{"id":130261,"date":"2020-04-19T05:33:11","date_gmt":"2020-04-19T13:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130261"},"modified":"2020-04-19T05:33:11","modified_gmt":"2020-04-19T13:33:11","slug":"rise-and-kill-first-the-secret-history-of-israels-targeted-assassinations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130261","title":{"rendered":"Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2018 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* ON SEPTEMBER 11, JIHADIST hijackers flew two airliners into the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field after the hijackers were overpowered by passengers. \u201cIn one swoop, the complaints against us ceased,\u201d said Major General Giora Eiland, head of Israel\u2019s National Security Council. \u201cIt simply dropped off the [international] agenda.\u201d Decades of Israel trying to explain its drastic measures to the rest of the world were suddenly made unnecessary. Everyone, for a time, seemed to understand. Sharon immediately ordered the intelligence organizations to give the Americans all of the files for \u201cBlue Troll,\u201d the code name for the development of Al Qaeda in Sudan, and other relevant intelligence. Later, he ordered the Shin Bet and the IDF to share their experience with guests who came from abroad to learn from the country with the world\u2019s best counterterror program. \u201cThere was a stream of people arriving here,\u201d said Diskin, who hosted the senior guests. Sharon issued instructions, as part of his relationship with Bush, \u201cto show them [the Americans] everything, to give them the lot, to allow access to everywhere, including the Joint War Room, even during interdiction operations.\u201d The Americans were most interested to find out how the integrated assassination system of all the intelligence arms worked, and how Israel had developed the capability to execute a number of operations simultaneously. The very system internationally condemned only weeks earlier was now a model to be copied. \u201cThe attacks on 9\/11 gave our own war absolute international legitimacy,\u201d Diskin said. \u201cWe were able to completely untie the ropes that had bound us.\u201d <\/p>\n

* [Ariel] Sharon kept a booklet he\u2019d occasionally pull out to share with visiting diplomats. He\u2019d received it from the Israel Police, and it contained color photographs of a bus minutes after a suicide terrorist had blown himself up inside it. Decapitated bodies and human limbs were scattered in every corner. The fire had scorched the clothing off of victims and painted their skin with blotches of green and blue. \u201cWhen one of those pesky diplomats came to talk to us once again about the elimination of this or that terrorist,\u201d said Dov Weissglass, Sharon\u2019s chief of staff and confidant, \u201cArik would force the person to look. He\u2019d page through it, picture after picture, watching their eyes widen as they took in the atrocity of it. He didn\u2019t let them off even one contorted body or headless neck. When he was finished, he calmly asked, \u2018Now tell me: Would you be prepared for such a thing to happen in your country?\u2019\u2009\u201d To provide Sharon with more material to show the diplomats, Weissglass\u2019s staff bought photographs from a Palestinian press agency showing Arabs being executed for suspected collaboration with Israel. <\/p>\n

* During the course of the conflict in the occupied territories, several variations of the Grass Widow technique were used, baiting gunmen out of their hiding places and exposing them to fire from a concealed sniping position. In one variation, an Israeli force would arrest a comrade of the terrorists out in the open on the street, prompting armed gunmen to come outside and attack the force. In another, an armored car would drive up and down a street, with a loudspeaker broadcasting an Arabic recording of shouted challenges like \u201cSo where are all the big heroes of Izz al-Din al-Qassam? Why don\u2019t you come out and fight? Let\u2019s see if you are men.\u201d Or, more provocatively, \u201cAll the Jihad are fags\u201d or \u201cHamas are sons of whores. Your mothers work in the streets and give it out free to anyone who wants it.\u201d These are some of the more refined remarks\u2014others are even less suitable for print. Perhaps surprisingly, this method has worked well. Gunmen come out to shoot at the offending vehicle and end up getting picked off by a sniper from Grass Widow concealed in a nearby apartment. Grass Widow operations killed dozens of gunmen from all the Palestinian organizations. From the military\u2019s point of view, the system worked, and the IDF gained relative freedom of action in the streets of Palestinian cities. The legality of these operations, however, is debatable at best. \u2014 BY THE SUMMER OF 2002, the Shin Bet and its partners were able to stop more than 80 percent of attacks before they turned deadly. The targeted killings were clearly saving lives. But there was a disturbing trend in the data, too: The number of attempted attacks was increasing. <\/p>\n

* Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was exasperated the agency. The Mossad was too sleepy and effete for his liking, and too reluctant to take risks, after its earlier operational mishaps. Mossad chief Efraim Halevy\u2019s approach was the exact opposite of Sharon\u2019s, who always wanted to take the initiative and attack. As Dov Weissglass explained, \u201cAt a time when Israel found itself in one of the most difficult battles of its life, the Second Intifada, we could never understand why that magnificent body known as the Mossad was simply nonexistent. With Halevy, the diplomatic aspect was infinitely developed. The operational aspect was like an appendix to him, superfluous tissue that was dispensable.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Sharon really had only one person in mind: Meir Dagan, his good friend who had served under him in the army. Dagan was tough and aggressive, exactly the kind of person Sharon needed to fight back against the Radical Front.<\/p>\n

* DAGAN TOOK OVER THE Mossad in September 2002. Shortly afterward, Sharon put him in charge of covert efforts to stymie Iran\u2019s nuclear program. Since the late 1990s, Iran had poured huge resources into its plan to acquire a nuclear weapon capability as rapidly as possible, buying equipment and expertise wherever it could. Both men saw a nuclear Iran as an existential danger to Israel. Dagan was told that he would receive whatever he wanted\u2014money, personnel, endless resources\u2014as long as he stopped the ayatollahs from building an atomic bomb. He took it all and got down to work. \u201cSharon was right to appoint him,\u201d Weissglass said. \u201cMeir arrived and began to work wonders.\u201d Dagan moved into his new office in the Mossad\u2019s main building and hung a picture of his grandfather, kneeling, staring in terror at the German troops around him, minutes before he was murdered. \u201cLook at this photograph,\u201d Dagan would say to Mossad operatives before sending them off on missions. \u201cI\u2019m here\u2014we, the men and women of the Mossad, are here\u2014to make sure it doesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dagan decided to dismantle the Mossad and reassemble it in a way that suited him. First, he sharply focused the Mossad\u2019s intelligence-gathering objective. Information was not to be collected for its own sake, catalogued, and filed into an impotent library\u2014Dagan wanted intelligence that could be directly put to use against the enemy. He wanted information that led quickly to preemptive and preventive operations, to sabotage, ambushes, targeted killings, and assassinations. The Mossad, under the new director, would be a warrior agency. \u201cI told Arik [Sharon] that in my opinion, a deep change had to be made in the organization,\u201d Dagan said. \u201c\u2009\u2018But you have to decide,\u2019 I warned him, \u2018whether you\u2019re ready to pay the price. Journalists will climb all over me and you and the Mossad. It won\u2019t be easy. Are you ready to pay the price?\u2019 He said that he was. Arik knew how to back someone up.\u201d Dagan frequently met in private with Sharon to get approval for covert operations. A former senior Mossad officer described the mood: \u201cThose were days of hysteria. Dagan would arrive early in the morning, and until nightfall he never stopped yelling at everyone that they weren\u2019t delivering the goods and that they were worthless.\u201d In Dagan\u2019s view, it was particularly important \u201cto straighten out\u201d the personnel in the Junction division, which was in charge of recruiting and operating agents. This was \u201cthe real heart of the Mossad,\u201d in his eyes. \u201cUnderlying every operation, however you put it together, there is HUMINT.\u201d Junction\u2019s core personnel were \u201ccollection officers\u201d (katsa), case officers who recruited and ran the agents. They were sophisticated professionals, skilled in manipulation. According to Dagan, however, the collection officers also manipulated the Mossad itself. Dagan described the Junction division he encountered upon assuming his position as \u201ca complete system of falsehood, which deceives itself and feeds itself lies\u201d in order to convince itself and the entire Mossad of its success. \u201cFor years, they did whatever they wanted. They recruit a guy who serves tea in some office near a nuclear facility and say they have someone inside the Iranian atom project. They needed to be grabbed by the collar and given a boot in the ass.\u201d Dagan changed Junction\u2019s procedures and demanded that all agents undergo a polygraph test in order to prove that they were reliable sources. <\/p>\n

