No Mission Is Impossible (26 page)

Retaking the hijacked “Mothers' bus.”
(GPO)

The commandos left the room quickly, descending the stairs, grabbing official documents and other papers they found, and ripping a small safe out of the study wall to take with them. Above them, Umm Jihad heard a woman's voice shouting at them in French to hurry:
“Allez! Allez!”

The operation had taken less than five minutes. The commandos exited and stood in front of the house, where their commanders counted them, to ensure that everyone was there. From her window, Umm Jihad looked at them and counted twenty-four people. Their vehicles sped toward the beach; inside, the commandos found crates of soft drinks prepared by the Mossad. The boats awaited them at the beach, and they ventured out into the open sea, together with the Mossad agents who had taken part in the operation. Other agents had stayed in Tunis and called the police to report that the attackers' vehicles had been seen traveling toward the city—the opposite direction from the get-away route. Police in Tunis placed roadblocks on the roads leading out of Sidi Bou Said toward the capital, and the country's president scrambled ground forces and helicopters, also ordering the closure of the airport and seaport. But, with the exception of the three rented vehicles abandoned on the beach, not a trace of the Israelis was found.

By the following day, the episode made front-page headlines around the world; there could be no doubt that the operation had been the work of the Israelis. Abu Jihad had been killed, but his name wasn't forgotten. Years later, his talented wife, Umm Jihad, was appointed to serve as a minister in Yasser Arafat's government, after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. She and her daughter would describe the assassination to Israeli writers and journalists.

   
THE FAMILY OF MIRIAM BEN YAIR, KILLED IN THE MOTHERS' BUS ATTACK

          
Miriam Ben Yair's daughter, Rachel, in tears: “When the terrorist turned toward my mother, she begged him, ‘My daughter is getting married next month; please have mercy on me.' He shot her to death. She was on her way to the Nuclear Research Center, where she worked as an executive secretary. Invitations
to my wedding that she had been planning to distribute to her friends were found in her bag.”

              
Ben Yair's husband, Eliyahu: “Friends met me in the street and asked, ‘What, you haven't heard? The Mothers' Bus was attacked!' I raced to Soroka hospital. My wife's sister, Frieda, a nurse there, told me, ‘It's over.'”

              
Her son, Ilan: “My mom was a pretty woman, full of joy. She knew French very well and worked at the Nuclear Research Center from the time the French built the reactor. Her family was her entire world, and she dreamed of leaving one day, to raise her grandchildren. She didn't get to. She was forty-six at her death.”

              
Eliyahu: “It was Major General Yitzhak Mordechai who comforted us. He would visit us often, talk to us. He was like a member of the family.”

              
Rachel: “We knew that Abu Jihad was responsible for the murder. His death gave us a certain relief, but the pain remains deep and sharp, just as it was before.”

Iran has become the major supplier of weapons, mainly missiles, to the terrorist organizations in Gaza. The weapons usually leave Iran aboard innocent-looking cargo vessels; then they are either unloaded in Sudan and sent to Gaza in truck convoys via Egypt and Sinai, or left aboard the ships that traverse the Suez Canal and dumped in Gaza waters, where local Arab divers recover them. One of the most recent cases is the capture in March 2014 by Israeli commandos of the boat
Klos C
, carrying a concealed load of missiles. The most famous mission of this kind, however, is the capture of the weapons on the ship
Karine A.

A
t 3:58 in the morning on January 3, 2002, two rubber Morena-type boats pulled next to the hull of the
Karine A,
a freighter making its way in the Suez Gulf. An electronic signal was flashed to the Shayetet 13 commandos on the Morenas, and they swiftly began climbing from the boats onto the deck of the ship. Suddenly, helicopters swooped down from overhead, and more fighters dropped out of them, sliding down on assault ropes. Quickly and without using weapons, the soldiers spread throughout the ship. They immediately started searching for a shipment of weapons purportedly sent from Iran to the Palestinian Authority.

Hovering simultaneously overhead were Israeli Air Force fighter jets; Sikorsky helicopters carrying members of Unit 669, the IDF's airborne rescue and evacuation team; a plane equipped for intelligence gathering, surveillance photography, and refueling; and a Boeing 707 serving as the command post for IDF Chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, Navy Commander Yedidia Ya'ari, Air Force Commander Dan Halutz, and additional senior officers, who would stay in the air for approximately
two hours until the start of the operation, tracking what was taking place below. “It was a long flight,” a senior officer recalled, “three hundred miles from the Israeli coast. The plane was crowded and very cold, and you could cut the tension with a knife. “

Until the last minute, the mission commanders feared that the raid would be called off because of the stormy weather. The waves were rising nearly ten feet, the winds reaching speeds of almost forty miles an hour. It was hard to sail in such conditions, and even harder to rappel down ropes from a helicopter onto the deck of a ship. But the
Karine A,
according to highly reliable intelligence, was in the Red Sea, en route to the Suez Canal, and the IDF needed to do everything in its power to take hold of the ship before it reached its destination.

