The Dubai Operation: Mossad, Murderer & Mayhem in the Desert
5
minute read
By
SPYSCAPE
|
|
Dubai was an opportune city to kill Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. He regularly visited the Middle Eastern emirate to meet arms dealers and security was relatively lax in touristy Dubai. Mahmoud could move around freely - so could the undercover surveillance team that had been trailing him for months.
When Mahmoud’s plane touched down at Dubai International Airport on January 19, 2010, it was his fifth visit in less than a year. It was also his last. Mahmoud was one of Israel’s Most Wanted for kidnapping and killing two IDF soldiers. He had a ‘Red Page’ - the codename for a Mossad assassination order - and there had been three attempts on his life yet Mahmoud flew to Dubai without a security team, then headed to the Al Bustan Rotana hotel and checked into Room 230.
al-Mabhouh
The ‘Fox’ wasn’t overly concerned. “You have to be alert,” he once told Al Jazeera. “They call me the Fox because I can sense what is behind me, even what is behind that wall.”
Unfortunately for al-Mabhouh, his four assassins were waiting behind his hotel room door when al-Mabhouh returned from a business meeting later that evening. Dubai’s police chief said he was 99 ‘if not 100’ percent certain Mossad was behind the murder. Yet French-Israeli writer/director Emmanuel Naccache suggested in his 2013 spy action comedy Kidon (‘Spear’) that Mossad was framed. So which is it?
Details of the assassination have emerged slowly, with scraps of intelligence leaked over more than a decade, and the picture that has emerged offers a masterclass in covert killing and a spy operation that captivated the world.
Kidon, the title of Naccache’s movie, is also the name of the Mossad unit suspected of planning and executing the killing of Israel’s enemies. Yaakov Katz’s The Shadow War describes the unit as "an elite group of expert assassins who operate under the Caesarea branch of the espionage organization”.
Caesarea recruits IDF Special Forces soldiers and they are believed to be the team that followed al-Mabhouh in the year before his death, studying his movements, planting a Trojan horse on his computer, and hacking his email server. When al-Mahmoud booked a Dubai flight online at short notice, there was no time to prepare falsified passports for a team estimated to include two dozen operatives.
Instead, the squad used British, Australian, Irish, German, and French passports - some borrowed or cloned from Israelis with dual citizenship, others stolen and doctored. It was risky. The team had already flown to Dubai three times in six months and would need to reuse the same passports yet again. Nonetheless, Rise and Kill First author Ronen Bergman said Mossad chief Meir Dagan approved the plan and dictated his decision to an assistant: “Plasma Screen - authorized for execution.”
One team member was an Israeli who’d secured a German passport under the assumed name of Michael Bodenheimer, an American entitled to German citizenship through his father. It was the only passport that wasn’t forged in Operation Plasma Screen yet it would prove to be a weak link in the highly choreographed mission.
This story is part of our weekly briefing. Sign up to receive the FREE briefing to your inbox.
Dubai was an opportune city to kill Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. He regularly visited the Middle Eastern emirate to meet arms dealers and security was relatively lax in touristy Dubai. Mahmoud could move around freely - so could the undercover surveillance team that had been trailing him for months.
When Mahmoud’s plane touched down at Dubai International Airport on January 19, 2010, it was his fifth visit in less than a year. It was also his last. Mahmoud was one of Israel’s Most Wanted for kidnapping and killing two IDF soldiers. He had a ‘Red Page’ - the codename for a Mossad assassination order - and there had been three attempts on his life yet Mahmoud flew to Dubai without a security team, then headed to the Al Bustan Rotana hotel and checked into Room 230.
al-Mabhouh
The ‘Fox’ wasn’t overly concerned. “You have to be alert,” he once told Al Jazeera. “They call me the Fox because I can sense what is behind me, even what is behind that wall.”
Unfortunately for al-Mabhouh, his four assassins were waiting behind his hotel room door when al-Mabhouh returned from a business meeting later that evening. Dubai’s police chief said he was 99 ‘if not 100’ percent certain Mossad was behind the murder. Yet French-Israeli writer/director Emmanuel Naccache suggested in his 2013 spy action comedy Kidon (‘Spear’) that Mossad was framed. So which is it?
Details of the assassination have emerged slowly, with scraps of intelligence leaked over more than a decade, and the picture that has emerged offers a masterclass in covert killing and a spy operation that captivated the world.
Kidon, the title of Naccache’s movie, is also the name of the Mossad unit suspected of planning and executing the killing of Israel’s enemies. Yaakov Katz’s The Shadow War describes the unit as "an elite group of expert assassins who operate under the Caesarea branch of the espionage organization”.
Caesarea recruits IDF Special Forces soldiers and they are believed to be the team that followed al-Mabhouh in the year before his death, studying his movements, planting a Trojan horse on his computer, and hacking his email server. When al-Mahmoud booked a Dubai flight online at short notice, there was no time to prepare falsified passports for a team estimated to include two dozen operatives.
Instead, the squad used British, Australian, Irish, German, and French passports - some borrowed or cloned from Israelis with dual citizenship, others stolen and doctored. It was risky. The team had already flown to Dubai three times in six months and would need to reuse the same passports yet again. Nonetheless, Rise and Kill First author Ronen Bergman said Mossad chief Meir Dagan approved the plan and dictated his decision to an assistant: “Plasma Screen - authorized for execution.”
