The Architect of Espionage

Leadership is the ability to move people above and beyond normal circumstances, especially in those cases where people are afraid or unsure of themselves —Meir Dagan, April 2009, from a speech to graduates of a command course at Mossad headquarters

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Dagan had a voracious appetite for constant adventure and learning, and he believed that he could learn from everyone—from the president of the United States to the workers who cooked and cleaned at Mossad headquarters.

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The new world order demanded that the Mossad no longer rest on the laurels of its past exploits. It had to be more dynamic, intuitive, and devious than its enemies. Its actions needed to be decisive. Dagan reinvigorated the service with a newfound appreciation of the pricelessness of intelligence as an actionable commodity, and he instilled a decisive way of thinking so that Israel’s spies did not react to disaster, but rather did everything in their power and their bag of dirty tricks to preempt, forewarn, and punish before the fact. Under Dagan’s leadership, the Mossad would no longer be a service provider to A’man, the Israeli military intelligence directorate and the nation’s largest espionage force. The Mossad would become the service. After he took the elevator to his new office at Mossad HQ, Dagan’s first order of the day was that the agency would not only gather intelligence on the threats facing Israel but would also act decisively to stop them. He used a lifetime of lessons learned as a warrior and special operator to turn the Mossad into an instrument of power and a weapon of strategic diplomacy.

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Under Dagan, new tactics, like covert financial warfare, became part of the Mossad’s arsenal. Old tactics, such as targeted killings, became new core strategies. Enemies of Israel who posed a threat to the country and the Jewish people were justifiable targets. Although Israel was a high-tech country, called Startup Nation, and enjoyed a First World standard of living and liberal beliefs, the country was a part of the world that had the explosive potential for savage retribution, where vengeance was always preemptive, even if it sometimes gave the outward appearance of being purely punitive, and violence was always a measure of last resort.

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Prime ministers lost sleep worrying about yesterday’s polls and tomorrow’s primaries. Generals and spy chiefs lay awake at night worrying about long-term threats. During his time in office, and until his death, Dagan was outspoken in his belief that Israel did not have the means to unilaterally and permanently destroy Iran’s nuclear aspirations. He understood military overreach and the disastrous implications that a foolhardy gesture of first-strike bravado would entail for Israel. Dagan also knew that Israel had a trump card in stopping Iran: its ultra-strategic relationship with the United States. Solidifying the intelligence ties between the CIA and Mossad was a strategic goal for all heads of Israel’s intelligence agency, but it was imperative for Dagan. Years of cooperation and mutual interests had forged a de facto operational alliance between the two nations, where the two services worked together to settle old scores and prevent nuclear thresholds from being crossed, but Dagan used his years in office to nurture, strengthen, and expand them beyond what had been thought possible. The bonds were too important to be left solely in the hands of elected officials.

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Dagan would have been relieved that the pillars of the countries’ relationship stood unflinching and strong the day after what transpired on October 7, when the United States provided Israel with a needed military buffer against Iran and its surrogates. But he would have been shattered by the fact that both the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, and A’man, the IDF’s Military Intelligence Branch, had received the Hamas playbook for invading Israel, code-named Jericho Wall, two years before the October 7 attack and done nothing with the information.4 Operational intelligence, according to Dagan, was a precious commodity that cost lives and national resources to acquire and was never to be wasted. That responsibility came with the burden of accountability. Israel’s intelligence services, Dagan believed and preached to anyone who would listen, were the guardrails of Israel’s democracy and the country’s very survival. They could never be caught by surprise, by what the 9/11 Commission called a “failure of imagination.”5

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Every morning when he entered his office and at night before he went home, Dagan looked at a black-and-white photograph of SS officers laughing at his maternal grandfather moments before he was executed in Nazi-occupied Poland. Every visiting head of a service, including those from Arab nations, along with Mossad officers and agents about to be sent overseas on missions vital to the safeguarding of the Jewish state, looked at that photograph as well, as a narrative tool that Dagan used to speak of the importance of the possible sacrifice that Israel’s warriors in the shadows would have to make to ensure that Jews would never again be systematically targeted for annihilation. That was his sworn life’s calling. Meir Dagan wore that responsibility as a badge of honor. It is what defined his life as a soldier and a spy chief. He realized the inescapable symbolism of being the first and last head of Israeli intelligence who had been born inside the ashes of Hitler’s Europe.

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Thirteen men have led Ha’Mossad Le’Modi’in U-La-Tafkidim Meyuchadim, the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, between the spy agency’s creation in 1949 and the Hamas terror attack of October 7. Meir Dagan, who led the organization from 2002 to 2011, was the most remarkable and impactful. His actions, leadership, and special brand of defiant chutzpah left a mark on the service he led, and the Middle East in which it operated, that would last for years to come.

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The Russian president, who waited for no one, looked forward to seeing Dagan. He respected world leaders, but it was understood that he admired the Israeli spy chief. The Mossad director in Putin’s eyes was a warrior and a no-nonsense shadow warfare professional. Netanyahu did not share the Russian president’s sentiments. The prime minister had inherited a Mossad director who had served two previous Israeli leaders and was nearing the end of his second term. Netanyahu did not like anyone who had previously worked for someone else.5 He, as it has been said, viewed Dagan as boorish. But Dagan always chuckled when he was looked upon that way based on his outward appearance and mannerisms, joking that “he only looked simple.”

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“Putin trusted Dagan,” one of the Israeli spy chief’s deputies explained. “Politicians could lie, it was part of their game, but those in the intelligence business knew who could be counted on. Dagan’s word was good as gold. And the Russian president knew it.”6

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Details of what was discussed behind closed doors inside the eavesdropping-proof presidential study in Bocharov Ruchey, like the meeting itself, have never been made public, but Iran was the primary topic on the prime minister’s agenda.7 It is believed that the meeting, an exchange of positions and intelligence, lasted over two hours—a long time for a conference between two heads of state and their intelligence chiefs. Trusted interpreters made sure that nothing was lost in translation.

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well past midnight. Plans were discussed. The merits and risks of possible action were debated. Some of the most fantastic and awe-inspiring operations in the history of the Mossad were conceived in Dagan’s office late at night while he smoked one of the endless number of pipes on his desk and drank a cup of dark tea talking to a deputy who sat across from him exploring the envelope of what was operationally feasible, in a room engulfed by the fragrance and cloud of pipe smoke. Wild ideas were tossed back and forth between Dagan and those he admired and trusted most. The building was often empty, just two men talking when both were too tired to head home. “This was when we were most creative, and the boldest in our thoughts, in figuring out ways to deal with the people and the powers that threatened Israel,” a former branch chief remembered with a smile, “this was when history was made, the kind that in most cases can never be published.”8 Some of the ideas tossed around as dawn’s first sunlight neared would play out weeks or months later. Others, the nucleus of outside-the-box fantastic notions, would play out in Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran many years later. The shadow war to stop Israel’s enemies from posing an existential threat to the Jewish state was an around-the-clock effort, but the meetings were also forums for an open and sometimes painfully frank sharing of ideas. There were enormous risks—to lives and national interests—in every operational blueprint and mission conceived in that room, and Dagan wanted everyone’s thoughts and apprehensions vocalized—especially his own. As he often said, “Anyone who doesn’t cast doubt is not suited to be in the intelligence profession.”9

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The coast of Israel came into view on a windswept winter morning five days after the Caserta set sail. The outline of Mount Carmel jutted up into the gray sky, as did the cranes and freighters clustered in the Haifa port. The ship’s passengers crowded the main deck to see for themselves. The pious removed prayer books from their coat pockets and prayed. Not Mina. Although she came from religious stock, the horrors of the Holocaust had knocked all the faith out of her tiny frame. “How could God, if there is a God, allow one million children to be murdered?” she told her boys repeatedly as they grew up, Eli Huberman would later reflect; the boys never prepared for or celebrated their bar mitzvahs.

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Prayer could no longer be an excuse used as armor to protect the Jewish people, Mina would instruct her sons. It was a lesson Eli would always remember and one that Meir would never forget.

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Amidar was a place where learning how to fight earned social status. The children took after their parents; the kids fought in the street. Meir learned he could take on someone twice his size. His nickname in the neighborhood was Pancho, after the famed Mexican bandit. He was fearless and always willing to take risks, someone who learned to cut corners and throw a punch when needed.

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Eli was studious with an aptitude for the sciences. He was disciplined and organized. Meir was rambunctious and an explorer prone to disappearing—sometimes on expeditions around the neighborhood and then other times on treks across the country. His rambunctious spirit was fueled by a children’s book series called Hasamba by Yigal Mossinson. Hasamba, the Hebrew acronym for Havurat Sod Muhlat Be’Hehlet, or The Absolutely Absolute Secret Group followed the heroic adventures of a group of Tel Aviv children who helped the underground Haganah fight the British. Other books in the series had storylines involving the Israeli military and its security services. “Meir tried to organize his friends to emulate the Hasamba gang in the dunes around Bat Yam,” Eli remembered.4 He envisioned himself going out on secret missions even at a very young age.

