S H A B T A I
S H A V I T
HEAD OF THE
MOSSAD In Pursuit of a Safe and Secure Israel
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
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C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments vii Introduction xi ONE. Intelligence TWO. Intelligence and the International Arena
1 62
THREE. Intelligence and National Security
126
FOUR. A Diplomatic Perspective
168
FIVE. Wars
275
Appendix: In Memoriam
331
Notes 356 Index 360
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
The ceremony marking the change of command of the Mossad, during which I received my letter of appointment, took place on April 19, 1989, at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. Among those present were Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who had chosen me to serve as director of the Mossad; minister of defense and former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin; Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Dan Shomron, former Mossad directors, the Mossad Division Heads’ Forum (Rasha), the Heads of Services Committee (Varash), the military secretary to the prime minister, the prime minister’s veteran stenographer Mitka Yaffe, the outgoing Mossad director Nahum Admoni and his family, and my own family, with the exception of my youngest son, who was off skiing in Switzerland. The ceremony was modest and conducted with an air of understatement characteristic of Prime Minister Shamir. The prime minister read out Nahum’s letter marking the end of his tenure and thanked him briefly for his service and for his long-standing contribution to Israel’s national security. Nahum delivered some parting words. The prime minister read out my letter of appointment and wished me good luck in the new position. I then gave my prepared remarks, to which I had given a great deal of thought.
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I began by mentioning my twenty-five years of service in the Mossad, which I believed had trained me for the esteemed role that I was taking on. Even so, I accepted the role with apprehension, veneration, and trepidation. I thanked the prime minister for choosing me, and Nahum for warmly recommending me for the job. I thanked my family and especially my wife, who at the beginning of my career had partaken in covert activities along with me. I emphasized the great sacrifice required of the family members of Mossad operatives. I praised the Rasha forum, which constitutes the management of the Mossad. These are people who have accumulated hundreds of years of experience among them, and because covert affairs are learned in the field rather than in academia, their combined experience is priceless. They are people who are tough, who tend to say little and keep their feelings hidden. I also commended the Varash forum, stressing that the cooperation among Military Intelligence, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad, through which each body contributes its unique abilities, creates a power multiplier that brings about results that no one body could produce alone. Finally, I expressed my support and best wishes to the Mossad’s employees and operatives scattered across the globe, including in enemy countries, whose actions guarantee the security of the people and the State of Israel. I thought that the occasion of my acceptance of the position, in the presence of the prime minister and others, merited the expression of my thoughts, and my remarks lasted a few minutes. I remember that while I was speaking the prime minister leaned over to the person standing next to him and whispered, “I never knew that Shabtai could speak!” I had met with Prime Minister Shamir several times before that ceremony, in various meetings and contexts, but I had never said, whether in response to a question or at my own initiative, more than the minimum required to express my opinion on the issue at hand. I had always felt that the prime minister’s time was a precious commodity and that his status required reverence both in speech and in behavior. Thus to him I appeared to be “the silent
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type”—which incidentally, could have described him as well—and, as the saying goes, I have never regretted the things I did not say. The ceremony ended with a toast and a tasting of Jerusalem’s famous burekas (savory stuffed pastries) served in the prime minister’s bureau, and then everyone went on their way. I drove from Jerusalem toward the coastal plain, and, with a feeling of awe, I entered the office of the director of the Mossad and took my seat on the chair that I had gazed upon for so many years. The late 1980s and early 1990s, during which I served as director of the Mossad, were a historic crossroads in the world order. The geopolitical and geostrategic transformations that took place during this period were of a magnitude and weight the likes of which had not been seen since the end of World War II. During these years, the State of Israel witnessed the following milestones: • In December 1987, the First Intifada (a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation) broke out and the Hamas organization was established, adding a religious aspect to political terrorism. • In November 1988, the Palestinian National Council (PNC) declared Palestinian independence in Algiers, thereby implying its acceptance of the principle of the division of the land into two states. • In December 1988, the UN General Assembly acknowledged the declaration of the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) received UN observer status. • In November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From that point and throughout the 1990s, approximately one million Jews immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union, a development that, in my humble opinion, was the best thing to happen to the State of Israel since its independence in 1948.
