[THS] The Guardian: The truth about the Mossad

[Peter Webster]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/19/ian-black-mossad-dubai

The truth about the Mossad

The recent, outlandish assassination in Dubai may prove the most damaging yet in
the Mossad's history of high-profile, bungled operations. How did it squander its
reputation for ruthless brilliance?

          o Ian Black
          o The Guardian, Friday 19 February 2010

2005, MUNICH

A still from Steven Spielberg's film Munich

Last November, a sharp-eyed Israeli woman named Niva Ben-Harush was alarmed to
notice a young man attaching something that looked suspiciously like a bomb to the
underside of a car in a quiet street near Tel Aviv port. When police arrested him, he
claimed to be an agent of the Mossad secret service taking part in a training exercise:
his story turned out to be true – though the bomb was a fake.

   1. Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services
   2. by Ian Black, Benny Morris
   3. 634pp,
   4. Avalon Travel Publishing
   5.

No comment was forthcoming from the Israeli prime minister's office, which formally
speaks for – but invariably says nothing about – the country's world-famous
espionage organisation. The bungling bomber was just a brief item on that evening's
local TV news.

There was, however, a far bigger story – one that echoed across the globe – two
years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man
named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon's Shia
movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a
dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about
that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been
one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations.

The Mossad, like other intelligence services, tends to attract attention only when
something goes wrong, or when it boasts a spectacular success and wants to send a
warning signal to its enemies. Last month's assassination of a senior Hamas official in
Dubai, now at the centre of a white-hot diplomatic row between Israel and Britain, is
a curious mixture of both.

With its cloned foreign passports, multiple disguises, state-of-the-art communications
and the murder of alleged arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh – one of the few
elements of the plot that was not captured on the emirate's CCTV cameras – it is a
riveting tale of professional chutzpah, violence and cold calculation. And with the
Palestinian Islamist movement now vowing to take revenge, it seems grimly certain
that it will bring more bloodshed in its wake.

The images from Dubai follow the biblical injunction (and the Mossad's old motto):"By
way of deception thou shalt make war." The agency's job, its website explains more
prosaically, is to "collect information, analyse intelligence and perform special covert
operations beyond [Israel's] borders."

Founded in 1948 along with the new Jewish state, the Mossad largely stayed in the
shadows in its early years. Yitzhak Shamir, a former Stern Gang terrorist and future
prime minister, ran operations targeting German scientists who were helping Nasser's
Egypt build rockets – foreshadowing later Israeli campaigns to disrupt Iraqi and
(continuing) Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear and other weapons.

The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war
criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were
organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support
for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the
infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan
Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.

It was after that that the service's role expanded to fight the Palestinians, who had
been galvanised under Yasser Arafat into resisting Israel in the newly occupied West
Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1970s saw the so-called "war of the spooks" with Mossad
officers, operating under diplomatic cover abroad, recruiting and running informants
in Fatah and other Palestinian groups. Baruch Cohen, an Arabic speaker on loan to
the Mossad from the Shin Bet internal security service, was shot in a Madrid cafe by
his own agent. Bassam Abu Sharif, of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, was badly disfigured by a Mossad parcel bomb sent to him in Beirut.

Steven Spielberg's 2006 film Munich helped mythologise the Mossad's hunt for the
Black September terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
Eleven of them were eliminated in killings across Europe, culminating in the small
Norwegian town of Lillehammer, where a Moroccan waiter was mistaken for Ali
Hassan Salameh, the Munich plot's mastermind. Salameh was eventually killed by a
car bomb in Beirut in 1979 – the sort of incident that made Lebanese and Palestinians
sit up and notice last year's botched training episode in Tel Aviv.

Some details of the assassination of Mabhouh last month echo elements of the
campaign against Black September – which ended with the catastrophic arrest of five
Mossad agents. Sylvia Raphael, a South African-born Christian with a Jewish father,
spent five years in a Norwegian prison; she may have been among the young
Europeans in Israel who were discreetly asked, in nondescript offices in Tel Aviv, if
they wished to volunteer for sensitive work involving Israel's security. Other agents
who had been exposed had to be recalled, safe houses abandoned, phone numbers
changed and operational methods modified.

Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as
abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the
devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether
the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian
gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing
secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still
little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help
fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald
Reagan's presidency.

It has, in addition, suffered occasional blows from its own disgruntled employees. In
1990, a Canadian-born former officer called Victor Ostrovsky blew the whistle on its
internal organisation, training and methods, revealing codenames including "Kidon"
(bayonet), the unit in charge of assassinations. An official smear campaign failed to
stop Ostrovsky's book, so the agency kept quiet when another ostensibly inside
account came out in 2007. It described the use of shortwave radios for sending
encoded transmissions, operations in Iran for collecting soil samples, and joint
operations with the CIA against Hezbollah.

