Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 29 FOR THE MOMENT …

Mossad, like other intelligence services around the world, braced itself for the fifth anniversary on September 11, and the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Since the discovery of the London-based plot to bring down ten American and British airliners over the Atlantic, the intelligence analysts had listened closely to what one called “the whispers in the wind” for the first hint that the fifth anniversary would be marked by another massive atrocity. The analysts of Mossad focused on the latest threat al-Qaeda had issued — that it would soon strike against Israel with a ferocity never seen before. The Jewish state was still reeling from its failure to defeat Hezbollah and the increased fighting in the Gaza Strip. The threat from Tehran continued. Islam, the giver of many lasting benefits to mankind and the proud possessor of a thrilling history, had been transformed into a rabid form of Islamism by its devotees who called for the elimination of all those who opposed them. “Death to the infidel” had become a call, which closed anti-West rallies across the Muslim world.

The trumpet call followed those seventy-one minutes which began at 8:46 A.M. on September 11, 2001, in the blue sky over New York. That was the moment when American Flight 11 gouged into the North Tower, and ended at 9:57 A.M. when the doomed passengers on United Flight 93 tried, but failed, to regain control over their plane before it crashed into the Pennsylvania soil. After 9/11 the calumny took root, nurtured by the new freedom of the Internet and ironically supported by the words of then U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld: “We know what we know; we know there are things we do not know; and there are things we know we know we don’t know.” That classic Rumsfeldism — which had actually referred to the need for a regime change in Iraq — was seized upon by the extremists as proof America had something to hide over 9/11.

The official 9/11 Commission said there was no evidence that office equipment in the towers had been “pulverized down to the last computer microchip.” Lee Hamilton, the former vice chairman of the Commission, felt compelled to say (to the author): “A lot of people I have encountered believe the U.S. government was involved. Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course the evidence does not lead that way at all.”

So why is it that many millions of people in the United States and Europe continue to embrace the accusation of a vast conspiracy? Is it possible — as a Mossad psychologist told the author — that what he called “the reality of terror” had become “dulled by the constant replaying of the television images so people saw it subconsciously as another kind of computer-generated game?”

The apologists for al-Qaeda filled the airwaves across the Arab world with claims that the 9/11 attacks had been a gigantic conspiracy by the Bush administration as an excuse to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006, five years after they had first surfaced while smoke from the Twin Towers rose from the world’s largest funeral pyre, those claims had been given a new legitimacy. Seventy-five American academics, who called themselves Scholars For Truth, claimed things were not as officially presented. Some go so for as to speculate that a shadowy group of neo-conservatives, many of them embedded in the Bush administration, knew of the attack in advance and conspired with the CIA to topple the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the hope such unprecedented attacks would gain overwhelming support for a U.S.-led war in the Middle East. The last time such an attack had aroused the collective fury of Americans had been Pearl Harbor, when Japan had launched its assault on the U.S. fleet. The decision to do this had been to give Tokyo a clear geopolitical advantage in the Pacific and paved the way for an attack on the United States. That dream had finally died in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, sixty-one years later, the Scholars For Truth — professors, lecturers, and academics of all kinds — claimed the decision to secretly launch 9/11 was also rooted in geopolitics, its objective to give the Bush administration control over the oil fields of Iraq.

A founder and leader of the group, Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at the Brigham Young University in Utah has said: “There is the clear possibility of thermite-based arson and demolition. The planes seen crashing into the Twin Towers were just a distraction. We don’t believe that nineteen hijackers and a few others in a cave with bin Laden pulled this off acting alone. We challenge this official theory and, by God, we’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

His case, presented with all the scholarly language of academia, has given some credence to the hundreds of books and tens of thousands of Web pages devoted to 9/11 that argue the Bush administration had encouraged the attacks. Central to the argument is Professor Jones’s thesis that there is no official explanation for the speed with which the Twin Towers collapsed; each had taken 10 seconds for the 1,400-foot towers to topple; the other building in the complex, a 47-story structure, had taken only 7 seconds to do so, of that there is no dispute. But for the Scholars For Truth this was a phenomenon that contravened “the physical law of conservation of momentum and offers no credible explanation of how the towers fell at near terminal velocity into their own footprint. For some reason ninety percent of the building material was converted into ‘flour,’ creating a massive volume of sub-one-hundred-fifty-micron dust across southern Manhattan. By comparison with the destruction of other high-rise buildings, which have also spontaneously collapsed, either through mudslides or earthquakes, they fell to the side, largely intact or reduced to only large pieces of rubble and minimal dust amounts. The physical energy required to collapse the World Trade Center buildings and pulverize all office contents including computer chips to their basic elements clearly indicates a quantity of energy far beyond the gravitational energy potential of each tower; this is further evidence that the weight of a tower is insufficient to produce the energy required to pulverize its contents to such an extent.”

A poll conducted by Ohio University revealed that one-third of the American public believed the federal government assisted in the World Trade Center attacks or took no action to stop them. The poll offered one clue as to why millions accepted this. The pollsters found that the people most likely to believe “are those who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly read, watch, or listen to ‘mainstream’ media. Alone before a computer, linked to their cyber friends as their only company, they can easily begin to accept all sorts of bizarre notions, especially when trying to make sense of an event as grotesque as the collapse of two skyscrapers,” reported the London Daily Telegraph, two days after the fifth anniversary.

So who is Professor Jones, who many see as an exposer of what would be undoubtedly the world’s greatest conspiracy — one that left the news that Princess Diana’s inquest was to open in January 2007 as little more than a passing footnote? The soft-spoken professor is the same man who is also convinced that Jesus wandered through ancient Mexico around AD 600, paying calls on various Mayan villagers and has published “evidence that the Mayans are well aware of the resurrected Lord” centuries before the Spanish priests brought them the good news. Professor Jones has also, for the past ten years, promoted in Third World countries a solar funnel cooker based on the highly disputed scientific theory of cold fusion. But despite this colorful background for a physics professor, Professor Jones has gathered like-minded academics to support his claim of a 9/11 conspiracy. However, in checking the author found that many of the Scholars For Truth are not scientists with proven expertise in relevant fields like aviation, air defense, air traffic control, civil engineering, firefighting, metallurgy, and geology — all essential skills to come to an informed conclusion about how the Twin Towers were felled. Many are academics who have devoted a great deal of their careers tilting at various windmills. Professor James H. Fetzer, who teaches in Minnesota and is head of a splinter group, is convinced that President John F. Kennedy was killed by several shooters and that the moon landing in 1969 was likely a hoax. More recently he has been quoted as urging that Americans “arm themselves and lend support to a military coup that will replace the Bush government with a new regime.”