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•
In June 1992, Yitzhak Rabin was elected prime minister. Following fifteen years of Likud rule, the Labor Party returned to power, though it was not to last for long. • In September 1993, the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO were signed in Washington, D.C., and were approved by the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). • In July 1994, the exiled Palestinian leadership in Tunis, headed by Yasser Arafat, returned to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and established the Palestinian Authority. • In October 1994, a peace agreement was signed between Israel and Jordan, the second Arab state to make peace with Israel. • In November 1995, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a despicable evildoer. • In May 1996, the Likud, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to power. In May 1999, the Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, took back the reins, but only until February 2001, when Ariel Sharon brought rule back to the Right. As of this writing (2018) the Right has remained in power. The Middle East also experienced dramatic changes during this period (the end of the 1980s and early 1990s). The Iran-Iraq War, which had lasted nearly a decade, came to an end with the Iraqis having the upper hand, though the war did not end with the Iranians’ total surrender. Iraqi supremacy was achieved through the combination of chemical weapons and surface-to-surface rockets/missiles on the battlefield. The Iranians did not have a response to the chemical weapons used against them, or to the missiles and rockets that pene trated deep into Iran, including the capital, Tehran. Iran, under the rule of mullahs (educated Shiite Muslims who were trained in religious law), learned its lesson from the war and decided to build up comprehensive nonconventional strategic capabilities, including chemical, biological, and nuclear capabilities and the ability to launch strategic surface-to-surface missiles.
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The First Gulf War, which broke out in 1991, was a formative event from both a regional and a global perspective. The following steps led up to it. First came the waiting period and intelligence preparations, during which the question was raised regarding whether Saddam Hussein, so soon after the conclusion of his war against Iran, would embark on another escapade. Then came the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, followed by President George H. W. Bush’s building of an impressive and broad coalition that included Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria. The fact that these countries joined the coalition against Iraq, which was supported by Jordan and the Palestinians, was the last nail in the coffin of the notion of p an-Arabism in the history of the Middle East. Another step was the Israeli-American dialogue on the issue of Israel’s participation in the war. President Bush urged Prime Minister Shamir not to intervene, and in exchange he promised that the US military would make taking out Iraq’s surface-to-surface missile batteries a top priority. Shamir was under tremendous pressure from some of his cabinet ministers and from the IDF to take military action, but he refused, even though there were those who claimed that Saddam Hussein’s apparent possession of surface-to-surface missiles armed with chemical warheads was another reason for the IDF to intervene. Iraq launched thirty-nine surface-to-surface “Scud” missiles into Israeli territory. The US Army was unable to destroy even part of the Iraqi surface-to-surface missile system, but Prime Minister Shamir gritted his teeth and stuck to his position of nonintervention. Government ministers and IDF brass found it difficult to comprehend how Shamir, a former underground commander and an adherent of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s vision of the Iron Wall (outlined in 1923 in an essay arguing that peace between Jews and Arabs in Palestine would be achieved if and only if the Jews were strong enough to convince the Arabs that they could not vanquish them), a commander of a special operations unit in the Mossad and a man of the political Right, could refuse to involve the IDF in the war against Saddam Hussein.
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At that time, only a few people knew that a week before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a secret meeting had taken place between Prime Minister Shamir and King Hussein of Jordan, during which the two had shaken hands on an agreement that the Iraqi threat to Israel (with the exception of missiles) would be eliminated (more about this is written in a separate chapter). This pact helped Shamir to maintain his stubborn stance against Israeli intervention in the war.1 Turkey, after over a decade (the 1980s) of maintaining a lukewarm relationship with Israel, began to respond to its courting. Relations between the two countries, including between their security and intelligence apparatuses, rapidly improved and resulted in strategic cooperation and understandings. The nature of terrorism during this period also changed beyond recognition. In the past, terrorism had been local, that is, nationalistic and secular, its perpetrator groups struggling to achieve self- determination, autonomy, or independence. The impact of this terrorism was usually minor and localized. The terrorism of today, manifested in Israel with the establishment of Hamas in 1987 and Islamic Jihad, is a religious Islamic terrorism whose extremism is increasing with time and whose reach has become global. It is imperialist terrorism in the sense that it expresses Allah’s command to fight the infidels, by either converting them to Islam or annihilating them, and to establish a global Muslim caliphate. It is a terrorism that, according to the principles of its belief (mainly Shiite but also found among marginal Sunni groups) does not recognize coexistence with the other. Its war against the infidels is considered a holy war—jihad. The act of suicide in the war against the infidels is considered a religious commandment and grants the perpetrator the title of shahid (martyr). It is a terrorism in which the end sanctifies the means and in which the single attacker is able to target many more infidels. It is a terrorism with a global distribution of individuals and small groups of citizens, connected via the internet, and unlike military bodies it is not formed around territory, hierarchy, uniform, infrastructure, a chain of command, and so forth. The media impact made by global
