Hezbollah (50 page)

At the Swissair travel office in Zurich, Mikdad paid cash for a round-trip plane ticket to Tel Aviv. Back in his hotel room, he practiced penning Andrew Newman’s signature. In Zurich, Abu Muhammad received names and phone numbers from Iranian agents of Palestinians who would assist Mikdad in Jerusalem by providing him with additional explosives and guiding him if needed. To put his operative at ease the night before his big operation, Abu Muhammad set out to show Mikdad a
good time; witnesses claim to have spotted Mikdad out in Zurich escorted by an unidentified woman.
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On April 4, Abu Muhammad accompanied Mikdad to the airport to review last-minute details. He reiterated that Mikdad was about to make a name for himself. He would be famous. The two set fixed times for communication, twice a day from public phones. After arriving at the airport, Mikdad checked his bags at the counter but kept the radio in his carry-on, which was searched manually by airport security officers after passing through the scanner. The security measures included the use of a special vacuuming device capable of detecting explosives residue. Mikdad was asked to turn on the radio to ensure it was what it appeared to be, and the soft classical music convinced the security officers the device was harmless. Mikdad boarded his flight without further hassle, and a few short hours later Swissair flight 314 arrived in Tel Aviv at 5:05
PM
. According to Mikdad, he cleared Israeli customs on his forged British passport with no problems. Suppressing his nerves at the security counter, he was relieved when the Israeli officer looked at his passport, signed and stamped it, and welcomed him to Israel.
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His first stop was not Jerusalem but Tel Aviv. Mikdad checked into the Center Hotel near the Dizengoff shopping mall in central Tel Aviv. No one at the desk noticed when he misspelled his own last name on the hotel forms, signing “Nemam.”
³²
For three days he scoped out Tel Aviv for prime spots to detonate bombs. Every night at 8:00, he called Abu Muhammad from the same public phone in Tel Aviv to one of two public phones just outside the Zurich central train station. Mikdad and Abu Muhammad spoke only in code. Abu Muhammad asked, “How are the girls in Tel Aviv?” to which Mikdad responded, “I haven’t found the right one just yet.” Mikdad then asked if it was a good time to get in touch with their friends in Jerusalem, and Abu Muhammad approved. The next morning Mikdad took a train to Jerusalem, where he met two local contacts. They took him to a local fruit and vegetable market, which Mikdad viewed as an ideal spot for a bombing. They drove to a modern shopping mall, but the mall was not crowded and security was tight. They then strolled through an outdoor pedestrian mall that was popular with diners and tourists. Confident he had found what he was looking for, Mikdad returned to Tel Aviv.
³³

On April 9, at 10:30
AM
, Mikdad took a taxi back to Jerusalem, where he checked into the Lawrence Hotel, right outside the Old City.
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Hotel employees would later describe Mikdad as polite and quiet, leaving in the mornings carrying maps and a tourist’s camera, and returning at night.
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Room 27, however, had become Mikdad’s base of operations. One of his contacts brought him a kilogram of plastic explosives, a box of rusty nails, and some basic appliances. Mikdad then met another of his contacts to discuss the first attack and requested another five kilograms of explosives. That night, he joined prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque and had his photograph taken in front of the Dome of the Rock.
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On April 11, Mikdad held a final meeting in Jerusalem with his local collaborators. They chose the site for the first bombing and delegated assignments. Mikdad called to report to Abu Muhammad, who offered his approval and blessing.
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Mikdad would strike a mighty blow against the Israelis. The preoperational surveillance
he conducted at other sites could be used in future attacks by others who would follow in his footsteps.

On the morning of April 12, Mikdad sat on his bed and dismantled the clock radio. He removed the detonator from the antenna and clamped it to the cord. He was confident, having practiced this maneuver a dozen times, and attached the detonator to the C4, which abruptly exploded. Later, alive but maimed, Mikdad wondered how the accident had happened. What had he done wrong? Perhaps his contact provided low-quality or faulty material? Or perhaps the Israelis penetrated his small network of local facilitators? The Israelis, happy to let such questions hang in the open for future plotters to ruminate about, refused to answer.
³⁸

