Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (28 page)

The most important and daring among the military Special Forces is the “Sayeret Matkal,” an army reconnaissance and commando unit modeled on the British SAS even to the extent of adopting the SAS motto, “Who Dares Wins.” In practice many, perhaps a majority, of the spectacular Israeli raids, rescue operations, and coups de main attributed to Mossad were the work of the Sayeret Matkal (also known as General Reconnaissance Unit 269). The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, served with it, as did his two brothers. Another veteran of Sayeret Matkal was Ehud Barak, Israel’s tenth prime minister. Sayeret units are now routinely built into Israel’s other military arms, including the infantry. For example, Sayeret Yahalom “is a special elite combat unit of the Engineering Corps. It specializes in accurate demolitions and planting pinpoint explosives along with other high-scale engineering operations in and outside the Israeli borders.” Over the years many other Special Forces teams have been created in response to Israel’s wars of survival. According to Israeli military sources, they include the following:

Mistaravin: Pseudo-Arabs trained in counter-terrorism, used for “surprise, hit-and-run missions” within the Occupied Territories. Israeli military sources assert that the Mistaravin use force economically and precisely, containing the threat of greater violence. “Undercover riot control is a good example…. A couple of undercover operators, who infiltrate the riot, can quickly take out the riot’s leaders, preventing the need to use riot control techniques on the participants using large uniformed forces…. During the first Intifada (1987–1994) and the second Intifada (2000–2005) the units conducted thousands of missions, killing or capturing hundreds of terrorists…. Today…there is a distinct preference to capture the terrorists alive when possible so they can be used as intelligence sources.”

Sayeret Egoz: “Originally a counter-guerrilla force set up in the 1960s for retaliatory cross-border missions, principally in Lebanon.”

YATA (Urban Tactical Units) created in 2004 “to fight surgically and effectively against insurgents in urban areas.”

LOTAR (Counter-Terror) Eilat: Based in Israel’s most southern city, it is “the only Israeli Defense Force unit which specializes in hostage rescue…. Especially renowned for its snipers.”

Sayeret Shaldag (Special Air Ground Designating Team): An SF unit within the Israeli Air Force set up after the Yom Kippur War in 1973—in which the IAF lost 100 aircraft—as a reserve to Sayeret Matkal to direct air strikes using laser designators. It is described as “the IDF primary airborne assault force,” modeled on the British SAS. In 1982, in operations in Lebanon, Shaldag destroyed missile sites and anti-aircraft batteries, ensuring Israeli air superiority. In 1986–87, the first years of the Intifada, “Shaldag was among the very first units to conduct undercover missions wearing typical Arab clothing.” In September 2007, the unit was thought to be involved in an attack by F-15 Israeli Air Force strike aircraft on a cache of nuclear materials supplied by North Korea to Syria.

Shayetet 13: Naval commando unit formed in 1949. During its early decades, until the 1980s, the unit suffered from insufficient training and specialization; but then, in Lebanon, it had “an excellent track record of dozens of successful operations each year, without casualties” including “interdiction of terrorists’ vessels, blowing up enemy headquarters and key facilities, conducting ambushes and planting explosives in terrorists’ routes.” Against that record, “it lost twelve of its operators in a botched raid in Lebanon in 1997.” In November 2009, a flotilla of Shayetet 13’s speed boats intercepted the Antiguan-flagged freighter
Francop
off the coast of Cyprus. It carried a large consignment of missiles, rockets, shells, grenades, and assault rifles hidden in containers in the hull “bound for Hizbollah from Iran,” said Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. The haul was the biggest of its kind for seven years. In the Red Sea in 2002 Shayetet had intercepted the
Karine A
, also carrying arms from Iran to its Hamas ally in the Gaza Strip.

This list is far from exhaustive. Other teams include Army Unit 8200 (signals intelligence); Unit 504 running agents in occupied territories; even faceless establishments such as Facility 1391, known as “Israel’s Guantanamo.” There, according to the newspaper Ha’aretz, “detainees are blindfolded and kept in blackened cells, never told where they are, brutally interrogated and allowed no visitors of any kind…. No wonder Facility 1391 officially does not exist.”
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Brassey’s most recent International Intelligence Yearbook (2003 edition) adds to this list the Nativ, or Liaison Bureau, still assisting Jews to leave Russia while acquiring that useful by-product, intelligence; deep reconnaissance units 5707 and 669; and Malmad, operating from the Defense Ministry and allegedly responsible for computer espionage. Its predecessor, Lekem (or Lakam), was disbanded as a result of Pollard’s betrayal of the U.S. Navy.

