Esther's Sling (27 page)

Syria has been a client state for Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, for fifty years. The value of that relationship to the Russians has waned and waxed over the decades. But the one constant for Russia has been that Syria has remained a counterbalance to the main client state of the USA in the region: Israel. That counterbalance comes from proximity. Syria shares fifty miles of disputed border with Israel. With proximity comes the ability to observe. To take advantage of this ability, Russia has supplied, built and partially manned a series of radar complexes and listening posts around Syria.

This network of radar
installations had grown to 24 locations supporting 137 active Surface to Air Missile, or SAM, sites in 2007 when the IAF launched Operation Orchard on September 6, 2007. This mission resulted in the destruction of a secret nuclear reactor being constructed in the desolate desert region of northeastern Syria. The fact that fourteen Israeli warplanes flew so deep into Syrian airspace, destroyed their target and returned to Israel unscathed, created a serious rift in Russian-Syrian relations. The Russians had promised upgrades to counter the effectiveness of IAF electronic jamming.

The Syrians played their cards as best they could, demanding and accepting every enhancement to their air defense network that Moscow was willing to provide. Quietly, the Syrians turned to China to ask for the latest in Chinese radar technology – not to replace the Russian equipment but
to supplement it. The result was the delivery to Syria of two Chinese built JY-27 anti-stealth radar systems with a range of up to 500 kilometers.

At the same time, the Iranians were placing equal pressure on Russia to upgrade the Syrian radar network so that the Syrians could provide early warning to Iran of any departure of a large number of IAF aircraft headed east towards Iran. The pressure worked
, and during 2009 and 2010 Russia delivered a range of upgrades even as the Chinese delivered their long-wavelength anti-stealth radar systems. Some of the upgrades required the active assistance of Russian technicians, who started manning radar installations and command posts in greater numbers. When the Syrians protested as a matter of pride, the Iranians intervened to insist on full access for the Russians, reminding the Syrians of the fiasco of Operation Orchard.

For the IAF officers planning Project Block G, this expanded radar network presented challenges. Russian technicians using Russian radar were able to look deep into Israeli airspace. The two Chinese JY-27 radars were both located in the desert east of Damascus and could see deep into both Jordan and the western region of Iraq. The Israelis had been routinely jamming these radar systems over the years leading up to Block G – a process which resulted in a tit for tat electronics war between Israel and the Syrians/Russians/Chinese. When the day came to launch Block G, the jamming that would take place needed to be a routine event.

But at Mount Olympus, simply jamming the early warning radar systems inside Syria was not enough. A greater margin of safety needed to be attained. The result was the first active operation for Block G: Operation Arrow.

On
September 2, General David Schechter gathered the senior staff of the Olympus planning team inside the main conference room in the hidden bunker complex adjacent to Sde Dov airport. The bunker looked from the outside like one of the many mid-rise apartment buildings in the area, but inside, a full communications, encryption and supporting technology suite was now in constant use. The team had grown significantly over the prior two years and Schechter knew it would grow even more in the days to come. He called the meeting to order and started with a review of preparations and the state of readiness of the IAF. When this had been completed, he asked Amit Margolis to stand and address the group of 27 men and women.

“Thank you, General,” said Margolis as he stood. He cleared his throat. “This group was officially formed
over three years ago to plan and execute the most important military mission since our fathers and grandfathers won our independence. For the last year and a half we have been ready to go and waiting for the right conditions both politically and militarily.” This was a speech that had not been heard before in the group, and Margolis could sense the excitement level building. He tried to remain calm, certain that everyone in the room could tell that he was anything but. “It is my honor to report that the time has come. We are going live.”

A murmur broke out throughout the room. Somewhere in the back an officer whistled. Suddenly another officer starting clapping
, and that emotion swept the room in an instant. Everyone was applauding. Amit joined in. General Schechter applauded as well, unable to fight off the emotion. It was a collective release of tension built over years of pressure. Schechter stood back up and walked a few feet over to his left to shake Margolis’ hand. The action brought everyone to their feet. Schechter motioned for everyone to calm down and return to their seats.

