Anatomy of a hit on a death cult arms merchant

Sunday Times:

IN early January two black Audi A6 limousines drove up to the main gate of a building on a small hill in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv: the headquarters of Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence agency, known as the “midrasha”.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stepped out of his car and was greeted by Meir Dagan, the 64-year-old head of the agency. Dagan, who has walked with a stick since he was injured in action as a young man, led Netanyahu and a general to a briefing room.

According to sources with knowledge of Mossad, inside the briefing room were some members of a hit squad. As the man who gives final authorisation for such operations, Netanyahu was briefed on plans to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a member of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza.

Mossad had received intelligence that Mabhouh was planning a trip to Dubai and they were preparing an operation to assassinate him there, off-guard in a luxury hotel. The team had already rehearsed, using a hotel in Tel Aviv as a training ground without alerting its owners.

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The story reads like a thriller novel. It is long and detailed. The Independent on Sunday has a history of some of Mossad's greatest hits that is also pretty fascinating.

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Oddly, the coup that first placed Israel in the international intelligence premier league was almost certainly the work of Mossad's domestic counterpart, Shin Bet, although Mossad's legendary director Isser Harel claimed the credit and certainly became involved in its transmission. (If Mossad's closest UK equivalent is MI6, Shin Bet's is MI5.) This was the acquisition in 1956 of a Polish translation of Nikita Khrushchev's famous "secret speech" denouncing the evils of Stalinism to the 20th Soviet party congress, which came to Israel by way of a Polish journalist. The decision, approved by Ben-Gurion, to pass this sensationally valuable intelligence property to Washington did more than anything else in the 1950s to cement relations with the CIA and the rest of the US security apparatus.

After an initial period in which one of Mossad's driving forces, the future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, devoted multiple efforts against former Nazi scientists, helping Egypt with its weapons programme, what really made the agency's name was its success in 1961 in locating, capturing and bringing back to Israel for trial the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. He remains the only man to have been judicially executed in Israel.

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Klein narrates in vivid detail the Paris hit on Atef Bseiso, who was directly involved in Munich; but Mossad did not catch up with him until 1992. The operation was personally run from a safe house in the 11th arrondissement by the then head of the agency, Shabtai Shavit – travelling, it is topical to note, "on a borrowed identity: a different name was on the passport in the pocket of his blazer".

Bseiso, on a trip from the PLO headquarters in Tunis, was under continuous surveillance as he checked into the Meridien Hotel in Montparnasse, as he went out to dine with a local PLO bodyguard and "an unidentified Lebanese woman", and as he was driven back at around midnight in the new Jeep he had bought on his trip. Two young hitmen ambled towards him as he walked to the hotel doors, before one, Tom, opened fire – noiselessly, thanks to the silencer on his Beretta 0.22 – pausing only to collect the hot cartridge cases before heading back to the getaway car, parked, as is Mossad practice, two 90-degree turns away.

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There is much more.

The Daily Mail on Sunday has a much shorter version of the hit in Dubai.

I certainly do not have a problem with Israel's response to the war being waged against it by the Hamas death cult and the religious bigots in Iran. As arms merchant for the death cult the guy certainly deserved to die. He was on a mission to acquire missiles to aim at Israeli non combatants.