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  But despite Salah’s arrest and subsequent revelations, there was growing tension between Israel and the United States over the deportees. United Nations resolutions were passed to condemn the expulsions by Israel. From London to Lagos, foreign ministers contacted their counterpart in Israel to demand that the men trapped in a southern Lebanese no-man’s-land be permitted to return home. The Lebanese winter was harsh, and reporters from CNN and other international networks held sympathetic interviews with the men as they huddled around campfires wearing tattered blankets. But at night, as those same reporters returned to Israel or Damascus for a hot meal, the deportees were visited by representatives from Iranian intelligence and from Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite “Party of God,” which had been at war with Israel and the United States, in Lebanon since 1982. Hezbollah introduced the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s philosophy of martyrdom into the vernacular of the Middle East. During his country’s war with Iraq, Iranian military commanders had ordered thousands of schoolchildren to go out along the borders to dig up mines placed by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers. The students were given plastic necklaces with keys on them and told they were the “keys to paradise.”

  Iran exported its Islamic revolution to Lebanon, where young Shiite men, eager to earn a spot in heaven, volunteered in droves to strap on explosives and blow themselves up. Hezbollah destroyed two U.S. embassies; they blew up barracks of both U.S. Marines and French paratrooper peacekeepers. They rewrote the terrorism handbook.

  Imad Mughniyeh represented Hezbollah at the meetings with Hamas in Marj al-Zuhur. Mughniyeh, a south Lebanon native, was the thirty-one-year-old diabolical mastermind behind Hezbollah’s meteoric rise as a terrorist army powerful enough to force the United States out of Lebanon, an army that was also waging a bloody guerrilla campaign against Israeli forces in the country. Iran’s representative at the meetings with Hamas was Ali-Reza Asgari, the commander of those Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps based inside Lebanon.14 Asgari was instrumental in transforming Hezbollah into a formidable terror power, and now he had similar hopes for Hamas. By January 1993, as the deportees were working with their new strategic allies, Iran began budgeting $30 million annually for Hamas.15 That stipend would increase tenfold in the months to come.

  The Iranians and Hezbollah schooled the deportees in the A to Z’s of terror tradecraft, in bomb building, suicidal terror tactics, and intelligence gathering. But U.S. President Bill Clinton and the leaders of the European Union pressed Yitzhak Rabin to take the Hamas commanders back. The deportees were out of range and out of sight of Israeli intelligence, who didn’t know what was going on once the news cameras left at night. American and European political pressure on Israel was enormous, especially as the winter’s chill gave way to the warmth of spring and then the broiling heat of summer, and the secret talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization intensified. Rabin would ultimately yield to this foreign political pressure.

  The Israelis allowed some of the deportees to return months after they were dispatched to southern Lebanon. A trickle soon turned into a steady stream. The men returning to the West Bank and Gaza were searched for explosives or incriminating paperwork, but there was no visible evidence of the intense schooling they received. The formulas for homemade explosives and the methods and means for recruiting an army of martyrs were committed to memory. Hamas and Hezbollah, like the two things they told you to never mix together in high school, were primed to explode on Israel.

  According to then military secretary to Yitzhak Rabin, General Amos Gilad, allowing the deportees to return was a fatal mistake: “Deportation in and of itself is a good tactic. You can either kill someone or you can expel him, but in both instances he has been removed from the territory. The problem here was not the deportation but that they connected with Hezbollah and we should have prevented this. Hezbollah hates the Sunnis but they hate us Israelis even more. When they returned from Lebanon they were much more dangerous than when they left. They were unified and now they were big heroes to the Palestinians. This was a war of symbols and in such a conflict you cannot permit your enemies to become heroes.”

  The returning deportees also learned the details of bank accounts to be at their disposal upon their arrival home. Iran had vast resources that it pledged to Hamas. The tens of millions of dollars that the Islamic Republic would invest in Hamas would rival the funds raised by the charities in the United States and elsewhere in the world Palestinian community. Hamas military commanders would soon have their hands on generous amounts of funds.

