer homes in Tel Aviv that the Political Department had occupied were handed over to the Mossad. It was also a personal victory for Isser Harel. Already in charge of the Shin Bet, he was installed as the chief of the Mossad as well, making him one of the most powerful—and secretive—figures in early Israeli history.
From that point on, Israeli foreign and security policy would be determined by jousting between Tel Aviv—where the military high command, the intelligence headquarters, and the Defense Ministry were located, and where Ben-Gurion spent most of his time—and Jerusalem, where the Foreign Ministry was housed in a cluster of prefabricated huts. Tel Aviv always had the upper hand.
Ben-Gurion kept all of the agencies under his direct control. The Mossad and the Shin Bet were under him in his capacity as prime minister, and military intelligence fell under his purview because he was also minister of defense. It was an enormous concentration of covert, and political, power. Yet from the beginning, it was kept officially hidden from the Israeli public. Ben-Gurion forbade anyone from acknowledging, let alone revealing, that this sprawling web of official institutions even existed. In fact, mentioning the name Shin Bet or Mossad in public was prohibited until the 1960s. Because their existence could not be acknowledged, Ben-Gurion prevented the creation of a legal basis for those same agencies’ operations. No law laid out their goals, roles, missions, powers, or
budgets or the relations between them.
In other words, Israeli intelligence from the outset occupied a shadow realm, one adjacent to yet separate from the country’s democratic institutions. The activities of the intelligence community—most of it (Shin Bet and the Mossad) under the direct command of the prime minister—took place without any effective supervision by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, or by any other independent external body.
In this shadow realm, “state security” was used to justify a large number of actions and operations that, in the visible world, would have been subject to criminal prosecution and long prison terms: constant surveillance of citizens because of their ethnic or political affiliations; interrogation methods that included prolonged detention without judicial sanction, and torture; perjury in the courts and concealment of the truth from counsel and judges.
The most notable example was targeted killing. In Israeli law, there is no death penalty, but Ben-Gurion circumvented this by giving himself the authority to order extrajudicial executions.
The justification for maintaining that shadow realm was that anything other than complete secrecy could lead to situations that would threaten the very existence of Israel. Israel had inherited from the British Mandate a legal system that included state-of-emergency provisions to enforce order and suppress rebellions. Among those provisions was a requirement that all print and broadcast media submit any reports on intelligence and army activities to a military censor, who vetoed much of the material. The state of emergency has not been rescinded as of the time of this writing. But as a sop to the hungry media, Ben-Gurion was shrewd enough to establish an Editors Committee, which was composed of the editors in chief of the print and radio news outlets. From time to time, Ben-Gurion himself, or someone representing him, would appear before the committee to share covert tidbits while explaining why those tidbits could never, under any circumstances, be released to
the public. The editors were thrilled because they had gained for themselves entrée to the twilight realm and its mysteries. In gratitude, they imposed on themselves a level of self-censorship that went beyond even that imposed by the actual censor.
—
IN JULY 1952, AN exhibit of paintings by the Franco-German artist Charles Duvall opened at the National Museum in Cairo. Duvall, a tall young man with a cigarette permanently dangling from his lip, had moved to Egypt from Paris two years earlier, announcing that he’d “fallen in love with the land of the Nile.” The Cairo press published a number of fawning pieces about Duvall and his work—strongly influenced, the critics said, by Picasso—and he soon became a fixture in high society. Indeed, the Egyptian minister of culture attended the opening of Duvall’s show and even purchased two of the paintings that he left on loan to the museum, where they would hang for the next twenty-three years.
Five months later, when his show had closed, Duvall said that his mother had fallen ill and he had to rush back to Paris to care for her. After his return to France, he sent a few letters to old friends in Egypt, and then he was never heard from again.
Duvall’s real name was Shlomo Cohen-Abarbanel, and he was an Israeli spy. He was the youngest of four sons born to a prominent rabbi in Hamburg in Germany.
In the winter of 1933, as the Nazis rose to power and began enforcing race laws, the family fled to France and then Palestine. Fifteen years later, in 1947, Cohen- Abarbanel, whose artistic abilities had been apparent since he was a toddler, returned to Paris to study painting at the age of twenty-seven. A short time later, Haganah intelligence personnel heard about his talents and recruited him to forge passports and papers to be used by European and North African Jews being smuggled into Palestine in violation of British immigration laws. It was the beginning of a long career in espionage. Portraying himself as a bohemian artist, Cohen-Abarbanel operated networks of agents in Egypt and recruited new agents throughout the Arab world. He collected information about Nazi war criminals who had taken refuge in the Middle East, and he reported to his superiors on the initial attempts of German rocket scientists to sell their services to Arab armies.
When he returned to Israel in 1952, he pushed his superiors in the young intelligence agency the Mossad to invest more resources into finding and killing Nazis.
A short time after taking command of the Mossad, Isser Harel asked Cohen- Abarbanel to design an official emblem for the agency. The artist shut himself in his room and emerged with a design, which he’d drawn by hand. At its center was a seven-branched menorah, the sacred lamp that stood in the Temple in Jerusalem that the Romans destroyed in A.D. 70. The seal also bore a legend—verse 6 from
chapter 24 of the Book of Proverbs, authored, according to Jewish tradition, by King Solomon himself: “For by subterfuge you will make war.” This was later
changed to another line from Proverbs (chapter 11, verse 14), which reads,
“Where there is no subterfuge—the nation falls, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” Cohen-Abarbanel’s meaning could not have been clearer: using covert stratagems, the Mossad would be the supreme shield of the new Jewish commonwealth, ensuring that never again would Jews be dishonored, that neveragain would Judea fall.
The Mossad’s charter, written by Harel, was equally broad and ambitious. The organization’s purpose, according to its official orders, was “secret collection of information (strategic, political, operational) outside the country’s borders; carrying out special operations outside Israel’s borders; thwarting the development and acquisition of unconventional weapons by hostile states; prevention of terror attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets outside Israel; development and maintenance of intelligence and political ties with countries that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel; bringing to Israel Jews from countries that refused to allow them to leave, and creating frameworks for the defense of the Jews still in those countries.” In other words, it was charged with not only protecting Israel and its citizens but also standing as a sentinel for world Jewry.
—
ISRAEL’S YOUNG INTELLIGENCE SERVICES had to offer a response to a series of challenges presented by the ring of twenty-one hostile Arab nations that
surrounded Israel and threatened to destroy it. There were those in the top# echelons of the defense establishment who believed that these challenges would best be met by the use of pinpointed special operations far beyond enemy lines.
To this end, AMAN set up a unit called Intelligence Service 13 (which in Jewish tradition is considered a lucky number). Avraham Dar, now one of its prominent officers, went to Egypt in 1951 to set up a network of agents culled from local Zionist activists. On various pretexts, the recruits traveled to Europe, and then to Israel for training in espionage and sabotage. Outlining the goal of his network, Dar explained that “the central problem that made Egypt so antagonistic to Israel was the way King Farouk ran the government. If we could get rid of that obstaclemany problems would be solved. In other words”—and here Dar turned to a Spanish proverb—“no dog, no rabies.”
Getting rid of “the dog” proved to be unnecessary—Farouk soon was overthrown in a coup. And AMAN’s assumption that things would be better when
he was gone turned out to be totally groundless. However, the idea that this already established Egyptian network could be employed to change the course of history in the region was simply too tempting for Israel’s leaders to let go. AMAN decided to use these local agents against the Free Officers Movement, which had just recently ousted Farouk, “aiming to undermine Western confidence in the [Egyptian] regime by causing public insecurity and provoking demonstrations, arrests, and retaliatory actions, with Israel’s role remaining unexposed.” But the whole operation ended in catastrophe.
Despite intensive training, AMAN’s recruits were amateurish and sloppy, and all of their sabotage operations ended in failure. Eventually, eleven operatives were
ferreted out by Egyptian authorities. Some were executed after short trials, and one killed himself after suffering gruesome torture. The lucky ones were sentenced to long prison terms and hard labor.
The ensuing turmoil gave rise to a major political dispute that raged in Israel for many years, over whether AMAN had received the approval of the political establishment for these abortive operations.
The main lesson drawn by Israel was that local Jews should never be recruited in hostile “target” countries. Their capture was almost certain to end in death, and
send ripples throughout the entire Jewish community. Despite the temptation to use people who were already on the ground and didn’t need to establish a cover story, Israel almost never again did.
However, the underlying conviction that Israel could act boldly and change history through special operations behind enemy lines remained, and was in fact cemented in place as the core principle of Israel’s security doctrine. Indeed, this philosophy—that special ops behind enemy lines should be at least one of the country’s primary methods of national defense—would predominate among Israel’s political and intelligence establishment all the way up to the present day.
And while many of the world’s established nations kept a separation between the intelligence outfits that gathered information and the operations units that utilized that information to conduct clandestine missions, from the very beginning Israel’s special forces were an integral part of its intelligence agencies. In America, for instance, special-operations units Delta Force and SEAL Team Six are components of the Joint Special Operations Command, not the CIA or military intelligence. In Israel, however, special-operations units were under the direct control of the intelligence agencies Mossad and AMAN.
The goal was to continually translate gathered intelligence into operations.
While other nations at the time were also gathering intelligence during peacetime, they did so only to be prepared in case war broke out, or to authorize the occasional special-ops attack. Israel, on the other hand, would constantly use its intelligence to develop special-ops attacks behind enemy lines, in the hope of avoiding all-out warfare entirely.
—
THE FASHIONING OF AN emblem, a charter, and a military philosophy was one thing. Implementation, as Harel was soon to learn, was another thing altogether,
especially when it came to aggressive action.
The Mossad’s first major operation ended badly. In November 1954, a captain in the Israeli Navy named Alexander Yisraeli—a philandering grifter deeply in debt—slipped out of the country on a bogus passport and tried to sell top-secret documents to the Egyptian embassy in Rome. A Mossad agent working in that embassy tipped off his superiors in Tel Aviv, who immediately began to develop a plan to kidnap Yisraeli and return him to Israel for trial as a traitor.
For Harel, this was a critical test, both for the security of the nation and his career. In those formative years, the heads of all the agencies jockeyed for power and prestige, and one significant failure could prove professionally fatal. He assembled a top-notch team of Mossad and Shin Bet operatives to grab Yisraeli in Europe. He put his second cousin, Rafi Eitan, who as a teenager had assassinated two German Templers, in charge. Eitan says that “there were some who proposed finding Yisraeli and killing him as quickly as possible. But Harel squelched this immediately. ‘We don’t kill Jews,’ he said, and declared this was to be an abduction operation.” Harel himself said,
“It never occurred to me to issue an order to kill one of our own. I wanted him to be brought to Israel and put on trial for treason.”
This is an important point. There is a tradition of mutual responsibility in Judaism, and a deep connection among all Jews, as if they are one big family.
These values are seen as having kept the Jewish people alive as a nation throughout the two thousand years of exile, and for a Jew to harm another Jew is considered
intolerable. Back in the days of the Palestinian underground, when it was effectively impossible to hold trials, eliminating Jewish traitors was deemed legitimate to a certain extent, but not after the state was established. “We do not kill Jews”—even if they were believed to be a grave danger to national security— became an iron law of the Israeli intelligence community. The plan unfolded perfectly at first. Eitan and three others pinched Yisraeli
after he’d been stopped by another Mossad female asset at a Paris intersection. The captive was taken to a safe house, where a Mossad doctor injected him with a sedative and placed him in a crate typically used to transfer arms, before putting him on a long, multi-stop flight on an Israeli Air Force cargo plane. At every stop, Yisraeli was injected again until, just as the plane touched down in Athens, he suffered a massive seizure and died. Following Harel’s orders, one of Eitan’s men ended up dumping the body from the back of the plane into the sea. Harel’s people fed the Israeli press false information that Yisraeli, who left behind a pregnant wife, had stolen money and settled somewhere in South America. Harel, who was very embarrassed that an operation of his had ended in the death of a Jew, ordered that all the records on the case be secreted deep in one of the Mossad’s safes. But Harel’s rivals kept a copy of some of the documents, to be used against him someday if so required. Harel also came to the conclusion that there was an urgent need for the formation of a special unit specifically designed to carry out sabotage and targeted killing missions. He began searching for “trained fighters, tough and loyal, who would not hesitate to squeeze the trigger when necessary.” He found them in the last place he would have been expected to look: the veterans of the Irgun and Lehi, against whom he had once fought a bitter struggle. Ben-Gurion had forbidden the employment of any former members of the rightwing underground in government departments, and many of them were jobless, frustrated, and hungry for action. The Shin Bet believed that some of them were dangerous and were liable to start underground movements against the regime. Harel aimed to kill two birds: to set up his special-ops unit, and to get the underground fighters into action under his command, outside the borders of the state. David Shomron, Yitzhak Shamir, and those of their comrades in the Irgun and Lehi who were deemed tough and daring enough were invited to Harel’s home in north Tel Aviv and sworn in. This was the establishment of Mifratz, Hebrew for “Gulf” or “Bay,” the Mossad’s first hit team.
..............
Chapter Three - The Bureau for Arranging Meetings with God
ISRAEL’S WAR OF INDEPENDENCE officially ended with armistice agreements in 1949. The unofficial fighting never stopped. Throughout the early 1950s, the country was constantly infiltrated by Arabs from the parts of Palestine that remained in Arab hands after the war—namely, the Gaza Strip, in the south, which was administered by Egypt, and the West Bank, in the east, which Jordan had annexed. The IDF estimated that in 1952, about sixteen thousand infiltrations occurred (eleven thousand from Jordan and the rest from Egypt). Some of those infiltrators were refugees who had fled during the War of Independence, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and were trying to return to their villages and salvage what was left of their property. But many others were militants whose objective was to kill Jews and spread terror. They called themselves fedayeen—“those who self-sacrifice.” The Egyptians, despite having signed an armistice, quickly realized that the
fedayeen could fight a proxy war on their behalf. With proper training and supervision, those Palestinian militants could wreak substantial havoc on Israel while giving Egypt the cover of plausible deniability. A young captain in Egyptian military intelligence, Mustafa Hafez, was put in
charge of organizing the fedayeen. Beginning in mid-1953, Hafez (along with Salah Mustafa, the Egyptian military attaché in Jordan’s capital, Amman) started recruiting and training guerrilla squads to be dispatched into Israel’s south. For years, those squads, six hundred fedayeen in total, sneaked across the border from Gaza and laid waste to anything they could. They blew up water pipes, set fire to fields, bombed train tracks, mined roads; they murdered farmers in their fields and yeshiva students at study—altogether some one thousand civilians between 1951 and 1955. They spread panic and fear to the point that Israelis refrained from driving at night on main roads in the south.
The proxy squads were considered a huge success. The Israelis couldn’t hold Egypt or Jordan directly responsible. They would respond instead by recruiting their own proxies, turning Arabs into informers, collecting intelligence on fedayeen targets, and then assassinating them. Those tasks were assigned, for the most part, to an IDF intelligence team known as Unit 504.
Some of the men of Unit 504 had been raised in Arab neighborhoods of Palestine and thus were intimately familiar with the language and customs of the locals. Unit 504 was under the command of Rehavia Vardi. Polish-born, Vardi had served as a senior Haganah intelligence officer prior to the establishment of the state, and he was known for his sharp wit and blunt statements. “Every Arab,” he said, “can be recruited on the basis of one of the three Ps—praise, payment or pussy.” Whether through those three Ps or other means, Vardi and his men recruited four hundred to five hundred agents, who passed on invaluable information in the period between 1948 and 1956. Those recruits, in turn, provided Unit 504 with information on a number of senior fedayeen dispatchers.
Several were identified, located, and targeted, and in ten to fifteen of those cases, the Israelis persuaded their Arab agents to place a bomb near that target.
That was when they would call Unit 188. That was when they required the services of Natan Rotberg.
—
“IT WAS ALL VERY, very secret,” Rotberg said. “We were not allowed to mention the names of units; we were not allowed to tell anyone where we were going or where we were serving or—it goes without saying—what we were doing.” Rotberg, a thick-necked and good-natured kibbutznik with a bushy mustache, was one of a small group, only a few hundred men, who took part in forming the original triumvirate of AMAN, Shin Bet, and the Mossad. In 1951, when Rotberg was assigned to a marine commando unit called Shayetet 13 (Flotilla 13), Israeli intelligence set up a secret facility north of Tel Aviv to teach “special demolitions” and manufacture sophisticated bombs. Rotberg, Flotilla 13’s explosives officer, was appointed to run it.
Rotberg had a large vat installed in which he mixed TNT and pentaerythritol tetranitrate and other chemicals into deadly concoctions. But though his mixtures were designed to kill people, he claimed that he did not act with hatred in his heart. “You need to know how to forgive,” he said. “You need to know how to forgive the enemy. However, we have no authority to forgive people like bin Laden. That, only God can do. Our job is to arrange a meeting between them. In my laboratory, I opened a matchmaker’s office, a bureau that arranged such meetings. I orchestrated more than thirty such meetings.”
When Rehavia Vardi and his men had identified a target, they would go to Rotberg for the bomb. “At first we worked with double-bottomed wicker baskets,” Rotberg said. “I would cushion the bottom part of the basket with impermeable paper and pour the concoction in from the vat. Then we’d put on a cover and, above that, fill it up with fruits and vegetables. For the [triggering] mechanism, we used pencils into which we inserted ampoules filled with acid that ate away at the cover until it reached the detonator, activated it, and set off the charge. The problem with the acid was that weather conditions affected the time it took to eat away [the cover], producing nonuniform timing. A bomb in the Gaza Strip would go off at a different time than one in the West Bank, where it is generally colder.
We then switched to clocks, which are much more accurate.”
But Rotberg’s bombs were hardly enough to solve the fedayeen problem.
According to several sources, explosives killed only seven targets between mid-1951 and mid-1953, while in the process killing six civilians.
The attacks continued unabated, terrorizing Israeli civilians, humiliating the Israel Defense Forces. Vardi and his men, talented as they were at recruiting agents, managed to glean only sparse information about the identities of the fedayeen handlers, and even when the unit did ferret out specific targets, the IDF was unable to find or kill them. “We had our limitations,” says Yigal Simon, a Unit 504 veteran and later on its commander. “We didn’t always have intelligence, we couldn’t send our agents everywhere, and they didn’t appreciate us enough in the IDF. It was important to the high command to show that the IDF—Jewish hands —could execute these actions.”
Regular IDF units did try several times to penetrate the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and Jordan to carry out retaliation attacks, but they repeatedly failed. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion accordingly decided to develop whatever capability the IDF lacked. Ata secret meeting on June 11, 1953, the Israeli cabinet approved his recommendation that it “authorize the minister of defense”—Ben-Gurion himself —“to approve…acts of reprisal against the attacks and murders [committed by] those coming from beyond the Israel-Jordan armistice lines.”
Ben-Gurion used the authority vested in him to act a short time afterward. Two guards at Even Sapir, a settlement near Jerusalem, were murdered on May 25, and he ordered that an ad hoc secret detail be set up in order to do away with a Palestinian arch-terrorist by the name of Mustafa Samweli, who had been behindthe slaying of the guards.
Now Ben-Gurion just needed the right man to lead it.
—
ARIEL SCHEINERMAN—BETTER KNOWN AS Ariel Sharon—was a twenty-five-year-old student in the summer of 1953, but he already had extensive combat experience.
