Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 6 AVENGERS

On a warm afternoon in mid-October 1995, a technician of Mossad’s internal security division, Autahat Paylut Medienit (APM), used a hand-operated scanner to check an apartment off Pinsker Street in downtown Tel Aviv for bugging devices. The apartment was one of several safe houses Mossad owned around the city. The search was an indication of the sensitivity of the meeting shortly to take place there. Satisfied the apartment was electronically clean, he left.

The apartment’s furniture could have come from a garage sale; nothing seemed to match. A few cheaply framed pictures hung on the walls, views of the Israel tourists liked to visit. Each room had its own separate unlisted telephone. In the kitchen, instead of domestic appliances, were a computer and modem, a shredder, a fax, and, where an oven would be, a safe.

Usually the safe houses were dormitories for trainees from the Mossad school for spies on the outskirts of the city while they learned street craft: how to tail someone or themselves avoid surveillance; how to set up a dead-letter box, or exchange information concealed inside a newspaper. Day and night the streets of Tel Aviv were their proving ground under the watchful eye of instructors. Back in the safe houses, the lessons continued: how to brief a katsa going to a target country; how to write special-ink letters or use a computer to create information capable of being transmitted in very short bursts on specified frequencies.

An important part of the seemingly endless hours of training was how to form relationships with innocent, unsuspecting people. Yaakov Cohen, who worked for twenty-five years as a katsa under deep cover around the world, believed one reason for his success was lessons learned in those lectures:

“Everyone and anyone became a tool. I could lie to them because truth was not part of my relationship with them. All that mattered was using them for Israel’s benefit. From the very beginning, I learned a philosophy: Do what was right for Mossad and for Israel.”

Those who could not live by that credo found themselves swiftly dismissed from the service. For David Kimche, regarded as one of Mossad’s best operatives:

“It’s the old story of many think they are called, few are chosen. In that way we are a little like the Catholic church. Those who remain, develop bonds which will carry them through life. We live by the rule of ‘I help you, you help me.’ You learn to trust people with your life. No greater trust can ever be given by one person to another.”

By the time every man or woman who had access to the safe houses graduated to the next group, that philosophy had been engraved on their minds. They were now katsas departing on a mission or returning to be debriefed. Known as “jumpers” because they operated overseas on a short-term basis, they inevitably called the safe houses “jump sites.” Too much imaginative description was frowned upon by their superiors.

Finally, the safe houses were used as meeting places for an informer, or to interrogate a suspect who had the potential to be recruited as a “mole.” The only indication of their numbers has come from a former Mossad junior officer, Victor Ostrovsky. He claimed in 1991 there were “about 35,000 in the world; 20,000 of these operational and 15,000 sleepers. ‘Black’ agents are Arabs, while ‘white’ agents are non-Arabs. ‘Warning agents’ are strategic agents used to warn of war preparations: a doctor in a Syrian hospital who notices a large new supply of drugs and medicines arriving; a harbor employee who spots increased activity of warships.”

Some of these agents had received their first instructions in a safe house like the one that had been meticulously checked for bugs on that October afternoon. Later in the day, a handful of senior members of Israel’s intelligence community would meet around the apartment’s dining-room table to sanction an assassination that would have the full approval of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In the three years he had been in that office, Rabin had attended a growing number of funerals for the victims of terrorist attacks, each time walking behind pallbearers and watching grown men weep as they listened to the committal prayer. With each death he had conducted “a funeral in my own heart.” Afterward he had again read the words from the prophet Ezekiel: “And the enemy shall know I am the Lord when I can lay down my vengeance on them.”

This was not the first time Rabin’s vengeance had been felt; Rabin had himself on more than one occasion participated in an act of revenge. Most notable had been the assassination of Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Khalil Al-Wazir, known throughout the Arab world and on Mossad’s Honeywell computer as Abu Jihad, the voice of holy war, who lived in Tunisia. In 1988, Rabin had been Israel’s defense minister when the decision was taken in the same apartment off Pinsker Street that Abu Jihad must die.

For two months Mossad agents conducted an exhaustive reconnaissance of Abu Jihad’s villa in the resort of Sidi Bou Said on the outskirts of Tunis. Access roads, points of entry, fence heights and types, windows, doors, locks, defenses, the routing employed by Abu Jihad’s guards: everything was monitored, checked, and checked again.

They watched Abu Jihad’s wife play with her children; they came alongside her as she shopped and went to the hairdresser. They listened to her husband’s phone calls, bugged their bedroom, listened to their lovemaking. They calculated distances from one room to another, found out what the neighbors did, when they were at home, and logged the makes, colors, and registrations of all the vehicles that came and went from the villa.

The rule for preparing an assassination Meir Amit had laid down all those years ago was constantly in their minds: Think like your target and only stop being him when you pull the trigger.

Satisfied, the team returned to Tel Aviv. For the next month they practiced their deadly mission in and around a Mossad safe house near Haifa that matched the target villa. From the time they would enter Abu Jihad’s house, it should take the unit just twenty-two seconds to murder him.

On April 16, 1988, the order was given for the operation to go ahead.

That night several Israeli air force Boeing 707s took off from a military base south of Tel Aviv. One carried Yitzhak Rabin and other high-ranking Israeli officers. Their aircraft was in constant touch by safe radio with the execution team already in position and led by an operative code-named “Sword.” The other aircraft was crammed with jamming and monitoring devices. Two more 707s acted as fuel tankers. High above the villa the fleet of aircraft circled, following every move on the ground through a secure radio frequency. A little after midnight on April 17 the airborne officers heard Abu Jihad had returned home in the Mercedes Yasser Arafat had given him as a wedding gift. Prior to that the hit team had set up sensitive listening devices able to hear everything inside the villa.

From his vantage point near the villa, Sword announced into his lip mike that he could hear Abu Jihad climbing the stairs, going to his bedroom, whispering to his wife, tiptoeing to an adjoining bedroom to kiss his sleeping son, before finally going to his study on the ground floor. The details were picked up by the electronic warfare plane — the Israeli version of an American AWAC and relayed to Rabin’s command aircraft. At 12:17 A.M. he ordered: “Go!”