One team member was an Israeli who’d secured a German passport under the assumed name of Michael Bodenheimer, an American entitled to German citizenship through his father. It was the only passport that wasn’t forged in Operation Plasma Screen yet it would prove to be a weak link in the highly choreographed mission.
An advance team landed in Dubai at 6:30 am, one day before al-Mabhouh. They were later joined by dozens of operatives who scattered their arrival times, flying in from Frankfurt, Rome, Zurich, and Paris, according to former Mossad officer Dan Magen, author of Israeli Mossad - The True Story. All were recorded on state-of-the-art surveillance cameras.
The squad broke into units as they didn’t know where al-Mabhouh was staying. Three groups staked out hotels where the target had previously stayed while a fourth surveillance unit followed al-Mabhouh from the airport to the Al Bustan Rotana, a luxury hotel fitting with CCTV cameras in the lobby, elevators, and hotel corridors.
One duo dressed as tennis players, others as tourists with shopping bags. Some were disguised in Al Bustan hotel uniforms. The tradecraft was sloppy though. The tennis players waited in the lobby for hours with towels conspicuously draped over their shoulders while they clutched rackets - the cases curiously missing - until they finally left to follow Mahmoud up to Room 230.
CCTV shows ‘tennis players’ following al-Mabhouh to his room
The clues add up
The hit squad paid cash or used prepaid cards issued by an American company, Payoneer, to cover their hotel bills - another mistake in Magen’s opinion. The cards were not commonly used in Dubai and the founder of Payoneer is an ex-Israel Defense Forces commander. (He denied any connection to the Dubai murder.)
To avoid direct contact with other team members, they also used cell phones with calls routed through a number in Vienna - another clue for Dubai investigators who later compared the suspects’ call lists.
When al-Mabhouh left for a business meeting outside of the hotel, a lock picker reprogrammed the electronic lock on Room 230 so it would open with an unregistered key. "The hotel's electronic records later confirmed that someone had tampered with the lock 30 minutes before the hit," Magen said.
Perhaps the team’s biggest mistake was underestimating Dubai's canny police chief, General Dhahi Khalifan Tamim. "Where do you find a real tennis player walking around with a tennis racket out of its case?" he’d later ask.
The Al Bustan hotel lobby
The Dubai police probe
It’s not clear how al-Mabhouh died. The BBC's Jane Corbin said he was suffocated with a pillow. Rise and Kill First's Bergman said assassins used a gadget with ultrasound waves that could inject medication without breaking the skin. It may have been a combination, Magen suggests.
However it transpired, al-Mabhouh was dead within 20 minutes. CCTV cameras recorded the four assassins exiting Room 230. Most of the team left Dubai within hours and the remainder were gone in 24 hours.
Hotel security found al-Mabhouh’s body the next day when he didn’t answer the hotel maid's knocking. Dubai’s police chief ordered an autopsy and compiled a list of travelers who entered and departed Dubai around the same time as al-Mabhouh’s trips in 2009 and 2010.
Police discovered a suspicious team of British, Irish, Australian, French, and German ‘nationals’ - using the same passports on each trip. Their names were cross-referenced with the Al Bustan hotel guest list.
The finger points to Mossad
General Dhahi Khalifan Tamim assembled a video narrative of CCTV footage and called a press conference. He fingered Mossad with 99 percent certainty and a huge diplomatic row ensued. Britain and Ireland expelled Israeli diplomats although for years the agency wouldn’t deny or accept responsibility. Dubai and Israel, an uneasy pairing at the best of times, reportedly didn't speak for 18 months until the US brokered talks.
Magen said Mossad’s mistake - the ‘smoking gun’ - came down to the Israeli operative who applied for a German passport using the name of American Michael Bodenheimer. The spy applied for the German document using an Israeli passport and a fictitious address so his cover story quickly unraveled. In Cologne, the German Federal Criminal Policy Agency would soon discovered that ‘Michael Bodenheimer’ - aka Uri Brodsky, aka Alexander Varin - was the same man. Brodsky/Varin was arrested in Poland and repatriated to Germany in August 2010. After a cash bail of 100,000 euros was paid for his release, Brodsky/Varin immediately left Germany for Tel Aviv. "Because of him, we now know that Mossad was behind everything that transpired in Dubai on January 19," Magen wrote in his 2017 book.
In an interview for Bergman’s 2018 Rise and Kill First, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan admitted his mistake for the first time: “I was wrong in sending the team in with those passports. It was my decision and only my decision. I bear the full responsibility for what happened.”
Dagan either quit or was pushed out as Mossad's spymaster in late 2010. Either way, Mossad’s top-secret tactics were exposed to the world by a Dubai police chief who’d been sorely underrated and by nations friendly to Israel but incensed their passports were used to cover up murder.
Still, some in the intelligence community - where morality comes second to the mission - admired the near-flawless hit: "They got in, killed the guy, and disappeared without leaving proof of who they were," former US Army intelligence officer Robert Ayers told the media. "It doesn't get any better than that."
This story is part of our weekly briefing. Sign up to receive the FREE briefing to your inbox.
Gadgets & Gifts
Put your spy skills to work with these fabulous choices from secret notepads & invisible inks to Hacker hoodies & high-tech handbags. We also have an exceptional range of rare spy books, including many signed first editions.
We all have valuable spy skills - your mission is to discover yours. See if you have what it takes to be a secret agent, with our authentic spy skills evaluation* developed by a former Head of Training at British Intelligence. It's FREE so share & compare with friends now!
