Finally, the safe houses were used as meeting places for an informer, or to interrogate a suspect who had the potential to be recruited as a “mole.” The only indication of their numbers has come from a former Mossad junior officer, Victor Ostrovsky. He claimed in 1991 there were “about 35,000 in the world; 20,000 of these operational and 15,000 sleepers. ‘Black’ agents are Arabs, while ‘white’ agents are non-Arabs. ‘Warning agents’ are strategic agents used to warn of war preparations: a doctor in a Syrian hospital who notices a large new supply of drugs and medicines arriving; a harbor employee who spots increased activity of warships.”
Some of these agents had received their first instructions in a safe house like the one that had been meticulously checked for bugs on that October afternoon. Later in the day, a handful of senior members of Israel’s intelligence community would meet around the apartment’s dining-room table to sanction an assassination that would have the full approval of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
In the three years he had been in that office, Rabin had attended a growing number of funerals for the victims of terrorist attacks, each time walking behind pallbearers and watching grown men weep as they listened to the committal prayer. With each death he had conducted “a funeral in my own heart.” Afterward he had again read the words from the prophet Ezekiel: “And the enemy shall know I am the Lord when I can lay down my vengeance on them.”
This was not the first time Rabin’s vengeance had been felt; Rabin had himself on more than one occasion participated in an act of revenge. Most notable had been the assassination of Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Khalil Al-Wazir, known throughout the Arab world and on Mossad’s Honeywell computer as Abu Jihad, the voice of holy war, who lived in Tunisia. In 1988, Rabin had been Israel’s defense minister when the decision was taken in the same apartment off Pinsker Street that Abu Jihad must die.
For two months Mossad agents conducted an exhaustive reconnaissance of Abu Jihad’s villa in the resort of Sidi Bou Said on the outskirts of Tunis. Access roads, points of entry, fence heights and types, windows, doors, locks, defenses, the routing employed by Abu Jihad’s guards: everything was monitored, checked, and checked again.
They watched Abu Jihad’s wife play with her children; they came alongside her as she shopped and went to the hairdresser. They listened to her husband’s phone calls, bugged their bedroom, listened to their lovemaking. They calculated distances from one room to another, found out what the neighbors did, when they were at home, and logged the makes, colors, and registrations of all the vehicles that came and went from the villa.
The rule for preparing an assassination Meir Amit had laid down all those years ago was constantly in their minds: Think like your target and only stop being him when you pull the trigger.
Satisfied, the team returned to Tel Aviv. For the next month they practiced their deadly mission in and around a Mossad safe house near Haifa that matched the target villa. From the time they would enter Abu Jihad’s house, it should take the unit just twenty-two seconds to murder him.
On April 16, 1988, the order was given for the operation to go ahead.
That night several Israeli air force Boeing 707s took off from a military base south of Tel Aviv. One carried Yitzhak Rabin and other high-ranking Israeli officers. Their aircraft was in constant touch by safe radio with the execution team already in position and led by an operative code-named “Sword.” The other aircraft was crammed with jamming and monitoring devices. Two more 707s acted as fuel tankers. High above the villa the fleet of aircraft circled, following every move on the ground through a secure radio frequency. A little after midnight on April 17 the airborne officers heard Abu Jihad had returned home in the Mercedes Yasser Arafat had given him as a wedding gift. Prior to that the hit team had set up sensitive listening devices able to hear everything inside the villa.
From his vantage point near the villa, Sword announced into his lip mike that he could hear Abu Jihad climbing the stairs, going to his bedroom, whispering to his wife, tiptoeing to an adjoining bedroom to kiss his sleeping son, before finally going to his study on the ground floor. The details were picked up by the electronic warfare plane—the Israeli version of an American AWAC and relayed to Rabin’s command aircraft. At 12:17 A.M. he ordered: “Go!”
Outside the villa, Abu Jihad’s driver was asleep in the Mercedes. One of Sword’s men ran forward, pressed a silenced Beretta into his ear, and pulled the trigger. The driver slumped dead across the front seat.
