On July 31, 1997, the day after two Hamas suicide bombers killed 15 and injured another 157 people in a Jerusalem marketplace, Mossad chief Danny Yatom attended a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The prime minister had just come from an emotional press conference at which he had promised that he would never rest until those who planned the suicide bombings were no longer a threat.
Publicly, Netanyahu had appeared calm and resolute, his responses to questions measured and magisterial; Hamas would not escape retribution, but what form that would take was not a matter for discussion. This was the “Bibi” from Netanyahu’s days on CNN during the Iraqi war, when he had earned repeated praise for his authoritative assessments of Saddam Hussein’s responses and how they were viewed in Israel.
But on that stifling day, away from the cameras and surrounded only by Yatom and other senior intelligence officers and his own political advisers, Netanyahu offered a very different image. He was neither cool nor analytical. Instead, in the crowded conference room adjoining his office, he frequently interrupted to shout he was going to “get those Hamas bastards if it’s the last thing I do.”
He added, according to one of those present, that “you are here to tell me how this is going to happen. And I don’t want to read in the newspapers anything about ‘Bibi’s’ revenge. This is about justice—just retribution.”
The agenda had been set.
Yatom, well used to the mercurial mood swings of the prime minister, sat silently across the table as Netanyahu continued to bluster. “I want their heads. I want them dead. I don’t care how it’s done. I just want it done. And I want it done sooner rather than later.”
Tension deepened when Netanyahu demanded that Yatom provide a list of all Hamas leaders and their present whereabouts. No prime minister had ever before asked for sensitive operational details at such an early stage. More than one person in the room thought that “Bibi was sending a signal he was going to be hands-on for this one.”
It deepened the unease among some Mossad officers that the service was being forced to come too close to Netanyahu. Perhaps sensing this, Yatom told the prime minister that he would provide the list later. Instead, the Mossad chief suggested that it was “time to look at the practical side of things.” Locating the Hamas leaders would be “like searching for individual rats in a Beirut sewer.”
Once more Netanyahu erupted. He didn’t want excuses; he wanted action. And he wanted it to start “here and now.”
After the meeting ended, several intelligence officers were left with the impression that Bibi Netanyahu had crossed the fine line where political expediency ended and operational requirements took over. There could not have been a man in the room who did not realize that Netanyahu badly needed a public relations coup to convince the public the act-tough-on-terrorism policy that had brought him into office was not just empty rhetoric. He had also gone from one scandal to another, each time barely wriggling clear by leaving others to carry the blame. His popularity was at an alltime low. His personal life was all over the press. He badly needed to show he was in charge. To deliver the head of a Hamas leader was one surefire way.
A senior Israeli intelligence officer undoubtedly spoke for many when he said:
“While we all agreed there could be no objection to the principle that to cut off the head kills the snake, it was the time frame which was our concern. All Bibi’s talk about ‘action now’ was pure bullshit. Any operation of that nature requires careful planning. Bibi wanted results as if this was a computer game, or one of those old action-hero movies he likes to watch. But it just doesn’t work like that in the real world.”
Yatom ordered a full search of every Arab country and sent katsas into Gaza and the West Bank to discover more about the whereabouts of the shadowy figures who control Hamas. Throughout August 1997, he was summoned several times to the prime minister’s office to report on his progress. There was none. The Israeli intelligence community was rife with accounts of how the prime minister had demanded that Yatom put more men into the field and had begun to hint that if he didn’t see results soon, he might have to take “other actions.” If Netanyahu had intended this to be a clumsy threat to his Mossad chief, it did not work. Yatom simply said he was “doing everything possible.” The unspoken implication was that if the prime minister wanted to fire him, that was his prerogative; but in the public debate that would inevitably follow, there would be questions asked about Netanyahu’s own role. But the prime minister continued to press for the death of a Hamas leader—and he wanted it sooner rather than later.
