The Volunteer (18 page)

I then let Uri take over, and he succinctly explained what had happened in Jordan. True to Mossad form, Uri stuck to the generalities of the mission and did not go into any operational details. Uri then requested the Agency's assistance through their good contacts with the Jordanian security intelligence service and its head, Samih Battikhi.

Mike looked shocked, and he took a while to respond. As for me, I was feeling slightly ridiculous. A few hours earlier, we'd all been in a room together, and my team had been trying to enlist the Americans in high-risk operations against Hezbollah. Now we were admitting to Mike that we'd completely screwed up a mission against Hamas, a far less professional terrorist outfit.

Mike said he'd pass the request along, but that he really didn't know how they'd react at Langley. The meeting broke up, and I rode with Mike to the front gate. His parting words to me were, “I hope you get your team back.” I know he meant it. Mike was that kind of guy.

In the end, after negotiations in which the Mossad was not involved (we were not exactly flavor of the month in Jordan) took place over a period of weeks, the two captured Kidon team members eventually arrived safe and sound back in Israel. In exchange, an Israeli physician had to fly to Amman to deliver a life-saving antidote to Mashaal. We also had to free Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin, Hamas's paraplegic “spiritual leader,” who'd been imprisoned for life by Israel in 1989 for ordering the execution of two Israeli soldiers. (Yassin should have stayed in Jordan. In 2004, after Israel reached the end of its tolerance for his “spiritual” activities—which typically involved young Palestinians exploding themselves amid Israeli crowds—he was killed by an Israeli missile as his handlers were wheeling him to morning prayers in Gaza City.)

The incident was a huge embarrassment for the Netanyahu government, which had authorized the mission. And many in the Mossad claimed that the assassination attempt had been “forced” upon the agency by politicians. I was skeptical of these excuses because I knew the Mossad was strong enough to stand up for itself and reject a mission its leaders believed was too risky.

Moreover, Caesarea was fully capable of a simple job like this one. In my view, the screw-up lay not with the decision to kill Mashaal, but with the plan for doing so. I remember discussing this with Charles shortly after the affair, and we both agreed that it made no sense to perform the operation with Kidon, whose combatants had no experience operating in Arab countries. We speculated that the unit was used only because it was the favorite of Caesarea's deputy head, who happened to be a former Kidon unit commander. He'd long argued that Kidon could be used in hostile countries, despite its combatants' lack of deep-cover skills.

Netanyahu's government had to do the grovelling without American help: the CIA didn't give us any assistance. Ultimately, Ephraim Halevy saved the day by flying to Jordan and calling in a favor from his friend King Hussein. It was a master stroke by Halevy, and it was no surprise that he took over as Mossad director general when Yatom finally resigned in February of 1998.

With the combatants safely back in Israel, a three-man state commission was mandated to investigate what became known as the “Mashaal Affair.” Many of my colleagues were called to testify, and some volunteered to put in their two cents' worth. The mission became a spy-world byword for amateurish bungling.

At the time, Tevel managed a productive two-way intelligence flow with the Jordanian intelligence service, and my colleagues who were responsible for this relationship were particularly angry at seeing all their hard work and earned trust go up in smoke. Our department also had to contend with the Canadians for “borrowing” their passports. (For the record, Canada was not aware of the operation and had no supporting role. The job was strictly “blue and white.” In fact, assassination missions like this one are so compartmentalized that even the Mossad's other operational divisions were unaware of it until it blew up.) Interestingly, however, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service was sympathetic, and it was business as usual with them at Tevel despite the diplomatic flap. During a liaison exchange by our counterterrorism officers to Canada soon after the Mashaal affair broke, many CSIS members mentioned that their only regret in the whole matter was that we didn't succeed.

