Mossad
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Mossad

Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal

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Mossad

Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal

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About This Book

"This book tells what should have been known and isn't—that Israel's hidden force is as formidable as its recognized physical strength."
— Israeli President Shimon Peres

For decades, Israel's renowned security arm, the Mossad, has been widely recognized as the best intelligence service in the world. In Mossad, authors Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal take us behind the closed curtain with riveting, eye-opening, boots-on-the-ground accounts of the most dangerous, most crucial missions in the agency's 60-year history. These are real Mission: Impossible true stories brimming with high-octane action—from the breathtaking capture of Nazi executioner Adolph Eichmann to the recent elimination of key Iranian nuclear scientists. Anyone who is fascinated by the world of international espionage, intelligence, and covert "Black-Ops" warfare will find Mossad electrifying reading.

Mossad unveils the defining and most dangerous operations, unknown heroes, and mysterious agents of the world's most respected—and most enigmatic—intelligence service. Here are the thrilling stories of daring top secret missions, including the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the eradication of Black September, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear facility, and the elimination of key Iranian nuclear scientists.

Drawn from intensive research and exclusive interviews with Israeli leaders and Mossad operatives, this riveting history brings to life the brave agents, deadly villains, and major battlegrounds that have shaped Israel and the world at large for more than sixty years.

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Publisher
Ecco
Year
2012
ISBN
9780062123442
Chapter One
King of Shadows
In the late summer of 1971, a fierce storm was lashing the Mediterranean coast, and tall waves battered the shores of Gaza. The local Arab fishermen prudently stayed ashore; this was not a day to brave the treacherous sea. They watched with astonishment as a ramshackle boat suddenly emerged from the roaring waves and landed heavily on the wet sand. A few Palestinians, their clothes and keffiyehs rumpled and soaked, jumped out and waded ashore. Their unshaven faces showed the fatigue of a long journey at sea; but they had no time to rest, they were running for their lives. From the angry seas, an Israeli torpedo boat emerged, pursuing them at full speed, carrying soldiers in full battle attire. As it approached the shore, the soldiers jumped into the shallow waters and opened fire on the fleeing Palestinians. A couple of Gazan youngsters, playing on the beach, ran toward the Palestinians and led them to the safety of a nearby orchard; the Israeli soldiers lost track of them but continued to search the beach.
Late that night, a young Palestinian man carrying a Kalashnikov snuck into the orchard to investigate. He found the fugitives huddled together in a remote corner. “Who are you, brothers?” he asked.
“Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” came the answer. “From the Tyre refugee camp, in Lebanon.”
“Marhaba, welcome,” the youth said.
“You know of Abu-Seif, our commander? He sent us to meet with the Popular Front commanders in Beth Lahia (a terrorist stronghold in the south of the Gaza strip). We have money and weapons, and we want to coordinate our operations.”
“I’ll help you with that,” the young man said.
The following morning, several armed terrorists escorted the newcomers to an isolated house inside the Jabalia refugee camp. They were led into a large room and invited to sit at a table. Soon after, the Popular Front commanders they hoped to meet walked in. They exchanged warm greetings with their Lebanese brothers, and sat, facing them.
“Can we start?” asked a stocky, balding young man wearing a red keffiyeh, apparently the leader of the Lebanese group. “Is everybody here?”
“Everybody.”
The Lebanese raised his hand and looked at his watch. It was a prearranged signal. Suddenly, the “Lebanese envoys” drew their handguns and opened fire. In less than a minute, the Beth Lahia terrorists were dead. The “Lebanese” ran out of the house, made their way through the crooked alleys of the Jabalia camp and Gaza’s crowded streets and soon crossed into Israeli territory. That evening, the man with the red keffiyeh, Captain Meir Dagan, commander of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) secret Rimon commando unit, reported to General Ariel (Arik) Sharon that Operation Chameleon had been a success. All the leaders of the Popular Front in Beth Lahia, a lethal terrorist group, had been killed.
