The Volunteer (17 page)

In fact, in 2000 in North Carolina, the FBI arrested eighteen men connected to a Hezbollah smuggling ring that had transferred some eight million dollars back to Laqis to assist in the financing of Hezbollah's operations. The main ringleader was a man named Mohammad Dbouk, a senior operative based in Canada, who had been in direct contact with Laqis and had helped manage many of Hezbollah's procurement operations across North America. Had Ramez been faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars in a federal penitentiary, he might have led the FBI to that network a few years earlier. Instead, a single naive judge managed to screw everything up. Not for the first or last time, Etti had been right.

Six years later, in 2004, long after I'd left the Mossad, Ramez suddenly returned to the United States on a flight from Beirut. Why did he come back? I can only speculate. He probably missed his estranged family, who were still in Michigan. I also doubt that he'd received a particularly warm reception in Lebanon, seeing as how he'd screwed up his mission and attracted the FBI's scrutiny to Hezbollah's procurement network. He was a blown operative, and of no use to anyone. Even his parents probably weren't too happy with him, seeing as how they lost their home when he jumped bail.

Fawzi Mustapha Assi, aka Ramez, is now currently a resident of the federal correctional institution in Milan, Michigan, a low-security facility. Given the general mood on terrorism in the U.S., I'm guessing that he'll be there for a long time.

Maybe I'll drop by for a visit?

Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day. America will be of no avail to them. Their generals will be of no avail to them. Allah willing, we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.

KHALED MASHAAL

E
ven before September 11, the United States received multiple warnings about the scale of the threat from militant Islam. In the wake of these tragedies in Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, a small but growing stream of forward-thinking American security officials came to the Mossad looking to educate themselves about Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

Of the many meetings I had with CIA and FBI agents during this period, the one that took place on September 25, 1997, stands out in my memory. The CIA's Counterterrorism Center had sent a three-man delegation to discuss Hezbollah, including the possibility of the CIA and Mossad conducting joint operations against the group's leaders. We saw it as a golden opportunity to involve the United States more actively against a foe that we sometimes felt we were fighting single-handedly.

Of the three visiting Americans, the one I remember best is Harry, then the CIA's principal Hezbollah analyst. The day was hot and humid, and Harry must have been the only person in Israel wearing a tie. He reminded me of a smooth salesman, complete with ready smile, toothpaste-commercial teeth, stylish suit, and shiny cufflinks. He presented quite a contrast with his Israeli hosts, clad in the usual Mediterranean uniform of open-collar shirts and too much chest hair. Even with the air conditioning running full blast, the rest of us were sweating, yet Harry seemed cool as a cucumber.

We met in the area of HQ that, for some reason, we all called the
midrasha
, or “seminary.” Along with the liaison meeting rooms, it housed a commercial-style kitchen, plush suites for visiting dignitaries requiring a discreet place to stay, a conference center, and training classrooms.

Harry was joined by his grey-haired, avuncular boss, David, and a shy tagalong who never said or did anything that recorded itself in my memory. From the Mossad's counterterrorism department, we brought along Nissim and Lior, both Hezbollah analysts. We also had with us the head of the Mossad's counterterrorism department, Yuval. I was there in my capacity as liaison officer along with Mike, the deputy from the CIA's Tel Aviv station. (Mike's senior colleagues had shown up for the opening pleasantries but, as was usually the case, they vanished once we got down to details.)

Lior presented the delegation with aerial photos outlining the locations of Hezbollah functionaries, along with intelligence data about their activities. None of our proposals went beyond electronic eavesdropping or human intelligence recruitment operations. Certainly, assassination plots were out of the question: in the pre-9/11 days, the CIA was a skittish, risk-averse organization, a far cry from the agency that led the invasion into Afghanistan in late 2001, and that used a drone-mounted Hellfire missile to blow up a car full of jihadists in the Yemeni desert a year later.

Seen in retrospect, that skittishness likely cost many lives. If the United States and its allies had taken the Hezbollah threat seriously in those early days, the Shiite terrorist group might never have built up the weaponry it used to such deadly effect during the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006. Nor would Hezbollah have been able to lend their expertise to al-Qaeda in the run-up to the Kenya, Tanzania, and New York attacks. On the other hand, I suppose it's human nature to ignore a threat until it matures: even Israel under Ariel Sharon largely turned its back on Hezbollah for the six years following its evacuation of Lebanon in 2000.