Mossad, the Israeli state’s intelligence service, comprises ten separate departments. It is still primarily an intelligence agency similar to the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), on which it was originally modeled. Its covert strike force, Kidon, is part of a “Mossad-Within-Mossad” operational branch known as Metsada.

This is probably not a complete, up-to-date list; but it is possible, by identifying the operations in which these agencies have taken part, to replicate Israel’s Special Forces agenda. This would include (on Mossad’s part)
Strategic Intelligence
(such as disclosure of Khrushchev’s secret denunciation of Stalin in 1956);
Direct Action
including assassination (in conjunction with Army Special Forces);
Kidnap
(with agencies such as Shin Bet);
Rescue Operations
(largely military SF);
Acquisition of Military Hardware
(including Operation Noah’s Ark, the mysterious escape from Cherbourg on Christmas Day, 1969 of Israel’s impounded gunboats; and acquisition of a MiG-23, after its Syrian pilot was turned, 12 October 1989);
Interdiction Operations
(such as Operation Sphinx, the air attack on Iraq’s nuclear facility, 1981; or Operation Plumbat, the theft at sea of an entire cargo of 200 tons of uranium oxide);
Invisible Military Exports
, including arms deals and training teams for the Kurdish Peshmerga; Chilean special forces; Colombian guerrillas and—simultaneously—Tamils and Sinhalese, then at war with one another. There were some spectacular failures along the way but, by and large, more gains than losses.

What follows is a far from complete account. It is indicative, however, of the nature of the operations run by Mossad and its allies, combining courage, ingenuity, and—thanks to the belief that the ultimate Commander-in-Chief is God himself—sublime indifference to the niceties of international law or international opinion. Two operations dominate the history of Israel’s special operations, operations linked by daring and public exposure. One was an exercise in Jewish vengeance; the other, the preservation of precious Jewish blood.

For two decades from the 1960s onward, Western institutions were plagued by violent, “chic” revolution whose icon was Che Guevara, a movement that swept university campuses from Berlin via France, the Netherlands, and Northern Ireland to Ohio. Some protests had their origin in extreme left-wing politics. Others opposed military conscription for war service in Vietnam. In Ulster and elsewhere, there was a legitimate issue of civil rights. Some of these events, particularly in Ireland, began with the politics of provocation and spilled over into lethal civil war. Extremists of every kind made common cause to overturn the established order. They were often from wealthy backgrounds, part of a generation that had not been chastened by the Second World War. Libya’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, supplied the IRA with assault rifles and explosives. Palestinian extremists merged with West German Marxist terrorists. Starting with the hijack of four airliners bound for New York but blown up on Dawson’s Field, Jordan in September 1970, air travel was perceived as a very bad idea. A Terrorist International had come into being.

In Germany, the imprisoned leaders of the Baader-Meinhof group (the Red Army Faction) called on the Palestinian terrorist group Black September for help. The Palestinians spotted their chance during the countdown to the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Hostage-taking and prisoner exchange were part of the landscape of terror practiced on all sides. Black September (named after the defeat of Syrian-backed Palestinians attempting to subvert Jordan two years earlier) sent a team of eight into the Olympic village in the early hours of 5 September where many of the Israeli team were quartered. Having taken eleven hostages, the terrorists issued their demand: release and transfer to Egypt 234 Palestinians and others held in Israel, as well as Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in prison in Germany. The Israeli prisoners, weight-lifters and wrestlers, did not go quietly. In some of the fights that followed, two of them were shot dead.

Hours of negotiation followed. The German authorities persuaded the terrorists to travel with their hostages by helicopter to Fürstenfeldbruck NATO air base, ostensibly to be flown by a Lufthansa civil airliner to Egypt. In the febrile atmosphere at the airport, the terrorists smelled a rat. After inspecting the Lufthansa jet, two of them started running back to the helicopter. It was now dark. An unqualified police sniper opened fire. In the chaos that followed, the remaining hostages were murdered and five of the terrorists shot dead, the last one after a manhunt that continued into the early hours. Three terrorists survived, only to be handed over by the West German government to Libya, following the hijack of another Lufthansa airliner.

