Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (30 page)

Within the U.S., the idea of abduction in a just cause was taken up by Washington in the 1980s as a response to Arab terrorism. Two new laws sponsored by President Reagan in 1984 and 1986 and a secret legal opinion gave the FBI “extraterritorial jurisdiction over terrorists acting against U.S. nationals and property outside the United States.”
²⁰⁶
These laws, and an executive order, became known as “the Presidential Snatch Option.” Debate focused on two kidnaps. In September 1987, a team involving staff from the Pentagon, CIA, Drug Enforcement Agency, and State Department lured Fawaz Younis, a Lebanese, onto a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean. The bait was an illegal drug deal. Younis’s crime was his part in hijacking a Royal Jordanian airliner, carrying, among others, American passengers. Though he was small fry and no casualties were caused, Younis was convicted on three counts and sentenced to thirty years. A federal appeals court found that his arrest met necessary standards of international law.

Following the Mossad’s example, the road to extraordinary rendition in the War on Terror now lay open to thousands of cases similar to Younis’s. One of these was the kidnap of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr (“Abu Omar”), a Muslim Imam, snatched on a street in Milan on 17 February 2003 in an operation coordinated by the CIA and Italian military intelligence. Omar was held for four years in an Egyptian prison where, he alleges, he was tortured. After his release in February 2007, he settled in Italy. A trial of those allegedly involved in Omar’s kidnap opened in Rome in 2009. A total of twenty-six American defendants—twenty-five CIA agents and a U.S. Air Force colonel—were tried
in absentia
. In court were seven Italians including the former head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolo Pollari.
²⁰⁷
The issues of jurisdiction and state legitimacy were now emerging as the horns of a dilemma that was to trouble international lawyers for decades. Though President George W. Bush expressed a popular sentiment when he said, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say,”
²⁰⁸
the rule of law remained at the center of the battle for international opinion and for hearts and minds among the uncommitted majority.

But not in Israel, hermetically sealed from such considerations along with Facility 1391, “Israel’s Guantanamo.” As Dan Yakir, legal adviser to the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), put it: “The existence of a lockup like this gives rise to a double concern: first, of secret arrests and ‘disappearances’ of people; and second, an abuse of power, unfair treatment, violence, and torture.”
²⁰⁹
In theory, Israeli law—specifically the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) Law, adopted by the Knesset in 2002—“restricts the use of force against terrorists during their interrogation.” One of the Special Forces units responsible for interrogation, as well as running agents outside Israel, is the Army’s Intelligence Corps Unit 504, whose cadre of
katamim
, “officers for special tasks,” includes some who undergo additional training to become
hakshabim
, or interrogators.

Following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, there were reports that the U.S. used Israeli interrogators to break top-level Iraqi prisoners, including former intelligence chiefs, using “a variety of techniques that did not cause physical damage.”
²¹⁰
Notionally, such techniques could include the use of drugs, hypnotism, deception, and blackmail, pioneered by British Intelligence in Cairo during the Second World War. In December 2003 Julian Borger,
The Guardian’s
diplomatic editor, reporting from Washington, alleged that Israeli urban warfare specialists were helping to train U.S. Special Forces in counter-insurgency techniques, including assassination of guerrilla leaders. None of Borger’s sources was identified.
²¹¹
Clear proof of Israel’s direct involvement in the Iraq adventure is lacking, but it might be in the interests of both Israel and the U.S. to work together on specific, short-term, acute problems. If so, Special Forces would be the obvious candidates for such deniable operations. By the turn of the century, before 9/11, international opinion was turning against Israel’s assassination policy—as if the world was its legitimate hunting ground—but even then, the Israeli intelligence historian Benny Morris told the
Sunday Telegraph
, an Israeli parliament would never take the Mossad to task for carrying out assassinations. “Israel has no limitations in that respect,” he said. “Even in the 21st century it would be possible for a prime minister to say, like Golda Meir, just go and kill them.”