As for Khaled Mashaal, he survived his brush with the long arm of Israeli justice. In 2004, he was appointed the “world leader” of Hamas and took to hiding out in Damascus, where he now issues fiery manifestos against Israel and does his level best to undermine moderate Palestinian elements. Many analysts believe he ordered the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in June 2006, specifically to sabotage the efforts of some of his Hamas political colleagues who were inching toward reconciliation with Israel.

Whenever I see his name in the news, I think back to September 1997 and remember what might have been—if only two Mossad combatants operating in Amman had taken the time to look in their rear-view mirror. I suggest Mashaal keep an eye out. One way or another, the Mossad will complete its mission.

I may not have been the greatest president, but I've had the most fun for eight years.

BILL CLINTON

T
he most enduring image arising from Bill Clinton's failed effort to bring peace to the Middle East was the former president's threeway handshake on the White House lawn with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Behind the scenes, however, it wasn't Clinton who led the peacemaking effort, but a mild-mannered, middle-aged American diplomat named Dennis Ross.

As part of my liaison work with the Mossad in the 1990s, I met Ross on various occasions, and found him to be intelligent and thoughtful. At the time, much was made of the fact that Ross is Jewish. But by my observation, he was impeccably even-handed. If the peace envoy had any flaw, it was that he was too gullible when it came to swallowing Yasser Arafat's cynical promises. As I will demonstrate, neither Ross nor Clinton was willing to acknowledge the truth about the inveterate terrorist, even when Israel's intelligence establishment presented them with the plainest evidence imaginable.

By 1998, Palestinian terrorism had become a common feature of the post-Oslo Accords landscape. These attacks were conducted with a wink and a nod from Arafat. But Ross, along with the rest of the West's diplomatic corps, insisted they were the handiwork of marginal radicals—and that the best way to thwart them was to prop up Arafat as a “moderate” alternative.

For the cameras, Ross put on a brave front. But when I met him in person, he usually looked tired and frustrated. In private conversation, he conceded that Arafat was maddening to deal with. Most of us at the Mossad saw Ross as a well-meaning diplomat with a near-impossible mandate.

It's no secret that Clinton's determination to bring peace to the Middle East was not motivated only by geopolitical goodwill; it was also a bid to burnish his presidential legacy and win the Nobel Peace Prize. And so he used every available tool at his disposal to accomplish the goal—including the CIA. The Agency's station in Tel Aviv was staffed with thirty-plus officers, far more than were needed for standard intelligence functions. At Tevel, it was common knowledge that the majority of these agents were doing quasi-political liaison work with the myriad warlords and Arafat lieutenants who were the real power behind the ostensibly democratic Palestinian Authority.

As a naive West would finally find out when Arafat launched his allout terrorist war against Israel in 2000, Clinton's no-questions-asked approach to Palestinian nation-building was misguided. One of the most deadly consequences was that the techniques the CIA taught the PA security apparatus—covert operations and counterterrorism, in particular—served to professionalize an organization that would soon be openly at war with Israel.

In order to make a success of Oslo before the end of Clinton's second term in 2001, Ross and the other Americans I dealt with turned a blind eye to the growing evidence that Arafat had no intention of pursuing a peaceful two-state solution. But Israeli leaders were more concerned with protecting Israel than winning international awards. And eventually, there came a time when we had to start showing the Americans the facts they didn't want to see.

One of these instances came in the spring of 1998, when I got a call from the head of the ISA's Arab affairs division, Silvan. He told me the ISA had something that Stan Moskowitz, the CIA's chief of station, needed to see.

I headed out to the ISA office to see what Silvan had in mind. When I arrived, he was with the ISA's counterterrorism chief, Menachem. They had with them a small file box, from which they produced a set of Arabic documents issued by the Palestinian Authority.

“ We brought some visual aids,” said Menachem, a dark, bespectacled fellow who'd spent years at the sharp end of the ISA's campaign against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. “This is evidence linking Arafat and one of his security chiefs with shooting attacks against Israeli civilians.”

