In the case of Gerald Bull they knocked on his front door late in the evening. The remaining two men perform the execution. Another is the “transporter”, to get the team safely away from the killing area. His task is to keep tabs on the victim’s movements. The usual composition of a hit team is four. Their roll-call of Mission Successful includes Fathi Shkaki, the leader of Islamic Jihad, and Gerald Bull, the rogue Canadian investor of Saddam’s supergun. A nerve agent delivered by an aerosol or injection,” explained Victor Ostrovsky, a former member of kidon. Strangulation with a cheese-cutter if the victim is to be killed at night.
“They are taught how to use the weapon appropriate for the target. They had been sent to a special camp in the Negev desert. The kidon team had passed the two years course at the Mossad training school at Henzelia, near Tel Aviv. Meir Amit had said when he was Mossad’s chief: The link between intelligence work and sexual entrapment is as old as spying itself. To be ever ready to sleep with someone to obtain vital information. The women had learned how to use their sex. Neviof, how to break into an office, a bedroom, or any other given target and plant listening bugs – or a bomb. They had learned how to memorise fibres – precise physical descriptions of people. They also understood the closed language of their world. They dressed the part they looked the part. Between them, they spoke Swahili and other dialects. They could pass for Arabs or for Indian traders. The team chosen to go to Mombasa had local language skills. An arsenal of guns: short-barrel pistols, sniper rifles with a mile killing range. Explosives no bigger than a throat lozenge capable fo blowing off a person’s head. They would use a small laboratory of poisons, sealed in vials until the moment came to strike. But the kidon would find the men behind the Mombasa outrage and kill them. It might take months – as it had with avenging the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The kidon would kill the planners of the massacre after they had traced them to their lair – wherever it was. Their sole job in Mombasa was to find and kill the perpetrators of the massacre: those behind the three bombers who had gone to their deaths laughing. They were the men and women of kidon, Mossad’s ultra-secret assassination unit. They had their own aircraft, their own pilots. The team who would “roll the dice” travelled separately – as they always did. Detectors that could detect a sliver of metal deep inside a corpse – metal that would show where the explosives came from. They would sift and search the wreckage, using sophisticated equipment to do so. Every person with proven field experience was on a plane to Kenya within an hour of the massacre. The same for the Germans,” a senior intelligence man in Tel Aviv told me.īut for Meir Dagan it was time to roll the dice. MI6 for a lead back to a threat to Britain. Other intelligence services would be trawling through the evidence looking for clues that would fit their agendas. There would only be lip-service support from the authorities on the ground. It would be working 1,500 miles away in a hostile environment. “Mossad would not be operating in its own backyard against suicide bombers. They, too, were ready to roll the dice.ĭagan, only the tenth man to head Mossad and bear the title of memune – “first among equals in Hebrew” – reminded his listeners sat on their plastic-form chairs what Meir Amit had once said. That was the deal those in the canteen had accepted when they were recruited. But he would not hesitate to expose them to death – if it was for the greater good of Israel. Ways of killing that not even the Mafia, the former KGB or China’s secret service use. He would allow them to use proscribed nerve toxins. He would protect them with every means he knew – legal or illegal. But there will always be brave men ready to roll the dice,” he said.ĭagan, his listeners in the canteen knew, was cast in the same mould.
Sometimes, out on a mission, the dice is against you.
We trained them better than any other secret service. Some of those agents had one thing in common. Each name engraved on the concrete was of an agent who had been killed while trying to destroy Israel’s enemies. We spoke as he walked me through Mossad’s own unique memorial in Tel Aviv to the dead – a concrete maze shaped in the form of a brain.