Hezbollah (53 page)

It appears that the key factor behind Israel’s willingness to complete the prisoner swap with Hezbollah, even at such a high cost, was concern about the highly classified information to which Tannenbaum had access. Investigators quickly assessed that Tannenbaum revealed extensive information to his captors. They additionally made any plea bargain with the government contingent upon his taking polygraph tests to verify his cooperation and truthfulness in the investigations. Concerns shot through the roof as he failed successive polygraph tests and left out details about his
drug trafficking activities in an apparent effort to shield himself from prosecution.
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Later, under cross-examination in an unrelated case in which he was called to testify about a former business partner, Tannenbaum would concede, “I did not tell my interrogators everything. I didn’t tell them about the drug deal.”
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Back in the weeks following his release, however, Israeli officials concluded Tannenbaum was not cooperating with counterintelligence investigators, and Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter told Israeli parliamentarians that investigators doubted Tannenbaum’s story.
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Despite his deceptive behavior, Israeli prosecutors signed an immunity agreement with Tannenbaum, because they were reliant on his cooperation—only he could tell them what they needed to know. However, he would be required to undergo further lie detector tests. This was a logical demand given the Knesset’s subcommittee on Intelligence and Secret Services’ conclusion that the Tannenbaum affair was “one of the gravest in Israel’s history.”
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In June 2007, an Israeli military tribunal stripped Tannenbaum, now a taxi driver, of his rank, demoting him to private.
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The case of Fawzi Mohammed Mustafa Ayub stands out for two reasons. First, he is one of the few Hezbollah infiltrators to successfully evade Israeli security and make his way into Israel undetected. Second, he was able to operate on the ground in Israel and the West Bank for about a year and a half before being detained. Coming off the failed efforts by Mikdad and Smyrek, Hezbollah worked hard to ensure the success of its next infiltration mission. In Ayub Hezbollah planners found a Hezbollah veteran who had taken part in sensitive operations abroad in the past.
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As a Shi’a teen growing up in war-torn Beirut at the start of the Lebanese civil war, Fawzi Ayub joined the Shi’a Amal militia in 1975. “The Christians oppressed us,” he stated in testimony before a Tel Aviv court in 2002. “I saw dead people, women and children. It affected me. I saw that the miserable ones have to be protected.”
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In 1983, a year after Hezbollah’s founding, Ayub followed a stream of religious Shi’a who left Amal for the more explicitly religious and radically militant Hezbollah. Ayub demonstrated his capabilities and rose within the ranks of Hezbollah’s militia and terrorist wings. Just three years after joining the group, he was selected to participate in a sensitive terrorist operation abroad. In a sign of Hezbollah’s early commitment to pan-Shi’a solidarity, the operation did not target Israel, America, France, or another multinational force, but Iraq—a fellow Arab state ruled by a minority Sunni regime that oppressed its majority Shi’a population and was at war with Iran.