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He was a shovav, the Hebrew word for one who is perpetually naughty, and could not help but get into trouble. He was often ordered to go to the principal’s office because of his behavior and then sent home. He was so disruptive, legend had it, that teachers entered the classroom, yelled at Huberman to leave the room, and then only started teaching once he was out the door. Still, his parents made him take accordion lessons, and he practiced at home. If he liked to do something, he did it faithfully. He could not tolerate being bored. Meir loved to read, just like his brother. His reading level surpassed his age, and the small Bat Yam apartment was always full of books borrowed from the nearby library, taken from school, or used paperbacks purchased for a few agorot, the Israeli version of the penny. There were books beneath his pillow and under the couch. Even books that he had read before were cherished and read once again. Meir liberated magazines from the trash and tried to read newspaper headlines from newsstands rather than in the afternoon edition. Television was a decade away, so most Israelis—including preteen Meir—received the news from the radio. At the top of every hour, a national news broadcast interrupted all programming with updated headlines about the precarious security situation along Israel’s frontiers.

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But Unit 101 made headlines. Their punitive raids were designed to be preemptive—to instill such destruction in areas that the fedayeen used to launch attacks that the villages that provided the guerrillas a haven would think twice before letting them use the areas as a base of operations from which to attack Israel. The unit’s first operation was a retaliatory strike against a fedayeen base in the Gaza Strip that resulted in fifty dead. A raid against the West Bank village of Qibya in response to the murder of an Israeli woman and her two children resulted in sixty-nine Jordanian guardsmen and civilians killed. There was an international outcry. U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles halted aid because of the severity of the Israeli commando operation and voted to censure Israel in the United Nations.5

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Israel became stronger as Meir grew up. The Jewish state developed into a military power to be reckoned with. Colonel Arik Sharon’s paratroopers captured the Mitla Pass in the Sinai Desert in the 1956 war against Egypt, a conflict that Israel fought alongside Great Britain and France. Boys schooled in the horrors of the Holocaust were determined to be the type of Jews that could not be led to extermination. They were tough and determined.

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At home, Shmuel was dismissive and distant to his two sons. Bitter that his efforts in Poland on behalf of Hashomer Ha’Tzair were never appreciated or rewarded upon his arrival in Israel, with a position in government or at an agency that had prominence and brought financial reward to him, Shmuel Huberman carried that slight with him for the rest of his life. “He was a good father,” Eli Huberman would recall, “but not a warm and loving one.”7 Even years later when Meir was a general, Shmuel would say, “I have one son who’s a scientist and another who’s in the army.”

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Few Israeli families—especially in Bat Yam—owned a car, so Meir took a bus to the army. The housewives who looked at their world from their windowsills yelled at him and wished him the best of luck in the army. There were few secrets in the Bat Yam apartment building and the women told him to be careful. Mina Huberman would have wanted to hold her son’s hand as she walked with him to the bus stop, but, as his brother Eli remembered, “Meir’s rebellious and proud nature would never agree to such a gesture.”

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That night, a few conscripts cried in their bunks, frightened to be away from home for the first time. The cockier ones, or those who could bombastically camouflage their raw recruit trepidation, boasted about their plans to volunteer with the paratroopers and wanted to know when they would be issued with an Uzi submachine gun. Meir mostly kept to himself and avoided the false displays of bravado his platoon mates were acting out. There was no need. He removed a razor-sharp commando dagger from his rucksack and quietly slipped it into his kit bag so the others would not see and report him to the drill sergeant. Personal weapons were not allowed at the induction base.

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The most secretive commando force in the IDF’s Order of Battle was Sayeret Mat’kal—or the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit.I Based on the model of Great Britain’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment and the motto of Who Dares Wins, Mat’kal was formed in 1957 as a covert intelligence-gathering force to carry out long-range reconnaissance missions far from Israel’s frontiers. The unit was created because of the failures of Operation Cricket, when three Israeli paratroopers and two infantrymen ventured behind Syrian lines in the winter of 1954 dressed in civilian clothes, to plant a series of listening devices to tap into military lines of communication. A Syrian army patrol ambushed the team. They were taken to Damascus, where they were tortured in captivity. One of the soldiers, Corporal Uri Ilan, committed suicide rather than disclose classified information and inserted a small note into his clothes that he scribbled with the words “I did not betray.”2 The debacle in Syria convinced many officers who worked in the intelligence and covert battlespace, especially a major named Avraham Arnan, that the IDF needed a force of special men who could carry out the most complex and dangerous assignments and not get caught.

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No reason was given for his ouster—Mat’kal commanders did not oblige those who did not make the grade with explanations concerning their dismissal. Deep down, Meir never forgave the slight. He blamed the elitists for keeping him out, men like Ehud Barak—and two brothers named Netanyahu who made names for themselves as one of the Chief of Staff’s Boys: one, Yoni, immortalized for leading the hostage-rescue operation in Entebbe in July 1976, and Benjamin, known to the world as Bibi, who would become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

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Meir enjoyed his time in uniform, though somehow the disappointment of not continuing in Sayeret Mat’kal dampened his thoughts of making a career in the army. He was almost twenty-two years old, a combat veteran, and still sleeping on the same L-shaped sofa with his brother. Eli was in graduate school studying clinical microbiology at Tel Aviv University.”

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The other Palestinian factions in Gaza operated from smaller arsenals. The PFLP had to build a complete weapons armaments acquisition supply chain. Some weapons were purchased from Bedouins in the Sinai Desert who rummaged the battlefield of 1967 in search of whatever would fetch a top price, but Israeli intelligence manipulated many of these Soviet-made grenades to explode the moment the pin was pulled rather than after the prescribed four seconds. Dozens of terrorists were killed as a result.

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By the end of 1970, the terror groups had killed 128 fellow Palestinians and 15 Israelis.3 Groups like Fatah and the PFLP focused much of their violence on suspected collaborators, men and women whom the Israelis referred to as “Returners to Zion.”4 Some provided the Israelis with information for profit; others used revenge as a motive. Rumors alone were enough to have someone sentenced to death. Everyone had an agenda. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood accused individuals who sold drugs and alcohol of working with the Israelis, guaranteeing that they would be lined up against the wall. Fatah members accused rivals. Prostitutes, who served all sides, were specifically targeted. No one was spared—not children, the elderly, and not even pregnant women.

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mirrored his thought process and personality. He had heard accounts of a young paratroop officer of boundless courage and wanted to meet him. In February 1970, Meir suffered a debilitating wound that should have ended his military career. His jeep struck a land mine8 planted on a sandy stretch of road near El Arish by Egyptian commandos. Meir had ventured into the minefield because a series of Katyusha rocket launchers had been positioned at his base and were timed to launch the 122mm projectiles. Disregarding his own safety, he rendered the devices safe and hit a mine on his way out of the explosive-laden ambush. Chunks of shrapnel, jeep chassis, and bone tore through Meir’s calves and thighs. He was flown by helicopter to Sheba Hospital in Beersheba, where doctors saved his legs and his life. Meir’s friends and fellow soldiers urged him to leave the army with a medical disability. A sane individual would have accepted a pension and created a new life. He was never able to shake the pain, no matter how many surgeries he would endure.

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Huberman’s unmatched courage was known throughout the command. Accounts of what happened in the minefield had become legendary. Sharon liked talking to men of all ranks, especially those with reputations for arrogance and courage. He summoned the young officer to his office for a behind-closed-door meeting. Most twenty-five-year-old lieutenants would be apprehensive about meeting a general, but Meir welcomed the chance. Known as someone who spoke the truth no matter who he was before and the ramifications, Lieutenant Huberman relished the opportunity. This was his chance to impress. He polished his brown leather boots and folded his red beret sharply into the left epaulet of his Class A olive tunic before hitching a ride to Southern Command HQ in the Negev Desert town of Beersheba.

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The general and the lieutenant sat for over an hour—an unheard-of allocation of time for a man of Sharon’s rank. Sharon turned to Meir and asked how he would handle rounding up the terrorists on the wanted list. Huberman did not stammer for a second. “The best way is to move around Gaza in civilian clothes, like the locals, so that we can get close to them.”12 Sharon was impressed. The Mat’kal experiment was top secret, as only a handful of officers knew of its existence, and the fact that a young lieutenant would have the creativity to come up with an idea like that on his own impressed Sharon greatly.

