Son of Hamas (21 page)

My father came home and shared what he had learned with me. We were now privy to information about a plot to assassinate one of Israel’s highest-ranking officials—the foreign minister. The ramifications were chilling.

Obviously, there was nothing to do but place a call to Abdullah’s contact. Marwan Barghouti didn’t want Abdullah to use his phone, and my father didn’t want him to use his either. We all knew that the Israelis would be listening, and neither man wanted to be connected with the terrorist operations.

So my father sent me out to buy a disposable cell phone on which we could make the call before throwing the phone into the trash. I bought the phone, wrote down the number, and called it in to the Shin Bet so they could trace the call.

Abdullah called his contact in Nablus and told him to stop whatever he was doing until he heard otherwise. As soon as Israeli intelligence learned what had been planned, they put extra security on every member of the Knesset and the cabinet. Finally, after a couple of months, things began to calm down a little.

In the meantime, Marwan continued to work toward Abdullah’s release, not only because Abdullah had provided him with bombs, but also because he wanted him free to kill more Israelis. In addition to being one of the leaders of the Second Intifada, Marwan Barghouti was also a terrorist who was personally shooting soldiers and settlers.

Eventually, the PA did release Abdullah Barghouti. The Shin Bet was furious.

Then everything got really crazy.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Game

Summer 2001–Spring 2002

On August 27, 2001, an Israeli helicopter fired two rockets into the office of Abu Ali Mustafa, secretary-general of the PFLP. One of the rockets struck him as he sat at his desk.

The following day, more than fifty thousand outraged Palestinians, along with Mustafa’s family, attended his funeral. Mustafa had opposed the peace process and the Oslo Accords. Nevertheless, he was a moderate like my father, and we had gone together to hear him lecture many times.

Israel credited him with nine car-bomb attacks, but it wasn’t true. Like my dad, he was a political leader, not a military leader. Israel had absolutely no evidence against him. I knew that for a fact. But it didn’t matter. They assassinated Mustafa anyway—perhaps in retaliation for the carnage at the Sbarro restaurant, or perhaps because of the Dolphinarium massacre. More likely, they simply wanted to send a message to Yasser Arafat. In addition to his role in the PFLP, Mustafa was also a member of the PLO’s Executive Committee.

Two weeks later, on September 11, nineteen Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four jetliners in the United States. Two crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. Another crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. And the fourth went down in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. All told, 2,973 people died in addition to the terrorists themselves.

As the news media struggled to keep up with the unbelievable events continuing to unfold, I sat with the rest of the world watching again and again the reports of the Twin Towers collapsing, white ash covering Church Street like a February blizzard. I felt a rush of shame when I saw the footage of Palestinian children celebrating in the streets of Gaza.

The attack reduced the Palestinian cause to ashes, too, as the world shouted with one voice against terrorism—any terrorism, for any cause. In the weeks to follow, the Shin Bet began searching for lessons to be found in the rubble of what would come to be known simply as 9/11.

Why had the U.S. intelligence services not been able to prevent the disaster? For one thing, they operated independently and competitively. For another, they relied mostly on technology and rarely collaborated with terrorists. Those tactics may have been fine in the Cold War, but it’s pretty tough to combat fanatical ideals with technology.

Israeli intelligence, on the other hand, relied mostly on human resources; had countless spies in mosques, Islamic organizations, and leadership roles; and had no problem recruiting even the most dangerous terrorists. They knew they had to have eyes and ears on the inside, along with minds that understood motives and emotions and that could connect the dots.

America understood neither Islamic culture nor its ideology. That, combined with open borders and lax security, made it a much softer target than Israel. Even so, although my role as a spy enabled Israel to take hundreds of terrorists off the streets, our work couldn’t begin to put an end to terrorism—even in a tiny country like Israel.