Outside the villa, Abu Jihad’s driver was asleep in the Mercedes. One of Sword’s men ran forward, pressed a silenced Beretta into his ear, and pulled the trigger. The driver slumped dead across the front seat.

Next, Sword and another member of the hit team laid an explosive charge at the base of the villa’s heavy iron front door. A new type of “silent” plastic explosive, it made little sound as it blew the doors clean off their hinges. Inside, two of Abu Jihad’s bodyguards were standing in the entrance hall, too stunned by the explosion to move. They, too, were shot dead by silenced weapons.

Running to the study, Sword found Abu Jihad watching video footage of the PLO. As he rose to his feet, Sword shot him twice in the chest. Abu Jihad crashed heavily to the floor. Sword stepped quickly forward and put two more bullets through his forehead.

Leaving the room, he encountered Abu Jihad’s wife. She was holding her small son in her arms.

“Get back to your room,” Sword ordered in Arabic.

Then he and the team vanished into the night. From the time they had entered the villa to departure had taken them only thirteen seconds — nine vital seconds better than their best practice run.

For the first time, an Israeli assassination met with public criticism. Cabinet minister Ezer Weizman warned that “liquidating individuals will not advance the peace process.”

Nevertheless the assassinations continued.

Two months later, South African police were finally forced to reveal a secret that Israel had pressed them to keep: Mossad had executed a Johannesburg businessman, Alan Kidger, who had been supplying high-tech equipment to Iran and Iraq that could be used to manufacture biochemical weapons. Kidger had been found with his arms and legs amputated. Johannesburg’s chief police investigator, Colonel Charles Landman, said the killing was a “clear message from the Israeli government through its Mossad.”

Six weeks before the execution of Abu Jihad, Mossad had played an important role in another controversial assassination — that of three unarmed members of the IRA shot dead on a Sunday afternoon in Gibraltar by a team of Britain’s Special Air Services marksmen.

In previous years, some of their colleagues from British intelligence had been secretly brought to Tel Aviv by Rafi Eitan to witness firsthand how Mossad executed Arab terrorists in the back streets of Beirut and Lebanon’s Bekáa Valley.

Four months before the Gibraltar shootings, Mossad agents had begun their own surveillance of Mairead Farrell, Sean Savage, and Daniel McCann in the belief they were once more on a “shopping spree for Arab arms for the IRA.”

Mossad’s close interest in the activities of the IRA went back to the time when the Thatcher government had, in the utmost secrecy, brought Rafi Eitan to Belfast to brief the security forces on the developing links between the Irish terror groups and the Hezbollah.

“I arrived on a rainy day. It rained every day I was in Ireland. I told the British all we knew. Then I went on a tour of the province, all the way down to the border with the Republic. I was careful not to cross over. Imagine what the Irish government would have said if they’d picked me up! Before I left I arranged for the SAS to come to Israel so they could see something of our methods in handling terrorists.”

From those early beginnings a close working relationship developed between the SAS and Mossad. Senior Mossad officers would regularly travel to SAS headquarters in Hereford to brief special forces on operations in the Middle East. On at least one occasion a joint Mossad-SAS unit trailed several high-ranking IRA men from Belfast to Beirut and photographed them in meetings with Hezbollah leaders.

In October 1987, Mossad agents tracked the tramp steamer Eksund as it made its way through the Mediterranean with 120 tons of arms, including surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, machine guns, explosives, and detonators. All had been purchased through IRA contacts in Beirut. The Eksund was intercepted by the French authorities.

Unable to make headway with the Irish security authorities — at least one Mossad officer still believed this stemmed from Israel’s strong opposition to Ireland’s peacekeeping role in Lebanon — Mossad used Britain’s SAS as a conduit to tip off Dublin about other arms shipments heading for Ireland.

The Mossad agents trailing the IRA commando unit in Spain quickly decided they were not there to meet Arab arms dealers, nor to make contact with ETA, the Basque terrorist group. Nevertheless, the Mossad team continued to dog the footsteps of Spain’s International Terrorism Unit, who were also following the Irish trio.

At first there was a keep-your-distance attitude by the Spaniards. This was their operation — the first time they had become seriously involved with both MI5 and the SAS in dealing with the IRA. Understandably, the Spaniards wanted to ensure the glory, if it came, would be theirs. Mossad quickly made it clear that all they wanted to do was help. Relieved, the Spaniards were soon working together with Mossad.

When the Spanish lost track of Mairead Farrell, it was a katsa who located her. He discovered that Farrell had hired another car, a white Fiesta, and parked it, loaded with sixty-four kilos of Semtex and thirty-six kilos of shrapnel, in an underground parking lot in Marbella.

The fashionable resort is not only a favorite refuge from the fierce desert sun where a number of Arab notables spend their time dreaming of the day the hated Israel will be overrun; Marbella is only a short distance from the raffish marina of Puerto Banus, where many Arab petrodollar millionaires kept their luxury yachts. Mossad had long feared that the boats traveled the length of the Mediterranean to smuggle explosives and weapons to Arab terrorists. Farrell’s car was suspected of being parked for that purpose, ready to be hoisted on board a boat ostensibly bound on a cruise to the Holy Land.

The Mossad team conducted surveillance on the car. They also spotted Farrell at the wheel of another Fiesta, the one she had used to drive McCann and Savage around Spain these past weeks. Two of the Mossad team followed the IRA unit as it drove south toward Puerto Banus. Ten minutes after leaving Marbella, Farrell passed the entrance to the marina and continued on down the coast.

Using their car radio tuned to the police channel, the Mossad katsa alerted the Spanish police that the IRA trio were heading toward Gibraltar. The Spanish alerted the British authorities. The SAS team moved into position. Hours later Farrell, McCann, and Savage were shot dead. They were given no warning or chance to surrender. They were executed.

A week later, Stephen Lander, the MI5 officer officially credited with running the operation — and who would later become director general of MI5—telephoned Admoni to thank Mossad for their help with the assassination.

On that October evening in 1995, in the safe house off Pinsker Street, all was ready for the meeting to settle the next assassination.

Selected for execution was the religious head of Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shkaki. Mossad had established that his group had orchestrated the deaths of over twenty Israeli passengers in a bus destroyed the previous January by two suicide bombers outside the small town of Beit Lid.

