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Chapter One
The Chess Match Begins
Police work has been described as years of routine punctuated by seconds of unimaginable terror. It is never boring, and the most mundane duty can sometimes erupt into heart-stopping madness. The midnight shift in the Dan Area just north of Tel Aviv promised to be routine for police officer Aharon Bin-Nun and his partner Leon Cahalon, a volunteer in the national police Civil Guard program.
The objective of Civil Guard patrols was to be the eyes and ears of the regular patrol force, and to summon help if trouble was spotted. Trouble was generally considered to fall under the category of what the Israeli defense establishment called HTA, or hostile terrorist activity. Usually, however, Civil Guard volunteers and the cops who rode shotgun with them ended up stopping car thieves, arresting burglars, or breaking up a domestic argument that spilled onto a neighborhood street. As they drove through the industrial zone of Or Yehuda, a town southeast of Tel Aviv, the two officers checked factories for signs of break-ins and cruised the deserted streets and alleys hoping that the women of the evening were safe from harm. All was quiet.
In the early morning hours of November 19, 1992, the two men driving in their beat-up blue-and-white van came across a Fiat van whose rear lights weren't working. Civil Guard patrols almost never handed out traffic citations, but the vehicle looked suspicious, as did the three Arabs inside who appeared to be nervous about the appearance of police. Using the loudspeaker, Bin-Nun ordered the van to pull over, but the driver floored the gas pedal and quickly disappeared in a cloud of black smoke that reeked of smoldering rubber. Radioing the dispatcher with the license plate number, Cahalon and Bin-Nun engaged in the last thing the two men thought they'd be involved in that November night--a high-speed chase.
The chase proceeded north along the desolate No. 4 highway leading toward Tel Aviv's middle-class suburbia. Other police units joined the pursuit. The Fiat van swerved from northbound lane to southbound, racing through red lights and almost crashing at several intersections yet to be cordoned off. Police attempted to stop the van with snake-teeth spikes rolled out across the roadway, but the driver managed to avoid several such obstacles as the van headed into the exclusive community of Ramat Efal.
On Rimon Street, as sleeping residents were summoned out of their slumber by the sounds of police sirens and tires screeching, the van entered a one-way street. Had the driver been fluent in Hebrew, he would have realized that the sign bearing the words DERECH LE'LO MUTZAH was warning of a dead end. Backed into a corner, the three men leaped out of the vehicle and attempted to flee from the oncoming gauntlet of blue-and-white patrol cars. Two of the men were captured before they could escape; the third man was arrested an hour later as he attempted to break into a nearby home. The three men were Palestinians.
The plates of the van, number 19-380-54, came back as stolen, but the cops who responded had a hunch that the three men were not run-of-the-mill car thieves. Indeed, inside the van the cops discovered something ominous. Five twelve-kilogram gasoline tanks, filled to capacity, were bound together by duct tape and wired to a battery and what appeared to be a crude timer. Acetone and store-bought detergents served as the explosive nerve center.
Sappers from the bomb squad rushed to the scene. Many had handled improvised devices before, from hand grenades to booby-trapped paint cans crammed with explosives, but never something so big and precarious. Police used loudspeakers to roust residents out of their homes and into bomb shelters just restocked with food and water after the Gulf War; they were told to sit tight until it was safe for them to return to their homes. The van stopped in the middle of Rimon Street was a classically designed, soundly constructed car bomb that had the potential to rain death and destruction over an area of two thousand feet.
As police helicopters hovered overhead, members of the bomb squad maneuvered a small tracked robot toward the van. The sappers wanted to neutralize the device and then assemble the intact elements, to be used as evidence later on. The robot, an indigenously produced automaton named "Bambi," was to fire a twelve-gauge round into the central mechanism of the detonator, thus rendering the device inert.