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Meir was determined to turn his new unit, called Sayeret Rimon, or the Grenade Recon, into the IDF’s first operational—proactive—undercover force. He even contracted an insignia company to create a unit badge, a hand grenade as the handle for a winged dagger, to accentuate the unit’s combat prowess. He imagined that Grenade would be just as much a psychological force as a tactical one. Meir understood that the new unit needed to get under the skin of the men they pursued; to be successful, the unit had to haunt the minds of the men who perpetrated acts of terror and make men who perpetrated violence afraid of the surroundings they felt safe in. It was a perfect incubator for a later career in establishing intelligence protocols and defining the operational needs of dirty trick expediency. A report on Israel’s Kan 11 television network would even categorize the unit as a “bunch of bastards.”14 Sharon let his young officer use his imagination and courage as he saw fit. Meir shifted the unit’s primary focus from intelligence gathering to gathering intelligence for proactive tactical counterterrorism.15 He was only twenty-six years old and, as it would soon become apparent, had become the most important man in the Gaza Strip.

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Israel’s armies had disguised special operations personnel as Arabs before, pre- and post-independence. In 1938, during the height of the Arab Revolt, an eccentric, creative-minded no-nonsense British Army intelligence officer stationed in Palestine named Captain Orde Wingate put together a mixed hundred-man counterinsurgency to kill saboteurs and guerrillas in the villages where they lived. Wingate, a Christian Zionist, a mad eccentric, and someone who fashioned himself an inventor of innovative tactics, knew that the British Army in the Northwest Frontier force in India and the Royal Irish Constabulary had used similar tactics battling guerrillas. Wingate’s creation, known as the Special Night Squads, was made up of British soldiers and Haganah operatives, mainly men from the Jewish Supernumerary Police, who forged innovative tactics, including inserting teams dressed as locals into Galilee Arab villages to hunt down terror suspects.

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The Chameleons had to be convincing—their disguise had to be foolproof down to the smallest detail. They could not have any military identification on them, and nothing that linked them to Israel. Their sandals had to be the kind found in the markets of Gaza. They used the local soap brand and brushed their teeth with Egyptian paste so that they would not stand out. They smoked Cleopatra cigarettes made by the Eastern Tobacco Company in Cairo. Cleopatras were harsh but they were cheap, and even the most suspicious members of a Palestinian terror group knew that no Israeli in his right mind would dare smoke them. When the Chameleons went shopping, they always bought clothes that were seemingly too large. Shopkeepers, especially those who sold them female garments, used to wink at the Israelis, thinking that these were for wives who were of a hefty size, something considered very sexy in Egyptian cinema at the time. But not only were they meant to fit men, they also had to conceal holsters, ammunition magazines, grenades, radio equipment, and commando daggers. The Chameleons would be close-quarter combat specialists, designed to engage their targets at point-blank range, and their primary weapon of choice was the pistol: British and Soviet-made handguns that were easy to find in Gaza. Meir’s sidearm of choice was a 9mm German-made Luger pistol that he had procured out of an arms cache captured from Lebanese gun runners. Years later Dagan would reflect, “There was training in rapid shooting with pistols and the development of an instinct to respond to [enemy] fire. We went through all the skills [required] to use a weapon in any situation.”

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Life at the unit’s villa was a nonstop orchestra of vehicles coming and going that was conducted to a soundtrack of constant gunfire. Impromptu pistol ranges were set up and used around the clock so the Chameleons and the tactical force could hone their handgun skills. Tins of inedible Luf, the IDF version of preserved bully beef, were improvised targets for close-range live-fire drills. The beef cans were part of the IDF soldier’s combat rations, but many thought they were nothing more than a prescription for guaranteed dysentery, so the soldiers liked shooting them up, though cleaning up the post-training mess was always a hated chore. According to published accounts, and urban legend, Meir would wake up in the morning, relieve himself with one hand, and shoot at empty soda cans and bottles with the other.11

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Meir signaled the jeeps to block the taxi and ordered his men to surround the Mercedes. The operators aimed their AK-47s at the vehicle. Meir approached cautiously with his sidearm, but Abu Nimer, sitting next to the driver, opened the front passenger door and produced an F-1 fragmentation hand grenade. He pulled the pin and said, “We will all die here.” Meir shouted “Rimon! (Grenade!)” and lunged at Abu Nimer, making a go for the terrorist’s hands. Meir wrestled him to the ground, clutching the hand holding the grenade to make sure the safety lever was still held down tightly and the striker did not hit the primer activating the device. Meir was not one to lose a wrestling match. He overpowered Abu Nimer and carefully inserted the safety pin back in its place, saving the lives of the Palestinian cab passengers and those of his men.II “The arrest of Abu Nimer would define the unit and its commander,” Shmuel Paz later remembered.12

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The Chameleons looked for weaknesses in the men they hunted and surveilled: which one cheated on his wife; which one was gay. Blackmail and shame were potent weapons in turning a suspect into an invaluable source of information once sent back into his element. Meir authorized the use of collaborators; he saw them as force multipliers and even permitted some who had earned his trust to ride along with the Chameleons and help ferry a force to their target. There was nothing clean about counterinsurgency. Suspects who did not resist arrest were taken to Shin Bet headquarters for processing and questioning. Those who fought back and threatened the lives of the unit’s men were shot and killed. Meir would later reiterate that he had never killed anyone who was not carrying a weapon. There was no middle ground. Comply or die.

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Meir invented tactics unique to the unit and specific to the surroundings. One of the most notable was what became known as the Straw Widow.4 The tactic involved taking over a home and staking it out until the targeted individual walked through the door and realized he was trapped. The operators usually confined the residents in a room where they could not communicate with anyone or warn the men that the Israelis were lying in wait. Most of the terrorists featured in the Most Wanted Notebook knew that they were marked for arrest. They tried to stay one step ahead of the Shin Bet and Meir’s squads by spending each night in a different bed. Meir devised a plan where the terrorists’ sexual patterns were analyzed. “Even the terrorists had physical, natural, needs,” Shmuel Paz would remember, “and it would prompt men with a price on their head to risk it all for a few hours of intimacy with either their wives, mistresses, or even boyfriends.”5 And that’s where Meir and his men would be waiting. There were three possible outcomes: surrender, surrender and collaborate, or resist and be terminated. Many thought that they could outfight Meir’s men. The battles were usually one-sided.

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Meir and his NCOs devised notoriously devious methods of making the terrorists fear the ground where they felt safest. In one operation in the Jabaliya refugee camp, Shmuel Paz remembered, the IDF publicized that it was abandoning a structure it had used as a temporary headquarters, but not before Meir’s men burrowed out deep pits in the cellar where they could lie in ambush. When, at night, squads of armed Palestinians entered, the Israelis made sure they did not exit. Grenade Recon operators used this tactic repeatedly until the terrorists stayed clear of the building. Dozens were arrested and killed in these operations.

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Major General Sharon, beyond his military accomplishments, was a shameless showman and a master manipulator. He was always on television—Israel only had one station—and he choreographed impressive feats of power and style, such as racing through the desert in his black Dodge Dart staff car surrounded by sword-wielding Bedouin chiefs on horseback.8 Sharon made a point of providing select journalists with exclusive access and occasional scoops to ensure positive press. He even allowed Ron Ben-Yishai, the defense correspondent for Channel One, to get an up close and personal look at Meir and his men in action on an actual mission in the orchids of Gaza. His reporting at the time, under the strict restrictions of the IDF Military Censor, could not reveal any of the details of the undercover work, or anything about the force commander. It did not matter. Sharon liked to dangle scoops to reporters as a long-term publicity investment—capital that could yield dividends when needed.

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Generals led armies on conventional battlefields in head-on confrontations. Intelligence chiefs led spies into a shadowy no-man’s-land of deception and manipulative tradecraft in engagements that took months—sometimes even years—to yield an outcome. Meir wanted to create a paradigm somewhere in the middle. He reviewed Shin Bet reports, read A’man translations of terror statements from Beirut that were written about in the Arab press, and began to craft meaningful dirty tricks. Because of the need for secrecy, the leaders of the terror groups in Beirut and Damascus were known by noms de guerre, usually beginning with the word Abu, or “Father of.” But they were faceless code words on handwritten notes. The PFLP commanders in Gaza could not know who the men who sent them weapons and instructions were. It inspired Meir to conceive a daring plan to upend Dr. Habash’s entire PFLP network of compartmentalized and interconnected cells in Gaza. He would let collaborators and informants know that the PFLP headquarters in Beirut was sending senior officers and a shipment of weapons and explosives by sea, and they expected local cell leaders to meet them at a predesignated fishing pier. The terrorists used mother ships, usually Algerian freighters that crisscrossed the Mediterranean to unload smaller wooden vessels in international waters. The deception had to be spot-on for the operation to work, and a seaworthy vessel was acquired and brought to a remote pier in the port of Ashdod, where Grenade Recon operators had to paint it in colors and markings that would not arouse suspicion.9 The operation was code-named Industry.