After a long round of discussions, we broke for a catered lunch, and I went down to my office to see if any time-sensitive messages had come in. It was hot, and I had just maneuvered myself close to the air conditioning outflow duct when Sheila walked into my office with a grave expression on her face.

“Nobody knows this yet,” she said, “but two Mossad combatants from the Kidon division have fallen into Jordanian hands in Amman.”

Since leaving my combatant job with Caesarea, I'd fallen out of the loop. But Sheila had close contacts in the branch, given her father's former position in Caesarea. As in any organization, blood connections carried a lot of weight.

“I heard they were taking out a senior Hamas leader and the mission went awry. Two were captured and four are holed up in the Israeli embassy.”

It was stunning news, and I had trouble believing it for two reasons. The first was that—as an empirical matter—combatants just
don't
get caught. The other was that I'd never heard of Caesarea's Kidon unit being deployed in an Arab country before. Their sphere of operations is everywhere outside of “target countries” that pose a threat to Israel.

“You can't tell anyone because we're not supposed to know,” she added. “Even in Caesarea, only a few people know about it.”

I gave her my vow of silence—who would I tell anyway? All I could think to say was, “What a colossal fuck-up.”

As I walked back to the liaison meeting rooms, my head was reeling at the implications. If her news was true, this was almost unprecedented: the last time a Caesarea combatant fell into enemy hands was when the legendary Eli Cohen was captured by the Syrians and publicly executed on May 18, 1965, more than three decades earlier. Cohen had managed to ingratiate himself with Syria's military and government officials, and sent intelligence to Israel via secret radio transmissions, encoded written correspondence, and debriefings by his controllers in Europe and Israel. In one famous episode, he even convinced Syrian generals to permit him access to their army's main fortifications in the Golan Heights, which would soon pass into Israeli hands. Feigning sympathy for the Syrian soldiers, he had offered to plant trees near their barracks so they could have some shade—trees that were then used as targeting markers by the Israelis. He was ultimately caught by Soviet counterintelligence experts who triangulated the frequency of his radio communications. After his execution, he became a legend in Israel. While I worked at Tevel, the lobby of Mossad HQ featured an exhibit in his honor, displaying some of his surviving equipment and personal effects.

I put myself in my colleagues' shoes. Like every combatant, I'd worried often about the prospect of capture throughout my career. The world is unkind to captured spies. There are no Geneva Conventions governing their treatment, nor even any gentlemanly codes of conduct. In places such as Iran and Syria, a captured Mossad agent could expect to be hanged—after any useful information had been extracted from him through torture and inhumane confinement.
¹³

In this case, however, my fears were somewhat mitigated by the fact that the captors were Jordanian. Israel and Jordan fought bitter wars against each other in 1948 and 1967. Jordan had also played host to Palestinian terrorists who murdered many Israelis in the PLO's early years. But, over time, a mutual understanding emerged between the two countries—something resembling respect, if not affection. King Hussein, who would rule until his death in 1999, was an honorable man who'd forged a strong relationship with many Israeli leaders and diplomats. He had a particularly warm relationship with Ephraim Halevy, who'd retired as deputy director general of the Mossad after negotiating the Jordan-Israel peace treaty in 1994.

Needless to say, I was somewhat distracted by Sheila's bombshell. I found it hard to concentrate on the afternoon meetings with our American visitors; I kept looking at Uri, my department head, but he betrayed no knowledge of the day's events. I felt sorry for him, because he was about to walk into a bunch of stormy liaison meetings with the Americans, who would no doubt be furious.

Whatever the Americans' reaction, I knew Uri would do everything in his power to bring Washington on board in resolving the crisis. In this kind of case, U.S. help could mean the difference between getting our team back safe, and having them spend years in an Arab prison.

Uri and Harry were friendly from Uri's stint at the Mossad station in D.C., and they agreed to meet in downtown Tel Aviv for drinks and dinner after our meeting broke up. We were all invited, and I said I'd be there—knowing full well there would be no dinner. Uri mentioned offhandedly that he'd been summoned to the office of Danny Yatom, Mossad's director general. Once that meeting was over, I knew, neither Uri nor anyone else would be in the mood for a night out.