He’d established himself as a leader from his days as a teenaged youth-movement counselor and had proven his courage during the War of Independence, during which he had been badly wounded. Arik, as he was also known, was charismatic and authoritative, a warrior in top physical condition, and he didn’t hesitate when the IDF General Staff recruited him to eliminate Samweli. “My father immediately said yes,” wrote Sharon’s son Gilad, in a biography of Ariel. “He was confident that with seven or eight good men, friends who’d served with him in the war and afterward, and with the right kit, he could do it.”
On the night of July 12–13, Sharon and a squad made up of reservists managed to get inside Samweli’s village in the West Bank and blow his house up. But the intelligence they were given was flawed, and Samweli wasn’t at home. The force got entangled in a firefight and made it out by the skin of their teeth.
The high command saw the operation as a success—deep penetration of enemy territory, demonstration of its ability to hit a target, and returning to base without casualties. Sharon, by contrast, came back exhausted and totally dissatisfied. His conclusion was that such operations have to be carried out by professionals, something completely different from the random group of buddies he had taken with him that night. He told his superiors that there was a need for an elite commando unit. On August 10, Unit 101 came into being.
“This unit was set up for the purpose of operations across the border, those non- standard missions that demand special training and high-level performance,” according to the “101 Operations Procedures,” written by Sharon himself. Sharon was given free rein to select his own men, from reservist soldiers
redrafted to the army as well as regular soldiers. He wanted to put them through a grueling, yearlong training program. His fighters learned how to handle explosives, how to navigate over long distances, and how to fire accurately and precisely while on the run over mountainous terrain, exercises that both developed their skills and instilled a sense of pride and confidence.
The young leader made sure his men stood apart from the IDF regulars, arming them with a different personal weapon from the outdated bolt-action Czechoslovak rifle in use at the time. Instead they were issued Carl Gustav submachine guns, and they were also the first to try out the new and still secret Israeli-made Uzi.
Sharon also relaxed the rules of both dress and conduct; at their secret base in the Jerusalem mountains, the men of Unit 101 often worked entirely in civilian attire. To Sharon, the outward trappings of military order were of marginal use; more important was that his men believed they were special, better, the best. And that they trusted their commander: Sharon’s operational briefings were precise and unequivocal, and he fought at the front of his battalion, often in the most vulnerable position, embodying the well-known motto of IDF commanders:
“Follow me!”
Sharon was imbued with a limitless and unrestrained motivation to go on operations, and he grasped that if he had to wait for precise intelligence from
AMAN to carry out a targeted killing, he might never do anything.
Accordingly, Sharon and Moshe Dayan, chief of the general staff, shifted tactics, abandoning pinpoint precision for something more primal. Rather than kill prime Palestinian terrorists, they would avenge the killings of Israelis by attacking and terrorizing the Arab villages from which the terrorists had set forth to harm Jews, as well as the army camps and police stations.
“We cannot prevent the murder of workers in the orchards and of families in their beds,” Dayan said in a lecture in 1955, “but we have the ability to set a high price for our blood.”
Sharon, craving action, drew up plans for a series of punitive raids against Arab military and civilian targets, then lobbied for his superiors to approve them. Yet it is an open question how many of those raids were punitive as opposed to provocative. Sharon was fond of quoting Dayan’s famous dictum “We do not initiate battles in times of peace.” Uzi Eilam, who served as Sharon’s intelligence officer, suggests that this was not an ironclad rule. “There were many cases in which we, at Arik’s bidding, provoked the enemy over the border and incited war.In a real analysis of ‘who started it’ over the entire history of the IDF’s retaliations, we will not come out squeaky clean.”
Even in real time, as they were unfolding, there was an apparent downside to Sharon’s tactics. In the fall of 1953, fedayeen murdered a young woman and her two children in Yehud, just southeast of Tel Aviv, brutal deaths that shocked the Israeli public. The government vowed to retaliate. The assumption was that Arab militants were using West Bank villages close to the border as bases to attack Israel. Sharon selected one of those villages—Qibya, which may or may not have been involved in the Yehud murders—as a target.
On October 15, before dawn, Sharon led a force of 130 men from Unit 101 and other outfits, carrying more than 1,500 pounds of explosives, into Qibya. Within hours, the village was destroyed. “In the Qibya operation,” one of Sharon’s lieutenants later testified, “we blew up forty-three houses. The IDF was equipped with small flashlights left over from the British Army, something you could barely see with. We went in with a megaphone, shining flashlights and shouting: ‘If there’s anyone here, come out, because we are about to blow it up.’ Some got up and came out. Then we’d apply the explosives and blow up the house. When we returned, we reported eleven [Arabs] killed. It wasn’t that we lied; we just didn’t know.”
The death toll was sixfold higher. At least sixty-nine were killed, most of them women and children. The world, including much of Israel and Jewish communities around the globe, was horrified. The UN Security Council condemned the raid, as did the U.S. State Department, which announced that it already had suspended aid to Israel for violating the armistice agreements of 1949.
Israel’s official explanation for the massacre was that rogue Jewish civilians were responsible. “All IDF units were at their bases” on the night of the raid, Ben- Gurion said publicly. Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, repeated Ben- Gurion’s lie at a session of the Security Council.
Privately, Ben-Gurion gave Sharon his full support, because Unit 101—despite the worldwide outrage—boosted morale within an Israeli Army exhausted by unrelenting defensive operations. The unit represented dedication, daring, physical prowess, and mental stamina, ideals to which each IDF unit aspired. As Sharon later said, Unit 101 “proved, within a short period of time, that there was no mission it could not carry out,” and that those missions helped secure Israel’s borders. That claim is open to debate—there are serious questions about how successful those commando raids were in reducing attacks by infiltrators, and some didn’t even achieve their immediate objectives—but Israeli soldiers believed it was true.
And that was enough. In early 1954, only five months after Unit 101 had been established, Dayan merged it with the Paratroopers Brigade, with Sharon as one of the battalion commanders. Dayan believed that Unit 101 had become a model—of training and discipline, of dedication and skill—that Sharon could replicate with the paratroops and then in the entire army.
Sharon’s activity within the paratroops was more restrained, because he was no longer commander of an independent unit, but also because changes had taken place in the high command. Ben-Gurion had resigned and been replaced as prime minister by the dovish Moshe Sharett, who generally refrained from approving retaliation attacks.
But what Sharett did not approve, Sharon’s men took upon themselves. The sister of the most renowned warrior in 101, Meir Har-Zion, was brutally murdered by Bedouins while on an illegal hike across the Jordanian border. Har-Zion and two comrades, with Sharon’s moral encouragement and logistical assistance, went to the scene and killed four Bedouin shepherds in revenge. Sharett demanded that they be court-martialed, but Dayan and Sharon, with Ben-Gurion’s backing, thwarted it.
Sharett wrote in his diary on January 11, 1955: “I wonder about the nature and the fate of this nation, capable of such fine spiritual sensitivity, of such profound love of humanity, of such honest yearning for the beautiful and the sublime, while at the same time it produces from amongst the ranks of its youth boys who are capable of murdering people with a clear mind and in cold blood by thrusting knives into the flesh of young, defenseless Bedouin. Which of the two souls that run around in the pages of the Bible will overcome its rival within this nation?”
—
MUSTAFA HAFEZ, MEANWHILE, WAS still alive. The Egyptian intelligence captain and his colleague in Jordan, Salah Mustafa, continued running squads of Palestinian infiltrators, and those infiltrators were still wreaking havoc in Israel.
On March 17, 1954, a gang of twelve Arab terrorists ambushed a civilian bus on its way from Eilat to Tel Aviv at Scorpion Pass, a winding stretch of road in the heart of the Negev Desert. Firing point-blank, they killed eleven passengers. A nine-year-old boy, Haim Furstenberg, hiding under a seat, got up after they had left the bus and asked, “Have they gone?” The terrorists heard him, returned to the bus, and shot him in the head. He survived but was paralyzed until his death, thirty-two years later. The Arabs mutilated and spat on the bodies of the dead. It turned out later that they were Palestinians and Bedouins who had come from Jordan and were supported by Salah Mustafa.
Sharett was under heavy pressure to retaliate, but he would not approve a revenge operation. “An act in reaction to the bloodbath would only blur the horrifying effect, and would place us on the same level as the mass murderers on the other side,” he wrote in his diary.
Instead, AMAN’s Unit 504 sent in a detail of three Bedouin assassins whom they employed as agents. They crossed into Jordan heavily armed and carrying two explosive devices prepared by Natan Rotberg. They discovered where one of the terrorists lived, in a village in southern Jordan, and, after deciding not to blow up his house, they waited until he was alone and shot him dead. “Our agents found the ID card of the bus driver among the things he’d looted and brought it back to us,”
Yigal Simon, a 504 senior veteran, recounts.
This pinpoint operation was considered a success by 504, but it didn’t make much of a difference in the wider picture. Targeted killings, with their limited success, had failed to stop, or even noticeably stall, the cross-border attacks.
Punitive raids had drawn global ire but hadn’t slowed the carnage.
In the middle of the 1950s, Hafez was winning. The terrorists he trained carried out ever more deadly attacks in Israeli territory—collecting intelligence, sabotaging infrastructure, stealing property, and killing Israelis. Israel, lacking proper infrastructure, including high-resolution intelligence, experience, know- how, and large enough trained and equipped forces, could respond only with increasingly nonspecific retaliation operations and heavy bombing of the Gaza Strip.
Hafez’s name appeared frequently in the reports that Unit 504 received from its sources in the south. Yet he was a vague figure, cloaked in shadows. “We never got a picture of him,” said Yaakov Nimrodi, who commanded the unit’s southern base.
“But we knew that he was a young man of about thirty, fairly good-looking and very charismatic. Our prisoners and agents spoke of him with admiration and
awe.”
Hafez and Nimrodi, himself a young, charismatic officer, stood on either side of# the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Hafez was considered one of the best minds in Egyptian
intelligence,” Nimrodi said. “Few were our agents who managed to slip through his fingers. Many were captured and liquidated, or became double agents after the treatment they received from him, and turned against us. In this war of minds, only the best won and survived.”
Against the background of the security impotency and under heavy public pressure, Sharett was compelled first to accept Ben-Gurion as his defense minister,
and then to give him back the premiership, in November 1955. Sharett went back to being just the foreign minister and later was forced to resign under pressure from Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion’s return encouraged AMAN to again plan more vigorous attacks against the fedayeen. One idea was to do away with Hafez. “He was the head of the
snake,” Nimrodi said, “that we had to cut off.”
“But this was difficult, for three reasons,” said Avraham Dar, who now, as a major in AMAN, was charged with gathering intelligence about Hafez. “First,
collecting enough intelligence about him and about the places he frequented; secondly, getting to him and killing him; and third, the diplomatic problem. He was a senior officer in the army of a sovereign state. Hitting him might have been seen as crossing a red line in relations with Egypt, and lead to deterioration.”
Attempts by the UN to mediate between Israel and Egypt failed, and Hafez’s raids continued, through 1955 and into the spring of 1956.
On April 29, 1956, a squad of Palestinian guerrillas trained by Hafez opened fire on farmers working in the fields of Nahal Oz, a kibbutz on Israel’s southern
border. Roi Rotberg, a young first lieutenant in the IDF reserves, in charge of security for the kibbutz, rode out on horseback to repel them. The Palestinians
killed him, gouged out his eyes, and dragged his body through the field and across the trench that marked the border, an effort to suggest that Rotberg had invaded
foreign soil.
Moshe Dayan took Rotberg’s death particularly hard. He had met the lieutenant only the day before, as he toured southern settlements. The next day, April 30,
Dayan stood over Rotberg’s open grave and read a eulogy that, in the intervening years, has come to be seen as the seminal formulation of Israeli militarism:
Roi was murdered yesterday, in the early morning. The silence of the spring morning
blinded him and he did not see those lying in wait at the edge of the furrow.
Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been turning the land and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance…
We are the generation of settlement, and without steel helmets and the maw of the cannon
we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not live if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire fences and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water. Millions of Jews, annihilated because they had no country, gaze at us from the dust of Jewish history and command us to settle and raise up a land for our people.
…We must not flinch from seeing the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us and await the moment when they are strong enough to get our blood. We will not avert our gaze lest our hands grow weak. This is our generation’s destiny.
In simple terms, Dayan meant that the Jews in the State of Israel may have arrived as settlers returning to their ancient homeland, but, from the perspective of the Arabs, they came as invaders. Therefore the Arabs—justifiably, from their point of view—hated the Jews. And the continued existence of the Jews depended, more than anything, on their ability to defend themselves against the Arabs who wished to kill them. All the rest—development, the economy, society, and culture —were subordinate and must bend to the needs of security and survival. This, in Dayan’s view, was Israel’s destiny, born of thousands of years of Jewish history.
Standing over the grave as Dayan spoke was Roi’s cousin, Natan Rotberg, the bomb maker. After the funeral, Natan promised his uncle, Shmaryahu, that he would avenge Roi, his son.
As it happened, Dayan was determined to avenge Roi, too, and all the other Israelis killed and terrorized by Hafez’s squads. This time, Dayan persuaded Ben- Gurion not only to launch a retaliation raid against a Palestinian village, but to allow him to instruct the intelligence community to kill the Egyptians running killers into Israel—the colonels Hafez and Salah. This was a significant escalation. Avraham Dar wrote the operational order, which was code-named Eunuch (Saris). As far as can be ascertained, this was the first operational order for a targeted killing that was both written and carried out in the history of the State of Israel.
“In light of Egypt’s organization of fedayeen activities in the Gaza Strip and Jordan,” Dar wrote, “it has been decided to act against its organizers, Mustafa
Hafez in the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian military attaché in Jordan. The goal: the physical elimination of the said two men with booby-trap bombs.” In Hafez’s case,
Dar recalls, “it was clear to us that the bomb had to be given to him by someone he trusted.”
They found their man in Muhammad al-Talalqa, a young Bedouin who lived in the Gaza Strip and was working for both Hafez and Unit 504. Al-Talalqa and Hafez were not aware that 504 knew he was a double agent, and the AMAN unit decided to exploit this and give him something in a package that would seem tohim so important that he would immediately take it to Hafez.
What could that something be? A book that included all the ciphers in Morse code used by the Israelis, which Talalqa would be instructed by 504 to take to another Israeli agent in Gaza.
Once again, the services of Natan Rotberg were called for. He would indeed avenge his cousin.
“Zadok [Ofir, an officer at Unit 504’s southern base] called me and told me about the plan,” Rotberg said more than five decades later. “I understood who was
involved and was very pleased. I told them that if they could deliver a thick book to Hafez, I would take care of the rest.
“I cut out the book’s insides and poured in three hundred grams of my stuff.
Was it enough? Of course. A detonator is twenty grams—if it explodes in your hand, you’ll end up without any fingers. So three hundred grams that explodes in a person’s face will kill him for sure.
“The apparatus was based on a metal arm, a marble, and a strong spring. When the book was closed, inside a wrapper reinforced by ribbons, the arm is under pressure and doesn’t move. The minute you undo the ribbons and loosen the wrapper, the arm springs free and propels the marble forward, puncturing the detonator, which sets off the bomb and—kaboom!”
The plan and the booby trap worked perfectly. On July 11, 1956, al-Talalqa crossed the border, went straight to the Egyptian military intelligence HQ in Gaza, and excitedly handed the package to Hafez. “When he pulled the book out of the package,” an eyewitness later told a secret Egyptian inquiry, “a piece of paper fell out. Colonel Mustafa Hafez bent down to pick it up from the floor, and at that moment the explosion occurred.” Hafez was mortally wounded. Some of those present testified that, as he lay sprawled on the floor, he shouted, “You beat me,
you dogs.”
The next night, Natan Rotberg paid a visit to his uncle, Roi’s father. He made a special point of putting on his dress uniform. “I told him, ‘Shmaryahu, I took care of your account with Mustafa Hafez,’ ” Rotberg said. “Did it make him feel better?
I’m not sure, but me it did. I was happy. Shmaryahu was silent. A tear formed in his eye and he thanked me for updating him.”
The Egyptians were too embarrassed to acknowledge their security lapse publicly. The day after Hafez died, a notice appeared in the Egyptian newspaper
Al-Ahram: “Col. Mustafa Hafez, stationed in the Gaza Strip, was killed when his vehicle hit a mine….He was one of the heroes of the war in Palestine and fought for its liberation. History has recorded his heroic deeds. His name sowed fear and panic in Israel.” The same day Hafez was killed, Salah Mustafa, the Egyptian military attaché in Amman, received in the mail a copy of Achtung Panzer! by Heinz Guderian, the German army’s tank warfare hero and one of the fathers of the concept of blitzkrieg. Avraham Dar, an aficionado of military history and strategy, chose the book because he was sure Salah would think it a suitable gift. Two Mistaravim had entered East Jerusalem, which was under Jordanian rule, and mailed the book from there so the postmark wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Salah, who had not yet heard of the attack on his counterpart in Gaza, opened the book, and it blew up, wounding him mortally. He later died in the hospital. Chief of staff Dayan grasped the significance of these two hits, and he held in his backyard a lavish party to celebrate the killings of Hafez and Salah. Avraham Dar put together the guest list.
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Chapter 4: The Entire Supreme Command, with One Blow
THE TARGETED KILLINGS OF Hafez and Salah jolted Egyptian military intelligence, and there was a certain reduction in the number of terrorist incursions into Israel. From the Israeli point of view, this was a success. But then the skies over the region grew clouded for a different reason. On July 26, 1956, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, acting on an anti colonialist agenda, nationalized the Suez Canal, the vital shipping link between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. The British and French governments, whose citizens were the major shareholders in the highly profitable company that operated the waterway, were furious. Israel, for its part, wished to regain passage through the canal, but at the same time, it also saw an opportunity to deliver a clear message to Egypt: namely, that Nasser would finally pay a heavy price for sending militants in the Gaza Strip to attack Israel, and that his explicit ambitions to destroy the country would be met with crushing force. This convergence of interests begat a secret alliance between the three
countries, with the energetic young director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Shimon Peres, playing a leading part in drawing up an ambitious war plan. Israel would invade the Sinai Peninsula, thus giving the French and the British a pretext—a crisis threatening the Suez—to also invade. France promised to provide Israel with an air umbrella against attacks by the Egyptian Air Force. Shortly before D-Day, Israel’s AMAN learned that a delegation that included the powerful Egyptian chief of staff, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, and many other senior officials had left Cairo by plane for Damascus. An opportunity presented itself. With one precision strike, Israel could eliminate nearly the entire Egyptian military leadership.
The air force began conducting intensive training in night interception, a difficult operation, given the technological capabilities available at the time. Ben- Gurion and Dayan decided that Israel would do all it could to conceal its involvement, and try to make it look as if the plane had crashed because of a technical fault.
The mission was code-named Operation Rooster.
The Egyptians were expected to make the short flight from Damascus back to Cairo in two Ilyushin Il-14 aircraft. AMAN assigned the task of identifying and tracking the air convoy to its signals intelligence (SIGINT) unit. The unit (known nowadays as Unit 8200) had already racked up a number of prominent successes in the 1948–49 war, and afterward AMAN invested many resources in the
development of the unit, which would eventually become the largest—and, some say, the most important—in the IDF.
The investment proved out. A few days before the delegation left Cairo for Damascus, SIGINT technicians managed to isolate the broadcast frequency the Egyptians were expected to use on the short flight back to Cairo. Twenty Israeli radio operators, all under the age of twenty-five, waited tensely at headquarters in Ramat Hasharon, north of Tel Aviv, manning round-the-clock shifts, waiting for the Egyptians to leave the tarmac in Damascus. The unit was under intense pressure from the high command, as the land invasion of the Sinai Peninsula was planned for October 29, and the demoralizing chaos of losing its entire senior military staff would put the Egyptians at a distinct disadvantage. Time was running out.