The incident brought the number of terrorist attacks to over ten thousand in the last quarter century. In that time over four hundred Israelis had been killed and another thousand injured. Many of those responsible for this catalog of death and maiming had themselves been hunted down and killed in what katsa Yaakov Cohen, who had himself done his share of revenge taking, would describe as “all those back streets that have no names; where a knife can be more effective at times than a gun; where it’s either kill or be killed.”

In this pitiless world Shkaki had long been lionized by his people. It was he who had personally granted the bombers of Beit Lid absolution from the inviolable Islamic prohibition against suicide. To do so he had combed the Koran to extrapolate a philosophical assumption that oppression makes the oppressed discover new strengths; in preparing the suicide bombers he had exploited the psychological flaws in unbalanced youngsters who, like the Japanese kamikaze teenagers in World War II, went to their own end on that January day in a state of religious fervor. Afterward, Shkaki had paid for their death notices in Jihad’s newspaper and, at Friday prayers, had praised their sacrifice, assuring their families their sons had found a place in heaven.

In the tension of the streets where he operated, it had become a matter of honor for a family to provide a son for Shkaki to sacrifice. Those who died were remembered each day after the muezzin wailed through the crackling loudspeakers to call the faithful to prayer. In the shadowy coolness of the mosques of south Lebanon, their memories were kept alive.

His next recruits chosen, their target selected, Shkaki would hand the youths over to his bomb makers. They were the strategists who could study a photograph of a target and decide upon the quantity of explosive needed. Like ancient alchemists, they worked by experience and instinct, and their language was filled with the words that brought death: “oxidizer,” “desensitizer,” “plasticines,” and “freezing point depressants.” These were Shkaki’s people. Borrowing a phrase once used by a leader of his hated enemy, Israel, he told them all: “We fight, therefore we exist.”

On that October evening when his fate was about to be settled in the Tel Aviv safe house, Shkaki was at home in Damascus with his wife, Fathia. The apartment was strikingly different from the squalor of the refugee camps where he was venerated. Expensive carpets and wall hangings were gifts from the ayatollahs of Iran. A gold-framed photograph of Shkaki with Mu’ammar Gadhafi was a present from the Libyan leader. A coffee service made of silver was a gift from the Syrian president. Shkaki’s clothes were far removed from the simple gown he wore on his crusades among the impoverished masses in south Lebanon. At home he wore robes cut from the finest cloth available from London’s Savile Row and his feet were shod in custom-made shoes bought in Rome, not the bazaar sandals he wore in public.

Over his favorite meal of couscous, Shkaki reassured his wife he would be safe on his forthcoming trip to Libya to seek further funds from Gadhafi; he hoped to return with one million dollars, the full amount he had requested in a fax to Libya’s revolutionary headquarters in Tripoli. As usual the money would be laundered through a Libyan bank in Valletta on the island of Malta. Shkaki planned to spend less than a day on the island before catching the flight home.

News of the stopover in Malta had prompted his two teenage sons to give him their own shopping order: half a dozen shirts each from a Malta store where Shkaki had shopped previously.

Fathia Shkaki would recall: “My husband insisted if the Israelis were planning a move against him, they would have done so by now. The Jews always respond quickly to any incident. But my husband was very certain in his case they would do nothing to make Syria angry.”

Until three months before, Shkaki would have correctly judged the mood in Tel Aviv. Early in the summer of 1995, Rabin had turned down a Mossad plan to firebomb Shkaki’s apartment in the western suburb of Damascus. Uri Saguy, then chief of military intelligence and effectively Israel’s intelligence supremo, who had authority even over Mossad, had told Rabin he detected “a sea change in Damascus. Assad is still on the surface our enemy. But the only way to overcome him is to do the unexpected. And that means giving up the Golan Heights, give it up completely. Move every one of our people out of there. It’s a huge price. But it is the only way to get a proper lasting peace.”

Rabin had listened. He knew how much the Golan had personally cost Uri Saguy. He had spent most of his military career defending its rugged terrain. He had been wounded four times doing so. Yet he was prepared to put all this behind him to see Israel have real peace.

The prime minister had postponed Mossad’s plans to eliminate Shkaki while Saguy continued to explore the reality of his hopes.

They had withered in the heat of the region’s summer, and Rabin, who was now a Nobel Peace Prize winner, had ordered Shkaki’s execution.

Shabtai Shavit, in his last major operation as Mossad’s chief, ordered a “black agent” in Damascus to resume electronic surveillance of Shkaki’s apartment. The agent’s American equipment was sophisticated enough to override the defense circuit breakers in Shkaki’s Russianbuilt communications system.

Details of Shkaki’s forthcoming visit to Libya and Malta were sent to Tel Aviv.

Now, on that October evening in 1995, the heads of Israel’s three most powerful intelligence services made their way through the crowds strolling along Pinsker Street. Each one supported the conditions for executing a self-proclaimed enemy of Israel that Meir Amit had so clearly defined when he had been director general:

“There would be no killing of political leaders. They needed to be dealt with politically. There would be no killing of a terrorist’s family. If its members got in the way, that was not our problem. Each execution had to be sanctioned by the prime minister of the day. And everything must be done by the book. Minutes kept of the decision taken. Everything neat and tidy. Our actions must not be seen as some act of state-sponsored murder but the ultimate judicial sanction the state could bring. We would be no different from the hangman or any other lawfully appointed executioner.”

Since the successful hunting down of the nine terrorists who had killed the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in 1972, all subsequent assassinations had broadly observed these conditions. Almost twenty-three years to the day since Meir Amit had first formulated the rules for a state-sponsored killing, his successors headed for the safe house.

The first to arrive was Shabtai Shavit. Colleagues unkindly said he had the manner of a front-desk clerk in one of Tel Aviv’s lesser hotels: the same carefully pressed clothes, the handshake that never maintained its grip for long. He had been in the job for three years and gave the impression he never quite knew how long he would remain.

Next came Brigadier General Doran Tamir, chief intelligence officer for the Israel Defense Forces. Nimble and in the prime of his life, everything about him suggested the authority that came from long years of commanding.

Finally Uri Saguy arrived, strolling into the safe house like a warrior god on his way to stardom even more glittering than his position as director of Aman, military intelligence. Soft-voiced and self-deprecating, he continued to provoke controversy among his peers by insisting that beneath its renewed bluster, Syria was still ready to talk peace.