  Weeks after they kidnapped and murdered Toledano, members of the Secret Squad traveled to the West Bank town of Yamoun to meet a certain Hamas military commander. Mohammed Issa, the twenty-three-year-old squad leader who shot Toledano, presented the Hamas commander with the Israeli policeman’s service weapon to prove that they were the ones who seized and murdered him. The Hamas commander was impressed. He gave the kidnappers 4,000 Jordanian dinars (approximately $7,000), along with a pistol and an Uzi submachine gun purchased on the black market, and urged them to continue their work on behalf of Hamas.16

  That money went far. The squad purchased a white van that they used in an attempt to run over two hitchhiking soldiers one evening in central Israel, but they crashed into a guardrail after slightly injuring one of the young conscripts. The squad’s Hamas handler gave them an additional $1,000 to fix the van so they could use it for future terror operations.17 On March 30, the squad shot and killed two Israeli policemen in a drive-by ambush. It was to be their last operation.

  Early in the morning hours of June 6, 1993, the Shin Bet, supported by special Border Guard forces, apprehended the four East Jerusalem residents behind the bloodshed. The arrests happened as the Secret Squad was planning a series of potentially devastating car bombings throughout Israel. A bomb factory, with components to make several powerful improvised explosive devices, was also uncovered in Nablus.

  The four men were charged with Toledano’s abduction and murder, as well as a slew of other terror offenses. They were tried and convicted in an Israeli military court, and sentenced to multiple life terms. * But their crimes, and the deportation of the 415, set in motion a chain of events that emboldened Hamas and gave it access to more funding from the United States, the Persian Gulf, and Iran.

  In the early 1990s, a new and highly lethal form of terrorism had emerged against Israel, one that weaponized Islamic fervor thanks to a multitude of money streams. Veteran Shin Bet agents knew that the paradigm had changed. The worst was yet to come.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Da’wa

  Many Israelis found it hard to contain their disbelief. Some wept as they huddled around television sets with grainy images broadcast live, via satellite, from the American capital. It was 1993. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a founding father of the Jewish state and the army chief who was one of the architects of Israel’s amazing 1967 Six Day War victory, was in Washington, D.C., standing on the same grass as Yasir Arafat, the PLO chairman and, in most Israeli eyes, a man who embodied cold-blooded terror.

  Up until that moment it was illegal for Israelis to maintain contact with the PLO. Now, on the White House lawn with U.S. President Bill Clinton bursting out of his suit with joy, Israel and the Palestinians were moments from signing an accord that would ostensibly end hostilities between two sides locked so intractably in a deadly fight over a small patch of land. The unthinkable happened on September 13, 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands.

  Palestinians also watched in disbelief. It was unfathomable to many in the towns in Gaza and around the major West Bank cities that Abu Ammar (Arafat’s nom de guerre) would make peace with the hated Jews. The Israelis monitored the mood in the territories, not knowing if the handshake in Washington, D.C., would trigger new violence. Virtually every arm of Israel’s military and intelligence services thought they understood what was going on in the territories, but they could never control the mood on the street.
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br />   The West Bank of the Jordan River captured from the Hashemite Kingdom in 1967, called by its biblical name Judea and Samaria by the Israeli security forces, consisted of more than 2,100 square miles and more than a million inhabitants living in eight major urban sprawls, smaller towns, and villages, as well as nineteen refugee camps. The West Bank also encompassed East Jerusalem; the city was divided in the armistice between Israel and Jordan after the 1948 War of Independence. The Gaza Strip, 140 square miles in size and one of the poorest and most heavily congested locations on the planet, was captured from Egypt in the 1967 war. Both the West Bank and Gaza were under Israeli military control, and it was the army that had the daily contacts with the Palestinian themselves.

