TLS On How Mossad helped Hamas

on Mossad

A botched assassination attempt by seven Israeli agents and the rise to power of Khalid Mishal

by Duncan Campbell-Smith

In March 1997, disappointed over the latest reversals in the peace process in the Middle East, King Hussein of Jordan wrote a letter to Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister of ten months’ standing, that must figure as one of the saddest documents in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Having openly endorsed Netanyahu in the Israeli general election of May 1996 – a disastrous miscalculation – Hussein felt a deep sense of betrayal. Netanyahu had wasted no opportunity in the ensuing months to disparage the peace process begun in Oslo in 1993, and to assert a combative line on new settlements in the Occupied Territories.
The King saw his vision of an eventual peace for the region turning to “a distant elusive mirage”. The letter is quoted at some length in Avi Shlaim’s authoritative biography, Lion of Jordan (2007). “I could remain aloof”, wrote Hussein, “if the very lives of all Arabs and Israelis and their future were not fast sliding towards an abyss of bloodshed and disaster, brought about by fear and despair.” And so it proved. In Kill Khalid, Paul McGeough, an Australian journalist with long experience as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, chronicles the bloodshed and disaster that followed. Things have fallen apart just as Hussein predicted – and went on lamenting, until his death in February 1999 – and it is the members of Hamas, full of passionate intensity, who have been the chief beneficiaries of the fear and despair. McGeough’s narrative, constructed from the scribbled notes of years on the road, as well as dozens of privileged interviews and a careful gleaning of the media record, recounts the story of the Islamist party. In the process, it draws on the wider history of the triangular relationship between the Palestinians, the Jordanians and the Israelis over the past half-century to explain the dramatic rise to power of Hamas. If McGeough treats the suicide-bomb strategists of the movement with an impartial eye that some readers may find unsettling, he has nonetheless produced a compelling and wholly credible account of a political phenomenon that most outside observers misjudged for years – and with which US policy-makers must contend, as hopes rise for an Obama peace initiative.
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The undisputed leader of Hamas today, barricaded with his family inside a fortified office complex on the outskirts of Damascus, is Khalid Mishal. The racy title of McGeough’s book sums up his central thesis, that Mishal came to power largely as the result of a botched assassination attempt by seven Mossad agents in September 1997.
Eschewing the more familiar air-to-ground missile, car bomb or silent bullet in the night, Israel’s secret service opted for a poison that would supposedly result in death a day or so later, while leaving no clues for the autopsy. Stepping out of his car on the way to the office one morning, Mishal encountered a couple of men posing as tourists. One caught his attention by noisily pulling open a soda can; the other leapt up and squirted a deadly toxin into his ear. At this point, however, Mossad’s plan went awry. A bodyguard chased and caught the two assailants, who were handed over to the police. Mishal himself was taken to hospital in time to halt, and eventually reverse, the usually fatal after-effects. And four Mossad accomplices were run to ground in the local Israeli embassy.
Unfortunately for all concerned, except Mishal, this was the embassy in Amman. The intended victim was a Jordanian citizen, living openly in the capital with the tacit approval of the government. Worse than a crime, the assassination attempt was a blunder with calamitous consequences. It had been ordered not only in total contravention of the existing understandings between Jordan and Israel, but also days after Hussein – in a last desperate bid for a breakthrough – had sent a plan to the Israeli Prime Minister for a thirty-year truce that he hoped might conceivably win support from all Palestinian factions, including Hamas.
The attack was therefore seen as the crudest possible rebuff. Hussein and his government reacted accordingly, while Arabs in the street rejoiced at the sight of Mossad operatives caught behaving like Keystone Cops. Only after the intervention of President Clinton and secret midnight visits to Amman by Netanyahu and several senior colleagues, including Ariel Sharon, was the crisis eventually brought to an end.
For Netanyahu himself, the episode was hugely damaging. He had authorized the assassination personally, in defiance not only of that private letter from Hussein six months earlier but also of wiser councils within his own government. (Thus did Hussein discover, in Professor Shlaim’s words, that Netanyahu “was devious, dishonest and completely unreliable” – a judgement McGeough amply endorses at several points.) The ensuing breach with Hussein undermined Netanyahu’s credibility with his colleagues and the wider public, and contributed directly to his defeat and temporary withdrawal from politics less than two years later.