Much of the history of Special Forces—anyone’s Special Forces—is a story of dirty, morally reprehensible—if effective—work. In terms of presentation, rescue operations, whether by the SAS at the besieged Iranian embassy in London in 1980, or the rescue of several hundred Falasha Jews from Ethiopia four years later, play very much better. For the professional Special Forces soldier, it all comes down to the same thing: a job to be done. The Falashas are a mysterious people, possibly the remnants of the lost Israel tribe of Dan, finally acknowledged as Jews by Israel in 1972. In the 1980s, thousands of them sought sanctuary from local wars in Sudan. As an exit strategy for these people, Mossad, disguised as a Belgian holiday company, constructed a successful Red Sea diving resort on the coast of Sudan. Unnoticed by European holiday makers, over a six-week period, almost 8,000 Falashas were smuggled by Hercules from an airfield near the resort and flown to Israel. A news leak blew Mossad’s cover and Operation Moses, as it was codenamed, was hastily wound up. In a follow-up operation (Joshua) run by the CIA, another 800 were extracted. After a political stalemate lasting six years, Israel overcame a tight political deadline in Operation Solomon to airlift around 5,000 more Falashas from Sudan in thirty-six hours. Absorbing 36,000 agrarian Ethiopian Jews who practiced animal sacrifice and spoke no Hebrew into a densely urban culture presented a double challenge for Israel: one part, practical, the other, the issue of identity, of what it means to be an Israeli and to what century Zion belongs. The Falashas left the Jewish homeland around the 2nd century
B
.
C
.
E
. In Operations Moses and Solomon, Mossad—uniquely among intelligence agencies—had demonstrated that it could even transcend the time barrier. Using various ingenious devices, Mossad’s colleagues in Special Forces demonstrated that they could also, virtually, walk on water. The list of successes is greater than this chapter records. In addition to Entebbe, there were hostage rescues in 1972 (Operation Isotope); 1974 (school children saved at Ma’alot); 1975 (Operation Savoy: hotel guests extracted from captivity); 1978 (bus rescue); 1980 (Misgav Am kibbutz rescue). Kidnaps, in addition to Vanunu and Operation Crate 3, included the abductions of Sheikh Abdul-Karim Obeid (Lebanon, 1989) and Mustafa Dirani (1994) as well as Adolph Eichmann in 1960. These unorthodox military/intelligence exploits represent a style of warfare which the U.S. and Britain only started to rediscover after their interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then with more legal caveats and moral inhibitions. Even some loyal Israelis had misgivings. On 21 December 2003, thirteen reservists serving with Sayeret Matkal placed before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a formal protest about military suppression in the Occupied Territories. It said: “We have come to tell you, Mr. Prime Minister, that we will no longer be accomplices to the reign of oppression in the Territories and the denial of the most elementary human rights of millions of Palestinians, nor shall we be the shield of settlements erected on confiscated land.”

The protesters, the most senior of whom was a major, were expelled from Sayeret Matkal. Such episodes are not unique among Special Forces operators, whether they are asked (as were members of B Squadron, 22 SAS, to embark on a clearly doomed mission during the South Atlantic War) or stand by without protest as at least one SAS observer was asked to do (fruitlessly) during the massacre of Muslim men by Serbs at Srebrenica. The Sayeret Matkal dissidents—three officers and ten soldiers—suffered no further sanction than expulsion. They represented a degree of legitimate moral unease among some sections of Israeli society elsewhere in the military community. Nearly 600 members of the Israeli Defense Forces signed statements refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories. They included a decorated Air Force general who was also an air ace and twenty-six other serving or former pilots. As one expert in military studies put it: “It’s a difficult type of war. It’s harder to uphold ethics. There are no books on moral regulations for fighting terror.” Just so. When the chips are down, Israel’s Special Forces will point out that for sixty years, their country’s enemies have sworn to destroy the country. Israel, with varying help from a few friends, was still standing at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Whether it might have survived without black operations involving civilian casualties is another question. In a global war on terror, it is one which increasingly challenges liberal Western governments far from Jerusalem. Israel represents in an acute form a very contemporary dilemma.