  The large conference room in the IDF Central Command Headquarters in the West Bank was overflowing with high-rank officers, senior Shin Bet agents, and intelligence officials. They gathered to analyze the situation after the now-famous White House lawn handshake and determine how it could impact on the terror activity in the region. There had already been other vociferous debates among the generals and the heads of the security services. The officers and commanders who ran security operations thought themselves expert in the day-to-day lives of the residents of the West Bank and Gaza. The commanders viewed the areas under their control tactically. The Shin Bet had human assets deep inside the various terrorist groups that staked a claim to the resistance against Israel. The Shin Bet agents were Arabic specialists; they spoke the language, immersed themselves in the culture, and understood the nuances of Islam. Each agency and unit went around the table speaking its piece.

  Toward the end of the meeting a young army officer by the name of Uri L.* serving in COGAT, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, asked permission to speak. He started to explain and analyze the development of a new terror phenomenon—the civilian infrastructure being constructed by the terror organizations. This phenomenon was known as da’wa, which in Arabic means “the call to the believers to shelter beneath the faith.” It also meant a return to the faith, a way where those who lived outside the struggle could give something back to the community and to the greater cause.1 In essence, da’wa covered the enormous Hamas civilian infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza. Its objective was to imbue every aspect of Palestinian life with a fundamentalist message. The da’wa was life: It was food, medication, and schoolbooks. But it was also triacetone triperoxide—the homemade witch’s brew of store-bought materials that could be turned into the explosives used by suicide bombers to attack Israeli targets. The da’wa was funded globally.

  Uri focused on the financial basis of this growing threat. The money poured into the territories from all over the world—ostensibly to benefit the daily lives of Muslim Palestinians. The Holy Land Foundation, a not-for-profit group in Richardson, Texas, was one of the primary conduits of funds from the United States. Hamas leaders—including Musa Abu Marzook, the group’s Virginia-based political chief—sent fiery clerics from the territories on speaking tours of the American heartland to raise funds for the people back home. Palestinian communities thrived in Brooklyn, New York, and New Jersey, as well as in Virginia, Michigan, and Florida. But there were also vibrant Palestinian communities in the Midwest—in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Indiana—where stores always had a small collection jar so shoppers could help those “under occupation.” Money was also collected in mosques, and millions of dollars were sent back to the territories via a multitude of charities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

  The al-Aqsa Foundation funneled money from Germany; Interpal, with posh offices in London, as well as Birmingham, Manchester, and Leicester, raised money from the Palestinian communities in the United Kingdom.

  The monies brought in overseas were sent to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip via bank transfers, money changers, and transnational IOUs. There were even barter arrangements, where goods were shipped free of charge to merchants in the territories and the money earned from their sale was given to the charities—minus a small cut for the merchant.

  Uri described the perilous implications that would arise from this threat and urged his assembled colleagues to find ways to crush it in its infancy. He explained that if the IDF did not prioritize undermining the escalation of this dangerous development it would be come back to haunt Israel for generations. Most of the participants were already packing up and leaving as Uri spoke, and the meeting was adjourned without any meaningful resolution of the matter.

  Despite their lack of interest in Uri’s words, the only real experts, those who truly understood what was really going on inside the schools, mosques, and hearts and minds of the Palestinian people, were the officers and administrators assigned to COGAT. The unit was part of the Ministry of Defense and attached to the IDF General Staff. It is the official Israeli agency for one-on-one interaction with Palestinian civilian entities. COGAT made sure that homes and hospitals had water and power; COGAT helped to build and maintain infrastructure and enable a semblance of normalcy for the Palestinian population; COGAT ensured that Palestinian merchants could continue to ply their livelihoods.

  Virtually all the officers and administrators assigned to COGAT had something of an intelligence background, and virtually all spoke flawless Palestinian-accented Arabic. These men and women sat with Palestinian mayors, clerics, human rights leaders, shopkeepers, and teachers. They spoke to Palestinian family heads and tried to help settle all sorts of disputes—from clans at odds with one another to businessmen fighting over a failed deal. COGAT personnel knew what the Palestinians ate, and whom they admired. They knew the currency of day-to-day life better than anyone.