Days passed slowly, radio operators patiently waiting for a sound in their headsets. Dawn broke on October 28, the day before zero hour, and still the
Egyptians hadn’t left Syria. Finally, at two o’clock on the afternoon of October 28, the signal they were waiting for was picked up: the pilots of the Ilyushin Il-14s were getting ready to leave. Mattias “Chatto” Birger, commander of the air force’s 119 Squadron and one of
the air force’s best pilots at the time, was selected for the dramatic mission. At about 8 P.M., SIGINT informed the air force that only one of the two Egyptian Ilyushins had taken off. Still, SIGINT believed that all of the Egyptian officers were on board. Operation Rooster was a go.
Chatto climbed into the Meteor Mk. 13 jet and took off with his navigator, Elyashiv “Shivi” Brosh. It was a particularly dark night, so dark that even the horizon nearly vanished in the blackness. Chatto climbed to ten thousand feet and leveled off. The radar pinged off an approaching plane. “Contact, contact, contact!” Shivi said over the intercom. “Two o’clock, our altitude, three miles head-on, moving to three o’clock. Four! Make a hard right! Slower! You’re closing in too fast!”
Against the massive black sky, Chatto saw tiny orange flares, the flames from the Ilyushin’s exhaust pipes. “Eye contact,” he reported to ground control. want a positive identification of the craft,” said air force commander Dan Tolkowsky, who sat in the control center. “Positive, beyond all doubt. Understand?”
Chatto veered slightly to the left until he could see light in the windows of the passenger compartment. The windows of the cockpit were larger than the others.
That’s a positive identification, Chatto thought. Only an Ilyushin has windows like that. He also made out people in army uniforms walking among the seats.
“Identification confirmed!” he said.
“Cleared to open fire, only if you have no doubt,” Tolkowsky responded. “Roger.”
Shells erupted from four twenty-millimeter cannons fitted on the nose of the airplane. Chatto was blinded by an unexpected brilliance: someone on the ground crew, trying to be helpful, had loaded tracer rounds into the cannons, but the bright flashes in the near-total darkness seared his eyes.
Chatto recovered his sight. He saw fire in the sky. “Got him!” Chatto told ground control. “The left engine is in flames, and it looks like there’s a short circuit, because everything is dark.”
Chatto squeezed the trigger again. The Ilyushin exploded, a fireball in the night, spewing flaming chunks of wreckage. It began to spin down toward the sea.
“Did you see it crash?” Tolkowsky asked as Chatto pulled his plane out of the spin. “Affirmative, crashed,” Chatto answered.
Chatto brought his plane in on fumes and was greeted on the tarmac by chief of staff Moshe Dayan and General Tolkowsky, who gave Chatto the news that, at the last minute, Amer had apparently decided to wait for the second plane.
“If there’s time,” Chatto said, “we’ll fuel up and go out again.”
“We’ve considered that but reached the conclusion that it would look too obvious and would be liable to reveal our intelligence source,” Dayan responded.
“We’ve decided to let Amer be. Even so, the minute you liquidated the Egyptian General Staff, you won half the war. Let’s have a drink for the second half.”
Operation Rooster was without doubt a superb intelligence and aerial warfare achievement. Indeed, the participants in Operation Rooster later began calling it
“the downing of the Egyptian General Staff” and would claim that the chaos that prevailed in the high command in Cairo had contributed significantly to Israel’s
victory in the war that broke out the next day.
Whether or not the impact was quite as large as these men claimed, the IDF would go on to easily rout the Egyptian Army. It put the world on notice: The Jewish state was now a serious fighting force. Ben-Gurion, temporarily in a state of euphoria, sent a public letter to the officers and soldiers of the 9th Brigade talking about the “Third Kingdom of Israel.”
—
TOGETHER WITH THE SINAI Peninsula, Israel had also conquered the Gaza Strip. After the IDF occupied the Strip, Rehavia Vardi sent some of his men from Unit
504 to search the Egyptian intelligence building in Gaza City, where Mustafa Hafez had been killed a few months before. In a cellar they found a hidden
treasure, one that the desperately fleeing Egyptians had neglected to destroy: the intact card file of all the Palestinian terrorists that Hafez and his men had deployed against Israel in the five years preceding the Sinai Campaign.
It was as if the Egyptians had left a hit list. Vardi met with chief of staff Dayan and asked for his permission to begin killing the Palestinians named in the card file. Dayan, in turn, received Ben-Gurion’s approval. Vardi then ordered Natan Rotberg—and his vat of explosives—to go into overdrive.
Rotberg’s special formula was poured into wicker baskets, cigarette lighters, fruits, vegetables, even pieces of furniture. Unit 504’s Arab agents concealed the bombs in appropriate places or passed them on as gifts to as many as thirty Palestinian fedayeen in Gaza. Between November 1957 and March 1958, Vardi’s men worked through the file, eliminating men who’d terrorized Israelis for years.
The targeted killing missions were largely a success, tactically speaking, but notnecessarily strategically. “All these eliminations were of very limited importance,” Rotberg said, “because others simply took their place.”
Very quickly, the secret conspiracy by Britain, France, and Israel turned into a resounding international diplomatic disaster. The United States forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza. France and Britain also caved in and finally lost control of the canal, and the leaders of both of those superpowers were forced to resign.
The Egyptian regime was now seen as having stood up to meddling Western colonialism, and having forced two great European powers and its sworn Jewish enemy to stand down. Nasser was cast as a hero and became, for all practical purposes, the leader of the Arab world. Nasser did, however, agree to allow Israeli ships to use the canal, and to stop sponsoring fedayeen operations in Gaza. He grasped that the potential for a general military flare-up with Israel from these operations was greater than the advantages to be derived from them. Finally, in 1957, it seemed that terror would stop streaming into Israel from across the border.
—
THE SINAI CAMPAIGN MADE it clear to the Arab states that destroying Israel would be very difficult, and it gave Israel eleven years of freedom from large-scale warfare, up until the Six-Day War of 1967. The IDF used this time to morph into a powerful, large, well-trained, technology-based military force, equipped with modern weapons and boasting an intelligence arm, AMAN, with extensive
capabilities.
The years that followed were also good years for the Mossad. Isser Harel had nurtured it from a fledgling, sometimes stumbling organization into an agency of close to a thousand employees, renowned internationally for its toughness, tenacity, and enterprise. Israel had begun to emerge as an intelligence power in 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in which he spoke frankly about the crimes committed by his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. Every spy outfit in the Western world was anxious to obtain the text, to study it for clues to Khrushchev’s mindset, but none of them could penetrate the Soviet Union’s iron veil of secrecy. It was Israeli intelligence that succeeded, andIsser Harel ordered that a copy of the speech be handed to the CIA.
The agency’s impressed and grateful director, Allen Dulles, passed it on to President Dwight Eisenhower, who then ordered that it be leaked to The New York Times. The publication stirred up a global storm and greatly embarrassed the Soviet Union.
The secret alliance between American and Israeli intelligence was born. On the American side, it was led by James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, a supporter of Israel who, like Harel, saw a Soviet spy under every bed. Through this channel, the CIA would obtain a great deal of Middle East intelligence, a practice that continues to this day.
Israel’s Sinai Campaign of 1956, though a political disaster, further cemented the country’s standing in intelligence operations. In the wake of that brief war, Harel began weaving a network of secret contacts within countries all over the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, including many that publicly sided with Arabs. This modus operandi was known in the Mossad as “the periphery doctrine,” and it called for the establishment of covert links with countries and organizations that lay just outside the ring of hostile Arab states surrounding Israel, or with minorities inside those states who were at conflict with Israel’s adversaries.
The outstanding achievement of the Mossad’s periphery strategy was a tripartite intelligence alliance—code-named Trident—between Israel, the shah’s Iran, and Turkey. The heads of the three countries’ spy agencies would meet from time to time and exchange large amounts of intelligence material. The alliance also carried out joint operations against the Soviets and the Arabs. Ben-Gurion persuaded President Eisenhower that Trident was a top-class asset, and the CIA provided funds for its activities.
The biggest coup for the Mossad, however, came in 1960, when Israeli operatives tracked Adolf Eichmann—one of the main architects and facilitators of Hitler’s Final Solution—to Buenos Aires, where he’d been living for ten years under the name Ricardo Klement.
A German Jewish prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, despaired of the chances of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice in Germany, so instead he leaked information that he
had gathered about Eichmann to the Mossad. When a Mossad official came to see him, Bauer left him alone, with the classified documents lying on the desktop. The Israeli understood the hint and copied the relevant details.
Ben-Gurion authorized Harel to go to Buenos Aires, at the head of a large team.
The premier was determined to settle accounts with Eichmann, who was given the code name Dybbuk, from the Hebrew word for an evil spirit that takes hold of a living person. But the aim of the operation was far greater than wreaking vengeance upon an individual, however egregious his transgressions may have been. Ben-Gurion ordered Harel and his team not to physically harm Eichmann, although killing him would have been the easiest option, but instead to kidnap him and bring him to face trial in Israel. The goal was to stir an internationally resonant
awareness and ineradicable memory of the Holocaust, via exposure of the acts of one of its chief perpetrators.
Dozens of Mossad operatives and collaborators took part in the operation, some of them carrying and switching passports of up to five nations. They spread out into a number of safe houses all over the Argentinean capital.
On May 11, the team positioned itself near the stop where the man known as Klement got off the bus every evening at 7:40 and walked a short distance to his home. On this evening, the bus came, but Eichmann did not appear. The team’s orders were to wait until no later than 8 P.M. and, if he did not appear by then, to abort, so as not to arouse suspicion.
At eight, they were preparing to pack it up, but Rafi Eitan, commander on the field, decided to wait a little longer. Five minutes later, when Eitan was about to
give up for the night, another bus stopped. Klement descended and began walking, one hand in his pocket.
Zvi Malchin was the first to pounce. He feared that Klement suspected something and was about to draw a gun, so instead of grabbing him from behind and dragging him to the car, as planned, he pushed him from behind into a ditch and jumped on top of him, with Eitan and another operative close behind.
Klement yelled, but there was no one around to hear him. Within seconds, he was overpowered and tossed into the backseat of a car. Zvi Aharoni, a Mossad operative, who was sitting there, told him in German that if he made trouble he would be shot on the spot.
Eitan began looking for marks that would indicate beyond doubt that he was indeed Eichmann. The scar under his arm, where the SS tattoo had been, was easily located. The scar of an appendectomy that he had undergone, meticulously documented in his SS file, was more of a problem. Eitan had to open his belt and shove his hand under Klement’s trousers, all while the car was roaring ahead and the passengers were being jolted from side to side. But he eventually found it and exclaimed, “Zeh hoo! Zeh hoo!”—Hebrew for “It’s him! It’s him!”
In the dark, Eitan and Malchin’s eyes were shining. They shook hands and hummed a few bars of the Partisans’ Song, which had been written in honor of the Jews who had fought the Nazis in the forests, and ends with the line “Our march beats out the message: We are here.” Eichmann was sedated and smuggled to Israel in an El Al plane. His trial in Jerusalem attracted unprecedented international attention, and the procession of witnesses reminded the world of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed by hanging. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. Meanwhile, the skimpy news release about Eichmann’s discovery and abduction had given the Mossad the standing of a ruthless and capable espionage agency. By mid-1962, Harel was considered the strongman of the Israeli intelligence and defense establishments. Ben-Gurion had gotten everything he’d hoped for. But for all that glory, Harel’s agency had completely missed a devastating threat developing right next door.
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Chapter 5: “As If the Sky Were Falling on Our Heads”
ON THE MORNING OF July 21, 1962, Israelis woke up to their worst nightmare: Egypt’s newspapers reported the successful test launch of four surface-to-surface missiles—two of the new Al-Zafer (the Victor) model and two of the Al-Qaher (the Conqueror) model. Two days later, the missiles—ten of each type, draped with the Egyptian flag—were paraded through Cairo along the Nile River. Some three hundred foreign diplomats were among the spectators, as were many of the residents of Cairo. President Nasser himself reviewed the parade from a special stand before a government building near the Nile. He proudly declared that the Egyptian military was now capable of hitting any point “south of Beirut.” Given that the entire territory of Israel lay between Egypt, to its south, and Lebanon, with Beirut as its capital, to the north, the implication was clear. The next day, a broadcast delivered in Hebrew from Egypt-based radio station
“The Voice of Thunder from Cairo” was even more explicit. “These missiles are intended to open the gates of freedom for the Arabs, to retake the homeland that was stolen as part of imperialist and Zionist plots,” the anchorman boasted. The Israeli public’s deep unease was only magnified when, just a few weeks later, it became clear that a team of German scientists had played an integral role in developing these missiles. World War II had ended only seventeen years earlier, and suddenly the traumas of the Holocaust, suffused as they were with images of German scientists in Wehrmacht uniforms, gave way to a new and different existential threat: weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Israel’s new great enemy, Nasser, whom Israelis regarded as the Hitler of the Middle East. “Former German Nazis are now helping Nasser in his anti-Israeli genocide projects” was the news described by the Jewish press.
And the Mossad, despite its sweeping charter to monitor and protect Israel from external threats, had been caught unaware. The Jewish nation’s intelligence services—to say nothing of its political and military leaders—had been stunned to learn of Egypt’s missile project mere days before the test launch. It was a devastating reminder of the little country’s vulnerability and a humiliating failure
for Harel’s Mossad.
Worse, the German scientists developing the Egyptian missiles that could destroy Israel weren’t obscure technicians. They were some of the Nazi regime’s most senior engineers, men who’d worked during the war at the research base at Peenemünde, a peninsula on the Baltic coast where the Third Reich’s most advanced weaponry was developed. They helped build the V-1—the flying bomb that terrorized England—and the V-2 ballistic missile, which the Germans had used to destroy huge sections of Antwerp and London and which served as the prototype for today’s long-range surface-to-surface missiles.
“I felt helpless,” said Asher Ben-Natan, the director general of the Defense Ministry, “as if the sky were falling on our heads. Ben-Gurion again and again spoke of the nightmare that kept him awake at night—that he, the first prime minister, had brought the surviving Jews of Europe to the State of Israel, only for them here, in their own country, to undergo a second Holocaust.”
The Mossad itself, in a top-secret internal inquiry into the affair conducted in 1982, summed it up like this: “It was one of the most important and traumatic events in the history of the Israeli intelligence community, of the type that leads to a chain reaction that engenders extreme actions.” And indeed, the reactions were extreme.
—
HAREL PLACED THE ENTIRE Mossad on emergency footing. An atmosphere of crisis swept through every corridor of the agency, reflected in the internal cables of those months. “We are interested in obtaining [intelligence] material, whatever may happen,” the HQ in Tel Aviv cabled Mossad stations in Europe in August 1962. “If a German turns up who knows something about this and is not preparedto cooperate, we are ready to take him by force and to get him to talk. Please take note of this because we must get information at any cost.”
Mossad operatives immediately began breaking into Egyptian diplomatic embassies and consulates in several European capitals to photograph documents.
They were also able to recruit a Swiss employee at the Zurich office of EgyptAir —a company that occasionally served as cover for Nasser’s intelligence agencies.
The Swiss employee allowed Mossad operatives to take the mailbags at night, twice a week, to a safe house. They were opened, their contents were photocopied, and then they were closed again by experts who left no sign they’d been tampered with, then returned to the airline office. After a relatively short period, the Mossad had a preliminary understanding of the Egyptian missile project and its heads.
The project had been initiated by two internationally known scientists, Dr. Eugen Sänger and Wolfgang Pilz. During the war, they had played key roles at Peenemünde Army Research Center. In 1954, they joined the Research Institute of Jet Propulsion Physics, in Stuttgart. Sänger headed this prestigious body. Pilz and two other veteran Wehrmacht specialists, Dr. Paul Goercke and Dr. Hans
Krug, were heads of departments. But this group, feeling underemployed and underutilized in postwar Germany, approached the Egyptian regime in 1959 and offered to recruit and lead a group of scientists to develop long-range surface-to- surface rockets. Nasser readily agreed and appointed one of his closest military advisers, General ’Isam al-Din Mahmoud Khalil, former director of air force intelligence and the chief of the Egyptian Army’s R&D, to coordinate the program. Khalil set up a compartmentalized system, separate from the rest of the Egyptian Army, for the German scientists, who first arrived in Egypt for a visit in
April 1960.
In late 1961, Sänger, Pilz, and Goercke relocated to Egypt and recruited about thirty-five highly experienced German scientists and technicians to join them. The facilities in Egypt contained test fields, laboratories, and luxurious living quarters for the German expats, who enjoyed excellent conditions and huge salaries. Krug, however, remained in Germany, where he set up a company called Intra Commercial, which was in fact the group’s European front.
Almost as soon as the Mossad had gained a basic grasp of the situation, however, more bad news arrived. On August 16, 1962, a grave-faced Isser Harel came to see Ben-Gurion, bringing with him a document from the Egyptian intelligence mailbags that had been photocopied two days before in Zurich.
The Israelis were in shock. The document was an order written in 1962 by Pilz,to the project managers in Egypt, and it included itemization of the materials that needed to be acquired in Europe for the manufacture of nine hundred missiles.
This was an enormous number. After its interception, according to a Mossad internal report, the organization was hit by “an atmosphere of near panic.” Worse still, the document raised the fear among Israeli experts that the Egyptians’ true aim was to arm the missiles with radioactive and chemical warheads.
Ben-Gurion summoned urgent conferences at the highest level. Harel had a plan, of sorts.
The intelligence collected so far by the Mossad revealed an Achilles’ heel in the missile project: The guidance systems were lagging so far behind as to be borderline nonfunctional, which meant that the missiles could not go into mass production. As long as this was the case, Egypt would need the German scientists.
Without them, the project would collapse. Harel’s plan, then, was to kidnap or to eliminate the Germans.
Toward the end of August, Harel went to Europe to put his plan into action. The weather was turning cold, heralding the coldest winter the area had known in many years. After all efforts to locate Pilz had failed, Harel decided to act against Krug.
On Monday, September 10, at 5:30 P.M., a man who introduced himself as Saleh Qaher phoned Krug’s home in Munich. He said he was speaking on behalf of Colonel Said Nadim, chief aide to General Mahmoud Khalil, and that Nadim had to meet Krug “right away, on an important matter.” Saleh added, in the friendliest of tones, that Nadim, whom Krug knew well, sent his regards and was waiting for Krug at the Ambassador Hotel in Munich. The matter at hand, Saleh said, was a deal that would make a tidy profit for Krug. It was impossible to discuss it at the Intra office because of its special nature.
Krug didn’t see this as unusual, and he accepted the invitation. Saleh was none other than an old Mossad hand, Oded. Born in Iraq, he had been active in the Zionist underground there, fleeing the country in 1949 after almost being caught.
He’d gone to regular schools in Baghdad, with Muslims, and could easily pass for an Arab. For years, he served the Mossad in an operational capacity against Arab targets.
Krug met Oded in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. “We, Colonel Nadim and I, need you for an important job,” he said.
The next day, Oded went to the Intra offices to pick Krug up and take him to meet Nadim at a villa outside the city. “I came in a taxi, and Krug was happy to
see me and introduced me to the company’s employees. He never suspected for a moment that I wasn’t who I said I was. There was good chemistry between us. In the Mercedes, on the way to the address I’d given him, I flattered Krug and told him how we, in Egyptian intelligence, appreciate his services and contribution. He spoke mainly about the new Mercedes he just bought.”
The two arrived at the house where Krug believed Nadim was waiting for him.