About a month later, on October 17, four PFLP gunmen walked into the Jerusalem Hyatt Hotel and assassinated Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi. They said it was revenge for the Mustafa assassination. Despite his seemingly apolitical portfolio, Ze’evi was an obvious target. He publicly advocated a policy of making life so miserable for the three million people in the West Bank and Gaza that they would voluntarily move to other Arab countries. Mixing his metaphors, Ze’evi reportedly once told an Associated Press reporter that some Palestinians were like “lice” who should be stopped like a “cancer spreading within us.”
8

Tit for tat, the reciprocal killing continued. An eye for an eye—and there was no shortage of eyes.

For several years now, I had worked hard to gather every scrap of information I could to help the Shin Bet stop the bloodbath. We continued to keep an eye on Muhammad Jamal al-Natsheh, Saleh Talahme, and the other three guys I had stashed away after their release from the PA prison compound. They changed locations several times, and only Saleh kept in touch with me. But we tracked the others through their families and by monitoring calls on public telephones.

Saleh trusted me, always told me where he was living, and frequently invited me to visit. As I got to know him, I found that I really liked Saleh. He was an amazing man—a brilliant scholar, graduating at the top of his electrical engineering class and one of the best students in the history of Birzeit University. To him, I was the son of Hassan Yousef, a good friend and a good listener.

I spent a lot of time with Saleh; his wife, Majeda; and their five children (two boys and three girls). Their older son was named Mosab, like me. Majeda and the kids had come to Ramallah from Hebron to spend a little time with Saleh in his apartment hideout. I was still working on my degree at the time, and one evening, Saleh asked me how school was going.

“Any problems with anything?”

“Yeah, Economical Statistics.”

“Okay, tomorrow you bring the book and we’ll sit down together and study. It will be our own little class.”

When I told Loai and others in the Shin Bet about it, they were pleased. They thought that these tutoring sessions would make a good cover for intelligence gathering.

But it wasn’t entirely a cover. Saleh and I were becoming friends. He taught me, and I actually did very well on the exam a couple of weeks later. I loved him, and I loved his children. I often ate with the family, and over time, a strong bond began to form among all of us. It was a strange relationship because I knew that by now Saleh had become a very dangerous guy. But then again, so had I.

* * *

One night in March 2002, I was sitting at home when two men came to the door.

Suspicious, I asked, “How can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Sheikh Hassan Yousef. It’s important.”

“Tell me why it’s important.”

They explained that they were two of the five suicide bombers who had just arrived from Jordan. Their contact had been arrested, and they needed a safe place to stay.

“Okay,” I said. “You came to the right place.”

I asked what they needed.

“We have a car full of explosives and bombs, and we need someplace safe to leave it.”

Great,
I thought,
what am I going to do with a car stuffed with explosives?
I had to think quickly. I decided to keep their car in the garage beside our house. It was obviously not one of my brighter ideas, but I was forced to think on my feet.

“Okay, here’s some money,” I said, emptying my wallet. “Go find a place to stay, get back to me here tonight, and we’ll figure out what to do.”

After they left, I called Loai, and to my relief, the Shin Bet came and took the car away.

All five suicide bombers returned a short time later. “Okay,” I told them, “from now on, I am your connection to Hamas. I will provide your targets, locations, transportation, everything you need. Do not talk to anyone else, or you might be dead before you have a chance to kill any Israelis.”

This situation constituted an extraordinary windfall in terms of intelligence. Up to now, no one ever knew about suicide bombers before they detonated their explosives. Suddenly, five of them had shown up at my door with a carload of bombs. Thirty minutes after I told the Shin Bet their location, Prime Minister Sharon authorized their assassinations.

“You can’t do that,” I told Loai.

“What!”

“I know they are terrorists, and they are about to blow themselves up. But those five men are ignorant. They don’t know what they’re doing. You can’t kill them. If you kill them, this is my last operation.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“No, but you know how I work. I made an exception once with Halawa, and you remember how that ended. I will not be part of killing people.”

“What option is there?”

“Arrest them,” I said, though even as I spoke the words, I knew it was a crazy idea. We had the car and the bombs, but these guys still had their belts. If a soldier got within a hundred yards of their one-room flat, they would detonate the belts and take everybody with them.

