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Mossad - The World's Most Efficient Killing Machine
12-9-2
Standing on a canteen table in down-town Tel Aviv, Israel's spymaster studied
the men and women of Mossad.
In the few weeks since taking over Mossad, Meir Dagan knew he already commanded
something his recent predecessors never managed. Respect.
Barely raising his voice he spoke.
"When I was fighting in Lebanon, I witnessed the aftermath of a family feud. The
patriarch's head had been split open, his brain on the floor. Around him lay his
wife and some of his children. All dead. Before I could do anything, one of the
murderers scooped up a handful of brain and swallowed it. This is how you will
all now operate. Otherwise someone will eat your brain."
His every word held them in thrall - even if they sent a shudder through some of
his listeners, hardened as they were.
In the canteen were those who had killed many times already. Killing enemies who
could not be brought to trial because they were hidden deep inside Israel's Arab
neighbours.
Only Mossad could find and kill them. Rafi Eitan, the legendary former
Operations Chief of Mossad told me when we sat together in his living room in a
north Tel Aviv suburb:
"I always tried to kill when I could see the whites of a person's eyes. So I
could see the fear. Smell it on his breath. Sometimes I used my hands. A knife,
or a silenced gun. I never felt a moment's regret over a killing."
Meir Amit, when he had been director of Mossad, later insisted "we are like the
official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administers the lethal
injection. Our actions are all endorsed by the State of Israel. When Mossad
kills it is not breaking the law. It is fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the
prime minister of the day".
We spoke as he walked me through Mossad's own unique memorial in Tel Aviv to the
dead - a concrete maze shaped in the form of a brain. Each name engraved on the
concrete was of an agent who had been killed while trying to destroy Israel's
enemies.
Some of those agents had one thing in common. Amit had sent them to their
deaths.
"We did all we could to protect them. We trained them better than any other
secret service. Sometimes, out on a mission, the dice is against you. But there
will always be brave men ready to roll the dice," he said.
Dagan, his listeners in the canteen knew, was cast in the same mould. He would
protect them with every means he knew - legal or illegal. He would allow them to
use proscribed nerve toxins. Dum-dum bullets. Ways of killing that not even the
Mafia, the former KGB or China's secret service use. But he would not hesitate
to expose them to death - if it was for the greater good of Israel.
That was the deal those in the canteen had accepted when they were recruited.
They, too, were ready to roll the dice.
Dagan, only the tenth man to head Mossad and bear the title of memune - "first
among equals in Hebrew" - reminded his listeners sat on their plastic-form
chairs what Meir Amit had once said. Then Dagan added:
"I am here to tell you those days are back. The dice is ready to roll."
Dagan jumped down from the table and walked out of the canteen in total silence.
Only then did the applause start.
Shortly afterwards came the Mombasa massacre of eleven days ago. An
explosive-laden land-cruiser drove into the reception area of the island's
Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel.
Fifteen people died and 80 were seriously injured. Two shoulder-fired missiles
nearly downed an Israeli passenger plane bringing tourists back to Tel Aviv from
Kenya. Two hundred and seventy-five barely missed a Lockerbie-style death.
Meir Dagan immediately suspected it was the work of Osama bin-Laden's al-Quaeda
and that the missiles had come from Iraq's arsenal.
But to suspect and prove would be the greatest challenge Mossad had faced since
the War on Terrorism was launched by President Bush.
"Mossad would not be operating in its own backyard against suicide bombers. It
would be working 1,500 miles away in a hostile environment. There would only be
lip-service support from the authorities on the ground. Other intelligence
services would be trawling through the evidence looking for clues that would fit
their agendas. The CIA for a fix on bin-Laden. MI6 for a lead back to a threat
to Britain. The same for the Germans," a senior intelligence man in Tel Aviv
told me.
But for Meir Dagan it was time to roll the dice. Every person with proven field
experience was on a plane to Kenya within an hour of the massacre.
They would sift and search the wreckage, using sophisticated equipment to do so.
Detectors that could detect a sliver of metal deep inside a corpse - metal that
would show where the explosives came from. And much else.
The team who would "roll the dice" travelled separately - as they always did.