“Okay. Okay,” said Schechter loudly. “Calm down. We have a lot do to. Perhaps we should hold off on the celebrations until the day after the strike is done.” He paused for a moment to allow the group to sit back down and focus once again on the enormous work to be done. “We have a new moon on
Friday, October 4, and the forecast looks perfect. All leaves are canceled. I will have a work schedule posted on the break room wall later today to let everyone plan the coming weeks. When you are off, you can go home and stay home. No travel, no parties, no drinking. If you are called to return here, I expect you back here within thirty minutes. As always, everyone is welcome to use the dorm rooms for the duration. However, when you are off, you need to rest. There will be plenty of lost sleep over the next four weeks, so it is critical that you rest and sleep when you can.

“
Keep in mind that this event can be postponed up to twenty-four hours prior to takeoff. At this point, weather will be the deciding factor. The forecast looks perfect, but only God knows what will happen. So pray the weather holds, but never forget that if it doesn’t, we will be back on a one month hold. Any questions?” There were none. “Okay, IAF team stay here for full sequencing run-through and notification plan review. Sling team, please join Amit in the small conference room next door. If you are on the operator team,” Schechter was referring to the officers who had been planning the special operations missions that were integral to the Block G, “we will meet here in two hours.”

Amit Margolis left the large conference room to walk next door to
a smaller conference room. He convened his team of five. Even within the Olympus planning team, a group that currently held the highest security classifications in Israel outside of the country’s nuclear weapons program, the information about Esther’s Sling was known only to the five in the room plus General Schechter. His team went through the status of all of the assets, both human and mechanical, that were necessary to make the plan work. But in the back of his mind, Amit was already inpatient to hear that the Archer had struck. Operation Arrow was the first part of Project Block G to go into action and no one inside this bunker complex knew about it except for Amit Margolis – not even General Schechter. It was a Mossad operation and it involved the single greatest asset of the state of Israel – Archer. If it worked, a special operations mission into Syria that had been planned for over a year could be canceled.

Operation Arrow began preliminary operations months earlier when Abu Muhjid, inside a safe house in Ramadi, Iraq, logged onto an Arab dating website named muslima.com. He went to his “Favorites” list and, as he had been trained, pulled up the profiles on several women, aimlessly browsing through photographs. After a minute or two of that, he clicked onto the profile of a young Jordanian woman living in Amman. It was the profile he always returned to. Among her photographs was a newly posted photo of her in the Jordanian countryside with her uncle at a restaurant along Route 10 about six kilometers southeast of the town of al Mafraq. The date on the photo was April 20, 2012. The photo was a code for Muhjid, telling him when and where to meet his Mossad handler. He had a week until April 20, 2013 and he needed to be at the restaurant in the photo at 2 p.m. local time on that date.

A week later, the Archer was eating a meal of hummus and
kubbeh at the appropriate time when he noticed a man walk out of the restroom. He didn’t recognize the man, but he recognized the old home jersey for Manchester United that the man was wearing. On the back it had the number 7 and the name “Ronaldo,” a relic of days past for the English football club. The man returned to his table and ordered a cup of tea. Muhjid continued to finish his meal, taking another ten minutes to eat and pay his bill. He stood and went to the restroom. After relieving himself, he washed his hands in a basin. Behind him, the man in the football jersey walked into the restroom and paused to make sure they were alone. The Archer turned toward the man, who handed him an envelope. Muhjid quickly stuffed the envelope into his pants and exited the restroom.

Muhjid headed back toward Iraq
. After a hundred kilometers of driving, he pulled off the highway to find a spot in the desert where he could spend the night and read the contents of his package from Tel Aviv. What he saw when he opened the envelope got him both excited and scared. If he was able to pull off the attack outlined, he would gain fame inside al Qaeda. He stopped to think about why Israel would want him to attack an airbase inside Syria, but he couldn’t come up with any logical reason other than that the Israelis and the Syrians seemed destined to an eternal death match. But it didn’t matter to the Archer. He liked the assignment and, in his judgment, it would renown to the glory of al Qaeda, his new family. When he was recruited, Mossad told him that if they gave him an assignment, he would like it. They had been true to their word.

The final page of his instructions, which were always careful to look as if they had come from within al Qaeda, told him to be ready to go operational by the first of
September. The other item in the envelope was a small stack of American $100 notes, one hundred of them. The money was better than gold in this part of the world. The Archer had work to do.

The Archer was ready to go on the morning of
September 14, three days after receiving the green light via code in a photo posted on muslima.com. His target was the Palmyra Air Base in Syria, a military airfield located forty miles east of Tiyas Air Base, the main airfield of the Syrian Air Force. Tiyas was, in turn, about ninety miles to the northeast of Damascus.

