Assassination in Dubai did deep harm to Australian-Israeli relations

The assassins’ hit in a Dubai hotel was quick and clean, but the fallout has been anything but for Israeli-Australian relations.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead in a Dubai hotel in January 2010.

The Israeli assassins had missed their man once but there would be no mistake this time.

When Mahmoud al-Mabhouh stepped into his luxury hotel room on a chilly January night in Dubai in 2010 they were waiting for him. Two powerful sets of arms held the Hamas weapons dealer, blocking his way back to the corridor. A third man, the ­executioner, gagged him with one hand and, with the other, pressed to Mabhouh’s neck an ultrasound instrument loaded with suxamethonium chloride, a potent ­anaesthetic.

“The men maintained their grip until al-Mabhouh stopped struggling,” writes Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, taking up the story in his new book, Rise and Kill First, a history of targeted assassinations by the country’s spy agencies.

“As the paralysis spread through his body, they laid him on the floor. Al-­Mabhouh was wide awake, thinking clearly, seeing and hearing everything.

“He just couldn’t move. Foam formed at the corners of his mouth. He gurgled.

“Three strangers stared at him dispassionately, still holding his arms, just in case. That was the last thing he saw.”

It has taken until now, with the publication of Bergman’s book in Australia, for the full account of ­Mabhouh’s murder to emerge, with its loaded implications for Australia’s relations with Israel.

That’s because four members of the 26-strong Israeli hit squad used forged Australian passports, evidently doctored from genuine documents held by Australian dual citizens living in Israel, to track and kill him after he was marked to die in what is known as Operation Plasma Screen. What was viewed at the time by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, as yet another successful “negative treatment” of an enemy of the Jewish state would turn out to be a watershed event that sped the departure of Mossad’s powerful director and exposed a clandestine assassination program that continues to this day.

Aged 48, Mabhouh had been a senior operative of two decades’ standing for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs Gaza and is listed as a terrorist organisation under Australian law.

He had been on Israel’s most-wanted list since 1989 for the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers, Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa’adon, and was under no illusion about the lethal reach of its intelligence arms. His predecessor in charge of weapon acquisitions for Hamas, Izz al-Din al-Sheikh Khalil, had been killed in 2004 in a car bombing orchestrated by Mossad in the Syrian capital, Damascus, where he too lived.

CCTV footage shows Mahmoud al-Mabhouh leave the hotel lift followed by suspected assassins in tennis gear.

However much Mabhouh may have deserved his fate — and as Bergman reveals, opinion was divided in the upper echelons of the ­agency on whether he actually qualified for negative treatment, its ­euphemism for assassination — the furious international reaction to the killing and the Israelis’ ­brazen appropriation of foreign passports made this an operation too far for Mossad and its then boss, Meir Dagan.

The diplomatic ructions between Israel and Australia would ricochet for years through the ­bilateral relationship. In the aftermath of the passport scandal, Kevin Rudd’s Labor government expelled the Mossad liaison officer based at the Israeli embassy in Canberra. The officer still has not been replaced.

The collateral damage for the Israelis continued to pile up. Australia changed its vote in the UN from opposing a war-crimes investigation into ­Israel’s 2009 military incursion into Gaza to abstention, a symbolic shift. While Rudd’s foreign minister, Stephen Smith, dismissed any link to Mabhouh’s death, it was seen for what it surely was: retribution for the abuse of Australian passports in the hit. “It did significantly undermine trust within Australia and especially with Australian intelligence agencies,” says Australia’s former ambassador to Israel, Dave Sharma.

Separately, the Labor Right’s rock-solid support for Israel would start to waver. Rank-and-file ­dismay with Jewish settlement ­expansion and the collapse of peace negotiations with the Palestinians under Benjamin Netan­yahu morphed into a perfect storm for the ALP as the realpolitik of the growing Islamic vote in its western Sydney heartland began to bite.

Rudd, who has joined Bob Hawke and another former Labor foreign minister, Bob Carr, in pushing for Palestinian recognition to be framed in ALP policy, referenced the Mabhouh affair when he went after the Israeli PM in February last year during Netanyahu’s historic visit to Australia. Accusing Netanyahu of “torpedoing” what was left of the two-state process, Rudd said: “No apology has ever been received for that action which had the consequence of putting Australian passports and the security of Australian passport holders travelling to the Middle East at risk.”

Bergman fills in the gaps around Mabhouh’s assassination in Dubai, which was staged to look like the Palestinian had died of natural causes in bed in the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel, less than six hours after he flew in on January 19, 2010. He had had a busy afternoon and evening, meeting with a banker to buy sophisticated surveillance equipment for Hamas and with his contact from Iran’s Revolut­ionary Guards to discuss weapons shipments.