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Night after night, disguised operators emerged from the darkness, supported by heavily armed backup, and hunted the names of the terrorists. The legwork and preparation were done in the early evening, the silent deployments after midnight, and the engagements in the hours before dawn’s first light. It was one of the reasons why Meir developed a reputation as someone “who ate Arabs for breakfast.”12 The force wrote the counterterrorist manual on the fly, utilizing brute force and boundless guile. The number of names on the Wanted List shrunk every week, as did incidents of terrorist violence.

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Grenade Recon eviscerated a generation of terror leaders and sent those who remained into hiding, wary of reentering the fray. The names of over five hundred men filled the Most Wanted Notebook when Meir’s unit commenced operations. By the end of 1972, only ten names remained.2 Grenade and the supporting Israeli units had not only cut the grass, as the removal of mid-level terror operatives was known in IDF circles, but they had also pulled up many roots.

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The tactics, though, warranted measures that were unsavory and opened the debate about how and to what lengths combating terrorism pushed men over the edge. The up-close-and-personal engagements in homes, alleys, and refugee camps required men with skill sets that were dangerous when not contained, and that also took a psychological toll on those asked to venture into danger night after night. Some would claim, years later, that the experiences had left them with PTSD.4

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In numerous interviews, Meir remained unapologetic. During the year-and-a-half Grenade was operational, he said, they operated in a kill-or-be-killed reality. There were no philosophical debates of morality and proportionality of counterinsurgency warfare or intelligence tradecraft when whoever had the faster pull of a trigger, and the better plan, lived to fight another day. None of Meir’s men were killed in the point-blank battles they fought and the dangerous pursuits into the darkness his men conducted. That was all that mattered. That was the true burden of leadership.

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Known among his friends and comrades as having a very off-color sense of humor, Meir did not use his best material on Bina while they were dating. He was sensitive and gentle, even though the image of a slave to emotion and sensitivity is hard to equate with the man who led the undercover unit in Gaza. He also appeared to be frightened of commitment.5 After four years of courtship, Bina gave him the ultimatum he feared, even though she knew he was the one and that the two of them would not break up. After she gave him the now-or-never warning, Meir, a man intimidated by nothing that could be thrown his way, bought a ring, an apartment in Bat Yam, and a suit for the wedding. The rumor was that he purchased his outfit in the best haberdashery in Gaza. A military rabbi officiated the ceremony in a Bat Yam wedding hall with a jazz band playing at the reception, where Ariel Sharon was the guest of honor. The couple had no money. They used the cash and checks in the envelopes they received to pay for the ceremony.6

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Meir’s time in Gaza would define him for the remainder of his life. Enemies viewed him as a cold-blooded killer who would stop at nothing to achieve his objectives, and his admirers—even rivals—looked at his courage and creativity with awe. The experience made his career. But he was proud always to remind his critics and rivals that his unit never killed a civilian or someone who was not involved in terror activity.

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A month later, in nearby Maalot, the bloodshed continued. On May 14, three terrorists from the Maoist North Korean−supported Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine crossed the Israeli border from Lebanon and, after killing five people, including a four-year-old boy, took 115 children hostage at an elementary school. A standoff ensued; the terrorists demanded the release of jailed comrades and placed their captives in the windows of the two-story building to deter any rescue attempt. But a team from Sayeret Mat’kal stormed the school. The rescue bid failed.I Instead of fighting the Israeli commandos, the terrorists turned their guns on the children, killing twenty-two.2 At the time, it was the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.

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The networking, the effort to establish human contact—telling dirty jokes and discussing Middle East intricacies and rumors about terror chieftains and princes—built trust and loyalty among his Christian partners and their Shiite allies. The spy game was all about one man’s belief that the other could be relied upon not to betray him. But sometimes the hunter was also the hunted. Dozens of local militiamen—sometimes hundreds—would stand guard outside the homes, restaurants, and fortresses where these meals were held. The local Palestinian warlords would have paid a king’s ransom for the chance to kidnap or kill Israeli intelligence officers. Dagan used several unmarked Mercedes when venturing in and out of southern Lebanon. He did not follow a routine, alternating his routes and travel times, to shake off surveillance and any attempts at an ambush. Much of what Dagan did in his office nurturing ties with the Lebanese Christians and waging a campaign against Palestinian terror targets was kept from Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ezer Weizman.9 It was certainly kept out of sight and out of mind from Major General Yehoshua Saguy, the A’man chief, and a cautious man of deliberate long-term thinking who was opposed to rogue enterprises across the border that had the potential of enveloping the region in full-scale war. But Raful and Ben-Gal wanted A’man out of the loop, and both men usually got what they wanted. Secure telephone and radio lines—outside the network of A’man eavesdropping capabilities—serviced communications between Ben-Gal, Raful, and Dagan.

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Olympia was audacious, an idea of pure game-changing chutzpah, and had the potential to change the Middle East forever. At its core was the assassination of PLO chairman Yasir Arafat and his minister of defense Khalil al-Wazir, better known by his nom de guerre of Abu Jihad—an attempt to decapitate the Palestinian leadership in one explosive flash. The grandiose scheme required the support of Shiite agents who Dagan recruited to deliver the hundreds of kilograms of high explosives that would kill scores—including innocents—but eradicate the symbols of Palestinian terror. The agents were recruited from the predominantly Shiite section of south Beirut known as the Dahiya, a lower-income area near the airport where the Palestinians were despised. The Palestinians were Sunni; when they arrived in 1948, and especially in 1970 from Jordan, they upset the delicate balance of social order that had existed in the country for centuries—during the times of the Ottomans, during the French mandate, and especially after independence.

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Meir battled the exhaustion of leading a covert campaign as much as he fought to ignore the pains of his injuries. He never let either get in the way of him being a devoted husband and a doting father. He refused to be the sheriff at home and did not attempt to instill military-like discipline in the household. He tried as best he could to be nurturing and supportive of his children, like their grandmother Mina and never be dismissive like his father. He always smiled even when he did not feel like it, wanting Bina and the kids to enjoy him coming home and not dread his return because he was too exhausted or irritable to make the most of the limited time he had to spend with them. The kids adored their father who on his one day off woke up early to take the family on day trips across northern Israel.

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During the civil war, the Lebanese Forces showed a penchant for brutality. Ever fashionable, female Christian soldiers wearing tightly tailored uniforms were rumored to slice off the ears of the Palestinians they killed and keep them in their Chanel purses. A former Mossad official who visited Beirut in 1981 remembered asking his Lebanese Forces guide about what was cheap in the country, hoping to come home with a souvenir. His escort responded, “Human life. That’s the cheapest.”

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It took a combined force of Dagan’s brigade and battalions of infantrymen and paratroopers nineteen hours to neutralize Kfar Sil’s main street. A tank commander in Major Ben-Reuven’s 71st Battalion called the fighting pure hell; wherever an Israeli tank appeared in the open, whenever a Golani infantryman raised his head, the Syrians unleashed terrible fire, Ben-Reuven would recall.6 Dagan summoned several Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers to clear the debris of destroyed armor and allow the Israelis to push through. Dagan offered the Syrians two options in Kfar Sil: flee or die.7

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Defense Minister Sharon never relinquished his desire to eliminate Arafat—an event he was certain would be a home-improvement project for the Middle East. A special team, code-named Herring (Dag Maluach in Hebrew) was tasked with killing the PLO leader; his code name was Fish Head.11 Dagan, along with operatives from the Mossad, A’man’s Unit 504, and Sayeret Mat’kal, hunted Arafat, calling in air strikes and trying to pinpoint the wily Palestinian leader’s location and summon on-call flights of F-4E Phantom fighter bombers when the intelligence was accurate. On numerous occasions, the aircraft were racing toward Beirut, their pylons packed with bombs, only to have the mission aborted because of fears that the collateral damage of innocent lives would be unacceptable.

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During a respite in the fighting, at a command post on the outskirts of Beirut, an exhausted Brigadier General Yaron, Dagan’s new division commander, summed up the first month of combat with a perspective that only a tired soldier could articulate: “In his chaos, the one who can reorganize better will be the one who wins.”12

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Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem intensified. On August 13, an agreement was reached to oversee the evacuation of Syrian and Palestinian forces from Beirut. Peacekeepers—French paratroopers, American Marines, and Italian amphibious troops—would supervise the evacuation and protect the residents of the Muslim half of the Lebanese capital. Between August 21 and 31, six thousand Syrian troops would retreat on land and the eighty-five hundred Palestinian guerrillas, including Arafat, would depart by sea. The Palestinian fighters fired their AK-47s into the air as they were loaded onto passenger liners for new exiles in Algeria, Tunisia, and Yemen, their determination to fight Israel and avenge the creation of the Jewish state unchanged by another battlefield humiliation. Yasir Arafat raised the V-sign hand gesture in defiance as he boarded his ship to Tunis while Israeli snipers awaited the order to kill him—a command that never came.15

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The best-laid plans of spies and statesmen can unravel in the flash of hundreds of kilograms of high explosives. In the afternoon of September 14, Bashir Gemayel was assassinated when a powerful bomb planted by Syrian agents detonated in his political headquarters. His body was identified by a Mossad agent in Beirut who recognized the ring and watch he was wearing. Everyone braced for the carnage to follow.