Dagan was only twenty-six, but already a legendary fighter. He had planned the entire operation: posing as Lebanese terrorists; sailing in an old vessel from Ashdod, a port in Israel; the long night of hiding; the meeting with the terrorist leaders; and the escape route after the hit. He had even organized the fake pursuit by the Israeli torpedo boat. Dagan was the ultimate guerrilla, bold and creative, not someone who stuck to the rules of engagement. Yitzhak Rabin once said: “Meir has the unique capacity to invent antiterrorist operations that look like movie thrillers.”
Future Mossad chief Danny Yatom remembered Dagan as a stocky youngster with a mane of brown hair, who had applied to join the most prestigious Israeli commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, and amazed everybody with his knife-throwing skills. With his huge commando knife, he could hit dead-on any target he chose. Although he was an excellent marksman, he failed the Sayeret Matkal tests and initially had to content himself with the silver wings of a paratrooper.
In the early seventies, he was sent to the Gaza strip, which had been conquered by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and had since become a hornet’s nest of deadly terrorist activity. The Palestinian terrorists murdered Israelis daily in the Gaza strip and in Israel with bombs, explosives, and firearms; the IDF had all but lost their control over the violent refugee camps. On January 2, 1971, when the sweet Arroyo children, the five-year-old Avigail and the eight-year-old Mark, were blown to pieces when a terrorist threw a hand grenade into their car, General Ariel (Arik) Sharon decided he had to put an end to the bloody massacre. He recruited a few old friends from his battle-scarred youth, along with several talented younger soldiers. Dagan was one, a round-faced, short, sturdy officer who walked with a limp—he stepped on a land mine in the Six-Day War. While recuperating in the Soroka Hospital in Beer-Sheva, he had fallen in love with his nurse, Bina. They married when he recovered.
Sharon’s unit officially did not exist. Its mission was to destroy the terrorist organizations in Gaza using risky and unconventional methods. Dagan used to wander occupied Gaza with a cane, a Doberman, several pistols, revolvers, and submachine guns. Some claimed to have seen him disguised as an Arab, leisurely riding a donkey in the treacherous Gaza alleys. His infirmity didn’t cool his determination to carry out the most dangerous operations. His views were simple. There are enemies, bad Arabs who want to kill us, so we have to kill them first.
Within the unit, Dagan created “Rimon,” the first undercover Israeli commando unit, which operated in Arab disguise deep in enemy strongholds. In order to move freely in Arab crowds and reach their targets undetected, they had to operate in disguise. They quickly became known as “Arik’s hit team” and rumors had it that they often killed captured terrorists in cold blood. Sometimes, it was said, they escorted a terrorist to a dark alley, and told him: “You’ve got two minutes to escape”; when he tried, they shot him dead. Sometimes they would leave behind a dagger or a gun, and when the terrorist reached for it, he would be killed on the spot. Journalists wrote that, every morning, Dagan would go out to the fields, use one hand for peeing and the other for shooting at an empty Coke can. Dagan dismissed such reports. “There are myths that stick to all of us,” he said, “but some of what’s written is simply false.”
The tiny unit of Israeli commandos were fighting a tough, cruel war, risking their lives daily. Almost every night Dagan’s people donned women’s or fishermen’s disguises and went in search of known terrorists. In mid-January 1971, posing as Arab terrorists in the north of the Strip, they lured Fatah members into an ambush, and in the gunfight that erupted, the Fatah terrorists were killed. On January 29, 1971, this time in uniform, Dagan and his men traveled in two jeeps to the outskirts of the Jabalia camp (a Palestinian refugee camp). Their paths crossed with a taxi, and Dagan recognized, among its passengers, a notorious terrorist, Abu Nimer. He ordered the jeeps to stop and his soldiers surrounded the cab. Dagan approached, and at that moment Abu Nimer stepped out, brandishing a hand grenade. Staring at Dagan, he pulled its pin. “Grenade!” Dagan shouted, but instead of scrambling for cover, he jumped on the man, pinned him, and tore the grenade from his hand. For that action he was awarded the Medal of Courage. It’s been claimed that after tossing away the grenade, Dagan killed Abu Nimer with his bare hands.
Years later, in a rare interview with Israeli journalist Ron Leshem, Dagan said: “Rimon wasn’t a hit team . . . It was not the Wild West, where everybody was trigger-happy. We never harmed women and children . . . We attacked people who were violent murderers. We hit them and deterred others. To protect civilians, the state needs sometimes to do things that are contrary to democratic behavior. It is true that in units like ours the outer limits can become blurred. That’s why you must be sure that your people are of the best quality. The dirtiest actions should be carried out by the most honest men.
 