CHAPTER 7

BIG BOYS’ GAMES, BIG BOYS’ RULES

O
n 30 April 1980, just six days after the disastrous failure of Operation Eagle Claw to rescue U.S. diplomats in Iran, a new siege began. This time the victims were seventeen Iranian diplomats working at their country’s imposing London embassy across the road from Hyde Park, plus eight visitors and an unassuming London policeman, a “Bobby,” armed with a revolver. Their captors were six Iranian Arabs, armed with submachine guns and hand grenades and sent by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The terrorists had arrived in London on 30 March, time enough to do some energetic shopping in the belief that their mission would be successfully completed within twenty-four hours. On British television, they watched reports of Delta’s doomed operation at Desert One. The stage was now set for yet another hostage spectacular in London, in which Western security forces, constrained by tight rules of engagement (no indiscriminate shooting, etc.) would be perceived as odds-on losers.

The British had handled two sieges in the recent past, one in London, the other in Belfast, both linked to the Irish War. They had ended with the surrender of IRA terrorists to the SAS, which had been training in close-quarter battle for just such an operation for years beforehand. They developed special snap-shooting techniques on the move, in a crowded environment, that no Wild West shooter could match, except in the movies. Some of the soldiers admitted, privately, to a sense of anti-climax when there was no gunplay. Their practice runs, in a concrete building known as The Killing House, used real VIPs as hostages who were bound and held as “prisoners” during an assault in which hundreds of rounds of live ammunition were fired. This high-risk training had taken the life of at least one instructor.

Saddam’s purpose in seizing the Iranian embassy was to enforce his claim to the Iranian province of Khuzestan—which the Arab minority described as “Arabistan”—and the release of Arabs imprisoned in Iran. Khuzestan was oil-rich. Ten years before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam’s claim to Khuzestan was another megalomaniac gesture by the Iraqi dictator. It was mid-morning when the terrorists rang the bell on the outer door of the London embassy, then wrestled Police Constable Trevor Lock to the ground. One of the intruders started the operation clumsily, firing a bullet through the glass of the inner door. Lock, bleeding from a face wound, managed to send an emergency signal on his personal radio before he was overcome. The SAS, at their Hereford base 150 miles to the west of London, were alerted unofficially by one of their own veterans now serving with the police. Within thirty minutes, before the public was aware of the drama building inside the embassy, a troop of twenty-four men led by a captain from the regiment’s Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing, at a peak of training for just such an emergency, was on its way to London. By early evening, it had moved covertly into a building adjoining the embassy. At a location nearby, a hastily constructed mock-up of the building was being assembled. The soldiers called it Operation Pagoda.

Storming the embassy was close to mission-impossible. As one of the planners told the author: “Basically, we were facing a fortress situation here. You have to bear in mind this was a big, mid-terrace building on six floors (four above ground) with fifty rooms, easily defended at the front and back because of the open spaces on either side of it; twenty hostages and six terrorists who got increasingly jumpy as time went by, moving the hostages from one room to another.”

The drama followed two paths that converged, after five tense days, in an explosion of violence. At first, the London police, faithful to a scenario practiced many times, called in a hostage-negotiator to seek a peaceful end to the confrontation. He was also buying time for the SAS to get prepared, should the worst happen. The “worst” would be clear evidence that the terrorists had started to murder hostages. Efforts to monitor what was going on in the embassy included hand-drilling through walls, to implant listening devices. Tell-tale sounds of that process were overcome by arranging for civil airliners to divert their flight paths over the building, creating as much noise as possible. It was a trick the SAS had used at a terrorist siege in Holland three years earlier. The SAS had another useful asset: the blueprint for security devised by the regiment for the embassy during the years of the Shah’s government in Tehran. Explosive charges estimated to blow in the heavy metal window frames on much of the building were calculated, and—in case of unexpected problems—doubled. This was to generate unwelcome complications when the moment came to strike.

The SAS rapidly increased its strength around the building, including an expert sniper team in Hyde Park. Two groups—Red and Blue—prepared for the assault. Red Team, following an Immediate Action Plan, was to storm the embassy at ten minutes’ notice if the killing started. Red had already made its first reconnaissance of the embassy roof and was preparing abseil ropes and harnesses so as to make an assault from above. Blue Team would strike with more sophistication if the initiative lay with the rescuers, once the location of the hostages was identified. The negotiations dragged on as the terrorist leader, Salim, became increasingly jittery, goaded by one of his captives, the embassy press officer Abbas Lavasani, who challenged Salim to kill him. The terrorists demanded, and got, one concession: a propaganda broadcast by the BBC Overseas Service, stating their cause.

