Sloppy By Pro Standards, But Hey...It's Still A Dead Terrorist

WIRED takes a look at the assassination of a Hamas offical in Dubai from last month:

The elaborate assassination of a Hamas official last month in Dubai has all the earmarks of a Mossad operation and was likely sanctioned by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, says a former case officer in the Israeli intelligence service.

Victor Ostrovsky, who wrote a controversial book about his four years with the Mossad in the 1980s, says that many of the details in the surveillance video of an alleged 11-person assassination team indicate that the operation was likely rushed, and that the use of aliases belonging to Israeli citizens is a common tactic of the Mossad, though generally not for assassination plots.

The video and assassination have sparked extensive debate in the media, inside and outside Israel, over, among other things, the alleged assassin team’s use of forged passports from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Germany. At least seven of the passports used the names of residents in Israel who hold dual citizenship in other countries and who say they were not part of the operation. They are now concerned that they could be targeted for revenge by Hamas or others. Another three aliases are similar to the names of Israeli citizens, but they have different middle names.

There have been reports that some of the forged passports were being used for travel for at least six months prior to the assassination in Dubai.

The operation has resulted in diplomatic fallout for Israel, with British authorities demanding to know why UK passports were used in the plot.

Ostrovsky told Threat Level it was common during his time in the Mossad to ask permission of foreign-born Israelis to use their passports for intelligence operations.

“When you come to live in Israel and you’re a dual citizen, a lot of times you’re asked for the use of your passport,” he said. “In the 90s they used to ask. Especially if you’re in the military and you’re an officer and you have dual citizenship.”

But then, he says, there came a time when people began to say no “and they started to do that without asking [permission].”

Ostrovsky said, however, that it was highly unusual to use the name of an Israeli for a kill operation such as this one. Instead, such passports might be used for an undercover Israeli operative in the United Kingdom posing as a businessman traveling to Syria for a week or so for business.

“It’s not supposed to be used in operations like this. It’s not a throwaway. It’s not something you put at risk,” he said. “Having used it this way shows that whoever did it was really in a rush.”

Ostrovsky says he worked for the Mossad between 1982 and 1986. He spent two and a half years in training, after which he worked as a case officer out of Israel. His job was to enter surrounding countries, such as Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and Jordan to recruit local spies for the Mossad. Although he was never involved in assassination operations, he says he knows how they were conducted, and the Dubai operation matches Mossad tactics.

The Israeli government has acknowledged Ostrovsky’s work for the Mossad and tried to halt publication of his book By Way of Deception.

Earlier this week, Dubai authorities released extensive footage from surveillance cameras that allegedly shows the movements of a professional 11-person assassination team in the hours before and after a top Hamas leader was killed in January in a hotel room. The government has since indicated that at least 17 people were involved in the operation, though it has only released the aliases used by 11 of them.

The footage, taken from cameras at the Dubai airport and several luxury hotels, follows the activities of 10 men and one woman as they arrived in Dubai on various European passports and moved among hotels and a shopping center, even changing disguises at one point, during the hours before Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed.

Al-Mabhouh, 48, was a founder of Hamas’ military wing and was also said to be a liaison for smuggling weapons from Iran to Gaza. According to the Jerusalem Post, two weeks before he was killed he admitted in an interview later broadcast on Al Jazeera that he was responsible for kidnapping and murdering two Israeli soldiers in 1989. He said he had disguised himself as an Orthodox woman to conduct that attack.

Al-Mabhouh had survived at least three other assassination attempts, according to statements his family made to CNN.

He was found dead in room 230 at the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel on January 20. The door on al-Mabhouh’s room was latched and chained from the inside. An initial report indicated that he died from sudden high blood pressure in the brain, but his family told CNN that there were signs of electric shock on the back of his knees, behind his ears on his genitals and on his chest. They say he was also smothered.

An investigation into hotel records and surveillance tapes uncovered the suspicious activities of a group of Westerners who were in the hotel at the time, most of whom are seen in the video wearing baseball caps to shield their faces. Members of the group staked out al-Mabhouh’s room on the hotel’s second floor, met clandestinely in a shopping mall and other locations, donned wigs and other disguises and left the hotel briskly after the deed was done. Dubai police have indicated that they have retinal scans of the suspects, that were taken at the Dubai airport as part of routine passenger scanning.

