Hezbollah (51 page)

Smyrek’s arrest disrupted these plans. According to Israeli police, Smyrek arrived with $4,000, a video camera, maps of Israel, and unspecified “electronic communication devices.”
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Videotape in his possession when he was arrested showed footage of himself delivering the message Hezbollah requested he make denouncing Israel and proclaiming his desire to be a martyr for Hezbollah.
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Under interrogation Smyrek confessed to plotting a suicide attack, expressed no remorse, and pledged to “continue his efforts to kill Israelis” if given the chance.
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He detailed the basic code he had developed to communicate with his Hezbollah handlers based on references to books he owned.
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He was convicted by an Israeli court and sentenced to ten years in jail for aiding and abetting Hezbollah by planning a suicide attack on its behalf. State prosecutors in Hanover, Germany, also indicted Smyrek for “planning to take his own life and that of others in a bombing attack,” but Israeli prosecutors chose to try him there instead of extraditing him to Germany—a move that created friction with their German counterparts.
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Smyrek still expressed no remorse after his conviction, and declined an offer to serve his time in a German prison.
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Israeli prosecutors were unable to convince German authorities to arrest Fahdi and Mohammed Hamdar for spotting and recruiting Smyrek into Hezbollah. As one former Israeli official wistfully recalled, “The people who recruited Smyrek managed to escape capture. The Germans did not arrest them. It was pretty strange.”
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At the time of Smyrek’s arrest, Hezbollah denied any knowledge of him and insisted the entire incident was an Israeli fabrication.
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But after six years in jail, Israel released Smyrek under the terms of a prisoner swap negotiated with Hezbollah to secure the release of a kidnapped Israeli. Before leaving Israel, Smyrek granted an interview to a German documentary filmmaker. “It is an honor to die for Islam and for Allah,” he said in the interview. “When the order comes you have to carry it out and there is no time to ask if there is a God or not, or to think what will happen after you’re dead, without feeling you simply have to lay down your life as Allah decreed.”
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Smyrek returned to Germany after his release. Though he signed a document renouncing violence as part of his early release from prison, Smyrek had told the documentary interviewer he remained eager to carry out an attack. A purportedly free man, Smyrek reportedly was still subject to police observation while in Germany.
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German security services remain concerned about the activities of the nearly thousand-strong Hezbollah support network in the country. The group’s supporters reportedly meet in some thirty cultural centers and mosques across the country, including five in the North Rhine–Westphalia region alone.
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And while their primary activities focus on raising funds for the organization back in Lebanon, they also function as a logistical support network for the group’s weapons procurement and operational activities.
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From time to time, intelligence suggests Hezbollah operatives may be plotting attacks within Germany. In August 2008, for example,
Germany’s federal criminal police chief warned that Hezbollah sleeper cells might have been planning an attack in Germany. Investigators were reportedly monitoring as many as 200 suspected Hezbollah militant sleeper cells in Germany at the time, according to the police chief.
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For its part, Hezbollah has sought to normalize its presence in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. From 2002 to 2003, for example, Hezbollah officials visited Britain, Denmark, Germany, Italy (twice), and Switzerland (also twice).
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Hezbollah even reportedly attempted to purchase a building in Berlin’s Neukoelln district in June 2002. “The building was declared intended to be a cultural-social-religious center,” an Israeli intelligence report noted, “but it is actually designed to be the general headquarters for Hezbollah’s operational activity in Europe, especially Germany.”
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In the wake of the Smyrek episode, Hezbollah continued to recruit operatives and train them for infiltration missions into Israel. At the same time, the group pursued a parallel project aimed not at sending its agents into Israel but at luring Israeli targets to them. Ironically, Qais Obeid, the key person behind Hezbollah’s abduction program, was himself a citizen of Israel.

The Obeid family had deep roots in the State of Israel, centered on Taibeh, a town in what is commonly referred to as the Arab Triangle, a block of Israeli Arab towns bordering the northeast corner of the West Bank. Diab Obeid served as a member of the Israeli Knesset, on the Arab List, which was affiliated with the Mapai Party (the forerunner of today’s Labor Party) from 1961 to 1973.
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These were turbulent times, including the 1967 Six Day War, which brought the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula under Israeli control and prompted a sharp upswing in Palestinian and broader Arab nationalism, as well as eventually radical Islamist extremism. As Israeli Arabs growing up amid these competing emotional and political currents, some members of Diab Obeid’s family drifted away from his liberal political leanings and toward crime and, ultimately, religious extremism.

