Poisoned
toothpaste and exploding phones: Israel linked to 2,700 assassination
operations in 70 years
BLACK CUBE was hired by Harvey Weinstein to character assassinate
American actors!
A new book also strongly suggests
that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the longtime
Palestinian leader, an act its officials have consistently denied
Poisoned toothpaste that
takes a month to end its target’s life. Armed drones. Exploding
cell phones. Spare tires with remote-control bombs. Assassinating
enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers of Islamic holy
men.
A new book chronicles these
techniques and asserts that Israel has carried out at least 2,700
assassination operations in its 70 years of existence. While many
failed, they add up to far more than any other Western country,
the book says.
Ronen Bergman, the
intelligence correspondent for Yediot Aharonot newspaper,
persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell
their stories, some using their real names. The result is the
first comprehensive look at Israel’s use of state-sponsored
killings.
Based on 1,000 interviews
and thousands of documents, and running more than 600 pages, “Rise
and Kill First” makes the case that Israel has used assassination
in the place of war, killing half a dozen Iranian nuclear
scientists, for instance, rather than launching a military attack.
It also strongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to
kill Yasser Arafat, the longtime Palestinian leader, an act its
officials have consistently denied.
Bergman writes that Arafat’s
death in 2004 fit a pattern and had advocates. But he steps back
from flatly asserting what happened, saying that Israeli military
censorship prevents him from revealing what – or if – he knows.
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The book’s title comes from
the ancient Jewish Talmud admonition, “If someone comes to kill
you, rise up and kill him first.” Bergman says a huge percentage
of the people he interviewed cited that passage as justification
for their work. So does an opinion by the military’s lawyer
declaring such operations to be legitimate acts of war.
Despite the many interviews,
including with former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert,
Bergman, the author of several books, says the Israeli secret
services sought to interfere with his work, holding a meeting in
2010 on how to disrupt his research and warning former Mossad
employees not to speak with him.
He says that while the U.S.
has tighter constraints on its agents than does Israel, President
George W. Bush adopted many Israeli techniques after the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and President Barack Obama launched
several hundred targeted killings.
If someone comes to kill
you, rise up and kill him first
-
“The command-and-control
systems, the war rooms, the methods of information gathering and
the technology of the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now
serve the Americans and their allies were all in large part
developed in Israel,” Bergman writes.
The book gives a textured
history of the personalities and tactics of the various secret
services. In the 1970s, a new head of operations for Mossad opened
hundreds of commercial companies overseas with the idea that they
might be useful one day. For example, Mossad created a Middle
Eastern shipping business that, years later, came in handy in
providing cover for a team in the waters off Yemen.
There have been plenty of
failures. After a Palestinian terrorist group killed Israeli
athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel sent its agents to
kill the perpetrators – and shot more than one misidentified man.
There were also successful operations that did more harm than good
to Israel’s policy goals, Bergman notes.
Bergman raises moral and
legal concerns provoked by state-sponsored killing, including the
existence of separate legal systems for secret agents and the rest
of Israel. But he presents the operations, for the most part, as
achieving their aims. While many credit the barrier Israel built
along and inside the West Bank with stopping assaults on Israeli
citizens in the early 2000s, he argues that what made the
difference was “a massive number of targeted killings of terrorist
operatives.”
One of Bergman’s most
important sources was Meir Dagan, a recent head of Mossad for
eight years who died in early 2016. Toward the end of his career,
Dagan fell out with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu partly over
launching a military attack on Iran. Netanyahu said intelligence
techniques such as selling the country faulty parts for its
reactors – which Israel and the U.S. were doing – weren’t enough.
Dagan argued back that these
techniques, especially assassinations, would do the job. As
Bergman quotes him saying, “In a car, there are 25,000 parts on
average. Imagine if 100 of them are missing. It would be very hard
to make it go. On the other hand, sometimes it’s most effective to
kill the driver, and that’s that.”