Just as the Holocaust has increasingly attracted its deniers, so the tragedy of 9/11 is indeed so shocking and incomprehensible that it has attracted a growing number of people to reject the simple truth: that al-Qaeda had announced its coming, weeks before — and that the clear warnings from Mossad had been largely discounted. In Tel Aviv a senior Mossad analyst told the author in September 2006:

More certain is that those members of the Bush administration in power on that September 11, 2001, overreacted to the destruction. The official exaggeration began with the initial reports of casualties being estimates as high as twenty thousand. The number, thankfully, would turn out to be under three thousand. In the weeks after 9/11 dozens of innocent “terrorist suspects” were imprisoned without charge. The administration did nothing to deny rumors that Iraq was preparing to launch an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein became the new Hitler. President Bush, like his father, was cast in the role of the fighter pilot ready to lead his nation to victory against the evil forces of al-Qaeda. No wonder the president readily admitted that the Hollywood movie Independence Day was one he never tired of watching.

A Mossad analyst, a veteran of many years of cool and careful judgments, said to the author:

As the last quarter of 2007 waxed, in Tel Aviv Meir Dagan briefed General Elyezer Shkedy, the country’s air force chief, on the latest intelligence from his deeper agents inside Iran. Israel’s embattled prime minister had told Shkedy to prepare for a full-scale aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mossad’s former director of operations, Rafi Eitan, now a key member of Olmert’s shaky coalition, had publicly warned the population to update their bomb shelters against an attack from Tehran’s missiles. Israel’s decision to ratchet up its preparations for an air assault came after Tehran had ignored the UN deadline to stop its nuclear enrichment program to create atomic weapons. General Shkedy, the forty-nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors whose office is dominated by a photo of an Israeli F15 flying over Auschwitz, described the concern over Iran as “a serious threat to Israel and the rest of the world. My job is to maximize our capabilities in every respect. Beyond that, the less said the better.” Giora Eiland, Israel’s former national security adviser, added: “Trying to negotiate with Iran is going nowhere. Tehran is now a major threat to Israel. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ready to sacrifice half of his people to eliminate us.”

A special Israeli Defense Force Unit, “Iran Force,” had been created under Shkedy. Several Pentagon strategic bombing specialists were attached to work alongside Israeli military planners. The unit has real-time access to American satellite images taken over Iran’s ten nuclear facilities. Israel’s air force, equipped with the latest American bunker-busting bombs, was the only means the country had to attack Iran. Distance ruled out a ground force assault. Uri Dromi, a former air force colonel, told the author: “Dates and timeframes are under close scrutiny. No formal date has yet been set. But the options for an attack are shortening.” Much would depend on information from Mossad spies in Iran.

In London Nathan, the Mossad station chief, had been fully briefed on an MI5 anti-terrorism operation that had discovered Britain’s first Islamic “school for terror.” It followed the arrests across London of fourteen radical Muslim extremists. They included Abu Abdullah, who was detained after he preached at a London mosque that he would “love to see our jihadists go to Iraq to kill British and American soldiers.” Abdullah had been a regular visitor to the Jameah Islamiyah Faith School. The tall, gothic building stood in fifty-four acres on the edge of a beautiful English village and had long been a brooding presence even in its days as a Roman Catholic seminary. It was to the school that Abu Hamsa, the hook-handed extremist preacher, “brought young Muslims to be indoctrinated in jihad,” confirmed a senior MI5 officer. Hamsa is currently serving seven years for incitement to murder. After he finishes his sentence he will be deported to the United States to face charges of inciting to murder American citizens in Yemen.

The discovery of the school for terror reveals how extensive al-Qaeda’s influence was within Britain’s Muslim community. Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad, said that Britain now had “a secret army of thousands of well-trained guerrilla fighters ready to kill in the name of religion.” Over two hundred MI5 and anti-terrorist officers had surrounded the school at Mark Cross near Crowborough in East Sussex. The raid followed the latest admission by a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay that he had attended a summer training camp at the school. It had been conducted by Abu Hamsa shortly before he was jailed in February 2006. The school was run by Bilal Patel, the school imam. He claimed (to the author) the school “welcomes all groups to enjoy camping in an Islamic environment in our grounds.” Mr. Patel ran the private school “as a charity.” But he admitted he had received donations from wealthy Muslims to buy the property for £800,000 from the previous owners, a ballet school.

A senior MI5 officer said: “We have long feared that Britain has become a sanctuary for terrorists from the battlegrounds of Chechnya, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. They pose as asylum seekers. What we are now discovering is a nightmare scenario coming true.” He revealed that al-Qaeda has developed a one-week basic jihad training course to be taught at “foundation camps set up in rural UK locations.” The course is available through al-Qaeda Web sites. A British government report published last May revealed their number was “somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand.” The report also said there were an estimated 16,000 people in the United Kingdom who “are supportive of al-Qaeda.”

The news didn’t surprise Meir Dagan. He had long felt that in one of their meetings, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, had shown commendable reality when she had said: “We can catch some of them, but not all of them.”

The early morning sun caught the rust-stained hull of the 1,700-ton cargo ship as it slowly steamed into the busy Mediterranean port of Tartus in Syria on September 3, 2007. From its mast flew the flag of South Korea and the stern plate identified the al-Hamed as being registered in Inchon, one of the country’s major ports.

Watching the ship maneuvering into its berth from a distance was a man with the swarthy skin of a Kurd or one of the marsh Arabs of Iraq. He was fluent in both their languages as well as some of the dialects of Afghanistan. He was, in fact, a Turkish-born Jew who had eschewed the life of a carpet seller in the family business in Istanbul to go to Israel, serve in its army as a translator, and finally achieve his life’s ambition to work in Mossad. Fifteen years later, he was recognized as one of its most brilliant operatives. In that time, he had operated in a dozen countries under as many aliases, using his linguistic skills and chameleon-like characteristics to observe and be absorbed into whichever community he had been sent.

Now, for the moment, he was code-named “Kamal” with a perfectly faked Iranian passport in his pocket. Meir Dagan had stressed to him the importance of his mission: to confirm the role of al-Hamed in the dangerous relationship, which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad had formed with North Korea.