The relationship among the three men was, in Shavit’s words, “cautiously cordial.”

Said Uri Saguy, “We can hardly compare with each other. As head of Aman, I tasked the other two. There was competition between us but, as long as we were serving the same aim, it’s fine.”

For two hours they sat around the living-room table and reviewed the plan to have Fathi Shkaki murdered. His execution would be an act of pure vengeance, the biblical “eye for an eye” principle Israelis liked to believe justified such killings. But sometimes Mossad killed a person when he stubbornly refused to provide his skills to support Israel’s aspirations. Then, rather than risk those talents falling into the hands of an enemy, he too was ruthlessly terminated.

Dr. Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist, was the world’s greatest expert on barrel ballistics. Israel had made several unsuccessful attempts to buy his expertise. Each time Bull had made clear his distaste for the Jewish state.

Instead he had offered his services to Saddam Hussein to build a supergun capable of launching shells containing nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads from Iraq directly into Israel. The supergun’s barrel was 487 feet long, composed of thirty-two tons of steel supplied by British firms to Iraq. Late in 1989 a prototype had been test-fired at a gunnery range at Mosul in northern Iraq. Saddam Hussein had ordered three of the weapons to be built at a cost of $20 million. Bull was retained as a consultant at $1 million. The project was code-named Babylon.

His company, Space Research Corporation (SRC), was registered in Brussels as an armaments design company. From there it had sent out a detailed requirement list to European suppliers, including twenty in Britain, to provide high-technology components.

On February 17, 1990, a katsa in Brussels obtained copies of documents setting Babylon’s technical goals: the supergun was really going to be an intermediate range ballistics missile. The core of the weapon’s launch system would be Scud missiles grouped in clusters of eight to give the warheads a range of 1,500 miles. That would place not only Israel but many European cities in range. Bull believed it would be possible to eventually produce a supergun capable of landing a direct hit on London from Baghdad.

Mossad’s director general, Nahum Admoni, sought an immediate meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. A former urban guerrilla leader who had ruthlessly fought the British during the dying weeks of the Mandate, Shamir was the kind of political leader Mossad liked, fully supporting the need to destroy Israel’s enemies when it was critical and all else failed. During the 1960s, when Nazi rocket scientists were working with Egypt to provide long-range weapons capable of hitting Israel from across the Sinai Desert, Shamir had been called in by Mossad to provide expertise in planning assassinations. His speciality during the Mandate rule had been devising means to eliminate British soldiers. Shamir had sent former members of his underground forces to kill the German scientists. Some of these assassins later became founding members of the Mossad’s kidon unit.

Shamir spent only a short time studying Mossad’s file on Bull. The service had done its usual thorough job tracing Bull’s career from the time, at the age of twenty-two, he had been awarded a doctorate in physics and gone to work for the Canadian government’s Armaments and Research Development Establishment. There he had clashed with senior officials, sowing the seeds for what had become a lifelong hatred of bureaucrats. He had set up as a private consultant—“literally a gun for hire,” the file observed with a touch of black humor.

His reputation as an armaments inventor was established in 1976 when he designed a .45-caliber howitzer that could shell targets twenty-five miles away; at that time the only comparable weapon NATO possessed had a maximum range of only seventeen miles. But once more Bull fell foul of government attitudes. NATO members were blocked from buying the new gun because the major European weapon producers had effective political lobbies. Bull finally sold the howitzer to South Africa.

He then moved to China, helping the People’s Liberation Army develop its missile capability. Bull enhanced the existing Silkworm rockets by giving them a larger range and a greater payload of explosives. Batches of the rockets were then sold by China to Saddam Hussein. Initially Iraq deployed them in the long-running war against neighboring Iran. But a sufficient quantity of Silkworms remained at Iraqi launch sites for Mossad to believe they would eventually be used against Israel.

Meanwhile, project Babylon was gathering pace. A more advanced prototype had been test-fired. Opponents of the Saddam regime who had been recruited as Mossad informers in Iraq reported that missile nose cones were being designed to hold chemical and biological weapons.

On the afternoon of March 20, 1990, in the prime minister’s office, Yitzhak Shamir agreed with Nahum Admoni that Gerald Bull had to die.

Two days after the decision was taken, a two-man kidon team arrived in Brussels. Waiting for them was the katsa who had been closely monitoring Bull’s activities.

At 6:45 on the evening of March 22, 1990, the three men drove in a hired car to the apartment block where Bull lived. Each kidon carried a handgun in a holster under his jacket.

Twenty minutes later, the sixty-one-year-old Bull answered the chiming doorbell of his luxury apartment. He was shot five times in the head and the neck, the kidons firing their 7.65-mm pistols in turn, leaving Bull dead outside his doorway. Later, Bull’s son, Michael, would insist his father had been warned that Mossad would kill him. He could not say who had given the warning or why his father had ignored it.

Once the kidon team was safely back home, Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare began to feed stories to the media, strongly suggesting that Gerald Bull had died because he had planned to renege on his deal with Saddam Hussein. Now, five years later, the tactics used to execute Bull, a scientist Israel considered as much of a terrorist as Fathi Shkaki, were once more to be implemented on the direct order of another prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

On October 24, 1995, two men in their late twenties — code-named Gil and Ran — left Tel Aviv on separate flights; Ran flew to Athens, Gil to Rome. At each airport they collected new British passports handed over by a local sayan. They arrived in Malta on a late-afternoon flight and checked into the Diplomat Hotel overlooking Valletta’s harbor.

That evening a motorcycle was delivered to Ran. He told staff he planned to use it to tour the island.

No one at the hotel would recall the two men having any contact. They spent most of their time in their rooms. When one of the bellboys had remarked that Gil’s Samsonite case was heavy, Gil had winked and said it was filled with gold bars.

That evening a freighter that had sailed the previous day from the port of Haifa, bound for Italy, radioed the Maltese harbor authorities reporting it had developed engine trouble and, while it was being fixed, the ship would remain hove to off the island. On board the freighter were Shabtai Shavit and a small team of Mossad communication technicians. They established a radio link with Gil, whose suitcase contained a small but powerful radio.

