| Israel's Man in Hamas Just 'Wanted to Save Lives' |
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By Avi Issacharoff Yousef's book, "Son of Hamas," written with Ron Brackin, will be published next Tuesday (Salt River Press). In it, the 32-year-old tells his entire life story for the first time and reveals the great secret he harbored for 14 years. I first met Mosab Yousef, a Muslim, in July 2008, in California. He told me then about the dramatic upheaval in his life. In 1999, he began to draw closer to Christianity and a few years later converted. Haaretz Magazine published his story at the time, and Hamas immediately denied it vehemently. A year and a half later, Yousef, son of the Hamas leader in the West Bank, has decided to reveal the whole picture: For more than a decade he was an agent of Israel's Shin Bet security service. He was motivated not by economic gain or self-interest, but by sheer ideology. During the grimmest period of the second intifada, Yousef brought about the arrest of the most wanted terrorists on Israel's list, those who are mentioned repeatedly in the headlines - among them Ibrahim Hamed and Marwan Barghouti. He even agreed to the arrest of his father, who is still in jail today, to prevent his assassination by Israel. This is the story of an intelligent young man who acts courageously against the movement in which he was raised in an effort to save lives, and manages to persuade the Shin Bet to arrest wanted individuals instead of killing them. "Captain Loai" - as Yousef's handler in the Shin Bet was known at the time - makes no secret of his admiration for his "source": "So many people owe him their lives and don't even know it," he says. "People who did a lot less were awarded the Israel Security Prize. He certainly deserves it. I knew him for six years, as a coordinator and as a district director. And I tell you, that if we had X number of intelligence coordinators in the region, thanks to him we had X+1. He was the extra coordinator. You know what? He was better than most of us - no offense to anyone." Captain Loai is no longer with the Shin Bet; he works as a security officer in the center of the country and is studying at university. But it's clear that he is nostalgic for the days and nights of pursuing wanted individuals and suicide bombers. "The amazing thing is that none of his actions were done for money," he says of Yousef. "He did things he believed in. He wanted to save lives. His grasp of intelligence matters was just as good as ours - the ideas, the insights. One insight of his was worth 1,000 hours of thought by top experts. "Let me tell you a story," Loai continues. "One day we received information that a suicide bomber was going to be picked up at Manara Square in Ramallah and be given an explosives belt. We didn't know his name or what he looked like - only that he was in his twenties and would be wearing a red shirt. We sent the Green Prince to the square and with his acute sense, he located the target within minutes. He saw who picked him up, followed the car and made it possible for us to arrest the suicide bomber and the man who was supposed to give him the belt. So another attack was thwarted, though no one knows about it. No one opens Champagne bottles or bursts into song and dance. This was an almost daily thing for the Prince. He displayed courage, had sharp antennae and an ability to cope with danger. We knew he was one of those who in any situation - rain, snow, summer - give their all." Informer or double agent? Mosab Yousef remembers vividly the day on which a Shin Bet agent entered his cell in the detention facility of the Russian Compound in Jerusalem and suggested he work for Israel - i.e., become a collaborator. Until his arrest, he was a member of the Hamas students' organization at Birzeit University in the West Bank and had been involved in stone-throwing; he was sent to prison after buying a gun in 1996. Soldiers at the Ramallah checkpoint stopped the Subaru he was driving and told him to turn off the engine, he recalls: "They pulled me out of the car and even before I could defend myself they threw me to the ground and pummeled me." In our conversation, Yousef said he had not planned to become an informer and did not make the decision all of a sudden: "I was taken to the detention facility, [which we call] the 'Muskobiya,' where I underwent harsh torture and was beaten repeatedly in the interrogation. My hands were tightly bound. Then this Shin Bet man arrived and suggested that I work with him. I did not ask for money, as my financial situation was good. I thought of telling him that I would accept the offer, and then become a double agent and take revenge on the Shin Bet and on Israel for arresting me and for the things that were done to my father. "My plan," he continues, "was to collect information about the Shin Bet from within and use it against Israel. I knew that it was a dark, evil organization run by evil people who were doing terrible things, like forcing people to become collaborators. After I agreed, I was kept in jail for 16 months, because if I were released too quickly it might stir suspicion that I had become a Shin Bet agent." In prison he saw appalling things. "I was in jail with Hamas people, with senior figures in the organization who ran an apparatus called Majad, a kind of internal security body of Hamas aimed at uncovering Israeli agents. They tortured prisoners, most of them from Hamas, whom they suspected of collaboration. My job was to write down the confessions and testimonies. As the sheikh's son, I was trusted. It was there that I lost my faith in Hamas. They killed people for no reason. While everyone was warning me about the Shin Bet, for the first time in my life I saw Hamas people torturing their comrades, members of their nation, with exceptional cruelty. The truth was of no interest to them. If they so much as suspected someone, that was the end of him. They tortured people brutally, burned them, jabbed them with needles, put out cigarettes on them." After his release from prison in 1997, Yousef started to meet with Captain Loai, and says, "I had no plans to kill anyone or to be a spy, I was just curious." Already in their second meeting, he relates, the Shin Bet man managed to surprise him. Yousef: "He explained to me that if I wanted to work for the Shin Bet, I had to respect a few rules. 