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Some say that the three months in Lebanon during the summer of 1982 changed Meir Dagan forever. The brigade he commanded lost twenty-five soldiers and officers during the combat—twenty-five sets of families to visit and console. Dagan felt responsible for each young man who did not return to his home. He carried that burden for the remainder of his life, his emotions showing at the annual memorial services held in their honor. Even when he was the head of the Mossad, spearheading covert actions that could never be publicized, he did not mind crying at these events to show how much the loss of these men, his men, meant to him. Dagan, a former subordinate would reflect, was a man of war who hated wars.

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The bombing caught the Israeli government completely by surprise. Prime Minister Begin was in New York City, on the opening leg of a lengthy visit to the United States. The Israeli defense establishment was not prepared to inform its soldiers—or its citizens—that the war known as Operation Peace for Galilee had unleashed a new terrorist enemy that threatened to bring the Iranian brand of suicide operations to Israel’s northern frontier. Although investigators who responded to the blast examined the bits and pieces of Qasir’s Peugeot and tested the twisted frame of the sedan for explosive residue, the military censor’s office forbade any inference that the headquarters was hit by terrorists and peddled a story that propane tanks used for cooking had accidentally blown up. The lie would be the official government stance for forty-two years.

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Israel had built its geopolitical strategy and long-term regional aspirations around Bashir Gemayel. But Lebanon had changed since the switch was triggered on the 180 kilograms of military-grade explosives that afternoon in Beirut when the Lebanese president-elect and many of his key commanders evaporated into a blinding flash. The assassination paralyzed Israel’s intelligence capabilities inside the country. “Israel was rendered blind,” Reuven Ehrlich, Dagan’s chief intelligence officer, would comment. “IDF commanders knew nothing of the interwoven complexities of the Lebanese landscape.”5 The reality of the fractured nation became even more puzzling after the suicide bombing of the headquarters in Tyre.

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Dagan’s appearance, the weapons he carried, and the heavily armed entourage that followed him wherever he went were the props of a shadow theater for projecting power and earning respect. The men he met with—Sunnis, Christians, Shiites, and Druze—revered him. “Arabs don’t hide their respect,” Amiram Levin remembered. “They never made him wait. They shared their problems with him because they knew he could be relied upon to bring solutions. He treated everyone like human beings. Everyone was a possible partner.”9

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The most important of these representatives was Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, the Iranian ambassador to Damascus. Although only thirty-six years old, Mohtashamipour was one of the most powerful men in the revolution, having been a favorite student of Ayatollah Khomeini and then one of his most trusted advisors when the cleric was exiled to Iraq and later France. Beyond his religious acumen, Mohtashamipour was a master manipulator in forging strategic alliances; he established operational ties with Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization.10 Soon, young and zealous Iranians were sent to Lebanon to undergo counterintelligence, demolitions, and special operations training. Mohtashamipour was obsessed with spreading Khomeini’s revolution to Lebanon and establishing a base of operations for the fight against Israel. The cleric was one of the founders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

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The name Hassan Nasrallah did not register on any “Be on the Lookout” printouts. His mugshot was not in the system. But the name Imad Fayez Mughniyeh was on file. Mughniyeh, a Shiite born in 1962, in the small farming village of Tayr Dibba four miles from Tyre, was a teenager when he volunteered in the ranks of Fatah to fight the Christians during the Lebanese Civil War. His specialty was sniping at women trying to find food for their families. He was good at killing and was recruited to serve in Force 17, Fatah’s elite Praetorian Guard, as a bodyguard to Arafat’s deputy. Mughniyeh’s nom de guerre was al-Fahad, “The Leopard.” Israeli intelligence captured the master log of all members of Force 17, though Mughniyeh had shed his fatigues and disappeared into the Shiite slums of south Beirut rather than board a ship taking Palestinian fighters to an overseas exile. His name was not associated with any new Shiite underground guerilla organizations.

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The names of people of interest, the old-time usual suspects and new faces and previously unknown terror cells, were discussed at the staff meetings inside Dagan’s Marjayoun HQ. HUMINT was the most valued commodity in the espionage bazaar of southern Lebanon, and A’man Unit 504 was king. Unit 504 was one of the most secretive entities in the IDF—it was called a mini-Mossad. Made up of Arabic-speaking officers who operated in confines of interest throughout the region, the unit consisted of analysts, handlers, case officers, and interrogators. There were existing networks of sources and assets that Dagan and A’man counterparts had built before Operation Peace for Galilee. New ones always had to be found and nurtured. The intelligence officers were the lifeblood of Dagan’s entire organization. But the spies and their handlers could only report and log in what they knew or heard rumblings about. There were no absolutes in the espionage arena. Sometimes, vital information came too late to be used effectively.

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A month later, at 6:00 a.m. on November 4, 1983, a young man from a hilltop village recruited by Mohtashamipour and Mughniyeh drove a truck packed with TNT into the new Israeli military headquarters in Tyre. Protocols had been established to deal with suicide bombers, and the guards on duty fired over one hundred bullets at the speeding truck, but the driver was able to penetrate the main perimeter, reach the outer parking lot, and detonate his lethal payload. The Shin Bet command center was obliterated in the blast; tents where soldiers slept were vaporized. Fifty-nine people were killed in the second Tyre bombing—thirty-one of them were Lebanese detainees. Neither the Mossad,

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New schools, clinics, and mosques were built in impoverished hamlets. New tractors suddenly plowed fields. New cars, from dealerships in Damascus, suddenly appeared in family driveways. Mercedes was the vehicle of choice. Dagan did not put two-and-two together, failing to understand that money was the oxygen that fueled an underground terror movement, like the one in Iraq and Iran, where parents sent their children off to face certain death on the battlefield for the glory of sacrifice. For the remainder of his intelligence career, the nexus between cash and murder would be a central theme of Dagan’s counterterrorism doctrine.

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The noted bard Khalil Gibran once wrote, “You have your Lebanon and its dilemma. I have my Lebanon and its beauty. Your Lebanon is an arena for men from the West and men from the East. My Lebanon is a flock of birds fluttering in the early-morning as shepherds lead their sheep into the meadow and rising in the evening as farmers return from their fields and vineyards.” But the real Lebanon was so much more than the beautifully crafted words of an acclaimed poet. It was a battlespace of boundless barbarity and betrayal—a flashpoint of such unimaginable savagery that had nothing to do with Israel, the Palestinians, the French, or even the Ottomans, or any of the landlords of a land defined by the phrase “Pity Thy Nation,” but was all about faith and tribalism. Even combat-hardened men like Dagan were not prepared for the medieval religious hatred that flowed through the country’s veins.

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During one of his tours of the fault lines where Palestinians, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, and Druze intersected into absolute carnage, Dagan came across a Druze fighter wearing a uniform with a dazzling camouflage pattern and a bright red beret. The Druze militiaman was calm, almost nonchalant, but was standing over the rotting corpse of a Christian Phalangist militiaman and wore a devilish smile. It was hot, and the mugginess of a warm summer’s day and the stench of decaying flesh summoned the flies and the feelings of utter sickness from the Israelis in Dagan’s entourage. The Druze fighter took great joy in watching the Israelis begin to dry heave and perspire as nausea got the better of them. Sensing an opportunity to show off, he broke a branch from a nearby bush and stuck it into the swollen head of the dead Christian, using it as an impromptu skewer. He then offered a piece of the bloody mess to Dagan, asking if he had ever tasted a Christian’s brain before taking a bite for himself. Dagan was aghast and did all he could not to hurl the breakfast he’d consumed hours earlier.2 He would never eat meat again.

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was a time of great hope and trepidation in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a nation that aspired to acquire nuclear weapons to destroy the Jewish state and that had used chemical weapons against Iran and its Kurdish minority, had been defeated, albeit, not destroyed, by an American-led coalition that included an astounding forty-two nations that repelled the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein unsuccessfully tried to drag the Jewish state into the war by launching SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv. Israel exercised self-restraint and did not allow the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to become a pretext for another Arab-Israeli war.I

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When it was Dagan’s turn to address the assembled branch chiefs, unit leaders, and intelligence officers, he glanced around the room, cleared his throat, and spoke about the irrefutable fact that the organization’s greatest weapon was its personnel. He twisted his serious face slowly into a devilish smile, and closed, “Attention! I am short and fat with a large belly, and I am bald. But I am the head of the Mossad and will be here for a long time.”10

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Silence followed Dagan’s self-effacing moment of candor and confidence. The guests that night left headquarters under the darkened winter’s night sky, somewhat unsure of the man who had been thrust upon them and their organization. The men of Meir Dagan’s security detail were puzzled, as well. Their protectee was not leaving the building. As they doubled back inside to check on him, they saw the new Mossad director going to every one of the workers who had made the evening possible and thanking them for their work. Dagan spoke to each waiter, cook, busboy, and cleaner, treating each one with respect usually reserved for heads of state. It was a small gesture, a sign of egalitarian identification that a man from the streets had made it to the director’s office. Dagan wore that distinction as a badge of honor.

