Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (18 page)

While Shabak ran down other clues, an Islamic scholar the government occasionally consulted suggested that perhaps Yassin himself could defuse the crisis. Yassin detested the Oslo process, viewing it as an alliance of heathens—Israel and the PLO—forged expressly to destroy Hamas. But Islam had laws about protecting prisoners. And members of Hamas held up Yassin as a religious authority. He would certainly not call on the Hamas men to release Wachsman, but he might instruct them to keep him alive.

For the interview, Rabin’s media advisers suggested Danny Levy, a reporter with Israel Television’s Arabic language service. Israeli prison authorities rarely granted interviews with inmates, but in this case they processed the request quickly. By early afternoon, Levy and his camera crew were allowed through the gates of the Kfar Yona prison east of Netanya and into Yassin’s cell.

To Levy’s delight, Yassin said just the right things. “Keeping him alive could serve our purposes, so he must be kept alive,” he told the journalist in Arabic. “I advise them to respect him, protect him and not to kill him. They should protect him and not threaten his life.” Levy left the prison thinking that he’d saved Wachsman’s life.

But when the interview was broadcast later in the day, security officials debated whether it would have the desired effect. For one thing, there was no guarantee the Hamas men who abducted Wachsman would even see it. Safe houses were often basement hideaways with no electricity. And there was also the question of how the interview would be perceived. Carmi Gillon, who had been filling in as head of Shabak for some weeks now, was sure the captors would think it was staged or coerced. “There’s not a single Hamas person who would have considered the remarks authentic,” Gillon would say years later.

By now, more than a hundred journalists had gathered outside the
Wachsman home in Ramot, including the correspondents of the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
. The neighborhood lay just inside the West Bank, effectively a settlement populated mostly by religious Jews. But it was built on land Israel annexed after the 1967 war and districted as part of the new, expanded Jerusalem.

Inside, the house had become a makeshift command center, with people constantly coming and going, some foreign to the Wachsmans, others familiar. The army had sent a psychologist to be with the family, which included Esther Wachsman’s Israeli-born husband, Yehuda, and their six sons. Other soldiers manned a dedicated phone line the army installed in the den along with a recording device, in case the captors called. Academics specializing in Islamic studies sat with the family and offered advice. Some were phoning Muslim clerics around the Arab world, asking them to call on the captors not to harm Wachsman. At Yehuda’s request, a rabbi was going from room to room to check the
mezuzot
—the ritual cases that religiously observant Jews affix to their doorposts with a prayer rolled up inside. A defective parchment might bring bad luck.

At one point the phone rang in the den and Rabin came on the line. He had called to assure Esther and Yehuda that he would do whatever he could to free their son. But in the back and forth, he also let on that he did not intend to trade Hamas prisoners for Wachsman. As defense minister in the 1980s, Rabin had approved two staggeringly lopsided prisoner swaps under heavy pressure from the parents of the captive soldiers. He hoped to head off demands from the Wachsmans by explaining his position directly. Yehuda pleaded with Rabin to just hint publicly that he was willing to negotiate. Even if he did not intend to strike a deal, at least he could buy time. With all those journalists camped in front of the house, Yehuda considered stepping outside and making the bogus announcement himself. But Rabin alluded to other initiatives under way and said Yehuda would only harm the chances of freeing his son.

When the conversation ended, Esther decided on a different approach. She stepped outside her front door and told journalists that President Clinton should get involved. Though Esther’s children were born and raised in Israel, they all inherited their mother’s American
citizenship. The United States had an obligation to protect its nationals, she said to the cameras. Back in her living room, she dialed the White House. To her surprise, a Clinton staffer eventually phoned back and put the president on the line. Until a few days earlier, she’d been an ordinary high school English teacher; now she was talking to the president of the United States. Esther asked Clinton to press Rabin. Yes, Israel had a policy of not negotiating with terrorists. But prime ministers had applied it selectively over the years. Clinton promised to do what he could.

The hours passed with no news and no relief. It had been an unusually hot day for autumn in Jerusalem but by the late afternoon a soft breeze wafted through the house. Esther envisioned her son lying in a dungeon somewhere in Gaza, more than sixty miles away. In fact, he was just across the valley from Ramot, tied to a bed on the second floor of the home in Bir Nabala, his eyes covered with a red kaffiyeh.