They got out of the car. A woman opened the front door, and Krug went in. Oded was behind him, and the door closed, with Oded, as planned, remaining outside.
Three other operatives were waiting inside the room. They stunned Krug with a few blows, gagged him, and tied him up. When he came to, he was examined by a French Jewish doctor recruited by the team. He thought Krug was suffering from slight shock and therefore recommended not giving him sedation shots. A German-speaking Mossad operative told him, “You are a prisoner. Do exactly what we say or we’ll finish you off.” Krug promised to obey, and he was placed in a secret compartment built into one of the vehicles, a Volkswagen camper, and the whole squad, including Isser Harel himself, who was present throughout, set out
for the French border in that car and two others. On the way they stopped in a forest, and Harel told Krug that they were about to cross the border and that if he made a sound, the driver of the car would activate a mechanism that would pump a lethal amount of poison gas into the compartment.
When they reached Marseille, a heavily sedated Krug was placed on an El Al plane flying Jewish North African immigrants to Israel. The Mossad handlers told the French authorities he was a sick immigrant.
At the same time, the Mossad launched a wide-ranging disinformation operation, with a man resembling Krug and carrying documents in his name traveling around South America, leaving a paper trail that indicated Krug had simply grabbed the money and run away from Egypt and his collaborators.
Simultaneously, the Mossad leaked disinformation to the media saying that Krug had quarreled with General Khalil and his people and had apparently been abducted and murdered by them.
In Israel, Krug was imprisoned in a secret Mossad installation and subjected to harsh interrogation. At first he remained silent, but soon he began cooperating, and
over the course of several months he “yielded much fruit,” according to a Mossad report. “The man had a good memory and he knew all of the organizational- administrative details of the missile project.” The documents that were in his briefcase were also useful. The report concluded, “This data made it possible to build up an intelligence encyclopedia.” Krug even volunteered to go back to Munich and work as a Mossad agent there.
Eventually, though, after it seemed to the interrogators that Krug had told them everything he knew, the Mossad pondered what to do with him. It was clear that complying with his offer to go back to Munich would be very dangerous—Krug could betray his new controllers, go to the police, and tell them how the Israelis had abducted a German citizen on German soil. Harel chose the easier way out.
He ordered S.G., one of his men, to take Krug to a deserted spot north of Tel Aviv and shoot him. An air force plane picked the body up and dumped it into the sea.
The success of the Krug operation spurred Ben-Gurion to give a green light to more and more targeted killing operations. He approved the use of Military Intelligence (AMAN) Unit 188, a secret operational outfit that put Israeli soldiers under false cover deep inside enemy countries. The unit’s command was located in the Sarona compound in Tel Aviv, not far from Ben-Gurion’s office, and it had a
training facility on the beach in north Tel Aviv, adjoining Natan Rotberg’s special demolitions lab.
Isser Harel resented Unit 188. Since the mid-1950s he had been trying to persuade Ben-Gurion to transfer it to the Mossad, or at least to put him in charge of it, but with the army vehemently opposed, Ben-Gurion turned him down.
The head of AMAN, Major General Meir Amit, didn’t believe that the German scientists were as grave a threat to Israel as Harel did. However, because of the
interorganizational rivalry with the Mossad, he demanded that his Unit 188 be permitted to act against them, because, as he put it, “We must not ignore it. We must nip this matter in the bud.” Thus, intense competition over who would kill more Germans began between Unit 188 and the Mossad.
During that time, 188 had a veteran operative under deep cover in Egypt. Wolfgang Lotz was the perfect mole—the son of a gentile father and a Jewish mother, he was uncircumcised and looked like a typical German. He built up a# cover story as a former Wehrmacht officer in Rommel’s Afrika Korps who had become a horse breeder and returned to Egypt to start a stud farm.
Within a short time, Lotz, a gifted actor, had become an integral part of the growing German social circle in Cairo. He supplied 188 with many details about the missile projects and its personnel. He could not, however, take it upon himself to eliminate them in actions that would require his direct participation, for fear that he would be exposed. The head of Unit 188, Yosef Yariv, reached the conclusion that the best way to do away with the German scientists would be to use letter and parcel bombs. Yariv ordered Natan Rotberg to start preparing the bombs. As it happened, Rotberg was working on a new type of explosive: thin, flexible Deta sheet, “sheets of explosive material, developed for civilian purposes, which were meant to fuse two pieces of steel when they went off” and would allow him to make more compact charges. “We had to develop a system that could be kept unarmed and safe during all the shuffling that a letter goes through in the mail system, and then
go off at the right time,” Rotberg explained. “The envelope’s mechanism thus worked in such a way that the bomb was armed not when it was opened, which would make the whole thing very explosive, but only when the contents were drawn out.” The R&D was done in collaboration with French intelligence, in exchange for information conveyed by Lotz about the activities of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) underground in Cairo. Unit 188 also helped the French smuggle explosives into Cairo to be used in assassinating FLN members there.
The first target to be sent one of the new letter bombs was Alois Brunner, an absconded Nazi war criminal who had been a deputy of Adolph Eichmann and served as commander of a concentration camp in France, sending 130,000 Jews to their deaths. Unit 188 located him in Damascus, where he’d been living for eight years under an assumed name. The Arab countries gave asylum to more than a few Nazi war criminals, and in exchange they received various services. Brunner helped train the interrogation and torture units of the Syrian secret services.
He was found with the help of Eli Cohen, one of the unit’s top agents, who was active inside the higher echelons of the Syrian defense establishment. After Ben- Gurion gave his approval for the elimination of Brunner, Yariv decided to try out one of Rotberg’s Detasheet devices on the Nazi. “We sent him a little gift,” said Rotberg.
On September 13, 1962, Brunner received a large envelope in Damascus. It exploded after he opened it. He suffered severe facial injuries and lost his left eye, but survived.
Still, encouraged by having gotten the bomb delivered to the target, Unit 188 was eager to use the same method against the German scientists. The Mossad objected. As Rafi Eitan explained, “I oppose any action that I don’t control. The mailman can open the envelope, a child can open the envelope. Who does things like that?”
And getting to the Germans in Egypt turned out to be a very complicated matter, because they didn’t receive their mail directly. Egyptian intelligence collected all of the mail for the project and its personnel at the offices of EgyptAir, where it was then sent on to Cairo. Thus, it was decided to break into the airline office during the night and place the envelopes into the mailbags. Using a new method for opening locks with a sophisticated master key developed in the Mossad’s workshops, Mossad operatives who were assisting Unit 188 gained entry to the Frankfurt offices of EgyptAir on November 16.
The break-in specialist was half-hidden behind a woman operative as they leaned together against the door like a couple of lovers. The team entered the office but failed to find the mailbag. The next day, they tried again. While they were busy with the door, the janitor made an appearance, totally inebriated. There were no women with the team this time, so two of the men pretended to be homosexuals making out, and they managed to escape without arousing the suspicion of the drunken janitor. The next night, another attempt was made, and this time it went smoothly. The pouch of mail to be sent to Egypt was on one of the desks. The team inserted the booby-trapped envelopes into the bags.
Pilz had been selected as the prime target. The intelligence gathered about him indicated that he was divorcing his wife so he could wed his secretary, Hannelore Wende. The wife lived in Berlin, but she had hired a lawyer from Hamburg. The letter bomb targeting Pilz was thus designed to look as if it had come from that lawyer, with his logo and address appearing on the back. “The planners of the project assumed that such a personal item of mail wouldn’t be opened by Wende, and that she would give it to Pilz himself,” said the final report on the operation.
But the planners were wrong. Wende, who received the letter on November 27, presumably thought that it concerned her life as much as Pilz’s. She opened it and it exploded in her hands, blowing off some of her fingers, blinding her in one eye, damaging the other, and blowing some of her teeth out of her gums. The Egyptian authorities immediately realized what was going on and located the other booby- trapped mail items with X-ray machines, then handed them over to be defused and probed by specialists from Soviet intelligence in Cairo. The Cairo blasts frightened the scientists and their families but didn’t make any of them give up their cushy,
well-paid jobs. Instead, Egyptian intelligence hired the services of an expert German security officer, a former SS man by the name of Hermann Adolf Vallentin. He visited the Intra offices and the project’s various suppliers, advising them on security precautions, on replacing the locks on their doors, and on securing their mail deliveries. He also began probing the backgrounds of certain employees. The next target on Harel’s hit list was Dr. Hans Kleinwächter and his laboratory in the town of Lorch, which had been hired to develop a guidance system for the missiles. Harel sent the Birds (Tziporim)—the Shin Bet’s operational unit, which was also used by the Mossad—to Europe with orders to start planning Operation Hedgehog against Kleinwächter. Harel’s orders were straightforward: “Kleinwächter is to be abducted and brought to Israel, or if that doesn’t work, kill him.”
Harel himself set up his headquarters in the French city of Mulhouse, to his increasing chagrin. Birds commander Rafi Eitan recalls: “It’s the middle of the winter, horrible snow, bone-chilling cold, twenty-something degrees below zero outside. Isser is furious, sitting in some boarding house in France, beyond the Rhine. He shows me some pictures and says, ‘This is the target—go kill him.’ ”
The Birds operatives were exhausted after the innumerable operations connected with the German scientists that they had been assigned to in the# previous months and the support they had been giving to Unit 188. Eventually Eitan told Harel that in his opinion the circumstances were not ripe for a targeted killing. “We needed to wait a bit and create a trap of our own, not just shoot people in the street. ‘Give me a month,’ I told him. ‘I’ll carry out the mission and# no one will know that I was even here.’ ”
But Harel wouldn’t listen. On January 21, he dismissed the Birds and called in Mifratz, the Mossad targeted killing unit commanded by Yitzhak Shamir, in order to have Kleinwächter done away with. What Harel didn’t know was that Vallentin had grasped that Kleinwächter would be the Mossad’s next target. He gave him a series of briefings, made sure he was constantly accompanied by an escort, and gave him an Egyptian military pistol.
On February 20, a Mossad lookout saw Kleinwächter setting out alone on the road from Lorch to Basel. They decided to make the hit when he got back. Shamir, who, together with Harel, commanded the operation in the field, assigned the job of firing the shots to a trained former Irgun assassin by the name of Akiva Cohen. Harel sent the German-speaking Zvi Aharoni along with him. They waited for the target to get back in the evening. But he didn’t show up, and it was decided to call the operation off. Then everything went wrong. Kleinwächter finally did appear, and the cancellation order was suddenly reversed, but the execution of the entire action was hasty and amateurish. The Mifratz operatives’ car blocked Kleinwächter’s, but the way both vehicles had stopped on the narrow roadprevented the Mossad men from getting away after the operation. Aharoni got out of the car and went up to Kleinwächter, as if to ask him for directions. The idea was to get him to open the window. He began doing so.
Cohen, who approached Aharoni from behind, drew his gun, tried to aim it through the open window, and fired. But the bullet hit the glass and shattered it, and then hit Kleinwächter’s scarf, but it missed his body. For some unknown reason, the pistol didn’t fire again. One theory is that the spring snapped, another is that the bullet was a dud, and yet another is that the magazine got loose and fell out. Aharoni saw that the plan had failed and yelled at everyone to make a run for it. They couldn’t use their car, so they ran off in different directions to try to get to waiting escape vehicles. Kleinwächter drew his pistol and began firing at the
fleeing Israelis. He didn’t hit anyone, but the entire operation was an embarrassing failure.
Harel then launched a number of actions aimed at intimidating the scientists and their families, including anonymous letters threatening their lives and containing much information about them, as well as actual visits in the middle of the night to give similar warnings.
These operations also failed dismally when the Swiss police arrested a Mossad operative by the name of Joseph Ben-Gal after he threatened Professor Goercke’s daughter Heidi. He was extradited to Germany, convicted, and sentenced to a short term in prison. Mossad agents following the trial had the disagreeable experience of watching as the missile project’s security officer, the hulky Hermann Vallentin, appeared at the proceedings with a smug smile, not even pretending to hide his pistol.
By the spring of 1963, Harel’s Mossad hadn’t slowed, let alone ended, the Egyptians’ progress toward rockets that could annihilate Israel. So Harel then took to political subterfuge. He began leaking stories to the press—some true, some embellished, some outright lies (that the Germans were helping Egypt produce atom bombs and deadly lasers)—about Nazis building weapons for Arabs to kill
Jews. Harel was totally convinced that the German scientists were Nazis still determined to complete the Final Solution, and that the German authorities were aware of their activities but were doing nothing to stop them. The truth was that they were people who had become accustomed to the good life under the Third Reich, had become unemployed when it fell, and now were simply trying to make some easy money off the Egyptians. But Harel dragged the entire organization, and in fact the whole country, behind this obsession of his. In order to prove his claims, Harel presented information gathered in Cairo about a Dr. Hans Eisele, the Butcher of Buchenwald, who’d been involved in appalling experiments on Jewish inmates. He was designated a war criminal but escaped trial and found a comfortable refuge in Egypt, where he became the
physician of the German scientists. Harel also fingered a number of other Nazis in Cairo, though none of them belonged to the group of missile scientists.
His goal was to publicly vilify Germany, with which Israel had a complicated relationship, a subject of much dispute internally. Relative moderates such as Ben- Gurion and his chief aide, Shimon Peres, maintained that, at a time when the United States was reluctant to provide Israel with all the military and economic aid it asked for, Israel could not afford to turn down assistance from the West German
government, which came in the form of a reparations-and-compensation agreement and the sale of military equipment at a fraction of its real cost.
Hardliners such as Golda Meir and Harel himself, on the other hand, rejected the notion that the Federal Republic of Germany was a “new” or “different” Germany. History, to their minds, had left a permanent stain. Harel also called in the Editors Committee, that unique Israeli institution, then composed of the top editors of the print and electronic media, who self-censored items in their publications at the request of the government. Harel asked the Editors Committee to provide him with three journalists, whom he subsequently recruited into the Mossad. They were sent to Europe, at the Mossad’s expense, to gather intelligence about the front companies that were buying equipment for the Egyptian project. Harel claimed he needed the journalists for operational reasons, but the truth was that he wanted to use their involvement and the materials they
collected to launder information he already possessed; as such, it could be disseminated to the foreign and Israeli media for the purpose of manufacturing newspaper reports that would create a climate suited to his purposes. Harel’s stories generated a media frenzy and a growing sense of panic in Israel.Ben-Gurion tried to calm Harel down, to no avail. “He was not, in my opinion, quite sane,” said Amos Manor, the Shin Bet chief at the time. “It was something much more profound than an obsession. You couldn’t have a rational conversation about it with him.”
It ended, as most obsessions do, in Harel’s own destruction. His publicity campaign, the frenzied newspaper stories he’d planted of Hitler’s minions rising
again, badly wounded Ben-Gurion. The prime minister was attacked for not having done enough to end the threat posed by the German scientists working in Egypt—a threat Israeli citizens saw as a clear and present danger to their very existence— and for leading his country into a conciliation with West Germany, which now seemed to be at least indirectly responsible for a new version of the Final Solution.
On March 25, 1963, Ben-Gurion summoned Harel to his office and demanded an explanation for a number of actions Harel had carried out vis-à-vis the local and international media without Ben-Gurion’s approval. The conversation degenerated into a bitter debate over the Israeli government’s policy toward Germany. The prime minister reminded Harel that he was supposed to implement government# policy, not set it. Offended by the rebuke, Harel offered his resignation, confident the Old Man couldn’t manage without him and would beg him to stay. Ben-Gurion thought otherwise. He accepted the resignation on the spot. Isser Harel’s once brilliant career ended in a failed bluff and utter defeat. He was immediately replaced by Meir Amit, the chief of AMAN.
—
BUT IT WAS TOO late for Ben-Gurion, too. Harel’s campaign against the scientists had played into the hands of opposition leader Begin, who never let up his attacks on Ben-Gurion. Even inside his own party, Mapai, things had reached a boiling point. Ben-Gurion squabbled ceaselessly with Golda Meir, Harel’s main supporter.
Less than two months after replacing Harel, Ben-Gurion, convinced he’d lost the support of even his own party, resigned. He was replaced by Levi Eshkol.
Meanwhile, Egypt was still tinkering with the guidance systems for the missiles that could have caused grave harm to Israel.
Meir Amit, one of the IDF’s brilliant young commanders—a planner of the 1956 Sinai Campaign who was responsible for advancing the Military Intelligence Directorate by several generations—took over a Mossad in disarray.
The agency was deeply demoralized. In the nine months since Egypt had announced its four missile tests, the Israelis had learned precious little about the program, and everything the Mossad and AMAN had tried thus far had failed to even slow the project, let alone dismantle it. Pressuring Germany—whether through Harel’s self-immolating press campaign or Foreign Minister Golda Meir’s fiery speeches to the Knesset—had made no difference. Later that summer, a strongly worded missive from Eshkol to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, demanding immediate action to get the scientists back from Egypt, also failed to spur the Germans. As Israeli diplomats reported to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, they could only assume that “Adenauer and the leadership are preoccupied with more important problems,” such as “managing the Cold War in the post–Cuban missile crisis period.”
Amit set about rebuilding the organization, reinforcing it with the best personnel he knew from AMAN. As soon as he took over, he ordered a halt to any matters
that he considered extraneous, and a drastic reduction of the resources being# devoted to the hunt for Nazi criminals, explaining that it was “a matter of priorities. Before all else, we have to produce information about the enemies of the State of Israel nowadays.”
Amit knew he needed a tactical reset, and that the Mossad had to rethink its approach to the problem of Egyptian missiles. His first order, then, was for a shift away from targeted killing operations, and for the vast majority of his resources to be focused instead on trying to understand what precisely was going on inside the missile project.
Secretly, however, with most of the top officials of the organization out of the loop, he prepared a targeted killing project of his own against the scientists.
Operations personnel were trying to find ways to send parcel bombs from inside Egypt, thereby significantly shortening the time between the sending and opening of the package. They tried out the method on a relatively easy target, the physician Hans Eisele. On September 25, there was a blast in the post office in the upscale
Cairo neighborhood of Maadi, when a letter bomb that had been addressed to Dr. Carl Debouche, the false name Eisele was using, exploded and blinded a postal worker.
The failure of this operation convinced Amit that targeted killings should only be used very sparingly—if not as a last resort, then at the very least only after meticulous planning that would prevent embarrassing failures. Nevertheless, he ordered the Mossad to prepare plans to shoot, blow up, or poison the scientists, in the event that the effort to solve the matter peacefully didn’t work.
Amit ordered that break-ins to all the offices connected to the missile project in Germany and Switzerland be stepped up, and as many documents as possible photographed. These operations were enormously complex. The sites were well guarded—both by Egyptian intelligence and by Hermann Vallentin’s men—in the hearts of crowded European cities, in countries where the law was strictly enforced.
Mossad operatives burglarized the Egyptian embassies, the Egyptian purchasing mission in Cologne, and the Intra office in Munich. They broke into the Egypt Air office in Frankfurt no fewer than fifty-six times between August 1964 and December 1966.
The information obtained in the break-ins (some thirty thousand documents were photographed up to the end of 1964 alone) was important, but far from sufficient. The Mossad had to recruit someone on the inside of the missile project.
This critical task was assigned to a division called Junction (Tsomet in Hebrew), which would become the Mossad’s most important branch, responsible for bringing in the bulk of the organization’s intelligence.
Unlike in Hollywood movies and pulp fiction, most of this information is not collected directly by Mossad employees darting about in the shadows. Rather, it is gleaned from foreign nationals in their home countries. The Mossad case officers responsible for recruiting and operating these sources are called “collectionofficers”—katsa, in the Hebrew acronym—and they are expert psychologists. They know how to persuade a person to betray everything and everyone he believes in: his friends and family, his organization, his nation.