Kamal had known before he left Tel Aviv the ship had sailed from Namp’o, a North Korean port in the high security area south of the capital, Pyongyang. An NSA satellite image had shown it steaming out into the Yellow Sea on a journey, which had taken it across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic and through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, and finally into Tartus harbor. At some stage of its voyage, it had re-flagged itself at sea and the crew had painted on the stern plate the port of registration as Inchon. The newness of their work was still apparent against the drab gray of the rest of the hull.

Through a contact in the Tartus harbormaster’s office, Kamal had managed to check the al-Hamed’s manifest and all day had watched trucks being loaded with the cement it listed. Then, as the sun began to set, military trucks arrived at the dockside and from the ship’s hold cranes lifted crates covered in heavy tarpaulin, which soldiers guided into the trucks. Using a high-resolution camera no bigger than the palm of his hand, Kamal photographed the transfer. When he finished, he pressed a button on the camera to transmit the images to a receiving station inside the Israeli border with Lebanon. In an hour, they were in Mossad headquarters.

Kamal knew then his trip had achieved all Meir Dagan had hoped. Though he could not see inside the crates, the spy intuitively knew the steel-cased containers were holding weapons-grade plutonium, the element which had fueled the American atomic attack that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. In his mission briefing, Kamal had been told by Professor Uzi Even, who had helped to create Israel’s own nuclear facility at Dimona, that the plutonium would, in its raw form, be easily transported as nuggets in lead protective drums and the shaping and casting of the material would be done in Syria.

On that warm September day almost fifty-two years after Nagasaki had been destroyed, sufficient plutonium had been delivered to Syria to devastate an entire country, its neighbor, Israel.

Shortly before noon on September 4, 2007, a number of cars drove past the concert hall of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv and entered the heavily guarded headquarters of Major General Eliezer Shkedy, the country’s air force commander. As a fighter pilot he had won a deserved reputation for daredevil tactics coupled with a cool analytical mind. His speciality had been flying dangerously close to the ground, maneuvering past peaks and rocky outcrops, then hurtling skyward to ten thousand feet, nearing the speed of sound, before diving on the target, his weapon system switched on, his eyes flitting between the coordinates projected on his hood screen to the bombsight and the target. Weapons released, he would turn radically, the screech from the strain on the airframe like a banshee wail, and he would once more hurtle skyward. From dive attack to his second climb, it would take him only seconds.

For the past week Shkedy had prepared for an unprecedented operation, which would require those tactics to be carried out by pilots he had hand-picked because their flying skills matched his own. But they would be flying not the F-16 fighter plane he had once commanded, but Israel’s latest jet, the F-151. Flying at almost twice the speed of sound and capable of delivering a five-hundred-pound bunker-busting bomb, it was the most formidable fighter plane in the Israeli Air Force.

For weeks the pilots had practiced the flesh-flattening G-force of right-angle turns, diving and evading, to hit a small circle, the IP (initial point), carrying out bombing runs at an angled dive of thirty degrees. They had practiced all this in the pitch black of night in the Negev Desert. At first many of the dummy bombs had fallen wide of the IP, but soon they were landing inside, a number scoring the required bullseye. Shkedy called them “my Top Guns”—though they were far removed from the Hollywood version of Top Gun pilots. His fliers were sober-sided, led quiet lives, rarely partied, and had trained day and night for when they would finally be given the order to fly tactical strikes against Iran. Those attacks, they had been told, would take place at dawn or dusk. But all they knew so far about the mission they were spending weeks training for was that it would take place in the dead of night. No one had yet told them when or where, and they were content it should remain so. Curiosity was not one of their traits.

While F-15I twin afterburners glowed over the desolate night landscape and the pilots dropped their dummy bombs, which exploded white phosphorous smoke on the ground’s IP to determine the accuracy of the drops, in Shkedy’s Tel Aviv complex his staff studied the approach to the target and discussed the precautions each F-151 must take from the moment its pilot pressed the red button on the control stick to release his bomb. The time they would spend over the actual target, TOT, would have to be between two and four seconds. In that period with its bomb released, an F-151 would sink dangerously toward the ground, giving the pilot a second to fire his afterburner to climb and avoid the “frag pattern,” the deadly metal fragments of spent explosive, which would follow the detonation. A bomb’s shrapnel would rise to three thousand feet in seven seconds and unless the aircraft was clear of the target area, it could be blown up and other pilots already at various stages of their bomb runs would fly into a curtain of lethal fragments, which could destroy them. To avoid this, each pilot would have to endure body-crushing pressure of eight Gs while negotiating a radical ninety degree turn away from the IP after bombing and climb to thirty thousand feet from the target zone to avoid ground missiles.

To calculate the precise distance from take-off to target and the exact angle for the attack, the planners pored over computer graphs, satellite images, and physics tables to check and re-check figures. The targeters calculated that because the bombs would pierce the target roof before exploding inside, the roof would momentarily serve as a shield, reducing the frag pattern by between 30 and 40 percent. To help further protect the lead aircraft over the target, it would have its laser-guided bomb fitted with a delay fuse, providing a precious two-second lead time before the detonation.

Given the distance to the target, it was clear the F-151s would each have to carry two external fuel tanks, one under each wing. Filled with five hundred gallons of fuel, each tank added three thousand pounds to the aircraft weight. That required further complex calculations to be made: the exact point at which the bombing dive would start and the altitude at which the ordnance would be dropped.

In late August, while the al-Hamed was entering the Strait of Gibraltar, General Shkedy flew to the base of the sixty-ninth squadron in the Negev; the squadron was the Air Force’s frontline air assault force trained to attack Iran. Waiting for Shkedy in the airfield briefing room were the five pilots whom he had selected to carry out the raid. With an average age of twenty-six, many came from families who were Holocaust survivors, like Shkedy himself.

For him the pilots had a kind of nobility to their youth; behind their relaxed and open manner was steel. Once before, he had flown to speak to them at the start of their special training and had begun by saying they had been selected for an air-to-ground mission, military speak for bombing a ground target. He had looked into their faces, glad to see they showed no emotion. No one had looked at the huge wall map of the Middle East. Nevertheless he anticipated each would be creating in his mind the potential mission profile: a low level flight to the target, then a high level return very possibly into headwinds. It could be Iran. But they had not asked him then and they did not do so on that late August morning when Shkedy once more met them in the briefing room.

