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  The four young men who kidnapped Toledano called themselves the “Secret Squad.”1 They carried out the operation in order to prove their worth to a local Hamas commander, hoping that the deed would be enough to earn acceptance into the group’s military wing. The kidnapping was done completely on spec: The perpetrators even pooled their savings to purchase their getaway car. The four planned to carry out an operation in the capital, but Jerusalem’s streets were too well protected. They chose the city of Lod instead. Toledano was targeted at random.2

  The Shin Bet received confirmation of Toledano’s abduction shortly before noon. Two of the kidnappers, their faces concealed by kefiyyehs, or Arab headdresses, walked into the Red Crescent office in the West Bank town of El-Bireh and handed over a copy of Toledano’s police identity card, along with a pledge that the sergeant would be killed at 9:00 that night unless Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was freed from an Israeli prison. “Our group kidnapped one of the officers of the occupation on Dec. 13, 1992,” the communiqué proclaimed. “We are demanding the occupation authorities and Israeli leaders release Sheik Ahmed Yassin in exchange for releasing this officer.”3

  Sheikh Yassin was a quadriplegic Islamic scholar who had created a Palestinian version of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza and the West Bank, an organization that would become known to the world as Hamas. The Israelis imprisoned Yassin in 1984 for stockpiling weapons in his home, but he was released a year later as part of an exchange of 1,500 Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli POWs captured in Lebanon. He was arrested again in 1989 and sentenced to two life terms for ordering the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers, and attempting to use the bodies as leverage to free Hamas terrorists jailed by Israel.4 Yassin was also convicted for approving the torture and murder of an Arab man suspected of collaborating with Israeli security forces in Gaza.

  Toledano’s kidnapping sparked a political crisis in Israel. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin convened an emergency security cabinet session, demanding action. Israel had just endured close to five years of bloody violence during the Palestinian intifada, or uprising. Hamas, along with the Iranian-funded Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), had successfully injected the zeal of fanatical Islamic fundamentalism into Palestinian nationalism, making the most of a thirst for catastrophic bloodshed. Israel was at the time involved in delicate and covert talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization. The abduction of Nissim Toledano was a brazen attempt by Hamas to disrupt those tenuous negotiations and trigger a wave of rage and violence.

  Rabin had no intention of negotiating with Hamas for Toledano. The prime minister realized that Toledano was probably already dead, and he understood the political ramifications of terrorists kidnapping a police officer off the streets of an Israeli city and murdering him in cold blood. Rabin was a seasoned politician, but his background was military, and he knew that a decisive battlefield statement was needed to send a clear message that there would be consequences for Hamas. Like many of Israel’s commanders at the time, Rabin was a chain smoker, and a cloud of smoke engulfed the stormy cabinet meeting of angry strategizing. Rabin had vowed to break the bones of Palestinian protesters during the intifada, and now he wanted to break the back of Hamas. A no-holds-barred measure was required, the prime minister explained. He ordered the heads of the intelligence services, and the commanders of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to take immediate action.

  Led by the Shin Bet, IDF special ops units and Border Guard counterterrorist teams raided multiple locations throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The raids yielded high-ranking operatives from Hamas and the PIJ. These men ran the Hamas and PIJ political wings, controlling the charitable funds that were the groups’ financial lifeline; they were also all active commanders in terror operations against Israeli civilians. The detained men included doctors, lawyers, and engineers; some were even American green card holders. In all, some 1,200 were arrested and detained. Prime Minister Rabin wanted to sever Hamas’s civilian spine, which fueled and provided safe haven for its military component. He wanted the terrorists relocated far from the territories. Rabin ordered that the top leadership of the two terror organizations, 415 operatives in all, be deported to the no-man’s-land of southern Lebanon. Lawyers for the deportees took the matter to the Israeli Supreme Court to plead for the expulsions to be halted.