Unfortunately, though, none of them had been able to work their psychology on anyone close to the Egyptian program. Recruiting agents in Arab countries became
a long-term strategic priority, but in the short run, with the clock ticking, Junction would have to look elsewhere.
—
IN APRIL 1964, AMIT sent Rafi Eitan to Paris, which served as the European nerve center of Israeli intelligence, to run Junction’s operations on the Continent. Up to this point, all of Junction’s efforts to enlist one of the scientists had come to naught, mostly because of the rigid security precautions instituted by Vallentin.
From day to day, he was becoming more of a problem.
The need to deal with Vallentin would lead to the netting of a much bigger fish. Avraham Ahituv, Junction coordinator in Bonn, had an idea, and he presented it to Eitan in Paris in May 1964. He’d identified a dubious character who’d sold arms and intelligence to the Nasser regime and who also was close to the German scientists. “There is just one small problem,” Ahituv said. “The man’s name is Otto Skorzeny, and he was a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer, Hitler’s special- operations commander, and a favorite of the Führer.”
“And you want to recruit this Otto?” Eitan asked sarcastically. “Wonderful.”
“There’s one more small matter,” Ahituv added. “He was a devoted Nazi and amember of the SS.”
In 1960, Ahituv told Eitan, Harel had ordered Amal, the unit that handled the hunt for Nazi war criminals, to gather as much information as possible about Skorzeny, with the goal of bringing him to justice or killing him. His file said he was an enthusiastic member of the Austrian Nazi Party at the age of twenty-three, had enlisted in 1935 to a secret SS unit in Austria, and had taken part in the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria) and in Kristallnacht. He rose rapidly in rank in the Waffen-SS, becoming head of its special-operations units. Sturmbannführer Skorzeny parachuted into Iran and trained local tribes to blow up oil pipelines serving the Allied armies, and he plotted to murder the Big Three Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. He also had a plan for abducting and killing General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was forced to spend Christmas 1944 surrounded by a heavy guard. Most famously, Skorzeny was selected personally by Hitler to lead the Gran Sasso raid, which successfully extricated the Führer’s friend and ally, the former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, from the Alpine villa where he was being held prisoner by the Italian government. Allied intelligence called Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.” He was not, however, convicted of war crimes. He was acquitted by one tribunal, and after he was rearrested on other charges, he escaped with the help of his SS
friends. He took refuge in Franco’s Spain, from where he established profitable commercial relations with fascist regimes around the world and also maintained contact with the German scientists in Egypt.
Skorzeny’s acquaintance with the scientists in Egypt and the fact that he’d been a superior officer to Hermann Vallentin during the war were enough, in Eitan’s
view, to justify trying to recruit him, despite his Nazi past. Eitan was not a Holocaust survivor, and he dealt with the matter, as was his wont, without emotional involvement. If it helped Israel, he thought, that would make it worth forgiveness. “And we could offer him in exchange something that no one else could,” he told his colleagues. “Life without fear.”
Through a number of intermediaries the Mossad established contact with Countess Ilse von Finckenstein—Skorzeny’s wife. She would serve as the Mossad’s
entrée. The Mossad file on the countess says that she was “a member of the aristocracy. She is a cousin of the German [prewar] Finance Minister Hjalmar
Schacht….She is 45, a fairly attractive woman, brimming over with energy.”
“She was involved in everything,” said Raphael (Raphi) Medan, the German- born Mossad operative who was assigned to the mission. “She sold titles ofnobility, had ties with Vatican intelligence, and sold arms as well.” She and her husband also had liberal ideas about their relationship. “They didn’t have children,” Medan said, “and they maintained an open marriage. Ilse always looked stunning.
Every two years she underwent hormonal treatment in Switzerland in order to preserve her youth.”
Medan “had had a reputation, because of his European good looks, for being able to influence women,” according to the Mossad report on the affair. A meeting was set in late July 1964, in Dublin, Ireland. Medan introduced himself as an Israeli Defense Ministry employee on leave and looking for an opening ininternational tourism. He might be interested in taking part in the Bahamas development project that the countess was involved in, he said. The countess liked Medan, and their relationship warmed up. When their business talk was over, she invited him to a party at her farm. This was the start of a series of meetings,
including some wild visits nightclubbing all over Europe.
According to a Mossad rumor that circulated for many years, and was gently hinted at in the reports but not explicitly stated, Medan “sacrificed” himself for his country—and took advantage of the German couple’s open marriage—by wooing the countess and eventually taking her to bed. (Medan commented on this by saying, “There are things that gentlemen do not speak about,” and described their encounter, with a smile, as “good and even gratifying.”)
In Madrid, on the night of September 7, Medan told her that a friend of his from the Israeli Defense Ministry wanted to meet her husband “about a very important matter.” The friend was already in Europe and waiting for a reply.
Convincing von Finckenstein to cooperate was not difficult. Only four years before, Israel had found, grabbed, tried, and executed Adolf Eichmann. There were powerful forces in the Jewish world, including Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, engaged in worldwide campaigns to find and prosecute Nazis like Skorzeny. Medan, therefore, was able to offer the countess—and, by extension, her husband—that “life without fear.”
In the morning, when they were still groggy from the alcohol and smoke in the clubs, von Finckenstein informed Medan happily that her husband was ready to meet his friend—that night, if possible.
Medan called Ahituv to Madrid. He set up a meeting in a hotel lobby that evening. The countess came first, glamorously accoutred. Fifteen minutes later, the colonel appeared. Medan introduced them to Ahituv. Then he took von Finckenstein aside, for a “business talk.” Skorzeny stayed with Ahituv.The Mossad’s internal final report on the affair, though written in dry professional language, could not overlook the intensity of the meeting: “It is difficult to overstate Avraham Ahituv’s emotional reluctance over this operation. Avraham is a scion of a religiously observant family, a native of Germany educated in a religious Jewish school. For him, the contact with a Nazi monster was a shocking emotional experience that went beyond the demands of the profession.”
In the detailed report Ahituv himself submitted, on September 14, 1964, he described the talks he had that week with Skorzeny: Skorzeny was a giant. A hulk of a man. He was obviously remarkably strong physically.
On his left cheek was the well known scar from his pictures, reaching his ear. He was partly deaf in that ear and asked me to sit on his right. Well dressed.
Two moments gave me a shock. Skorzeny was looking for a number in his phone book to give me. All of a sudden, he took a monocle out of his pocket and stuck it into his right eye
socket. His appearance then, what with his bodily dimensions, the scar, and his aggressive gaze, made him look like the complete Nazi.
The second incident happened after our meeting, when we were dining together in a restaurant near his office. Suddenly someone came up to us, clicked his heels together
loudly, and greeted him in German as “My General.” Skorzeny told me that this was the owner of the restaurant and he used to be one of the top Nazis in those parts…
I have no illusions about his original opinions. Even his wife didn’t try to clear him. She only stressed that he played no part in the Holocaust….Most of the conversation at the first meeting centered on political issues, on World War II and the Holocaust, East-West relations, and the Middle East situation.
Ahituv brought up the issue of Skorzeny’s participation in the Kristallnacht pogroms. He pulled out a long list of people who had taken part in the attacks and
presented it to Skorzeny. Skorzeny was familiar with the document, which had been stored in Yad Vashem, because the accusation had been raised and discussed during the war crimes trial from which he had managed to escape.
He pointed to an X inked next to his name. “That’s proof that I did not participate,” he said, though Nazi hunter Wiesenthal interpreted the mark as proof# of just the opposite. Skorzeny complained that Wiesenthal was hunting him, and that more than once he had found himself in a situation where he “feared for his life.” Ahituv decided not to stretch the point too far and did not argue.
At a certain stage, Skorzeny got tired of talking about the war. “He stopped me and asked me what my business was. It was clear that there was no point in playing
hide-and-seek. I told him I was in the Israeli [intelligence] service. [Skorzeny said that] he wasn’t surprised we had gotten to him. At different times, he had been linked to different countries, and with some of them he still maintained excellent relations. He was definitely prepared for an exchange of views with us as well.”
“An exchange of views” was Skorzeny’s delicate way of saying that he agreed to full and comprehensive cooperation with Israel. Skorzeny demanded a price for his
help. He wanted a valid Austrian passport issued in his real name, a writ of lifetime immunity from prosecution, signed by Prime Minister Eshkol, and his immediate removal from Wiesenthal’s list of wanted Nazis, as well as some money.
Skorzeny’s conditions sparked a sharp argument in the Mossad. Ahituv and Eitan saw in them “an operational constraint and a requirement for the success of the operation.” Other senior officials argued that they were “an attempt by a Nazi criminal to cleanse his name,” and they demanded a new look at Skorzeny’s past.
This new investigation revealed further details about the role he played on Kristallnacht, “as the leader of one of the mobs that burned synagogues in Vienna,” and that “until recently, he was an active supporter of neo-Nazi
organizations.”
Meir Amit, practical and unemotional as always, thought that Eitan and Ahituv were right, but he needed the moral support of the prime minister. Levi Eshkol listened to Amit and consulted some of the high-ranking Mossad members who were Holocaust survivors (unlike Amit, Eitan, and Ahituv, who were not), hearing their vehement objections. Nevertheless, he finally approved giving Skorzeny money, a passport, and immunity.
The prime minister also approved the request concerning Wiesenthal, but that wasn’t his decision to make, nor the Mossad’s. Wiesenthal was an opinionated and obstinate man, and although he had close links with the State of Israel and even the Mossad, which financed some of his operations, he wasn’t an Israeli citizen, and he worked out of Vienna, outside of Israel’s jurisdiction.
In October 1964, Raphi Medan met with Wiesenthal to discuss, without elaborating the details of the operation, why Skorzeny had to be removed from Wiesenthal’s blacklist of Nazi criminals to be hunted down and prosecuted.
“To my astonishment,” Medan recalled, “Wiesenthal said, ‘Herr Medan, there is not a chance. This is a Nazi and a war criminal and we will never strike him from our list.’ No matter what I said or how I tried, he simply refused categorically.”
When told he would remain on Wiesenthal’s list, Skorzeny was disappointed but agreed to the deal anyhow. Thus did the unbelievable come to pass—the Führer’s
favorite, wanted all over the world as a Nazi war criminal who had apparentlyburned synagogues and taken part in SS operations, became a key agent in the most important operation waged by Israeli intelligence at the time.
Skorzeny’s first step was to send word to his friends among the scientists in Egypt that he was reviving a network of SS and Wehrmacht veterans “to build a new Germany”—in other words, to establish a Fourth Reich. To prepare the ground, he would tell them, his organization would have to gather information in secret. The German scientists working for Nasser would thus be required, under
their Wehrmacht oaths, to provide Skorzeny’s phantom organization with the details of their missile research so it could be used by the new German military force in the making.
At the same time, Skorzeny and Ahituv also masterminded a plan to get information out of the formidable security officer Hermann Vallentin, who knew everything about the Egyptian missile project. Unlike with the recruitment of the sophisticated and experienced Skorzeny, who was aware he was dealing with a
Mossad man, and whom Ahituv never tried to mislead, the two decided to use some subterfuge on Vallentin. Skorzeny played his part perfectly. He summoned Hermann Vallentin to Madrid
under the pretense that he was hosting a special gathering for his subordinates from the “glorious war.” He put Vallentin up, at Mossad expense, in a luxurious hotel and presented him with his phony plan for reviving the Reich. Then he revealed that this was not his only reason for the invitation to Madrid, and that he wanted him to meet “a close friend,” an officer of the British MI6 secret service. The British, he said, were interested in what was going on in Egypt, and he asked Vallentin to help his friend. Vallentin was suspicious. “Are you sure the Israelis aren’t involved?” he asked.
“Stand to attention when you’re spoken to, and apologize!” Skorzeny fired back.
“How dare you say something like that to your superior officer!” Vallentin duly apologized, but he wasn’t convinced. And he was, in fact, completely right. Skorzeny’s “friend” was no Brit, but an Australian-born case officer in the Mossad by the name of Harry Barak. Vallentin agreed to meet him, but not to cooperate, and the meeting between the two led nowhere.
The resourceful Skorzeny immediately came up with a solution. At his next meeting with Vallentin, he told him that his friend from MI6 had reminded him that a cable Skorzeny had sent close to the end of the war, in which he notified the general staff that he was promoting Vallentin, had not reached the general staff or Vallentin.
Vallentin’s eyes lit up. Though this retroactive promotion was now purely
symbolic, it clearly meant a lot to him. He stood up and gave the Heil Hitler salute and thanked Skorzeny profusely.
Skorzeny told Vallentin that he was ready to give him a written document confirming that he had been promoted. Vallentin was grateful to his new friend from British intelligence for the information he had provided, and agreed to help him as much as he wanted.
In time, Skorzeny invited other former Wehrmacht officers involved in the missile project to Madrid. They attended lavish parties at his home, billed as gatherings of Waffen-SS special forces veterans. His guests ate, drank, and enjoyed themselves late into the night, never knowing that the Israeli government was paying for their food and drinks and bugging their conversations.
The information provided by Skorzeny, Vallentin, and the scientists who came to Madrid solved most of the Mossad’s information problem regarding Egypt’s missile program. It identified precisely who was involved in the project and exactly what the current status of each component was.
Thanks to the new wealth of information from this operation, Meir Amit’s Mossad managed to crumble Egypt’s missile project from the inside, using a
number of methods in parallel. One was the dispatch of threatening letters to many of the German scientists. They were very cleverly worded, based on top-grade intelligence provided by Vallentin, and included intimate details about the recipients.
“Remember that even if you are not to blame for the crimes of the German nation in the past, you will not be able to deny your responsibility for your deeds today. You had better consider very seriously the contents of this letter, for the sake of your future and the future of your young family.” “The Gideons” was the name of the unknown organization that signed the letters.
Meanwhile, thanks to new intelligence from its sources, primarily Vallentin, the Mossad was able to identify a secret Egyptian plan to recruit scores of workers from the Hellige aircraft-and-rocket factory in Freiburg who were about to be dismissed. Amit decided to take advantage of the momentum to carry out a quick move aimed at preventing their departure for Egypt.
On the morning of December 9, Shimon Peres, then deputy defense minister, and Raphi Medan carried a locked case containing a number of documents in
English that had been prepared by the Mossad director’s office based on materialsupplied by Skorzeny, Vallentin, and the scientists who came to Madrid, and flew off for a hurriedly arranged meeting with one of West Germany’s senior politicians, former defense minister Franz Josef Strauss. Peres and Strauss were architects of the restitution agreement between West Germany and Israel. Strauss rose from his seat to greet the two Israelis, and he and Peres embraced warmly.
“We sat for six hours,” Peres said. “God, that man could drink. Wines from all over the world, and beer. I can also drink, but quantities like that? Six hours and we didn’t stop drinking.”
The information Peres presented to Strauss was far more detailed, cross- checked, authentic, and grave than anything that had been presented to the Germans previously. “It is inconceivable that German scientists would help our worst enemy in such a manner, while you stand idly by,” Peres told Strauss, who must have grasped what the leakage of this material to the international press would have meant.
Strauss looked at the documents, and agreed to intervene. He called Ludwig Bölkow, a powerful figure in the German aerospace industry, and asked for his help. Bölkow sent his representatives to offer the Hellige scientists and engineers jobs under good conditions at his plants, as long as they’d promise not to help the Egyptians.
The plan worked. Most of the new group never went to Egypt, where the missile program urgently needed their assistance with the balky guidance systems—a development that fatally crippled the project.
The final blow came when a representative of Bölkow’s arrived in Egypt to persuade the scientists already working there to come home. One by one they deserted the program, and by July 1965 even Pilz was gone, having returned to Germany to head one of Bölkow’s airplane component divisions.
The German scientists affair was the first time the Mossad mobilized all of its forces to stop what it perceived as an existential threat from an adversary, and the first time Israel allowed itself to target civilians from countries with which it had diplomatic relations.
Given the newly raised stakes, a 1982 top-secret internal report was written, analyzing whether it would have been possible to resolve the. affair using “soft” methods—generous offers of money from the government of Germany to the scientists—without “the mysterious disappearance of Krug, or the bomb that maimed Hannelore Wende, or the other letter bombs and the intimidation.”
The report concluded that it would not have been possible: The Mossad believed that, without the threat of violence directed at them, the German scientists would not have been willing to accept the money and give up on the project.
............
Chapter 6: A Series of Catastrophes
AFTER THE GERMAN SCIENTISTS affair, the Mossad was on a roll. Meir Amit brought in more professionals from the military, introduced new technologies, and strengthened links with intelligence services abroad. He also continued to set in motion numerous organizational reforms. Amit wanted to establish a single operations division in the Mossad, which would bring all of the units dealing with sabotage, targeted killings, and espionage in the Arab countries under one umbrella. In order to do this, Amit did what Harel had tried to do for years and he, Amit, had opposed: He transferred Unit 188 from AMAN to the Mossad and merged it with Shamir’s Mifratz. Yosef Yariv was appointed head of the division, with Shamir as his deputy. The Mossad chief named the division Caesarea, after the Roman city on the
Mediterranean coast, another example of the Israeli intelligence community’s penchant for code names taken from the country’s ancient history. The network of Caesarea activities outside of Israel was code-named the Senate. Amit also wanted his own intelligence division. Until recently, the same unit, the
Birds, had served both the Shin Bet and the Mossad. Amit now decided that he wanted a separate unit that would work only outside of Israel and only for the Mossad. He co-opted some of the Birds unit’s personnel for new intelligence unit, which he named Colossus.In addition to these bureaucratic changes, under Amit the agency carried out operations that garnered unprecedented amounts of information about the Arab
states and their military services. One of the most outstanding of these was Operation Diamond, in which Junction recruited an Iraqi pilot, Munir Redfa, who defected to Israel with his brand-new MiG-21 fighter plane, the most advanced and threatening attack weapon in the hands of the Soviet bloc at the time. The Israeli Air Force was now able to prepare to cope with its most powerful adversary
in future aerial combat. The Pentagon was very eager to learn the secrets of the plane, and Amit gave the Americans not just the blueprints for the MiG but the plane itself, fully equipped and with a trained pilot.
Amit had also assiduously cultivated Israel’s secret relations with Morocco, in line with the “periphery doctrine.” Though Morocco was an Arab country, in close contact with Israel’s main enemies, it also was moderate and had no territorial dispute with Israel. Furthermore, its leader was the relatively pro-Western king Hassan II.
Morocco received valuable intelligence and technological assistance from Israel, and, in exchange, Hassan allowed Morocco’s Jews to immigrate to Israel, and the Mossad received the right to establish a permanent station in the capital, Rabat, from which it could spy on Arab countries.
The height of the cooperation came in September 1965, when the king allowed a Mossad team led by Zvi Malchin and Rafi Eitan to bug all the meeting rooms and private suites of the leaders of the Arab states and their military commanders during an Arab summit in Casablanca. The purpose of the summit was to discuss the establishment of a joint common Arab command in future wars with Israel.
But King Hassan’s relations with some of the other Arab rulers were shaky, and he feared that some of them were acting to depose him, so he let the Mossad listen in.
This gave Israel an unprecedented glimpse of the military and intelligence secrets of its greatest enemies, and of the mindsets of those countries’ leaders. At that summit, commanders of the Arab armies reported that their forces were not prepared for a new war against Israel, information that was the basis of the Israeli military’s supreme confidence when they urged Prime Minister Eshkol to go to war two years later, in June 1967. “This sensational material,” a Mossad report stated, “was one of the highlights of the achievements of Israeli intelligence since its foundation.”
