And so they flew south in their own plane to Mombasa. Mossad agents from Lagos, Nigeria—from where Israel gets the bulk of its oil—were there to support the team from Tel Aviv. Other
Dagan’s men were polite to officers from the CIA, MI6, and other European services, and paid lip service to the atrocity’s having been committed within Kenya’s jurisdiction. But for the team, the dead and injured were Israelis. That made it their job.
In Tel Aviv, Dagan waited. He knew his operatives had melted into the region’s multiethnic population.
To this day, no one knows for certain what success the Mossad team had. But sources in a number of other intelligence services say it did kill several suspected terrorists and dumped their bodies in crocodile-infested swamps. If so, that would fit into Mossad’s way of doing things. The reality of their world is a different one from that of others.
And while his agents carried out their ruthless safari against al-Qaeda, Meir Dagan was immersing himself in the struggle against another, equally fearsome enemy: the suicide bombers who continued to terrorize Israel in the closing weeks of 2002.
The first suicide bomber had struck in Israel on a warm spring day in April 1993. Others soon followed, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Men, women, and children had died on buses, in shopping malls and cafés, and on the way to school. Each death had one common purpose: to wreck any hope of bringing peace to the region. Most of the bombers had come from a terrorist group known as the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. For Israelis, it was more feared than Hezbollah and Hamas.
Each potential bomber was recommended to the Martyrs Jihad Committee. So far the combined resources of Israel’s intelligence community had failed to locate its members. All that was known was that they communicated important decisions through handwritten notes.
Long before a candidate was approached, careful checks were made into the family background. A critical decision in the selection process was the religious standing of any bomber. The imam, the prayer leader of the mosque where a candidate worshiped, was consulted on how well the person knew the Koran, how regular was his attendance at Friday prayers. There were other preconditions before a person was accepted for martyrdom. No bomber was selected who was the sole wage earner in the family, if two brothers volunteered, only one was chosen.
Having passed those basic requirements, a candidate was invited to meet the Martyrs Jihad Committee. These meetings were often held in public places, like crowded cafés, to reduce the risk of electronic surveillance.
The first meeting focused on a candidate’s religious knowledge. Next he was questioned about his political commitment. If his answers were satisfactory, he was placed on the list of suicide bombers. No one knew its size. But it was believed to number hundreds.
Meir Dagan had found the details in Mossad files. But he wanted to know more. And so, in every spare moment, he had dug deeper into the close world of the bombers and the men who prepared them.
The preparations for martyrdom were conducted in a mosque, usually in a back room away from prying eyes. The iman was assisted by a member of the Martyrs Jihad Committee. They spent up to eight hours a day with a candidate, the time divided between silent prayer and reading portions aloud from the Koran.
An important task at this stage was to give the candidate repeated assurances, that on the Day of Judgment, he or she—for women were eligible to become bombers—would be allowed, upon entering paradise, to choose seventy relatives to also enter; that in heaven a male bomber would have at his disposal seventy-two houris, the celestial virgins who are reputed in Islamic folklore to live there.
These promises were interspersed with checks to see that a bomber’s belief in martyrdom never wavered. The imam and his assistant repeated time and again the same exhortation. “You die to achieve Allah’s satisfaction. You have been chosen by Allah because he has seen in you all that is good.”
The first sign to a bomber that he was about to go to his death came when he was joined by two “advisers” who replaced the assistant. Older men, steeped in Islamic extreme dogma, their task was to ensure that a bomber did not waver in his readiness to die. They focused on the “glory” waiting in paradise of being finally in the presence of Allah, of being allowed to meet the prophet Muhammad.