The night after the explosion, Mikdad’s wife and daughter were quickly taken away from their home in Dahiya and brought to Lassa by Hezbollah. The family issued two statements, one denying any connection to the bombing and another denying Hussein Mikdad’s very existence.
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Mikdad spent two years in the Ayalon Prison in Ramla under constant medical observation.
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The explosion had blinded him and blown off both his legs and one hand. Then, in summer 1998, Israel agreed to a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah through German mediation. Dozens of Hezbollah and Amal prisoners and the bodies of still more who died fighting Israel were swapped for the body of Itamar Ilya, an Israeli soldier killed in combat in Lebanon. Among the people released back to Hezbollah was Hussein Mikdad. As he crossed the Lebanese army checkpoint at Kfar Falous, his wife and mother rushed to greet him.
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Even as Hussein Mikdad sat in Israeli custody in 1997, two new recruits trained in Hezbollah camps were primed to infiltrate Israel. Unlike Mikdad, however, these recruits were not Lebanese operatives capable of passing as foreigners but foreigners selected for recruitment by Hezbollah spotters in Malaysia and Germany, respectively. Both would travel to Lebanon for training in 1997 in advance of their missions.

The Malaysian recruit, Zainal bin Talib, was tasked primarily with collecting intelligence. This surveillance may have been tied to unconfirmed threat reporting suggesting that Southeast Asian Hezbollah operatives were planning an attack in Israel in 2000. Bin Talib’s intelligence collection was so successful that Hezbollah dispatched him to Israel twice within a year, first in late 1999 and then again in summer 2000. Israeli intelligence services did not learn of his visits until long after they had occurred. Three other Indonesian recruits were selected for similar infiltration missions to Israel, though the exposure of Hezbollah’s Southeast Asian network prevented these recruits from being dispatched on their missions.
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The German operative, a convert to Islam named Stephan Joseph Smyrek (also known as Abdul Karim), was less successful. Forewarned about Smyrek by German security, Israeli authorities arrested him on arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport on November 28, 1997. Like Mikdad before him, Smyrek had a mission to open a new front in Hezbollah’s war with Israel by carrying out a suicide bombing in a heavily populated Israeli city.
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Smyrek was born in Detmold, Germany. His parents divorced when he was four years old, and when his mother remarried, Stephan moved with her and his British stepfather to England, where he attended boarding school from 1982 to 1987. After graduating he returned to Germany, serving in the army (Bundeswehr) from 1989 to 1993. Smyrek reportedly served a short prison sentence for couriering drugs before his 1994 conversion to Islam. He may have been under police protection briefly after testifying against some of his former drug-dealer associates. In Braunschweig, the Lower Saxony city where he lived, he spent time with a conservative Egyptian woman, but the romance ended badly when the woman’s father forbade her from continuing to see Smyrek. Apparently smitten, Smyrek wrote her love songs, including one hinting that he would be engaged in some kind of terrorist operation.
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He studied Arabic, worked odd jobs, frequented a Turkish-owned pizza shop, and attended a mosque. It was there, without direction in life, that Smyrek was recruited into Hezbollah.
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Germany was long a center of Hezbollah activity in Europe, and German security officials saw Imad Mughniyeh, in close concert with Iran, as the key leader of the group’s efforts related to “planning, preparing and carrying out terrorist operations outside of Lebanon.”
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Bassam Makki’s 1989 plot to bomb Israeli targets in Germany offers one stark case in point (see
chapter 3
), but Hezbollah’s activities in Germany did not end there. In 1994, for example, Germany issued a warning related to the possible entry into the country of “a group sent by Mughniyeh to carry out attacks against U.S. targets.”
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According to Hezbollah scholar Magnus Ranstorp, several senior Hezbollah commanders shared responsibility with Mughniyeh for the group’s “special operations abroad” in Europe, including Hussein Khalil, Ibrahim Aqil, Muhammad Haydar, Kharib Nasser, and Abd al-Hamadi.
⁴⁸

