Israel’s Kill List: Inside the Mossad’s campaign to off its most dangerous foes

Source: Foreign Policy

“There’ll be a summit conference in the sky,” smiled an Israeli intelligence official Wednesday morning when he learned of the assassination of Hassan Lakkis, the Hezbollah commander in charge of weapons development and advanced technological warfare, in a Beirut suburb around midnight on Tuesday, Dec. 3. The killing of Lakkis is yet another in the latest in a long series of assassinations of leading figures in what Israeli intelligence calls the “Radical Front,” which comprises two countries — Syria and Iran — and three organizations: Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.
“We’re talking about a number of organizations and people involved in nuclear and terrorist activity. [They] do it not only for their countries in various missions, but have created an international network — the most dangerous and most efficient that I have met,” the official added. The coalition’s goals: “the construction of a nuclear bomb and of various missilery capabilities — from very short to very long ranges — and the implementation of suicide terror at the highest level.” The Israeli goals: take these men out, one by one.
This isn’t the first time Israel has faced very powerful enemies, of course. But Israeli intelligence officials think this may be the most diverse, most intricately woven set of foes the country has encountered. These foes range from those at the leadership level down to field operatives, according to Mossad and Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) high-ranking officials. And it all involves deep, intimate cooperation that even spans the religious rifts between Sunnis and Shiites, driven by a single motive force: hostility toward the state of Israel.
Back in 2004, the Mossad began identifying various key figures within this Radical Front — those with advanced operational, organizational, and technological capabilities. While other, better-known personalities in these extremist groups and their state backers dealt with strategy, these were the people who handled the details and the translation of strategy into actual practice.
The Israeli intelligence source, who dealt with the Radical Front, likens the anti-Israel coalition to SPECTRE, the fictional enemies of James Bond. With one difference: “SPECTRE usually did it for money.” Israeli intelligence drew up a list of these men, each one the possessor of highly lethal skills that could be threatening to Israel, even if there had not been a coordinated network embracing of all of them. The list was headed by two men: Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s supreme military commander, and Gen. Muhammad Suleiman, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s head of secret special projects, including the building of a nuclear reactor, and the person in charge of Syria’s ties with Iran and Hezbollah. As Meir Dagan, the former Mossad chief, told me: “Gen. Muhammad Suleiman was in charge of Assad’s shady businesses, including the connection with Hezbollah and Iran and all sensitive projects. He was a figure Assad was leaning upon. And these days, he misses him.”
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