Gideon's Spies

In hours, Reuben had been ordered to investigate the possibility that Mughniyeh had visited Berlin to undergo further plastic surgery. Now, six months later, the katsa had the proof in the file his informer had handed over.

On Sunday afternoon, February 3, 2008, Meir Dagan chaired a meeting in the conference room adjoining his office. On the table were jugs of water and pots of coffee for those seated around it. They were the head of Shin Bet, the country’s internal security force, the government’s national security adviser, the political adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the military advocate-general to the Israeli Defense Forces, IDF. Among them sat a brigadier-general, the head of kidon, Mossad’s unique unit that conducted legally-approved assassinations. Beside Dagan sat his Director of Operations. In a corner of the room was the table and chair usually occupied by the notetaker to record decisions and other discussions. Now it was empty. There would be no record of this meeting.

Over the past six years, similar meetings had been held by Dagan since he came to office in August 2002. The first had been four months later in December that year to discuss the case of Ramzi Nahara, a Mossad informer Dagan had known personally who had defected to Hezbollah. Was it for money? A skewed belief in the group’s cause? Had he fallen for one of the Arab women Hezbollah used to try and entrap a foreigner? There were no answers. But the meeting was short and unanimous. Nahara had to be located. He was tracked to an Arab village and killed with a car bomb planted by a former colleague in the service he betrayed.

In March 2003, another meeting discussed Abu Mohammed Al-Masri, who had been sent by al-Qaeda from Pakistan to create a cell to target Israeli villages on the border with Lebanon using rockets. He, too, died in a car bomb as he drove around south Lebanon seeking recruits and suitable sites to launch the weapons. The next target the meeting had discussed, in August 2003, was Al Hussein Salah, Hezbollah’s explosives expert who had begun rebuilding the organization’s arsenal in the Beirut suburbs. He was on his way to meet his bomb-makers when he died in yet another car bomb planted by the Mossad.

A full year passed before Dagan once more had summoned the men in his conference room. The decision had been taken in the stifling heat of July 2004 that Ghaleb Awali, the Hezbollah link-man between Damascus and the activists in the Gaza strip, should be killed by a car bomb as he headed south to meet the activists. The bomb was planted under his seat. In Awali’s place came Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil, a senior Hezbollah official in Damascus who had been given responsibility by Syria to liaise between Damascus and Hamas and Hezbollah units in Gaza and the West Bank. Even as he drove to his first appointment, Khalil was killed by a Mossad car bomb in a Damascus suburb. In May 2006, Mahmoud Majzoub, a senior member of the Islamic jihad committee through which Hezbollah liaised with Tehran, was killed by a car bomb as he drove for lunch in a south Lebanon restaurant.

Each of the targets had been carefully selected, placed under surveillance and the moment of their deaths was the result of the planning that would once more occupy the men in the conference room on that Sunday afternoon. It was there that the fate of Imad Mughniyeh would be settled. His death warrant was in the folder beside Dagan on the table. It had originally been signed by the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon (in 2008 still in a coma) and ratified by Ehud Olmert. The question the meeting was asked to decide was how could the warrant be executed?

On the table before each man was a copy of the file that Reuben had transmitted on a high-security line from his Berlin office. Inside the file were a series of still prints from a video, in all thirty-four images. They showed the various stages of the plastic surgery Imad Mughniyeh had undergone. First his beard had been shaved and the previous scar tissue carefully removed. A note attached to the print contained the original observation in German, now translated into Hebrew, that the scar tissue on the cheeks, jaw and the temples dated from 1993 following surgery at a clinic in Tripoli, Libya. Close-up images revealed further details of the surgeon’s work at the East German clinic. The eyes had been reshaped by tightening the skin on Mughniyeh’s temples. His lower jaw had been expertly cut, a piece of bone removed and then re-sewn to provide a narrower jaw line, which gave the face a leaner look. A number of front teeth had been removed and replaced with others of a different shape. His hair had been colored a distinguished-looking gray and, instead of his spectacles, he now wore contact lenses. Compared to the original newspaper photograph, Imad Mughniyeh looked radically different.