Standing before a plasma screen, he used a remote control to illuminate it. For the first time the pilots saw the target; a complex deep inside Syria almost one hundred miles northeast of Damascus. He explained there was “good and sufficient intelligence” to destroy the complex, which the Syrians were using to build nuclear bombs. He waited for the flicker of response then continued. Under the cover of being an agricultural research center, the complex was already engaged in extracting uranium from phosphates. Soon it would have weapons-enriched plutonium coming from North Korea. He told them the Israeli satellite Ofek-7, which had been launched only two months before, had been geo-positioned to watch the activities at the complex near the small Syrian city of Dayr az-Zawr. He indicated its position on the screen. No bombs must fall on civilians.

Shkedy then turned to the route in and out of the target area. The aircraft would fly up along the Syrian coast and enter its airspace at the last moment north at the port town of Samadogi and then follow the border with Turkey. At the point where the River Euphrates began its long journey south into Iraq, the attack force would swing south to the Syrian desert town of ar-Raqqah beyond which they would begin the bombing run. The way out would be a high-altitude straight run between the Syrian towns of Hims and Hamah to the Mediterranean. Over the coast of Lebanon they would turn south and return to base. The total mission time would be eighty minutes. In the event of an emergency, navy rescue launches would be positioned off the Syrian coast.

He ended the briefing by saying the attack would be in the early hours of the morning and would take place “soon.” For a moment longer the air force commander looked at the small group of pilots. Perhaps sensing their one concern, he added that every step would be taken to ensure Syria’s vaunted air defenses would be jammed. He did not say how and no one asked. It was a mark of the trust and respect they had for General Eliezer Shkedy.

The genesis for the operation ensued three years prior when a massive explosion on a North Korean freight train heading for the port of Namp’o occurred on April 22, 2004. Mossad agents had learned that in a compartment adjoining a sealed wagon were a dozen Syrian nuclear technicians who had worked in the Iranian nuclear program at Natanz, near Tehran, and had arrived in North Korea to collect the fissionable material stored in the wagon. The technicians died in the train explosion, and their bodies were flown home in lead-encased coffins aboard a Syrian military plane. By then a wide area around the explosion site had been cordoned off and scores of North Korean soldiers in anti-contamination suits had spent days recovering wreckage and spraying the entire area. Mossad analysts suspected they were recovering some of the estimated fifty-five kilos of weapons-grade plutonium North Korea possessed. Since the explosion — its cause never established — the intelligence service had tracked Syrian military officers and scientists on a dozen trips to Pyongyang where they met with high-ranking officials in the regime. The most recent meeting was shortly before the al-Hamed had left Namp’o.

It was Kamal’s report and photographic evidence of the arrival and unloading of the ship that was the focus of the meeting in General Shkedy’s headquarters on September 4, 2007. The air force commander’s briefing room was dominated by large plasma screens on two walls. One contained a blow-up of the ship and the covered crates being off-loaded and driven away. A second screen showed the town of Dayr az-Zawr. A third screen displayed a satellite image of a large square building surrounded by several smaller ones and a security fence. The area was identified by the word: “Target.”

Seated around the conference table with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were the other key players in the operation, codenamed “Sunburst.” For Olmert, it was further proof of his powers of survival. A year ago he had been close to being driven out of office after the debacle of the war in Lebanon when he was vilified as the most incompetent leader Israel had ever had. He had fought back, appointing Ehud Barak as his new defense minister and Tzipi Livni as foreign minister. Both now flanked him at the table giving Olmert the political support he needed for “Sunburst.” Beside them sat Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and now leader of the Likud Party. Like Barak, Netanyahu was experienced in the complexities of “black” operations. Barak had been a leader in Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s elite commando force who bore the same motto as Britain’s SAS: “Who Dares Wins.” Netanyahu had approved several Mossad missions while in office.

The lynchpin of “Sunburst” was Meir Dagan. Early in the summer, he had presented Olmert with evidence of what he called “the nuclear connection” between Syria and North Korea that had reached a dangerous level. Syria already possessed sixty Scud-C missiles, which it had bought from North Korea, and on August 14, when the freighter al-Hamed was already bound for Syria, North Korea’s foreign trade minister, Rim Kyung Man, was in Damascus to sign a protocol on “cooperation and trade in science and technology.” Afterward the minister had flown to Tehran, furthering the triangular relationship between North Korea, Syria, and Iran.

Mossad’s analysts had concluded that Syria was not only a conduit for the transport to Iran of an estimated £50 million of missiles, but also could serve as “a hideout” for North Korea’s own nuclear weapons, particularly its plutonium, while the regime continued to promise it would give up its nuclear program in exchange for the massive security guarantees and financial aid the West had promised.

Until recently, Meir Dagan had remained uncertain whether this was the case. Now, the latest intelligence from his agents in the country showed that Syria was determined to create its own nuclear weapons.

The meeting had been called to discuss the matter. Dagan began by saying the crates unloaded from the al-Hamed had been tracked by Israel’s satellite to the complex. Dagan continued the meeting with his usual succinct analysis. The building was now almost certainly to be where the crates had been delivered. Inside its main structure was the machinery to cast the warheads for housing the weaponized plutonium. Scientists at Dimona had concluded that a small quantity of polonium and beryllium would be used to create the chain reaction for the plutonium, after the pellets were machined in “glove boxes,” sealed containers accessed only by special laboratory gloves to protect the technicians at the site. Dagan had concluded with a final warning: the longer Israel waited to destroy the site, the closer the technicians in the building would come to creating their weapons.

Within minutes the decision was taken to eliminate the complex.

In the late evening of September 5, 2007, Israeli commandos from the Sayeret Matkal dressed in Syrian army uniform crossed into Syria over its northern border with Iraq. They were equipped with a laser guidance system designed to guide aircraft to the target. With them were specialists from the Israeli Defense Forces. In their backpacks was equipment linked to IDF electronic counter-measure jamming technology designed to disrupt Syria’s formidable air defenses. When they were forty miles from the target the men hid and waited.

At their airfield in the Negev, the five mission pilots sat down to a large dinner. Even though they were not hungry, they knew they would need all the nutrients for the sheer physical energy and mental skills they would expend in the coming hours. Afterward they went to the briefing room where Shkedy was waiting with other senior officers. The briefing officer once more ran through the mission procedure: radio frequencies, radio silence protocols, and individual call signs. Take-off time would be at 23:59 with twenty seconds separating each plane. There would be a dogleg out to sea at five hundred knots, over eight miles a minute, then, with Haifa to their right, they would drop to sea level and head up the coast of Lebanon, past Beirut and continue into Syrian airspace. From there it was on to the IP.