Diab’s son, Hassan, served as deputy mayor of Taibeh in the 1980s, and both father and son were said to be well connected within Israeli political circles. The third generation of the Obeid clan also seemed to be doing well. Hassan’s five sons included a physician in Germany, a manager of the Taibeh branch of one of Israel’s largest banks, and three business owners, including Qais, the youngest, who was in the jewelry business. But in 1989 Hassan was arrested for trafficking large quantities of drugs from Lebanon and sentenced to ten years in prison. Released three years early, he died a short time later.
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How or why Hassan drifted into the underworld of drug smuggling remains unclear. What is clear is that by the time he was arrested he was no small player. Not only did the counternarcotics operation that led to his arrest reportedly involve a significant quantity of drugs, but he was arrested along with Mohammed Biro, known as the “Middle East drug lord” for his oversized role in the narcotics underworld in Lebanon.
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In a twist more common to spy novels than real life, Mohammed Biro, a onetime source for Israeli intelligence, switched allegiance and allied himself and his drug-running enterprise with Hezbollah. In 1989, Biro was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Sometime after his own release from prison, Hassan asked his sons to visit Mohammed Biro in jail, which they did. Qais returned several times and developed a relationship of his own with Biro, and through him, with Qayed Biro, Mohammed’s youngest son, and other members of the Biro family living in Lebanon.

Qais was facing difficulties at the time of his meetings with Biro. His jewelry business had taken a turn for the worse, leading him to dabble in several other ventures, some shady, including a check-cashing scheme. Qais slipped in and out of debt, regularly relying on his family to bail him out but never fully finding his footing. In 1996, Qais and Ofer Schneitman, his Jewish-Israeli partner who also owned a gun shop, were arrested on charges of conspiring to sell ammunition to Palestinians in the West Bank. Qais’s accomplice was sentenced to thirteen months in prison for selling 2,000 rounds of ammunition to an undercover Shin Bet agent posing as a Palestinian. Qais got a lucky break and was released after a month’s detention. A short time later, Qais was rearrested on charges of carrying a gun without a permit and spent about a year and a half in prison.
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As he stumbled from failed business endeavors to debt to criminal activities, Qais Obeid grew closer to the Biro clan. Qais and Qayed Biro met several times in Europe, providing—investigators would later surmise—Qais’s entrée to Hezbollah. Over time, Qais found in the service of Hezbollah the meaning and success that eluded him as a businessman and criminal. For a few months, maybe a little over a year, he operated covertly out of Israel. Later, in September 2000, just as the second Palestinian intifada was breaking out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Qais left Israel and turned up in Beirut, where he assumed a senior leadership position in Hezbollah’s newly minted Unit 1800, which was responsible for supporting Palestinian terrorist groups and abducting Israelis.
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Qais Obeid’s first attempt to kidnap Israelis on Hezbollah’s behalf took place in July 2000, while he was still in Israel. That month, Obeid met with Gaza businessman Faiz Shohan and Nasser Ayad, a member of the Palestinian Authority special operations Force 17, to iron out a plan to smuggle $100,000 worth of cocaine from Lebanon, to Europe, and onward to Israel’s Ashdod port. Shohan would use his shipping permit to transport containers from Ashdod to Gaza. At the time, the three also considered kidnapping Israelis and smuggling weapons into Gaza. Then the second intifada erupted. Although Qais fled to Lebanon, Ayad and Shohan revised their plan, with Obeid providing input and oversight from abroad in his new position with Hezbollah’s Unit 1800. By December 2000, the plan was for Obeid to coordinate the smuggling of weapons—fifty Kalashnikov and M-16 rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition—into Israel from Lebanon. Shohan would earn $30,000 for using his shipping license to move the container of weapons to Ashdod and from there to Gaza.
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But the plot would be altered once more, this time by Obeid and his friend Qayed Biro, who devised a plot to kidnap an Israeli soldier or civilian hitchhiker and use
the captive as a bargaining chip to negotiate the release of Qayed’s father, Mohammed. The profile of their target victim was a hitchhiker in his or her early twenties, a common sight in Israel. The pressure to secure the release of a young Israeli, especially a soldier, would be immense for any Israeli government, maximizing the plotters’ negotiating leverage. After sedating the victim, they planned to stuff the victim into a container and smuggle the container through the Karni checkpoint into Gaza. From there the victim would be transferred to a fishing vessel to be met at prearranged coordinates by a boat from Lebanon carrying Qayed Biro and Qais Obeid along with drugs and weapons. The drugs and weapons would be taken back to Gaza, while Biro and Obeid would accompany the prisoner to Lebanon. The plot never came off, however, because Israeli commandos detained Nasser Ayad in January 2001. Within days, an Israeli targeted rocket attack killed Iyad’s father, Col. Mansur Iyad, a senior Force 17 official who was recruiting cells in Gaza to carry out attacks at Hezbollah’s behest. That same month, Faiz Shohan was arrested as well.
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Qais Obeid was a busy man, however, and this was not the only or even the most daring abduction he was then plotting. Even before he departed for Beirut, Obeid began to lay the groundwork for a plot that would involve Hezbollah networks as far afield as Germany and Abu Dhabi and deliver to Hezbollah a retired Israel Defense Forces (IDF) colonel whose current business clients gave him access to highly sensitive Israeli intelligence. The abduction that commenced would not only prove an intelligence bonanza for Hezbollah, it would ultimately enable Hezbollah to secure the release of more than 400 prisoners from Israeli jails—an accomplishment that dramatically boosted the organization’s political stature in Lebanon and throughout the Arab world. It would also reveal the breadth of Hezbollah’s operational reach across two continents and into Israel itself.