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Meir Dagan always defined his background as coming from a generation that, in his words, history had screwed up—a generation that gave everything and asked for nothing in return. He had fought in three conventional and countless irregular wars. He had lost many friends in battle; any warrior who had seen such horrors and survived engagements with the enemy is a changed human being. His parents had survived Hitler’s genocide. When he entered his office, often nursing a cup of tea with lemon, he would glance at the framed portrait of his grandfather moments before he was murdered and appreciate the meaning of the espionage service he led and the sacrosanct mission he had to carry out.

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Caesaria, named after a Roman city in Israel on the Mediterranean coast, is Mossad’s special operational arm, comprised of combatants—men and women—with advanced tactical skills. These are the best trigger pullers in Israel—usually recruited from veterans of the three tier-one units in the IDF’s Order of Battle (the army’s Sayeret Mat’kal, the navy’s Flotilla 13, and the air force’s Shaldag unit), or individuals from top-flight commando units that have a propensity for adventure and dare.

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Kidon, Hebrew for bayonet, is the direct-action sub-unit within Caesaria; described in various platforms as Mossad’s assassination unit, Israeli journalists have to preface any reference to it with the words “according to foreign reports” to never acknowledge its existence from a source inside the Jewish state.5 Kidon handles the most sensitive missions of extreme prejudice, specializing in eliminating high-value targets. The unit, also referred to as Wrath of God, became legendary after it hunted down the Black September terrorists in Europe and the Middle East who were responsible for murdering the Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre.

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Everyone in headquarters had heard the story of the legendary security cabinet meeting when Dagan was national security advisor, shortly after Sharon was elected prime minister. Dagan walked slower than most because of the constant state of pain from his war wounds, and he did not like to be seen using a cane. At this meeting, as the ministers and IDF brass walked into the cabinet meeting room for a closed-door session, shuffling for a good seat, Dagan walked in and sat at the far end, opposite the prime minister. “Come sit next to me at the head of the table,” Sharon told him. “Mr. Prime Minister,” Dagan replied, “wherever I sit is the head of the table.” Cabinet officials, military representatives, and even the stenographers were aghast by Dagan’s unabashed arrogance. But it thrilled Sharon. He broke out in a loud baritone laugh and smiled for the remainder of the meeting.

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In the Mossad scope of understanding, returning Arad—preferably alive—was the fulfillment of a pact between Israel’s leaders and its soldiers that no man or woman would ever be left behind. But if Israel released Obeid and Dirani for Tannenbaum and the three slain soldiers, it would lose its trump card in trying to bring Arad home. There were heated debates at headquarters—and in the prime minister’s office—examining the virtue of exchanging Israel’s most valuable trading chips for the return of a trafficker. Dagan opposed striking a deal for Tannenbaum, and let the prime minister know his feelings. “How many Israelis and Jews would be slaughtered by the killers Israel would have to release?” Dagan asked, former subordinates in the Mossad remembered.II Future events would prove him right.

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Omar Suleiman was Egypt’s legendary spymaster. He had a reputation for Machiavellian brilliance and pure ruthlessness. Like Dagan, he was personable and distant from the stilted demeanors of Western diplomats and intelligence chiefs. Both came from humble beginnings and proved their worth in military uniforms, reaching positions of great command and importance. Suleiman was President Hosni Mubarak’s right-hand man and the second most powerful figure in the country. Dagan was Prime Minister Sharon’s most trusted counsel. Foreign Policy magazine called him the Middle East’s top “spook.”11

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Sometimes, during these trips, Dagan was forced to travel in disguise, but he was a hard man to hide. A former head of the counterterrorism desk remembered that “wigs, even fake mustaches, were sometimes employed, but Israel being Israel, where everyone knew everyone else, he would be ushered to the gate in a masquerade only to have someone walk by who had served under him in the army, and yell, ‘Hey Dagan, how are you? Remember me?’ ”22 The Israeli Ministry of Defense classified Meir Dagan as a wounded warrior, a man with a hundred percent disability from wounds suffered during his years in active service. But he never complained about his condition. Sitting in a car for long stretches was excruciating for him. So was getting in and out of taxis; even negotiating the escalator at a metro station could be difficult. He never slowed the pace, even though his schedule was grueling. The travel, jet lag, and the pain of walking from various points in an airport terminal took a terrible toll on his body, but he never allowed it to hamper his stature as a warrior; he refused to be driven in a cart or wheeled anywhere, even though each step caused debilitating pain. Younger officers were amazed by his stubborn resilience.

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The Mossad, along with A’man’s mysterious Unit 188 special tasks force, blueprinted Operation Damocles, the targeting of the Germans for assassination. In Cairo, throughout Egypt, and in Western Europe, the prominent Germans involved in the project received letter bombs, a bullet to the face, or ended up dazed and confused, kidnapped for interrogation back in Israel. According to published accounts, the Mossad even recruited Otto Skorzeny,7 the Waffen SS Obersturmbannfüher who had been Hitler’s go-to special operations wizard, leading, among others, Operation Oak, the daring September 1943 rescue of Benito Mussolini. Damocles became one of the most controversial operations in Mossad history. Assassinations failed; innocent people were killed. Israeli intelligence officers were arrested in Switzerland, and the campaign became public and a scandal in the country that cost Harel his job and, ultimately, the prime ministership of Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion.8 The belief was that Harel’s Mossad had exaggerated the threat posed by the ambitious—though ultimately unsuccessful—Egyptian missile program. Meir Amit, Harel’s successor, utilized diplomacy and break-ins to undermine Nasser’s grand scheme, stealing cargo containers of documents and learning more about the project than even the Germans involved in building the missiles for Cairo knew.

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For all the bluster surrounding Meir Dagan, and his misclassification as a man who slept with a dagger between his teeth, he viewed the planned taking of another life as a measure of absolute last resort. He was not religious and did not consider the position of Mossad chief as an extension of a divine authority dispensing justice; the calculated elimination of another human being could never be solely punitive. That was the official line, at least. Neither Dagan nor any member of the Mossad ever shed a tear when a terrorist with blood on their hands was killed in a shootout with the IDF or one of the Border Guard police special operations units while resisting arrest or in an airstrike, but dispatching a team to terminate a target was always preventative: someone who had masterminded mass murder in the past and continued to plot catastrophic attacks in the future was permissible, albeit almost always deniable.

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Dagan had no intention of giving his officers the James Bond license to kill. Negative Treatment came with an enormous burden of responsibility and moral clarity. To emphasize this, Dagan gave all his division chiefs, senior officials, and any guest who came to his office—or whose office he was a guest in—a copy of Christopher R. Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, published in 1992.9 The book chronicles a German reserve rear-echelon battalion dispatched to the town of Jozefow in Poland in 1942. The soldiers were too old and too out of shape for combat duty, but they were professionals, and yet they proceeded to massacre tens of thousands of Jews. Dagan found great meaning in the work, not only…

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But Dagan had killed men with his bare hands, up close and personal, and he had watched men, his men, die. No one emerged from that trauma unscathed. Dagan brought those internal scars with him to the Mossad. Dispatching his officers to Iran was a great conflict for him. If one of them were captured, there was no doubt that the agent would be tortured and killed. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps loved show trials and public executions. The favored method of state murder was hanging—suspects, the guilt or innocence did not matter, were hoisted by their necks on industrial cranes until the lifeless body of the accused stopped struggling one hundred feet above a Tehran square. Israel and Iran had never exchanged spies. There was no Checkpoint Charlie where enemy agents were swapped. Intelligence operatives were killed. Even their remains were never returned.III

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Dagan, contrary to his swashbuckling reputation, was risk averse. And, as he revealed in a documentary about his career and final struggles that appeared on Israeli television in December 2024, he had a psychological yardstick he used to gauge whether to send an Israeli into harm’s way. “I called it the Dan Dagan exam,” he explained, the test named after his son. “Would I send my son on this mission?”10

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There were days, though, when Dagan never went home. Late-night meetings turned into secure calls with time zones seven hours behind and five hours ahead. Aides sometimes found him at work at his desk at three in the morning reading pages, making notes, and humming Russian folk tunes that had been coopted into Hebrew; he was transfixed by classical music, and the rousing hymns of the Soviet Army from the Second World War, his daughter Noa reflected years later at a memorial for her father.1 He would grab a few hours of shut-eye on his office sofa. Soldiers were masters at turning any flat surface into a suitable bed. He was still a tank officer at heart, or at least that was how he viewed himself. Dagan did not expect his staffers to work the same hours he did, but many chose to follow the boss’s lead. He was harder on himself than he was on those who worked for him. He felt the job was too important to surrender to such human frailties as exhaustion, and nothing, not the pains his battered body felt, or calls from family and friends to slow down, would convince him otherwise. The way he saw the world, there were not enough hours in the day, and it was his job to catch up against the clock. He was too old and far too stubborn to change his ways.