McGeough devotes a quarter of his book to an account of this episode – literally a blow-by-blow account when it comes to the fight scene with the “tourists”. But he takes a hundred pages to set the background first, tracing Mishal’s life from his birth on the West Bank in 1956 to his family’s flight after the Six Day War in 1967 and his teenage years as an exile in 1970s Kuwait. Here, as a college student and budding physics teacher, a devout young Mishal (“a nerd before the term was invented”) committed himself to the Muslim Brotherhood. He gathered around him in the early 1980s a coterie of political activists, who rejected as hopelessly corrupt and ineffective the secular version of Palestinian resistance led by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the PLO. While Arafat’s forces were cornered by Sharon’s army in Beirut and expelled to Tunis, Mishal and his fellow exiles embraced a new vision. It would rely on Islamic piety and endless networking across the Palestinian diaspora to inspire, and bankroll, a different kind of resistance. The Kuwaiti exiles saw themselves as part of the international jihad, then just starting to pitch the mujahideen against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. As yet non-committal over the use of violence, they set out to build support at the grass roots. Covert support came from US and Israeli sources, keen to back Islamic do-gooders as a softer and more acceptable face of dissent than the PLO.
Mishal directed much of his fund-raising activities on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, led by the wheelchair-bound cleric, Sheikh Yassin. When the first Intifada revolt broke out in the Occupied Territories at the end of 1987, Yassin proclaimed the formation of Hamas, to promote an uncompromising guerrilla war against Israel. Months later, Arafat decided to renounce violence and to recognize Israel.
Mishal had no difficulty choosing between these two alternatives, and committed the Kuwaiti Brotherhood to Hamas. (It might have been instructive to hear a little more about how the American and Israeli security forces executed a less than perfect U-turn at this point – and, indeed, about Hamas’s decision to embrace suicide missions as its distinctive contribution to the Palestinians’ armed struggle. Neither issue, perhaps, gets quite the attention from McGeough that it deserves.) Then, in 1990, Arafat supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Having resettled his family in Amman, where they were taking a break, Mishal hurriedly returned to Kuwait to pack up his Hamas treasury files before Saddam’s marauding soldiers could find them. He managed to escape, though not before an Iraqi checkpoint toyed with arresting him. Failing to recognize his importance, they sent him on his way – shades of Lenin on his bicycle, perhaps, challenged by a policeman in St Petersburg at the dawn of the Revolution. But it is the young Stalin that comes to mind as we follow Mishal’s career through the 1990s. McGeough recounts many conversations with leading Jordanian journalists about the Hamas leadership. One told him Mishal “was the least interesting of them . . . [he was] just an assignment guy, chosen for his mediocrity . . .”. No doubt many others shared the same view. He was a colourless bagman, on the losing side.
The mid-1990s were lean years for Hamas: widespread popular support for the Oslo accords and a savage clamp-down on the movement’s activities by Arafat in the Occupied Territories brought it “to the brink of organizational and military paralysis”. But Mishal quietly went on accumulating party jobs in Jordan, controlling the money and joining a three-man committee that watched over Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigade. Jordanian intelligence worried over his extremist views. (“The word ‘Israel’ does not exist in his ideological dictionary” was apparently the top man’s angry assessment.) As of 1997, meanwhile, he was still very little known beyond his own clandestine world. Even his parents, it seems, had no idea that he worked for Hamas. At the height of the crisis over the assassination attempt, we hear of the US ambassador in Amman turning to a CIA man and asking “Who the hell is Khalid Mishal?”.
Netanyahu’s spectacular own goal, suggests McGeough, changed everything. Fully recovered from his ordeal, Mishal found himself a household name across the Arab world – and was fired now with a sense of his own destiny. Suddenly he was unmistakably the coming man. As well as running the Hamas finances, he had been temporarily in charge of its political bureau for a couple of years. Alarmed at his rise, the Jordanians tried to have him replaced. Mishal swept aside their machinations – though in November 1999, he found himself being forcibly deported in a private jet to Qatar, a pit-stop on the road to Damascus.
More fundamentally, the fall-out from the Amman episode rallied support for Hamas on the streets. As part of the deal struck with King Hussein and President Clinton to limit the damage to Israeli–Jordanian relations, Netanyahu was coerced into releasing scores of prisoners locked up in the struggle to suppress the Intifada. One of them was Sheikh Yassin, who had been behind bars for eight years and now returned to Gaza like a conquering hero. Hamas and its hard-line affiliates had coordinated dozens of suicide bombings in Israel during Yassin’s imprisonment: it was largely the revulsion against them that had brought Netanyahu to power. It was a condition of the Sheikh’s release that they should stop, but Yassin soon reneged on this. The bombings went on, constantly adding to the polarization of attitudes in the Middle East in response to the Second Intifada that began in 2000, the Bush presidency’s war on terror after the attacks of September 11 and the debacle for US policy in Iraq. Hamas exploited the terror weapon ruthlessly over these years, eventually managing to sideline Arafat and anyone else ready to accept Israel’s existence as the starting point for a political solution. In response, Mossad put its 1997 escapade behind it. Yassin and most of his senior associates in Gaza were assassinated one by one. If the attempt on Mishal’s life had caused embarrassment in 1997, the Middle East was a very different place seven years later. McGeough records an Israeli Cabinet minister publicly promising in 2004 to do away with The Man Who Wouldn’t Die in 1997: “The minute we have the operational opportunity, we’ll do it”.