Palmyra Air Base was just south of the M20 highway and adjacent to a town called Tadmur. The base had only a single landing strip with a shorter parallel taxiway. Both ran east to west. Sixteen earth
-covered concrete revetments housed a half dozen MiG-23BN Flogger ground attack aircraft. But it was not the aircraft that Muhjid was tasked with destroying, it was a single building that had been constructed during 2011 on the northern edge of the base.

The building was not huge, encompassing 11,465 square feet, but its importance was
enormous. It was funded by Iran and built by the Russians to serve as the central command, communication and analysis center for all of the early warning radar inside Syria. Inside the building, eight Iranian Air Force and Revolutionary Guard liaisons, twenty-one Syrian Air Force personnel and fourteen Russian technicians operated 24 hours per day, 365 days a year to collect and analyze all of the data that showed up on the various radar and monitoring units that were being fed into the building via hard wire from a microwave communication tower located on top of the town hospital. This tower communicated with a microwave tower on top of the 6,043 foot ridge of Jabal ash Shamail, located to the north of Damascus. The building was connected to the headquarters of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp in Tehran via telephone and the Internet. If an Israeli action was detected, Tehran would know about it even before the Syrian air defense network was put on alert.

Archer was given intelligence on his secondary targets as well. The men who occupied the target building all lived in housing just to the northwest of the base. The Russians had insisted, against the advice of the Syrian security service, on constructing a road that connected the building
to the small community of homes in the town of Tadmur where the Russian advisors lived, some with their families. The connecting road was only one mile long. Mossad not only wanted Archer to destroy the building, but also for him to kill all the Russians who were not on duty at the time. They had given him a map that had all of the homes of Russians highlighted. He also had high resolution satellite photos of the base and the housing area.

Finally, Mossad gave him two tertiary targets. About ¾ of a mile to the east of the target building was a Russian P-14 Tall King radar with a range of up to 400 kilometers. Another third of a mile to the southeast of that was one of the two Chinese JY-27 radar units that were now based in Syria.

The original package delivered to Archer had all of the information that he needed to plan his attack. He was feeling very confident, since the Syrians had done little to guard the Palmyra Air Base. It was far to the east of the population belt of Syria that ran north to south within 70 miles of the coast line – and that meant that it had so far escaped the worst of the civil war now raging. But Archer had to change his plans when he was called into Jordan again in early August to receive the latest intelligence. In the chaos of war, events occur beyond the ability of even the brightest minds to predict or control. Mossad analysts had come to realize that the information they gave to Archer on the defense of the base was outdated. IAF reconnaissance flights over the eastern deserts of Syria, combined with intelligence gathered by Unit 8200, had shown that far more Syrian troops had been deployed to protect Palmyra in recent months. Instead of a simple guardhouse with one or two soldiers, a Syrian army company was now stationed on the base. A squad had set up a Russian DShK heavy machine gun to protect the entrance to the connecting road.

But the new package given to Archer also included a nugget that Abu Muhjid knew how to take full advantage of. Somehow Mossad had obtained a list of the men in the Syrian army unit now tasked with defending Palmyra Air Base. Beside each name was their religious affiliation – Sunni or Shia. Since this duty was not considered front line work, most of the men in this unit were Sunni Muslims. Next to some of these men was an asterisk. A note on the bottom of the page indicated that the asterisk meant that these men were known to
harbor fundamentalist beliefs.

The sun on the morning of
Saturday, September 14 rose unencumbered by any cloud formations. The day promised to be a gorgeous fall offering. Muhjid thought it a perfect day for combat.
Combat
. That is what Abu Muhjid thought of his actions, regardless of whether the targets were soldiers or civilians. Everyone was a combatant in his mind. He had spent the night in As Sukhnah, a small Sunni village only forty miles further to the east of Palmyra along the M20 highway. Muhjid was the honored guest of the local imam, a man who dreamed of the end of the secular decadence of the Assad family. Just about the entire village of As Sukhnah was of like mind to the imam. The one family known to spy for the regime had been threatened enough to stay inside and mind their own business.

At 0629 hours, following morning prayers, Muhjid met with two men. The first was a comrade in al Qaeda who had fought by
Muhjid’s side during the past eighteen months inside Iraq and Syria. The other was a middle-aged man who Muhjid knew only as Mohammed. Archer did not want to know anything more about the man. Experience had taught him that it was easier that way. The three men reviewed the plan. All was ready. Archer turned to Mohammed.