As the sappers crouched for position, guiding Bambi by remote control, the chief bomb-disposal technician flipped a toggle switch to fire the round. Instead of neutralizing the device, however, the pellets detonated it. The explosion bounced the van like a child's toy as a fireball singed the overhanging trees. A cloud of thick, acrid black smoke shot into the crisp autumn air.
The blast was a monstrous one. Windows throughout the neighborhood shattered, storm shutters were ripped off their hinges, and several parked cars were sprayed with smoldering shrapnel. Bomb squad officers surmised that either the device was booby-trapped or it had been predetonated by the timing mechanism. They were sure that if it had exploded in a crowded area, hundreds would have been killed.
By the time dawn arrived at the crime scene, now crowded with investigators, journalists, and curious onlookers, the two men captured first were inside a soundproof room illuminated by a single fluorescent light. They had already been interviewed, had been introduced to the unpleasantness of what incarceration is like for terrorists. Already they had learned that they could either relinquish straight away all information the investigators would demand, or end up enduring hours, weeks, or even months of what was known as "pressure." Most never made it through the deprivations and humiliations of that unnerving pressure; they gave in as their physical and psychological envelopes were breached. After the third terrorist was in custody, and after several days of intense scrutiny, the investigators knew all that the three could tell. It was enough to paint a daunting portrait of what possibly lay ahead.
Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was informed of the averted disaster in a closed-door briefing. Ya'akov Perry, the head of the General Security Service, Israel's counterterrorist and counterespionage intelligence agency--better known by its Hebrew acronym of Shin Bet--told Rabin that the powerful device detonated in Ramat Efal was not a remote-control bomb, the type that had killed so many in other parts of the world: in Bogota, Belfast, Colombo, and the Basque lands. Rather, this was intended to be a suicide attack. According to information extracted from the Shin Bet interrogations, the terrorists were planning to drive their vehicle to the Dizengoff Center shopping mall, park the van in the underground garage, and then, after a prayer and a surge of adrenaline that would stiffen their frames, they'd initiate the blast that would topple the massive mall, kill scores, and bring them martyrdom and paradise.
The attempted bombing was the work of Hamas, Rabin was told. The men captured had not built the device, nor had they planned the operation on their own. They had been dispatched by a twenty-seven-year-old commander in the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade who, coincidentally, had also built the bomb. The man was married, a devout Muslim, and a longtime Hamas activist who had earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Ramallah's Bir Zeit University in electrical engineering.
A week later, the Israeli Army magazine Bamachane published a cover story titled "Living in the Shadow of Terror" in which Brigadier General Shmuel Arad, the head of the operations brigade in the IDF General Staff, warned, "Terrorists in the territories are receiving instruction and training from commanders who were trained abroad." In fact, there was a sense of foreboding in the minds of many intelligence service and police commanders following the Ramat Efal incident. They feared that a bloody winter lay ahead, and that car bombs had replaced stabbings and machine-gun attacks in the Hamas repertoire. They also began to fear the man who had dispatched the bombers, the man who became known in the Shin Bet vernacular as "The Engineer."
Rivkah Toledano was unaware of the trepidation that had overtaken Israel's counterterrorist community, nor had she ever heard of the mysterious individual known as "The Engineer." She did know that she rarely had the opportunity to watch her husband of six years, Nissim, dress for work. Often he was showered, shaved, and ready to go by 5:00 A.M. She made sure his lunch was ready the night before, and Nissim said good-bye to his wife before dusk, kissing her on the forehead after he had done the same to his pride and joy, his two children--Shai, the boy, who was five, and Natalie, who was two and a half. Their home was a comfortable apartment in a modest, single-story stucco block, with a neat garden shaded by a dangling eucalyptus tree in the town of Lod, just a few minutes from busy Ben-Gurion International Airport. The Toledanos lived on a modest Israeli income, the salary of a career policeman serving with the Mishmar Ha'Gvul, the Border Guards. Although service in the "Green Berets," as the Border Guards are known, could have sent him to the Lebanese border, to the international port of Ashdod, or even to the madness of the Intifadah in either Gaza or the West Bank, Nissim Toledano worked only two kilometers from his home, at Border Guard headquarters on Ha'Chashmonaim Street in Lod. He liked it that way. He wasn't in the job for danger and thrills--his family was his life.