The West Germans’ loss of control at Fürstenfeldbruck, where only five untrained, badly deployed police snipers were initially outnumbered by their enemy, was observed from the control tower with cold anger by Mossad’s director, Zvi Zamir, and Victor Cohen, Shin Bet’s senior interrogator. They were allotted a grandstand seat on condition they remained passive observers of their countrymen’s murders. The surviving terrorists and their dead comrades were received by most of the Arab world, aside from Jordan, as heroes.

The stage was now set for the next part of this bloody drama. In spite of the fact that one of Mossad’s operations to hunt down and kill the Munich terrorists and their key planners was codenamed “Wrath of God,” General Zamir denied that vengeance had any place in Israel’s thinking. In an interview more than thirty years later, he said: “We are accused of having been guided by a desire for vengeance. That is nonsense. We acted against those who thought that they would continue to perpetrate acts of terror. I am not saying that those who were involved in Munich were not marked for death. They definitely deserved to die. But we were not dealing with the past; we concentrated on the future.” Elsewhere, he used the phrase “prevention of future threats” to describe the campaign of selective assassination outside Israel as a result of West Europe’s failure to halt a succession of airline hostage-taking operations by Arab terrorists.
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Around twelve suspects were assassinated during a campaign that lasted several years. Preparation for the first strike against those held responsible for Munich took little more than five weeks. Captured Palestine Liberation Organization prisoners were persuaded, by bribes, blackmail, or other means, to identify some of the suspects. Others were already known to Mossad as “the usual suspects.” Accurate identification depended heavily on the belief that Black September, originally backed by the Syrian movement known as al-Saiqa, was an arm of Arafat’s PLO. To reduce the possibility of error, each assassination was preceded by a quasi-legal tribunal in Israel colloquially known as “Committee X.” Over a fifteen-month period, at least eight Arab terrorists were slain. The first man to go, on 16 October 1972, was Abdel Wa’il Zu’itar, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s man in Rome. As he waited for the elevator in his apartment building, he was shot twelve times at point-blank range, probably by a two-man team from Mossad’s Kidon hit team. On 8 December, Mahmoud Hamchari, the PLO’s man in France, answered the telephone in Paris: “Oui?”

“Est-que c’est Monsieur ‘Amchari qui parle?” the caller asked.

“Oui. C’est lui,” Hamchari replied.

At that moment, a bomb, concealed inside a bedside table on which the telephone rested, exploded. Hamchari died a month later. Six weeks passed, and in January 1973 Hussein Al Bashir, a senior member of the PLO’s guerrilla arm, Al Fatah, was preparing for bed at a perhaps aptly named Olympic Hotel in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia. His assassins watched and waited for his bedroom light to be turned off. They then detonated the bomb planted under the bed.

On 9 April, a joint operation involving Mossad and the Army’s Special Forces commando Sayeret Matkal assassinated three more top PLO men in their Beirut homes. A week ahead of the attack, six Mossad agents (three using British passports) arrived on civilian flights from different capitals, to prepare the way with hired cars, safe houses, and target reconnaissance. The commandos came in by sea, the last mile by small inflatables, guided by a flashlight code from the agents onshore. Their surprise attack on the enemy apartments in downtown Beirut was total. Almost simultaneously, Muhammed Najjar, Kamal Adwan—allegedly senior Black September leaders—and Kamal Nasser, the PLO’s spin doctor, were gunned down by their masked attackers as other Sayeret commandos struck at alternative Palestinian centers in the city in diversionary operations. Before the smoke had cleared, Israel’s Special Forces had vanished like phantoms, collecting new clothes and passports before they passed “Go” on their indirect way home by civil flights. Others linked to the Munich massacre, taken out during the wave of Mossad assassinations, included Ziad Muchessi (Athens, 12 April 1973) and Mohammed Boudia, an Algerian terrorist organizer with links to many disparate groups (Paris, 28 June 1973).