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  Various Egyptian regimes outlawed the Brotherhood; the dreaded Egyptian secret service, the Muchabarat, sent many of its founders and top commander to the gallows. But the movement took root in Gaza. The year 1978 saw the opening of the Islamic University in Gaza, considered by many to be a base of operations for the Brotherhood. Gaza was poor and desolate—woefully neglected by the Egyptians who ruled the strip from 1948 to 1967. Gazans were traditionally religious, and more in line with the fundamentalist form of Islam that many preached in the mosques of Cairo and the Nile Delta.

  In 1987, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin founded Hamas. Yassin was a quadriplegic since childhood, yet he did not allow his disability to interfere with his pursuit of religious studies. Although his spinal injury affected his voice, turning his words into a squeaky whisper, Yassin became a charismatic preacher and an Islamic scholar. His Hamas was billed as a religious organization dedicated to charity. Its message of religious piety and fierce nationalism found a receptive audience in the Palestinian communities in the United States and Europe, as well as among the tens of thousands of Palestinians who lived and worked in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, and their money flowed into the Strip. Hamas built schools and clinics, employing thousands of jobless in Gaza and later in the West Bank.

  Hamas styled itself as a religious and political organization, but it was also a military force and a terrorist army. The funds it raised internationally paid for widows and orphans, as well as fighters and their weapons. The money went to the Hamas military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade—named for an Islamic preacher who attacked Jewish civilians in prestate Israel. Its members trained for war, and they adopted the principles of Jihad, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice.4

  The Hamas military arm was directed by the organization’s political wing—the same wing that controlled all of the charitable donations flowing in from the United States and Europe, as well as the apparently endless stream of cash from Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf states. According to conservative estimates from Israeli intelligence at the time, Hamas military networks in the West Bank alone operated on an annual budget of over $1 million. The funds were filtered through the front offices of foundations and charities, and through the back doors of schools and mosques. The money, doled out in dribs and drabs, was laundered through an extensive criminal conspiracy that was virtually untraceable to Israel’s prying eyes.

  The territories themselves, men like Uri and Lavi knew, were not awash with money. The local economy was primarily agricultural; laborers, when the security situation allowed, ventured into Israel to work at menial jobs. Much of this money, as well as earnings sent home by Palestinian laborers and professionals working in the Persian Gulf and subject to a PLO tax, paid the salaries of local commanders and their men in order to keep the resistance going. Other funds, from the terror factions’ budgets, paid for the widows of men killed and stipends for the families of those with husbands or sons jailed in Israel for terror offenses.

  Uri was the first Israeli officer to consider how Israel could insert itself into the flow of money, into the Hamas da’wa. In 1992, as a consultant in Arab Affairs to the West Bank military governor, he wrote an in-depth intelligence briefing examining the civil infrastructure of Hamas in the territories, where the money was coming from and how it was spent. “I knew we were dealing with a monster,” Uri remembered, “and that the only way to deal with this monster was to wage war against the intertwined threads that connected the Hamas military wing with all its benevolent components. The civil infrastructure, the complete da’wa, had to be defeated.”5

  Uri’s report, coupled with the arrest of the Chicago tourists and other events, was considered groundbreaking enough to launch a wave of military raids against Hamas-run schools, mosques, and clinics. The Israeli effort, known as Operation Destruction of Leaven (named for the Jewish ritual of ridding homes of bread before the Passover holiday), was far-reaching: Community leaders were arrested, and weapons, explosives, and piles of money were seized. So many documents were confiscated that intelligence officers found the paper trail overwhelming.6 Much of what was seized ended up in the trash bin. The intelligence value of the find was not yet appreciated by the military and political echelons. Uri’s thesis was largely ignored. It was back to business as usual.

  But Uri continued to lobby the IDF hierarchy to take the issue of the da’wa seriously, and view it as a strategic threat. Uri traveled to bases throughout the West Bank, giving presentation after presentation, to local commanders. One general working out of IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv seemed very interested in what Uri had to say: Their meeting, slated for fifteen minutes, turned into a three-hour discussion. But the end result was the same—the IDF wanted to go after men who commanded cells and knew where the weapons were. Uri began to despair. He felt like he was hitting a dead end. However, there was one high-ranking IDF officer who saw promise in Uri’s work.