In the mid-1980s, Ayub was convicted by a Romanian court for his role in a Hezbollah plot to hijack an Iraqi airliner set to depart from Bucharest in order to negotiate the release of Shi’a clerics detained in Iraq in exchange for the Iraqi passengers. Two operational teams—one primary and the other a backup—were assembled and dispatched to execute the hijacking. The redundancy served Hezbollah well since Romanian authorities uncovered the first team, which included Ayub. The point man for the first team, a man named Sh’alan, traveled to Bucharest a few days
ahead of his associates to procure handguns for the hijackers, but he was caught and quickly confessed. “Sh’alan was supposed to meet us and give us weapons, a small handgun,” Ayub told a Tel Aviv court after his arrest in Israel years later.
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Romanian authorities arrested other members of the team, including Ayub, as they arrived in the country. The second team arrived undetected, however. It appears the hijackers flew from Romania to Iraq and then boarded Iraqi Airways flight 163 destined for Amman, Jordan. Iraqi security officers on board the plane tried to stop the hijacking, but two hand grenades went off, causing the flight to crash near Arar, Saudi Arabia. Of the 106 people on board, some 62 died as the plane crashed and split in two. Hezbollah’s IJO claimed responsibility for the attack from Beirut, and the CIA identified one of the hijackers as Ribal Khallil Jalul, whose photo adorned a Hezbollah martyr poster found near a mosque in Beirut.
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Ayub was sentenced to seven years in a Romanian prison, “but Hezbollah sent an agent to pay off the Romanians and he was released after just ten months.”
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This was not Hezbollah’s first operational venture in Romania. According to an April 1992 CIA report, as of late 1990, Hezbollah began planning a joint operation together with PIJ targeting Jewish émigrés at a Warsaw synagogue and the Budapest airport.
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Over the years, reports would emerge indicating that Hezbollah operatives had long worked out of the Balkans, in general, and Romania, in particular. In October 2001, Moldovan intelligence accused Mahmoud Ahmad Hamoud, who left his native Lebanon when he was eighteen, of having close ties to Hezbollah. Hamoud, who lived in Romania from 1992 to 1997, married into the Moldovan political elite and served as Lebanon’s honorary consul to Moldova. But authorities there alleged he “received 400,000 dollars from the leaders of the Hezbollah terrorist organization in order to consolidate the position of the organization in Romania” when he lived there. He was also accused of drug trafficking and smuggling women for prostitution.
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The following year, Romanian intelligence sources reported that Hezbollah was active “in the country’s main university cities, focusing on propaganda, economic and intelligence activities.”
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Following his release from a Romanian prison in 1988, Ayub immigrated to Canada, sponsored by an uncle under a program reserved for refugees displaced by the Lebanese civil war. Family members living in Canada welcomed Ayub, and he became a Canadian citizen in 1992. Asked by an Israeli judge if he had told Canadian authorities about his conviction in Romania on terrorism charges, Ayub replied, “They didn’t ask me.”
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And he never told.

At first glance, Ayub seemed to be leading a normal life in the Toronto area. He married a woman from the United States, just across the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. At some point the couple lived near Dearborn, Michigan, according to US prosecutors.
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He worked at a grocery store during the day and took classes at night. But all the while Ayub remained an active Hezbollah agent, according to Israeli officials. While in Canada, Israeli officials note, Ayub “maintained contact with senior Hezbollah officials and carried out operations.”
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After his first marriage fell apart, Ayub married an émigré from Lebanon in 1994. The new couple had several children, and Ayub worked for a computer company,
but his wife was unhappy in Canada. In 2000 they moved back to Lebanon, where Ayub bought a bakery and ran a business selling building supplies. Around the time Ayub went into debt that same year, Hezbollah came calling. It sent senior members who knew Ayub from his early days in the group with a simple message: It was time for Ayub’s next sensitive mission.
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Looking back, it is possible Ayub’s travel to Canada was less a personal decision than a strategic move by Hezbollah. After just a few years, the group procured from Canada something far more valuable than the night-vision goggles or other dual-use equipment it usually shopped for in North America; it secured Canadian citizenship and a Canadian passport for a member of its elite IJO. “Fawzi Ayub is a very important guy for them,” an Israeli official explained. “We have good information that he is connected to this [Islamic Jihad] apparatus. There are not many guys like that.”
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Armed with his Canadian passport, and trained to carry out sensitive missions abroad, Ayub was an ideal candidate for Hezbollah’s most ambitious infiltration operation to date.