The operation planner and field commander, Vice Admiral Eli (“Chiney”) Marom, was assisted by a superb meteorologist. Marom understood that if they waited for the ship to reach the originally planned interception point, approximately twenty-five miles south of Sharm el-Sheikh, the storm would be at full force. After additional assessments and calculations, he decided that his forces would sail to a point twice as far from Israel as the preselected location, 150 miles south of the Suez Canal. The shayetet officers who heard his suggestion didn't believe it possible, as it carried a much greater risk that something would go wrong; they were also uncertain that the fuel supplies for the helicopters and boats would suffice. But Chiney persisted, suggesting that the fighters take with them barrels of fuel for refilling at sea, and that the helicopters, which couldn't circle for long in the air, would act in full coordination with the naval forces to best use the window of time at their disposal. The chips had fallen, and the mission got under way.

Chiney was forty-seven, a moshav boy, whose father had escaped his native Germany when the Nazis came to power, and landed in China. There he had wed Chai Lee, the daughter of a Russian-born Jewish woman and a Chinese man. The couple had immigrated to Israel and Chai Lee had changed her name to Leah. Young Eli had inherited her slanted eyes and his comrades at the naval officers' academy had nicknamed him Chiney. His Asiatic features made an American paper call
him the “Israeli Chinese Admiral.” He was known as an excellent officer. “The fact that Chiney looked different,” one former comrade said in a press interview, “forced him to constantly show that he was better. He became one of the best very quickly.”

The night of the operation had been preceded by a long period of complex surveillance that combined multipronged intelligence gathering and preparations. It had all begun when some top-secret reports were delivered to the IDF intelligence headquarters. The documents dealt with a project to smuggle weapons by ship from Iran to the Gaza Strip. This wasn't the first time the Palestinians had tried to smuggle weapons to Gaza by sea. In May 2001, the Israeli Navy had captured a small boat, the
Santorini,
as it sailed to Gaza from a Hezbollah base in Lebanon. On its deck, the Israelis had found a small but significant cache of weapons: Russian Strella missiles with which the Palestinians intended to bring down IAF planes. It was undeniable proof that Yasser Arafat was speaking out of both sides of his mouth, talking about his people's desire for peace to leaders in the West and, at home, in Arabic, about jihad.

A seemingly unimportant finding alerted the sensors of the Israeli intelligence community: the Palestinians had paid too much for an old ship. The navy head of intelligence recalled, “We realized that the ship in question had been acquired for a task that wasn't innocent at all; they had done everything to conceal their activities. They were treating this like a secret mission, using special technology.”

Intelligence operatives immediately began tracking the activities of the people involved in the purchase and the handling of the ship, and searching for any tiny piece of information that might lead them to crack the mystery of the
Karine A.
In early December, they had assembled a partial picture of the Palestinian operation: the ship had been purchased in the summer of 2001 by Palestinians using multiple straw companies. Fearing detection by the Mossad or other intelligence organizations, the Palestinians changed the ship's name,
Rim K,
to
Karine A.
As eagle-eyed Israeli Mossad agents watched, the ship sailed from Lebanon to Port Sudan, where it was loaded with large quantities of rice, clothing, toys and household appliances, with plenty of space left over for the weapons awaiting
the ship at its next destination—Kish Island, off the coast of Iran. Under the darkness of night, an Iranian ferry loaded the
Karine A
with eighty-containers, each holding nearly eighteen hundred pounds of weaponry.

The ferry's Farsi-speaking crew provided the
Karine A
captain with a list of the containers' contents, as well as clear instructions for the rest of the trip. The weapons had been loaded into eighty sophisticated, buoyant, hermetically sealed containers built by Iran's military industry. When the
Karine A
approached Gaza, its crew would dump the containers in the water. Each container was equipped with a compartment that could contain water or air. When the compartment filled with water, the container would submerge; a diver would later approach and turn a switch, compressed air would displace the water, and the container would float to the surface. At this stage, small boats would collect the containers and bring them to the beaches of Gaza, where they'd be collected by Palestinian police personnel and brought to the terrorists.

After the ship was loaded, it set sail for the crucial leg of its journey. However, it was forced to dock for eleven days at the port of Hodeidah, in Yemen, because of technical problems. The stop in Yemen gave the IDF the vital time window it needed to plan and prepare for the seizure of the ship.