It was Mabhouh’s fifth visit to the ­United Arab Emirates city in less than a year and the Israelis were watching, laying the ground­work for the hit. They might have got away with it but for one key flaw: the forged foreign passports supposed to provide cover for the Mossad team had been used too many times to get them in and out of Dubai, and would signpost the trail back to Tel Aviv.

The fake Korman passport.

One of the four fake Australian passport holders posed as expatriate Melburnian Adam Korman, 42, who sold musical instruments in Tel Aviv. He had no idea how the Israeli intelligence accessed the original document and altered it with a photo of the stand-in. This man visited Dubai in March 2009, leaving four days later for Hong Kong and ­returning in August with the ­female holder of another doctored Australian pass­port in the name of Nicole Sandra McCabe, 35, also originally of Melbourne. The stolen or forged papers of 12 Britons, six Irish, four French and a German also were used by the Israeli operatives. Like Australia, Britain and Ireland expelled Israeli diplomats. France and Germany settled for rebukes of Netanyahu’s government.

During Mabhouh’s stay in Dubai in ­November 2009, the Plasma Screen crew poisoned a drink that was brought to his hotel room, but succeeded only in making him faint, according to Bergman. When he got home to Damascus, none the wiser, he apparently ­accepted medical advice that he had picked up a virus.

When he returned to Dubai two months later to check in to the $350-a-night Al Bustan Rotana, there would be no mistake. The problem for Mossad was there hadn’t been time to forge credible new passports for the entire team, more than two-dozen strong, and some would be going in with the same identities and cover stories for the third time in barely six months.

At other times in the agency’s 70-year history, the operation would have been cancelled. But under the aggressive Dagan, a former special operations officer who was injured by a Palestinian mine while fighting in Gaza in the 1970s, the order was to proceed.

Members of the surveillance team were captured on security cameras in the lobby, sporting tennis attire and racquets, when Mabhouh strode in at 3.35pm. They followed him to his room, 230, and the mission commander, posing as Frenchman Peter Elvinger, booked in to room 237 across the corridor. When the Palestinian left the hotel to conduct his business and shop, the three assassins slipped into the empty room using a special master key that left no electronic trace.

The murder was calibrated to appear to be unsuspicious. The ultrasonic injection device delivered the lethal dose of anaesthetic into Mabhouh’s neck without breaking the skin. After checking the drug had worked, they removed his shoes, shirt and trousers, and laid them neatly in the closet; the body was put to bed and the door lock manipulated to make it look as though it had been set from inside using another artifice from the Mossad bag of tricks. By Bergman’s account, the trio was in and out of the room in 20 minutes, before heading straight to the airport with the rest of the Plasma Screen team.

Mabhouh’s body was not discovered until the next day and attracted little interest from Dubai authorities — until Hamas began to make noise with Dubai’s police chief Dhahi Khalfan Tamim. It didn’t take him long to connect the dots from CCTV footage, the logs of an Austrian phone cut-out used by the Israelis and the overworn passports. Rather than hush it up, Khalfan went public, ­releasing the material to the international media and calling on Dagan to “be a man” and own up to the hit.

While the Israeli government rode out the storm, Bergman says it was a different matter inside Mossad. The blowing of so many operatives’ covers meant whole sections of operations had to be shut down. In the book, Bergman documents the highs and lows — for Israel — of the efforts by its formidable spy agencies, not just Mossad, but Shin Bet closer to home and the AMAN military intelligence service, to ­target enemies and kill them. “I did not write this to glorify the Mossad,” Bergman told The Weekend Australian. “In many, many cases, the Israeli James Bond looks more like an ­Inspector Clouseau.”

He argues that the Israeli ­intelligence community is ­arguably the best in the world and “sooner or later found a solution to any threat it was presented through the long string of remarkable tactical successes”. Yet this belied a “disastrous strategic failure” as the country’s leadership looked to assassination and sabotage ­operations for solutions that should have come from diplomacy and political dialogue. “Throughout the years, these successes convinced the political leaders of the country, wherever they are, Right or Left, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin or Netanyahu, that they have some sort of exotic capability to order pinpoint special operations way behind enemy lines … targeted killings, planting of (computer) viruses, sabotage … and by these operations stop the regular process of events,” Bergman said.

“And because of that, they believed they did not need to turn to statesmanship, to discourse. I think the bottom line is that beneath the tactical successes, there is a catastrophic political failure.”

Bergman met Dagan in 2011 when Dagan uncharacteristically hosted journalists at the Mossad academy north of Tel Aviv to deliver what turned out to be a parting spray at Netanyahu. As he announced his departure as ­director, the spy chief insisted the mission to kill Mabhouh had been a success. After all, the threat he posed was eliminated, the team had got home safely and the huffing and puffing from Dubai about arrest warrants had turned out to be more hot air.

But Bergman said Dagan eventually came around, admitting to him before his death from cancer in 2016 that there had been mistakes in Plasma Screen for which he was responsible.