In the evening, with forty-eight hours remaining until the deadline expired, a call came from Ahmed Tibi, an Arab-Israeli member of parliament. Tibi was sitting with Arafat in Gaza and wanted to put the Palestinian leader on the line. Esther had been ambivalent about the Oslo Accord when it was signed a year earlier. She hadn’t voted for Rabin and did not believe Arafat genuinely intended to make peace with Israel. But now, on the phone, he was promising to help. Arafat told her he’d ordered his security chiefs to find her son and get him home safely. Though it had been more than a year since Israel and the PLO signed their mutual recognition agreement, it was unusual for Arafat to be speaking to an ordinary Israeli—one who did not represent either the government or the military. Esther thought he sounded sincere.

Morning came with no breakthrough. The security chiefs still believed Hamas was holding Wachsman in Gaza, but one top Shabak official, Gideon Ezra, decided to check the names of people who rented cars in Jerusalem over the preceding week. The cell would likely have used either a rental or a stolen car for the abduction. Astonishingly, no one had thought to check with the car companies.

Getting the lists and combing through them took hours but by the afternoon, one name stood out: Jihad Yarmur. The East Jerusalem
resident had rented a car on Sunday morning and paid his bill in cash. He returned the car on Tuesday, four days before the rental contract expired. Shabak had no file on Yarmur but did have information about one of his brothers. He was a known Hamas activist. For the first time since the abduction, investigators finally had a lead. Police officers picked up Yarmur at his home in the neighborhood of Beit Hanina, just a mile south of Bir Nabala, and brought him to a detention center for questioning.

Shabak interrogations could be corporal affairs. Over the years, investigators routinely beat Palestinian detainees, occasionally to death. After two major Shabak scandals in the 1980s, a government commission banned some interrogation methods but allowed investigators to exert “moderate physical pressure” on suspects—including shaking them violently and keeping them tied up in stress positions for hours. To Israeli and international rights groups, these “special procedures” still amounted to torture. But under the new regulations, investigators had to obtain permission from Shabak officials high up the chain of command before getting physical with suspects.

As the interrogation got under way, Gillon phoned the state prosecutor, Dorit Beinish, to notify her that he would be allowing investigators to deploy the special procedures. Still new to the job, Gillon wanted cover for what could prove to be a controversial decision. There was, as yet, no evidence linking Yarmur to the abduction. But in the initial questioning, he seemed to be hiding something the interrogators already knew—that he’d rented a car on Sunday. And with the ultimatum expiring in less than twenty-four hours, Shabak had to get to the truth quickly. Beinish thought it over quietly for several moments while Gillon held the phone to his ear. Yes, she finally said, she would back his decision.

Meanwhile, at the plaza of the Western Wall, tens of thousands gathered to pray for Wachsman’s safety, the worshippers pressed up against one another in the cool Jerusalem night. And in the interrogation room less than a mile west of there, investigators worked on Yarmur.

At six the following morning Gillon entered a meeting of the army’s top brass at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv with no news to
report. The interrogation had gone on all night and was still in progress. But while the meeting wound on, a secretary pulled the Shabak chief out of the room for a call from Ezra, in Jerusalem. Yarmur had finally opened up, describing the abduction in detail and providing the location of the safe house. The cell was holding Wachsman in Bir Nabala, not Gaza, Ezra reported. Arafat had been telling the truth.

Gillon went straight to Rabin’s office, with Barak a step behind him. Soon Rabin’s entire security team crammed into his room, including the heads of Mossad and military intelligence. Rabin grilled Gillon about the interrogation, dwelling on almost every detail. Yarmur had last been at the house in Bir Nabala on Tuesday. He provided a description of the interior and the names of the men inside—two Hamas militants from East Jerusalem and one from Gaza. The men had automatic rifles and possibly explosives. Wachsman, he said, had been alive and well earlier in the week. Yarmur had communicated with him in Hebrew.