When the briefing ended, Shkedy walked to the front of the room and paused to look at each pilot.

“You all know the importance of your target. It must be destroyed at all costs. This is the most important mission any of you have taken or probably will ever take. Every step has been taken to protect you. But if anything does happen, we will do everything to rescue you. That I promise you. But I am confident that surprise is on our side. You will be in and out before the Syrians realize what has happened,” said General Shkedy.

No one in the room doubted him. They all knew the mission was a pivotal point in the protection of Israel. The silence was broken by Shkedy’s final words: “God be with you!” Then he stepped forward and shook the hand of each pilot.

By 11:45 in the evening, the ordnance technicians had checked the bombs, ensuring each was securely positioned in its release clip beneath the wings of each F-151. After his check, the technician removed the metal safety pin from each bomb.

A minute later, the runway crew had reported the strip was clear of small stones or any other obstruction that could be sucked into the engine and destroy it.

From the twin tailpipes of the first aircraft, followed by the others, came the scalding heat from the afterburners.

In each cockpit the pilots had gone through the same drill: activating the computerized checks of the navigation, mechanical, communications, and finally the firing systems.

Each pilot wore two suits: his flight suit and, over it, the G-suit, a torso harness, survival gear, and a helmet. Clipped to each harness was a small gadget that would send a homing-signal if he was forced to abandon the mission.

At one minute to midnight the first F-151, with a roar and a plume of exhaust marking its progress, sped down the runway. Shortly after midnight the last of the planes had retracted its wheels. Sunrise had started.

The mission was a total success. Satellite images showed the complete destruction of the complex and, the next day, Syrian bulldozers covering the blitzed area with earth to avoid the spread of radiation. It would be ten days before the country’s vice president, Farouk al-Sharaa, would only say: “Our military and political echelon is looking into the matter.” In Tel Aviv Ehud Olmert, not quite able to conceal his smile, said: “You will understand we naturally cannot always show the public our cards.” But to play them, in the early hours of the morning of September 6, 2007, those pilots had carried out one of the most daring air strikes ever.

In January 2008, three days after President Bush had left Israel, where he had been privately briefed on the mission, the Israeli Defense Force released a satellite image that showed Syria had commenced rebuilding the destroyed site.

On Saturday morning, February 2, 2008, a man emerged from the U-Bahn, Berlin’s railway system, and stood outside the subway exit on the Kurfüerstendamm, the city’s elegant shopping quarter. He had started his journey in one of the eastern suburbs of the city and its purpose was contained in the briefcase he carried. A car pulled up, the driver opened the passenger door, and together they drove off.

Who the man was and what he had been asked to do was known, apart from the driver, to only Meir Dagan and a handful of senior Mossad officers in Tel Aviv. They had patiently waited for the car’s passenger to obtain what they wanted.

Six months before, the driver introduced himself to the man as “Reuben.” It was not his real name: like all other details about his identity, it remained in a secure room where the names of all current katsas, field agents, were kept in Mossad headquarters. A few days ago, the man had left a message at one of the agreed dead-letter boxes, which Reuben regularly checked, that he was ready to deliver what he had been asked to provide in return for a substantial sum of euros, half as a down payment, the balance on delivery of what was now in his briefcase.

They were photos of Imad Mughniyeh. Next to Osama bin Laden, he was the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Long before the al-Qaeda leader had launched his pilots against New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, Mughniyeh had introduced suicide bombers into the Middle East. The Hezbollah terrorist mastermind had read an account of the WWII Japanese kamikaze pilots in Hezbollah’s own newspapers, Al Sabia and Al Abd, which had praised the pilots for their sacrifices. In the alleys and souks of Beirut, Mughniyeh had persuaded families it was a matter of honor to provide a son, or sometimes even a daughter, for similar sacrifices. They had remained the human weapons of choice against Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Those who had chosen to die were remembered in Friday prayers in the shadowy coolness of the mosques, after the rhetoric of the muezzin calling for the destruction of all those who opposed Hezbollah.

The deaths of the young bombers were lauded and their memories kept alive. Mughniyeh told their families the souls of their children needed no more, that their suicide bombings would be remembered forever and assured them a place in Hezbollah’s version of Heaven.

Like bin Laden, Mughniyeh had been hunted across the Middle East and beyond by Mossad, the CIA, and every other Western intelligence service. But each time he came close to capture, he escaped, the trail gone cold. Until now.

On that cold winter day in February 2008, with a bitterly harsh wind from the Polish steppes whistling through the streets of Berlin, Reuben drove along past the smoke-blackened ruins of the Gedäechtniskirche, the church that was a memorial to the Allied bombing raids of WWII, a grim contrast to all the other buildings, which made the city look like any other European capital.

At some point the man produced a file from his briefcase and, in return, replaced it with an envelope Reuben handed over containing the balance of the fee for the images in the file.

The cover of the gray-colored document bore the stamp of what was once one of the most powerful agencies in the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, itself at one time the most important satellite nation in the former Soviet Union. The stamp identified the file had once belonged to the Stasi, the security service of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security.

In the forty years of its existence it had employed 600,000 full time spies and informers, roughly 1 secret policeman for every 320 East Germans. The Stasi had its own imposing headquarters in East Berlin, interrogation centers around the city, its own hotels and restaurants in the countryside, and clinics where only Stasi staff and their families could be treated. One clinic, close to the River Spree, had facilities to perform plastic surgery including facial reconstruction for Stasi agents and sometimes carefully selected members of terror groups with which the Stasi had close connections.

With bewildering speed, the citizens of East Germany awoke in November 1988 to find the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the resignation of the GDR’s Politburo and the official end of the Stasi’s reign of terror. But not everything had ended. The clinic near the Spree had still remained in business, offering its skills to those with the funding to pay for plastic surgery.

The file now in Reuben’s possession contained photos of Imad Mughniyeh, which had been taken at the clinic after post-operative surgery. His face looked very different from the one, which had last filled the pages of newspapers and magazines after he had been photographed at a Hezbollah rally before once more disappearing almost a quarter of a century previously when he had established an even more murderous reputation than any other terrorist of the 1980s.