  On the morning of December 16, 1992, as the Israeli justices wrangled with the legalities of expelling the suspected terrorists, Fatma Abu Dahuk, a twenty-five-year-old Bedouin girl, made a grisly discovery in the West Bank. Fatma set out from her family tent near Kfar Adumim, halfway between Jerusalem and Jericho, to search for a lost camel that had strayed during the night. The desert hills and wadis were deep and cavernous but easy terrain for an experienced Bedouin. As she walked through the steep valleys, in a ravine made colorful by winter flowers, Fatma stumbled upon the badly mutilated body of a man clad in military olive, his face covered by a matching green parka. His hands were bound high behind his back and he had been stabbed repeatedly. It was Toledano. Investigators believe that he was savagely tortured and murdered shortly after his capture.

  News of Toledano’s murder sparked riots in his hometown of Lod. Jewish protesters marched toward the Arab neighborhoods screaming “Death to Arabs.” The fate of the 415 was sealed.

  At a little past midnight on December 17, the 415 Hamas and PIJ leaders were ushered from their holding facilities throughout Israel. They were blindfolded and placed on buses, the windows of the vehicles covered by blankets to prevent the prisoners from knowing their destination. The buses drove north, toward the Lebanese border. Israel occupied a security zone inside southern Lebanon, and the buses pushed deep into Lebanese territory, until they reached lines patrolled by the Lebanese military. The deportees were ordered off the buses and told to make their way to the nearby village of Marj al-Zuhur, several miles from the Israeli lines.

  Rabin’s move drew international condemnation. Even U.S. President-elect Bill Clinton saw the deportations as counterproductive to the success of the ongoing negotiations. But the men forced into a tent encampment inside the freezing wasteland of southern Lebanon were the brains, muscle, and—most important—the accountants of the Hamas underground. These men knew the intricate details required to keep an illegal and covert organization functioning on a daily basis. It was a severe hit to the terror groups. While the 415 shivered around their South Lebanon campfires, assault rifles weren’t being purchased on the West Bank black market; terrorists’ widows weren’t receiving their stipends; and there was no money to rent Gaza safe houses. Hamas operations in the Palestinian territories had come to a dead halt.

  Mohammed al-Hamid Khalil Salah was one of the thousands of passengers landing at Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport on the afternoon of January 15, 1993. Salah, a Palestinian native, was a naturalized U.S. citizen who sold cars for a living in Chicago. He appeared nervous as he stepped onto the tarmac after his flight from London. Plain-clothed Israeli security officers were everywhere, conspicuous in their safari jackets and mirrored sunglasses. These young men were designed to be a visual deterrence, and they kept an eye on anything out of the norm as travelers entered Israel. The security services had received information that a Hamas operative would arrive from the United States, although they did not know his identity or his mission. Salah found himself under the gaze of border policemen patrolling around the aircraft; the shuttle from the tarmac to the arrivals hall provided little relief. The Chicago resident readied his American passport for the inevitable scrutiny. It wasn’t easy for West Bank natives to return to the region, and especially not through Ben-Gurion.

  Salah was nervous when he handed over his passport. “I am here to visit family and friends,” he said in a soft and shaky voice when the young customs official asked what the purpose of his visit was. His travel documents were studied. The entry process took much longer than usual. Men in uniform, and some Arabic speakers in plainclothes, questioned Salah intensely. Fi
nally, after a very long delay, Salah’s passport was stamped. His suitcases were the last ones rotating on the baggage carousel.

  Salah hurried outside from the arrivals hall and into the winter’s cold in search of a taxi. Agents from the Shin Bet were already on him. Salah’s name was not on any terrorist watch list, but he sparked some curiosity and the agents at the airport decided to follow him. The Shin Bet had tossed Salah back into the sea, hoping to catch bigger fish.

