Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The specialists had known from many years of listening to tapes recorded by the yaholomin, Mossad’s communication unit, that Arafat had often spoken of his conviction that he had been chosen to lead the Arab world, a stepping stone to his assuming the mantle of a modern-day caliph; the position of leadership had been handed down from the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s successors in the seventh century.

This fantasy had succoured Arafat during his darkest hours in exile and those turbulent years he had railed that the very existence of Israel was at the root of all problems, not only for the Arab nations but the entire Muslim world. In Washington and elsewhere it was long argued there was no point in listening to the rant of a demagogue whose sole message was one of violence.

But on the sixth floor the specialists knew it would be dangerous to ignore Arafat’s words. While he and his associates no longer controlled terrorist operations, or at least very few, Arafat’s ideology had inspired many young jihadists to see in his words that they had a sacred duty to somehow strike back at the West for actions in Muslim states. Following the emotional scenes at Arafat’s funeral, Mossad katsas across the Middle East, in Kashmir and Chechnya, had all reported his death had stirred up passions.

A priority for the specialists was to show the billion-strong Islamic world that Yasser Arafat was never worthy of being a successor to Abdul Mejid II, the last caliph who had gone into exile after Turkish Nationalists, on March 3, 1924, had abolished the caliphate. Turkey’s leader, Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk, turned what remained of the Ottoman Empire, broken up at the end of the First World War, into a secular republic and forced through the wholesale adoption of European legal codes, writing, and a calendar. The seeds of jihad had been sewn.

In Egypt there followed agitation against British colonialism. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, became a potent political force; and when Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a coup in 1952, he succeeded with their help. But Nasser soon saw the Brotherhood’s extremism as a threat and banned the movement. Its members were exiled, jailed, or hanged. Many found refuge in monarchies such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It was then that Arafat and Osama bin Laden had become radicalized.

Both men, very different in their backgrounds, were influenced by a number of factors: Israel’s defeat of Arab armies in 1967; Saudi Arabia’s petrodollars, which gave Islamists the funds to proselytize around the Muslim world; and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, which overthrew the shah of Iran in 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year, was a rallying call to wage jihad against the Soviet Union, funded by Saudi money and equipped with American weapons and with the full support of the Pakistan secret services.

The only blip in the ever-expanding militancy in the Islamic world was the assassination of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat in 1981 after he signed a peace treaty with Israel. Arab leaders incarcerated their own extremists.

“For the first time the West had become aware of what Israel had been saying for years about the danger of Islamic Fundamentalism,” said David Kimche, a former deputy director of Mossad (to the author).

But the radicalization, exploited by both bin Laden and Arafat, went unchecked. The United States became the Great Satan, the Infidel Empire. The deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 further radicalized the Muslim world.

It was at this stage that the specialists on the sixth floor had decided that Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden chose separate paths to achieve their aims, with bin Laden determining the way forward was to wage war against Israel’s powerful ally, the United States. In 1993 came the bombing of the World Trade Center that brought terrorism home to America. In 1998, from the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, announced they were forming the “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” They issued a fatwa declaring that “it is the duty of every Muslim to kill Americans and Jews.”

On October 12, 2000, suicide bombers rammed a dinghy packed with explosives into the side of the American warship, the USS Cole, in Aden, killing seventeen sailors. Two years later, on November 28, 2002, in Mombassa, three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel. Ten Kenyans and three Israeli tourists were killed. At the same time a surface-to-air missile narrowly missed an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombassa airport with two hundred tourists returning home to Tel Aviv.

Petro-Islam terrorism had risen from the ruins of Arab nationalism. The “impious” precepts of the shah of Persia’s regime had been replaced by the tenets of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which had spread beyond the borders of Iran to become the focus of hope in the greater Muslim world. The politicizing of Islam—until then largely seen in the West as a conservative faith losing its grip in the face of the growing influence of what bin Laden would call “the Coca-Cola society of the Great Satan”—had become a fully fledged revolution. Its first target, and never to lose that position, was Israel. Its defence against a stream of attacks fell upon Mossad. To destroy Arafat, his fedayeen, Hamas, and Hezbollah became prime objectives.

Syria had been quick to support these groups for a self-serving reason: it gave the regime credibility in the Arab world over its long-running enmity toward Israel. But it had become a double-edged sword. While Syrian-sponsored terrorist attacks had indeed finally persuaded Israel to negotiate over the Golan Heights—a precursor for what happened over the removal of the settlers from Gaza—its continued investment in terrorism had reinforced Israeli public opinion not to trust Damascus. Nevertheless, the removal of the Gaza settlements, as the promised precursor for a lasting peace for Israel, had resulted in growing resentment among a population who ironically began to echo the Hamas slogan that attacks would end only when every Jew was driven into the sea.

Mossad’s analysts concluded that one way to win back support for the “road map” to peace was to carefully demolish Yasser Arafat’s legacy. To do so, its Technical Services Department mobilized its skills in using the latest information technology. From the start of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, Arab terror groups, such as Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, had used the Internet to promote their aims. Easy to set up, free to access, hard to censor, cyberspace had become an ideal place for issuing policy statements, claiming responsibility for terror attacks, appealing for funds, offering weapons and explosives training, and selling anything from suicide vests to the ingredients to create biological or germ warfare agents.

Mossad had been probably the first security service to monitor the Internet; as militants recognized that their mosques were almost certainly under surveillance, Web sites offered a new and relatively safe way to communicate with their followers. Mossad had created a large number of its own Web sites on which they posted carefully constructed disinformation in all the languages of the Middle East.

In the aftermath of Arafat’s death, stories began to appear on the sites claiming Arafat had betrayed his own people for his own aggrandizement and noting his lack of moral probity. The sites claimed that vast sums of money intended to improve the lives of poverty-stricken Palestinians had ended up in Arafat’s private portfolio.

The claims were the work of the dozen psychologists in LAP, Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare. It had a long history of creating discord among Israel’s enemies. Arafat’s death had offered a further opportunity for LAP to show its skills.