Over time, the Hezbollah support network in Germany would grow. According to the annual reports of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, some 800 members or supporters of Hezbollah lived in Germany in 2002. That number increased to around 850 by 2004 and to 900 by 2005. Among “Arab Islamist groups” in Germany, Hezbollah had become the second largest by 2005.
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That year, a German court deported a Hezbollah member who had lived in the country for twenty years. Though Germany had not banned Hezbollah as a terrorist group, the Dusseldorf court ruled the man was “a member of an organization that supports international terrorism” and refused to extend his visa.
⁵⁰
German security agencies “intensively watch” groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, German minister of interior Wolfgang Schaeuble commented in summer 2006. Clearly referring to Stephan Smyrek, he noted that one reason for his concern was that “in the past, there were attempts to recruit suicide attackers in Germany.”
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According to Israeli intelligence, Smyrek was recruited by Hezbollah spotters in Germany who saw in him “the picture of a Christian European—blond hair, blue eyes.”
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He could travel more freely in the West than a Lebanese Hezbollah operative. His recruitment, an Israeli report concluded, was “made possible by a spotting pool operated by Mughniyeh in Europe, especially in Germany. It enables Hezbollah to spot and recruit Europeans who support and identify with the organization’s goals.”
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At some point, Israeli intelligence believed, Fahdi Hamdar and his cousin
Mohammed, Hezbollah talent spotters, noticed Smyrek’s “virulent [expressions of] hatred for Israel” at a Braunschweig mosque, recognized his yearning for focus and purpose in his life, and suggested he consider a trip to Lebanon to attend a Hezbollah military training camp.
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It is unclear when exactly the Hamdar cousins made their pitch or how long Smyrek took to consider it, but by the time his mother visited him in May 1997, his mind was made up. Smyrek told his despondent mother that he was going on a trip and wanted to break off all contact with her. Asked where he was going, he simply replied, “You better not know where I am going or what I am going to do.” His mother had not seen him since he converted to Islam. “I didn’t recognize him,” she would later recount. “He had changed and behaved very strangely.” Within weeks, Smyrek would be in Beirut, his first stop en route to a Hezbollah training camp.
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Wary he might be an informer and keen to see him prove his commitment to the cause, Hezbollah security officials insisted Smyrek visit them in Beirut before his admission to a Bekaa Valley training camp. He arrived in Beirut in August 1997, where he was questioned at length before being accepted as a Hezbollah recruit and sent on for training. Over two months Smyrek trained in weapons and explosives in the Bekaa Valley. Then, having passed the scrutiny of Hezbollah security and completed an intense course, Smyrek was ready to be deployed.
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In November 1997, Smyrek left Lebanon and returned to Germany. His Hezbollah handlers instructed him to travel to Amsterdam, where he claimed to have lost his passport and received a new German passport bearing no evidence of his recent trip to Lebanon.
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Despite this precaution, however, German security services had already picked up on Smyrek’s radicalization, his travel to Lebanon, his return to Germany, and his intent to carry out an attack in Israel. It remains unknown at what point along his journey from German soldier to Hezbollah recruit the German security services identified Smyrek as a person of interest, but by the time he attempted to board an El Al Airlines flight to Israel at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, his name had been added to Interpol’s terrorist watch list.
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Dutch security officials detained Smyrek only briefly at the airport, but by the time they released him he had missed his flight. Dutch authorities presumably used this time not only to question Smyrek but also to warn Israeli authorities of his pending arrival. Smyrek reportedly contacted his Hezbollah handlers, who insisted that the mission go ahead. He boarded the next flight to Israel, during which he reportedly sat next to undercover Israeli officers and was arrested on arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport.
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According to Israeli police, after conducting surveillance of possible attack sites, Smyrek was to meet his Hezbollah handler in Turkey. Based on his surveillance reports (and, presumably, the handler’s assessment of his commitment to carrying out the attack), the handler would decide on Smyrek’s final target and attack plan.
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According to his confession, ever since he converted to Islam and set his heart on becoming a suicide bomber, Smyrek’s attack of preference was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv or Haifa.
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According to Israeli intelligence, Smyrek devised alternative plans, in the event he could not enter Israel, to carry out an unspecified attack targeting the Israeli embassy then in Bonn or murder Israeli diplomats abroad.
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Smyrek’s
Hezbollah handlers supported his suicide bombing proposal but instructed him to collect as much information as possible about these alternative targets so that they could make a fully informed decision on the final target at their meeting in Turkey.
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As in Mikdad’s case, local facilitators were to provide Smyrek with explosives for the attack.
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