  Meir Dagan was born Meir Huberman on January 30, 1945, on a train to the Soviet Union as his family fled war-torn Poland. The train, it is believed, was traveling through the Ukraine at the time. The family settled in Novosibirsk, in the middle of the Siberian wasteland. His parents were survivors of Hitler’s death camps and Meir was raised on tales of suffering and resilience. He arrived in Israel in 1950 at the age of five; his family first lived in a temporary camp for new immigrants before settling in suburbs south of Tel Aviv. Life in post-independence Israel wasn’t easy for the Huberman family. There was a new language to learn; the country was poor, struggling to pull itself out of a costly war of independence and into a functioning state that could absorb the millions of immigrants flooding to its shores from all around the world.

  Meir’s father was an administrator in a technical school. His mother was a cashier in a supermarket. The family settled in the beach town of Bat Yam, located a few miles south of the Tel Aviv city limits. Most of the kids in the neighborhood were like Meir, refugees and newcomers. Dagan recalled that in his family’s inner circle many had different last names. The family wasn’t one of blood ties but rather a common thread of surviving the horrors of Hitler’s Europe.7 For Meir and other youngsters like him, their upbringing was molded by the horrors of the Holocaust.

  Meir’s grandfather, Rabbi Dov Ehrlich, was photographed in 1944 moments before German soldiers shot him dead. That image haunted the family, Meir in particular. Ehrlich was wearing a prayer shawl and his hands were raised; he was on his knees. The murder of six million Jews, especially for those whose families escaped the horror, created a uniquely Israeli form of determined defiance. “The notion,” one of Meir’s dearest friends, Major General Yossi Ben-Hanan, remembered, “was that we were not going to be one of the flock walking meekly to the slaughter.”8 Meir Hebraicized his family name to Dagan and became, as Ben-Hanan recalled, “more Israeli than the native born Sabras.”9

  The young Meir was a troublemaker. He was a handful for his teachers and his parents, and his older brother often had to go and search far and wide for the adventurous young boy who had a passion for exploring. Rumor was that he even made it to the famous Red Rock in Petra, Jordan, across the then enemy border, all by himself.10 He liked to visualize knowledge by seeing or by reading. He was always surrounded by books. He loved to read histories and biographies; he even read a few science fiction novels.

  Meir Dagan was conscripted in the Israel Defense Forces in August 1963. Highly motivated, the eighteen-year-old volunteered for Sayeret Mat’kal, the elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit that was Israel’s most secretive commando force. Dagan was determined to make it in, to prove his mettle to everyone at the IDF recruitment center. Danny Yatom, a future commander of Sayeret Mat’kal and future director of the Mossad spy agency, was also there. Seeing Dagan, Yatom felt out of place. Dagan enjoyed removing a commando dagger from his pocket and, for kicks, throwing it at a block of wood ten yards away. “I don’t know how to do these things,” a young Yatom said to himself, watching Dagan. “I don’t belong here.�
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  Dagan’s hopes of joining this most elite club came to nothing. Mat’kal was the bastion of Sabras, and the unit’s ranks were primarily filled with the sons of the founding families from the Kibbutzim (Israel’s collective farms). The IDF was egalitarian, but Mat’kal was the elite of the elite. Only the best could apply, and only those that fit the mold were accepted. The rejection stayed with Dagan, forging the type of soldier—and commander—he’d become.12

  Dejected though determined, Dagan entered a different elite unit: the 35th Paratroop Brigade. Ultimately, displaying singular tenacity and uncanny leadership, Dagan became a reconnaissance unit officer within the brigade. He was a platoon commander during cross-border counterterrorist raids that preceded the Six Day War and, as a reservist, led a company that participated in the capture of the Golan Heights from Syria in June 1967. That victory created a sense of euphoria that was infectious. Dagan signed on to make the army his career.

