Israel Matzav

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh: What went wrong?

One year ago next week, Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was liquidated in a luxury hotel room in Dubai. Although the 'crime' has never been solved, most of the world believes that Mabhouh was killed by the Mossad. Ronen Bergman, one of Israel's best known political and military analysts, has a blow-by-blow description of the entire operation here (Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan). Here are a few highlights.

It was at that point, approximately a week after his death, that the Hamas leadership in Damascus contacted Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, chief of the Dubai Police, and informed him that they believed Al-Mabhouh had been killed by the Mossad. According to European intelligence sources, Tamim's initial reaction was to rage at them on the phone, verbally abusing senior Hamas officials for using Dubai as a battleground for espionage and terrorism. "Take yourselves and your bank accounts and your weapons and your forged fucking passports and get out of my country," he reportedly shouted. Once he calmed down, though, a cursory review of the hotel-security footage from the cameras outside room 230 at the time of Al-Mabhouh's death convinced Tamim that he needed to open an investigation immediately.

So it may well be that the authorities first arrived at the conclusion that Al-Mabhouh was assassinated and only then revisited and adjusted their pathology findings so as to avoid admitting to the world that, despite their massive investment in the state-of-the-art security systems that blanket the country, they were unable to say with any certainty how Al-Mabhouh had died. In a press conference held on February 15, Tamim announced that Al-Mabhouh had been killed by a hit squad and announced that their forensic tests indicated that he'd been suffocated. Lab tests, he said, were still under way. Nearly two weeks later, on February 28, he announced the discovery of the exact cause of death. That Al-Mabhouh's body was reportedly sent back to Syria on January 28, however, and buried after a big funeral procession on January 29, calls into question these findings.

The rest of the investigation that Tamim conducted, however, was meticulous and efficient in a way that no one, least of all the Mossad, had expected. A source close to the investigation said that the moment Tamim concluded that Al-Mabhouh had not died of natural causes, he ordered his people to search Dubai's extensive databases and identify everyone who had arrived in the emirate shortly before the killing and left soon after. This list was then cross-referenced against the names of visitors who had been in Dubai back in February, March, June, and November of 2009, all the times of Al-Mabhouh's previous visits. The short list that emerged was then checked against hotel registers, and footage from hotel security cameras at the times these individuals checked in made it possible to put a face to each name. Tamim then compared these visual identifications to the footage from the Al Bustan Hotel at the time of Al-Mabhouh's death, which gave him the names of the assassins. And searching databases of financial transactions gave him the identities of the rest of the team, all of which Dubai authorities posted online for the world to see.

Tamim also turned out to be extremely media-savvy. He presided over well-planned press conferences, carefully doling out information in a manner guaranteed to keep viewers—especially in the Arab world—coming back for more. He publicly called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of Meir Dagan, whom he challenged to "be a man" and take responsibility for the assassination. More realistically, perhaps, he called for international arrest warrants for all members of the hit squad, which caused considerable diplomatic embarrassment for Israel. When asked by an interviewer what the hit team's biggest mistake was, Tamim answered that the presence of two men waiting for hours in the lobby in tennis gear with uncovered rackets was so bizarre that it instantly raised suspicion.

The laughable attempts of the Mossad operatives to disguise their appearance made for good television coverage, but the more fundamental errors committed by the team had less to do with cloak-and-dagger disguises than with a kind of arrogance that seems to have pervaded the planning and execution of the mission.

Despite the fact that Dubai is a hostile environment—a distant Arab state with ties to Iran—many details of the mission suggest the Mossad treated it as if they were operating inside a base country. The use of Payoneer cards is one obvious example. For the most part, prepaid debit cards are only used domestically within the United States, and while Payoneer does issue debit cards that are valid internationally, these are relatively rare. That several of the team members were using the same type of unusual card issued by the same company—one whose CEO, Yuval Tal, is a veteran of an elite Israeli Defense Force commando unit—gave the Dubai police a common denominator to connect the various members of the team.

It has also become apparent that in order to avoid calling one another's cell phones directly, the operatives used a dedicated private switchboard in Austria. Any operative trying to reach a colleague—whether in the hotel down the street or at the command post in Israel—dialed one of a handful of numbers in Austria, from which the call was then rerouted to its destination. But since dozens of calls were made to and from this short list of Austrian numbers over a period of less than two days, the moment that the cover of a single operative was blown and his cell phone records became available to the authorities, all others who called or received calls from the same numbers were at risk of being identified.

It gets worse. One of the most serious mistakes made by the planners of the operation—certainly the one that caused the greatest embarrassment to the Mossad and to Israel—involved the use of forged foreign identities.

When it comes to false identities and false passports, the Mossad has a unique problem, one that most Western intelligence services do not face. When the CIA or the British SIS (or MI6, as it is commonly known) send an operative into the field, they can usually provide him or her with a valid U.S. or U.K. passport issued in whatever false name and identity the individual will be using. But an Israeli spy cannot use an Israeli passport, since the most important targets for Israeli espionage are in countries that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. For this reason, the need for foreign documentation has always been an acute one in the Mossad, which has historically resolved this problem by forging what it needed. Naturally, this is done without the authorization of the countries involved.

Whenever the Mossad is found out, as has happened from time to time, a major diplomatic scandal erupts.

...

What the blown identities of the operatives illustrate more than anything is the now seemingly insurmountable problem posed by twenty-first-century counterespionage systems. False identities and cover stories are no longer any match for well-placed security cameras, effective passport control, and computer software that can almost instantly track communications and financial transactions.

Why did the Mossad permit things to go so wrong in Dubai? In a word, the answer is leadership. Because Dagan refashioned the Mossad in his own image, and because he drove out anyone who was willing to question his decisions, there was no one in the agency to tell him that the Dubai operation was badly conceived and badly planned. They simply did not believe that a minnow in the world of intelligence services such as Dubai would be any match for Israel's Caesarea fighters. As one very senior German intelligence expert told me: "The Israelis' problem has always been that they underestimate everyone—the Arabs, the Iranians, Hamas. They are always the smartest and think they can hoodwink everyone all the time. A little more respect for the other side—even if you think he is a dumb Arab or a German without imagination—and a little more modesty would have saved us all from this embarrassing entanglement."

Read the whole thing. It's a great story.

Labels: Dubai, Inspector Tamim, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Meir Dagan, Mossad

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:22 PM