  Salah traveled the forty minutes up the twisting Highway One toward Jerusalem. The Israeli capital had been cut in two in the armistice agreement that ended hostilities in 1949 between Israel and Jordan. The western half of the city was Jewish, and the eastern part, including the Old City, had been held by Jordan until Israel captured it in the 1967 Six Day War. Salah headed to the eastern section of the city, to the YMCA, a sprawling complex that occupied a city block on the Nablus Road just outside the walls of the Old City. A room had been prepared for him. Salah kept to himself, barely leaving his accommodation.

  The Shin Bet maintained close surveillance on the YMCA, and additional resources were provided for the operation. The security services even summoned the assistance of Unit 33, a secretive undercover police unit assigned to the Jerusalem District. Unit 33 fielded policemen from all backgrounds, speaking a Tower of Babel of languages and using a variety of disguises as they blended into the Jerusalem landscape. Salah had no idea that a large-scale surveillance operation was monitoring his every move.

  A few days after his arrival, Salah was joined by a friend from Chicago. Mohammed Jarad was a thirty-six-year-old Palestinian green grocer from the Windy City’s Albany Park neighborhood. His arrival worried the Shin Bet. Were the two men sent to Israel on a terrorist mission? Did their bags hold weapons or explosives? Shin Bet Director Ya’akov Peri, a veteran of the terror wars inside the Palestinian areas, ordered his agents to seize the two men. On January 25, Unit 33 received its orders to apprehend the suspects.

  The police approached Salah’s room cautiously. Terrorists had traveled to Israel before, posing as tourists then building bombs inside their hotel rooms in the hope of mounting a catastrophic attack. An entry team positioned itself at the door and readied for the push inside; one of the operators used his skill in picking the lock to open the door, cautious due to fears that the room was rigged with explosives. But when the officers burst in, they found the two men unarmed. A police bomb disposal unit was summoned to open the suitcases, concerned that the luggage held Semtex or another military-grade explosive. But when the bags were opened, the Shin Bet agents and policemen stood in surprised silence. Salah’s luggage contained a huge amount of American dollars. Some of the policemen joked that they had uncovered Aladdin’s treasure.5

  Salah and Jarah were ushered to the Russian Compound, the Jerusalem Police District’s operations center for questioning. If there was a simple explanation for the money—a down payment on a business, perhaps a wedding dowry—then the men would have to pay the customs fine and be sent on their way. But the police knew that there were regional—even transnational—criminal enterprises run from the West Bank that reached all the way to the United States. Guns, drugs, and auto theft were rife in the territories, and some of the Palestinian gangs involved ran international fraud operations in the Midwest. But if the money was destined for a terror faction, the Shin Bet wanted details.

  Salah was questioned by the security services, who called him by his Hamas nom de guerre, Abu Ahmad. The Israelis would discover that Mohammed Salah was much more than a bag man, delivering bundles of cash like a common courier. He had been recruited into the ranks of Hamas in 1987, by Musa Abu Marzook, the Gaza-born Colorado State University–educated political head of Hamas. Abu Marzook operated out of Falls Church, Virginia—well out of the reach of the Israeli security services. Salah was trained by Hamas and began working as a covert financier for the organization in 1991. He opened several accounts in his name at the First National Bank of Chicago, LaSalle Bank, and Standard Bank and Trust, all for use by the Islamic Resistance Movement.6

  Salah was carrying $97,000 in U.S. currency when he was arrested; the money came from his American account that had boasted a healthy balance of $650,000.7 Salah couldn’t initially explain where the funds came from. He argued that he was a simple man who had done well living the American dream. But under intense questioning, he confessed that the money indeed belonged to Hamas.

  Salah recounted the instructions he received from Abu Marzook before he embarked to Israel:

  “It is necessary to organize the military activity in Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, Jericho and Jerusalem. It is also necessary to check the situation in Gaza and the requirements of the people there, since the dominant feeling is that Gaza was not hurt by the deportations, neither politically or militarily. It is necessary to allocate funds as follows:

  Ramallah: $100,000

  Nablus: $130,000

  Hebron: $100,000

  Gaza (military activity): $300,000

  The rest: according to the military and general requirements.”8

  In the past these monies were disbursed to Hamas cells through the offices of halfanim, or money changers. The money changers were an essential thread in the fiscal fabric of the West Bank following the 1967 War, when the proper banking system all but disappeared. They exchanged foreign currency in kiosks, and brought cash of all currencies to and from the Arab world, transporting it across the Allenby Bridge between the West Bank and Jordan. The money changers were reliable and could often handle large transactions using a network of contacts in cities around the Middle East. They were ideal conduits for the illegal movement of money, as their transactions were untraceable.