To the Palestinians, the Border Guards were known as the Men of Kfar Qassem, a reference to the massacre of thirty-three civilians in the town of that name along the border with Jordan as a curfew was being enforced in the days prior to the 1956 Sinai War. The tag was inaccurate and unfair over the course of time, but privately many Border Guard commanders relished the idea of the Arabs thinking of them as brutal and "different" from the average Israeli soldier. Indeed, the Border Guards, part of the Israeli police, had always been something of an enigma in Israel's security service scheme of things--half army, half police, they were the perennial outsiders even though their skills as policemen, guards, and even troopers were internationally renowned. The average Israeli did not identify with the Guards, since most members were either Jews from the Arabic diaspora who spoke Arabic and understood the Arabic mentality, or Druze, Circassian, or Bedouin. Still, they were citizens of the Jewish state and served with Jews as comrades-in-arms, as professional policemen. Nissim Toledano had grown up with Arabs, Lod being a mixed city. He lived with them as neighbors and friends.
At 5:15 on the morning of December 12, 1993, Master Sergeant Toledano left his house for work. He kissed Rivkah and the kids good-bye, nestled his Beretta pistol into a brown leather hip-holster, and grabbed his green parka. Israeli winters are brief, but the cold and the dampness can chill to the bone. Morning rain greeted the border policeman as he headed out the door to the darkened pavement of Shlomoh Ha'Melech Street and the long walk toward Border Guard HQ on the eastern end of Ha'Chashmonaim Street.
Nissim Toledano never made it to work that morning. He was such a creature of habit that his commanders were immediately alarmed by his absence at the 6:00 A.M. roll call. They knew enough of the man's domestic situation to realize that he wasn't having the cursed problems that tend to afflict cops with too many years on the job--marital pressures, divorce, depression. In fact, Toledano was the envy of many in the Guard. By 8:00 A.M., Toledano's commander phoned Rivkah and, without trying to raise any flags, asked if her husband was ill or at home. "Isn't he at work?" she asked nervously. The commander, a veteran of the terrorist wars in southern Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza, was alarmed; a sixth sense hit him in the gut like a hammer. He immediately ordered the Lod police precinct to send all available personnel to find the missing border policeman. Foul play had to be blamed--the officer suspected there could be no other explanation.
By the time the patrol cars began combing the streets of the city for Nissim Toledano, he was already across the Green Line, in the Occupied Territories, far removed from the security of Lod. In one well-planned move, three men had ambushed the twenty-nine-year-old police officer by running him down and knocking him to the ground, and, following a brief struggle, forcing him inside a white sedan with stolen yellow Israeli license plates that took him to a safe house somewhere in the West Bank.
Frantic with anguish, Toledano's family commenced a search for Nissim. One of Rivkah's sisters, following her brother-in-law's daily route to work, found a gray and red skullcap laying in a ditch. It belonged to Nissim. It was an ominous sign of the tragedy that would be confirmed hours later. Just after 10:00 A.M., two young men, their faces concealed by checkered kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads, walked into the lobby of the Red Cross building in the West Bank town of Ramallah, a suburb of Jerusalem referred to as the Beverly Hills of the West Bank because of its luxurious villas. The men, nervous though cocky, approached the attractive receptionist, a young student named Suha, and said abruptly, "We are members of the Hamas, from the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade. We have kidnapped an Israeli officer, and we demand the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in exchange for his life." Before leaving abruptly, the two dropped off an envelope on Suha's desk with their demands and a photocopy of Nissim Toledano's laminated Border Guard ID. Suha, stunned by what had transpired, called her boss, who upon reading the neatly typed page contacted the local Israeli military commander.
