Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Even more worrying for Israel, Mossad undercover agents reported the growing presence of those spies in the Hezbollah strongholds in the Beka’a Valley. It was there that the organization was believed to have stockpiled its growing supply of missiles and rockets supplied by Iran. One Mossad report put the figure at 18,000. This number included the Katyusha rockets made in Russia, which have a range of fifteen kilometers. More powerful were the Iranian-built Fajr-3 missiles, almost six meters long, which have a range of almost forty kilometers. Most powerful of all were Iran’s version of a Scud missile, the Shabtai-1. They could reach any Israeli city. When Iraqi Scuds rained down on Haifa and Tel Aviv during the Desert Storm conflict in 1991 (see chapter 16, “Spies in the Sand”), hundreds of buildings were destroyed and scores of civilians injured. One of Mossad’s yaholomin , the electronic surveillance units, had picked up conversations between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Khalid Meshal in his fortress-like villa in a suburb in the north of Damascus. Meshal, who had survived a Mossad assassination attempt in Amman, Jordan, was now the overall strategist for Hamas and a respected figure within Hezbollah.

Meir Dagan was a good example that much intelligence is anti-historical because it uses stratagems to frustrate the truth as well as unearth it. Facts are often directed toward some distant, unwritten goal, and it is the highest purpose of any intelligence to leave complicity hidden and ambiguous. At the Mossad training school, the Sources and Methods class reminds students that they cannot simply adhere to the historian’s discipline; that a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque, but he must control it so absolutely to work only with the material on hand and refrain from supplementing deficiencies with additions of his own. But the class instructor explained that in intelligence work the deficiencies are precisely what is expected to be supplied. “Action cannot wait for certainty. Motive deception will be at the center of their endeavors. They will create situations to draw fact out of the darkness. The art of informed conjecture will be part of their skills, but always to be used within the range of probability. Their writ will confine them to the realm of surmise,” one of the instructors told the author.

Those finely-honed skills had served Meir Dagan well. Now they went into overdrive after Mohammad Khatami, a senior member of the Iranian leadership, in the second week of May described Hezbollah as “the sun of Islam who will soon shine even brighter.” A few days later President Ahmadinejad ended another of his anti-Semitic harangues to a Tehran crowd with the promise: “We shall very soon witness the elimination of the Zionist state of shame.” Was this merely more rabble-rousing rhetoric? Or was it finally the precursor of what Dagan had long predicted: an attack on Israel on two fronts—Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah coming out of the olive and banana groves of south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley? And would that be the moment Iran would mobilize its Revolutionary Guards and would al-Qaeda seize the opportunity to marshal its untold numbers of jihadists throughout the Muslim world. To try and find answers Meir Dagan had sent encoded priority signals to Mossad stations across the Middle East to report signs of mobilization. Then he refreshed himself on Hezbollah and its previous methods.

Throughout the 1980s the organization, having adopted the name of the “Party of God,” kidnapped more than two hundred nationals in Lebanon—mainly American or western Europeans, including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy. It had organized the highjacking of civilian aircrafts and had more or less pioneered the idea of suicide bombings against American and French targets—killing almost 1,000 people—including 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut and 58 French paratroopers.

By the time the Iran-Iraq War was over, Tehran saw the “Party of God” as a trump card it could play in the Middle East by using it to influence the broader course of regional politics and to wage a low-intensity war against Israel. The emergence of Hassan Nasrallah led to Hezbollah controlling southern Lebanon. Financially it cost Iran very little—no more than one day’s profit from its oil revenue at €50 million a year—to maintain Hezbollah. However, Hezbollah was also funded by income from businesses set up by the movement. These included a bank, a mortgage co-operative, an insurance company, six hotels, a chain of supermarkets across south Lebanon and the Beka’a Valley, a dozen urban bus and taxi companies, and a travel agency that sends tens of thousands of pilgrims to Mecca and other Muslim holy places. Between them they provide Hezbollah with €300 million a year.

The Beka’a Valley had become its power base, centered on the historic city of Balbeck, with its own modern hospital and staffed by Syrian and Iranian doctors and nurses. It also ran clinics, a social welfare system, centers for orphans and widows, and schools—where the syllabus was identical to the one taught in Iran. It collected its own taxes with a 20 percent levy, called khoms, on all incomes. All this contributed to the image of Hezbollah being an independent state within the state of Lebanon. To emphasize its status, it had a number of “embassies”; the one in Tehran is the largest; others are situated in Yemen, Damascus, and Beirut.

Its relationship with the rest of Lebanon was complex. In May 2006, it still held 14 seats in the 128-seat national assembly, including 2 portfolios in the council of ministers. But Hezbollah also insisted it was primarily “a people-based movement fighting on behalf of the Muslim world.” To reinforce that idea, it has a powerful media department, including its satellite television channel, al-Manar (the lighthouse), which transmitted to the entire Arab world and was regarded by many viewers as better than al-Jazeera. Supporting its rolling news channel were four radio stations, two newspapers, several magazines, and a book publishing house. Its own police force worked within sharia law and Hezbollah courts sent the convicted to its own prisons in the Beka’a Valley.

Mossad estimated its militia numbered nine thousand in May 2006: the well-equipped fighters were backed by an estimated three hundred thousand reservists. It was a more powerful force than the Lebanese-Armed Forces that was supposed to have disarmed it under the United Nations Resolution 1559. That was unlikely to happen, given the majority of the army were Shi’ites and would refuse to fight their own.

Within Iran, Hezbollah’s support bridged the political divides within the ruling establishment. The country’s mullahs, whether “reformist” or “hardliner,” regarded Hezbollah as a reminder of their own revolutionary youth. In the same week that Mohammad Khatami and President Ahmadinejad had delivered their chilling words, the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, had temporarily set aside their arguments to unite in demanding that the Revolutionary Guards should be ready to fight alongside Hezbollah should Hassan Nasrallah call upon them. The deputies had also agreed to send Hamas an “emergency grant as a gift” to counter the freeze imposed by the European Union and other international donations intended for the new Palestinian government. It was Iran’s first move to marginalize Mahmoud Abbas and make Hamas the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In Lebanon, Hezbollah had begun to lean on the new pro-American coalition government led by Fouad Siniora and Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader.

For Meir Dagan the situation was starkly clear. Iran was positioning itself to expand its influence through what could be a pincer movement by Hamas and Hezbollah—the war on two fronts the intelligence chief had long feared. Success for Tehran would mean for the first time since the seventh century its direct power would have extended to the shores of the Mediterranean. If Israel were to launch a preemptive strike—under the guise of being the regional champion of western democracy at the frontline in the fight against political Islam—it might earn the approval of the Bush administration, but it would leave Israel exposed to fierce criticism elsewhere. Meir Dagan’s advice to Olmert was that Israel should continue to “wait and see.” In the meantime, two of his predecessors, Efraim Halevy and Meir Amit, also started to sound a warning.