* UNTIL THE END OF 2001, the Shin Bet confined itself to targeting what were known as \u201cticking time bombs,\u201d people who either were working on planning an attack or about to carry out an attack, or who were directly involved in such behavior\u2014the commander and recruiter of the suicide attackers, or the bomb maker, for example. There were a number of problems with that approach. The first was identifying targets from among the seemingly endless supply of volunteers. There were \u201cmore suicide bombers than explosive vests,\u201d a Hamas spokesman boasted. These Palestinians fit no profile: They were young and elderly, educated and illiterate, those who had nothing to lose and those who had large families. At first they consisted only of adult males, but later on, Hamas leaders encouraged women and children to sacrifice themselves, too. Successfully identifying an attacker, moreover, did not necessarily mean stopping an attack. The monitors, the desk officers, the interpreters, the intelligence analysts, and the technologists might all track an attack as it \u201crolled along\u201d\u2014in the agency\u2019s professional lingo\u2014\u201calmost until the bang.\u201d But they could not stop them, because Israel could not operate openly inside hostile Palestinian-controlled territory. And by the time the bomber reached Israel, it was generally too late. There were several nervous breakdowns among these desk officers and monitors during this period. <\/p>\n

* Since picking off individual bombers was ineffectual, Dichter decided to shift focus. Starting at the end of 2001, Israel would target the \u201cticking infrastructure\u201d behind the attacks. The person who blew himself up or planted the bomb or pulled the trigger was, after all, usually just the last link in a long chain. There were recruiters, couriers, and weapons procurers, as well as people who maintained safe houses and smuggled money\u2014an entire organization overseen by commanders of regional cells, above whom were the main military commanders, themselves subordinate to the political leaders of the organizations. They would all be targets. A potential death sentence was hung over the heads of all active members of the Hamas military wing, known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. \u201cThey would very quickly realize that not one of them\u2014from the regional operations officer to the taxi driver to the photographer who shoots the suicide bomber\u2019s farewell video\u2014was immune to getting hit,\u201d said Yitzhak Ilan, a senior Shin Bet operative at the time and later deputy head of the agency. Targeting suicide attackers was futile, because they were, by definition, expendable and easily replaced. The people who groomed and organized and dispatched them, however, were not. Nor, as a rule, were they nearly as eager for martyrdom as those they recruited. Israeli intelligence figured that there were fewer than three hundred people actively involved in organizing the suicide bombings, and no more than five hundred active members of all the terrorist groups combined. They would not all have to be killed. \u201cTerror is a barrel with a bottom,\u201d Dichter explained to the Knesset\u2019s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. \u201cYou do not have to reach the last terrorist to neutralize it. It is enough to reach a critical mass, and in effect you bring it to a standstill.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Israel] developed a mathematical model to determine the amount of \u201credundancy\u201d or reserve manpower in Hamas. The results showed that taking out 20 to 25 percent of the organization would lead to its collapse. <\/p>\n

* Of course, the assassinated would quickly be replaced by those next in line, but over time, the average age dropped, as did the level of experience as younger and younger people filled the ranks. As Yitzhak Ilan said, \u201cOne day, when the commander of Islamic Jihad in Jenin was brought into the interrogation room, a man whom, by chance, we had captured and not killed, I was pleased to learn that he was nineteen years old. I realized that we were winning, that we had axed the entire chain that had preceded him.\u201d Now that a coherent strategy had been developed, they had to figure out how to find and kill these targets. The Shin Bet informed Prime Minister Sharon that, with so many assassinations under consideration, all the relevant resources of the State of Israel would be required. <\/p>\n

* Schematically, much of the new targeted killing system wasn\u2019t fundamentally new at all: The intelligence echelon gathered information, the prime minister authorized, and the field forces executed the hit, just like in the 1970s and \u201980s in Europe and Lebanon. But there were important differences. As one seasoned intelligence officer said, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan, \u201cThe scalability is the message,\u201d meaning that the use of advanced technology in itself created a completely new reality. Enlisting the entire intelligence community, assisted by the best communications and computer systems in the world, along with the most advanced military technology developments, drastically increased the number of assassinations that the system could carry out simultaneously. Until then, \u201cit took the Mossad months, if not years, to plan and implement one hit,\u201d said a Shin Bet officer. But now, \u201cfrom the Joint War Room, we could run four or five a day.\u201d <\/p>\n

* THOUGH THE ISRAELIS MIGHT not have given full consideration to the moral implications of the new program, they were aware that they needed to provide legal cover for officers and subordinates who might later face prosecution, either in Israel or abroad. In early December 2000, IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz summoned the chief of the Military Advocate General\u2019s Corps, Major General Menachem Finkelstein, to his office. \u201cI assume that you know that Israel sometimes has a policy of \u2018negative treatment,\u2019\u2009\u201d Mofaz told Finkelstein. \u201cIn the current legal situation, is it permitted for Israel to openly kill defined individuals who are involved in terrorism? Is it legal or illegal?\u201d Finkelstein was stunned. \u201cDo you realize what you are asking me, Chief of Staff?\u201d he replied. \u201cThat the IDF\u2019s advocate general will tell you when you can kill people without a trial?\u201d <\/p>\n