The kidnapping of Nissim Toledano sparked a frenzy throughout Israel. At army checkpoints throughout the Occupied Territories, soldiers were placed on high alert. Leaves were canceled and additional units dispatched to roadblocks and villages known to be "problematic." The Israeli intelligence community dropped most of its routine tasks and began an all-inclusive search for the kidnapped cop. Commando cops from the Ya'ma'm, the Israeli National Police counterterrorist and hostage-rescue unit, were summoned to barracks at their base in central Israel and placed on immediate deployment status. Hostage-taking opened the door for a commando operation, and Israel wanted all its assets ready for action.
By noon, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, somber and determined, had summoned his cabinet for an emergency meeting. The room inside the Knesset was uncharacteristically silent under a fog of cigarette smoke, as ministers read the Hamas communiqué that had now been quickly translated by Shin Bet Arabic-language specialists, photocopied, and highlighted.
In the name of Allah the merciful and beloved
Decree No. 2
Message issued by the "Special Unit" in the martyr company of Izzedine al-Qassam, the military arm of Hamas. On 13/12/92, the sixth anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Resistance Movement carried out the abduction of an officer in the Occupation Army who is being held in an undisclosed location and the operation was carried out according to and as ordered. We are now informing the Occupation Forces: We are holding the officer, and we demand from the Occupation Army and the Occupation Government to free Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in exchange for this officer. The authorities have ten hours, no later than nine this evening. The release will take place under the following conditions:
1. Keep to the timetable, otherwise we will immediately kill the officer after the end of the ultimatum.
2. The release of Sheikh Yassin will take place under the supervision of the International Red Cross, the Egyptian Ambassador, the French Ambassador, the Swedish Ambassador and the Turkish Ambassador. These ambassadors will guarantee that Israel does not return Sheikh Yassin to prison following his release.
3. We warn the Occupation Authorities that we will respond immediately and harshly to any attempt to harm our Sheikh.
4. We must free the officer immediately after the release of Sheikh Yassin, in the way that we see fit.
5. Israeli Television will film the process of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's release and will broadcast, live, him being turned over to the foreign diplomats.
"The Special Unit" Izzedine al-Qassam Company Military Arm/Hamas Movement
A deafening silence descended upon the cabinet. Hamas was no longer a splinter group on the religious fringe of the Palestinian revolution, nor were its members amateurs. They had kidnapped before; but these were usually spasms of opportunity masked by mystery--there were no demands and no challenges to the Israeli political leadership. This, coming on the heels of the thwarted Ramat Efal bombing, was clear and present proof that Hamas had raised the ante of violence.
The manhunt was the largest in Israeli history. Thousands of soldiers and policemen raced against time to find any trace of Toledano or his abductors. The Border Guards, eager to save one of their own, worked double shifts. Israeli soldiers, policemen, and counterterrorist agents from Shin Bet frantically searched the villages and towns of the West Bank and Gaza. Informants were tapped, suspects brought in for questioning, and the message put out on the street that something bad would happen to Hamas supporters if Sergeant Toledano was harmed. Although the Israelis had no intention of releasing Sheikh Yassin, the crippled spiritual guide of the movement, they did convince him to make a plea for the sergeant's life on Israeli TV. On the night of December 14, thousands of troops conducted a house-to-house campaign, literally rousting a population of 1.3 million out of their beds in search of the abducted Border Guard sergeant.
At a cave east of Rafat, in hills that were treacherous in the pitch black, one of the many men wanted by the Israeli task force was watching the Israeli search operation with a pair of binoculars and eyes trained by years of the Occupation to notice threats from a distance. Yehiya Ayyash, Israeli ID No. 932116239, had an inkling that there would be an operation that night, and he had left his home just after midnight with his trusted Israeli Army issue assault rifle. Ayyash was a survivor, and survival in the Middle East required luck.
