Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Over the past six years, similar meetings had been held by Dagan since he came to office in August 2002. The first had been four months later in December that year to discuss the case of Ramzi Nahara, a Mossad informer Dagan had known personally who had defected to Hezbollah. Was it for money? A skewed belief in the group’s cause? Had he fallen for one of the Arab women Hezbollah used to try and entrap a foreigner? There were no answers. But the meeting was short and unanimous. Nahara had to be located. He was tracked to an Arab village and killed with a car bomb planted by a former colleague in the service he betrayed.

In March 2003, another meeting discussed Abu Mohammed Al-Masri, who had been sent by al-Qaeda from Pakistan to create a cell to target Israeli villages on the border with Lebanon using rockets. He, too, died in a car bomb as he drove around south Lebanon seeking recruits and suitable sites to launch the weapons. The next target the meeting had discussed, in August 2003, was Al Hussein Salah, Hezbollah’s explosives expert who had begun rebuilding the organization’s arsenal in the Beirut suburbs. He was on his way to meet his bomb-makers when he died in yet another car bomb planted by the Mossad.

A full year passed before Dagan once more had summoned the men in his conference room. The decision had been taken in the stifling heat of July 2004 that Ghaleb Awali, the Hezbollah link-man between Damascus and the activists in the Gaza strip, should be killed by a car bomb as he headed south to meet the activists. The bomb was planted under his seat. In Awali’s place came Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil, a senior Hezbollah official in Damascus who had been given responsibility by Syria to liaise between Damascus and Hamas and Hezbollah units in Gaza and the West Bank. Even as he drove to his first appointment, Khalil was killed by a Mossad car bomb in a Damascus suburb. In May 2006, Mahmoud Majzoub, a senior member of the Islamic jihad committee through which Hezbollah liaised with Tehran, was killed by a car bomb as he drove for lunch in a south Lebanon restaurant.

Each of the targets had been carefully selected, placed under surveillance and the moment of their deaths was the result of the planning that would once more occupy the men in the conference room on that Sunday afternoon. It was there that the fate of Imad Mughniyeh would be settled. His death warrant was in the folder beside Dagan on the table. It had originally been signed by the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon (in 2008 still in a coma) and ratified by Ehud Olmert. The question the meeting was asked to decide was how could the warrant be executed?

On the table before each man was a copy of the file that Reuben had transmitted on a high-security line from his Berlin office. Inside the file were a series of still prints from a video, in all thirty-four images. They showed the various stages of the plastic surgery Imad Mughniyeh had undergone. First his beard had been shaved and the previous scar tissue carefully removed. A note attached to the print contained the original observation in German, now translated into Hebrew, that the scar tissue on the cheeks, jaw and the temples dated from 1993 following surgery at a clinic in Tripoli, Libya. Close-up images revealed further details of the surgeon’s work at the East German clinic. The eyes had been reshaped by tightening the skin on Mughniyeh’s temples. His lower jaw had been expertly cut, a piece of bone removed and then re-sewn to provide a narrower jaw line, which gave the face a leaner look. A number of front teeth had been removed and replaced with others of a different shape. His hair had been colored a distinguished-looking gray and, instead of his spectacles, he now wore contact lenses. Compared to the original newspaper photograph, Imad Mughniyeh looked radically different.

Those around the table decided a car bomb would once more be the most effective way to carry out the assassination. But there were problems. Mossad’s previous car bombing of Mughniyeh’s associates would undoubtedly have made him cautious about traveling anywhere in his own car. There was a possibility he would use the vehicle of one of his bodyguards. But there was no firm intelligence of who they were or what type of cars they used. The information the Mossad agent had acquired that Mughniyeh was back in Damascus looking “very different” would need time to be checked so a plan could be properly developed.

It was Meir Dagan who brought the discussion to a halt. He reminded others that in nine days time, February 12, a historic event would be taking place in Tehran and other Arab countries. It would mark the twenty-ninth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution. In Syria a day of celebration would be marked by a reception at the city’s Iranian Cultural Center, given by the newly appointed Iranian ambassador to Syria, Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi. It would be a fitting time for him to be introduced to Imad Mughniyeh. In Dagan’s view there was more than “a good chance” Mughniyeh, if he were back in Damascus, would attend the function. To refuse such an invitation would not only offend his Syrian hosts who had given him shelter, but also the Tehran mullahs and their ambassador that would bask in the reflected glory of being in the presence of such an exalted figure who had done so much damage to the West.

Meir Dagan had spoken the words he had used before at other meetings to order an assassination.

“We do it.”

By Monday, February 4, 2008, the kidon brigadier-general had chosen the three operatives he would use for the assassination. Each had been assigned a code name, which matched the one-off passport he would have. The documents would be specially prepared by the Mossad travel department from the stock of passports in storage. Other documents provided details of their home address and occupation. “Pierre,” the French passport holder, had an address in Montpelier, France, and was identified as a car mechanic. “Manuel,” the holder of the Spanish passport, had a home in Malaga and was described as a tour guide; “Ludwig” ’s German passport described him as living in Munich where he worked as an electrician.

The names, addresses, and job backgrounds were genuine, those of sayanim , the Jewish volunteers upon whom Mossad often depended on for its more dangerous operations. Among the tasks the volunteers fulfilled was that of providing cover for agents by allowing them to assume their identity.

While the documents were being prepared by the forgers working in the basement of Mossad headquarters, in the Negev Desert the three kidon memorized their “legends”—the stories they would tell if challenged by immigration, police, or the security officers of Syria. Each story was kept as simple as possible: Pierre could talk knowledgably about car engines; Manuel about his work escorting tourists around the south of Spain; Ludwig memorized the intricacies of being an electrician.

In the meantime the travel department checked the flights into Damascus. In his briefing, the brigadier-general had told the head of the department the kidon should travel separately and arrive at different times in the Syrian capital, and the flights should be on Air France, Jordanian, and Alitalia airlines. Each ticket should have a selection of return flights booked. All the seats should be in Economy. Pierre should arrive first and have a prepaid hired car waiting for him at Damascus. Like the other two, the purpose of his visit should be given as “holiday.”

In the next week a Mossad sayanim in Beirut, a man who had made the journey several times, drove north to Damascus. His familiar figure and the reason for his journey—to explore with the Syrian Ministry of Tourism the possibility of creating twin holidays to Lebanon and the historic ruins of Syria—aroused no suspicion. The sayanim visited the Ministry, made his pitch and drove around Damascus. Among the many photographs he took were several of the Iranian Cultural Center and the surrounding streets. By nightfall he was back in Beirut. That evening the photos had been transferred onto a disk and transmitted to a travel agency, a front for Mossad in downtown Tel Aviv. From there it was couriered to their headquarters in the city.