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jihadi organizations is global, costs them nothing, and plays out in real time. The historical father of this type of terrorism is Sheikh Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt in the 1920s. The Muslim Brotherhood’s violent activity since its establishment has been limited to Egypt itself, but its religious ideology of the rule of sharia (Islamic law) has fed most of the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organizations that we know today. The bin Laden school of global jihad—al-Qaeda—first appeared on the radar of intelligence bodies in Israel and the West in the early nineties, and its outgrowths—ISIS and their ilk—developed toward the end of the United States and its allies’ war in Iraq and the “Arab Spring.” ISIS took terrorism to an extreme that human history had not seen since the Hun invasion of the West. The organization displays a combination of nihilism and suicide bomber culture. Unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS has already begun working, with each territory that it conquers, toward the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate. Terrorist groups around the world (Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Houthis in Yemen, Wilayat Sina in Sinai, Al-Shabab in Somalia, and more) have announced their inclusion in this caliphate. The domestic and regional events that characterized the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which I served as director of the Mossad, pale in comparison to the changes that took place on the global stage during this period. I am referring, of course, to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although World War II ended with a crushing victory for the United States, its allies, and the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany and Japan, the ink on the surrender documents had not yet dried when the world had to accept a new world order. The main feature of this new order was the Cold War between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, who for fifty-five years competed with each other over the expansion of their areas of influence in the world, beyond the borders that were determined at the end of World War II. Today, in retrospect, it can be argued that the world during the period
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of the Cold War (1945–90), with a few exceptions, was infinitely more stable than the world in which we live today. These exceptions were the fight for control of Czechoslovakia, won by the Soviets, and the struggle for influence in Greece, which concluded with an American victory, as well as the Berlin Crisis and the Korean War. The global stability that prevailed was the result of a geostrategic balance of power, which saw the confrontation between the two superpowers continuously teetering toward brinkmanship, and when they reached the point of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the world, absurdly, became more stable. This point was reached at the beginning of the 1960s, following the Cuban Missile Crisis. The fear of the annihilation of humankind in a nuclear event was what brought about the global stability that lasted many years, until 1990. Because the leaders of the two superpowers were rational actors, they made sure to create a mechanism to be used in times of crisis, in the form of a direct telephone line between the Kremlin and the White House. I reference this fact in order to imply that the finger liable to press the Iranian nuclear button would be influenced, at least potentially, by considerations that are not rational but messianic. Moreover, no emergency hotline for the prevention of crises would be present in this case. In a world with the capability of MAD, the nations saw fit to align themselves with one of the two superpowers in accordance with their own in terests and worldview. This added another layer of security to global stability in the shadow of the nuclear threat. Nations asserting themselves to be “nonaligned” constituted a third bloc. In this context, one must mention Pakistan and India, which developed nuclear weapons in the 1970s, and the rivalry between the two, which undermined stability, certainly in that region. China, which finally came out of hibernation during the Cold War period, must of course also be mentioned. But in spite of all this, it can be said that the influence of the nonaligned bloc on the global order was marginal. The Soviet Union collapsed and the United States became the only superpower from 1991 to 2000. However, the United States failed to take advantage of this decade during which it was, for all
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intents and purposes, “the only sheriff in town” to establish a new world order, with stability based on shared interests and the desire of the world’s citizens to live in a better place (as portrayed in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”). Instead, the United States’ contribution to the world in the last decade of the twentieth century accelerated the transition from a bipolar world to a multipolar world whose main feature at the time of this writing (2018) is instability, the likes of which the world has not seen since World War II. The Mossad’s Essential Elements of Information (EEI), as well as those of other agencies in the post–Cold War era, focused on a series of issues, the principal of these being the proliferation of noncon ventional weapons and local, regional, and global terrorism, with an emphasis on religious (jihadist) terrorism. The Mossad, by definition, is tasked with seeking out responses to the EEI everywhere in the world outside the borders of the State of Israel. The responses to these two issues have been found not only in the Middle East and western Europe, which were the Mossad’s traditional arenas from its inception until the end of the Cold War, but also in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia and the Far East, South America, and even Africa and Australia. All of these changes required the Mossad to adapt accordingly with regard to human resources, budgets and means, and deployment and combat doctrine. This book is intended to share the writer’s insights, impressions, experiences, and thoughts of his time as director of the Mossad (1989–96) against the backdrop of the events described above, as well as other experiences. The book does not purport to present scientific research; rather, it conveys the author’s personal opinions.
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