No Mission Is Impossible (25 page)

But on June 9, Israeli restraint toward the Syrians came to an end. Israel's request that they pull their forces back to their prewar positions went unanswered, and Israel decided to act with all its might. (See Chapter 11.)

   
GABI ASHKENAZI, DEPUTY COMMANDER OF GOLANI BRIGADE, LATER THE IDF CHIEF OF STAFF

          
“As a deputy commander of Golani Brigade, I went through several difficult moments during this battle. The first was when I was informed that Sayeret Commander Moshe Kaplinsky had been wounded. I sent Goni Harnik to replace him, and three or four minutes later, they're reporting that his armored personnel carrier has turned over in the village of Arnoun, near the Beaufort, and that he has started running on foot, his back badly hurting, to where his soldiers were located. I said to myself, the spine of the command has been hit, and now Goni has disappeared on me. . . . But within a few minutes, Goni
shows up on the radio, we speak, the battle goes on and I have the feeling that the situation is under control.

              
“The second difficult moment was at the end of the battle, when they told me that Goni had been killed, together with five fighters. That really hurt. Goni and I had gone through a lot together, and I felt that I had lost not only an excellent commander but a good friend, as well as an exceptional fighter.

              
“Given that the battle had been planned for daytime and took place at night, in a situation in which the commanders had been hit, the Sayeret and the engineers company fought in a manner worthy of commendation, and all because of the quality of the fighters, the commanders and their familiarity with Beaufort.

              
“At the end of the battles, when I descended from Beaufort, I didn't believe that we would spend two decades there, and that in the year 2000, it would be me, as commander of the northern district, who would evacuate Beaufort and IDF forces from Lebanon.”

The Syrian Army and Air Force treat Lebanon as if it were part of Syria. They have established batteries of ground-to-air missiles in the Lebanese Beqaa. During the war with Lebanon, Israel will be confronted by the Syrian missiles and fighter planes.

O
n June 9, 1982, three days after the start of the first Lebanon War, IAF pilots waited with great tension and suspense for the signal to embark on one of the air force's most complicated missions: attacking Syrian missile batteries in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley. In Jerusalem, the government continued to discuss the operation, struggling over fears of an escalation with the Syrians, who were politically and militarily involved in Lebanon. The debate was tense and stretched on for many hours. The time set for the start of the operation was pushed back, and Air Force Commander David Ivry retired to his office to concentrate on the latest flashes from the battlefield. Colonel Aviem Sella, the head of IAF operations, circulated among the pilots, checking their readiness, providing encouragement and trying to ease the tension.

At 1:30
P.M
., IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan called the air force commander from the prime minister's office, telling him, “Time to act. Good luck!” At two, the offensive got under way.

When the green light was given, twenty-four F-4 Phantom jets
from IAF Squadron 105 took off, armed with missiles. Soaring alongside them were Skyhawk fighter aircraft, Kfirs—Israeli-made combat jets—and F-15s and F-16s armed with heat-seeking air-to-air missiles. For Israel's electronic-disruption effort, the air force had enlisted Hawkeye early-warning aircraft, Boeing 707s and Zahavan drones. At the peak of the action, approximately one hundred Israeli planes were in the air.

The Syrians likewise threw roughly one hundred aircraft into battle—MiG-21s and -23s. Nineteen surface-to-air-missile batteries had been spread across the Beqaa Valley, where they were ready to launch SA-3, SA-6 and SA-8 surface-to-air missiles, among the most advanced, state-of-the-art engines developed by the Soviet Union.

Surface-to-air missiles were still a source of trauma for Israel's air force. The war of attrition with Egypt, followed by the Yom Kippur War, had left behind bad memories and a sense of powerlessness against Egyptian missiles. The former defense minister, General Ezer Weizman, had coined the famous phrase “the missile that bent the plane's wing,” which had motivated IAF commanders to look for a solution to this difficult problem. For five years, the top minds in the air force had labored with members of the military industry to develop a technological response that would protect the planes from the enemy's missiles and bring the plane's wing back to its natural place.

Now the hour of judgment had arrived: Would the Jewish brain again come up with an answer? Would the pilots' nightmare come to an end? Would the IAF reestablish control over the region's skies?

The attack's opening move was the launch of drones over the Beqaa Valley, an act of misdirection. The aircrafts' radar profile had been designed to resemble that of fighter jets, and the Syrians fell into the trap. As Israel's military planners had thought, the Syrians immediately launched surface-to-air missiles at the drones, exposing the precise locations of their batteries, which in turn became targets for Israeli radiation-seeking missiles. Simultaneously, the IDF ground electronic sensors pinpointed the batteries' locations and its artillery began shelling them.