These successful operations provided the IDF with the critical intelligence it= needed to prepare for the next war. But then, at a dizzying pace, one catastrophe after another hit Amit and his organization.
—
THE TOP SPY FOR Unit 188, and now Caesarea, was Eli Cohen, who’d penetrated the ruling circles in Damascus and provided the information that enabled the
Mossad to locate the Nazi Alois Brunner and send him a letter bomb.
Cohen was originally assigned to serve as a sleeper agent who, rather than collect and convey information, would become active only if he had to alert Israel that Syria was planning to launch a surprise attack against it.
However, under pressure from his operators, and having become deeply enmeshed with and overconfident in his own cover story, he started broadcasting messages to his Mossad handlers on a daily basis, using a telegraphic device he kept hidden at his apartment. He reported on secret military installations, Syria’s# plot to take control of the region’s water sources (with the assistance of a Saudi contracting firm headed by Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s father), and Syria’s relationship with the Soviet Union, but also on Nazis holed up in Damascus, parliamentary gossip, and accounts of government power struggles. Cohen’s transmission of information of this nature and at this frequency was a serious and unprofessional error, on his own part but also, more important, on the part of his handlers.
“Eli Cohen was one of the people who went through life walking sideways,” said Moti Kfir, who, among other Mossad jobs, served as head of its training program in the early 1960s. “When you are sideways, sometimes you think that no one sees you. But he was wrong. He became too prominent. I told him during training, ‘Never be the life of the party.’ But he did the opposite.”
The letter bomb sent to Brunner and the lively interest that Cohen showed in other Nazis in talks with top Syrians—along with the fact that he was “in an unusual situation, an immigrant without a job…who was giving parties, mixing with high society,” and “providing his guests and friends entertainment of all kinds”—put the Syrian intelligence services on the alert and led one of his interlocutors to doubt the cover story of Kamal Amin Thabet, a wealthy Syrian merchant who’d returned to his homeland after long years of exile in Buenos Aires.
In a tragic coincidence for Cohen, during the same period, his transmitter caused interference with broadcasts from the Syrian General Staff HQ, across the street from the luxurious apartment he rented, and in which he held wild parties for Syrian high officials. Puzzled, the Syrians asked GRU, Soviet military# intelligence, to investigate. The Russians sent in special prowl cars, which managed to lock into the signals emanating from Cohen’s transmitter during one of his broadcasts.
Cohen was arrested, brutally tortured, quickly tried, and sentenced to death. He was hanged in public in the central square of Damascus on May 18. His body was left dangling on the gallows, draped in a white sheet bearing the text of his death sentence, as a message to the State of Israel.
The man who had recruited, trained, and operated Cohen, Gedaliah Khalaf, later said, “I looked at him, at my Eli, on Syrian television, and I saw in his face the diabolical torments he had undergone. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to scream, to do something, to take a pistol and break into the Mezzeh prison, to bang my head against the wall until it broke, until we could save him.
And they killed him and we could do nothing but stand there and watch.”
Amit’s Mossad, so freshly confident, was humiliated, impotent. Worse, the Mossad was exposed. The Syrians had tortured Cohen so severely—yanking out his fingernails, electrifying his testicles—that he’d broken. He revealed the secret communication codes and deciphered two hundred messages that he’d sent and the Syrians had picked up but hadn’t been able to read, and he told them what he knew about Israeli intelligence’s recruitment, training, and cover-building methods. Shortly after Cohen was caught, Caesarea was hit by another disaster. Wolfgang Lotz, the Caesarea spy in Cairo’s high society, a key element in the intelligence
gathering for the attempts to kill the German scientists in Egypt, was also uncovered, on February 10, 1965. His downfall also came from excessive activity, overconfidence in his cover story, and a number of crude errors that he and his handlers made.
The only thing that saved Lotz from suffering the same fate as Eli Cohen was the intervention of the BND, the German espionage service, which responded to Israel’s request and told the Egyptians that Lotz was also working for them. Lotz and his wife, Waltraud, were spared the gallows and sentenced to life in prison.
(They were later released in a prisoner exchange following the Six-Day War, in 1967.) But this was another hard blow for the Mossad. For fear of further losses, Yosef Yariv ordered his other spies, whose training and cover stories had cost many years of effort, to come home. Caesarea, barely out of its infancy, was nearly in ruins.
Prime Minister Eshkol regarded the downfall of the two spies as a national disaster. But despite the bad state the Mossad was in, Eshkol decided to approve a special targeted killing mission by Caesarea in Uruguay anyway. Two months prior, a conference attended by representatives of the various intelligence agencies had been held to discuss the state of the hunt for Nazis, a matter that was not high on the list of priorities. Raphi Medan, deputy chief of the Amal unit, which handled the issue, surveyed the possible targets for assassination on the list from which the name of Otto Skorzeny had just been erased. When he came to the
name of Herbert Cukurs, a Latvian Nazi war criminal who, as an aviator, had volunteered to assist the SS and the Gestapo, and began describing his horrific acts, a loud thud was heard. The head of AMAN, the Military Intelligence Directorate, Major General Aharon Yariv, had collapsed, and it took some time before he came to. Cukurs, it emerged, had burned alive some of Yariv’s relatives and friends.
After the conference, Amit, who was very close to Yariv and deeply affected by the incident, went to see Prime Minister Eshkol and received permission to have Cukurs eliminated. Cukurs had killed Jews for sport. He had gunned them down on city streets after telling them to run for their lives. He had locked Jews in synagogues he then set on fire, drinking whisky as he listened to the screams. Holocaust survivors called him the Butcher of Riga, and his name came up frequently at the Nuremberg war crimes trials as directly involved in the murder of some fifteen thousand Jews, and indirectly in the killing of twenty thousand more. But after the war, he had managed to escape and find refuge in Brazil, where he developed a tourism business, surrounding himself with security guards for fear of the same fate that befell Eichmann. Yaakov Meidad, a Caesarea operative who spoke Spanish and German, posed as an Austrian businessman seeking openings in the tourism industry in South America and managed to persuade Cukurs to go to Uruguay to meet a group of
developers at a luxurious mansion outside Montevideo. At the mansion, three assassins would lie in wait. The plan was for Meidad to enter first, followed by Cukurs. One of the assassins would shove him inside and close the door behind him. Then, when the Mossad team was out of the line of fire, he would shoot him.
The job, however, did not go as smoothly as planned. Cukurs was alert and feared a trap. The moment he entered, he grasped what was happening and made a break for it. Yariv tried to get a stranglehold on him as another Israeli dragged him inside. “The fact that Cukurs was frightened to death,” said Meidad, “and had livedin dread of this moment for twenty years gave him superhuman strength. He
managed to knock the guy down. He grabbed the doorknob and, had it not been for the three of us, including me, holding the door shut, he would have been able to get out.”
Cukurs bit hard into one of Yariv’s fingers, cutting off the tip, which remained in his mouth. Yariv screamed in pain and had to loosen his grip on Cukurs’s neck.
He almost broke free, but at the last moment one of the hit men, Ze’ev Amit (a cousin of the Mossad director), who had not been able to fire because of the
danger to his comrades, picked up a hammer and smashed it into Cukurs’s head again and again until he passed out. Then the third assassin, Eliezer Sodit-Sharon, formerly the chief hit man for the Irgun, fired two shots into the mass murderer, assuring that he was dead.
The operatives put the body into a suitcase, which they left in the mansion, and added on top a “verdict,” a sheet of paper inscribed with the words “In consideration of his personal responsibility for the murder of 30,000 Jews with horrible brutality, the condemned man has been executed. [Signed] Those Who Will Never Forget.”
Inside the Mossad, the operation was officially deemed a success, but the truth was that the unprofessional implementation could easily have led to disaster. Either way, Yariv was left with half a finger. The man who had crushed Cukurs’s head with a hammer, Ze’ev Amit, suffered from horrific nightmares for the rest of his life, haunted by the trauma of the murder.
—
THE NEXT DISASTER ALMOST cost Prime Minister Eshkol and Director Amit their jobs. On September 30, 1965, one day after the Mossad received the vitally important tapes from the Arab summit, one of the commanders of the Moroccan intelligence service, Ahmed Dlimi, contacted the Mossad and made it clear that the Moroccans wanted the debt for this valuable information repaid as soon as
possible. In the intelligence world, there are no free gifts.
Amit reported to Eshkol, “On the one hand they’ve given us these tapes, but on the other, they’ve said ‘Give!’ They want something very simple. There’s this goy, Ben Barka, who’s in the opposition to the king…and the king has given an order to wipe him out. They’ve come to us and said, ‘You’re great killers…Do it!’ ”
The opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka had been exiled from Morocco at the beginning of the 1960s and later sentenced to death in absentia. Moroccan intelligence tried to locate him, but Ben Barka was careful to conceal his location, moving from place to place, using pseudonyms. The heads of the Moroccan secret services asked the Mossad to help find, trap, and kill him.
“We faced a dilemma,” Amit recalled. “Either help and get drawn in, or refuse and endanger the national achievements of the highest order.”
Years later, Amit tried to paint a picture of himself having chosen “to walk between the raindrops” and not to directly abet the killing but “to incorporate it [the aid to the Moroccans] into our regular joint activities with them.” But a close look at Mossad internal cables and records shows that the organization was deeply involved.
Caesarea and Colossus helped the Moroccans pinpoint the kiosk in Geneva to which Ben Barka had his magazines mailed, enabling them to place him under
surveillance. Later, they proposed a plan whereby Ben Barka would be lured to mParis by a man posing as a documentary filmmaker fascinated by the Moroccan
exile’s life story and interested in making a film about it. The Mossad supplied the Moroccans with safe houses in Paris, vehicles, fake passports, and two different kinds of poison with which to kill him, as well as shovels and “something to disguise the traces.”
When Ben Barka came to Paris on October 29, 1965, the Moroccans kidnapped him, with the help of corrupt French police officers. He was taken to an empty Mossad safe house, where the Moroccans began brutally interrogating him. He died not long afterward from asphyxiation, after repeatedly being submerged in a bath of filthy water.
Mossad operatives were not involved or present when the killing took place, but# they took it upon themselves to handle the corpse, a joint team from Caesarea and Colossus removing it to the nearby Saint-Germain forest. They dug a deep hole in the ground and buried the body, after which they scattered chemical powder, which was designed to consume the body and is particularly active when it comes into contact with water. Heavy rain fell almost immediately, so there was probably not much left of Ben Barka shortly afterward. What was left, according to some of the Israelis involved, was moved again and today lies beneath the road to the recently constructed ultramodern Louis Vuitton Foundation, or even under the building itself.
Amit had promised Eshkol, “I won’t take any steps without telling you,” but then told him about only part of the truth, and only after the fact. On November 25,
1965, Amit told Eshkol, “Everything is fine” In truth, however, everything was not fine. The fact that Ben Barka had disappeared in Paris and that the heads of Moroccan intelligence and French mercenaries were involved exploded into the French media with a great bang, and stayed in the headlines for a long time. President Charles de Gaulle disbanded his intelligence services and prosecuted some of those involved. When King Hassan refused to hand over the heads of his spy agencies to stand trial, de Gaulle angrily cut off diplomatic relations with Morocco.
The fallout from the operation has lasted for decades and left a dark shadow on relations between Morocco and France, where there is still an investigating magistrate in charge of the case. The probes raised suspicions against Mossad personnel, too, and all those involved left Paris in a hurry. For many years they remained at risk of facing trial.
Isser Harel was serving at the time as Eshkol’s adviser on intelligence. Bitter and frustrated over the way he had been ousted from the directorship of the Mossad, and envious of the successful Amit, Harel got hold of the pertinent documents on the Ben Barka affair and went to war against Amit.
In a lengthy report he submitted to the prime minister, he declared, “The Mossad, and through it the state, were engaged in various actions connected to a political assassination, in which Israel not only had no interest, but should not have,
I believe, from a moral, public, and international perspective, been involved at all.” Harel demanded that Eshkol fire Amit and send a personal emissary to tell the truth to de Gaulle. Eshkol refused, and Harel accused the prime minister of becoming involved in the murder himself and demanded that he resign forthwith.
He threatened Eshkol, saying that “the echoes of the affair will come to the attention of the public and the entire party [Labor] will be tainted with the shame.”
When that didn’t work, he leaked the gist of the story to a sensationalist yellow weekly, and when the censor blocked the publication, he informed high-ranking party members of the details and urged them to rebel against Eshkol’s leadership.
These members then tried to persuade Golda Meir to lead a coup against Eshkol. Meir agreed that Amit must go, but she drew the line at ousting the prime minister. “I should topple Eshkol, and take his place?” she asked the conspirators, with the pathos for which she was famous. “I would rather throw myself into the sea.”
When Harel’s vitriolic attacks did not subside, Eshkol and Amit decided to fight back, combating extortion with counter-extortion. Amit told his close associates,
“Harel will not drop the subject of his own accord…unless it is hinted to him that in his past there is enough material to undermine his claim that he is ‘the moral guardian’ of the Mossad.”
And, indeed, there was enough material. Amit had Alexander Yisraeli’s file brought back up from the archives. Yisraeli was the naval officer who had sold
secrets to Egypt in 1954 and then was abducted, with the intent of bringing him to trial, though he died in transit of an overdose of sedatives. Harel had ordered his
body to be thrown into the sea and for his family to be told he’d settled in South America.
Amit gave Yisraeli’s file to a veteran of the Mossad who despised Harel, was friendly with Amit, and knew about the affair. That person summoned Harel for a meeting. “What do you think would happen if this affair became public?” the man asked Harel. “Don’t you think such a serious matter would require a thorough examination and an intense investigation? Of course, we will try to keep the story
quiet, but we are not the only ones who know it, and it’s outrageous what comes to the attention of journalists these days.”
Harel understood the situation. Shortly afterward, he resigned.
For Amit, the main lesson of the affair was that “we must never get involved in carrying out sensitive tasks of others in which we do not have a direct interest, especially not assassinations. We must kill someone only if he is threatening Israel’s interests, and the execution—only blue and white,” a reference to the colors of the Israeli flag, by which he meant “only by Israelis.”
—
ALL THESE CATASTROPHES LEFT the agency, and particularly Caesarea, its spearhead, bruised and confused. Amit set up a number of inquiry panels to try to analyze what had gone wrong.
The predominant figure conducting these inquiries was Michael “Mike” Harari.
When their work was completed, Amit named Harari the deputy head of Caesarea. Harari served in this position for five years, first under Yosef Yariv and then under Zvi Aharoni, but in practice he was the living spirit of the division and, in effect, commanded it. In 1970, he was made head of Caesarea, a position he
held for ten years. The fifteen years during which he led the division were the most important and turbulent in its history. Harari was nicknamed Caesar and became the figure with the most profound influence on the world of the Mossad’s special operations. Harari was born in Tel Aviv in 1927. “Two events shaped my life,” he said. In 1936, while still a child, he witnessed the violent riots by Palestine’s Arabs against
the Jews and the British, which later became known as the Palestinian Revolt. “I saw the rioting mob and a burned-out British jeep with the charred body of the
sergeant still gripping the steering wheel.” When he saw Arabs and Jews fighting, he says, he did not hold back, but went into a nearby store and chose what looked like the best weapon—a hefty pick handle—and went to join the battle against the Arabs.
The second defining experience occurred in 1942, when he went down to play in the street and arrived on the scene a few minutes after officers of the British police’s CID had shot dead Avraham Stern, the commander of the extremist Jewish underground group Lehi. “I saw them bringing the body down. Then I went upstairs. I was a boy, and no one stopped me. I went into the apartment and saw the closet he had hidden in….These things affect you.”
In 1943, he lied about his age to join the Palmach, the secret army of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. “It was underground. It was secret, it intrigued me.” He took part in many actions, including the sabotage of railroad lines and bridges, attacks on British police stations, and intelligence collecting. He was arrested several times by the CID.
After World War II, when the Haganah command learned that Harari spoke a few languages, he was sent to Europe, to help with the transportation of the surviving Jewish refugees to Israel. He was involved in the secret acquisition of# ships and the complicated logistics involved in moving these illegal immigrants through the ruins of Europe to the boats, then smuggling them into Palestine under the noses of the British. “That was the period during which I created for myself the criteria and the methods for covert activities abroad, the tools that I used later on in the Mossad.”
After the establishment of the state, Isser Harel recruited Harari to the Shin Bet and then the Mossad, where he rose rapidly before being assigned to investigate
Caesarea’s operations. What he found was a unit in very bad shape, with a hodgepodge of personnel (former members of 188 Mifratz and the Birds, the operational unit of the Shin Bet, among others), a fuzzy combat doctrine, and undefined goals.
Caesarea’s string of failures led Harari to the conclusion that Caesarea must be rebuilt from the bottom up, with its objectives, tasks, and personnel redefined.
After several months of work, he submitted his doctrine to the heads of the Mossad: “In my view of the world, I believe that any country that wants to live must have a Caesarea of its own, a clandestine, compartmentalized, and elite body that will be able to carry out, beyond the country’s borders, the things that no other agency in the country is able to do. It is a unique tool our leadership can use to operate against the country’s enemies.”
Harari set Caesarea’s primary objectives as targeted killings, sabotage, collecting intel in hostile “target” countries, and special ops, like smuggling abductees across borders.
Most of the Mifratz field operatives that Harari investigated were former members of the extremist anti-British underground groups who’d been recruited by Isser Harel and commanded by Yitzhak Shamir. Harari found them to be extremely tough, with a lot of experience in combat and covert ops, ready to pull the trigger when the moment came. In other ways, however, Harari found them to be very weak: “They always failed in the getaway stage. I ordered that in planning an operation, the same weight be given to the goal and the getaway, and if there’s no way of getting out in one piece, don’t execute.”
Harari ordered the establishment of a “targets committee,” which would make in-depth studies to decide who’d be on the hit list, and ruled that slayings should never be carried out in close contact, with knives or other “cold” weapons.
The field personnel in the two operational divisions, Caesarea and Colossus, disliked being called operatives, which sounded bland and perfunctory, lacking the appropriate heroic inflection. (Worse was “agent,” an almost derisive term reserved for foreign nationals who’d been recruited to betray their own countries on Israel’s behalf.) Rather, they considered themselves warriors (lohamim), dedicated to defending and preserving their young nation.
Warriors though they both might have been, there was an essential difference between the personnel of the two divisions. A Colossus spy arrested in a “base country”—one with full diplomatic relations with Israel, like France or Italy— might risk imprisonment. In a “target country,” like Syria or Egypt, a Caesarea warrior would likely be subjected to horrific torture and interrogation and then executed. The exposure and capture of a Caesarea operative is perceived as a national disaster in Israel. This is why Harari insisted on iron discipline and zero errors.
And indeed, from the time that Harari rebuilt Caesarea, very few significant errors have occurred. In the entire history of the division, Eli Cohen is the only operative to have been caught and executed.“This phenomenal record,” says “Ethan,” who was a top officer of the unit for many years, “was achieved mainly thanks to Harari’s innovations and, above all, waterproof cover stories.”
The recruitment process was also a key factor in their success. “The main weapon of a Caesarea operative is the ability to work under deep cover,” Ethan explained. “This weapon has to be built in. All the rest, we can teach them.”
The Mossad was given access to Israel’s population database, which Caesarea’s selection experts scoured for certain types of people. For Harari, the natural place to look first for his personnel was among those serving, or those who had formerly served, in combat roles in the Israel Defense Forces. But this was just the start of the screening process. After the downfall of Eli Cohen and the exposure of the Mossad’s use of Jews from Arab countries as spies, he decided to rely mainly upon people who could pose as gentiles from Western countries.