The suitcase’s locks had to be opened counterclockwise to deactivate the fuses in the two charges built into the lid. They were designed to explode in the face of anyone who opened the case after turning the keys clockwise. The radio’s rhombic antenna, a quarter of a mile of fiber-optic cable, was tightly coiled to form a disk six inches in diameter. Splitters connected the disk to four dipoles welded to the inside corner of the Samsonite. During the night Gil received a number of radio messages from the boat.

Fathi Shkaki had arrived earlier that day on the Tripoli-Valletta ferry, accompanied by Libyan security men who had stayed on board, their responsibilities over when Shkaki came ashore alone. Before doing so, he had shaved off his beard. He identified himself to Maltese immigration officers as Ibrahim Dawish, showing them his Libyan passport. After checking into the Diplomat Hotel, he spent the next few hours in seafront cafés, sipping endless cups of coffee and nibbling sweet Arabic cakes. He made several telephone calls.

The next morning Shkaki was returning with the promised shirts for his sons, strolling along the seafront, when two men on a motorcycle slowed beside him. One of them shot the Jihad leader at point-blank range six times in the head. Shkaki died instantly. The motorcyclists disappeared. Neither was ever found. But an hour later a fishing boat sailed out of Valletta harbor and dropped anchor in the lee of the freighter. Shortly afterward the captain informed the harbor authorities that the engine malfunction had been temporarily repaired but the ship was returning to Haifa for further repairs.

In Iran, the spiritual home of Shkaki, the mullahs declared a day of national mourning. In Tel Aviv, asked to comment on the death, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said: “I am certainly not sad.”

A few days later, on November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated at a Tel Aviv peace rally, close to the safe house where his order to execute Shkaki had been prepared. Rabin had died at the hands of a Jewish fanatic, Yigal Amir, who in many ways had the same ruthless qualities the prime minister had so admired in Mossad.

Yitzhak Rabin, the hawk who had become a dove, the powerful political leader who had come to realize the only chance of peace in the Middle East was, as he once misquoted his favorite book, the Bible, “is to turn our swords into ploughshares and till the soil with our Arab neighbors,” was murdered by one of his own people because he failed to accept that his Jewish enemies would behave with the same ferocity as his old Arab foes had done — both groups determined to destroy his vision of the future.

In 1998 there were forty-eight members in the Mossad kidon unit, six of them women. All were in their twenties and superbly fit. They lived and worked outside Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, based in a restricted area of a military base in the Negev Desert. The facility could be adapted to approximate a street or a building where an assassination was to take place. There were getaway cars and an obstacle course to negotiate.

The instructors included former unit members who supervised practice with a variety of guns, and taught how to conceal bombs, administer a lethal injection in a crowd, and make a killing appear accidental. Kidons reviewed films on successful assassinations — the shooting of President John F. Kennedy, for example — and studied the faces and habits of scores of potential targets stored on their own highly restricted computer and memorized the constantly changing street plans of major cities as well as air and seaport layouts.

The unit worked in teams of four who regularly flew abroad on familiarization trips to London, Paris, Frankfurt, and other European cities. There were also occasional trips to New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. During all of these outings a team was always accompanied by instructors who assessed their skills in setting up an operation without drawing attention to themselves. Targets were chosen from local sayanim volunteers who were only told they were taking part in a security exercise designed to protect an Israeli-owned facility; a synagogue or bank were usually given as the reason. Volunteers found themselves pounced upon in a quiet street and bundled into a car, or had their homes entered in the middle of the night and awoke to find themselves peering down a gun barrel.

Kidons took these training exercises very seriously, for every team was aware of what was known as the “Lillehammer Fiasco.”

In July 1973, at the height of the manhunt for the killers of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mossad received a tip that the “Red Prince” Ali Hassan Salameh, who had planned the operation, was working in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer as a waiter.

Mossad’s then director of operations, Michael Harari, had put together a team not drawn from the kidon unit; its members were scattered across the world chasing the remaining terrorists who had carried out the Munich killings. Harari’s team had no field experience, but he was confident his own background as a katsa in Europe was sufficient. His team included two women, Sylvia Rafael and Marianne Gladnikoff, and an Algerian, Kemal Bename, who had been a Black September courier before being browbeaten by Harari into becoming a double agent.

The operation had run into disaster from the outset. The arrival of a dozen strangers in Lillehammer, where there had not been a murder for forty years, aroused speculation. The local police began to watch them. Officers were close by when Harari and his team shot dead a Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki, who had no connection to terrorism and did not even physically resemble Salameh. Harari and some of his squad managed to escape. But six Mossad operatives were captured, including both women.

They made full confessions, revealing for the first time Mossad’s assassination methods and other equally embarrassing details about the service’s clandestine activities. The women, together with their male colleagues, were charged with second-degree murder and received jail sentences of five years each.

Returning to Israel, Harari was fired and the entire Mossad undercover network in Europe of safe houses, dead-letter boxes, and secret phone numbers was abandoned.

It would be six years before Ali Hassan Salameh would finally die in the operation masterminded by Rafi Eitan, who said, “Lillehammer was an example of the wrong people for the wrong job. It should never have happened — and must never happen again.”

It did.

On July 31, 1997, the day after two Hamas suicide bombers killed 15 and injured another 157 people in a Jerusalem marketplace, Mossad chief Danny Yatom attended a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The prime minister had just come from an emotional press conference at which he had promised that he would never rest until those who planned the suicide bombings were no longer a threat.

Publicly, Netanyahu had appeared calm and resolute, his responses to questions measured and magisterial; Hamas would not escape retribution, but what form that would take was not a matter for discussion. This was the “Bibi” from Netanyahu’s days on CNN during the Iraqi war, when he had earned repeated praise for his authoritative assessments of Saddam Hussein’s responses and how they were viewed in Israel.

But on that stifling day, away from the cameras and surrounded only by Yatom and other senior intelligence officers and his own political advisers, Netanyahu offered a very different image. He was neither cool nor analytical. Instead, in the crowded conference room adjoining his office, he frequently interrupted to shout he was going to “get those Hamas bastards if it’s the last thing I do.”

He added, according to one of those present, that “you are here to tell me how this is going to happen. And I don’t want to read in the newspapers anything about ‘Bibi’s’ revenge. This is about justice — just retribution.”