Even if we managed to get them out alive without anybody else getting killed, they would be sure to mention my name to their interrogators, and I would be burned for sure. Self-preservation told me the safest thing for all concerned was just to let a helicopter fire a couple of missiles into their apartment and be done with it.

But my conscience was being rewired. Though not yet a Christian, I was really trying to follow the ethical teachings of Jesus. Allah had no problem with murder; in fact, he insisted on it. But Jesus held me to a much higher standard. Now I found I couldn’t kill even a terrorist.

At the same time, I had become far too valuable to the Shin Bet for them to risk losing me. They weren’t happy about it, but they finally agreed to call off the assassination.

“We have to know what is going on inside that room,” they told me. I headed over to the apartment under the pretext of taking the bombers a few pieces of simple furniture. What they didn’t know was that we had placed bugs inside the furniture that allowed us to hear every word they said. Together, we listened in as they discussed who would go first, second, third, etc. Everyone wanted to be first, so they didn’t have to watch their friends die. It was eerie. We were listening to dead men talking.

On March 16, security forces troops moved into position. The bombers were in the center of Ramallah, so the IDF couldn’t bring in tanks. Because the troops had to go in on foot, the operation was very dangerous. I followed the events from my place, as Loai talked to me on the phone and kept me informed of everything that was going on.

“They are going to sleep.”

We all waited until sounds of snoring came across the monitors.

The greatest risk was waking them too soon. The troops had to get through the door and reach the beds before any bomber could move a muscle.

A soldier fixed an explosive charge to the door as we listened to the monitors for the slightest noise, the slightest interruption in the snoring. Then they gave the signal.

The door exploded. Special forces troops rushed into the small apartment, catching all but one of the men. He grabbed a gun and jumped through the window—he was dead before he hit the ground.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone except me. As soon as they got the guys into the jeep, one of them mentioned my name, exposing me as a collaborator.

My worst fears had been realized. I was burned. Now what?

Loai had the solution. The Shin Bet simply deported the guy back to Jordan, sending his friends to prison. So while he was home free, having fun with his family, the other three would assume that he had been the traitor, not me. It was brilliant.

I had gotten away with it one more time, though just barely. But it was clear I was pushing my luck a little too hard.

* * *

One day, I received a message from Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, thanking me for the work I was doing for them. He said he had opened all the files in Israel’s war on terrorism and found the Green Prince in every one. While this was flattering, it was also a warning. I recognized it, and Loai recognized it. If I continued the way I was going, I would end up dead. The trail out there was too long. Somebody was sure to stumble across it. Somehow I needed to be sanitized.

My stubborn refusal to allow the five suicide bombers to be killed had compromised my situation in a big way. Even though everybody believed that the bomber who had been sent back to Jordan was responsible for the arrests, they also knew that Israel doesn’t hesitate to pick up anyone suspected of providing suicide bombers with help. And I had helped them a lot. So why hadn’t I been arrested?

A week after the bomber arrests, the Israeli security team came up with two ideas that could save me from being burned. First, they could arrest me and put me back into prison. But I was afraid that would be the same thing as a death sentence for my father, who would no longer have me to protect him from Israeli assassination attempts.

“The other option is for us to play the game.”

“Game? What game?”

Loai explained that we needed to trigger a high-profile event, something big enough to convince all of Palestine that Israel wanted me arrested or dead. In order to be persuasive, it couldn’t be staged. It had to be real. The Israeli Defense Forces had to really attempt to capture me. And this meant the Shin Bet had to manipulate and deceive the IDF—their own people.

The Shin Bet gave the IDF only a few hours to prepare for this major operation. As the son of Hassan Yousef, I was a very dangerous young man, they warned, because I had a tight relationship to suicide bombers and might be armed with explosives. They said they had good intelligence that I would come to my father’s house that night to visit my mother. I would stay only a short time, and I would be armed with an M16.