Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

On that February morning, the file in Reuben’s possession could bring his death closer for some of the worst crimes committed on Israel’s doorstep—Lebanon. His history of violent attacks was appalling. In 1983, he had plotted the attack against the American embassy in Beirut. Among the sixty-three dead were eight members of the CIA, including its station chief in the Middle East. In the same year, Mughniyeh arranged for the kidnapping of William Buckley, the CIA replacement station chief in battered Beirut.

Next he arranged the bombing of the U.S. Marines’ barracks near the city’s airport killing 241 people. In between, he had carried out skyjackings and organized the kidnapping of Western hostages, including Terry Waite, who had gone to Beirut to try to negotiate with the Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, to free the hostages Hezbollah already held. Along with Buckley, Waite—the emissary of the Archbishop of Canterbury—had been incarcerated in what became known as the Beirut Hilton, the underground prison beneath the city.

Imad Mughniyeh had been responsible for the murder of over four hundred people and the torture of even more. America had placed a bounty of $25 million (£12.5 million) on his head.

One by one Mossad’s menume , the Hebrew title by which each director-general is known, plotted Mughniyeh’s downfall. Men like the cool Nahum Admoni (1982–1990), the quiet-voiced Shabtai Shavit (1990–1996), the relentless Danny Yatom (1996–1998), and Efraim Halevy (1998–2002), the menume his staff called the “grandfather of spies,” had all chaired endless secret meetings to plan the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh.

Their agents had tracked him to Paris only for him to once more slip away, as he had done in Rome and Madrid. For a while the trail led to Minsk in the Ukraine and then to the Islamic Republics of the former Soviet Union. There were reports he was in Tehran, living under the protection of the Fundamentalist regime. But each time the hunt had petered out.

In 2002, Meir Dagan took over Mossad. He did what all his predecessors had done and studied the growing number of files that listed how close Mossad agents had come to capturing Mughniyeh. At times they had been close, very close. But somehow he had still wriggled free. The suicide bombings had continued. For Dagan it became an article of faith that, as the tenth menume , he would finally terminate Mughniyeh’s reign of terror.

Dagan had asked Mossad’s psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, psychoanalysts, and the profilers—collectively known as “the specialists”—to focus on where Imad Mughniyeh could be and the best way to kill him. There was a concensus the ideal means of doing so was with a car bomb. “It would be poetic justice,” one specialist said. Using the only photograph of him published in a newspaper and a handful of biographical details, they set to work.

Born in a south Lebanese village, the son of a fruit seller, Imad Mughniyeh had joined Force 17, Yasser Arafat’s personal bodyguards, at the age of fifteen. He was sixteen-years-old when he had killed his first Israeli, a settler in the Golan Heights. After Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was forced to leave Lebanon in 1982, Mughniyeh stayed behind in Beirut and joined Hezbollah, the organization, which had already established itself as the prime militant force resisting Israel. He came to the notice of Sheikh Fadlallah, who arranged for Mughniyeh to rise quickly in the Hezbollah ranks. By the age of twenty, Mughniyeh was a full-fledged terrorist after a spell of training in Tehran under the auspices of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

The newspaper snapshot, showing an exultant Mughniyeh addressing a Hezbollah rally in Beirut, was studied under computer analysis. Various shapes of beard were superimposed to suggest how he might look now as the specialists tried to create an image of him and to seek clues to his mindset. Using a technique, which they properly called “remote in-depth analysis,” but referred to among themselves as RIDA, they continued the task of mapping out his personality. They evoked a great deal in their analysis: Allah and the devil and the role each might play in his life. Much of what they posited was only intended to remain between them, verbal signposts along the road of trying to discover Imad Mughniyeh’s thinking as well as his physical appearance.

Other specialists worked to discover the psychological forces, which motivated Mughniyeh. He was a mass murderer, certainly, yet he did not fit the typology of fanatics, those who were driven by anger. It would be satisfying—at least for the behaviorists—to conclude that at the root of his evil was all-consuming rage. It was there of course, but was it an all-animating and life-energizing force? The psychologists wondered if he was what they deemed “inhabited by a strong streak of masked violence?” This would have allowed him to go about his work in a business-like manner, whether he was recruiting little more than children to be suicide bombers or ordering the bomb-makers to make even more powerful explosives. But again there was no clear answer—no more than there was to the question of how he maintained order within his own immediate psychological universe so he could equate his unspeakable actions to his own belief he was right to kill and destroy. Was he the man who had been psychologically shaped by all he had done over the past twenty-five years?

In the photo that had been taken in the 1980s at that Hezbollah rally, a full beard covered his chin and the peaked cap he wore covered his hair. Rimless spectacles also hid his eyes. One by one the facial analysts used their computer skills to remove his beard, spectacles, and hat, and aged him to his present forty-five years. The specialists concluded there was evidence that at some point Mughniyeh’s face had undergone some surgical work. But the traces of scar tissue indicated it had been done at least five years ago when he had first disappeared after the spate of suicide bomb attacks on Israel.

The Chinese were the acknowledged leaders in the field of facial surgery. But the Beijing regime had turned its back on Hezbollah. The Russians were a possibility, but again the Mossad medical experts ruled out plastic surgeons that had once worked for the KGB. Others who operated on what the experts called “close to the wind” were checked in Romania, Serbia, and North African countries. But Mossad agents did not discover any evidence Mughniyeh had undergone plastic surgery in any of these countries.

Then, in June 2007, came the break. Since the end of the war with Hezbollah in south Lebanon, Mossad had been steadily recruiting Israeli Arabs in the West Bank who were opposed to Hezbollah. One of the informers had a relative in a village near Mughniyeh’s birthplace. The cousin had told him that a friend of her family had heard Mughniyeh had traveled to Europe from the safe house the Syrian regime had provided. He had sent postcards from Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, and finally Berlin. It was little to go on, but it was a start.

First a Mossad agent, a fluent Arab speaker, had traveled to south Lebanon and had met the informer’s cousin. The agent had posed as an old friend of Mughniyeh. Little more had emerged except the cousin was certain Mughniyeh was back in Damascus, but according to her friend’s family, he now looked different.

In hours, Reuben had been ordered to investigate the possibility that Mughniyeh had visited Berlin to undergo further plastic surgery. Now, six months later, the katsa had the proof in the file his informer had handed over.

On Sunday afternoon, February 3, 2008, Meir Dagan chaired a meeting in the conference room adjoining his office. On the table were jugs of water and pots of coffee for those seated around it. They were the head of Shin Bet, the country’s internal security force, the government’s national security adviser, the political adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the military advocate-general to the Israeli Defense Forces, IDF. Among them sat a brigadier-general, the head of kidon , Mossad’s unique unit that conducted legally-approved assassinations. Beside Dagan sat his Director of Operations. In a corner of the room was the table and chair usually occupied by the notetaker to record decisions and other discussions. Now it was empty. There would be no record of this meeting.