“I envy you. Soon you will know Allah.”

The man smiled. He was as calm and happy as if he was about to embark on vacation. “Allahu Akbar,” he replied.

“Allah guide you this morning.”

The two men embraced and kissed each other on the cheeks.

Abu Muhjid got into the passenger seat of a small four-door sedan. He held a two-way radio. Between his legs
, an AK-47 rested with its muzzle on the floor and the pistol grip handle on his lap. Its wire frame butt was folded over and out of the way, allowing him to pull the weapon into a firing position easily. In the small glove compartment he placed a can of bright orange spray paint. He turned to the driver, a young man with a beard who was a local Syrian fundamentalist who had been on a previous operation conducted in Syria under Muhjid’s command. This one was much bigger and bolder than anything the al Qaeda commander had planned before. Muhjid told the man to head out. They had a fifty-minute drive to Palmyra, but they rarely said a word to each other. This sedan was leading a small convoy and Muhjid’s primary job on the drive was to spot any police or army units on the way. If any hint of a roadblock was detected, they would abort the mission and return to As Sukhnah.

Allah was with them this morning. The highway was empty except for an occasional truck that passed by or was passed. They drove at exactly 100 kph, below the posted speed limit of 110 kph. The reason was not to avoid a ticket, it was to set a known pace that everyone who followed could maintain. The timing of the plan was laid out clearly. The shift change at the target building occurred every morning at 0800 hours and the plan was coordinated around that event. The second vehicle in the convoy left As Sukhnah exactly at 0700 hours, twenty-fiv
e minutes after Muhjid’s sedan.

At
0727 hours, the sedan passed by the northern edge of Palmyra Air Base as it headed west into Tadmur. A minute later it came to a small roundabout as the two men entered the town. The car wheeled around the roundabout 270 degrees and exited onto the road that led to the base and the target building. But after a short distance, the car turned left onto a side road. They were now in the middle of the housing neighborhood that included eight homes occupied by Russian technicians. Four of the homes were on this street, conveniently located next door to each other.

“Slow down,”
Muhjid commanded. He looked at a map he had pulled from his pocket. Homes of Russians were highlighted in yellow and their addresses were written on the map. “Here. Right here,” said the al Qaeda commander as he pointed to a home to the right of the car. The driver pulled over and stopped. Muhjid grabbed the can of spray paint and removed the top, shaking the can violently for a few seconds. He opened his door and sprayed an “X” on the sidewalk in front of the home’s entrance gate. All of the homes on the street had an eight foot high concrete block wall around their property. The wall formed a long barrier adjacent to the sidewalk.

“Go to the next,” Muhjid
commanded. The process was repeated – and again two more times in quick succession. Archer looked down at his map. “Now go down and turn right.” The remaining four homes were scattered throughout the small housing section. It took the men another ten minutes to finish the job of marking the homes. These were not scarlet letters – they were much worse. These marks were a death sentence for the occupants of each home. After the last home was marked, the car pulled over and waited for a few minutes. The time seemed to Muhjid to take hours.

At 0755 hours, the car pulled back onto the road
leading to the radar network building. Muhjid turned to his driver. “Now we learn if Allah blesses us.”

The car drove slowly
toward the target building. Immediately after it left the residential neighborhood, it approached the edge of Palmyra Air Base. Ahead, a guardhouse was built into the middle of the road. The car stopped about ten feet short of the guardhouse. “If I die, grab the gun and kill as many as you can. Allahu Akbar.” Muhjid stepped out of the car, leaving his AK-47 still resting with its muzzle on the floor board of the passenger seat.

Abu Muhjid approached the guardhouse. To his right and a little further on he could see an emplacement lined with sandbags. Inside the emplacement, a large machine gun
was pointed at him. His fate would be known in the coming seconds. He figured that if he died, he would never know it until he awoke in heaven. A young Syrian soldier stepped out of the guardhouse and held up his left arm, motioning for Muhjid to stop.

“I am looking for Faraj.” Muhjid could feel his heart beating at a furious pace. He prayed that the guard in front of him did not pick up on it.

The guard had been told by Faraj, a young corporal respected in the squad for his devout beliefs, that a man would show up this morning asking for him. Faraj had spent the last number of weeks quietly preparing his squad for this moment. “Faraj,” the guard yelled in the direction of the machine gun nest.