Twenty-four Phantoms then suddenly appeared, each carrying two
“Purple Fists,” anti-radiation missiles that zero in on radar installations by detecting the heat from antiaircraft systems. The planes launched the missiles at the batteries from nearly twenty-two miles away; also fired were Ze'ev surface-to-surface missiles, a sophisticated short-to-medium-range weapon that had been developed in Israel. The entire time, drones circled above the area, transmitting the results back to the operation's commanders.

After the attack's first wave, the Syrian batteries went silent for several minutes, and then the second wave arrived. Forty Phantoms, Kfirs and Skyhawks fired various types of bombs, among them cluster bombs that destroyed the batteries and their crews. The third wave took on the few remaining batteries, and within forty-five minutes, the attack had ended as a complete success. Most of the batteries had been wiped out.

During the offensive, the Syrians had fired fifty-seven SA-6 missiles but had managed to hit just one Israeli plane. For several long minutes, the Syrian command had been in complete disarray, and when it realized its battery system had collapsed, scrambled its MiGs. During the aerial battles that ensued, Israel's F-15s and F-16s brought down twenty-seven MiGs using air-to-air missiles.

“From an operational standpoint, in contrast to what was planned, the attack on the missile batteries was one of the simplest missions I ever oversaw,” said Colonel Sella, who had been charged with the operation's ground management. “Everything went like clockwork. As a result, even after the first planes successfully attacked the batteries, I ordered their continued bombing. The perception was that any change, any pause or shift, could only create turmoil that would disrupt the progression of matters.”

Toward 4:00
P.M
., Sella reached a decision that he later described as the most significant of his life: to halt the operation. “At this stage, we had already destroyed fourteen batteries. We were an hour before last light, and we hadn't lost a plane. I believed we couldn't achieve a better outcome. When I leaned back for a minute in my chair, I took in some air and said to myself, ‘Let's stop—we've done our work for the day. They're going to bring more batteries tomorrow in any case.'”

Sella went to David Ivry, who was observing the mission with Chief of Staff Eitan. Sella leaned into Ivry's ear so that Eitan wouldn't hear and said, “I'm requesting authorization to stop the operation. We won't accomplish more today. We'll destroy the rest tomorrow.”

Ivry thought for a moment and nodded in agreement. The handful of planes then en route to an additional attack returned on Sella's orders to their bases. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon didn't love the decision, to put it mildly, even criticizing it harshly during a meeting with Eitan. But Sella's theory that the Syrians would move additional batteries to the Beqaa Valley overnight proved correct.

Over the next two days, Israeli bombers, escorted by fighter jets, set out to strike the new SA-8 batteries relocated by the Syrians. Because of the paralysis of Syria's defensive batteries, its air force dispatched planes to intercept the Israeli aircraft. In the battles that followed, Israel's pilots again had the upper hand: eighty-two Syrian aircraft were downed over the course of the first Lebanon War. The Israeli Air Force lost two planes to ground fire. During the campaign, what became known as the “biggest battle of the jet age” took place, involving approximately two hundred planes from the two sides.

“This situation, in which our planes were dominant and the Syrians were in a state of panic, gave us a huge psychological advantage,” Ivry said. “The aerial picture on the Syrian side was very unclear. We added in electronic means for disrupting their ability to aim and keep control, meaning that the Syrians entered the combat zone more as targets than as interceptors.”

When Ivry, who had also been the air force commander during Israel's attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor, was asked what his most exciting moment had been, he answered without hesitation that it was the end of the missile attack during the first Lebanon War. “When it became clear that we had succeeded in destroying the Syrian missile apparatus and that not one of our planes was damaged, it was a moment of true spiritual transcendence. This was a struggle involving the entire air force—a big concert with lots of instruments of various types, and everyone needed to play in perfect harmony.”

The missile batteries were wiped out.
(AF Journal)

The operation's success gave Israel complete control over the skies of Lebanon and made it possible for air force planes to freely assist IDF ground forces. Nevertheless, the air force abstained from striking Syrian ground troops, in keeping with a decision made by the cabinet, which feared sliding into an all-out war with Syria. On June 11, 1982, following mediation by the American emissary Philip Habib, a cease-fire between Israel and Syria took hold.

The mission, Operation Mole Cricket 19, was considered one of the four most important in the history of the air force. (The other three were Operation Focus, the assault on the combined Arab Air Forces during the Six Day War; Operation Opera, the attack on the nuclear reactor in Iraq, in 1981; and Operation Yonatan, the rescue of hostages in Antebbe, in 1976.) Western air forces regarded the mission as an example of the successful use of Western technology against Soviet defense strategy. The results of the attack caused a great deal of astonishment among
the military leaders of the Warsaw Pact, overturning their sense of confidence in the USSR, and particularly in the Soviet bloc's surface-to-air-missile apparatus.