Mofaz fully realized that. He asked again: Was it legal to assassinate suspected Palestinian terrorists? Finkelstein told him that it was a delicate and complex matter, one that required a comparative study of statutes all over the world, probably even the invention of an entirely new legal concept. \u201cInter arma enim silent leges,\u201d he said finally, quoting Cicero. In times of war, the law falls silent. <\/p>\n

Nevertheless, he ordered a team of bright young attorneys in the IDF to puzzle out a solution. On January 18, 2001, a top-secret legal opinion signed by Finkelstein was submitted to the prime minister, the attorney general, the chief of staff and his deputy, and the director of the Shin Bet. Under the title \u201cStriking at Persons Involved Directly in Attacks against Israelis,\u201d the document opened with this statement: \u201cIn the framework of this opinion, we have for the first time set out to analyze the question of the legality of the initiated interdiction\u201d\u2014another euphemism\u2014\u201cactions taken by the IDF\u2026.We have been told by IDF and Shin Bet that such actions are carried out in order to save the lives of Israeli civilians and members of the security forces. This is, therefore, in principle, an activity that leans on the moral basis of the rules concerning self-defense, a case of \u2018He who comes to kill you, rise up early and kill him first.\u2019\u2009\u201d <\/p>\n

For the first time, a legal instrument had been proposed for endorsing extrajudicial execution by the security forces. The opinion noted that its authors had done their best to find \u201cthe balance between a person\u2019s right to life and the duty of the security authorities to protect the citizens of the state.\u201d <\/p>\n

The opinion fundamentally recalibrated the legal relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. No longer was the conflict a matter of law enforcement, of police arresting suspects so that they can face trial. Rather, the intifada was an \u201carmed conflict short of war,\u201d but to which the laws of warfare applied. Those laws allowed striking at the enemy wherever he may be, as long as a distinction is drawn between combatants and civilians. In classic wars, that distinction is relatively easy: Members of the adversary\u2019s armed forces, as long as they are in the service, are legitimate targets. In the confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians, however, the distinction was much harder to make. Who is the enemy? How can he be identified? When, if at all, does he cease being the enemy? <\/p>\n

The opinion posited a new kind of participant in armed conflict: the \u201cillegal combatant\u201d who takes part in armed operations but is not a soldier in the full sense of the word. The term covered anyone active in a terrorist organization, even if his activity was marginal. As long as he is an active member in the organization, he could be considered a combatant\u2014even when he is asleep in his bed\u2014unlike a soldier on leave who has taken off his uniform. This expansive interpretation of \u201ccombatants\u201d led, in marathon discussions in the International Law Department (ILD) of the IDF Military Advocate General\u2019s Corps, to an issue called \u201cthe Syrian Cook Question\u201d: If Israel were in a normal state of war with Syria, any Syrian combatant could be killed legitimately, even an army cook in a rear echelon. By that standard, then, given the broad definition of \u201cillegal combatant\u201d in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it could be presumed that any person assisting Hamas would qualify as a target, too. This might potentially include a woman who washed a suicide bomber\u2019s clothes before he set out on his mission or a taxi driver who knowingly took activists from one place to another. <\/p>\n

That, according to the opinion, was too extreme. The opinion stipulated that only those about whom there is \u201caccurate and reliable information that the person concerned carried out attacks or dispatched attackers\u201d could be targeted. Moreover, assassination could not be used as punishment for past acts, nor as a deterrent to other combatants. It could be used only when \u201cit is almost certain that the target will in the future continue carrying out actions such as this.\u201d <\/p>\n

* Strangely enough, Bashar al-Assad had enormous respect for Israeli intelligence, which was why he worked so hard to deceive it. He was convinced that every message in Syria transmitted by electromagnetic means\u2014telephone, cellphone, fax, text, email\u2014was being intercepted by Israeli intelligence. \u201cHe truly believed that every time Mustafa called Mohammed, Moishele was listening in.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2018 book: * ON SEPTEMBER 11, JIHADIST hijackers flew two airliners into the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field after the hijackers were overpowered … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130262,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130261\/revisions\/130262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}