Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

At 10:00 A.M. Meshal was being driven by his chauffeur to work; in the back of the car with him were three of his young children, a boy and two girls. Beads followed at a discreet distance in his rented car. Other team members were out on the road in other cars.

As they entered the city’s Garden District, the chauffeur informed Meshal that they were being followed. Meshal used the car phone to call in the make and number of Beads’s car to Amman police headquarters.

As the rented Toyota drove past, Meshal’s children waved at Beads, as they had done to other motorists. The Mossad agent ignored them. Next Kendall’s green Hyundai pulled ahead of the chauffeur and both cars disappeared into the traffic.

Moments later an officer at Amman police headquarters called Meshal to say the car was rented to a Canadian tourist. Meshal relaxed and watched his children once more waving at passing motorists, their faces pressed close to the windows. Every morning they took turns riding with their father to work before the chauffeur dropped them off at school.

Shortly before 10:30 A.M. the chauffeur pulled into Wasfi Al-Tal Street, where a crowd had gathered outside the Hamas office, with Kendall and Beads among them. Their presence caused no alarm; curious tourists often came to the office to learn more about Hamas’s aspirations.

Meshal quickly kissed his children before leaving the car. Beads stepped forward as if to shake him by the hand. Kendall was at his shoulder, fumbling with a plastic bag.

“Mr. Meshal?” asked Beads pleasantly.

Meshal looked at him uncertainly. At that moment Kendall produced the aerosol and tried to spray its contents into Meshal’s left ear.

The Hamas leader recoiled, startled, wiping his lobe.

Kendall made another attempt to spray the substance into Meshal’s ear. Around him the crowd were beginning to recover from their surprise, and hands reached out to grab the agents.

“Run!” said Beads in Hebrew.

Followed by Kendall, Beads sprinted to his car, parked a little way up the street. Meshal’s chauffeur had seen what was happening and began to reverse back down the street, trying to ram the Toyota.

Meshal was staggering around, moaning. People were trying to support him from falling. Others were shouting for an ambulance.

Beads, with Kendall sprawled beside him and still clutching his half-used aerosol, managed to avoid the chauffeur’s car and was accelerating up the street.

Other cars were in pursuit. One of the drivers had a cell phone and was calling for roads in the area to be blocked. The chauffeur was using his car phone to contact police headquarters.

By now backup members of the kidon team had arrived. One of them stopped and waved for Beads to transfer to his car. As the two Mossad men jumped out of the Toyota, another vehicle blocked their path. From it emerged a number of armed men. They forced Beads and Kendall to lie on the ground. Moments later the police arrived. Realizing there was nothing they could now do, the remaining members of the kidon team drove away, eventually making their way undetected back to Israel.

Beads and Kendall were less fortunate. They were taken to Amman central police quarters, where they produced their Canadian passports and insisted they were victims of some “horrendous plot.” The arrival of Samih Batihi, the formidable chief of Jordanian counterintelligence, ended the pretense. He told them he knew who they were; he had just gotten off the phone with the Mossad station chief. Later, according to Batihi, the spymaster had “made a clean breast. He said they were his people and Israel would deal directly with the king.”

Batihi ordered that the two Mossad agents be locked in separate cells but that they not be harmed in any way.

Meantime, Meshal had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Amman’s main hospital. He complained of a persistent “ringing” in his left ear, a “shivery feeling like a shock running through my body,” and increasing difficulty with breathing.

The doctors put him on a life-support system.

News of the operation’s failure reached Yatom in a secure telephone call from the station chief in the Israeli embassy in Amman. Both men were said to be “beyond rage” at the debacle.

By the time Yatom reached Netanyahu’s office, the prime minister had received a telephone call from King Hussein on the hot line installed between the two leaders to deal with a crisis. The flavor of the call came later from an Israeli intelligence officer:

“Hussein had two questions for Bibi. What the fuck did he think he had been playing at? Did he have an antidote for the nerve gas?”

The king said he felt like a man whose best friend had raped his daughter and that if Netanyahu was thinking of denying everything, he had better understand his two agents had made a full confession on video, which was now on its way to Washington for Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, to review. Netanyahu sat there hunched over his phone, “as white as anyone caught with his hand in the till.”

Netanyahu offered to fly at once to Amman to “explain matters” to the king. Hussein told him not to waste his time. The intelligence officer recalled:

“You could hear the ice crackling on the line from Jordan. Bibi didn’t even protest when Hussein told him that he now expected Israel to release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin [the Hamas leader Israel had held in prison for some time], as well as a number of other Palestinian prisoners. The call lasted only a few minutes. It must have been the worst moment in Bibi’s political life.”

Events now took on their own momentum. Within an hour, an antidote to the nerve gas had been flown to Amman by an Israeli military plane and administered to Meshal. He began to recover and, within a few days, was well enough to stage a press conference in which he ridiculed Mossad. The Amman station chief and Samih Batihi had a short meeting during which they also spoke to Yatom on the phone. The director general fervently promised there would never be another assassination attempt carried out by Mossad on Jordanian soil. Next day Madeleine Albright made two short calls to Netanyahu; she made it clear what she thought of what had happened, her language at times as salty as King Hussein’s.

Learning how its passports had been compromised, Canada recalled its ambassador to Israel—a move that fell just short of breaking off diplomatic relations.

When details began to emerge, Netanyahu received a roasting in the Israeli and international press that would have driven other men to resign.

Within a week, Sheikh Yassin was released and returned to a hero’s welcome in Gaza. By then Kendall and Beads were back in Israel, minus their Canadian passports. These had been handed over to the Canadian embassy in Amman for “safekeeping.”

The two katsas never returned to the kidon unit; they were assigned to nonspecific desk duties at Mossad headquarters. As an Israeli intelligence officer said: “That could mean they would be in charge of security in the building’s toilets.”

But Yatom had become a lame-duck chief. His senior staff felt he had failed to stand up to Netanyahu. Morale within Mossad slumped to a new low. The prime minister’s office leaked the view that it “is only a matter of time before Yatom goes.”

Yatom tried to stem what one Mossad senior officer likened to “the tidal wave of dejection in which we are drowning.” Yatom adopted what he called “his Prussian pose.” He tried to browbeat his staff. There were angry confrontations and threats to resign.

In February 1998, it was Yatom himself who resigned in an attempt to head off what he acknowledged was “a near mutiny.” Prime Minister Netanyahu did not send his fallen intelligence chief the customary letter of thanks for services rendered.