They had their own aircraft, their own pilots. They were the men and women of
kidon, Mossad's ultra-secret assassination unit.
Their sole job in Mombasa was to find and kill the perpetrators of the massacre:
those behind the three bombers who had gone to their deaths laughing. The kidon
would kill the planners of the massacre after they had traced them to their lair
- wherever it was. It might take months - as it had with avenging the murder of
the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But the kidon would find the
men behind the Mombasa outrage and kill them.
They would use a small laboratory of poisons, sealed in vials until the moment
came to strike. They had long and short-blade knives. Piano wire to strangle.
Explosives no bigger than a throat lozenge capable fo blowing off a person's
head. An arsenal of guns: short-barrel pistols, sniper rifles with a mile
killing range.
The team chosen to go to Mombasa had local language skills. They could pass for
Arabs or for Indian traders. Between them, they spoke Swahili and other
dialects. They dressed the part; they looked the part. They also understood the
closed language of their world.
They had learned how to memorise fibres - precise physical descriptions of
people. Neviof , how to break into an office, a bedroom, or any other given
target and plant listening bugs - or a bomb. Masluh, the skill of shaking off a
tail.
The women had learned how to use their sex. To be ever ready to sleep with
someone to obtain vital information. The link between intelligence work and
sexual entrapment is as old as spying itself. Meir Amit had said when he was
Mossad's chief:
"Sex is a woman's weapon. Pillow talk is not a problem for her. But it takes a
special kind of courage. It is not just sleeping with an enemy. It is to obtain
information."
The kidon team had passed the two years course at the Mossad training school at
Henzelia, near Tel Aviv. They had been sent to a special camp in the Negev
desert. There they had learned to kill.
"They are taught how to use the weapon appropriate for the target. Strangulation
with a cheese-cutter if the victim is to be killed at night. A handgun fitted
with a silencer. A nerve agent delivered by an aerosol or injection," explained
Victor Ostrovsky, a former member of kidon.
Ostrovsky, who today lives in Arizona, will not say who he has killed. But he
quit Mossad - saying he could not "stomach the way they did things".
My sources in Mossad say he is "long past his sell-by date. We do things
differently now".
And, by all accounts, more ruthlessly.
The man known to Mossad as "The Engineer" was a top Hamas bomb-maker. He lived
on the West Bank, protected by gunmen.
One day he received a visitor - a distant cousin from Gaza. The young man spoke
like so many from that hotbed of Islamic fanaticism.
Over mint tea, the two men spoke far into the evening. Finally, The Engineer
invited his guest to stay over. The offer was accepted. The youth asked if he
could use The Engineer's mobile phone to call his own family to say they should
not worry.
He asked if he could make the call from outside the house to improve reception.
The Engineer nodded. The call over, the two men fell asleep on the floor.
Next day, the youth left to return to Gaza. That morning, The Engineer received
a call on the mobile. As he put the phone to his mouth and started to speak, his
head was blown off.
The youth had been recruited by Mossad to plant a powerful explosive inside the
phone. The detonation signal had come from a kidon half a mile away.
No one had seen him arrive. No one saw him go.
Over the past years, Mossad have killed scores of Israel's enemies by such
methods.
"We try to never use the same method twice. Our technicians spend all their time
devising new ways to kill," a Mossad source told me last week.
Their roll-call of Mission Successful includes; Fathi Shkaki, the leader of
Islamic Jihad, and Gerald Bull, the rogue Canadian investor of Saddam's supergun.
The usual composition of a hit team is four. One is the "target locator". His
task is to keep tabs on the victim's movements. Another is the "transporter", to
get the team safely away from the killing area.
The remaining two men perform the execution. In the case of Gerald Bull they
knocked on his front door late in the evening. The ballistic expert had just
moved in. He had been assured he was safe by his Iraqi minders. But they had
been lured away by some of the kidon back-up team.
These are known as sayanim - the Hebrew word for helpers. Throughout the world
there are tens of thousands. Each has been carefully recruited to provide the
kind of help that the kidon unit required to kill Bull.
