How Mossad tackles terror makers

feb 20th, 2010

in all honesty, the hit on the CIA at khost was equally brilliant. of
course, the question is when india's spy agencies will be able to do
this sort of operation.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: A P Joshi
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:21:32 +0530
Subject: How Mossad tackles terror makers
To:

a very good column on this issue.

By Gordon Thomas
New Indian Express, 19 Feb 2010
http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=The+spies+strike+again,+this+time+in+Dubai&artid=EdOh2Mhuzms=&SectionID=XVSZ2Fy6Gzo=&MainSectionID=XVSZ2Fy6Gzo=&SectionName=m3GntEw72ik=

The spies strike again, this time in Dubai

The Mossad assassins could have felt only satisfaction when the news broke
that they had succeeded in killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a top Hamas military
commander, in Dubai last month. The Israeli government's refusal to comment
on the death has once more gained worldwide publicity for Mossad, its feared
intelligence service. Its ruthless assassinations were made famous by the
film Munich, which detailed Mossad's attacks on the terrorists who killed
Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Long ago, the agency had established
that silence is the most effective way to spread terror among its Arab
enemies.
In the past year, al-Mabhouh had moved to the top of Mossad's list of
targets, each of which must be legally approved under guidelines laid down
over half a century ago by Meir Amit, the most innovative and ruthless
director-general of the service. Born in Tiberius, King Herod's favourite
city, Amit had established the rules for assassination.
"There will be no killing of political leaders, however extreme they are.
They must be dealt with politically. There will be no killing of a terrorist's
family unless they are also directly implicated in terrorism. Each execution
must be sanctioned by the incumbent prime minister. Any execution is
therefore state-sponsored, the ultimate judicial sanction of the law. The
executioner is no different from the state-appointed hangman or any other
lawfully-appointed executioner."

Permission to kill
I first met Amit in 2001 and through him, I talked to the spies of Mossad,
the katsas, and finally, to the assassins, the kidon, who take their name
from the Hebrew word for bayonet. They helped me write the only book
approved by Mossad, Gideon's Spies. Amit said the book "tells like it was —
and like it is".
Amit showed me a copy of those rules at our first meeting. After two years
of training in the Mossad academy at Herzlia near Tel Aviv, each recruit to
the kidon is given a copy.
The killing in Dubai is a classic example of how Mossad goes about its work.
Al-Mabhouh's 11 assassins had been chosen from the 48 current kidon, six of
whom are women.
It has yet to be established how al-Mabhouh was killed, but kidon's
preference is strangling with wire, a well-placed car bomb, an electric
shock or one of the poisons created by Mossad scientists at their
headquarters in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The plan to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had been finalised in a small
conference room next to the office of Meir Dagan, who has run Mossad for the
past eight years. The 10th director-general, Dagan has a reputation as a man
who would not hesitate to walk into a nameless Arab alley with no more than
a handgun in his pocket.
Only he knows how many times he has asked a prime minister for legal
permission to kill a terrorist who could not be brought to trial in an
Israeli court, along with the kidon to whom he shows the legally stamped
document, the licence to kill.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's name had been on such a document, which would have been
signed by Benyamin Netanyahu. That, like every aspect of a kidon operation,
would be firmly denied by a government spokesman, were he to be asked. This
has not stopped Dubai's police chief, Lt-General Tamin, from fulminating
against the Israeli prime minister.
Two years ago this week, Dagan sent a team of kidon to Damascus to
assassinate Imad Mughniyeh. His Mossad file included details of organising
the kidnapping of Terry Waite and the bombing of the US Marine base near
Beirut airport, killing 241 people. The United States had placed a £12.5
million bounty on his head. Dagan just wanted him dead.
Mossad psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, psychoanalysts
and profilers — collectively known as the 'specialists' — were told to
decide the best way to kill Mughniyeh.
They concluded that he would be among the guests of honour at the Iranian
Cultural Centre celebrations in 2008 for the celebration of the Khomeini
Revolution. The team rigged a car-bomb in the headrest of the Mitsubishi
Pajero they discovered Mughniyeh had rented, to be detonated by a mobile
phone. As Mughniyeh arrived outside the culture centre at precisely 7 pm on
February 12, the blast blew his head off.