The ship and its lethal cargo in the port of Eilat.

(Jo Kot, Yedioth Ahronoth Archive)

In Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz's office feverish discussions started, with the participation of the Shayetet commanders and air force and intelligence personnel. Maps were spread and operational plans submitted; everyone understood that the pivotal moment was growing close.

“What are you calling the operation?” Mofaz asked at one of the meetings.

“Noah's Ark,” replied the head of the navy's operations division.

“A nice name,” Mofaz smiled.

In the lead-up to the final decision, Chiney explained to the chief of staff, “Everything is based on the discovery of the ship. The moment we found out about it, the rest was simply a matter of scheduling.”

Mofaz remained uneasy. “Will you be on one of the patrol boats?” he asked Chiney.

“Yes.”

“You'll know how to process all the intelligence about the ship?”

“Yes.”

“You'll also be able to positively identify it, what's on it, its dimensions?

“Definitely.”

“Were you ever in the Straits of Tiran?”

“Many times.”

“Now, then, how would you sail the ship through the Straits of Tiran?”

“It's not too complicated. All we need to know is how to start the ship's engine.”

Mofaz summed up his position. “I cannot risk that this mission would fail. If you see that conditions in the sea are such that it can't be done, you must stop and think it over again; or you put this on hold temporarily, and we wait, let's say, for a day; or we let the ship go away.”

A few days before the operation, the team went to the home of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, presenting him with the details of the mission. Sharon listened, asked questions, requested a look at the maps and praised the operation's daring. He then authorized it, aware that its success depended on the precise coordination between the Shayetet commandos and the pilots of the helicopters from which they'd be rappelling
down. “This is like jumping onto a truck on a winding road,” a member of the Shayetet later said.

There remained some unresolved questions: Was the ship's crew armed? Was the hidden weaponry booby-trapped or loaded with explosive charges programmed to be operated remotely? Were there Palestinian fighters on board? The mission could become a bloodbath, if Palestinian armed terrorists were protecting the ship. To address all the contingencies it was decided that a Shayetet doctor and a medic would be part of the takeover team, and that one of the helicopters would be fully equipped for emergency surgery, if needed.

One night, shortly before the mission, the chief of staff and the operation's commanders watched a simulation during which Shayetet commandos rappelled onto a commercial ship from two helicopters. Mofaz was highly satisfied with the exercise. The commandos then departed to Eilat, where they would wait for the green light. But Mofaz and the intelligence experts were still preoccupied with the ultimate question: Where was the ship? Why couldn't they locate it? They knew without a doubt that it was making its way toward the Suez Canal, but a definitive ID was missing. Only a few days later, on January 1, 2002, the chief of staff received word that the
Karine A
had been conclusively identified, forty miles north of Jedda, Saudi Arabia, at a distance of four hundred miles from the area where the takeover was planned. The last reports noted that the ship's name,
Karine A,
was written clearly and prominently on the ship's hull.

On the morning of D Day, the various units began moving toward their destination. Chiney boarded a “Dvora” patrol boat, while Shayetet commander Ram Rotenberg boarded a helicopter alongside his fighters. About two hours before H-Hour, Mofaz and officers from the navy and Air force climbed onto the special Boeing that would fly them above the Red Sea area where the takeover would unfold.

Even before the operation began, the Boeing's passengers were glued to their monitor screens; they watched Chiney and his command team at sea, trying to identify the
Karine A,
which finally appeared on the radar in the middle of a group of ships twenty miles from the takeover
point. Using various indicators they attempted to determine which ship was the
Karine A
but without success. An IAF patrol plane was also unable to identify the target, due to a dense fog covering the waters. The navy's small flotilla drew closer to the group of ships. So as not to be identified, Chiney grouped the vessels in a unique formation, with a patrol boat in front and a patrol boat in the back and the rubber boats in between; from a distance, they looked like a single big ship.

The tension on the boats and in the Boeing kept growing. The window of opportunity was getting shorter—they needed to complete the mission by 4:15
A.M
.; the choppers couldn't stay in the area a minute longer.

Chiney continued to calculate the timing and geographical issues, and decided the operation had to begin at 3:45.

“But where is the ship?” wondered a Shayetet officer. “Where the hell did it disappear? Could it have managed to get away?”

Suddenly, about 4.5 miles away, a Shayetet intelligence officer spotted a ship with a prominent smokestack, three loading cranes and a mast at its center, the distinctive characteristics of the
Karine A.
The report quickly climbed up the chain of command, and the excitement grew. The ship had been found.