The perfect candidate was of European appearance, one who could pass as a tourist or businessman from a country whose citizens were welcomed in the Arab world. One pool of possible recruits consisted of the children of Israeli scholars or members of the Israeli diplomatic corps who had spent considerable time overseas because of their parents’ jobs. But most of Caesarea’s recruits were immigrants who’d lived in their native countries until adulthood (in very rare cases, Caesarea will recruit a Jew still living outside Israel), because they offered an obvious advantage: They did not need to be trained to play the role of a non-Israeli.
On the other hand, former training chief Kfir explained, there was a corresponding complication with such recruits. All aspirants undergo a thorough security check by Shin Bet, of course. But if an immigrant has not been properly distilled by Israeli society—if he or she hasn’t served in the IDF, hasn’t developed a network of long-term friends, doesn’t have relatives in the country—it’s much
more difficult to ascertain their loyalty to both Israel and the Mossad. It’s even possible that they’re already spies for another country. Consequently, the background checks following the initial polygraph tests for Caesarea recruits, already the most stringent in the Mossad, were made even tougher, with the investigators sometimes traveling abroad to scrutinize a candidate’s past. A massive effort was invested in the recruitment of each candidate.
Once prospects were identified, they received calls from persons who identified themselves as “government employees” and suggested a meeting in a café, where they described in a very general manner what it was all about. Others received a somewhat cryptic letter from the prime minister’s office or the Defense Ministry, with more or less the following language: “We offer you a chance to take part in an
operation involving varied and unique activities, which will confront you with exciting challenges and give you an opportunity to contend with them while reaching your full potential and personal satisfaction.” In addition to this direct approach, the Mossad has long run ambiguous want ads in Israeli newspapers referring to a “state organization” seeking candidates for “challenging work.”
From those pools of potential recruits, the Mossad began winnowing down the group through a variety of tests, until they were left with only those psychologically
fit for the job. The screening process for all operational jobs in the Mossad was and still is conducted by Mossad recruitment officers and psychologists. Harari
insisted that the psychologists themselves undergo an exhausting training program, including the horrific “prisoner exercise,” so they would realize what qualities were demanded from an operative and be better able to screen the candidates.
Finding candidate operatives with all the desired characteristics was, and is, a very difficult challenge. In the Mossad, they note with pride that the acceptance
rate is 0.1 percent. Moti Kfir put it this way: “The desired warrior has to be a Zionist. He needs to identify with Israel and its objectives. Above all, he has to have a balance of contrary characteristics. He needs initiative without being aggressive. Brave but not fearless. Outgoing but reticent. They must be willing to take huge risks, but without putting the mission and the organization in jeopardy and without this turning into a death wish. They need to be able to live a life of lies and deception while transmitting reliable reports and not hiding anything from their commanders. They need to employ personal charm without creating personal
connections.”
And then there is always the question of motivation: Why would a man or woman want one of the most dangerous jobs in the world? “There are two groups
of warriors,” Kfir said. “One comes from the positive direction, people who are coming to something. The second group comes from the negative direction, people who are getting away from something. The ones from the positive direction don’t have a problem making a living, and they don’t have wives who don’t understand them. They are people who come to serve Zionism and seek to satisfy their spirit
of adventure; they want to see the world, to play because they like the game. The ones from the negative direction—they’re people who are running away from something, who don’t like their homes, who haven’t been successful in a civilian career. They are people who are trying to create a better life for themselves.”
The Mossad takes both kinds of warriors, the positive and the negative. Their reasons for leaving their old life matter less than the ability to function in complete isolation in an enemy country, under an entirely different identity. “You are both a soldier and a general,” says Kfir. “It’s a heavy emotional and intellectual burden.”
Hoping to find a way to obviate or at least mitigate that burden, Harari also# initiated one other particularly ambitious recruitment program. “I heard that the KGB used to identify orphans, who wouldn’t have any restrictive commitments, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, took them under its wing, and trained them under# the best possible conditions to be operatives functioning under cover. I thought it# was a good idea.” He got Caesarea’s psychologist to find a fourteen-year-old Israeli boy without parents, and Caesarea took him under its wing, without his knowing who was now taking care of him. A psychologist and two tutors kept constant tabs
on him, and he was given an excellent education, enrichment classes in art and culture, and time for sports and leisure. “We told him we wanted him to serve the
nation when he grew up,” says Harari.
All of the grooming and tuition was a success. The boy became a soldier and then a talented young officer, highly cultured and capable of functioning under cover as a foreigner. But the project as a whole failed. “It became clear to me that it may work in a totalitarian country like Russia, but not in Israel. The Israeli Jew doesn’t have that kind of perseverance, and very soon he wanted a girlfriend, a civilian career, and a good salary. He would likely have aspirations in very different directions than what the intelligence world could offer. We had no alternative but to just let him go his own way.”
Other recruitment policies proved more successful. For practical operational reasons, the Mossad actually became an early pioneer in gender equality. “It is a
huge advantage having a woman on the team during an operation,” says Ethan. “A team made up of members of both sexes…always provides for a better cover storyand reduces suspicions.”
If recruits manage to make it past the initial screening stage, they then begin the “operatives course.” Most Caesarea cadets never visit Mossad headquarters during their training and have no contact with other trainees. They are exposed to as little information as possible so that they will have little to reveal if they are captured and tortured. During training, their home base is one of several apartments in Tel Aviv, so that they won’t be exposed to regular Mossad employees who come to work at headquarters every day.
Cadets undergo training in a host of spycraft fields—encrypted Morse code transmission (until technological developments rendered that mode of communication obsolete), surveillance, losing tails, weaponry, and hand-to-hand combat. They also study the geography, politics, and history of the Arab countries.
Skills are honed in a series of practice missions, almost entirely on Israeli soil, and are usually mundane: slipping a listening device into a telephone in a bank lobby, recovering innocuous documents, breaking into homes or businesses just to prove a recruit has the skill.
The creation of an elaborate cover story goes well beyond a fake name. The recruit is expected to learn an entirely new, fictitious biography: where he was
born and raised, who his parents were, the social, cultural, and economic background in which he was raised, his hobbies, and so forth. A passport issued by a friendly base country—or forged by the Mossad—will allow the warrior to travel freely, even to countries that don’t admit Israelis. The counterfeit profession, meanwhile, typically is one that requires frequent international travel and lots of time spent working alone, without partners, offices, or regular hours. A newspaper reporter or photographer, for example, or a screenwriter doing research for a movie script both work well, because neither requires much explanation.
The cover story, molded over time, distances the recruit from his true self and endows him with a new life in a new country that arouses no suspicion. Next, recruits practice creating second-level covers specific to individual situations. A warrior needs to be able to plausibly account for why he was in a particular place at a particular time—lingering outside a government ministry, for instance, monitoring how many people come and go—if pestered by a curious police officer. In order to be believable, that explanation needs to be given quickly, calmly, and with as little detail as possible; offering too much information can arouse suspicion as easily as no explanation at all.
Trainers will ratchet up the pressure by simulating arrest and brutal interrogation. A Caesarea warrior code-named Kurtz said that this is the toughest
part of the course. “They sent us in pairs to Jerusalem to shadow foreign diplomats. It seemed like a simple assignment—just to follow them and report, without establishing contact,” he said. “We were equipped with foreign passports, and our instructions were that under no circumstances were we to reveal to anyone who we really were. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, three police cars pull up and a few other thugs in civilian clothes jump us, knock us down, handcuff us, and throw us into the wagon.
“They took us to the Shin Bet interrogation facility in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. We spent three and a half horrible days there, without sleep, handcuffed, blindfolded. For part of the time, we were handcuffed to a chair with our arms behind us in a position that tensed our entire bodies; part of the time, they chained us to the ceiling, forcing us to stand on tiptoe. During the
interrogations, policemen and Shin Bet agents beat us and spit on us. I heard that they even urinated on one guy. The goal was to see who would break and who
would survive with his counterfeit cover.” Kurtz did not break. If he had, he likely would have been cut from the program.
Upon completion of the course, successful cadets qualify as operatives and
begin going on missions in target countries.
Harari introduced iron discipline into Caesarea and demanded absolute obedience. Anyone who didn’t follow the path he laid down found himself immediately on the outside. The division’s offices, on the eleventh floor of 2
Kaplan Street, Tel Aviv, were run quietly and with exemplary order. “Mike brought a European atmosphere with him to Caesarea,” said Ethan. “The speech, the finesse, the manners, the way of behavior. His office was always clean and tidy, tip-top, and so was he, in his behavior and dress. He was always well groomed, clean-shaven, with the scent of his favorite French Macassar cologne following him around wherever he went. This was important, because he got the whole unit accustomed to working in the atmosphere of the countries from which we ostensibly came.”
“Good intelligence and a strong Caesarea cost money,” Harari told Amit. He demanded bigger and bigger budgets, which he spent on training personnel and on the formation of more and more operational frameworks and networks. Harari’s people opened hundreds of commercial firms in innumerable spheres and countries, which would serve the Mossad for many years after his departure. Most of them did not have an immediate use, but Harari had the foresight to see, for example, that it would one day be advantageous for Caesarea to control a shipping company in a Middle Eastern country. Sure enough, there came a time when the unit needed a civilian shipping vessel to provide cover for a Mossad team in the waters off Yemen. The Mossad unit loaded packages of meat onto a vessel, shipping it from place to place while secretly carrying out their espionage mission.
In 1967, Harari’s changes began producing noticeable results, and Caesarea pperatives in target countries were transmitting valuable information back to Israel on a daily basis, mostly related to Israel’s main adversaries at the time: Syria,.Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq.
The Mossad, AMAN, and the government justifiably allotted many resources to preparations for the next military confrontation with the Arab states, which indeed ended up coming that June. However, Israeli intelligence failed to spot the next major challenge: the millions of Palestinians ready to fight for the return of their motherland. A wave of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis and other Jews would soon sweep through the Middle East
Chapter 7: “Armed Struggle Is the Only Way to Liberate Palestine”
BETWEEN 600,000 AND 750,000 Palestinians either fled or were driven out of the territory upon which the State of Israel was established and which it conquered during the war of 1948–49. The Arabs vowed to destroy the newborn state, and the Israeli leadership believed that if their precarious, vulnerable country was to have any chance of surviving, there had to be as few Arabs as possible within its borders. This was the rationale, however morally questionable, behind both the expulsions and the blanket refusal to allow any refugees to return—ever. Refugees were settled into Gaza (a 141-square-mile strip formed along the
southwest coast of Mandatory Palestine as a result of the 1948–49 war, controlled by Egypt until 1967 and by Israel since), the West Bank (the name given by Jordan to the 2,270-square-mile territory it controlled after the 1948 war in formerly Mandatory Palestine; Israel captured this territory in 1967), and other ramshackle camps in neighboring Arab countries, where the ruling regimes blustered that they eventually would wipe the Zionists from the map and return the Palestinians to their homeland. But that was mostly lip service. In reality, those regimes imposed harsh conditions of their own on the unfortunate refugees, who often had no rights, no significant control of their lives, no prospects for higher education or worthy employment. Living conditions were poor, and so were public health and even food security. The refugees who poured into the Gaza Strip during the 1948–49war more than tripled the area’s population. From about 70,000 inhabitants in
1945, the number rose to about 245,000 in 1950. By 1967, there were 356,000 inhabitants, and by 2015, there were 1,710,000. The refugees had become stateless people, cast out of their own country and unwanted by any other. But they and the permanent Palestinian residents of the villages and cities in the West Bank and Gaza still considered themselves a people. In the squalid camps, young militants organized themselves into nationalist movements, driven by pride of self and hatred of Israel.
Among them was a boy named Khalil al-Wazir, who had been born in Ramla, a town southeast of Tel Aviv, in 1935. During the 1948 war, he and his family, along with many other residents of Ramla, were deported to Gaza, where they lived in a refugee camp.
By the time he was sixteen, al-Wazir already was the leader of one of the militant groups. Eager to avenge his family’s deportation from Ramla, al-Wazir said, he “sought out mujahideen who had taken part in the [1948] Palestinian War so that we could learn from their personal experience in battle.”
Those veterans of the ’48 war trained al-Wazir and his friends, and they, in turn, trained other young Palestinians. In 1953, when he was just eighteen years old, al- Wazir commanded two hundred young men, all passionately motivated to fight the Zionist enemy. At the end of 1954 and the beginning of 1955, al-Wazir’s men began a series of sabotage and murder operations inside Israel. The Egyptians, using the young militants as cheap proxies, sent reinforcements of Palestinian students from Cairo to Gaza. Among them was a young electrical engineering student at the University of Cairo, Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini—Yasser Arafat.
Arafat’s place of birth is disputed. According to the official Palestinian version, he was born in 1929 in Jerusalem, as might be expected from a Palestinian leader.
However, it has also been argued that Arafat was born in Gaza or even in Cairo. Regardless, he came from an important Palestinian family with ties to the grand mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and to Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, the commander of Palestinian forces in 1948, both of whom were primary targets for assassination at that time.
Arafat, who took the nom de guerre Abu Ammar, and al-Wazir, who took the name Abu Jihad, became associates and confidants. They worked together to strengthen the Palestinian cells in the Gaza Strip.
Nevertheless, Israeli intelligence was not overly concerned with the festering militancy in the refugee camps. “In general, one could say that the Palestinian diaspora really didn’t interest us,” said Aharon Levran, who served as an AMAN officer at the time. “They did not constitute a significant force then.” Rather than a long-term strategic issue, the militants were considered an immediate tactical problem, a concern only to the extent that they slipped over the border to harass and terrorize Jews. And that problem ostensibly had been solved by the 1956 Sinai Campaign: Egypt, fearful of Israeli reprisals and more concerned with preserving peace on the border than with the plight of Palestinians, stopped sponsoring those raids.
The militants, however, did not see matters the same way. Abu Jihad and Arafat, blindsided and betrayed when the Egyptians prohibited further
infiltrations, decided the Palestinians could end their plight only by engaging in independent operations. Israel’s military victory in the Sinai Campaign, which
stopped the terrorist infiltration by Palestinians from Egyptian territory, thus also inadvertently led to the creation of a separate guerrilla movement.
After years of roaming from country to country, in late 1959 Arafat and Abu Jihad relocated to Kuwait. They had come to realize that in the eyes of Nasser, who was trying to unify the Arab world under his leadership, their activities would only be seen as obstructions. They knew that as long as they stayed in one of the major Arab states, they would never manage to create an effective all-Palestinian organization under their own authority.
Abu Jihad accepted the supremacy of Arafat, who was six years his senior and who already possessed a wide network of ties across the Palestinian diaspora. Arafat regarded himself as the leader, but he immediately identified Abu Jihad’s operational capabilities, something he himself lacked. For two years, Arafat, Abu Jihad, and three comrades worked on developing a series of principles and operational frameworks for their organization. They did so in secret, to avoid arousing the opposition of the Arab states. Finally, on October 10, 1959, thePalestine Liberation Movement was officially established.
They soon discovered, however, that the Arabic acronym of their name, Hataf, spelled a word that ingloriously translates as “quick death.” So Abu Jihad, who had
a special sensitivity for symbolic matters, proposed that the letters be reversed to form the acronym Fatah—that word means “glorious victory.”
The basic principles, disseminated at the time in the form of leaflets, would later be concentrated and expressed in the Palestinian National Covenant. Article 9 states, “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine,” and Article 6 in effect calls for the deportation of all Jews who had arrived in Palestine after 1917. Article 20 notes, “Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history….Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.”
Article 22 mentions that “Zionism is…racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods.” Most of the covenant’s strictures against Zionism allege that it is a tool of international imperialism.
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ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE, PREOCCUPIED WITH Nasser and convinced that Egypt posed the most credible and formidable threat, completely missed the founding of Fatah.
It wasn’t until early 1964, more than four years after the fact, that two Israeli spies filed the first field reports on the organization. Uri Yisrael (known in the Mossad as “Ladiyyah”) and Yitzhak Sagiv (“Yisrael”), working under the cover of Palestinian businessmen, warned that the cells of students functioning with Fatah’s support and inspiration were gaining more and more momentum in Europe and should not be belittled. On April 6, 1964, with the entire Mossad tied up with the affair of the German scientists, Ladiyyah wrote to his Mossad handlers, warning,
“I am coming to the conclusion that the danger we face from the scholars, students, and educated [Palestinians] is of no lesser significance than the arming of
the Arab states with weapons of mass destruction.”
At first, their Mossad case officers were unimpressed, dismissing Arafat, Abu Jihad, and their friends as “students and intellectuals stronger with words than in actions.” But Ladiyyah and Yisrael persisted, warning that their Palestinian acquaintances were speaking with increasing frequency about “the armed struggle against the Zionist entity.”
Fatah was “something entirely different from anything that had existed before,” they insisted in a May 1964 report. “These two”—Arafat and Abu Jihad—“are capable of inspiring the Palestinians to act against us.”
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FATAH CARRIED OUT ITS first terror attack on January 1, 1965, an attempt to bomb Israel’s National Water Carrier, the huge pipe-and-canal system that brings water from the Sea of Galilee to the country’s arid south. It was a highly symbolic act—threatening to cut out the source of life, water, in the desert of the Middle East— one that touched the raw nerves of all the residents of the region. The construction of the canal system had been a contentious issue, causing considerable agitation in Arab public opinion at the time. Although Prime Minister Salah Bitar of Syria declared in September 1963 that the Arab states had decided to wage “an unyielding campaign to prevent [Israel] from realizing its dream” of bringing water to the desert, those were empty words. It was only Fatah, still small and with few resources, that took the initiative and acted.
Planned by Abu Jihad, the operation was fairly amateurish, and an utter failure.
The group that was supposed to carry out the first military act by Fatah was arrested in Gaza a whole week before the launch date. Another group was also arrested in Lebanon a few days before the launch date. Eventually, a third group coming from Jordan did manage to lay explosives at the National Water Carrier site, but they failed to go off and were discovered by a security patrol. The members of the unit were caught. Despite this evident failure, the news of the operation reverberated throughout the Arab world. At last there was a force ready to take on the Israelis. AMAN, for its part, took notice but did little more.
At the same time, Ladiyyah’s connections, established over years of living a double life, paid off. Arafat and Abu Jihad maintained close contact with Palestinian students throughout Europe, particularly in East and West Germany.
Ladiyyah had a Palestinian friend, Hani al-Hassan, who headed West Germany’s Palestinian Student Association and whose brother, Khaled, was one of Fatah’s five founding members. Hani was in financial difficulties, and Ladiyyah came to the rescue. He offered to pay the rent on Hani’s apartment, at Beethovenstrasse 42, Frankfurt, which also served as headquarters for the student organization. The leaders of Fatah periodically gathered there as well.
In January 1965, the Mossad’s surveillance unit, Colossus, planted microphones in the apartment. For the next eight months, Israeli operatives eavesdropped on the Palestinians’ strategy sessions from a post across the hall, listening as they vowed to “wipe Israel off the map,” as Abu Jihad declared at one of the secretly recorded sessions.