  Salah knew the names of the money changers that Hamas generally worked with throughout the West Bank, but he had been instructed to stay in his room and await telephone instructions from Abu Marzook. Abu Marzook had traveled to Lebanon before the New Year to meet with the deportees at Marj al-Zuhur. He also met with Hamas leaders in Sudan, and Palestine Liberation Organization officials in Tunisia.9 Abu Marzook called his messenger several times from his pit stops across the Middle East.

  Salah confessed that he also made a previous trip to Israel on behalf of Hamas. Passport records revealed that Salah was in Israel months earlier, in August 1992. At that time he delivered $96,000 to Saleh al-Aruri, the Hamas commander in the West Bank city of Hebron. That money was later used to purchase black market weapons and ammunition, including assault rifles, an Uzi submachine gun, pistols, and a significant supply of ammunition. These weapons were later used to murder an Israeli reservist soldier in Hebron and a Border Guard police officer in Jerusalem. Abu Marzook, Salah admitted, was angry that some of the money delivered in August went to charitable causes and not completely to the Hamas military wing.10

  Salah’s connection to al-Aruri was troubling to Israeli authorities. Saleh al-Aruri had launched his Hamas career in Hebron University where he studied sharia law and rose to lead the student union’s Islamic faction. He had an uncanny gift for recruiting reliable operatives and was adept at handling money.11 Al-Aruri developed and maintained links between Hamas military cells in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. He also was one of the conduits for Palestinians living in the United States who collected money, ostensibly for charitable purposes, and then funneled it into the territories. As someone inside Hamas who dispensed the money, al-Aruri was one of the most important—and dangerous—members of the terror organization’s hierarchy.

  The Shin Bet arrested al-Aruri in 1992 and charged him with terror offenses. He was sentenced to more than fifteen years in prison. Yet although he was incarcerated in a maximum security facility, al-Aruri continued to act as a Hamas military commander from behind bars. Few inside Hamas possessed his comprehensive vision for armed resistance against Israel. Fewer still, even on the Israeli side, understood the absolute link between money and blood.

  Salah was a thorny problem for the State of Israel.
He was ultimately charged and convicted in a military court for involvement in a terrorist entity and sentenced to seven years in jail. * His case led Israel to press the United States to have its law enforcement agencies look deeper into the underground economy of Palestinian charities that supposedly collected nickels and dimes for orphans and food kitchens, but ultimately funded the bullets, bombs, and bloodshed.

  This was the first significant case in which terror financing was placed center stage by intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies. Somewhere in the Israeli security apparatus, a light switched on as they realized that a war on terror financing could be a tool in disrupting the activities of terrorist groups. This was where it all began.

  The Israeli government was eager to make an example of Mohammed Salah, labeling the Chicago resident as the “World Commander of the Hamas military organization.”12 After months of questioning, Salah admitted that the money he and Mohammed Jarad had brought to Israel was intended for Hamas, but he maintained that the cash was to be distributed to the families of the 415 deportees to Lebanon. The cash, Salah stressed, was raised legitimately through charities in the United States and Europe, for legitimate charitable purposes. After all, charity, or zakat, was one of the five pillars of Islam. The Israelis, somewhat belatedly, were concerned that Hamas was actually controlled from the United States, and that the freedoms afforded by due process, and the success of many Palestinian immigrants who found a place in the American dream, enabled the organization to serve as a remote operational command center.13 The United States had become an ATM of terror for Hamas.