Ayub trained in the handling and preparation of explosives at secret Hezbollah facilities in Beirut apartments. He was also taught how to hide any trace of his Lebanese identity and given strict guidelines on how to behave once in Israel, including suppressing all aspects of his Arab identity and speaking only English at all times. Some of this training may have been carried out by Mughniyeh himself.
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The purpose of his mission, according to the FBI, was to conduct a bombing on behalf of Hezbollah.
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Israeli authorities believe his mission was to perpetrate multiple attacks in Israel in cooperation with operatives from Hamas and PIJ. This was presumably part of an effort to improve the Palestinian terrorist groups’ bomb-making techniques just as the second intifada was gaining traction in October 2000.
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But that was not all. Israeli officials also believe that the bombing Ayub was to carry out by himself was to be an assassination attempt targeting the Israeli prime minister.
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Like Hussein Mikdad before him, Ayub arrived in Israel just before an Israeli election with the possible objective of influencing the vote by targeting key officials or sensitive government buildings. While Ayub was in the country, another Hezbollah operative, Jihad Shuman, was arrested just 300 meters from the prime minister’s Jerusalem residence. An Israeli intelligence report concludes, “By virtue of the similarities in their activity and the fact that the operatives concentrated on the area of Jerusalem containing many government buildings, it is possible that all three cases were attempts to harm the Prime Minister of Israel.”
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After several months of training, Ayub traveled to an unknown European country on his Canadian passport. In an attempt to wrap their operative in an extra layer of operational security, Hezbollah planners decided Ayub would not travel on to Israel on his Canadian passport, which was apt to create suspicion with its Lebanese visa stamps. The high-quality forged American passport he received while in Europe featured Ayub’s picture and the name Frank Boschi. Nine years later, in August 2009, Ayub would be indicted in US District Court in Detroit for willfully and knowingly using a false US passport to enter Israel “for the purpose of conducting a bombing on behalf of the Designated Terrorist Organization Hizballah.”
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Now answering to the name Frank Boschi, Ayub traveled to Greece and boarded a boat to Israel. It was October 2000, just weeks into the violence of the second intifada, when the Hezbollah operations specialist disembarked at the Israeli port of Haifa. “Then I did what I was told to do,” Ayub would later recount. “I went to Jerusalem, I stayed in hotels, and I bought a cellphone and called and said I was in Jerusalem.”
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After a few days in Jerusalem, Ayub traveled to Hebron in the southern West Bank, where he contacted a local terrorist operative. Together, the two scouted possible sites for the prepositioning and concealment of weapons for future operations.
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According to Israeli intelligence, Ayub did in fact prepare and hide explosives in caches in Israel for later use.
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According to one report, Ayub intended to assemble a fragmentation bomb in Hebron, a feat that would have marked a qualitative improvement in the lethality of the explosives utilized by Palestinian terrorist groups until that point.
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Fragmentation bombs have a thick outer layer designed to shatter into many pieces that then disperse in every direction at a very high velocity on detonation. To effect destruction at that level, Palestinian terrorists previously had to surround their explosives with nails, screws, and bolts.

Ayub’s mission was interrupted, however, by his arrest—not by the Israelis but by Palestinian police in Hebron. For all his training in operational security, something about Ayub’s behavior led Palestinian security officials to arrest him on suspicion of being an Israeli spy. Ayub claims Palestinian security officials blindfolded him, beat him, and accused him of being a member of the South Lebanon Army, whose members were sometimes deployed to the West Bank to spy on Palestinian groups and the Palestinian Authority on behalf of Israel. Perhaps it was Ayub’s arrival on the scene just as the second intifada began that raised their suspicions. Whatever the reason, Ayub suddenly found himself in a Palestinian prison cell.
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Ayub recounted his exchange with Palestinian police in testimony before an Israeli court:

I told them, “I’m from South Lebanon.” … They asked, “What organization?” I told them I was with Amal and then I moved to Hezbollah. Only when I told them I was with Hezbollah were they satisfied. They said, “You are in the resistance,” and I said, “I am here in the resistance as well.” Right away they brought me coffee and they left me alone; they were satisfied with me. They said they would bring me cigarettes and chicken. I said I was finished with being kicked and beaten up…. Later, one by one they came to me and asked me to tell them about my heroism.
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But the Palestinians did not release Ayub. A sympathetic officer named Younis reportedly looked after him and brought him coffee in return for the promise of several thousand dollars. After a period, however, Israeli forces arrested Younis. Another Palestinian officer chided Ayub for making a big mistake by cutting the deal with the arrested officer. Younis would surely tell the Israelis about the Hezbollah operative in their custody. On June 25, 2002, the IDF raided Hebron; in particular, they focused on the Palestinian police station and arrested Ayub.
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