At 6:30
P.M
. on Sunday 4 May, the fifth day of the siege, the front door of the embassy was flung open and a dead body rolled out onto the steps as television cameras focused on the horror of that moment. Salim had threatened to kill hostages earlier that day. The man he shot, claiming martyrdom, was Lavasani. Salim had fired other shots at random, to give the impression of more deaths. As a bluff, it failed dismally. The police immediately handed over control to the SAS, while maintaining the pretense of negotiations, by telephone, with Salim. By now, deserted by his Iraqi controllers, Salim’s demands had shrunk to a guarantee of safe conduct out of the country.

“Salim,” said the police negotiator. “Listen carefully, please. We want to talk about the bus.”

Distracted by the squeaking sound of a drill in the wall alongside him, Salim said: “What bus?”

“The bus that will take you to London Airport.”

On the roof, the Red Team were poised in black masks and overalls, abseil harnesses fitted to the ropes down which they would swoop like hungry carrion. At ground level, Blue team were ready with ladders and explosive charges to blow out windows. Across the road, in the park, the snipers swept their scopes across the building, searching for targets.

Salim sensed that something was wrong. He said, “I will speak later,” and hung up. Constable Lock, his revolver still in its holster, beneath his uniform, had won a degree of confidence with Salim who addressed him respectfully as “Mr. Trevor.” Lock, standing next to Salim, lifted the hotline telephone again, suggesting that the bus be brought without delay because “the people here expect an attack any moment.” Salim snatched the telephone to complain, “There is suspicion…. Just a minute. I’ll come back again.” His men darted from room to room, guns ready. “No suspicious noises, Salim,” soothed the negotiator. The attackers’ radios sent the code “London Bridge.” It was time to strike. “I’m going to check,” Salim told the negotiator. Right on cue, the first explosive charge ripped apart a skylight in the roof. This had been reinforced on the advice of the SAS in the years before the Shah was overthrown. Red Team smashed their way into rooms on the upper floors while Blue saw to windows below, hurling CS riot gas grenades and stun grenades ahead of them as they entered. One of these devices, or the explosive charges on the windows, heard across half of London, set fire to curtains on one side of the building.

In a deadly coincidence, the leader of the Red assault team, a senior sergeant, was trapped in his abseil harness. A defective rope had jammed and he was now its prisoner at a point where flames from the curtains engulfed the lower half of his body. He tried to kick out, away from the building, only to swing back into the flames. Above him, as the second abseil team prepared to jump, one of them saw his predicament and cut the defective rope. The sergeant fell a long way before landing on a balcony. In spite of his injuries, he found a way into the building to join the fight.

In a first-floor office, Constable Lock pounced on Salim, put his revolver to the terrorist’s head but “I could not bring myself to kill in anger.” As the two men wrestled on the floor, an SAS corporal hauled Lock away with the order, “Trevor, leave off.” A second or so later, the corporal and another rescuer poured sub-machine gunfire into the terrorist leader, hitting him with fifteen bullets.

Throughout the building, the rescuers hunted down one terrorist after another as smoke and CS gas swirled around them. In the telex room on the second floor, a terrorist armed with a submachine gun was covering fifteen terrified hostages. He threw a window open and hurled a grenade through it, having overlooked one detail. He had not extracted the pin that releases the detonator. As he glared out of the window, Sergeant S, one of the Hyde Park snipers, picked him off with a head shot at a range of around 300 meters. Other terrorists rushed into the telex room and began firing into the cowering hostages. SAS Corporal Tommy Palmer, a Scot, followed them into the same room and killed a terrorist holding a grenade with one pistol shot to the head. The surviving terrorists threw their guns from the window and tried to merge with the hostages. One was taken prisoner. Another, thrown unceremoniously with genuine survivors along a chain of SAS men down the stairs, was holding a grenade. Soldier I, as he is known, armed with an MP5 submachine gun, could not shoot the man without risk of hitting his own team, or hostages. He later wrote: “I raised the MP5 above my head and…brought the stock of the weapon down on the back of his neck. I hit him as hard as I could. His head snapped back…I caught sight of his tortured, hate-filled face. The sound of two magazines being emptied into him was deafening. As he twitched and vomited his life away, his hand opened and the grenade rolled away”…harmlessly, it should be said.
²¹²
In the embassy garden, the hostages were ordered to lie face-down, their arms strapped to their bodies, until they were identified. The only surviving terrorist, Fowzi Nejad (aka Ali Abdullah), was given a life sentence. He was released on license in November 2008 and granted asylum in Britain as required by human rights law. Had he been deported to Iran, the British authorities concluded, he might have been tortured. Constable Lock was not impressed.