Investigators believe the assassins tried to reprogram the electronic lock on al-Mabhouh’s door to gain entry. Some news reports say the assassins entered the room while the victim was out and waited for him to return, while others say they were thwarted from entering the room when a hotel guest stepped off the elevator on al-Mabhouh’s floor. They then had to resort to tricking al-Mabhouh into opening his door to them after he returned.

Interpol has issued wanted notices for the 11 suspects. Dubai authorities have blamed the Mossad for the attack and have called on Interpol to issue a “red notice” for Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman told an Israeli radio channel that “There is no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad and not some other intelligence service or country up to some mischief.”

Ostrovsky told Threat Level that there’s little doubt for him that the Mossad is behind the plot.

He said the number of people involved in the operation indicates that it may have been put together in a rush.

“The less time you have to plan and carry out an operation, the more people you need to carry it out [on the ground],” he said. “The more time you have to plan . . . there’s a lot of things you eliminate.”

If you know that you can stop the elevator in the basement, for example, you don’t then need people guarding the elevator lobby on the victim’s floor to make sure no one steps off the elevator, he said.

He says it was likely that the Mossad’s second in command for operations was in the hotel or the area when the assassination took place and has gone unnoticed by the Dubai authorities.

Dubai police identified one of the team members named “Peter Elvinger” as the leader of the operation. Elvinger was caught on tape at the Dubai airport shortly after arriving the morning of the assassination. He left the airport terminal, then came back in to speak with someone briefly. Shortly after the victim checked into his hotel room, Elvinger booked the room across from the victim’s room. But he never entered the room. Instead he gave the key to other team members, who used the room to organize their attack. Elvinger also left Dubai an hour before the killing occurred.

Ostrovsky, however, said the real leader of the operation “would be one of the last ones to leave” and would not have departed before the operation was completed.

Ostrovsky said that ever since the agency bungled an operation in Lillhammer in 1973 when it killed a waiter erroneously believed to be part of the Palestinian Black September group, it has stationed a high-ranking officer on the ground to call off kill operations at the last minute if needed. The identity of this officer is generally not known by the public or even to most members of the kill team, who would only have indirect communication with the officer through a command center. According to investigators in Dubai, the alleged assassins never called each on their phones, but did make a number of calls to Austria, where their command and control center was believed to be stationed.

Ostrovsky said although the operatives scattered to various parts of the world after the operation was completed, he believes they’re all back in Israel now. He says other countries are likely sifting through their airport surveillance tapes now to track the final destination of the team members.

He added that the Mossad was likely surprised by how the Dubai authorities pieced everything together so well and publicized the video and passport photos of the suspects.

“Nobody thought that somebody was going to piece that all together,” he said. “After all, who really cares about a guy in Hamas? There’s a perception that . . . the Arab world doesn’t really like Palestinians and that everyone would say it’s just another terrorist killed, great. Nobody’s going to make a fuss.”

He said he’s surprised that Israel would have risked such an operation while the government is in the midst of negotiations to release Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who is reportedly being held prisoner in Gaza by Hamas since June 2006.

“It shocks that they would do [the assassination] now,” Ostrovsky said. “But that’s Netanyahu in my opinion.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was in office in 1997 during another Mossad assassination operation. This one involved agents who, under Netanyahu’s orders, traveled to Jordan on forged Canadian passports and ambushed Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal as he was entering his office building, injecting him with a lethal nerve toxic. The plot backfired, however, when one of Meshaal’s bodyguards gave chase and caught the agents. Israel was forced to provide Jordanian authorities with an antidote to the poison to save Meshaal.

Ostrovsky said that despite the Dubai operation’s success, it was amateurish at moments. He points to the bad disguises the suspects used — wigs, glasses and moustaches — and the fact that some of the suspects seemed to slip into the same room to change their disguises. He also points to two of the suspects who followed the victim to his hotel room while dressed in tennis outfits and who didn’t seem to know what they were doing.

The two seemed to confer momentarily while the victim exited the elevator, as if deciding who would follow the victim to his room. A hotel employee accompanying the victim to his room even glanced back at the two, as if noticing their confusion.

“A lot of people in the field make those mistakes and they never come up because they’re never [caught on tape],” Ostrovsky said.