Yatom, Rabin’s military secretary, watched his boss take in the information. Even before the prime minister spoke, Yatom knew where the conversation was heading. Rabin had felt an agonizing powerlessness throughout the week. Now that the intelligence had come through, he would want action. “It was utterly clear that we would carry out a military operation at the moment a military operation was feasible,” Yatom recalled years later. “Not one person objected to it.”

Rabin instructed several of the participants, including Barak and Gillon, to head immediately to Bir Nabala to case the house. They left the Defense Ministry separately, to avoid arousing the suspicion of journalists who had been stalking the compound for news about Wachsman. Rabin also ordered the country’s two top antiterrorism units to begin preparing for an operation. He would leave it to Barak to choose between the two—the military’s Sayeret Matkal and the police unit known by the acronym Yamam.

Throughout the morning, officers from both units reconnoitered quietly in Bir Nabala. Of the two, Matkal was the better-known unit (in English, the general staff reconnaissance unit), having led the Entebbe mission and a series of other rescues and assassinations. To prepare for operations, Matkal liked to fashion life-size models of the
structure they were targeting—a building or a plane—and use it to drill dozens of times. But the deadline was now less than twelve hours away. The teams would draw up their assault plans based on very little—the details obtained from Yarmur and their own hasty survey of the house.

WHILE THE PREPARATIONS
for a raid got under way, members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee gathered in front of journalists in Oslo to announce their decision. The timing could not have been more awkward. A Shabak reconnaissance team had set up a hidden camera and trained it on the Hamas safe house, with the images transmitted directly to the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. The two broadcasts, one from Oslo, the other from Bir Nabala, captured the paradox of the moment. Together, they represented the main event and the sideshow of the thirteen-month peace process—though it wasn’t always clear which was which. Rabin and his aides could now see the two-story home where Wachsman had spent the past five days. Though nothing moved on the screen except for the occasional fluttering of leaves, Haber was mesmerized by the image.

The Nobel panel had deliberated for days. Not since 1973, when the committee awarded the peace prize to Henry Kissinger for negotiating a US withdrawal from Vietnam, had the arguments been so heated. One panelist, the conservative Norwegian politician Kåre Kristiansen, objected to honoring Arafat in light of his terrorist past. He resigned from the committee before the announcement. Others thought it was important to let Peres share the award. Not doing so would surely have aggravated the relationship between him and Rabin, a rivalry the Norwegians knew all about.

Finally, the panel decided to award the prize to all three men—Rabin, Peres, and Arafat. To avoid any perceived slights, the chairman of the committee announced the names alphabetically. “By concluding the Oslo agreements and subsequently following up on them, Arafat, Peres and Rabin have made substantial contributions to a historic
process through which peace and cooperation can replace war and hate,” Francis Sejersted told the reporters in Oslo.

Rabin might normally have gathered his advisers and family members for a toast. Instead, he issued a statement congratulating Arafat and Peres and warning the Palestinian leader against letting Hamas get the upper hand. “Today, the Palestinians face the moment of truth: if they do not defeat the enemies of peace, the enemies of peace will defeat them.” Rabin also inserted a line meant to lull the captors into believing Israel still thought Wachsman was in Gaza. “At this time, Israel Defense Forces soldier Nachshon Wachsman is in a Hamas cell in Gaza; his plight is our plight.”

By midday, both Sayeret Matkal and Yamam had drawn up their assault plans. Barak reviewed the two proposals, then handed the mission to Matkal. The choice surprised no one. Barak had served in Matkal early in his career and so had several other people who now held senior posts in the government and the military. The camaraderie among alumni of the unit, which included Yatom and Netanyahu, marked the closest thing Israel had to an old-boys’ network.

Matkal also had a tactical advantage. Just three months earlier, members of the unit had raided a home in Lebanon, grabbing the Muslim guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani from his bed and whisking him to Israel. Officials believed Dirani had information on the whereabouts of an Israeli airman missing since 1986. The operation involved travel by helicopter and a complicated extraction, elements that the raid in Bir Nabala would not require. But the unit had spent much time rehearsing a procedure that would now be essential: a slow, stealthy approach to a house in hostile terrain.