The Annals of Unsolved Crime (22 page)

If Mossad had agents in Dubai, as seems to be the case, they might have been there to monitor the activities of arms smugglers in Dubai. Other intelligence services, including those of America, Russia, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, may have had similar missions in Dubai. After all, Iran maintains its largest offshore financing facility in Dubai, which is used by the Revolutionary Guard, among others, to support its traffic in covert weapons. Since Mabhouh and Hamas were major players in this game, his presence may have attracted the attention of any of these parties. Consider, for example, that two of the twenty-six Dubai suspects exited by boat to Iran, according to Dubai authorities. This is an unlikely escape route for Mossad agents. Or that two other individuals whom the Dubai police had named as suspects worked for the Palestinian Authority, an archenemy of Hamas. (They were arrested in Jordan and turned over to Dubai.) Or that a third person wanted for questioning returned to Damascus just prior to the killing. While it may have been obvious that Mabhouh was being watched, it is less clear how or why this surveillance turned into murder.

The missing piece of the jigsaw remains Mabhouh’s mission to Dubai, one apparently important enough for him to travel there without his normal contingent of bodyguards. He stated that he was in transit en route to China, which was merely a cover story, since he had not made arrangements to continue
on to China. Mabhouh arrived from the airport at his hotel shortly before 3:00 p.m. and, after changing his clothes, left for an unknown destination. He was gone for several hours. But even with state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in Dubai, and extensive interviews with all the taxi drivers at the hotel, authorities claim they cannot determine either his whereabouts during these hours or the identity of the person or persons he met. Without knowing what he was doing, and with the intelligence services successfully cloaking and withdrawing their operatives, it remains an unsolved assassination.

There is no shortage of theories as to who murdered Mabhouh. The prime suspect of the Dubai authorities is Mossad. Certainly, Israel, which had previously attempted to capture Mabhouh, had a motive. There is also no doubt that Mossad had the capabilities to infiltrate agents disguised as tourists, who could follow and kill Mabhouh.

Another theory is that this was an inside job by Syria, which wanted to more tightly control the militant wing of Hamas. Someone in Syria apparently was responsible for having Mabhouh’s bodyguards bumped from the plane just before his flight to Dubai. As Syrian security agencies tightly control information concerning Hamas, it is unlikely that we will find out why Mabhouh was stripped of his protection. Without bodyguards, the assassin only needed to gain access to his room, and, if this was an inside job, Mabhouh may have himself been lulled into opening the door.

Iran might also have arranged his elimination because he was diverting arms shipments. This might explain the report that two of the suspects with false identities fled to Iran.

My assessment is that Mossad had motive, means, and opportunity. It may also have had sources in Syrian intelligence that assisted by providing data about Mabhouh’s movements. If so, it seems plausible to me that Israel assassinated Mabhouh.

CHAPTER 24
THE BEIRUT ASSASSINATION

The crime occurred at 12:56 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, 2005. Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, was blown up, along with most of his armored convoy, in front of the Hotel St. George in Beirut. The bomb had been packed into a white Mitsubishi van that had been moved into position by a suicide driver one minute and fifty seconds earlier; the powerful explosion tore a seven-foot deep crater into the street and killed twenty-three people.

The assassination caused an international uproar, and the Lebanese government turned to the United Nations for help. The U.N. Security Council appointed Detlev Mehlis, a German judge renowned for his solvings of terrorist bombings, to head its investigation. Early in the U.N. investigation, clues seemed to point to a jihadist suicide bomber. Various Islamist terrorists had used similar Mitsubishi vans in a spate of other Beirut bombings. Elements in the bomb were traced back to military explosives used by al-Qaeda of Iraq. A convenient videotape sent to Al Jazeera television showed a lone suicide bomber named Abu Addas claiming that he acted on behalf of an unknown jihadist group. But the lone-assassin theory did not last long.

The U.N. investigative team, which included forensic experts in explosives, DNA, and telecommunications from ten countries, found convincing evidence that the assassination was a cleverly disguised, state-sponsored operation. The
Mitsubishi van had been stolen in Japan, shipped via the port of Dubai to the Syrian-controlled Bekka Valley, where it was modified to carry the bomb, and then, only days before the assassination, driven over a military-controlled highway to Beirut.

One participant in the planning of the attack was Zuhir Ibn Mohamed Said Saddik, a Syrian intelligence operative. Saddik told investigators that the putative bomber, Abu Addas, was a mere decoy who had been induced to go to Syria and make the bogus video and was then killed. He further alleged that the actual van driver had been recruited in Iraq under false pretenses, presumably so that if he defected or was captured, he would wrongly identify his recruiters as jihadists. Saddik said that the “special explosives” in the TNT had been intentionally planted there to mislead investigators in the direction of Iraq. Saddik was arrested for his role in the crime in 2005 and was released without reason the following year. He vanished in March 2008 from a Paris suburb.

Meanwhile, the U.N. team uncovered evidence that the actual conspirators had resources and capabilities—including wiretaps of Hariri’s phones—that pointed to a state-level intelligence service. U.N. telecommunications analysts determined that eight new telephone numbers and ten mobile telephones had been used, along with the wiretapping, to follow Hariri’s movements with split-second precision and move the van into place.

In addition, a former Syrian intelligence agent told investigators that he had driven a Syrian military officer on a reconnaissance mission past the Hotel St. George on the day before the bombing, and that the officer had told him that four Lebanese generals, in collaboration with General Rustam Ghazali, the head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, had provided “money, telephones, cars, walkie-talkies, pagers, weapons, and ID cards” to the alleged assassination team.

Judge Mehlis’ report, issued in October 2005, concluded
that “there is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials, and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services.” Judge Mehlis had the four Lebanese generals arrested in 2005.