  Uri L. was one of the most capable officers serving in COGAT. Uri was very much a field man. A large, bald, and warm-spirited man with an appetite for humor, Uri wore his smile like a badge of honor. He was the kind of spymaster who could be fatherly to those human assets who needed reassurance, and brutal to those who had to be thrown out to the wolves. Uri could wrap his bearlike arms around a Palestinian recruited to be an informer and convince him of the importance of the intelligence he provided, but he could also use his large forearms to apply pressure when pressure was called for. The intelligence specialists in COGAT as well as the Palestinians they dealt with all liked Uri: Whether the conversation was in Hebrew or Arabic, he always paid attention to those he talked to and gave them his interest and respect.

  Working alongside Uri was Lavi S. * Lavi was a charismatic intelligence officer: Gentle and unassuming, he was careful with every word. He was very much like John le Carré’s legendary character George Smiley—every move he made on the chessboard was made knowing what he’d do twelve steps later. There were many men like Lavi in Israel’s security services: men of medium height and unassuming physiques who didn’t look like spymasters. Lavi, whose parents had come from Europe, was a master Arabist: He was fluent in Arabic—including the all-important Palestinian colloquial—and possessed an ideal mix of academic and field work, enabling him to understand the Arab street like few others. From COGAT, Lavi went on to head the Palestinian Affairs Division of the Israeli Ministry of Defense.2

  Uri and Lavi were very typical of the men and women who worked for COGAT: dedicated professionals with very specific areas of expertise. Each developed an intimate understanding of Gaza and the West Bank. They traveled to Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps on a daily basis, seeing the facts on the ground, and listening to the unfiltered Palestinian narrative. They knew the landscape: what lay on the surface and the tensions that simmered beneath.

  Both men saw the terrain was rapidly changing. A religious storm had swept the territories.

  More and more children were attending religious schools across the West Bank and Gaza. Women who once wore tight jeans and who worked to help support their families now wore the niqab and stayed home. Neighborhood mosques could barely contain the worshippers who flocked to daily prayers. More mosques than could be counted were under construction. There
were new buildings everywhere. Medical clinics and food banks sprang up inside refugee camps and small villages as Muslim benevolent societies filled a vacuum that was not served by the Israeli authorities or the various Palestinian resistance movements based on nationalistic struggle and socialist ideology. There were pan-Arab communist groups, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Others, like the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were Maoist; some, like the Palestine Liberation Front, were pro-Iraqi Ba’athists.

  The commanders of these factions used to meet in coffeehouses and in universities. The men of the new Islamic movements met in the mosques and in the Islamic schools. Uri and Lavi felt the ground shifting under their feet.

  The changes were obvious, but the new Islamic fervor did not correlate into a marked increase in security-related incidents, and those were what concerned the generals. The Shin Bet was in the intelligence-gathering and threat-mitigation business; the motivations behind the violence mattered little. The spies were concerned about locating, undermining, apprehending, and targeting the men who led terror cells. “There were many Shin Bet agents and army officers who believed that the Palestinians were simply targets and nothing more,” an Israeli intelligence officer who worked the territories at the time said. “These men made no attempt to get into the heads of the people and to immerse themselves with the mood on the Palestinian street.”3 Understanding the territories fell to COGAT’s experts, and the reality of a Palestinian society fueled by religious fervor and lavish investment of cold, hard cash worried men like Uri and Lavi. They tried to alert their colleagues—anyone who’d listen to the threat before it began to further metastasize.

  Hamas takes its name from the Arabic-acronym for Harakt al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement, and it also means “zeal.” It was created in 1987 in Gaza as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Society. Under Great Britain’s rule of Egypt, the Brotherhood was intent on instilling Islamic law into the fabric of Egyptian society. The movement also became a national liberation force that used fanatic displays of barbaric violence to prove their intent and to illustrate their ambitions. In 1936, during riots that engulfed the British mandate of Palestine, elements of the Brotherhood came to Gaza to inspire the inhabitants with the call to Islam.