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Dagan understood that money was a lethal weapon for terrorists and that defeating it could be achieved bloodlessly, behind the scenes, and in a way that would be digestible to the media, because Israel needed endless validation of its self-defense actions in the courts of international public opinion. When, thirty-plus years earlier, Dagan had engineered a new brand of warfare in Gaza, undercover operations were designed to unmoor the terrorists, make them feel unsafe in locations where they were the masters. Following and drying up the bloodstained millions that enabled Israel’s terrorist foes to kill not only unnerved the men behind the attacks but also humiliated them. Without cash or access to Islamic means of moving money underneath the established financial radars, terror chieftains could not rent safe houses, hire bomb building engineers, or pay salaries. Following the money that terrorists used to endanger Israeli national security and trying to destroy it was the specific reason Dagan brought Tziltzal, his pet project, into the Mossad Order of Battle. The task force had worked with police entities, counterintelligence services, and tax authorities across the globe. They could talk to everyone, because they were an asterisk—not confined to any specific jurisdiction—and a footnote to larger enterprises, ensuring national security. Tziltzal was small, but its numbers were also deviously inclined and possessed a mindset like Dagan’s that killing an enemy did not necessarily have to involve putting an explosive device under a car seat. Members of Dagan’s team often wondered if 9/11 would have happened if the radical zealots recruited by Khaled Sheikh Mohammed for Bin Laden had not been able to pay for travel and flight training. “If you took away the dollars and dinars made available to the terrorists,” a former member of Israeli intelligence commented, “they’d only be disgruntled men with hate in their hearts, only wishing they had the cash or credit to kill you, and we aren’t in the business of winning hearts and minds.”

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Olmert did not have a military background or the institutional experience of dealing with the high-pressure stakes of combat, but he had an uncanny grasp of what it took to lead an organization like the Mossad. As Tamir Pardo, Dagan’s deputy and a future head of the Mossad, once described the essence of the director’s job, “The head of the Mossad conducts a huge philharmonic orchestra, with most of the musicians being soloists, talented soloists, each of whom can perform alone on stage. But to achieve a result, you must take the group and organize it as an orchestra that knows how to play at the right pace, when to enter and exit, and when to stop.”

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The ground campaign became a slugfest and a meat grinder where every inch of territory was paid for in blood. Hezbollah did not have an air force, but it boasted a sizeable missile force that was used with great effectiveness against Israeli civilian population centers across the northern third of the country. Ballistic missiles were even fired into Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city. Tens of thousands of Israeli civilians living in Galilee and the northern reaches fled their homes. Those who stayed were sequestered inside bomb shelters. Some agricultural communities, especially among the Israeli Arab community, had no structural protection where it was safe to sit out the missile onslaughts. Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin was quoted as telling a closed cabinet security forum that “government systems in northern Israel had completely collapsed during the rocket attacks.” The cost of rebuilding the damage inflicted by four thousand rocket and missile strikes was estimated at over two billion dollars.8

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Meir Dagan sat in the Security Cabinet and tried to reason with Defense Minister Peretz and Chief of Staff Halutz that an effective way to expedite an end to the fighting and deal Hezbollah a decisive blow was to target the network of banking institutions that enabled the terror group to pay salaries, receive wire transfers, and buy weapons and explosives. In fifty-eight years of constant wars with its neighbors, Israel had never bombed an Arab bank from the air. The IAF did not have those targets in its files, but the Mossad did.

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They included the Beit al-Mal, Hezbollah’s unofficial treasury office with branches across the country; branches of Albaraka and Fransabank throughout Beirut and Lebanon’s largest cities; and the MEAB, or Middle East Africa Bank, a key laundering entity in Hezbollah’s global empire of Iranian money and profits earned from more creative sources, such as counterfeiting and narco-trafficking.III Other financial centers populated Dagan’s bank of suggested targets. Some worked with corresponding American banks. Any large-scale Israeli military operation targeting Lebanese banks, especially those that did business in the United States, risked the anger of President George W. Bush, who did not like it when Israel engaged in, as one former CIA officer claimed, “Middle Eastern Jesse James bullshit!”9 As it was, President Bush, overextended with campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, had to divert the Sixth Fleet to Lebanon so that U.S. Marines could evacuate American citizens from the war-torn country, and he did not want additional headaches from the allies in Israel.

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Hezbollah’s commanders maintained their zeal and desire to kill Israelis; they just did not have the loose cash needed to pay the salaries of the men on the front lines. Two weeks after the banks were hit, Hezbollah sued for a ceasefire. Dagan had been vindicated. His directives helped shorten a war and save the lives of young men at the front and civilians in their homes. He did not dare to light his pipe inside the prime minister’s office or any of the Security Cabinet get-togethers as a gleeful gesture of “I told you so”; that was beneath the office. And it was unnecessary. The prime minister realized Dagan had been correct all along.

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And Hezbollah’s hierarchy realized that it had made a fatal mistake in launching the war. “We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude,” Nasrallah told Lebanon’s New TV channel. “If I had known on July 11 that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”13

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Nasrallah would never see daylight again. He lived in bunkers, some as deep as 330 feet below ground, throughout south Beirut, the notorious Dahya section of the city, where Shiite clerics and Hezbollah officers lived. He knew that Israel—and especially its intelligence services—would never forgive him for the unnecessary carnage of 2006 and would one day find an opportune moment to prevent him from continuing a war against the Jewish state and the West at the behest of his paymasters in Tehran, and to convince his successor that continuing and escalating the hostilities would come at

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According to reports, Dagan visited Oman, Kuwait, and other nations where there was mutual interest. Dagan, though, was always suspicious of the Qataris. The tiny but über-wealthy Persian Gulf emirate masqueraded itself as a forward-thinking pro-Western nation seeking peace in the Middle East. Dagan saw through them, identifying the country and its pro–Muslim Brotherhood leaders as the “real problem” in their attempts to placate everyone. Dagan even suggested to his counterparts in the United States that they would be better served if the Pentagon removed its bases from Qatar.

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Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud became the Saudi point man for covert discussions with Israeli intelligence.9 He was rare among the Saudis, especially only five years after fifteen of his countrymen had been among the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, in that he embodied pragmatic moderation. He was as comfortable playing hardball with a senator as he appeared while talking to Larry King on CNN. Bandar understood the American mindset and its political layers so well that it was joked that he spent more time in the halls of Congress than most elected representatives. He was also a darling of the defense establishment—arms sales to the kingdom were good business. Bandar was a player and a skilled politician—two factors needed when handling a secret relationship. He also had the full support of King Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

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of the expensive eateries in Vienna. Multiple teams of agents watched Othman as he ordered drinks, ate a lavish meal, and then treated himself to a Viennese coffee and dessert. The Israelis sat inside the restaurant with him, on the street, in his hotel, and throughout the lobby, watching his every move. In Othman’s room, the Mossad officers found a treasure trove of documents, photographs, and folders. Everything was laid out on the bed, photographed, and then returned to its place. His laptop, though encrypted, was easy to enter. The contents of his hard drive were copied, and eavesdropping malware was placed inside it that would allow the Mossad to follow his work, contacts, and emails moving forward. The Israeli agents even found Othman’s mobile phone recharging under the bed. There was so much information stored in the hotel room that Othman managed to complete his dinner and head back to his room while the Israeli agents were still working inside it. There is usually a window, the target thirty seconds from returning, when an operation commander must order Hadal, to “cease,” and remove his agents from being uncovered. The intelligence team managed to extricate itself from the room before Othman entered the lobby elevator. Had Othman resisted the last cup of coffee and the piece of strudel and returned to his hotel room five minutes earlier, the operation would have been aborted, and the intelligence bonanza lost.

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According to the Mossad assessment, an opinion that A’man concurred with, Israel had a six-to-eight-month window before the reactor was completed and went hot—the significance being that attacking the site after it was operational risked radioactive fallout and a Chernobyl-like polluting of the Euphrates River. “For a thousand years,” Dagan would reflect in one of his last interviews on camera, “every time a child in Syria or Iraq died of cancer, the world would blame Israel.”17 The political and diplomatic repercussions that Israel would encounter would be enormous and irrevocable, the manifestation once again of the centuries-old blood libel of Jews for unspeakable atrocities.

