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The Hamas Hit: Assassination Politics

1 year ago
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James Grady
James Grady
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The growing diplomatic furor over the murder of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last month in Dubai, possibly by an Israeli hit team, cracks the cloudy glass partition all governments keep over assassination politics.
Dubai authorities say the assassins stalked Mabhouh and suffocated him with a pillow in his luxury hotel room. Working from dozens of airport, shopping mall, hotel lobby, and elevator security cameras, Dubai authorities pieced together video footage of the 10 men and one woman who they say used false passports, wigs, and other disguises to carry out the killing.
Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that despite evidence presented by Dubai authorities, there is "no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad and not some other service or country up to some mischief."
After that Israeli announcement, Dubai's police chief said there is a "99 percent chance" that Mossad was responsible for Mabhouh's death. Dubai has issued arrest warrants for the 11 suspects.
For Politics Daily, I reached out to three U.S. intelligence and terrorism experts to analyze the killing, which has generated worldwide headlines and could lead to more violence in the Middle East. One expert is a former deep-cover operative, another is a terrorism expert, and the third worked in counterintelligence and also has experience as a crime investigator. Their speculation about who is responsible is based on press reports of the assassination and their combined decades of covert experience.
All the U.S. experts, who still have working ties to our intelligence community, agreed that, as one of them put it, the killing looks like "classic tradecraft" for Israel.
"These guys (the Israelis) think they have a right to do this," the counterintelligence expert said.
Press reports name Mabhouh as one of the founder's of the military wing of Hamas, an Islamic movement that emerged in the struggles over Palestine territories and Israel in the 1980s. Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization by many countries, including the United States, and is active in rocket attacks against Israel and other violence in the Gaza Strip. Mabhouh allegedly helped funnel weapons from Iran to Gaza.
Video footage obtained by ABC News shows Mabhouh checking into the hotel lobby flanked by two men Dubai authorities say are part of the hit squad. The men engage the desk clerks in what appears to be routine conversation. In any intelligence operation, especially an assassination, the former operative notes, "The key is not to look like you're doing what you're doing."
In the video, the men who flanked Mabhouh at the registration counter do not follow him as he is escorted by a hotel clerk to an elevator. But rushing onto the elevator are two other men in tennis gear carrying rackets. They ride up to the second floor where Mabhouh checks into room 230.
Those two tennis players, say Dubai authorities, were part of the hit team. The terrorism expert noted that both Israeli and Arab intelligence operatives have previously used "tennis garb" disguises on their missions.
Surveillance footage from the hotel's second floor later shows two other suspects moving into what looks like surveillance positions before the killing.
According to the operative, a hit team of 11 people might seem like "overkill...but they were probably split into (duties of) surveillance, countersurveillance, logistics, diversion.
"They didn't want to miss," he said. "This was a high-value target."
As for using a pillow to suffocate Mabhouh, the counterintelligence expert, who is also a veteran criminal investigator, said the killers probably weren't concerned with faking a natural death: "They didn't want any sound. You could do that, and nobody in the room next door would hear."
What the hit team apparently didn't count on, the three experts said, is the overwhelming presence of security cameras in the modern world.
"It really is `Big Brother' out there," said the terrorism expert, alluding to the classic George Orwell novel '1984' about a world where government cameras track citizens everywhere. He laughed, and added: "It's no longer Three Days of the Condor." {Disclosure: I wrote the novel that became the 1975 Robert Redford movie "Three Days of the Condor," in which assassins need to neutralize only one set of security cameras during their murder mission.}
The terrorism expert also said that Dubai authorities probably identified the hit team members through some seemingly insignificant slip up -- leaving a trail that revealed a phony identity, perhaps -- as well as through the security camera footage. When it comes to investigative techniques and technologies, the oil rich, sophisticated country of Dubai "can afford anything and everything we got, face-recognition software, whatever," the counterintelligence expert said
The killing of Mabhouh has strained relations between allies. As PD Investigations contributor Delia Lloyd wrote this week, evidence implicated at least seven people with forged British passports in the crime, and six of the seven victims of stolen identities were Britons living in Israel, according to reports. While the British government has not accused the Israeli government of any wrongdoing so far, Lloyd reported that relations between the two countries are in a "deep freeze," one senior British official said.
Besides identifying the assassins and their employer, another issue has arisen: Was killing Mabhouh the best course of action?
"What's the purpose" of an assassination? asked the terrorism expert. "What good has it done? How has it helped?"
If you're close enough to a target to orchestrate that kind of assassination, he added, you're close enough to try to turn the target into a source of ongoing intelligence that might be of far more significant strategic worth than the limited tactical success of one killing.
The blowback of this operation has already happened: Israel and Mossad are being blamed for yet another assassination and Hamas has yet another martyr to rally supporters to its cause.
The payback has yet to come, but in Gaza, according to The Washington Post, Hamas has announced it already has a plan for vengeance.
Filed Under: PD Investigations
Tagged: assassination, dubai, hamas, israel, mossad
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