Network of sayanims
At Mughniyeh's funeral in Beirut, his mother, Um-Imad, sat among a sea of
black chadors, a sombre old woman, who wailed that her son had planned to
visit her on the day after he died. She cried out she had no photograph to
remember him by. Two days later she received a packet. Inside was his
photograph. It had been posted in Haifa.
The list of kidon assassinations is long and stretches far beyond the Arab
world. In their base deep in the Negev Desert — the sand broken only by a
distant view of Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona — the kidon practise
with a variety of handguns, learn how to conceal bombs, administer a lethal
injection in a crowd and make a killing look accidental.
They review famous assassinations — the shooting of John F Kennedy, for
example — and study the faces and habits of potential targets whose details
are stored on their highly restricted computers. There, too, are thousands
of constantly updated street plans downloaded from Google Earth.
Mossad is one of the world's smallest intelligence services. But it has a
back-up system no other outfit can match. The system is known as sayanim, a
derivative of the Hebrew word lesayeah, meaning to help.
There are tens of thousands of these 'helpers'. Each has been carefully
recruited, sometimes by katsas, Mossad's field agents. Others have been
asked to become helpers by other members of the secret group.
Created by Meir Amit, the role of the sayanim is a striking example of the
cohesiveness of the world Jewish community. In practical terms, a sayan who
runs a car rental agency will provide a kidon with a vehicle on a
no-questions basis. An estate agent sayan will provide a building for
surveillance. A bank manager sayan will provide funds at any time of day or
night, and a sayan doctor provides medical assistance.
Any of these helpers could have been involved in the assassination of
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Mossad has recently expanded its network of sayanim into
Arab countries.
A sayan doctor in the West Bank provided details of the homoeopathic
concoction Yasser Arafat used to drink. When he died in 2004, his personal
physician, al-Kurdi, said "poisoning is a strong possibility in this
case".There
have been reports that more than a dozen terrorists have died from poisoning
in the past five years.
Within the global intelligence community, respect for Mossad grew following
the kidon assassination of Gerald Bull, the Canadian scientist who was
probably the world's greatest expert on gun-barrel ballistics. Israel had
made several attempts to buy his expertise. Each time, Bull had made clear
his dislike for the Jewish state.
Instead he had offered his services to Saddam Hussein, to build a super-gun
capable of launching shells containing nuclear, chemical or biological
warheads directly from Iraq into Israel. Saddam had ordered three of the
weapons at a cost of $20 million. Bull was retained as a consultant for a
fee of $1 million.
On the afternoon of March 20, 1990, the sanction to kill Bull was given by
the then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Nahum Admoni, the head of Mossad,
sent a three-man team to Brussels, where Bull lived in a luxury apartment
block. Each kidon carried a handgun in a holster under his jacket.
When the 61-year-old Bull answered the doorbell of his home, he was shot
five times in the head and the neck, each kidon firing their 7.65 pistol in
turn, leaving Bull dead on his doorstep. An hour later they were out of the
country on a flight to Tel Aviv.
Within hours, Mossad's own department of psychological warfare had arranged
with sayanim in the European media to leak stories that Bull had been shot
by Saddam's hit squad because he had planned to renege on their deal.

'Do not disturb'
The same tactics had been placed on stand-by on October 24, 1995, for the
assassination of Fathi Shkaki who, like Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, had reached the
top of Mossad's target list as a result of his terrorist attacks.
Two kidon — code-named Gil and Ran — had left Tel Aviv on separate flights.
Ran flew to Athens, Gil to Rome. At each airport they collected new British
passports from a local sayan. The two men arrived in Malta on a
late-afternoon flight and checked into the Diplomat Hotel overlooking
Valetta harbour.
That evening, a sayan delivered a motorcycle to Ran. He told hotel staff
that he planned to use it to tour the island. At the same time, a freighter
that had sailed the previous day from Haifa bound for Italy radioed to the
Maltese harbour authorities that it had developed engine trouble. While it
was fixed, it would drop anchor off the island. On board the boat was a
small team of Mossad communications technicians. They established a link
with a radio in Gil's suitcase.
Shkaki had arrived by ferry from Tripoli, Libya, where he had been
discussing with Colonel Gadaffi what Mossad was convinced was a terrorist
attack. The two kidon waited for him to stroll along the waterfront. Ran and
Gil drove up on the motorcycle and Gil shot Fathi Shkaki six times in the
head. It had become a kidon signature.
When the police came to search Shkaki's bedroom they found a 'Do not disturb'
sign on his door — a signature that was repeated in last month's Dubai
killing.

© The Daily Telegraph
About the author:
Gordon Thomas is the author of Gideon's Spies

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