Democratic or not—Sharon, Dagan, and their colleagues largely annihilated terrorism in Gaza, and for years the area became quiet and peaceful. But some maintain that Sharon half-jokingly said of his loyal aide: “Meir’s specialty is to separate the head of an Arab from his body.”
Yet very few knew the real Dagan. He was born Meir Huberman in 1945 in a train car, on the outskirts of Herson, in the Ukraine, while his family was escaping from Siberia to Poland. Most of his family had perished in the Holocaust. Meir immigrated to Israel with his parents and grew up in a poor neighborhood in Lod, an old Arab town about fifteen miles south of Tel Aviv. Many knew him as an indomitable fighter; few were aware of his secret passions: an avid reader of history books, a vegetarian, he loved classical music and pursued painting and sculpting as hobbies.
He was a man haunted from an early age by the terrible suffering of his family and the Jews during the Holocaust. He dedicated his life to the defense of the newborn State of Israel. As he climbed the army hierarchy, the first thing he did in every new office he was assigned to was to hang on the wall a large photo of an old Jew, wrapped in his prayer shawl, kneeling in front of two SS officers, one holding a bat and the other a gun. “This old man is my grandfather,” Dagan would tell visitors. “I look at the picture, and I know that we must be strong and defend ourselves so that the Holocaust never happens again.”
The old man, indeed, was Dagan’s grandfather, Ber Ehrlich Slushni, who was murdered in Lukov a few seconds after the photograph was taken.
During the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, Dagan was among the first Israelis to cross the Suez Canal in a reconnaissance unit. In the 1982 Lebanon War, he entered Beirut at the head of his armored brigade. He soon became the commander of the South Lebanon security zone, and there the adventurous guerrilla fighter reemerged from the starched colonel’s uniform. He resurrected the principles of secrecy, camouflage, and deception of his Gaza days. His soldiers came up with a new name for their secretive chief. They called him “King of Shadows.” Life in Lebanon, with its secret alliances, betrayals, cruelty, phantom wars, was a place after his own heart. “Even before my tank brigade entered Beirut,” he said, “I knew this city well.” And after the Lebanon war ended, he did not give up his secret adventures. In 1984 he was officially reprimanded by Chief of Staff Moshe Levy for hanging out, dressed as an Arab, by the Bahamdoun terrorist headquarters.
During the Intifada (the Palestinian rebellion of 1987–1993), when he was transferred to the West Bank as an adviser to Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, Dagan resumed his old habits and even convinced Barak to join him. The two of them donned sweat suits, as befit true Palestinians, found a baby-blue Mercedes with local plates, and went for a ride in the treacherous Nablus Kasbah. On their return, they scared and then astonished the Military Headquarters sentries, once the latter recognized who was sitting in the front seat.
In 1995, Dagan, now a major general, left the army and joined his buddy Yossi Ben-Hanan on an eighteen-month motorcycle journey across the Asian plains. Their trip was cut short by the news of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Back in Israel, Dagan spent some time at the head of the antiterrorist authority, made a halfhearted attempt to join the business world, and helped Sharon in his Likud electoral campaign. Then, in 2002, he retired to his country home in Galilee, to his books, his records, his palette, and his sculptor’s chisel.
Thirty years after Gaza, a retired general, he was now getting acquainted with his family—“I suddenly woke up and my kids were grown-ups already”—when he got a phone call from his old buddy, now prime minister, Arik Sharon. “I want you at the head of the Mossad,” Sharon said to his fifty-seven-year-old friend. “I need a Mossad chief with a dagger between his teeth.”
It was 2002 and the Mossad was losing steam. Several failures in the preceding years had dealt severe blows to its prestige; the much-publicized failure to assassinate a major Hamas leader in Amman and the capture of Israeli agents in Switzerland, Cyprus, and New Zealand had seriously damaged the Mossad’s reputation. The last head of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy, didn’t live up to expectations. A former ambassador to the European Union in Brussels, he was a good diplomat and a good analyst, but not a leader and not a fighter. Sharon wanted to have at the head of the Mossad a bold, creative leader who would be a formidable weapon against Islamic terrorism and the Iranian reactor.
Dagan was not welcomed at the Mossad. An outsider, focused mostly on operations, he didn’t care very much about learned intelligence analyses or secret diplomatic exchanges. Several top Mossad officers resigned in protest, but Dagan didn’t much care. He rebuilt the operational units, established close working relations with foreign secret services, and busied himself with the Iranian threat. When the second, disastrous Lebanon War erupted in 2006, he was the only Israeli leader who objected to the strategy based on massive bombardments by the air force. He believed in a land offensive, doubted the air force could win the war, and came out of the war unblemished.