But the worst own goal came in 1997, during Binyamin Netanyahu's first term as
prime minister. Mossad agents tried but failed to assassinate Khaled Mash'al – the
same Hamas leader who is now warning of retaliation for Mabhouh's murder – by
injecting poison into his ear in Amman, Jordan. Using forged Canadian passports,
they fled to the Israeli embassy, triggering outrage and a huge diplomatic crisis with
Jordan. Danny Yatom, the then Mossad chief, was forced to quit. Ephraim Halevy, a
quietly spoken former Londoner, was brought back from retirement to clear up the
mess.

The Dubai assassination, however, may yet turn out to be far more damaging – not
least because the political and diplomatic context has changed in the last decade.
Israel's reputation has suffered an unprecedented battering, reaching a new low
during last year's Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. "In the current climate, the
traces left behind in Dubai are likely to lead to very serious harm to Israel's
international standing," the former diplomat Alon Liel commented yesterday.

Even though Israel is maintaining its traditional policy of "ambiguity" about
clandestine operations, refusing to confirm or deny any involvement in Dubai, nobody
in the world seems to seriously question it. That includes almost all Israeli
commentators, who are bound by the rules of military censorship in a small and
talkative country where secrets are often quite widely known.

It would be surprising if a key part of this extraordinary story did not turn out to be
the role played by Palestinians. It is still Mossad practice to recruit double agents, just
as it was with the PLO back in the 1970s. News of the arrest in Damascus of another
senior Hamas operative – though denied by Mash'al – seems to point in this direction.
Two other Palestinians extradited from Jordan to Dubai are members of the Hamas
armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, suggesting treachery may indeed
have been involved. Previous assassinations have involved a Palestinian agent
identifying the target.

Yossi Melman, the expert on intelligence for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, worries that,
as before the 1973 war, the Israeli government may be getting it wrong by focusing
on the wrong enemy – the Palestinians – instead of prioritising Iran and Hizbullah.

"The Mossad is not Murder Inc, like the Mafia; its goal is not to take vengeance on its
enemies," he wrote this week. "'Special operations' like the assassination in Dubai – if
this indeed was a Mossad operation – have always accounted for a relatively small
proportion of its overall activity. Nevertheless, these are the operations that give the
organisation its halo, its shining image. This is ultimately liable to blind its own ranks,
cause them to become intoxicated by their own success, and thus divert their
attention from their primary mission."

From an official Israeli point of view, the Mossad has an important job to do. Its
reputation for ruthlessness and cunning remains a powerful asset, prompting what
sometimes sounds like grudging admiration as well as loathing in the Arab world –
where a predisposition for conspiracy theories boosts the effect of the disinformation
and psychological warfare at which the Israelis are said to excel.

The government's official narrative, of course, is that Hamas is a terrorist organisation
that pioneered horrific suicide bombings, fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian
targets and – despite occasional signs of pragmatism or readiness for a temporary
truce or prisoner swap – remains dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. It
refuses to admit that its ever-expanding West Bank settlements remains a significant
barrier to peace.

In western countries, including Britain, there was widespread anger at the 1,400
Palestinian casualties of the Gaza war. Barack Obama has declared the occupation
"intolerable". Netanyahu heads the most rightwing coalition in Israel's history; his
famous quip that the Middle East is a "tough neighbourhood" no longer seems to
justify playing dirty.

Yet Israelis, and not just those on the right, worry that their very existence as an
independent state is being de-legitimised. And, judging by the jobs section of the
Mossad website, there are still plenty of opportunities for Israel's wannabe spies:
challenging positions are available for researchers, analysts, security officers,
codebreakers and other technical work. Speakers of Arabic and Persian are invited to
apply to be intelligence officers.The work involves travel abroad and a "young and
unconventional" environment.

It is a novelty of this episode that ordinary Israeli citizens are angry that their
identities appear to have been stolen by their own government's secret servants –
one reason why the Mossad chief Meir Dagan may find his days are numbered. But it
is hard not to detect an undercurrent of popular admiration for the killers of
Mabhouh. The day after the sensational CCTV images and passport photos were
shown, the Israeli tennis champion Shahar Pe'er reached the quarter-finals of a
major international competition in the emirate. "Another successful operation in
Dubai," the Ynet website headlined its story.

Ofer Kasti, Haaretz's education correspondent, did not have his passport cloned, but
he does bear a striking resemblance to the hit-squad member named as Kevin
Daveron. "My mum rang and asked gently if I'd been abroad recently," he wrote.
"Friends asked me why I hadn't brought back any cigarettes from the duty free shop
in Dubai. I thought I sensed admiring glances in the street. 'Well done,' said an
elderly woman who came up to me in the supermarket and clapped me the shoulder.
'You showed those Arabs.'"