   
AVIEM SELLA, SQUADRON COMMANDER

          
“For the sake of this operation, we developed, with the help of a great team of scientists from the Weizmann Institute, a computerized control and planning system that would make it possible to prepare and command a multivariable campaign: to manage hundreds of planes with hundreds of weapons facing dozens of missile batteries and dozens of radar installations. It was a dynamic system operating in real time with thousands of variables. The primary and most outstanding programmer was a Haredi [Orthodox Jew] who lived in Bnei Brak, Menachem Kraus, who had no formal education but immense and unique knowledge. He was involved in all of the operational programs and, at the moment of action, sat with us in the Pit, in his civilian clothes.

              
“At the end of the day, we would conduct a nighttime debriefing and discuss what we had learned. I arrived at one debriefing where all the squadron commanders were participating, as well as all the wing commanders and former air force commanders. And, all of a sudden, everyone is standing and starts to applaud me for the perfect operation. I was very moved, because this sort of thing is quite rare in the middle of a war. I also got a little statuette, which was inscribed, ‘To Sella, the thinker behind the fight against missiles, your vision has been fulfilled and we're standing tall once again—the fighters of Air Force Base 8.”

After the 1982 Lebanon War, the PLO terrorists and their leaders have been exiled to Tunisia, where they live with total impunity, protected by the Tunisian government. But in 1988, Prime Minister Shamir approves a mission to change that situation.

M
arch 7, 1988. The Mothers' Bus, so called because of the large number of women it carried, was on its daily morning trip from Be'er Sheva to the Dimona nuclear reactor. At a deserted stretch of the highway it was suddenly stopped by three men, standing in the middle of the road beside a military vehicle. Only after the men boarded the bus, waving automatic weapons, did the passengers realize that these were Arab terrorists. Panic broke out on board the bus, yet forty of the passengers, all of them workers at the Dimona reactor, managed to escape. The terrorists seized control of the bus and held hostage the remaining nine women and two men. Israeli Special Forces arrived almost immediately, and surrounded the vehicle. The terrorists began negotiating with them over the release of the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jails. They threatened to murder a hostage every half hour. First among those killed was Victor Ram.

The first intelligence reports that reached the Israeli unit indicated that the terrorists had crossed the border early that morning, coming from Egypt-controlled Sinai, and had hijacked a military jeep on their
way. Order was given to the fighters of the Special Unit of Israel's border guard (Yamam) to raid the bus. Which they did, killing the hostage takers, but not before the terrorists murdered two of the female captives, Rina Pazarkar-Sheratzky and Miriam Ben Yair. During the negotiations, one of the terrorists shouted, “Abu Jihad sent us!”

Abu Jihad. The name was highly familiar to the IDF's intelligence services. Abu Jihad—or “Father of Jihad,” whose given name was Khalil al-Wazir—was Yasser Arafat's deputy, and the head of the PLO's military wing. He was born in Ramleh, in then Mandatory Palestine, and grew up in refugee camps in Gaza. Before he was even twenty, he was organizing resistance groups composed of other Palestinian youths and was among the first to join Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Abu Jihad had participated in the first Fatah operation in Israeli territory, planting a bomb at a National Water Carrier facility on January 1, 1965. Following the Yom Kippur War, he planned a series of lethal terrorist assaults on Israel, including a 1974 attack in Nahariya that killed four Israelis and wounded six; a raid on the Savoy hotel in Tel Aviv on March 5, 1975, which killed eight hostages and three IDF soldiers, among them Colonel Uzi Yairi; a massive bombing in the crowded Zion Square in Jerusalem by a booby-trapped refrigerator that killed fifteen people on July 4, 1975; the Coastal Road massacre of March 11, 1978, in which thirty-five were murdered; and the killing of three Israeli sailors in Limassol, Cyprus, in September 1985.

By 1988, Abu Jihad was running the first Palestinian armed rebellion—the Intifada—from afar, and in the eyes of many Palestinians, had become a symbol of the struggle against Israel. He had married Intisar al-Wazir—also known as Umm Jihad, or “Mother of Jihad”—an impressive woman who was a leader in her own right. She gave him three sons and one daughter. Expelled from Lebanon with his PLO cronies after Israel's 1982 invasion, he was banished four years later from Jordan and settled in Tunis with the rest of the Fatah leadership.