Still, he was much criticized by the press for his tough attitude toward his subordinates. Frustrated Mossad officers, who were retired, ran to the media with their gripes, and Dagan was under constant fire. “Dagan Who?” scribbled one popular columnist.
And then, one day, the headlines changed. Flattering articles loaded with superlatives filled the daily papers, lauding “the man who restored honor to the Mossad.”
Under Dagan’s control, the Mossad had accomplished the heretofore unimaginable: the assassination of Hezbollah’s mad killer Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor, the liquidation of key terrorist leaders in Lebanon and Syria, and, most remarkable of all, a relentless, ruthless, and successful campaign against Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.
Chapter Two
Funerals in Tehran
On July 23, 2011, at four thirty P.M., two gunmen on motorcycles emerged on Bani Hashem Street in South Tehran, drew automatic weapons out of their leather jackets, and shot a man who was about to enter his home. They vanished after the killing, long before the arrival of the police. The victim was Darioush Rezaei Najad, a thirty-five-year-old physics professor and a major figure in Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program. He had been in charge of developing the electronic switches necessary for activating a nuclear warhead.
Rezaei Najad was not the first Iranian scientist who had recently met a violent end. Officially, Iran was developing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and they claimed that the Bushehr reactor, an important source of energy built with Russian help, was proof of their good intentions. But in addition to the Bushehr reactor, other clandestine nuclear facilities had been discovered, all heavily guarded and virtually inaccessible. Over time, Iran had to admit the existence of some of these centers, though they denied allegations of developing weapons. But by then, Western secret services and local underground organizations had exposed several major scientists in Iran’s universities who had been tapped to build Iran’s first nuclear bomb. In Iran, what could only be identified as “unknown parties” waged a brutal war to stop the secret nuclear weapons program.
On November 29, 2010, at seven forty-five A.M., in North Tehran, a motorcycle emerged from behind the car of Dr. Majid Shahriyari, the scientific head of Iran’s nuclear project. As he passed the car, the helmeted motorcyclist attached a device to the car’s rear windshield. Seconds later, the device exploded, killing the forty-five-year-old physicist and wounding his wife. Simultaneously, in Atashi Street in South Tehran, another motorcyclist did the same to the Peugeot 206 of Dr. Fereydoun Abassi-Davani, another major nuclear scientist. The explosion wounded Abassi-Davani and his wife.
The Iranian government immediately pointed its finger at the Mossad. The roles these two scientists played in Iran’s atomic weapons project were veiled in secrecy, but Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the project, declared that the attack had made a martyr of Shahriyari and deprived his team of its “dearest flower.”
President Ahmadinejad, too, expressed his appreciation of the two victims, in an ingenious way: as soon as Abassi-Davani recovered from his wounds, Ahmadinejad appointed him Iran’s vice president.
The men who attacked the scientists were not found.
On January 12, 2010, at seven fifty A.M., Professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi came out of his home at Shariati Street, in the Gheytarihe neighborhood in North Tehran. He was on his way to his lab at the Sharif University of Technology.
When he tried to unlock his car, a huge explosion rocked the quiet neighborhood. The security forces that rushed to the scene found Mohammadi’s car shattered by the blast and his body blown to pieces. He had been killed by an explosive charge, concealed in a motorcycle that was parked by his car. The Iranian media claimed that the assassination had been carried out by Mossad agents. President Ahmadinejad declared that “the assassination reminds us of the Zionist methods.”
Fifty-year-old Professor Mohammadi was an expert in quantum physics and an adviser to the Iranian nuclear weapons program. European media reported he had been a member of the Revolutionary Guards, the pro-government parallel army. But Mohammadi’s life, like his death, was shrouded in mystery. Several of his friends maintained that he was involved only in theoretical research, never with military projects; some also claimed that he supported the dissident movements and had participated in antigovernment protests.
Yet it turned out that about half of those present at his funeral were Revolutionary Guards. His coffin was carried by Revolutionary Guard officers. Subsequent investigations ultimately confirmed that Mohammadi, indeed, had been deeply involved in advancing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In January 2007, Dr. Ardashir Hosseinpour was allegedly killed by Mossad agents with radioactive poison. News of the assassination ra...

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