What transpired in Rafat also took place in Gaza, in Ramallah, in Nablus, Hebron, Jerusalem, and a few dozen small villages so small and innocuous that most senior commanders had never heard of them. A combined police/IDF/GSS sweep during the night of December 14-15 was the largest dragnet ever mounted by the Israeli security apparatus. In the West Bank and Gaza, 1,129 Hamas activists were rounded up. But there was no trace of Toledano--and time was running out. Israeli officials had no doubt that Hamas would carry out its threat to murder the kidnapped Border Guard. Guard policemen had turned the courtyard of Toledano's home, at 65 Shlomoh Ha'Melech Street, into an open-air synagogue as they prayed for their comrade, but privately, many feared the worst--they had come across Hamas handiwork in the past and had taken crime scene photographs of the mutilated bodies of its victims.
On the morning of December 16, 1992, Fatma Abu Dahuk, a twenty-five-year-old Bedouin girl from the Abu Dahuk tribe, left her family's tent near Kfar Adumim in the West Bank halfway between Jerusalem and Jericho to search for a camel that had strayed during the night. The desert hills and wadis, peppered with green patches of grass where rainfall had been completely absorbed, were deep and cavernous but easy terrain for an experienced Bedouin. During her search through the majestic beauty of the cavernous valleys, Fatma came across something that appeared misplaced in the tranquil desert setting. In a ravine turned colorful by the growth of winter flowers, Fatma came across the body of a man wearing military khaki and a green parka covering his face. His hands were bound and he was lying in a pool of dried blood.
The tribe's Muchtar was summoned to the grizzly scene and he immediately realized who the man was. News of the Toledano kidnapping had been the sole topic of conversation in the village, and it was impossible to escape the impromptu roadblocks, hovering air force choppers, and Border Guard jeeps maneuvering slowly through the village. By the time the Muchtar returned to his village, hundreds of Shin Bet agents, forensic pathologists, soldiers, high-ranking officers, politicians, and newspaper reporters had congregated in the desert. Israel Air Force helicopters flew overhead looking for clues, any signs of the killers. Border Guard and police units, searching in the area, arrived shortly thereafter and apprehensively entered the wadi to make a positive ID.
Nissim Toledano had not just been murdered, he had been butchered. There were signs of strangulation around his neck and mouth, and he had been stabbed repeatedly throughout his entire body. "This is a murder carried out with hatred and a lust for barbarity," uttered one Border Guard policemen on the scene, "cruelty like this is animalistic." Toledano's body was transported to the national pathological forensic lab in Abu Kabir, just south of Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, Border Guard commander Chief Superintendent Meshulam Amit, along with a police rabbi, made the dreaded knock on Rivkah's door. It was an emotional moment for a wife turned widow and two children robbed of their father.
For the police, there was an investigation to conduct and the thankless task of making sure that Jews in Lod and elsewhere did not make private gestures of revenge against Arab civilians. For the IDF, the kidnapping and murder of Toledano meant that the war that they had just begun to fight against Hamas had entered a new and bloody stage. Shin Bet agents tasked with tracking down Toledano's killers knew that they faced a difficult hunt for the men responsible for the abduction, torture, and execution of the Border Guard. Hamas was a secretive, highly compartmentalized organization. There was genuine fear that the terrorists had already fled across the Allenby Bridge into Jordan and then possibly on to Egypt, the Sudan, Iran, or even the United States.
A bold and politically resonant move was needed, and for the Israeli government, the choice was clear: massive deportation. For a Palestinian, no punishment could be worse. It was permanent and therefore particularly painful for those ferried across the frontier under armed escort who would leave family behind. There was no glory in deportation, just distance from everything held sacred. Better to die in battle a shaheed , or martyr, then to be handed one's walking papers on a windswept Lebanese mountain road. Among the 1,129 Hamas operatives that the security forces picked up during the sweeps of Gaza and the West Bank, GSS agents assembled a list of the most dangerous, the most senior, the most capable ringleaders. In all, 415 names were recommended for possible deportation.