Danny Yatom had been parachuted into the DG's office after the 1996 retirement of Shabtai Shavit. I liked and respected Shavit, as did most of his subordinates. He'd worked as a HUMINT case officer and head of Caesarea, and understood how an intelligence service operates. He'd also been schooled in the modern, Harvard MBA-style of business administration and management, and tried to instil in the Mossad a measure of corporate efficiency.

Yatom, by contrast, came to the Mossad as an army man. As part of his distinguished career, he'd fought with some of Israel's most elite military units, including the legendary Sayeret Matkal (or General Staff Reconnaissance Unit). One of the unit's responsibilities is hostage rescue. During one famous 1972 mission, Operation Isotope, Yatom and his fellow soldiers (including unit commander Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, two future prime ministers) disguised themselves as airline mechanics and successfully stormed a Sabena Airlines jet that had been hijacked by Palestinian terrorists.

The problem was that Yatom, a major general, never traded in his rank badges, and still seemed to think he was in charge of a military unit. His stern gaze, cropped short hair, and military gait were easy to pick out in the Mossad's corridors. And his uncompromising, top-down Prussian management style often seemed out of place in an intelligence agency, where subtlety is a prized quality and colleagues can't be rigidly categorized and valued according to the number of stripes on their shoulders.

I can imagine how Yatom exploded when he heard the news that two of his agents had been caught like common crooks. In any event, after Uri met with Yatom, our department convened in Uri's office and he broke the news that I already knew. I locked eyes with Sheila, but otherwise didn't betray the fact that I had advance knowledge.

The screw-up, we learned in that meeting, was part of a botched assassination attempt that had been approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Two combatants from the Kidon unit had organized an ambush of Hamas's Jordanian branch chief, Khaled Mashaal, at the entrance to the terrorist group's Amman offices. When Mashaal showed up, they seized him, and sprayed his ear with a lethal time-release chemical while four other team members remained in close surveillance of the building.

Noting that Mashaal's chauffeur and bodyguard had spotted the fracas and were about to give chase, two of the combatants in the support team tried to create a diversion by staging a public shouting match. They then jumped into their rental car and took off. The bodyguard commandeered a passing car in hot pursuit.

Inexplicably, the combatants remained ignorant of the fact they were being followed—a total amateur-hour botch-up. And when the pair eventually parked the vehicle, they were arrested by plainclothes policemen, who later discovered they were carrying bogus Canadian passports. Meanwhile, the remaining four combatants (including the two who'd actually assaulted Mashaal) escaped to the Israeli embassy, where they remained holed up.

Before he headed up for another meeting with the DG to get further instructions about involving the Americans, Uri asked me to summon Stan Moskowitz and Mike from the CIA station to a meeting later that evening. The story hadn't been broken by the media yet, and I had to hurry.

Mike was at his desk when I phoned, and he agreed to come by with Moskowitz. But when he showed up an hour later, Mike arrived alone. Moskowitz, he said, had other business to attend to. From experience, I suspected this meant he was drinking tea with Yasser Arafat, or on the golf course. But in retrospect, I think it's possible Moskowitz was trying to tell me something.

Before Uri broke the big news, I started off by telling Mike who Khaled Mashaal was. Uri and I figured that after I'd described some of the terrorist attacks the guy had organized—including some that had killed U.S. citizens—he wouldn't be so surprised that we'd tried to kill him.

I told Mike that Mashaal was the chief of Hamas's political wing, which was then based in Amman. But that same office, I added, controlled and financed the Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades, the organization's armed (i.e., terrorist) wing.
¹⁴
After reeling off a list of some of Hamas's many crimes, I hit him with the big one: “Mike, Mashaal was behind the Mahane Yehuda market attack in Jerusalem.”

I knew Mike would know exactly the incident I was talking about. The blast had taken place just two months previous, killing sixteen people and injuring 169 others. A team of FBI officers was in Israel at the time, and I'd personally taken them to the site soon after the bombing. Their visit to that awful scene was the talk of the FBI Legat for some time.

“I remember,” Mike said.

I continued. “On September 4, he authorized a suicide attack on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, in which five people were killed. American citizens were injured and killed in both attacks. One of them was a fourteen-year-old girl visiting Israel from Los Angeles.” The American government was sensitive about the welfare of its citizens abroad, and I hoped that these highlights from my short briefing would make their way up the food chain when Mike reported our request for political aid to his superiors.