The agenda had been set.

Yatom, well used to the mercurial mood swings of the prime minister, sat silently across the table as Netanyahu continued to bluster. “I want their heads. I want them dead. I don’t care how it’s done. I just want it done. And I want it done sooner rather than later.”

Tension deepened when Netanyahu demanded that Yatom provide a list of all Hamas leaders and their present whereabouts. No prime minister had ever before asked for sensitive operational details at such an early stage. More than one person in the room thought that “Bibi was sending a signal he was going to be hands-on for this one.”

It deepened the unease among some Mossad officers that the service was being forced to come too close to Netanyahu. Perhaps sensing this, Yatom told the prime minister that he would provide the list later. Instead, the Mossad chief suggested that it was “time to look at the practical side of things.” Locating the Hamas leaders would be “like searching for individual rats in a Beirut sewer.”

Once more Netanyahu erupted. He didn’t want excuses; he wanted action. And he wanted it to start “here and now.”

After the meeting ended, several intelligence officers were left with the impression that Bibi Netanyahu had crossed the fine line where political expediency ended and operational requirements took over. There could not have been a man in the room who did not realize that Netanyahu badly needed a public relations coup to convince the public the act-tough-on-terrorism policy that had brought him into office was not just empty rhetoric. He had also gone from one scandal to another, each time barely wriggling clear by leaving others to carry the blame. His popularity was at an alltime low. His personal life was all over the press. He badly needed to show he was in charge. To deliver the head of a Hamas leader was one surefire way.

A senior Israeli intelligence officer undoubtedly spoke for many when he said:

“While we all agreed there could be no objection to the principle that to cut off the head kills the snake, it was the time frame which was our concern. All Bibi’s talk about ‘action now’ was pure bullshit. Any operation of that nature requires careful planning. Bibi wanted results as if this was a computer game, or one of those old action-hero movies he likes to watch. But it just doesn’t work like that in the real world.”

Yatom ordered a full search of every Arab country and sent katsas into Gaza and the West Bank to discover more about the whereabouts of the shadowy figures who control Hamas. Throughout August 1997, he was summoned several times to the prime minister’s office to report on his progress. There was none. The Israeli intelligence community was rife with accounts of how the prime minister had demanded that Yatom put more men into the field and had begun to hint that if he didn’t see results soon, he might have to take “other actions.” If Netanyahu had intended this to be a clumsy threat to his Mossad chief, it did not work. Yatom simply said he was “doing everything possible.” The unspoken implication was that if the prime minister wanted to fire him, that was his prerogative; but in the public debate that would inevitably follow, there would be questions asked about Netanyahu’s own role. But the prime minister continued to press for the death of a Hamas leader — and he wanted it sooner rather than later.

By September 1997, Netanyahu had begun to call Yatom at all hours of the night about progress. The pressurized Mossad chief bowed. He pulled in katsas from other stations. For one, “Yatom was rearranging the map as a knee-jerk to Bibi’s demands. Yatom is one tough guy. But when it came to push-and-shove, he was just no match for Bibi, who had started to talk about how quickly his brother had helped to put together the raid on Entebbe. The comparison had no meaning. But that’s Bibi all over — use anything that can push his case.”

On September 9, news reached Tel Aviv that Hamas had struck again, this time seriously wounding two Israeli bodyguards of the cultural attaché at the newly opened Israeli embassy in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

Three days later, shortly before the Friday Sabbath began, Netanyahu requested that Yatom join him for lunch at his home in Jerusalem. The two men sat down to a meal of soup, salad, and a fish course, washed down with beer and bottled water. The prime minister immediately raised the attack in Amman. How could the Hamas gunmen have come close enough to shoot? Why had there been no advance warning? What was the Mossad station in Amman doing about it?

Yatom interrupted Netanyahu in midflow: There was a Hamas leader in Amman named Khalid Meshal who ran the organization’s politburo from an office in the city. For weeks Meshal had been traveling through various Arab countries, but Amman station reported that he was back in the city.

Netanyahu was galvanized. “Then go and knock him down!” he said across the table. “That’s what you have to do. Knock him down! Send your people in Amman to do that!”

Stung by almost six weeks of relentless pressure from a prime minister who increasingly had appeared to have no grasp of the political sensitivity of any intelligence operation, the Mossad chief delivered a sharp lesson. Eyes glinting behind his spectacles, he warned that to launch an attack in Amman would destroy the relationship with Jordan that Netanyahu’s predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, had created. To actually kill Meshal on Jordanian soil would jeopardize Mossad’s operations in a country that had yielded a continuous flow of intelligence about Syria, Iraq, and Palestinian extremists. Yatom suggested it would be better to wait until Meshal once more left Amman and then strike.

“Excuses! That’s all you give me! Excuses!” Netanyahu was said to have shouted. “I want action. I want it now. The people want action. It’s Rosh Hashanah soon!” he added, in a reference to the Jewish New Year. “This will be my gift to them!”

From that moment on, every move that Yatom made would be personally approved by Netanyahu. No other Israeli prime minister had taken such a close personal interest in a state-sponsored act of murder.

Khalid Meshal was forty-one years old, a full-bearded and physically strong man. He lived close to King Hussein’s palace and by all accounts was a devoted husband and father of seven children. Cultured and well-spoken, he had remained a little-known figure in the Islamic fundamentalist movement. But the rapidly assembled data that Mossad’s Amman station had put together indicated Meshal was the driving force behind the suicide bomb attacks against Israeli civilians.

Details of Meshal’s movements had been furnished, together with a photograph the Mossad head of station had surreptitiously taken. With his report was a personal plea that Yatom should once more try to persuade Netanyahu not to go ahead with an assassination in Amman. Such a reckless action would jeopardize two years of important counterespionage work Mossad had done with Jordan’s cooperation.

Netanyahu had rejected the plea, saying it sounded like a prediction of failure, something he would not tolerate.

Meantime, an eight-man kidon squad had been preparing: a two-man team would actually carry out the hit in broad daylight; the others would provide backup, including car support. The team would all drive back into Israel, crossing over at the Allenby Bridge near Jerusalem.

