Since the late 1940s, the United States has given Israel nearly $50 billion in military assistance—financial aid and access to weaponry that has helped make the Israeli armed forces one of the most technologically sophisticated, powerful militaries on the planet. Since 9/11, Israel has remained the number one recipient of US military aid, pulling in more than $9 billion in the three years after the terrorist attacks.
While other countries have been influenced by US aid, Israel has influenced its patron as well. In the post-9/11 world, the United States has turned to Israel for advice and training for urban combat against insurgents in Iraq and has borrowed controversial tactics that Israeli forces have used against Palestinians. In Iraq and elsewhere, the United States also has emulated Israel’s hard-nosed methods against terrorism, allegedly including the use of torture in interrogations. The growing closeness between the two intelligence services also raises the question of just how far Washington will go in the future in continuing to apply one of Israel’s most controversial anti-terrorism techniques: targeted killings.
Learning from the best
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US intelligence officials have visited Tel Aviv to meet with their counterparts from Mossad, Israel’s version of the CIA, and Shabak (or Shin Bet), the Israeli counterintelligence and anti-terrorism agency, as well as the Aman, Israel’s military intelligence service, according to Israeli intelligence and diplomatic sources who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly with ICIJ. In addition to exchanging information on terrorist organizations with their Israeli hosts, the visitors are reported to have viewed presentations by special forces units of the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli National Police describing methods and equipment employed by Israel in anti-terrorism operations.
According to those same sources, other countries have also sent their own intelligence officials to learn from the Israeli experience and to be briefed and trained by their Israeli counterparts. Almost every week, the sources said, the Tel Aviv-based headquarters of Mossad, Shabak, and Aman host guests from South America, Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, and South Asia, including countries such as Indonesia, which does not even have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.
Visitors also talk about ways to block the flow of financial funding from the United States, Europe, and Latin America to Palestinian militants. “Under the disguise of donating money to Palestinian charity, contributions are channeled to terrorist groups in Gaza and [the] West Bank,” says a senior Israeli official dealing with terrorist issues at Israel’s National Security Council. “Before 9/11, it was hard for us to persuade governments that money raised in mosques in their respective countries found its way to buy weapons and explosives in the Palestinian areas which eventually was turned against innocent Israelis. In the last two to three years, we find more attention to our claims and readiness to cooperate. On several occasions we provided names of charities and bank accounts in the UK, Italy, Paraguay, Argentina, and a few other countries, and the security services there followed accordingly and took action. Offices were raided, documents confiscated and in some rare cases accounts were frozen.”
Additionally, at least twice a year delegates from various branches of the Israeli intelligence community visit the United States to exchange information and engage in brainstorming sessions with their US counterparts. These discussions are “frank, open, and intimate,” according to an Israeli intelligence source who has been involved.
Due in part to these exchanges of ideas, the United States has been able to copy and learn from Israeli counterterrorist methods. Although Israel certainly did not invent techniques such as clandestine kidnapping or the use of stress positions during interrogation, it was one of the first countries to employ those techniques as part of a broader counterterrorism campaign.
Eichmann case a precedent
The CIA’s abduction of Egyptian cleric Hassan Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar) as he walked to a Milan mosque in 2003, for example, had a famous precedent—the 1960 Mossad operation that tracked, cornered, and abducted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“He [Eichmann] passed our car, which was parked on the margin,” Rafi Eitan, the Mossad officer in charge of the operation, recounted in an interview with ICIJ. “One member of our team, Tzvi Malchin, was shadowing and closing in on him. It all took a few seconds. Tzvi jumped on him. Both of them fell down into a ditch. Tzvi grabbed him. We opened the door, and Tzvi put him inside.” The parallels with the 2003 Abu Omar abduction are striking, where, according to Italian prosecutors investigating the involvement of 26 Americans, Omar was grabbed off the street by CIA agents and thrown into a waiting van.