The assassination was simple. Both kidon wore FedEx courier uniforms. One
carried a package. The other knocked on the door. When Bull opened it, the
package was thrust at him. As he stepped back he was shot - once in the forehead
and once in the throat. He flew backwards into the hall. The package was
retrieved, the door closed behind the dead Bull. Both men calmly walked away to
where the "transporter" was waiting. In hours, the team was back in Tel Aviv.
Preparation for an assassination can take weeks, even months. The hit team, once
selected, is moved to a Mossad safe house, one of many in Israel.
Eli Cohen, a former Mossad agent, told me that "a safe house looks like it was
furnished from a car boot sale".
It was in one such safe house that the plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein was
prepared.
It was elaborate even by Mossad standards. It revolved around killing Saddam
during a visit to one of his mistresses.
Mossad agents in Baghdad had discovered that the woman, the widow of a serving
Iraqi officer who had died mysteriously, would be driven from the palace to keep
a tryst with Saddam in a desert villa outside the city.
Heavily guarded, the villa would be a hard target to hit.
But Mossad believed there was a window of opportunity between the time Saddam
would land in his helicopter near the villa and enter its well-protected
compound.
The plan to kill Saddam has long been on Mossad's agenda. But previous attempts
had failed due to Saddam's obsession with changing his movements at the last
moment.
Mossad believed he would not do so this time.
"The woman is irresistible," said a report from one of its Baghdad undercover
agents.
Mossad had scouted an air corridor through which it believed a kidon could be
flown in below Iraqi radar.
A final rehearsal was held in the Negev desert. Israeli commandos doubled as
Saddam and his bodyguards - a party of five.
As they landed close to a replica of the villa, the kidon were in position. They
were equipped with specially adapted shoulder-firing missiles. But their weapons
were to only fire blanks for the rehearsal.
In a tragic mistake, one of the missiles had been replaced with a live one. It
killed the make-believe Saddam and his bodyguards.
The operation was cancelled.
But last week Meir Dagan was said to be considering adapting it to once more try
and kill Saddam.
After eleven days investigation, his teams in Mombasa confirmed the massacre had
all the hallmarks of being an Iraqi-sponsored act carried out by al-Quaeda.
How and when Mossad will strike against Saddam is, understandably, a closely
guarded secret.
But an intelligence sources suggested to me that a successful assassination of
Saddam could see the looming threat of war recede.
"With Saddam out of the way there is no reason to invade Iraq. The people
themselves will rise," said the source.
Dagan, the Mossad chief who could possible achieve that was born on a train
between Russia and Poland. He speaks several languages. He is an action man,
working 18 hour days. His private life is simple: he eschews the trappings of
power that goes with the job of running MI6 or the CIA. His salary is a fraction
of what their directors get. Three months into the job, he is adored by his
staff.
In the past years, Mossad has experienced many publicised failures, a loss of
morale and, worst of all, growing public criticism among its own people.
All that Meir Dagan is determined to change.
In his open neck shirt and chain store pants and sneakers, Dagan is no James
Bond. The only spy fiction he is known to read is John Le Carre - because, he
has told friends, he can at least empathise with its hero, Smiley.
Meir Dagan is also an avid reader of history of other intelligence services. It
is said he knows more about the CIA and MI6 than many of its current employees.
He constantly reminds his staff that action cannot wait for certainty. That
motive and deception are at the centre of their endeavours. That they must
create situations which seek to draw fact out of darkness. For him the art of
informed conjecture is an essential weapon.
Since Mombasa, Dagan has virtually worked and slept in his office. Its windows
look eastwards to the Judean Hills. Beyond are the tribal badlands of Pakistan -
where Dagan is convinced Osama bin-Laden is hiding - and the desert of Iraq
through which Dagan believes Saddam will try and escape if war starts. The
Mossad chief will be waiting.
Meantime, he is preoccupied with the latest news from Mombasa - and all those
points east where his kidon team are tracking the planners of the outrage.
Some have gone to the Philippines. Others to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Mossad's scientists and pathologists, as well as field agents, katsas, have
combed and bagged the clues from the Paradise hotel disaster area.