Mossad’s weapon of choice was unusual, not a gun, but an aerosol filled with a nerve agent. It would be the first time a kidon hit team had used this method of killing, though it had long been perfected by the KGB and other Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies. Russian scientists recently emigrated to Israel had been recruited by Mossad to create a range of deadly toxins, including tabun, sarin, and soman, nerve agents that were all outlawed under international treaties. The substances were intended to produce death that could be instantaneous or lingering; in all cases the victim lost control over his internal organs and suffered pain so excruciating that death itself would be a merciful release. This form of killing had been selected as appropriate for Meshal.

On September 24, 1997, the kidon unit flew into Amman from Athens, Rome, and Paris, where they had been positioned for several days. Some members traveled on French and Italian documents. The hit men had been given Canadian passports in the names of Barry Beads and Sean Kendall. They told staff when they checked into the city’s Intercontinental Hotel they were tourists. The other katsas bedded down in the Israeli embassy a short distance away.

Beads and Kendall joined them the next day. The two men once more inspected the aerosol. No one knew which nerve agent it contained. The agents speculated that it could induce anything from hallucinations to heart failure before death. They were briefed on the latest movements of Meshal by the station chief.

He had been in London in September 1978 when a Bulgarian defector, Georgi Markov, had been killed by a nerve agent. A passerby had jabbed him in the thigh with the tip of an umbrella. Markov had died an excruciating death caused by ricin, a deadly poison made from the seeds of the castor-oil plant. The passerby had been a KGB agent who had never been caught.

On that optimistic note, Beads and Kendall returned to their hotel shortly before midnight. Each ordered a room service breakfast of coffee, orange juice, and Danish pastries. Next morning, at 9:00 A.M., Beads appeared in the lobby and signed for the first of two rented cars, a blue Toyota. The second, a green Hyundai, arrived shortly afterward and was claimed by Kendall. He told one of the front-desk staff that he and “his friend” were going to explore the south of the country.

At 10:00 A.M. Meshal was being driven by his chauffeur to work; in the back of the car with him were three of his young children, a boy and two girls. Beads followed at a discreet distance in his rented car. Other team members were out on the road in other cars.

As they entered the city’s Garden District, the chauffeur informed Meshal that they were being followed. Meshal used the car phone to call in the make and number of Beads’s car to Amman police headquarters.

As the rented Toyota drove past, Meshal’s children waved at Beads, as they had done to other motorists. The Mossad agent ignored them. Next Kendall’s green Hyundai pulled ahead of the chauffeur and both cars disappeared into the traffic.

Moments later an officer at Amman police headquarters called Meshal to say the car was rented to a Canadian tourist. Meshal relaxed and watched his children once more waving at passing motorists, their faces pressed close to the windows. Every morning they took turns riding with their father to work before the chauffeur dropped them off at school.

Shortly before 10:30 A.M. the chauffeur pulled into Wasfi Al-Tal Street, where a crowd had gathered outside the Hamas office, with Kendall and Beads among them. Their presence caused no alarm; curious tourists often came to the office to learn more about Hamas’s aspirations.

Meshal quickly kissed his children before leaving the car. Beads stepped forward as if to shake him by the hand. Kendall was at his shoulder, fumbling with a plastic bag.

“Mr. Meshal?” asked Beads pleasantly.

Meshal looked at him uncertainly. At that moment Kendall produced the aerosol and tried to spray its contents into Meshal’s left ear.

The Hamas leader recoiled, startled, wiping his lobe.

Kendall made another attempt to spray the substance into Meshal’s ear. Around him the crowd were beginning to recover from their surprise, and hands reached out to grab the agents.

“Run!” said Beads in Hebrew.

Followed by Kendall, Beads sprinted to his car, parked a little way up the street. Meshal’s chauffeur had seen what was happening and began to reverse back down the street, trying to ram the Toyota.

Meshal was staggering around, moaning. People were trying to support him from falling. Others were shouting for an ambulance.

Beads, with Kendall sprawled beside him and still clutching his half-used aerosol, managed to avoid the chauffeur’s car and was accelerating up the street.

Other cars were in pursuit. One of the drivers had a cell phone and was calling for roads in the area to be blocked. The chauffeur was using his car phone to contact police headquarters.

By now backup members of the kidon team had arrived. One of them stopped and waved for Beads to transfer to his car. As the two Mossad men jumped out of the Toyota, another vehicle blocked their path. From it emerged a number of armed men. They forced Beads and Kendall to lie on the ground. Moments later the police arrived. Realizing there was nothing they could now do, the remaining members of the kidon team drove away, eventually making their way undetected back to Israel.

Beads and Kendall were less fortunate. They were taken to Amman central police quarters, where they produced their Canadian passports and insisted they were victims of some “horrendous plot.” The arrival of Samih Batihi, the formidable chief of Jordanian counterintelligence, ended the pretense. He told them he knew who they were; he had just gotten off the phone with the Mossad station chief. Later, according to Batihi, the spymaster had “made a clean breast. He said they were his people and Israel would deal directly with the king.”

Batihi ordered that the two Mossad agents be locked in separate cells but that they not be harmed in any way.

Meantime, Meshal had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Amman’s main hospital. He complained of a persistent “ringing” in his left ear, a “shivery feeling like a shock running through my body,” and increasing difficulty with breathing.

The doctors put him on a life-support system.

News of the operation’s failure reached Yatom in a secure telephone call from the station chief in the Israeli embassy in Amman. Both men were said to be “beyond rage” at the debacle.

By the time Yatom reached Netanyahu’s office, the prime minister had received a telephone call from King Hussein on the hot line installed between the two leaders to deal with a crisis. The flavor of the call came later from an Israeli intelligence officer:

“Hussein had two questions for Bibi. What the fuck did he think he had been playing at? Did he have an antidote for the nerve gas?”

The king said he felt like a man whose best friend had raped his daughter and that if Netanyahu was thinking of denying everything, he had better understand his two agents had made a full confession on video, which was now on its way to Washington for Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, to review. Netanyahu sat there hunched over his phone, “as white as anyone caught with his hand in the till.”

Netanyahu offered to fly at once to Amman to “explain matters” to the king. Hussein told him not to waste his time. The intelligence officer recalled:

“You could hear the ice crackling on the line from Jordan. Bibi didn’t even protest when Hussein told him that he now expected Israel to release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin [the Hamas leader Israel had held in prison for some time], as well as a number of other Palestinian prisoners. The call lasted only a few minutes. It must have been the worst moment in Bibi’s political life.”