After a few minutes of Menachem's show-and-tell, I knew that what I was hearing was a bombshell. In 1998, the world—and even many Israelis—still saw Arafat as an erstwhile killer who'd made a genuine, if imperfect, conversion to peaceable statesman. Just four years earlier, he and Yitzhak Rabin had shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, everyone knew Arafat was playing a double game politically, saying one thing in English and another in Arabic in order to appease militant Palestinian factions. But no one then suspected that Arafat was reverting to full-bore terrorism, orchestrating killings of Jewish civilians from his government offices in Ramallah.

Later, we came back to Mossad HQ, and I set the pair up in a conference room equipped with a video projector. Soon thereafter, Moskowitz's white Mercedes pulled up. I came outside and greeted him, then gave an Arabic greeting of “Ahalan wa Sahalan” to Ezra, his Circassian driver. The security guards opened the gates and bomb barrier, and Moskowitz's limo glided into the compound.

Moskowitz was clearly irritated to have been taken away from whatever he'd been doing at his stylish apartment in Jaffa, but he maintained the outward forms of diplomacy; the presence of Silvan, a division head, meant this was no run-of-the-mill briefing. I got Ezra a drink as he waited in the car, and took Moskowitz into the meeting room.

The chief of station took his seat, and I sat next to him while Menachem turned on the overhead projector. He began the presentation by asking Moskowitz if he'd ever heard of Ghazi Jabali.

“He's the police chief in Gaza,” Moskowitz responded in a bored voice.

This was true. But everyone in the room knew that the term
police
had a different meaning in the Palestinian Authority than in Israel or the United States. As in the West, police in the PA settled neighborhood disputes and caught petty criminals (when they felt like it). But they also constituted a well-armed paramilitary force that Arafat could deploy as his personal enforcers. Jabali himself was a notoriously corrupt Fatah apparatchik. Until this point, however, we had little reason to believe he was directly involved in anything worse than standard shakedown operations.

Menachem put up an organizational chart detailing the PA's security hierarchy and how Jabali fit into it. He knew that Moskowitz was as familiar with the PA's personnel structure as we were. But for the sake of what was to follow, Menachem needed to establish the fact that Jabali was an Arafat appointee and a senior member of his security infrastructure.

Then Menachem sat down and Silvan took over. Moskowitz sensed it was time for the punchline, and he started to stir. Silvan's English wasn't good, and I suspected he was nervous about dealing with the Americans. But he spoke slowly, and his words were clear. He started by listing off a series of recent shootings against Israeli civilian motorists, many of them women and children. These were the days when mass suicide bombings weren't everyday events in the Middle East, as they are now. Such ambushes by Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen were still seen as significant terrorist attacks. The point of the Palestinian security apparatus—funded, armed, and supported by the United States and the European Union—had been to prevent exactly this sort of lawlessness. Every act of violence offered proof that the Palestinians weren't up to the job.

In fact, as my ISA colleagues demonstrated that day, the truth was much worse. Not only was Arafat doing little to stop terrorism, he was one of its sponsors.

Following his catalogue of recent terror attacks, Silvan turned on a VCR and began playing a movie. On the video screen was a Palestinian police officer who'd served under Jabali. He was sitting up in a hospital bed, eating a sandwich and answering questions that were being asked off-screen by an ISA case officer. Like everyone in the Arab affairs division at the ISA, Menachem spoke Arabic fluently. He provided simultaneous translation for Moskowitz's benefit as the video played.

According to his informal hospital bed confession, the injured Palestinian was one of three police officers who'd recently been shot in a gun battle with an IDF special forces unit operating on the Israeli side of the green line. (Green line refers to the armistice line established following Israel's War of Independence. It separates the West Bank and Gaza from Israel's pre-1967 territorial holdings.) The other two Palestinians had been killed in the battle, and this one was singing like a bird. By his own account, the wounded police officer was being treated well. The interviewer clearly had established a good rapport with the man, and the discussion was almost collegial in tone. To prove these weren't actors, Menachem opened his file and produced the Arab's Palestinian Authority ID, along with various photocopied Arabiclanguage identity papers.