It was an era when the Venezuelan-born Marxist, Carlos the Jackal’s, claim to notoriety had begun with taking forty-two Opec oil ministers hostage in Vienna in 1975. He had then embarked on a reign of terror before Mossad had tipped off French intelligence where they could grab Carlos in Sudan and bring him to trial in Paris for his crimes on French soil and where he continues to serve a life sentence. Like Carlos, Abu Nidal had become another headline-grabbing terrorist after he ordered the gunning down of innocent men and women as they waited to board their Christmas flights in Rome and Vienna airports in 1985. Nidal had finally been killed by a Mossad kidon team. For a quarter of a century Imad Mughniyeh had avoided assassination.

On that February morning, the file in Reuben’s possession could bring his death closer for some of the worst crimes committed on Israel’s doorstep — Lebanon. His history of violent attacks was appalling. In 1983, he had plotted the attack against the American embassy in Beirut. Among the sixty-three dead were eight members of the CIA, including its station chief in the Middle East. In the same year, Mughniyeh arranged for the kidnapping of William Buckley, the CIA replacement station chief in battered Beirut.

Next he arranged the bombing of the U.S. Marines’ barracks near the city’s airport killing 241 people. In between, he had carried out skyjackings and organized the kidnapping of Western hostages, including Terry Waite, who had gone to Beirut to try to negotiate with the Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, to free the hostages Hezbollah already held. Along with Buckley, Waite — the emissary of the Archbishop of Canterbury — had been incarcerated in what became known as the Beirut Hilton, the underground prison beneath the city.

Imad Mughniyeh had been responsible for the murder of over four hundred people and the torture of even more. America had placed a bounty of $25 million (£12.5 million) on his head.

One by one Mossad’s menume, the Hebrew title by which each director-general is known, plotted Mughniyeh’s downfall. Men like the cool Nahum Admoni (1982–1990), the quiet-voiced Shabtai Shavit (1990–1996), the relentless Danny Yatom (1996–1998), and Efraim Halevy (1998–2002), the menume his staff called the “grandfather of spies,” had all chaired endless secret meetings to plan the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh.

Their agents had tracked him to Paris only for him to once more slip away, as he had done in Rome and Madrid. For a while the trail led to Minsk in the Ukraine and then to the Islamic Republics of the former Soviet Union. There were reports he was in Tehran, living under the protection of the Fundamentalist regime. But each time the hunt had petered out.

In 2002, Meir Dagan took over Mossad. He did what all his predecessors had done and studied the growing number of files that listed how close Mossad agents had come to capturing Mughniyeh. At times they had been close, very close. But somehow he had still wriggled free. The suicide bombings had continued. For Dagan it became an article of faith that, as the tenth menume, he would finally terminate Mughniyeh’s reign of terror.

Dagan had asked Mossad’s psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, psychoanalysts, and the profilers — collectively known as “the specialists”—to focus on where Imad Mughniyeh could be and the best way to kill him. There was a concensus the ideal means of doing so was with a car bomb. “It would be poetic justice,” one specialist said. Using the only photograph of him published in a newspaper and a handful of biographical details, they set to work.

Born in a south Lebanese village, the son of a fruit seller, Imad Mughniyeh had joined Force 17, Yasser Arafat’s personal bodyguards, at the age of fifteen. He was sixteen-years-old when he had killed his first Israeli, a settler in the Golan Heights. After Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was forced to leave Lebanon in 1982, Mughniyeh stayed behind in Beirut and joined Hezbollah, the organization, which had already established itself as the prime militant force resisting Israel. He came to the notice of Sheikh Fadlallah, who arranged for Mughniyeh to rise quickly in the Hezbollah ranks. By the age of twenty, Mughniyeh was a full-fledged terrorist after a spell of training in Tehran under the auspices of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

The newspaper snapshot, showing an exultant Mughniyeh addressing a Hezbollah rally in Beirut, was studied under computer analysis. Various shapes of beard were superimposed to suggest how he might look now as the specialists tried to create an image of him and to seek clues to his mindset. Using a technique, which they properly called “remote in-depth analysis,” but referred to among themselves as RIDA, they continued the task of mapping out his personality. They evoked a great deal in their analysis: Allah and the devil and the role each might play in his life. Much of what they posited was only intended to remain between them, verbal signposts along the road of trying to discover Imad Mughniyeh’s thinking as well as his physical appearance.

Other specialists worked to discover the psychological forces, which motivated Mughniyeh. He was a mass murderer, certainly, yet he did not fit the typology of fanatics, those who were driven by anger. It would be satisfying — at least for the behaviorists — to conclude that at the root of his evil was all-consuming rage. It was there of course, but was it an all-animating and life-energizing force? The psychologists wondered if he was what they deemed “inhabited by a strong streak of masked violence?” This would have allowed him to go about his work in a business-like manner, whether he was recruiting little more than children to be suicide bombers or ordering the bomb-makers to make even more powerful explosives. But again there was no clear answer — no more than there was to the question of how he maintained order within his own immediate psychological universe so he could equate his unspeakable actions to his own belief he was right to kill and destroy. Was he the man who had been psychologically shaped by all he had done over the past twenty-five years?

In the photo that had been taken in the 1980s at that Hezbollah rally, a full beard covered his chin and the peaked cap he wore covered his hair. Rimless spectacles also hid his eyes. One by one the facial analysts used their computer skills to remove his beard, spectacles, and hat, and aged him to his present forty-five years. The specialists concluded there was evidence that at some point Mughniyeh’s face had undergone some surgical work. But the traces of scar tissue indicated it had been done at least five years ago when he had first disappeared after the spate of suicide bomb attacks on Israel.

The Chinese were the acknowledged leaders in the field of facial surgery. But the Beijing regime had turned its back on Hezbollah. The Russians were a possibility, but again the Mossad medical experts ruled out plastic surgeons that had once worked for the KGB. Others who operated on what the experts called “close to the wind” were checked in Romania, Serbia, and North African countries. But Mossad agents did not discover any evidence Mughniyeh had undergone plastic surgery in any of these countries.

Then, in June 2007, came the break. Since the end of the war with Hezbollah in south Lebanon, Mossad had been steadily recruiting Israeli Arabs in the West Bank who were opposed to Hezbollah. One of the informers had a relative in a village near Mughniyeh’s birthplace. The cousin had told him that a friend of her family had heard Mughniyeh had traveled to Europe from the safe house the Syrian regime had provided. He had sent postcards from Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, and finally Berlin. It was little to go on, but it was a start.

