This has not stopped Dubai’s police chief, Lt-General Tamin, from fulminating against the Israeli prime minister.
That, like every aspect of a kidon operation, would be firmly denied by a government spokesman, were he to be asked. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s name had been on such a document, which would have been signed by Benyamin Netanyahu.
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Only he knows how many times he has asked a prime minister for legal permission to kill a terrorist who could not be brought to trial in an Israeli court, along with the kidon to whom he shows the legally stamped document, the licence to kill.
The 10th director-general, Dagan has a reputation as a man who would not hesitate to walk into a nameless Arab alley with no more than a handgun in his pocket. The plan to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had been finalised in a small conference room next to the office of Meir Dagan, who has run Mossad for the past eight years. It has yet to be established how al-Mabhouh was killed, but kidon’s preference is strangling with wire, a well-placed car bomb, an electric shock or one of the poisons created by Mossad scientists at their headquarters in a Tel Aviv suburb. Al-Mabhouh’s 11 assassins had been chosen from the 48 current kidon, six of whom are women. The killing in Dubai is a classic example of how Mossad goes about its work. After two years of training in the Mossad academy at Herzlia near Tel Aviv, each recruit to the kidon is given a copy. Amit said the book “tells like it was – and like it is”.Īmit showed me a copy of those rules at our first meeting. They helped me write the only book approved by Mossad, Gideon’s Spies. I first met Amit in 2001 and through him, I talked to the spies of Mossad, the katsas, and finally, to the assassins, the kidon, who take their name from the Hebrew word for bayonet. The executioner is no different from the state-appointed hangman or any other lawfully-appointed executioner.” Any execution is therefore state-sponsored, the ultimate judicial sanction of the law. Each execution must be sanctioned by the incumbent prime minister. There will be no killing of a terrorist’s family unless they are also directly implicated in terrorism. “There will be no killing of political leaders, however extreme they are. Born in Tiberius, King Herod’s favourite city, Amit had established the rules for assassination. In the past year, al-Mabhouh had moved to the top of Mossad’s list of targets, each of which must be legally approved under guidelines laid down over half a century ago by Meir Amit, the most innovative and ruthless director-general of the service. Long ago, the agency had established that silence is the most effective way to spread terror among its Arab enemies. Its ruthless assassinations were made famous by the film Munich, which detailed Mossad’s attacks on the terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The Israeli government’s refusal to comment on the death has once more gained worldwide publicity for Mossad, its feared intelligence service. The Mossad assassins could have felt only satisfaction when the news broke that they had succeeded in killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a top Hamas military commander, in Dubai last month. One of the leading chroniclers of the agency gives a unique insight into its methods. The killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh bears the hallmarks of the ruthless Israeli intelligence service.