During the recorded interview, which went on for about twenty minutes, the police officer admitted he and his colleagues were members of Ghazi Jabali's police force, and that they had been dispatched on missions to strike at Israeli civilian targets. The officer described again and again how Jabali ordered the attacks, and that he was taking orders from “Abu Ammar”—Yasser Arafat's nom de guerre.

For the first time since I'd met him, Moskowitz lost his cocky air and looked sincerely stunned. He said little, but everyone in the room could tell that he understood the importance of what he'd seen. Oslo and everything that followed had been predicated on the idea that Arafat was a sincere peace partner. Here on the screen was evidence suggesting everyone had been duped. And Moskowitz knew it fell to him to break the bad news to Ross and Clinton.

As for Menachem and Silvan, far from appearing triumphant, they looked nearly as deflated as Moskowitz. Critics are forever accusing Israel of using terrorism as a pretext to undermine the peace process. But the ISA's leadership is actually quite sympathetic to the concept of territorial compromise—if for no other reason than that it would make its job easier. Indeed, ISA case officers understand the Palestinian worldview better than any other non-Arab intelligence entity on earth. They live with Arab Israeli families for a year before they are put in the field, an experience that tends to give them some empathy. Some of the biggest peaceniks I've met in Israel were officers who'd served in the ISA.

When the meeting ended, I accompanied Moskowitz to his car and made the short drive with him to the gate. He said very little. I got the feeling he was dreading his next report to Washington.

In the end, however, the Clinton administration decided to ignore the intelligence and stick to its game plan. I guess they hoped Ross would somehow find a way to convince Arafat to abandon his double game. As for Ghazi Jabali, he became a sort of pariah among the other Palestinian warlords, who were no doubt seeking to distance themselves from this outed terrorist.

The rest of the story is by now well known. For the next two years, Arafat continued supporting terrorism against Israel, and the United States kept pretending to ignore it. Then, in September 2000, following the failure at Camp David, Arafat rolled the dice with one final allout offensive against Israel—a relentless campaign of butchery that culminated with Israel's invasion of the West Bank in 2002.

By this time, no one doubted Arafat's role in directing the terror. Documents seized by the Israelis during their 2002 invasion proved as much, as did Arafat's own calls for a “million martyrs” to descend on Jerusalem. By the time of his death in 2004, his career had come full circle—from terrorist to fêted diplomat, back to his true calling as terrorist.

I met Dennis Ross for the last time in Australia in 2001. By then, I was back in the field, and operating under a different Mossad pseudonym. The encounter took place at a social function to which we both happened to be invited. The well-intentioned host insisted on dragging me over to “meet” the famous Dennis Ross, who was holding court with a scrum of admiring listeners. Clinton was out of office, and Ross had left government. The former envoy was now at liberty to speak candidly about Arafat, which was just what he was doing. Thankfully, he didn't remember me. Or, more probably, he knew exactly who I was but had the good grace not to betray it. Otherwise, my cover would have been blown sky-high in mixed company. That alone was reason enough for me to like and respect the guy.

Ross's theme that night was that Arafat had refused to deal at Camp David because he was incapable of accepting any final deal that definitively closed the door on any of the Palestinians' cherished maximum demands. The conceit that Israel would one day grant the “right of return” to millions of descendants of 1948-era Palestinian refugees, fantastic as it may be, was particularly precious to Arafat. And so the only agreements he could bring himself to sign were those which, like Oslo, relegated the most explosive issues to future negotiations. After listening politely for a while, I asked Ross what Arafat really wanted.

“A one-state solution,” he responded flatly. “Not independent, adjacent Israeli and Palestinian states, but a single Arab state encompassing all of historic Palestine.”

However gullible Ross might once have been, it was clear the scales had fallen from his eyes. He hadn't achieved peace, but he'd at least succeeded in learning the truth.