Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

In this pitiless world Shkaki had long been lionized by his people. It was he who had personally granted the bombers of Beit Lid absolution from the inviolable Islamic prohibition against suicide. To do so he had combed the Koran to extrapolate a philosophical assumption that oppression makes the oppressed discover new strengths; in preparing the suicide bombers he had exploited the psychological flaws in unbalanced youngsters who, like the Japanese kamikaze teenagers in World War II, went to their own end on that January day in a state of religious fervor. Afterward, Shkaki had paid for their death notices in Jihad’s newspaper and, at Friday prayers, had praised their sacrifice, assuring their families their sons had found a place in heaven.

In the tension of the streets where he operated, it had become a matter of honor for a family to provide a son for Shkaki to sacrifice. Those who died were remembered each day after the muezzin wailed through the crackling loudspeakers to call the faithful to prayer. In the shadowy coolness of the mosques of south Lebanon, their memories were kept alive.

His next recruits chosen, their target selected, Shkaki would hand the youths over to his bomb makers. They were the strategists who could study a photograph of a target and decide upon the quantity of explosive needed. Like ancient alchemists, they worked by experience and instinct, and their language was filled with the words that brought death: “oxidizer,” “desensitizer,” “plasticines,” and “freezing point depressants.” These were Shkaki’s people. Borrowing a phrase once used by a leader of his hated enemy, Israel, he told them all: “We fight, therefore we exist.”

On that October evening when his fate was about to be settled in the Tel Aviv safe house, Shkaki was at home in Damascus with his wife, Fathia. The apartment was strikingly different from the squalor of the refugee camps where he was venerated. Expensive carpets and wall hangings were gifts from the ayatollahs of Iran. A gold-framed photograph of Shkaki with Mu’ammar Gadhafi was a present from the Libyan leader. A coffee service made of silver was a gift from the Syrian president. Shkaki’s clothes were far removed from the simple gown he wore on his crusades among the impoverished masses in south Lebanon. At home he wore robes cut from the finest cloth available from London’s Savile Row and his feet were shod in custom-made shoes bought in Rome, not the bazaar sandals he wore in public.

Over his favorite meal of couscous, Shkaki reassured his wife he would be safe on his forthcoming trip to Libya to seek further funds from Gadhafi; he hoped to return with one million dollars, the full amount he had requested in a fax to Libya’s revolutionary headquarters in Tripoli. As usual the money would be laundered through a Libyan bank in Valletta on the island of Malta. Shkaki planned to spend less than a day on the island before catching the flight home.

News of the stopover in Malta had prompted his two teenage sons to give him their own shopping order: half a dozen shirts each from a Malta store where Shkaki had shopped previously.

Fathia Shkaki would recall: “My husband insisted if the Israelis were planning a move against him, they would have done so by now. The Jews always respond quickly to any incident. But my husband was very certain in his case they would do nothing to make Syria angry.”

Until three months before, Shkaki would have correctly judged the mood in Tel Aviv. Early in the summer of 1995, Rabin had turned down a Mossad plan to firebomb Shkaki’s apartment in the western suburb of Damascus. Uri Saguy, then chief of military intelligence and effectively Israel’s intelligence supremo, who had authority even over Mossad, had told Rabin he detected “a sea change in Damascus. Assad is still on the surface our enemy. But the only way to overcome him is to do the unexpected. And that means giving up the Golan Heights, give it up completely. Move every one of our people out of there. It’s a huge price. But it is the only way to get a proper lasting peace.”

Rabin had listened. He knew how much the Golan had personally cost Uri Saguy. He had spent most of his military career defending its rugged terrain. He had been wounded four times doing so. Yet he was prepared to put all this behind him to see Israel have real peace.

The prime minister had postponed Mossad’s plans to eliminate Shkaki while Saguy continued to explore the reality of his hopes.

They had withered in the heat of the region’s summer, and Rabin, who was now a Nobel Peace Prize winner, had ordered Shkaki’s execution.

Shabtai Shavit, in his last major operation as Mossad’s chief, ordered a “black agent” in Damascus to resume electronic surveillance of Shkaki’s apartment. The agent’s American equipment was sophisticated enough to override the defense circuit breakers in Shkaki’s Russianbuilt communications system.

Details of Shkaki’s forthcoming visit to Libya and Malta were sent to Tel Aviv.

Now, on that October evening in 1995, the heads of Israel’s three most powerful intelligence services made their way through the crowds strolling along Pinsker Street. Each one supported the conditions for executing a self-proclaimed enemy of Israel that Meir Amit had so clearly defined when he had been director general:

“There would be no killing of political leaders. They needed to be dealt with politically. There would be no killing of a terrorist’s family. If its members got in the way, that was not our problem. Each execution had to be sanctioned by the prime minister of the day. And everything must be done by the book. Minutes kept of the decision taken. Everything neat and tidy. Our actions must not be seen as some act of state-sponsored murder but the ultimate judicial sanction the state could bring. We would be no different from the hangman or any other lawfully appointed executioner.”

Since the successful hunting down of the nine terrorists who had killed the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in 1972, all subsequent assassinations had broadly observed these conditions. Almost twenty-three years to the day since Meir Amit had first formulated the rules for a state-sponsored killing, his successors headed for the safe house.

The first to arrive was Shabtai Shavit. Colleagues unkindly said he had the manner of a front-desk clerk in one of Tel Aviv’s lesser hotels: the same carefully pressed clothes, the handshake that never maintained its grip for long. He had been in the job for three years and gave the impression he never quite knew how long he would remain.

Next came Brigadier General Doran Tamir, chief intelligence officer for the Israel Defense Forces. Nimble and in the prime of his life, everything about him suggested the authority that came from long years of commanding.

Finally Uri Saguy arrived, strolling into the safe house like a warrior god on his way to stardom even more glittering than his position as director of Aman, military intelligence. Soft-voiced and self-deprecating, he continued to provoke controversy among his peers by insisting that beneath its renewed bluster, Syria was still ready to talk peace.

The relationship among the three men was, in Shavit’s words, “cautiously cordial.”

Said Uri Saguy, “We can hardly compare with each other. As head of Aman, I tasked the other two. There was competition between us but, as long as we were serving the same aim, it’s fine.”

For two hours they sat around the living-room table and reviewed the plan to have Fathi Shkaki murdered. His execution would be an act of pure vengeance, the biblical “eye for an eye” principle Israelis liked to believe justified such killings. But sometimes Mossad killed a person when he stubbornly refused to provide his skills to support Israel’s aspirations. Then, rather than risk those talents falling into the hands of an enemy, he too was ruthlessly terminated.