Abu Jihad had already been marked for assassination a few years earlier; several operations had been planned but were abandoned at the last minute. However, with the Mothers' Bus attack of March 1988, the
cup runneth over. Following the attack, the head of the military intelligence department, General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, reached the conclusion that Abu Jihad should be eliminated. General Lipkin-Shahak knew what he was talking about: he was a decorated hero of Operation Spring of Youth in 1973. (See Chapter 14.)

The IDF new chief of staff, Dan Shomron, (the brain behind the Entebbe mission) approved an operation in principle and assigned its management and preparation to his deputy, Ehud Barak, the former commander of Sayeret Matkal. Outwardly, it appeared to be an incredibly complicated mission, more than 1,550 miles from home. The Mossad was asked to help. Ever since the Fatah leadership had settled in Tunis, the Mossad had been widening its effective intelligence network. Its agents in Tunis surreptitiously visited Abu Jihad's neighborhood, Sidi Bou Said, photographed his home and even succeeded in drawing up precise blueprints of the structure and its internal layout. A Mossad female agent had visited the house under false pretexts and submitted a report on its furnishings and interior: a corridor leading from the entrance to a couch and armchair-filled guest room; a door that led to Abu Jihad's study; another door, to the kitchen; and a staircase to the second floor, where the bedrooms of Abu Jihad, his wife, and daughter, Hanan, were located. The couple's baby, Nidal, a two-year-old, slept in his parents' room, while the family's two older boys studied in the United States.

The operation was planned as follows: the commandos of Sayeret Matkal would approach Tunisia's coast on Israeli naval ships. Members of Shayetet 13, the naval commando unit, would bring them to shore, and from there, they would reach Abu Jihad's home with the aid of the Mossad. The Shayetet and the navy had secretly mapped Tunis's coastline and located beaches for the Israeli landing. Air force jets were eventually dispatched for a surveillance flight, refreshing the IDF's intelligence before the operation.

Even so, the risks remained very high. Any encounter with PLO forces, Tunisian Army units or local police could lead to disaster, and it was clear that a retreat by Israeli forces or an evacuation of wounded participants would be much harder than in countries adjacent to Israel.
Abu Jihad's neighborhood was home to many PLO leaders on Israel's most-wanted list, and it was obvious that there would be a large presence of well-trained Fatah guards. Any misstep could end in battle or the entrapment of IDF soldiers. The operation could also lead to severe political consequences: Tunisia wasn't an active enemy of Israel, and it would be hard to explain an attack on Tunisians. One question kept Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin particularly restless: how would it be possible to confirm that Abu Jihad was home on the night of the mission?

The Mossad had assured Rabin that it would have up-to-the-minute information about Abu Jihad's whereabouts within his home, which it hoped to secure via intelligence reports and careful surveillance. In the meantime, final preparations were under way. An exact replica of Abu Jihad's home was built in Israel, where Sayeret Matkal trained for the infiltration and assassination. Elite officers were selected for the operation, and each was assigned a precise role.

The team that would go up to the bedrooms and the officer who would shoot Abu Jihad were also chosen. Heading the operation would be Sayeret Matkal's commander, Moshe Ya'alon. Bogie, who had returned to active service as a sergeant after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was now a colonel and considered one of the best Sayeret commanders. During the preparation for the mission Bogie decided to visit the area. He flew to Rome and from there, with a false passport, to Tunis. Once in Tunis, he was taken by Mossad agents on a tour near Abu Jihad's home. The next day, Ya'alon returned to Israel via Rome and joined his men.

The force set out in four missile boats, accompanied by a submarine, on Wednesday, April 13. Two of the boats transported the Sayeret Matkal and Shayetet 13 commandos, and were protected by the other two. One of the boats, containing a sophisticated electronics center, served as the operation's command post under Barak's command. A fully equipped and staffed medical operation unit had been set up in the other. The flotilla initially sailed northwest, toward the Greek islands, then turned west and later south, until it reached the coast of Tunisia.

That same day, three Mossad agents had appeared at a car-rental company in Tunis bearing false IDs. Calling themselves Ayish a-Saridi,
George Najib and Uataf Allem (the third was a woman), they rented three minibuses—two Volkswagen Transporters and a Peugeot.

The missile boats reached their destination on April 15. That day, Israel intercepted a transmission sent to the PLO by French agents, who warned that “the Israelis are cooking up something.” This was a cause for concern, but Barak ordered that the operation move ahead.

That night, two Boeing 707s belonging to the Israeli Air Force arrived in the skies over Tunis, one a receptor for electronic transmissions and the other providing air cover and serving as a refueling plane for the fighter jets circling in the region.