Every day an El Al plane has flown northwards to Israel with the evidence
despite behind-the-scene protests by the Kenyan intelligence service.
Mossad agents in Nigeria have provided important details on al-Quaeda in that
country. Katsas in South Africa have joined colleagues in Mombasa. From Rome,
Malta and Cyprus, other Mossad agents sped down through Africa into the
country's fierce heat.
Dagan's men are polite to the counter-intelligence officers from the CIA, MI6
and European services.
"But these are Israelis who are dead or injured. This is Mossad's job. And
everybody had better remember that," said one Mossad source.
Mossad has made no friends on the ground. They rarely do. That is their style:
go it alone. They believe they know more than anyone else in fighting terrorism.
And they may be right.
In Tel Aviv, having done all he could for the moment, Meir Dagan waits.
The 57 years-old, battle-hardened hero of past wars in Lebanon, in all those
places in the Middle East where the alleys have no names, has earned his
reputation as a no-holds barred leader. In those days, with a handgun in his
pocket and his dog at his heel, he had led from the front. Twice he had been
wounded, so that nowadays he sometimes uses a walking stick. He dislikes doing
so. He detests any sign of weakness in himself or in others.
Dagan is a blunt man, proud and imperious and prepared to stand on his record.
He crushed the first Intifada in Gaza in 1971. Two years later he fought in the
Yom Kippur War.
For him, Mossad, and ultimately Israel, the Mombasa massacre is a test - to show
that Mossad is back on centre stage with a vengeance.
No other intelligence service has a better history of operations in Central
Africa. In the 1960s Mossad drove out the vaunted Chinese Secret Intelligence
Service. It stopped Cuba's Fidel Castro exporting his revolution into Africa. It
beat the KGB at its own plans to turn the Congo into its playground. It was a
dirty and deadly war.
A terrorist group ambushed a Mossad katsa in the Congo and fed him to the
crocodiles. They filmed his last, threshing moments in the water - and sent the
footage to the local Mossad station chief. He retaliated by placing a two-pound
bomb under the toilet seat of the terrorist leader. It blew the villa apart.
Twelve terrorists died.
Mossad built up a relationship with BOSS, the security service of the South
African apartheid government. It sent a team to Pretoria to teach BOSS the art
of sophisticated methods of interrogation. Israeli instructors showed them the
black art of sleep deprivation, hooding, forcing a suspect to stand facing a
wall for long hours, and mental tortures such as mock tortures.
"The one certainty is that if the Mombasa killers are caught Mossad won't bother
with mock executions," said a Mossad source.
The methods Mossad uses are often outside the law. They have a unit that
specialises in burglary - using far more sophisticated means than those employed
by the infamous Watergate burglars. Their ineptitude led to the downfall of
President Nixon.
They have a special team of scientists working at the Institute for Biological
Research in Tel Aviv. They prepare the deadly toxins for the kidon.
Where other intelligence agencies no longer allow their agents to kill, kidon
have no such restraint. They remain fully licensed to assassinate in the name of
Israel once they have routinely convinced the incumbent prime minister of the
need to do so.
Ariel Sharon needs little convincing.
Mossad's assassins routinely witness some of Israel's leading forensic
pathologists at work so as to better understand how to make an assassination
look like an accident.
They learn how a pinprick or small blemish left on a victim's skin can be a give
away. They are shown how to ensure against this.
It makes them probably the most sophisticated lawfully-approved killers in the
world.
This morning (Sunday) Meir Dagan, as he has done every day since the Mombasa
attack, will awaken from a combat veteran's light sleep. This squat,
barrel-chested man will take his customary cold water shower and eat his daily
breakfast of natural yogurt, toast spread with honey washed down with several
cups of strong black coffee.
Next he will study the latest reports from not only East Africa - but from all
those areas where his team of hunters have now moved.
After briefing the prime minister on the scrambler phone that links Dagan to
Ariel Sharon, the memune may spend an hour at an easel in the corner of his
office - touching up one of the watercolour paintings which are the only known
passion in his life.
But like everything else about him, they will remain under lock and key. Just as
with his plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein, the first the world will know, if
Mossad is successful, will be after it has happened.
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