Rafi Eitan, who years earlier had commanded the IDF force that expelled Abu Jihad’s family from Ramla, was chief of the Mossad’s European operations at the time. Listening to the plotting, he understood straightaway that this was a movement with potential, and that it had a particularly charismatic, dangerous
leader. “Arafat’s true nature was apparent even back then in the meetings inFrankfurt,” Eitan said. “The students told Arafat and Abu Jihad that there were fifteen Palestinian organizations and that it was important to ensure that all of them operate under a single command. Arafat said that that wasn’t necessary, and that it was actually a good thing for each organization to have its own militia and budget. Doing so would guarantee, he said, ‘the continuation of the struggle against Zionism until we throw all the Jews in the sea.’ ”
Throughout the first half of 1965, Fatah carried out more and more guerrilla attacks, mining roads, sabotaging pipelines, and firing at Israelis with small arms.
Most of these attacks failed, but their echoes reached Rafi Eitan in Paris. In May 1965, Eitan asked Mossad director Amit to order a Caesarea unit to break into the apartment on Beethovenstrasse and assassinate everyone there. “We can do it easily,” he wrote to Amit. “We have access to the target and this is an opportunity
that we may not get again.”
But Amit, still reeling from the capture of Caesarea operatives Cohen and Lotz, refused to sign off. He didn’t see the group as much more than a gang of young
thugs with no real capability.
“Too bad they didn’t listen to me,” Eitan said decades later. “We could have saved ourselves a lot of effort, heartache, and sorrow.”
In the months that followed, there were more attacks, and their frequency steadily increased, reaching a total of thirty-nine in 1965. It was clear that Arafat
and Abu Jihad were a problem that wasn’t going to go away. “At first their terror attacks were ridiculous,” said Aharon Levran, who was then deputy chief of
AMAN’s intelligence collection division. “But as time went on, they became more serious….Faced with those situations, the intelligence community reacted in two
typical ways,” Levran said. “First, they set up a special department to handle the
matter. Second, they struck at the top of the pyramid.
The “special department,” a secret committee to examine how to counter Palestinian terrorism, was established in August 1965 and had three members: Levran; Mike Harari, deputy chief of Caesarea; and Shmuel Goren, commander of AMAN’s Unit 504.
The committee of three issued orders for the elimination of Arafat and Abu Jihad. Knowing that the unit’s recent catastrophes made it extremely unlikely they would get authorization for a targeted killing operation using Caesarea, the committee instead recommended a return to letter bombs. Using information
gathered by Ladiyyah and Yisrael, these bombs would be sent to a number of Fatah officials in Lebanon and Syria. On October 8, Mossad director Amit met with Prime Minister and Defense
Minister Levi Eshkol to submit the plan for his approval. “We have three targets,”
Amit said. “Our guy [Ladiyyah] has come back from the capitals [Beirut and Damascus], and we want to execute.”
After identifying the targets, Amit noted that Ladiyyah “has brought all of the necessary information, and the proposal is to send each one of them a ‘gift.’ ” The letters would appear to be from people known to the targets. To make them seem as authentic as possible, they would be mailed directly from inside Lebanon.
“It will be a woman doing it this time. She’ll go to Beirut and slip the letters into a mailbox there….[She is] South African, with a British passport, and she’s ready to do it.” Amit was speaking about Sylvia Rafael, daughter of a Jewish father and a gentile mother, who had developed a strong allegiance with the Jewish people, immigrated to Israel, and was recruited by the Mossad. She was trained by Moti Kfir and became the most famous female operative in the history of Caesarea.
Amit told Eshkol that there would be a whole wave of letter bombs. While the Mossad focused on its three targets, AMAN would simultaneously send twelve to
fifteen of the lethal envelopes to Fatah operatives in Jordan.
Eshkol was skeptical. “Have we ever had an attempt that worked out all the way?…In Egypt it didn’t work out all the way,” he said, reminding Amit that the letter bombs sent to the German scientists in Egypt didn’t kill them, but only caused injuries. Amit reassured him, saying, “We’re putting in more [explosive] material this time. Now we’re putting in twenty grams.”
Nevertheless, the booby-trapped envelopes didn’t work this time, either. A few recipients of the letters were slightly wounded, but most of the letters were discovered and defused before they could do any harm at all.
At that time, Arafat and Abu Jihad were in Damascus, which had agreed to extend its patronage to Fatah’s activities and to allow its military units to use some of Syria’s training facilities. The possibilities for any sort of Israeli action in Damascus were very limited, especially after the capture of Eli Cohen and the panicky evacuation of the other operatives there. Furthermore, from Syria, Fatah could better coordinate its struggle against Israel, making frequent entries into the West Bank, which was then under Jordanian rule. Fatah established bases there, from which they launched terror attacks inside Israel. Most of the attacks were sabotage attempts of civilian targets, including private houses, institutions, and infrastructure, like water pipes, railways, and dirt roads. In 1966, there were forty Fatah attacks in Israel. Though the frequency of the ,attacks remained the same as in 1965, there was a dramatic difference in the audacity and quality. Starting in the middle of 1966, Fatah began trying to hit Israeli military targets. In one such operation, on November 11, 1966, three Israeli# soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a land mine. Retaliation followed two days later when Israeli forces raided a Palestinian village, Samua, south of Hebron# in Jordanian territory. The original goal was to demolish houses in the village, in the hope of sending a signal that would deter the Arab states and motivate them to act against Fatah. However, the Jordanian army intervened. The result was sixteen dead Jordanian soldiers, one dead Israeli, and a sharp increase in tension on the border.
Still, the urge to sweep the Palestinian problem under the carpet was so strong that the Israeli establishment did all it could not to even utter the name Fatah. “We didn’t want to give Fatah credit, to say that this or that terror attack was its work,” said Shlomo Gazit, head of the Research Division of AMAN from 1964 to 1967.
“On the other hand, we had to refer to them somehow, so we decided on a neutral term.” That word was paha, the Hebrew acronym for hostile terrorist activity. For decades, this was the term used by Israeli officials when they told the public who was behind acts of terror.
In early 1967, the situation worsened rapidly. By the start of May, Fatah had launched more than a hundred attacks on Israel, across the Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Egyptian borders. Thirteen Israelis were killed: nine civilians and four soldiers. The back-and-forth of small-scale attacks—Palestinians raiding across the border, Israel retaliating—deteriorated Israel’s already fragile relationships with neighboring Arab countries.
On May 11, Israel declared that it was warning Syria for the last time that if it did not restrain Fatah, Israel would take large-scale military action. That warning led to the establishment of a joint military command by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and the concentration of enormous forces by all sides. Many Arabs believed that at last the time had come for the liquidation of the State of Israel.
In Israel, many people feared that another Holocaust was imminent. An atmosphere of gloom prevailed. Some expected tens of thousands to die. Mass burial sites were hastily prepared in public parks like Gan Meir, in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Prime Minister Eshkol gave a speech on Israeli radio on May 28, 1967, that only made things worse. Because the text had been changed at the last moment, Eshkolstuttered over key phrases. The Israeli public understood it as lack of resolve on his part, aggravating existing fears.
However, the heads of the Israeli Army and intelligence community were sure of their own capabilities and pressured Eshkol to let them strike first. Mossad chief Amit flew to Washington, where he met with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Amit understood from McNamara’s response that he had obtained what he later described as a “flashing green light” for Israel to launch a preemptive attack.
The Six-Day War broke out at 7:45 on the morning of June 5, 1967, with the entire Israeli Air Force bombing and strafing dozens of enemy airfields. Thanks to detailed and precise intelligence gathered by the Mossad and AMAN over long years of preparing for war, Israel’s Air Force was able to destroy, within hours,# nearly every combat plane that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan owned. By the time the war ended, on June 10, Israel was occupying territories that increased its size by more than 300 percent. Its conquests included the Sinai Peninsula, as well as the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
It now oversaw more than a million Palestinian inhabitants in those territories as well, many of them 1948 refugees who now were occupied by the same forces that had dispossessed them of their land twenty years before. In less than a week, the face of the Middle East had been completely transformed.
The war proved that the Israeli intelligence community and its military enjoyed unchallenged superiority over its rivals in the Arab states. Yet some Israelis realized that the mighty victory was not just a reason to rejoice—it was also an opportunity to forge a lasting truce. AMAN research chief Gazit composed a special top-secret paper, distributed to the leaders of the government and the military, that included a warning that “we should not look like braggarts, mocking a defeated enemy, debasing him and his leaders.” The memo called for immediate negotiations with the Arab states and the use of the conquered territories in a barter deal—an Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of an “independent Palestinian state” in exchange for an overall, absolute, and final peace treaty. In the Shin Bet, too, there were many who believed that this was a historic opportunity to end the national conflict between Jews and Arabs. Even Israel’s number-one spy,
Meir Amit, grasped the potential for peace. But his advice fell on deaf ears.
The sharp transition undergone by the Israeli public and its parliamentarians and cabinet ministers—from citizens and leaders of a country on the brink of destruction to those of a seemingly invincible empire—made everyone blind to the truth that even victory and the occupation of enemy territory could entail grave dangers.
Amit was one of the few who comprehended the profound and dangerous new trend in the national psychology. “What’s happening now is a disappointment, a
painful disappointment,” he wrote in his diary two weeks after the war. “I am apprehensive and worried and fearful at this waste of a victory….When I see how matters are being conducted, my hands go limp and I get a terrible feeling.”
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WHILE AMIT SAW ISRAEL’S victory as an opportunity for peace, Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad saw the Arab nations’ overwhelming defeat as a catastrophe to be exploited. They realized that the disgraceful failure of the Arab states’ leaders would make room in public opinion for new leaders, who would be perceived as young, brave, and uncorrupted. Abu Jihad also grasped that it would now be easier to wage guerrilla warfare against Israel.
On June 20, just ten days after the war ended, Arafat and Abu Jihad announced from Beirut that Fatah would continue its struggle, only now from within territories Israel had just conquered. True to his word, Abu Jihad initiated a damaging wave of terror attacks in Gaza and the West Bank—thirteen attacks took place during September 1967, ten in October, eighteen in November, and twenty in December. The targets were mostly civilian: factories, houses, cinemas, and the like. In the wake of those attacks, no one in Israeli intelligence dared advocate negotiations with Fatah. Although Abu Jihad was waging the war, it was clear to the Israelis that Fatah’s leader was Yasser Arafat. He was the one who laid down the diplomatic and ideological lines, and who gradually managed to unite all of the various Palestinian factions under his authority. He had also begun to mediate relationships with the
leaders of the Arab states, who had originally seen Fatah as a dangerous threat. In 1964, the Arab states founded the Palestine Liberation Organization and placed a puppet of theirs, Ahmad Shukeiri, at its head. But in the wake of the organization’s dismal performance in the Six-Day War and with Arafat’s rising prominence, Fatah gradually began taking control of the PLO, until Arafat was finally elected its chairman. Abu Jihad became the coordinator of its military activities, in effect
the second in command.
Arafat, who took to wearing a kaffiyeh headdress draped to look like a map of Palestine, had become the symbol of the Palestinian struggle.“Israel must strike at the heart of the terror organizations, their HQs,” Yehuda Arbel, the Shin Bet commander in Jerusalem and the West Bank, wrote in his diary. “The elimination of Abu Ammar”—Arafat—“is a precondition to finding a
solution to the Palestinian problem.” Arbel pressed the committee of three to take steps to achieve this goal. For his part, he drew up and distributed a wanted poster, the first of many, which included the following description: “Short, 155–160 cm; dark-skinned. Build: chubby; bald spot in the middle of his head. Hair on temples —gray. Mustache shaven. Demeanor: restive. Eyes: constantly darting back and forth.”
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ISRAELI FORCES TRIED TO kill Arafat a few times during and immediately after the Six-Day War. In the days following Israel’s victory, a Shin Bet informer identified his hideout in the Old City of Jerusalem, not far from Jaffa Gate. A contingent of soldiers was sent to get Arafat, dead or alive, but he managed to flee just a few# minutes before they arrived. Two days later, soldiers acting on another tip from a 504 agent raided an apartment in Beit Hanina, a village just east of Jerusalem, but found only a pita full of salad and tahini, with a few bites gone. A day later, Arafat managed to cross over one of the Jordan River bridges, dressed as a woman, in a cab belonging to one of his supporters.
In the meantime, PLO terror attacks against Israel became more frequent and more deadly. Between the end of the war and March 1968, 65 soldiers and 50 civilians were killed, and 249 soldiers and 295 civilians were wounded. The attacks launched by Fatah from its headquarters in Karameh, in the southern Jordan Valley, led to frequent clashes between the IDF and the Jordanian army, and the long border between the two countries seethed with tension, making normal life on the Israeli side impossible. The IDF brass urged Eshkol to approve a massive military operation, but he was hesitant.
The Mossad was frustrated. “The humiliation caused by the terror attacks produced a feeling of helplessness,” recalled Caesarea chief Zvi Aharoni. “I told the guys, ‘Think outside the box. Think of an idea how to kill Arafat.’ ”
The plan they came up with in January 1968 called for shipping a large car from Europe to Beirut, where it would be packed with explosives and then driven to Damascus by a Caesarea man operating under the cover of a businessman. It would be parked outside Arafat’s residence and detonated remotely at the right time. Amit went to Eshkol to seek approval but was met with a blunt refusal, on nthe grounds that the attack would invite and justify retaliatory attempts on the lives of Israeli political leaders. Eshkol saw Arafat as a terrorist, but one who had attained the status of a political leader, and this was perhaps the best proof of all of the PLO chairman’s success. But the Palestinian terror continued unabated. On March 18, a school bus hit a land mine. Two adult escorts were killed and ten children wounded. Now the reluctant Eshkol gave in to the pressure. He agreed that killing Arafat would be the primary aim of the operation against the Palestinian forces in and around Karameh.
On March 21, 1968, a unit from Sayeret Matkal, the elite IDF commando force, was flown by helicopter to a staging point in the desert near the Fatah base in Karameh. The commandos’ orders were simple and clear: “Attack in daylight,# seize control, isolate and kill the terrorists.” At a cabinet meeting the night before, the chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Haim Bar-Lev, had promised “a clean operation,” by which he meant no or almost no Israeli casualties.
But things went very wrong, and the battle dragged on much longer than planned. The Jordan River is high at that time of year, the vegetation along its banks is thick and the terrain difficult to negotiate, which held up the mechanized forces that were supposed to support the commandos. Furthermore, due to faulty coordination, the air force dropped leaflets warning the civilian population to evacuate at a preset time. The element of surprise was lost and the Fatah forces had ample time to prepare for the assault. They fought back fiercely.
Arafat—again dressed as a woman—got away in a mad dash on a motorcycle. Although the casualties—thirty-three Israelis dead, as well as sixty-one Jordanians and more than one hundred Palestinians—favored the IDF, for the first time in a face-to-face battle the Palestinians had succeeded in holding out against the strongest army in the Middle East. This showed who the real victors were. Arafat, immediately grasping the public relations potential of Israel’s bungled operation, turned it into a legend of Palestinian grit in the face of enemy attack. He even went so far as to (falsely) boast that his forces had wounded the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan. Thousands of Palestinians were inspired to enlist in the PLO. After Karameh, no one doubted that there was a Palestinian nation, even if Israel continued to deny it officially for many years thereafter. And no one could be mistaken: Yasser Arafat was that nation’s unchallenged leader.
The failure of the Karameh operation led Israel to adopt a more restrained policy in its raids into Jordan, and consequently engendered great frustration in theIDF. Transcripts of general staff meetings from that period reveal the extent to which the top brass was preoccupied with the PLO and with Yasser Arafat, who was regarded with great admiration by Palestinian youth.
The military and the intelligence community continued to look for ways to pinpoint and eliminate Arafat, but with no success. Eventually, out of desperation, they were even willing to adopt a particularly bizarre plan. In May 1968, a charismatic Swedish-born navy psychologist named Binyamin Shalit somehow heard about the secret three-man committee and proposed an idea based on the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, in which a Chinese intelligence hypnotist brainwashes an American prisoner of war and sends him to assassinate a United States presidential candidate.
Shalit claimed that he could do the same, with Arafat as the target. Shalit told the committee at a meeting attended by AMAN chief Major General Aharon Yariv that if he was given a Palestinian prisoner—one of the thousands in Israeli jails—with the right characteristics, he could brainwash and hypnotize him into becoming a programmed killer. He would then be sent across the Jordan, join the Fatah forces there, and, when the opportunity arose, do away with Arafat.
Incredibly, the committee approved the plan. The Shin Bet found several suitable candidates, and they were interviewed at length by Shalit, who picked the man he thought most suitable. Born in Bethlehem, he was twenty-eight, solidly built and swarthy, not particularly bright, easily influenced, and seemingly not entirely committed to Yasser Arafat’s leadership. At the time of his arrest, he had been living in a small village near Hebron. A low-level Fatah operative, he was given the official code name Fatkhi.
AMAN’s Unit 504 was assigned to provide the necessary infrastructure, but the unit’s operatives vehemently opposed the plan. As Rafi Sutton, then commander of the unit’s base in Jerusalem, said, “It was a foolish, crazy idea. The whole business reminded me of science fiction. Wild imagination and delusions.”
Sutton’s objections, however, were dismissed. A small structure containing about ten rooms was put at the Shalit team’s disposal. Here, Shalit spent three months working on Fatkhi, using a variety of hypnosis techniques. The message drummed into the impressionable young man’s head was: “Fatah good. PLO good.
Arafat bad. He must be removed.” After two months, Fatkhi seemed to be taking in the message. In the second stage of his training, he was placed in a specially prepared room and given a pistol. Pictures of Arafat jumped up in different corners and he was told to shoot at them instantly, without thinking first, righ tbetween the eyes—shoot to kill. AMAN Chief Yariv and Aharon Levran, part of the three-man targeted killing committee and a senior AMAN officer, went several times to observe Shalit’s work. “Fatkhi stood there in the middle of the room and Shalit spoke with him, as if they were just carrying out a normal conversation,” Levran told me. “Suddenly Shalit banged his hand on the table and Fatkhi began to run around the table. He reacted automatically to all sorts of gestures by Shalit. Then he put him in a room and showed us how Fatkhi raised his pistol to firing position every time Arafat’s picture popped up from one of the pieces of furniture. It was impressive.” In mid-December, Shalit announced that the operation could go forward. Zero
hour was set for the night of December 19, when Fatkhi was scheduled to swim across the Jordan River into the Kingdom of Jordan. A fierce storm rolled in, and the rain was unrelenting. The usually calm and narrow Jordan overflowed its banks. AMAN wanted to postpone, but Shalit insisted that Fatkhi was in an “optimal hypnotic” state and that the opportunity had to be exploited. A sizable entourage accompanied Fatkhi from Jerusalem. Shalit dropped him off and said a few hypnotic words. Fatkhi walked into the raging water, wearing a backpack that contained his gear. As he waded into the river, he was soon thrown off his feet by the current. He grabbed onto a boulder, unable to cross to the far side and unable to return. Ovad Natan, a driver from Unit 504 who had a large and muscular physique, jumped into the water and, at great risk, used a rope to tie himself to Fatkhi and pull him to his side. He then crossed the river with Fatkhi and deposited him on Jordanian territory. Rafi Sutton was standing on the Israeli bank of the Jordan and watching as, soaked and shivering, Fatkhi waved goodbye to his operators. “He made a pistol out of his fingers and pretended to shoot an imaginary target between the eyes. I noticed Shalit was pleased with his patient. It was a bit after 1 A.M.” About five hours later, Unit 504 received a communication from one of its agents in Jordan: A young Palestinian man, a Fatah operative from Bethlehem, had turned himself in at the Karameh police station. He told the policemen that Israeli intelligence had tried to brainwash him into killing Arafat and handed over his pistol. A source inside Fatah reported three days later that Fatkhi had been handed over to the organization, where he had made a passionate speech in support of Yasser Arafat.
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and Europe. “We were not ready for this new menace,” said Harari.