First a Mossad agent, a fluent Arab speaker, had traveled to south Lebanon and had met the informer’s cousin. The agent had posed as an old friend of Mughniyeh. Little more had emerged except the cousin was certain Mughniyeh was back in Damascus, but according to her friend’s family, he now looked different.

In hours, Reuben had been ordered to investigate the possibility that Mughniyeh had visited Berlin to undergo further plastic surgery. Now, six months later, the katsa had the proof in the file his informer had handed over.

On Sunday afternoon, February 3, 2008, Meir Dagan chaired a meeting in the conference room adjoining his office. On the table were jugs of water and pots of coffee for those seated around it. They were the head of Shin Bet, the country’s internal security force, the government’s national security adviser, the political adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the military advocate-general to the Israeli Defense Forces, IDF. Among them sat a brigadier-general, the head of kidon, Mossad’s unique unit that conducted legally-approved assassinations. Beside Dagan sat his Director of Operations. In a corner of the room was the table and chair usually occupied by the notetaker to record decisions and other discussions. Now it was empty. There would be no record of this meeting.

Over the past six years, similar meetings had been held by Dagan since he came to office in August 2002. The first had been four months later in December that year to discuss the case of Ramzi Nahara, a Mossad informer Dagan had known personally who had defected to Hezbollah. Was it for money? A skewed belief in the group’s cause? Had he fallen for one of the Arab women Hezbollah used to try and entrap a foreigner? There were no answers. But the meeting was short and unanimous. Nahara had to be located. He was tracked to an Arab village and killed with a car bomb planted by a former colleague in the service he betrayed.

In March 2003, another meeting discussed Abu Mohammed Al-Masri, who had been sent by al-Qaeda from Pakistan to create a cell to target Israeli villages on the border with Lebanon using rockets. He, too, died in a car bomb as he drove around south Lebanon seeking recruits and suitable sites to launch the weapons. The next target the meeting had discussed, in August 2003, was Al Hussein Salah, Hezbollah’s explosives expert who had begun rebuilding the organization’s arsenal in the Beirut suburbs. He was on his way to meet his bomb-makers when he died in yet another car bomb planted by the Mossad.

A full year passed before Dagan once more had summoned the men in his conference room. The decision had been taken in the stifling heat of July 2004 that Ghaleb Awali, the Hezbollah link-man between Damascus and the activists in the Gaza strip, should be killed by a car bomb as he headed south to meet the activists. The bomb was planted under his seat. In Awali’s place came Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil, a senior Hezbollah official in Damascus who had been given responsibility by Syria to liaise between Damascus and Hamas and Hezbollah units in Gaza and the West Bank. Even as he drove to his first appointment, Khalil was killed by a Mossad car bomb in a Damascus suburb. In May 2006, Mahmoud Majzoub, a senior member of the Islamic jihad committee through which Hezbollah liaised with Tehran, was killed by a car bomb as he drove for lunch in a south Lebanon restaurant.

Each of the targets had been carefully selected, placed under surveillance and the moment of their deaths was the result of the planning that would once more occupy the men in the conference room on that Sunday afternoon. It was there that the fate of Imad Mughniyeh would be settled. His death warrant was in the folder beside Dagan on the table. It had originally been signed by the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon (in 2008 still in a coma) and ratified by Ehud Olmert. The question the meeting was asked to decide was how could the warrant be executed?

On the table before each man was a copy of the file that Reuben had transmitted on a high-security line from his Berlin office. Inside the file were a series of still prints from a video, in all thirty-four images. They showed the various stages of the plastic surgery Imad Mughniyeh had undergone. First his beard had been shaved and the previous scar tissue carefully removed. A note attached to the print contained the original observation in German, now translated into Hebrew, that the scar tissue on the cheeks, jaw and the temples dated from 1993 following surgery at a clinic in Tripoli, Libya. Close-up images revealed further details of the surgeon’s work at the East German clinic. The eyes had been reshaped by tightening the skin on Mughniyeh’s temples. His lower jaw had been expertly cut, a piece of bone removed and then re-sewn to provide a narrower jaw line, which gave the face a leaner look. A number of front teeth had been removed and replaced with others of a different shape. His hair had been colored a distinguished-looking gray and, instead of his spectacles, he now wore contact lenses. Compared to the original newspaper photograph, Imad Mughniyeh looked radically different.

Those around the table decided a car bomb would once more be the most effective way to carry out the assassination. But there were problems. Mossad’s previous car bombing of Mughniyeh’s associates would undoubtedly have made him cautious about traveling anywhere in his own car. There was a possibility he would use the vehicle of one of his bodyguards. But there was no firm intelligence of who they were or what type of cars they used. The information the Mossad agent had acquired that Mughniyeh was back in Damascus looking “very different” would need time to be checked so a plan could be properly developed.

It was Meir Dagan who brought the discussion to a halt. He reminded others that in nine days time, February 12, a historic event would be taking place in Tehran and other Arab countries. It would mark the twenty-ninth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution. In Syria a day of celebration would be marked by a reception at the city’s Iranian Cultural Center, given by the newly appointed Iranian ambassador to Syria, Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi. It would be a fitting time for him to be introduced to Imad Mughniyeh. In Dagan’s view there was more than “a good chance” Mughniyeh, if he were back in Damascus, would attend the function. To refuse such an invitation would not only offend his Syrian hosts who had given him shelter, but also the Tehran mullahs and their ambassador that would bask in the reflected glory of being in the presence of such an exalted figure who had done so much damage to the West.

Meir Dagan had spoken the words he had used before at other meetings to order an assassination.

“We do it.”

By Monday, February 4, 2008, the kidon brigadier-general had chosen the three operatives he would use for the assassination. Each had been assigned a code name, which matched the one-off passport he would have. The documents would be specially prepared by the Mossad travel department from the stock of passports in storage. Other documents provided details of their home address and occupation. “Pierre,” the French passport holder, had an address in Montpelier, France, and was identified as a car mechanic. “Manuel,” the holder of the Spanish passport, had a home in Malaga and was described as a tour guide; “Ludwig” ’s German passport described him as living in Munich where he worked as an electrician.

The names, addresses, and job backgrounds were genuine, those of sayanim, the Jewish volunteers upon whom Mossad often depended on for its more dangerous operations. Among the tasks the volunteers fulfilled was that of providing cover for agents by allowing them to assume their identity.

