Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The meeting with the two DST officers was conducted in Dagan’s office and not in one of the small conference rooms where he usually met senior foreign intelligence officers; the choice of venue was a further indication of the closeness between the DST and Mossad. Like agents from British and European services, the DST regularly sent senior officers to the Palestinian Territories before traveling on to see Dagan. The visits were known as “pulse taking” by the Mossad director, who saw them as another way to check the strength of Palestinian fervor. On the surface it was a means to try and expunge decades of isolation that the removal of the Jewish settlers from Gaza had done little to diminish.

Dagan usually learned little from the visits by MI6 officers, Germany’s BND, Spain, and the CIA. “Indeed some of their interpretations were wide of the mark,” one of his aides told the author. But the DST usually provided well-informed judgments, helped by the ability of its agents to not only speak Arabic fluently but to understand its culture. It meant a DST evaluation could be trusted enough to be matched against what Mossad’s own informers in Gaza and the West Bank reported. For Dagan it was essential to get the French view of the coming Palestinian elections and the influence wielded by Hamas at ground-roots level in its challenge to Fatah, the ruling party. Yasser Arafat had designed it to create a nationalist mythology using the symbols of his kaffiyeh, stubble, and gun, to fuel a revolutionary belief in which political struggle was heroic, fiery militance superior to mundane governance, vehement rejection better than compromise, that all opponents—especially Israel—were evil, that terrorism was cleansing, and that the eventual victory would be all the better for it. But Arafat was gone and in the past year Fatah the organization had become increasingly inured to corruption. In the Palestinian Territories the despair among the young had grown by the day, along with unemployment, social chaos, and Fatah’s seeming inability to recognize that governing required attention to the prosaic details.

Into this situation had emerged Hamas. The terrorist organization had also been founded on hatred, paranoia, and an apocalyptic vision of how Israel would be destroyed by a plentiful supply of suicide bombers and huge financial support from Iran. Hamas politics were rooted in absolutionist terms: vengeance was glorious and victory was achieved through martyrdom. Founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who became its spiritual leader, Hamas was cautiously encouraged by Israel as a means of balancing the extremists within Fatah. “Incredibly as it seems today, we thought the ‘divide and rule’ policy that had worked so well in the past would do so this time,” recalled Rafi Eitan. In August 1988, Hamas published its “charter,” calling on all Muslims to “destroy Israel and its people.” The response was swift. Yassin was killed in his wheelchair by a fusillade of rockets from Israeli gunships. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the organization’s strategist, was killed by the same method shortly afterward. In 1997, Mossad failed to kill Khaled Meshal, the head of the organization’s international branch in Amman (see chapter 17, “Bunglegate”). Salah Shehade, the architect of Hamas’s suicide-bombing strategy, was killed by Israeli F-16 jets who precision-bombed his home in Gaza. His wife and children also died in the attack. By then more than three hundred suicide attacks had claimed four hundred Israelis, many of them women and children. But Hamas had continued to attract support among Palestinians with its pledge it would control the Palestinian Territories by 2027.

For Meir Dagan on that Tuesday morning the question was: How much closer would Hamas come to achieving its eventual aim through the coming Palestinian elections? Any success would be due largely to the failure of Yasser Arafat to leave Fatah a legacy of a properly functioning government after it had been given a monopoly on power by the Oslo peace accords of 1993. Thirteen years later, Fatah had still not been reinvigorated by promoting new young blood from within its ranks. Its leadership consisted of old men who clung to the past. The truth was that most Palestinians were worse off in 2006 than they were before the Oslo agreement. They lived inside a ring of Israeli military steel, and their economy, especially in the southern enclave of Gaza, was gradually being strangled by punitive restrictions on their movement. Would they awake in a few days’ time to a green dawn—a mass of verdant Hamas flags heralding a victory?

The indications from Mossad’s informers in Gaza and the West Bank, and its own analysts, were that Hamas would make a respectable showing at the polls—but that Fatah would be returned to office. This was echoed by the surveillance reports on Khaled Meshal in Damascus; his telephone calls to Hamas leaders in Gaza and the West Bank indicated their success in running hospitals, schools, and support agencies would, in the end, not be enough. What Dagan could not decide was whether Meshal, knowing he was being monitored, was indulging in skilled disinformation. Mossad’s analysts thought not: that Meshal also saw the coming election as only the first step on the political ladder, that Hamas would not expect to have real political power for many years to come.

It later emerged the two DST officers had echoed this view to Dagan. On that note, the Mossad chief took his senior aides to see a film.

Meir Dagan had been a young conscript in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) when in the early hours of September 5, 1972, in the city of Munich, Germany, where the Olympic Games were being staged, eight Black September terrorists used a passkey to enter an apartment block where a number of Israeli athletes slept. Twenty-five minutes later two of the sportsmen were dead, murdered in cold blood. Nine others had been captured. They would also die in the days to come. The atrocity on that warm autumn night shocked the world. In Israel, even before the tears had dried, cold anger called for vengeance even as the terrorists demanded the release of 236 political prisoners. For twenty-four hours there was a tense standoff between the hostage takers and the German police. In mounting disbelief, Israelis, including Dagan, sat glued to their television sets as rescue operations were bungled. An attempt to storm the apartment block was aborted when the Munich police realized the terrorists were watching their preparations live on television. Two more attempts failed after the Black September group demanded a jet to fly them and their hostages out of Germany. The Germans swiftly agreed to provide two helicopters to fly them to Munich airport. Waiting near the getaway aircraft was an armed police team dressed as Lufthansa staff. But only moments before the helicopters landed, the team was told to abort the mission as it was too dangerous. Posted around the area were five German army snipers to deal with eight heavily armed terrorists. When the helicopters landed a firefight ensued as the snipers tried to hit their targets. The terrorists detonated a grenade in one helicopter and raked the inside of the other with gunfire. The snipers continued to shoot. In minutes all nine surviving hostages from the initial attack on the apartment were dead, along with five of the Black September group. Three were captured. But six weeks later, on October 29, 1972, a Frankfurt-bound Lufthansa jet was hijacked. The terrorists demanded the release of the captured trio. This was swiftly agreed to by the German government. The terrorists, smiling broadly, were flown to a Black September base in the Middle East and disappeared.

There was not a man, woman, or child in Israel who could not recount what followed. Mossad was given the task of hunting down not only the Munich killers, but all those who had planned the massacre. Every Mossad director general who had come into office had made it his business in the first days of his tenure to study the files of how Mossad had carried out its mission, one that Golda Meir, then the prime minister, had called the Wrath of God. Her successors, like Benyamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon, had never tired of reading how Mossad’s kidon had sown the seeds of fear in every terrorist heart. In Barak’s later words (to the author): “The intention was to strike terror, to break the will of those who remained alive until there were none of them left.”