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Olmert rushed to a secure telephone and had a staffer connect him to President Bush. Bush was on a tour of Australia, and his ability to talk freely was diminished. But Olmert could not hold back. “Remember that thing in the desert we spoke about?” the Israeli prime minister asked. “Well, it’s not there anymore.”29

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The young Mughniyeh was obsessed with guns, and when Palestinian guerrillas took over parts of southern Lebanon after they were kicked out of Jordan in 1971, the young boy became enamored of the swagger and muscle of the Palestinian fedayeen, even though they abused the Shiite villagers. The reports of raped women, and husbands and fathers disappearing into the night, mattered little to him. He wanted to fight. In 1976, at the height of Lebanon’s Civil War, Imad Mughniyeh volunteered into the ranks of Fatah.II He was only fourteen years old. The battle lines in Lebanon’s fratricide might have been drawn along religious lines, but there was nothing pious in the bloodletting—especially among the Palestinian groups. The use of drugs and alcohol by the fedayeen, and the sexual promiscuity with female fighters, were anathema to Mughniyeh’s strict Shiite upbringing. Rather than being repulsed by it, it energized him. The teenager excelled at killing. He had not reached his eighteenth birthday when Mughniyeh was offered a spot in Force 17, Arafat’s Praetorian Guard and special operations unit. He was, it is believed, trained in the Soviet Union in the basics of dignitary protection. He would travel throughout the Middle East as a member of Abu Iyad’s detail. Iyad, the nom de guerre of Salah Khalaf, was Arafat’s deputy and the man who created Black September.III

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Mughniyeh’s résumé constituted some of the most heinous acts of terror of the 1980s and 1990s. Among the acts of mass murder that Mughniyeh blueprinted: the suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983; the bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks at Beirut International Airport and the French paratrooper headquarters in the Lebanese capital in October 1983; the bombings of the American and French Embassies in Kuwait City; the kidnapping and murder of CIA station chief William Buckley in 1984; the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1984; the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon; the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the murder of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem in 1985; the kidnapping and murder of U.S. Marine Corps colonel William Higgins; the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires; the bombing of the Argentine Israel Mutual Association Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994; and the bombing of the U.S. barracks in Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996.

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He was forty-four years old when he masterminded the kidnapping raid that sparked the 2006 Second Lebanon War and supervised Hezbollah’s support of Shiite rebels battling American and coalition forces in Iraq. The signs of middle age had begun to show. His guerrilla-style beard no longer concealed the onset of a double chin. He had gained weight; his paunch was uncharacteristic for a man who led a global terror army. He underwent a midlife crisis, seeking sexual reaffirmation of his once mighty manhood among the beautiful women in Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran. He began granting interviews, primarily to beautiful young female journalists who fawned over his achievements.11 He took on mistresses, multiple ones, though it is believed that some of these women were provided to him by the Quds Force, as a reward for his dedicated service against the United States and Israel in Lebanon and Iraq.12 After the 2006 Lebanon war, when the arms of Israeli intelligence became laser-focused on Mughniyeh, vanity had gotten the better part of his cover. He abandoned the one rule of tradecraft that had kept him two steps ahead of the spies: he became addicted to his mobile phone. It was hard to maintain girlfriends and woo journalists with couriers. The women sent messages to Mughniyeh’s pager, and he had numerous mobile phones, the must-have equipment when needing to send late-night text messages or the odd nude photograph.

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It is not known precisely when Meir Dagan pitched the idea of a joint Mossad-CIA operation to Michael Hayden. Many inside the Mossad were furious at the director for involving the Americans; it was a severe breach of Israeli independence and operational integrity. Dagan hushed the uproar as nonsense. He preached the virtue that intelligence that went unused was a waste of resources and possibly lives that were risked obtaining it. According to reports, the Mossad director shared the Israeli intelligence about Mughniyeh’s phone with Hayden. It did not take long for the CIA to be on board.

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It was decided that a car bomb would be used to kill Mughniyeh. Details of American participation remain vague. The CIA built the device and tested it over twenty times at a secluded site in North Carolina to ensure that the blast radius would not kill bystanders.16 The CIA would transport the device through a diplomatic pouch from Jordan, and then into Syria by road, and then provide Israeli agents on the ground with the explosives and added surveillance support. Israeli agents bought a new silver Mitsubishi Pajero SUV in Lebanon that would be used to deliver the bomb. The Pajero was driven to Damascus, where the device, described as highly sophisticated, was inserted into the vehicle in a place where it would be difficult to detect, and then parked on the street around one of the target buildings so that police and neighbors would become accustomed to it. According to Ehud Olmert, the explosives were planted in the bumper.17 Both Hayden and Dagan monitored the progress of the joint effort. Israeli assets on the ground focused on the house of one of Mughniyeh’s mistresses in the Kfar Sousa neighborhood of Damascus, an upscale area of luxury high-rises and five-star eateries. “The only reason why you maintain a girlfriend and spend the money lavishing her with gifts and promises of a future is to visit her,” an Israeli intelligence officer explained, “and Mughniyeh had damn good taste.”18 Mughniyeh also frequented a second apartment, also in a luxury high-rise, where he would meet Muhammad Suleiman and Qassem Soleimani. Teams of agents surveilled the locations around the clock. Cameras were installed around the addresses to send real-time images back to headquarters. Apartments were rented, providing advantageous views of the two locations Mughniyeh was likely to walk past. The routine allowed Mossad officers to create a forecast of arrivals and departures. Mughniyeh had become a man of routine, carnal desire, and a schedule. When he was near Damascus, the Pajero was always positioned to be in the center of the kill zone.

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Meir Dagan forbade any celebrations following the Negative Treatment of an enemy target. Champagne bottles were never opened, and no one dared clap. “We are not Gods,” he used to tell his officers. “The taking of another life is a last resort and nothing to rejoice over,” his former head of training remembers. Dagan never authorized a citation or a medal for any operation that resulted in the death of a legitimate target.20 There was, though, a sense of relief and closure. There was no arguing about the significance of eliminating Mughniyeh. He was irreplaceable to Hezbollah. The director of Mossad wondered how many innocent lives would now be spared with Mughniyeh no longer in the game.

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Even Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose contentious relationship with Dagan became very public, spoke glowingly of his former spy chief. Netanyahu spoke of the outside-the-box intelligence operations that Dagan would present to him for authorization, reminiscing that some of them were beyond the boundaries of imagination, they were so spectacular. The operations, the prime minister emphasized, personified the Israeli chutzpah, Dagan’s chutzpah. In a rare moment of magnanimity, Netanyahu thanked Dagan for his dedicated service to the people of Israel, reciting a passage from a poem by Shlomo Skulsky about Rosh Pina, Dagan’s beloved home, that captured the essence of the man: “You do not conquer the top of the mountain if there is no grave on its slope.”11

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History has proven that overconfidence and arrogance are Kryptonite for intelligence agencies and the nations they serve. The seismic ruptures of October 7 were far worse than those experienced in the smoldering collateral damage of October 1973. The perfect storm self-inflicted disaster was compounded by political hubris and strategic malpractice. In 2015, when an ailing Meir Dagan took the stage at the same square where, twenty years earlier, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated and warned that he was fearful of the country’s leadership and its lack of vision, the former Mossad director’s prescient warning spoke of such a disaster. The details of Israel’s October 7 intelligence failure will take years to analyze and perhaps decades to be declassified. The collapse was system-wide and catastrophic. The Shin Bet and A’man shared the intelligence and operational responsibility for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and history will allocate to them—and to the political leadership that allowed the intelligence to be ignored and its strategic miscalculations to guide the nation’s defenses—the responsibility they are due.

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In the fall of 2006, during that rainy late-night shoot-the-breeze session inside Meir Dagan’s office at Mossad headquarters in the predawn hours before a new day, when his trusted division chiefs were discussing what to do about Hezbollah and the words “kill them all” were uttered, the idea was not hyperbole. The words were a marching order. It began with the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh. The rest would have to follow. Meir Dagan’s Mossad took upon itself a massive project to enter every facet of Hezbollah’s world—its financial practices,II its leadership, their personal and sexual practices, and their other personality shortcomings—that could be used against key members of the Shiite Party of God and, at a moment of opportunity, deliver a crippling blow that the group would never be able to recover from.

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The Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War opened an enormous window into Hezbollah for Israeli intelligence. Iran dispatched Hezbollah units into the bloody fratricide to help protect the regime of Bashar al-Assad from ISIS, Kurdish rebels, and other fractious ethnic and religious militias in Syria trying to survive the carnage. The Syrian battlefield developed into a superpower proxy war with both the United States and Russia supporting different sides, and it was also an open book for the intelligence agencies. The amount of SIGINT and HUMINT shared between the friendly services, those in the West and their counterparts in the Arab world, was vast. Adding to the espionage landscape, Hezbollah, engaged in brutal combat and enduring significant losses, overlooked the legendary tradecraft secrecy that the terror group was known for.6 The funerals of Hezbollah operatives killed in Syria were broadcast on Lebanese television, and the faces of commanders were seen, and their drivers photographed; commanders spoke on their mobile phones with their liaison officers in Damascus and Tehran.

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