Events now took on their own momentum. Within an hour, an antidote to the nerve gas had been flown to Amman by an Israeli military plane and administered to Meshal. He began to recover and, within a few days, was well enough to stage a press conference in which he ridiculed Mossad. The Amman station chief and Samih Batihi had a short meeting during which they also spoke to Yatom on the phone. The director general fervently promised there would never be another assassination attempt carried out by Mossad on Jordanian soil. Next day Madeleine Albright made two short calls to Netanyahu; she made it clear what she thought of what had happened, her language at times as salty as King Hussein’s.

Learning how its passports had been compromised, Canada recalled its ambassador to Israel — a move that fell just short of breaking off diplomatic relations.

When details began to emerge, Netanyahu received a roasting in the Israeli and international press that would have driven other men to resign.

Within a week, Sheikh Yassin was released and returned to a hero’s welcome in Gaza. By then Kendall and Beads were back in Israel, minus their Canadian passports. These had been handed over to the Canadian embassy in Amman for “safekeeping.”

The two katsas never returned to the kidon unit; they were assigned to nonspecific desk duties at Mossad headquarters. As an Israeli intelligence officer said: “That could mean they would be in charge of security in the building’s toilets.”

But Yatom had become a lame-duck chief. His senior staff felt he had failed to stand up to Netanyahu. Morale within Mossad slumped to a new low. The prime minister’s office leaked the view that it “is only a matter of time before Yatom goes.”

Yatom tried to stem what one Mossad senior officer likened to “the tidal wave of dejection in which we are drowning.” Yatom adopted what he called “his Prussian pose.” He tried to browbeat his staff. There were angry confrontations and threats to resign.

In February 1998, it was Yatom himself who resigned in an attempt to head off what he acknowledged was “a near mutiny.” Prime Minister Netanyahu did not send his fallen intelligence chief the customary letter of thanks for services rendered.

Yatom left office with the first ripples of a sensation beginning to emerge over the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A dedicated Israeli investigative reporter, Barry Chamish, had privately gathered medical and ballistics reports and eyewitness accounts from Rabin’s bodyguards, his widow, surgeons, and nurses, together with members of the Israeli intelligence community he had spoken to. Much of it was evidence given in closed court.

By 1999 Chamish, at risk to himself, had begun to publish his findings over the Internet. They are an eerie replay of the doubts raised about a lone gunman in the John Kennedy assassination in 1963. Chamish’s closely argued conclusions are, if nothing else, intriguing. He has concluded, “The gunman theory, accepted by the Israeli Government’s Shamgar Commission into the Rabin assassination, is a cover-up in what was to be a staged, unsuccessful assassination to rekindle Rabin’s flagging popularity with the electorate. Yogal Amir had agreed to perform the lone gunman function for his controller or controllers in the Israeli intelligence community.

“Amir fired a blank bullet. And he fired just one shot, not the alleged three. Israeli police lab ballistic tests on a shell casing found at the scene do not match Amir’s gun. No blood was seen coming from Rabin. Then there is the mystery of how Rabin’s car got lost for eight to twelve minutes on what should have been a forty-five-second drive to hospital on clear streets cordoned off by police for the peace rally Rabin had been attending.”

Chamish’s most explosive allegation — like all the others he has made, this one has yet to be refuted by any Israeli official in authority — claims: “During that strange drive to hospital by a very experienced chauffeur, Rabin was shot twice by real bullets and they came from the handgun of his own bodyguard Yoram Rubin. His gun disappeared at the hospital and has never been found. Two bullets retrieved from the prime minister’s body went missing for eleven hours. Rubin later committed suicide.”

Chamish spoke to the three operating room surgeons who fought to save the prime minister’s life. The reporter discussed the testimony of police officers who had been present when Amir fired. The officers had all testified that when Yitzhak Rabin was placed in the car, he showed no visible wounds. The surgeons were adamant. When the prime minister finally reached the hospital, he showed clear signs of having sustained a massive chest wound and severe damage to his spinal cord in the lower neck area. The surgeons insisted there was no possible gunshot wound that would have allowed Rabin to leave the attack site showing no evidence of a wound and arrive at the hospital with multiple damage.

The Shamgar Commission concluded it had found no evidence to confirm those wounds had occurred. Subsequently the doctors have refused to discuss the matter.

Outside Chamish’s own investigation, there is independent sworn testimony to support his contention that “what happened is deep and is conspiratorial.”

At his arraignment hearing, Amir had told the court: “If I tell the truth, the whole system will collapse. I know enough to destroy this country.”

A Shin Bet agent who was close to Amir when he fired at Rabin testified: “I heard a policeman shout to people to calm down. The shot is a blank.” His evidence was given in closed court.

Leah Rabin stated at the same hearing that her husband did not stagger and fall after apparently being shot at close range. “He was standing and looking very well.” She also insisted she was kept from seeing her husband for a full hour after she had arrived at the hospital and, according to Chamish, was told by a high-ranking intelligence officer that she should “not worry as the whole thing had been staged.”

The prime minister’s widow has steadfastly refused to make any public comment on this or any aspect of her husband’s murder.

Chamish believes she had been scared into silence like seventeen nurses at the hospital where Rabin was admitted on that day. “The plan was evil and brilliant. They persuaded Rabin to let someone take a pot shot at him to help him regain his popularity. That was why he did not wear a bulletproof vest. Amir was carefully selected for his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. He was a dupe in the hands of his controller or controllers. What he couldn’t possibly know was how they would use his blank shot to murder Rabin in his car on the way to hospital.”

Barry Chamish does not fit the image of a “conspiracy nut.” He is careful in what he writes and overwhelms every piece of evidence with corroborative testimony. He has been slow to rush to judgment and gives the impression there is a great deal more he can say but won’t — yet. More certain, Chamish is a man who walks his own path, is beholden to no one and, most important of all, is trusted.

He has posted all the evidence he has so far obtained on the Internet, doing so partly as insurance and partly because he wants to get the truth out. He is also realistic enough to accept it may never surface in a form suitable for a court of law.