While the documents were being prepared by the forgers working in the basement of Mossad headquarters, in the Negev Desert the three kidon memorized their “legends”—the stories they would tell if challenged by immigration, police, or the security officers of Syria. Each story was kept as simple as possible: Pierre could talk knowledgably about car engines; Manuel about his work escorting tourists around the south of Spain; Ludwig memorized the intricacies of being an electrician.

In the meantime the travel department checked the flights into Damascus. In his briefing, the brigadier-general had told the head of the department the kidon should travel separately and arrive at different times in the Syrian capital, and the flights should be on Air France, Jordanian, and Alitalia airlines. Each ticket should have a selection of return flights booked. All the seats should be in Economy. Pierre should arrive first and have a prepaid hired car waiting for him at Damascus. Like the other two, the purpose of his visit should be given as “holiday.”

In the next week a Mossad sayanim in Beirut, a man who had made the journey several times, drove north to Damascus. His familiar figure and the reason for his journey — to explore with the Syrian Ministry of Tourism the possibility of creating twin holidays to Lebanon and the historic ruins of Syria — aroused no suspicion. The sayanim visited the Ministry, made his pitch and drove around Damascus. Among the many photographs he took were several of the Iranian Cultural Center and the surrounding streets. By nightfall he was back in Beirut. That evening the photos had been transferred onto a disk and transmitted to a travel agency, a front for Mossad in downtown Tel Aviv. From there it was couriered to their headquarters in the city.

Day after day the planning for the assassination continued. Instructors at their desert base checked every detail with the kidon: the language they would speak, the clothes they would wear, the reason why they had come to Syria out of season. The answer to that, given in different ways, was they each wanted a quiet holiday and one they could afford. Like the rest of their cover stories, it was believable from the way they dressed and spoke.

In between, the three men still had much to study and memorize: the roads to the Iranian Cultural Center, the routes from across the city, the area where they could find a lock-up garage, the location of the dead-letter box where the explosives had been left for them to kill Imad Mughniyeh. The material would be placed there by the Beirut sayanim. How and when he did so would remain one of the secrets of the operation moving to its climax.

Meir Dagan had tasked Israel’s own spy satellite, Trescas, to mount surveillance in the area of Damascus where the Iranian Cultural Center was situated. Mossad had priority over all the country’s military agencies for such an operation.

Day by day images were downloaded and studied by photo interpreters in the Kirya, the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, looking for any sign of Mughniyeh. There were several “possibles,” but none that matched the photo in the file Reuben had sent. The silent search from outer space continued. Dagan had “a gut feeling” the terrorist would be going to the Iranian celebration at the cocktail party, he told his Director of Operations.

On Saturday, February 9, 2008, the three kidon made their way to Tel Aviv airport to catch their flights to Vienna, Paris, and Frankfurt. A week before, Reuben had received the file from his informer and transmitted it to Tel Aviv. By nightfall, the three kidon were in their airport hotels waiting for their flights to Damascus the following day.

On their cell phones was a close-up of Mughniyeh’s face, which had been altered in that former Stasi clinic near the River Spree.

On Sunday morning, February 10, 2008, Pierre boarded Air France Flight AF 1519 at Charles De Gaulle airport for the journey to Damascus. The sun was setting over the city when he arrived. From Madrid, Manuel had flown on Jordanian Airways Flight RJ 110 to Amman and then on to the Syrian capital. An hour later, Ludwig’s Alitalia Flight AZ 7353 had left Milan’s Malpensa airport in mid-afternoon and arrived in Damascus at 6:30 P.M. local time.

Shortly after, the three men — untroubled by Syrian immigration and customs officers — stowed their carry-in bags in the trunk of the hired car and, with Pierre at the wheel, drove into the city. By late evening they had driven past the dead-letter box and located the lock-up garage which the Beirut sayanim had said would suit their purpose. Satisfied that neither the dead-letter box nor the garage were under surveillance, they picked up the explosives, the small portable radio, and the key to the lock-up garage left in the box. Behind the door of the garage, they worked to prepare the bomb, which would be concealed inside the radio and placed in the car’s headrest on the passenger side. By dawn they had finished.

Taking turns to stand watch, the three kidon slept in the car for most of the day. Late that afternoon, they drove around the city finally passing the Iranian Cultural Center. It was bigger than the sayanim’s photographs had suggested. It stood on a road with exit routes close by. The plan they had devised would work. Satisfied, the team returned to the lock-up garage. There was no sign that anyone had disturbed its door by dislodging the piece of cigarette paper placed at the bottom.

What they did for the next twenty hours would remain a mystery.

At 7 P.M. on Tuesday, February 12, the team was back outside the Iranian Cultural Center. Ludwig took up position at one street corner, Manuel another. Pierre drove the hired car further down the street from where the oncoming traffic was approaching. He activated the bomb placed in the headrest. Inside the radio, the timer began to tick. It had a four-hour clock. It was now 7:30.

Guests for the Iranian celebration of the Khomeini Revolution were steadily making their way into the Center. At 8 P.M., the Iranian ambassador arrived and hurried inside. None of the guests resembled the face on the cell phones of the three kidon.

At 9 P.M. a silver Mitsubishi Pajero turned into the street and parked close to where Ludwig and Manuel were standing on opposite sides. For a moment the driver and his passenger sat checking the street.

Then the passenger door opened and Imad Mughniyeh emerged. He wore a dark suit and his beard had been neatly trimmed. He started to walk up the street toward where the hired car was parked. He was level with the vehicle when there was a huge explosion, which blew the car into pieces and beheaded Mughniyeh. Later, some of his body parts were found twenty meters away.

Which of the kidon was the first to trigger the bomb would remain unknown. But before the first screaming guests ran from the Iranian Cultural Center reception, and the police and ambulances arrived, the three assassins had vanished.

It would later be suggested in some reports that a car had been left for them in a nearby side street and Pierre had driven the team to a predetermined pick-up point in the south of Syria for an Israeli air force helicopter to collect them. Eyewitnesses would claim they saw a helicopter flying out to sea. Another report said they had left Damascus airport on night flights to Europe. But nobody would ever know.

On the Friday, February 15, following his assassination, Mughniyeh was buried at a huge Hezbollah funeral in Beirut from where he had first launched his terrorist activities. His mother, Um-Imad, sat amid a sea of black chadors, a somber old woman who wailed that her son had planned to visit her on what had turned out to be the day after he had died.

A few days later, she received an envelope. Inside was a copy of one of the pictures taken of Mughniyeh’s face when he had undergone his successful plastic surgery. He had been her third son to die in a Mossad car bombing.