  Following the Six Day War, Dagan took charge of an ad hoc reconnaissance unit patrolling the shoreline of the Gaza Strip. The unit operated in the shadows to stem Palestinian terror cells that sprang up in the wake of the war. A friend recalled seeing Dagan in Gaza one day dressed as a native, surrounded by soldiers also dressed as indigenous Palestinians, and sitting atop a camel talking Arabic to locals. The Gaza Strip was home to over one million Palestinians and almost twice as many weapons. At the time, most of the Palestinian violence was directed at fellow Palestinians who worked in Israel, but in January 1971, an Israeli family was killed when a grenade was tossed in their car. Major General Ariel “Arik” Sharon, the commander of IDF Southern Command, summoned Dagan to his headquarters, ordering him to ramp up his force of plainclothes men to end the violence once and for all.

  The unit that Dagan formed was known as Sayeret Rimon, or “Grenade Recon”; the unit’s IDF codename was Zikit, Hebrew for “chameleon.”13 As the bodies began to pile up, many viewed it as nothing more than a hit squad,14 but the unit developed into a special operations force that would revolutionize how Israel battled terrorists. “We always acted according to military standards,” Dagan was quoted as saying in one of his rare interviews. “The Rimon era was not the Wild West where anyone could shoot anyone he wanted. Indeed, we never thought it permissible to eliminate women and children. But it’s correct that the rules of engagement were different. There were few limitations.”15

  Dagan’s men were all volunteers, all combat veterans from various commando units.

  Some were Arabic speakers. Those who weren’t were subjected to a crash course in Arabic and Palestinian culture. Dagan’s own Arabic was impeccable. His commandos used disguise and cunning to infiltrate every corner of the terrorists’ world. Dagan himself masqueraded as a beggar and a fisherman on more than one occasion.16

  The dangers of the work in the field, even a battlefield injury, didn’t deter Dagan. He was seriously injured when his jeep ran over a land mine in the Gaza Strip, resulting in his hospitalization for eight months. Dagan’s legs were wrapped in plaster, and his body was damaged by the powerful blast, but it didn’t prevent him from returning to the unit faster than the doctors would have liked, in order to lead his operators through the murky world of Gaza counterinsurgency. He was decorated for valor for an encounter with wanted terrorist Abu Nimer, from whose grasp Dagan personally wrestled a hand grenade with its pin already pulled during an arrest operation.17

  The unit’s use of strength and guile made Dagan a legend. The Palestinians called him a bastard; unit operators under his command were known in Arabic slang as Abu Ali, men of violence. And their methods were effective. Sayeret Rimon neutralized the outbreak of full-fledged violence in less than two years. There were 850 wanted terrorists in Gaza when Sharon ordered Dagan to clean things up. By the time Dagan was through there were only nine fugitives left.18 The relative quiet he brought to Gaza would last for nearly twenty years.

  The Gaza Strip was the perfect proving ground for Dagan’s brand of brilliant innovation. He devised operations that were so daring and diabolical they sounded more like spy fiction than real life. One unit officer proudly told Israeli television that there was little point in talking about the Gaza operations because nobody would ever believe him. In one instance, Dagan and his men impersonated a group of high-level PLO officials who had sailed from Lebanon to meet with operatives in the Strip. At the meeting, Dagan accused the local Popular Front commander of being a traitor and summarily tried him on suspicion of being an Israeli imposter. The Palestinian, frantic to avoid a firing squad, did everything in his power to prove that he was indeed loyal, and to rest his case, he provided intimate details about his cell commanders—including names, addresses, codenames, and upcoming operations. Within days Dagan managed to destroy the entire network.19 In another instance, when Dagan learned of a shortage of hand grenades in the Strip, his men arranged for a special sale of former Egyptian military grenades from a secret stash prepared by Bedouins in Sinai. Dagan’s engineers booby-trapped the grenades, and within days reports of “work accidents” in the Palestinian ranks filtered up the IDF chain of command.