Mishal has remained at the head of Hamas ever since. While unambiguously its supreme leader, he heads a movement built on a “deep-rooted system of shura, or consensus consultation” and has remained a shadowy figure. Like the IRA in Northern Ireland, Hamas insists on a division between its political and military arms. But in case this subtlety should be lost on a prospective assassin, Mishal rarely emerges in public. He is inclined, for example, to address rallies via a mobile phone held to a microphone on the stage. Probably this anonymity has contributed to the serious underestimation of Hamas in recent years. All were wrong-footed by its victory in the Palestinian elections of January 2006. And having defeated the moderates of Fatah at the ballot box, it routed them with the bullet in the vicious civil war of June 2007 that left it in control of Gaza.
McGeough plots a path through all this skilfully and with no little stamina: the events since 1997 fill the second half of the book. In the well-honed style of the Sunday magazine feature, he resorts wherever possible to fly-on-the-wall (or perhaps that should be eye-in-the-sky) accounts. This can pall at times, and inattentive readers may occasionally fancy they’ve wandered into the world of Mickey Spillane: characters tend to blow into town, tool around in fast cars and cut each other some slack. But it is a style that for the most part matches the bizarre story McGeough is telling – not least when it takes him into the US, on the trail of Hamas’s fund-raising activities. It also allows him to write with feeling about the regional background he knows well: the squalor in most of Gaza, for example, or the demolition of Palestinian orchards to make way for neon-lit Israeli settlements – “slices of America and Europe, dormitory suburbs that looked utterly out of place in the sunbaked Middle East”. And as a journalist himself, he has a sharp eye for the way in which both sides in the conflict have played the media.
Kill Khalid is more than just a thriller with endnotes. The author’s accumulated contacts over the years have given him rare access to most of the individuals at the centre of the Hamas story (though none, rather conspicuously, from Iran). Eventually, with just twenty pages or so to go, we get to meet the mysterious Mr Mishal himself. He agreed to be interviewed several times in his Damascus safe house in the autumn of 2007, and McGeough sets the scene in graphic detail. Beneath a portrait of Sheikh Yassin, Mishal lounges in an armchair, polishing grapes one at a time with a tissue. McGeough reports “a personal charm that belied the caricature and his cutthroat reputation” – but his views of the world are predictably more chilling than charming. He stands by the use of suicide missions and rocket attacks on Israel, seeing negative publicity outside the region as a price worth paying for their impact on Israel’s sense of security. No lack of conviction here: he simply waves aside any notion of terror as a dehumanizing force. “Mishal would not accept that the numbing violence that Palestinians and Israelis inflicted on each other had a brutalising effect on all who were trapped in the conflict.” It surprised him, he tells McGeough, that Hamas’s decision to enter the electoral process in 2006 did not attract more plaudits from the West. As for how he might react if ever confronted, like Arafat before him, with a choice between ostracism and genuine engagement in talks with Israel, Mishal is studiously vague.
As first and foremost an investigative reporter, McGeough goes in for very little speculation of his own. He is happy, however, to quote anonymous senior figures in Jerusalem and Washington acknowledging Mishal’s central importance to any future peace process. Knowing how quickly events can move in the region, he closes with a few nods to the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, as of October 2008, this future did not include Israel’s devastating attack on Gaza, launched in December. Where this has left Mishal and the Hamas government in Gaza, no one really knows. Nor is it clear, yet, how far the new US administration is ready to soften its line on any Hamas involvement in a coalition government with Fatah: the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has only confirmed that a more flexible stance is being considered. No doubt briefings on this have been high on the agenda at the White House shortly, as part of President Obama’s preparations to host his first meeting, on May 18, with Israel’s newly elected prime minister – the politically born-again Binyamin Netanyahu.


Paul McGeough
KILL KHALID The failed Mossad assassination of Khalid Mishal and the rise of Hamas
477pp. Quartet. £25.
978 0 7043 7157 6
US: New Press. $26.95
978 1 59558 325 3