The SAS success at Princes Gate, London, echoed like the cheers for an Olympic victory around the world, politically empowering the right-wing Thatcher government. It was Britain’s Entebbe. Ken Connor, with twenty-three years of frontline SAS service to his credit, was candid about the private feelings of the British establishment. He wrote: “The contrast between the Delta Force at Desert One and the Iranian Embassy could not have been more marked. Once more, while publicly sympathetic about the American misfortune, the SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] were ecstatic.” SIS, perhaps, hoped that a military success in the war against terrorism might erase memories of its own disasters: the defections of Soviet spies including Kim Philby from the upper ranks of SIS after years of betrayal of NATO, Britain, and America. But there was more reason than schadenfreude for celebrations. Britain, like Israel, is a major exporter of military training. As Connor reminds us: “The Kennedy assassination had been the catalyst for the spread of British influence through SAS bodyguard training…. After the Iranian Embassy siege, SAS expertise became one of Britain’s more successful exports in its own right. SAS troops would be hired out to friendly governments for training purposes
or even covert operations
[author’s emphasis] at a rate that covered the actual costs many times over.”
²¹³
One of the “covert operations,” in which regular SAS soldiers effectively became mercenaries hired by other, friendly governments, is discussed in chapter five.

The SAS had mixed feelings about the adulation that swamped it after Operation Pagoda. During the Second World War, it had achieved a golden reputation as a gung-ho raiding force operating behind enemy lines, either in four-man teams or at squadron strength with Resistance fighters in France. Suppressed by a Socialist government after the war, it had sinuously reinvented itself as a deep-jungle fighting force to take on Communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya and Borneo and the pitiless jebels of Aden. Its reserve regiments prepared to act as stay-behind forces in Europe, directing nuclear strikes in the event of a Soviet invasion. The regular, professional SAS shrank to one regiment of a few hundred brilliant individuals (“Misfits who happen to fit together”), an elite that ran a six-year war in Oman from 1970, exploring the possibilities of unconventional warfare to recruit yesterday’s enemy by arming him with the latest assault rifle.

It was dangerous work. In the Battle of Mirbat on 18 July 1972, a training team of ten SAS men, isolated in a mud-walled town forty miles from the nearest military base, was attacked by 250 hand-picked Marxist guerrillas armed with Kalashnikovs, heavy machine-guns, 82-mm mortars, two 75-mm recoilless rifles, and an 84-mm rocket-launcher. The SAS had .50 caliber machine guns, smaller 7.62-mm machine guns, and mortars. The battle lasted all day as wave after wave of enemy tried to overrun the base, with its back to the sea. Two Fijian volunteers were part of the British team. One of them, under heavy fire, took possession of a Second World War artillery gun (a 25-pounder), loaded and fired it singlehanded over open sights at pointblank range. As the enemy closed in for the kill, two Strikemaster aircraft of the Sultan’s Air Force, directed by the SAS, hit the position with 500-lb bombs. The SAS losses during the battle were two dead, two seriously wounded. This summary does not do justice to an epic, small-scale battle of a sort that had to await Afghanistan, more than thirty years later, to be understood. At the time, and for seven years later, the SAS said nothing. The British public were totally unaware of what had happened. In 1979, while this author was researching his first SAS history,
Who Dares Wins
, the story was revealed by a British officer who was not at Mirbat. Reluctantly, the SAS corrected my draft before it passed into Britain’s military history.