The operation commenced. The submarine drew closer to the appointed beach—A-Rouad, next to Ras Carthage—and reported that it was completely empty. Two pairs of Shayetet fighters, aboard tiny “Hazir” (“Pig”) submersibles, reached the shore, and met the trio from the Mossad, which had brought the rented vehicles. The Shayetet divers reported by radio that the beach was secure, and five rubber dinghies were immediately lowered into the sea, delivering twenty sayeret commandos to the shore. The landing point was a short distance from Sidi Bou Said. The commandos had been divided into four teams—A and B to carry out the operation, and C and D to provide protection. The fighters in A and B were armed with twenty-two-milimeter Berettas outfitted with silencers, as well as mini-Uzis. Several members of the C and D teams carried rifles and grenades. The Sayeret members wore coveralls concealing bulletproof vests and supple Palladium boots. Attached to their heads were communications devices with microphones and earphones, and their belts carried tiny pouches with ammunition and first-aid supplies. They were also equipped with surgical masks, to conceal their faces.

That evening, the Shin Bet had detained Fayez Abu Rahma, a relative of Abu Jihad who lived in Gaza. His interrogation had been cursory and unfocused, and he was released a few hours later. Actually, the arrest had a single, secret objective: to cause Abu Rahma to call Abu Jihad in Tunis, which would allow the Mossad and Military-intelligence's listening systems to confirm that the terrorist leader was in fact in the North African city.

But as H-Hour approached, a last-minute hitch occurred. While Sayeret Matkal was getting ready on the Tunisian beach, an urgent message was received from a Mossad agent. Abu Jihad wasn't home! He was in the city, at a meeting with another Palestinian leader, Farouk Kaddoumi. The unit was forced to wait. The risk was great: an elite unit of the IDF sitting tight on an isolated beach in an enemy country, thousands of miles away from home. A nerve-wracking hour and a half passed before Yaalon received word that Abu Jihad had returned home, escorted by two bodyguards—one who remained in the car, outside, and a second who went into the house. The sayeret fighters piled up in their vehicles and immediately departed for Sidi Bou Said, passing the darkened ruins of the ancient port of Carthage, where Hannibal had set sail to Spain, launching his legendary campaign against the Roman Empire.

The soldiers reached their destination shortly before 2:00
A.M
. Abu Jihad's car was parked in front of his house, and his bodyguard was dozing off in the driver's seat. Two fighters approached the vehicle, one disguised as a woman. The “lady” was carrying a large box of chocolates that concealed his hand, holding a silenced pistol. When they reached the car, one of them shot the bodyguard through the head. The others moved into the garden surrounding the house, while members of the A team broke through a reinforced wooden door with the help of specialized, noise-reducing equipment. The A and B teams snuck into the house; in the basement, the commandos killed the second bodyguard, as well as an unlucky Tunisian gardener who had chosen to sleep there. Members of the A team ran upstairs, toward Abu Jihad and his wife's bedroom.

Abu Jihad wasn't sleeping. An hour earlier, he had kissed his sixteen-year-old daughter, Hanan, good night, and after leaving her room had sat at his desk to begin writing a letter to leaders of the Intifada back in Israel. A faint noise outside startled him, and he picked up a firearm—his special silver-handled pistol—and turned toward the door. Umm Jihad realized what was going on and called, “Verdun, Verdun,” in reference to Verdun Street, in Beirut, the location of the building where terrorist leaders had been killed during Operation Spring of Youth.

Abu Jihad opened the door. Standing before him were masked men,
their weapons drawn. He managed to push his wife into an alcove in the wall and raise his revolver, but the officer facing him shot an entire magazine into him, as did the rest of the group afterward. Abu Jihad collapsed in front of his wife. While the attackers still fired at the terrorist leader, Umm Jihad jumped toward her husband and bent over his body, embracing the corpse and eventually shouting at the attackers, “Enough!”

The shooters didn't harm her nor her daughter, Hanan, who had been awakened by the sound of the shooting and burst into the room. One blurted out in Arabic, “Go to your mother!” but she saw the attackers firing at her father on the ground and, for a moment, stood opposite one of the commandos entering the room without a mask. She looked at his face—a face, she said, that she would never forget. He, too, shot her father in the head. Umm Jihad and her daughter saw a woman who had accompanied the Israeli unit; she was videotaping the entire operation. The two-year-old baby, Nidal, woke up and burst into tears. Above him stood a Sayeret commando spraying gunfire into the ceiling, but he didn't harm the child. The PLO later claimed that the attackers had fired seventy bullets, and that fifty-two had struck Abu Jihad.