  Ariel Sharon loved Dagan’s wild imagination and courage—and his capacity to turn outside-the-box thinking into success on the battlefield. It was said that the two men were cut from the same cloth; some said that the two could communicate telepathically, carrying out entire conversations without ever uttering a word. It is clear that Sharon viewed Dagan as his prodigal son, and their great admiration and friendship lasted a lifetime.

  Meir Dagan was a loyal man who remained close to the childhood friends he had played with as a youngster on the streets of Bat Yam. And he would be a loyal husband. He married his wife, Bina, in 1972. He had met her in 1968 in Sinai, when she was a nurse at a local hospital, and the two dated throughout his service in Gaza. “He was very charming,” Bina remembered. “He was quiet, but interesting. He always liked to tell funny jokes.”20 Finally, after four years of courtship, she gave the Meir the ultimatum: Marry me or it’s shalom! Dagan ran out and bought a suit in a market in Gaza City.

  Married life wasn’t easy for military newlyweds. Dagan came home every two or three weeks for a quick Sabbath, but the army was his calling. He served as a combat officer in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in the armored division that Sharon commanded, where he saw extensive combat and witnessed many of his friends getting killed. Following the war he was stationed in northern Israel. The family moved to the town of Rosh Pina, close to the 1967 demarcation lines with Syria and a quick drive to the Lebanese frontier. He built a home with Bina; they raised three children. When Meir was home, he was a loving husband and a doting father. The family made a point to explore the Israeli wilderness every Sabbath. There were always officers and soldiers in his house, though. His men meant everything to him.

  Dagan enjoyed a meteoric rise up the IDF chain of command. He commanded a battalion of tanks in Lebanon in 1978. He was named the commander of the South Lebanon Theater of Operations shortly thereafter, where he handled covert operations for the General Staff and Israel’s intelligence community. As a colonel, Dagan commanded the 188th Armored Brigade during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. His tank columns advanced all the way to Beirut. His brigade suffered heavy casualties in the bitter fighting. The losses of friends and subordinates would haunt him for the rest of his life. The carnage he witnessed weighed heavily on his mind. When Dagan returned from Lebanon, he became a vegetarian, vowing never to eat meat again. His family was forced to follow along.

  Following the 1982 war, Dagan served as commander of Ya’kal, the secretive liaison unit to Lebanon, which ran much of Israel’s intelligence efforts against the Palestinians, Hezbollah, and the Iranians. It was here, in his dealings with Christians, Sunnis, Druze, and Shiites, that he learned the value of human intelligence (HUMINT) in the war on terror. “The Arabs don’t hide honor,” a former comrade remembered, “and the locals revered him, treating him as a sage or a well-respected elder.”21
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  In 1991, Dagan was appointed the chief of staff’s counterterrorism advisor. In 1992, he became the head of the IDF General Staff’s Operations Brigade—effectively running special operations and counterterrorist missions. It was here that Dagan first met Uri. Before a mission to target a wanted terrorist cell leader in the West Bank, Dagan asked to be briefed by men who knew the territories like the back of their hands. COGAT sent Uri.

  Many officers dreaded being summoned to an audience with Dagan. He was as no-nonsense as they came—even by Israeli standards—and he had little patience for anyone who wasted his time. Dagan often butted heads with fellow officers, including his superiors. During the 1991 Gulf War, IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Ehud Barak did all he could to oust Dagan from the military, but the defense minister at the time would have none of it.22

  The first meeting between Dagan and Uri took place shortly after Operation Destruction of Leaven, in Ramallah, in the office of the COGAT governor of the city. Dagan authorized nightly missions carried out by some of the top-tier units in the IDF and Border Guard arsenals. The missions, requested by the Shin Bet, apprehended hard-core fundamentalists with blood on their hands or at least blood in their plans, but the operations did little to dent Hamas capabilities and influence. To the contrary, under attack by Israeli special operations units, the mystique of Hamas spread, and new recruits converted to the fold as the street credentials of the Islamic Resistance Movement spread with greater fervor. Dagan understood that the State of Israel needed a new and not necessarily tactical approach to ending the terror.