On December 17, 1992, a rainy winter's morning, the suspected terrorists were loaded onto a convoy of buses for the two-hour drive into Lebanon. The buses left the detention facilities in a slow and deliberate motorcade. The mood onboard the buses was somber and bleak as the men sat cuffed to bars and one another. The military policemen overtly escorting the convoy--and the counterterrorist commandos riding a covert shotgun--were perplexed. Their charges looked meek and benign. They were, according to one man involved in the operation, "so innocent looking, so unmenacing, that thinking that such men could torture and kill sent a shiver up my spine."
Israel had always attempted to keep its war against the Palestinians from turning into a religious struggle of Judaism versus Islam. The conflict over the strip of land between Lebanon and Egypt sandwiched by the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea was more complex than two religious elements battling each other for righteous supremacy. In fact, in the course of Israel's many wars and battles, the Druze, Circassians, and Bedouins--all Muslims--had fought and died defending the Jewish state. At the same time, many Palestinians were Christians, and their goal of bringing about the creation of an independent Palestinian state had nothing to do with the preachings of the Prophet; in fact, Dr. George Habash, the founder of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was a Greek-Orthodox from Bethlehem. Some of the most notorious individuals that the Israeli military and police had ever come up against were Christian Palestinians. Their struggle, and the war waged by virtually all the Palestinian guerrilla factions who were nurtured by regimes in Cairo and Damascus, were socialist in nature, pro-Soviet in indoctrination, and void of any true Islamic identity and influence.
Hamas, the acronym for Harakt al-Muqaqama al-Islamiya (Islamic Resistance Movement), meaning "zeal", was not a terrorist phenomenon born out of the ideology of a few Marxist followers wishing to set up camp in the hills, quote Engels and Mao, and wear khaki fatigues their entire lives. It wasn't fueled by the political desire to overthrow a wealthy ruling class. The movement had nothing to do with the Cold War, the Soviet Union, or the Warsaw Pact's generous assistance to fledgling revolutionaries waging their little wars throughout the world. Hamas had virtually nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict either, as the organization and its violent branches could have--and might still--declare war against a secular Arab regime with the same ferocity and effectiveness as it strikes the Jewish state of Israel. Hamas is exactly what its name says--an Islamic resistance to the evils of the Jewish state in Palestine and, in a campaign waged with unbridled brutality, against fellow Palestinians who would subvert Islam. A ballistic and benevolent empowerment of Islam's sole claim to the Palestinian soul and the Palestinian political landscape, Hamas is a rejection of the Jewish state and the PLO (and later Palestinian Authority), it is a scourge and a social entity that looks out for its own.
Although it has become a terrorist group worthy of the infamous reputation inspired by Black September and the Abu Nidal Faction, few of Hamas's senior operatives began their careers in the classrooms of Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow or in the Stacie's training centers in East Berlin. Nor were they sent by a patron superpower to the sugar fields of Cuba or to the gritty fields north of Pyongyang. Hamas operatives learned their tradecraft from one of the most violent, secretive, and effective terrorist undergrounds ever to operate in the Middle East: Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood Society was founded March 1928 in Ismailia, Egypt, by Hasan al-Banna, a firebrand cleric who would quickly build one of the largest political parties in Egypt by proposing a society based solely on the shari'a , or Islamic law. The Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood Society was in essence a movement of national liberation, in that it worked to free Egypt from Western control and non-Islamic influences. British forces in Egypt soon found themselves the target of random and violent hit-and-run attacks. The society reached Mandate Palestine in 1935 when Hasan al-Banna's brother, Abdel Rahman, visited Jerusalem and the city's ultranationalistic and vehemently anti-Jewish mufti and head of the Islamic Council, the controversial Haj Amin al-Husseini.
(Continues...)
Copyright © 1999 Samuel M. Katz. All rights reserved.
