One year ago, Israeli operatives botched the Dubai job — not by failing to kill their target, but by getting caught on CCTV:
A source close to the investigation said that the moment [Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, chief of the Dubai Police] concluded that Al-Mabhouh had not died of natural causes, he ordered his people to search Dubai’s extensive databases and identify everyone who had arrived in the emirate shortly before the killing and left soon after. This list was then cross-referenced against the names of visitors who had been in Dubai back in February, March, June, and November of 2009, all the times of Al-Mabhouh’s previous visits. The short list that emerged was then checked against hotel registers, and footage from hotel security cameras at the times these individuals checked in made it possible to put a face to each name. Tamim then compared these visual identifications to the footage from the Al Bustan Hotel at the time of Al-Mabhouh’s death, which gave him the names of the assassins. And searching databases of financial transactions gave him the identities of the rest of the team, all of which Dubai authorities posted online for the world to see.
Tamim also turned out to be extremely media-savvy. He presided over well-planned press conferences, carefully doling out information in a manner guaranteed to keep viewers — especially in the Arab world — coming back for more. He publicly called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of Meir Dagan, whom he challenged to “be a man” and take responsibility for the assassination. More realistically, perhaps, he called for international arrest warrants for all members of the hit squad, which caused considerable diplomatic embarrassment for Israel. When asked by an interviewer what the hit team’s biggest mistake was, Tamim answered that the presence of two men waiting for hours in the lobby in tennis gear with uncovered rackets was so bizarre that it instantly raised suspicion.
The laughable attempts of the Mossad operatives to disguise their appearance made for good television coverage, but the more fundamental errors committed by the team had less to do with cloak-and-dagger disguises than with a kind of arrogance that seems to have pervaded the planning and execution of the mission.
Despite the fact that Dubai is a hostile environment — a distant Arab state with ties to Iran — many details of the mission suggest the Mossad treated it as if they were operating inside a base country. The use of Payoneer cards is one obvious example. For the most part, prepaid debit cards are only used domestically within the United States, and while Payoneer does issue debit cards that are valid internationally, these are relatively rare. That several of the team members were using the same type of unusual card issued by the same company — one whose CEO, Yuval Tal, is a veteran of an elite Israeli Defense Force commando unit — gave the Dubai police a common denominator to connect the various members of the team.
It has also become apparent that in order to avoid calling one another’s cell phones directly, the operatives used a dedicated private switchboard in Austria. Any operative trying to reach a colleague — whether in the hotel down the street or at the command post in Israel— dialed one of a handful of numbers in Austria, from which the call was then rerouted to its destination. But since dozens of calls were made to and from this short list of Austrian numbers over a period of less than two days, the moment that the cover of a single operative was blown and his cell phone records became available to the authorities, all others who called or received calls from the same numbers were at risk of being identified.
It gets worse. One of the most serious mistakes made by the planners of the operation — certainly the one that caused the greatest embarrassment to the Mossad and to Israel — involved the use of forged foreign identities.
When it comes to false identities and false passports, the Mossad has a unique problem, one that most Western intelligence services do not face. When the CIA or the British SIS (or MI6, as it is commonly known) send an operative into the field, they can usually provide him or her with a valid U.S. or U.K. passport issued in whatever false name and identity the individual will be using. But an Israeli spy cannot use an Israeli passport, since the most important targets for Israeli espionage are in countries that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. For this reason, the need for foreign documentation has always been an acute one in the Mossad, which has historically resolved this problem by forging what it needed. Naturally, this is done without the authorization of the countries involved.
Whenever the Mossad is found out, as has happened from time to time, a major diplomatic scandal erupts. In the summer of 1986 an Israeli intelligence courier in West Germany left a bag containing forged British passports in a phone booth. The British government was outraged, and for a long time afterwards all ties between the British and Israeli intelligence services were cut. They were renewed only in the mid-1990s, after the Mossad and SIS signed a memorandum stating that neither would operate without consent on each other’s soil or work against each other’s interests. Historically speaking, though, the practice of forging passports was relatively simple, and usually went undiscovered. Rafi Eitan, now in his 80s, was at one time one of the Mossad’s master spies. He famously led the team that captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. “In the past it used to be so easy for us to assume new identities and to invent cover stories,” Eitan told me. “There was no Internet and there were no computers, and so no real possibility of checking who and what you were. We used to say that it was possible to forge a passport of a country that doesn’t exist!”
For this mission, all but one of the team members was traveling with a forged passport. The one passport that wasn’t forged belonged to “Michael Bodenheimer,” a member of the team and supposedly a German national. Once the Dubai authorities made public the names and nationalities under which the operatives had traveled, the German Federal Police opened an investigation into the provenance of Bodenheimer’s passport. What they soon found out (as was reported in the German magazine Der Spiegel) was that a valid German passport had been issued in June 2009 to a Mossad operative—using the name Michael Bodenheimer—who claimed German citizenship through his “father.” (The “father,” also an Israeli, had recently claimed that he was “Hans Bodenheimer,” born in Germany and a victim of the Holocaust, and he was granted immediate citizenship under a provision of the German constitution that allows for such cases. A real Holocaust survivor named Hans Bodenheimer did in fact exist, but it was not the man who applied for German citizenship.)
What the blown identities of the operatives illustrate more than anything is the now seemingly insurmountable problem posed by twenty-first-century counterespionage systems. False identities and cover stories are no longer any match for well-placed security cameras, effective passport control, and computer software that can almost instantly track communications and financial transactions