agent.
Because I had become the only point of access to my father, I was in direct contact with every Hamas leader in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Syria. The only other guy with that level of access was Khalid Meshaal in Damascus. Meshaal was born in the West Bank, but he lived most of his life in other Arab countries. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait and studied physics at Kuwait University. After Hamas was founded, Meshaal headed up the Kuwaiti chapter. And following the Iraqi invasion, he moved to Jordan, then to Qatar, and finally to Syria.
Living in Damascus, he was not subject to the travel restrictions of Hamas leaders in the territories. So he turned into a kind of diplomat, representing Hamas in Cairo, Moscow, and the Arab League. As he traveled, he raised money. In April 2006 alone, he collected one hundred million dollars from Iran and Qatar.
Meshaal didn’t make many public appearances; he lived in secret places, and he could not return to the occupied territories for fear of assassination. He had good reason to be careful.
In 1997, when Meshaal had still been in Jordan, a couple of Israeli intelligence agents broke into his room and injected a rare poison into his ear while he slept. His bodyguards spotted the agents leaving the building, and one of them went to check on Meshaal. He saw no blood, but his leader was down on the ground and unable to speak. The bodyguards ran after the Israeli agents, one of whom fell into an open drain. The agents were captured by Jordanian police.
Israel had recently signed a peace agreement with Jordan and exchanged ambassadors, and now the botched attack jeopardized that new diplomatic arrangement. And Hamas was embarrassed that one of their key leaders could be reached so easily. The story had been humiliating to all the parties involved, and thus everybody tried to cover it up. But somehow the international media found out.
Demonstrations broke out in the streets of Jordan, and King Hussein demanded that Israel release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual leader, and other Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the red-faced Mossad agents. In addition, Mossad was to send a medical team immediately to inject Meshaal with an antidote to the poison. Reluctantly, Israel agreed.
Khalid Meshaal called me at least once a week. Other times, he left very important meetings to take my phone calls. One day, Mossad called the Shin Bet.
“We have a very dangerous person from Ramallah who talks to Khalid Meshaal every week, and we can’t find out who he is!”
They were referring to me, of course. We all had a good laugh, and the Shin Bet chose to keep the Mossad guessing about me. It seems there is competition and rivalry between security agencies in every country—as with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, and National Security Agency in the United States.
One day, I decided to take advantage of my relationship with Meshaal. I told him I had very important information that I could not give him over the phone.
“Do you have a secure way to deliver it?” he asked.
“Of course. I will call you in a week and give you the details.”
The normal means of communication between the territories and Damascus was to send a letter with someone who had no police record and no known relationship with Hamas. Such letters were written on very thin paper, rolled down to a tiny size, and then slipped into an empty medicine capsule or simply wrapped with nylon thread. Just before crossing the border, the courier swallowed the capsule, then regurgitated it in a restroom on the other side. Sometimes, a courier would have to carry as many as fifty letters at once. Naturally, these “mules” had no idea what the letters contained.
I decided to do something different and open a new secret channel to outside leadership, thus extending my access from the personal level to the operational and security levels.
The Shin Bet loved the idea.
I chose a local Hamas member and told him to meet me at my old cemetery in the middle of the night. To impress him, I showed up carrying my M16.
“I want you to carry out a very important mission,” I told him.
Clearly terrified yet excited, he hung on to every word from the son of Hassan Yousef.
“You can tell no one—not your family, not even your local Hamas leader. By the way, who is your leader?”
I asked him to write out his entire history in Hamas, everything he knew, before I would tell him more about his mission. He couldn’t get everything down on paper fast enough. And I couldn’t believe the amount of information he gave me, including updates on every movement in his area.
We met a second time, and I told him he was being sent out of Palestine.
“Do exactly what I tell you,” I warned, “and don’t ask questions.”
I told Loai that the guy was involved in Hamas up to his neck, so if the organization decided to check him out, they would find a very active and loyal member. The Shin Bet did its own vetting, approved him, and opened the border for him.
I wrote a letter, telling Khalid Meshaal that I had all the keys to the West Bank and he could totally rely on me for special and complicated missions that he could not entrust to normal Hamas channels. I told him I was ready for his orders, and I guaranteed success.
My timing was perfect, since Israel had assassinated or arrested most of the Hamas leaders and activists by that time. Al-Qassam Brigades was exhausted, and Meshaal was desperately low on human resources.
I did not, however, instruct the courier to swallow the letter. I had designed a more complicated mission, mostly because it was more fun. I was discovering that I loved this spy stuff, especially with Israeli intelligence paving the way.
We bought the courier some very nice clothes—a complete outfit, so that his attention would not be drawn to the shoes in which, unknown to him, we had hidden the letter.
He put on the clothes, and I gave him enough money for the trip and a little extra to have some fun in Syria. I told him his contacts would recognize him only by his shoes, so he had to keep them on. Otherwise, they would think he was someone else and he would be in serious danger.
After the courier arrived in Syria, I called Meshaal and told him to expect to be contacted soon. If anyone else had told him that, Khalid would have immediately become suspicious and refused a meeting. But this man had been sent by his young friend, the son of Hassan Yousef. So he believed he had nothing to worry about.
When they met, Khalid requested the letter.
“What letter?” our courier asked. He didn’t know he was supposed to have a letter.
I had given Khalid a hint about where to look, and they found the compartment in one of the shoes. In this way, a new communications channel was established with Damascus, even though Meshaal had no idea that he was actually on a party line with the Shin Bet listening in.
Chapter Twenty
TORN
Summer 2001
A little before 2 p.m. on August 9, 2001, twenty-two-year-old Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri blew himself up at the crowded Sbarro pizza parlor at King George Street and Jaffa Road. Al-Masri was from an affluent family in the West Bank.
Between five and ten kilograms of explosives sprayed nails, nuts, and bolts into the summer crowd, killing 15 people and maiming another 130. Between this horror and the Dolphinarium bombing a few months earlier, the citizenry of Israel was almost blind with grief and rage. Whatever group or faction was behind these attacks had to be identified and stopped before more innocents were killed. Otherwise, events would very likely spiral out of control and unleash unprecedented death and heartache across the region.
Again and again, the Shin Bet pored over every detail of the bombing, trying to connect it to the five guys at the safe house—Muhammad Jamal al-Natsheh, Saleh Talahme, Ibrahim Hamed, Sayyed al-Sheikh Qassem, and Hasaneen Rummanah—but not a shred of evidence tied them to the Dolphinarium or Sbarro attacks.