When the judge moved to question Syrian officials—including the intelligence chief, Assef Shawkat, who is Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in law—the Syrians stonewalled and protested the inquest’s direction. In January 2006, the U.N. Security Council replaced Judge Mehlis with Serge Brammertz, a forty-three-year-old Belgian lawyer who had served as deputy prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Brammertz was replaced in 2008 by Daniel Bellemare, Canada’s assistant deputy attorney general. In April 2009, Bellemare requested that the four imprisoned Lebanese generals be released because of the “complete absence of reliable proof against them.” And so they were.

Meanwhile, Lebanese investigators working on behalf of the U.N. team had re-examined cell phone records from 2005. They uncovered a network of about twenty mobile phones that had all been activated a few weeks before the attack and then silenced just afterward. This so-called second ring of phones had been calling the same phone numbers that had been called by the eight phones that coordinated the attack.

By 2009, investigators had traced the second ring of phones to a command post of Hezbollah’s military wing under the notorious Imad Mughniyeh, who had been responsible, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, for other spectacular bombing attacks, including the 1983 U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut. But before this cell-phone evidence could be further examined, the Lebanese chief investigator working on this complex network was killed in Beirut in 2009. (Mughniyeh, who might
otherwise have been called as a witness, had himself been assassinated in 2008.) In April 2010, U.N. investigators summoned twelve Hezbollah members and supporters for questioning. This spurred rumors that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which the U.N. set up in March 2008, was on the verge of finally issuing indictments. The political reaction in Lebanon showed the potential costs of pursuing a political crime. Hezbollah’s powerful chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said ominously in July 2010 that Hezbollah would not stand by idly if its members were accused of involvement in the assassination. He also denounced what he called attempts to “politicize” the tribunal—as if political consideration could be omitted from political crime.

Nasrallah also moved to discredit the U.N. by saying that its investigators come from “intelligence services closely linked to the Israeli Mossad.” He demanded the establishment of a Lebanese committee to investigate “false witnesses.” In September 2010 he went further, claiming that Hezbollah had “evidence” that Israel was behind the assassination. Syria, for its part, is claiming to be the victim of planted evidence.

When the Special Tribunal for Lebanon then indicated four members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese government chose to ignore the indictments and terminate its support for the tribunal. The tribunal, which relocated to the suburb of Leidschendam just outside The Hague, then announced that it would try the four members of Hezbollah in absentia. It issued warrants for their arrest, but the Lebanese government refused to act on them. Instead, it declared the tribunal to be illegitimate, leaving the crime officially unsolved.

Three theories have been advanced to fill the judicial vacuum. First, there is the view that the assassination was the work of Syrian intelligence units based in Lebanon. In December 2005, former Syrian vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam, after resigning from the government, said that he heard Syrian
President Assad personally threaten Hariri before the assassination, and that Assad had the means to carry out the plot. Second, according to the U.N. tribunal, the assassination was carried out by Hezbollah, which bought the stolen Japanese van, armed it with the TNT and C4 explosives used in the attack, and killed Hariri. Finally, there is the theory proposed by Hezbollah that Israel’s Mossad was behind the attack. In support of this view, it is claimed that the jamming devices for blocking remote-control bombs in Hariri’s convoy were manufactured by Israel and that these devices were disabled before the attack. The U.N. investigation, however, found no evidence that any of the three anti-jamming devices had been disabled.

My assessment is that this political assassination was most likely organized by the military wing of Hezbollah, which then ghosted a trail to Syria to cover its tracks. The inability of the government to act on the evidence provided by the U.N. tribunal, or even serve the indictments on those charged, demonstrates again how difficult it is to resolve a crime when vital political interests are at stake.

CHAPTER 25
WHO ASSASSINATED
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA?

The brutal murder of Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on Vladimir Putin’s birthday in 2006 sent shock waves through the media community not only in Russia but around the world. The award-winning Russian journalist was gunned down at close range at about 4:00 p.m on October 7 in the stairwell of her apartment block. Three bullets hit her body, and a fourth bullet was fired into her head, execution-style. Next to her body, there were a Makarov PM pistol, a silencer, and the four shell casings from the bullets. As the Makarov PM ordinarily ejects its shells about ten to fifteen feet behind the shooter, the killer had collected the casings and neatly placed them next to his victim, which police interpreted as the signature of a contract killer. The killer, whose features were obscured from CCTV cameras by a baseball cap, knew the code to access Politkovskaya’s building. It was also determined from the cameras that he had entered the building just before Politkovskaya had returned from shopping.

The plot grew more sinister after police investigators examined the videotapes from other surveillance cameras. Politkovskaya’s last stop before returning home was the nearby Ramstor shopping center. Here the investigators established that she had been under surveillance by a man in jeans and a woman in black. The CCTV cameras revealed that they had
methodically followed her as she shopped. As they examined CCTV video from other locations she had visited early that week, they found that she had also been tailed by these and other trackers. Such surveillance technique suggested that she was being watched by a security service.

Identifying Politkovskaya’s trackers turned out to be relatively easy for the police.

According to the chief investigator in the case, the trackers had been linked to other plotters by their cell-phone records, saying, “they called back and forth by phone before the murder, on the day of the murder, and after it.” The problem confronting the police was where these tracks led. Some of those identified were current or former agents of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. Indeed, it was such a sensitive issue that it took nearly ten months before the police got Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, to issue warrants to arrest the suspects. In a press conference on August 27, 2007, after announcing that ten suspects in Politkovskaya’s murder had been arrested, Chaika ominously warned, “Unfortunately, this group included retired and acting Ministry of the Interior and FSB officers.” The official version was that Politkovskaya had been killed for money by a Chechen criminal gang in Moscow that had paid a lieutenant colonel in the FSB to provide surveillance on her.