Around August 2000, Qais Obeid visited the elderly Mohammed Biro in jail one last time before leaving for Lebanon. Biro still had years to serve on his prison term, even as age and infirmity were catching up with him. In September, just as the second intifada was gaining momentum in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Obeid booked a flight to Germany, where his brother lived. At Ben Gurion International Airport, authorities allowed him to travel, but only once he signed a document declaring he had no intention of contacting a “foreign agent” or representative of an “enemy group” while abroad. The declaration, which bears consequences only for resident citizens subject to local law enforcement, suggests Israeli authorities expected Obeid to return home to Israel. But Obeid had no such plans.
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Obeid and an Israeli named Elhanan Tannenbaum first met as children, and their lives intersected from time to time as they grew up.
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“Elhanan visited our village and we met him sometimes in Tel Aviv restaurants,” Qais Obeid’s brother Aqram noted.
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In the 1990s, Israel’s Channel 2 television reported, Tannenbaum “forged ties with several elements of the Israeli and Palestinian underworlds, Obeid among
them.”
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From about 1995 on, Tannenbaum and Obeid partnered in a business working with Palestinian money changers in the West Bank. Despite having advantages in life—Tannenbaum rose to the rank of colonel as a reservist in the IDF—both men suffered business failures, fell into debt, and engaged in criminal enterprises. By 2000 they both reportedly owed large sums to the Palestinian money changers with whom they did business.
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Tannenbaum reportedly convinced an army buddy to arrange for him to serve extra reserve duty, explaining he needed the extra pay.
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During his reserve duty Tannenbaum worked on a variety of sensitive military issues, even as his financial situation and links to Obeid increased his vulnerability to recruitment by enemy states or terrorist groups.
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Until Israel redeployed its forces south of the Lebanese border in May 2000, Tannenbaum maintained business ties in Lebanon, primarily selling pharmaceuticals. It was during his business trips to Lebanon, police would later assess, that Tannenbaum first met the Lebanese drug dealers with whom he would later work.
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Shortly after the Israeli-Lebanese border was closed, effectively ending that business opportunity, Obeid proposed that the two men go into business together by leveraging Obeid’s Arab-world contacts and Tannenbaum’s salesmanship.
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