'You must not befriend loose women or behave immorally,' he told me. 'Do not sleep with women or behave like a wise guy - especially you, the son of a sheikh. You have to find work and get along.' One time, Captain Loai stopped the meeting and asked me if I had already recited the midday prayers. Surprised, I said I hadn't. He then asked me to purify myself [by washing hands, face and feet] and pray, and then said we would continue. "It was important for them that I would continue to be the person I was, for me not to change, to be serious. They wanted respectable people, who were respected in their society, not those with a poor reputation. I became even more curious and wanted to learn more about them. My handlers told me time and again, 'You must respect your father and your mother and not do anything bad to anyone.' They did not yet ask for information about anything or anyone, and I became more and more serious in regard to them. My handlers, for their part, respected me and treated me very well and even helped me with my studies. I was stunned by their behavior. They did not want to take action against the Palestinians as such, only against the extremists. I looked at these people, whom in the past I had so much wanted to kill, and discovered that everything I knew about them was incorrect." It was also in this period that Yousef began to be drawn to Christianity and read the New Testament. "I remember encountering the sentence, 'Love your enemies.' That made me think: These enemies of yours, the Shin Bet, the soldiers, are only trying to do their job. I thought to myself how Hamas would behave in a reverse situation: Would they show mercy to Jews? And I thought: 'Who are you trying to kid? Hamas and Fatah would behave more humanely?' I couldn't define who my enemy was anymore. "True, the Shin Bet made horrible mistakes and killed innocent people, but its main goal, like Israel's, was to preserve the principles of a democratic country. There are 1.2 million Palestinians living inside Israel, within the Green Line, who enjoy rights and benefit more from Israel's prosperity and welfare than in any Arab state. Still, those soldiers took my father away before my eyes and shot people before my eyes, and believe me, it was no small thing for me to work for those people. It was a real turnaround." What were your goals when you agreed to work for them? Yousef: "I saw torture, killing, a war over land. For me, human life and saving human lives is the most important thing, more important than any piece of land or real estate. I wanted to save - and did save - human lives, Israeli and Palestinian. I did not do it because the Shin Bet pressured me, or for money. I did it because I understood what Hamas really is and I had to make a change. For my sake and for the sake of others. I thought to myself that even if people claim I am a traitor, let them say it. People will not believe it, they will think I did it for money, but they have no idea. I was happy, delighted when I stopped a suicide bomber." Hamas is born It's striking, throughout the interview, that Yousef uses the first person plural in talking about Shin Bet activity. In California, he says, he has a T-shirt saying, "I do secret work but I don't know what it is - the Shin Bet." "I also have an Israel Defense Forces T-shirt - olive colored, with the symbol - which I really love," he adds, laughing. By 1999 he had penetrated the heart of Hamas in the West Bank and was accompanying his father everywhere. As the book reveals for the first time, Sheikh Yousef conceived the idea of establishing Hamas in the West Bank a year before the organization's formal creation. In 1986, the son relates in his book, Sheikh Yousef met in Hebron with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Mohammed Jamal al-Natshe, Mohammed Musleh and others, and together planned the creation of the new organization. Hamas officially announced its existence in December 1987. In September 2000, when Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, Mosab Yousef was naturally accompanying his father to meetings. On September 27, the night before Sharon's visit, Sheikh Hassan met with Marwan Barghouti, commander of the Tanzim militia in the West Bank, and leaders of other groups. Yousef recalls: "I drove them to the meeting, and when we returned he told me that they had agreed that the next day, after Sharon's visit to the mount, they would foment demonstrations and in the end an intifada. Their plan was to stir up riots that would continue for two to three weeks. "They planned the intifada, and don't let anyone tell you anything different," he continues. "[However,] the Hamas leadership in Hebron and Gaza did not want to take part in the riots, because they said [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat did not deserve to be helped after he persecuted the organization so harshly. And the truth is that Hamas in Gaza did not take part in the demonstrations at the start of the intifada. But my father was in favor [of participating]." What do you mean by "planned"? Did Arafat ask them to do it? "I can't tell you for certain that he gave an order. But he did give them his blessing. Listen, man, what do you think? Barghouti, Hussein al-Sheikh, all those who organized the demonstrations - they met with Arafat every day. So what did they talk about? But that is not the worst thing I discovered at the time about Arafat. I was the one who revealed that the first squad of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was actually a group from Arafat's Presidential Guard, Force 17, which got money from Barghouti, who got it from Arafat." According to Yousef, it was he who led the Shin Bet to Force 17 man Muhanad Abu Halaweh. "Abu Halaweh sent more and more people to perpetrate terrorist attacks," he says. "He was a dubious type who walked around with a heavy machine gun and opened fire at every opportunity. The Shin Bet wanted to liquidate him and I told Loai that I agreed to the mission, even if it meant he would be killed. I felt there was no choice, because otherwise Muhanad would go on killing innocent people. "On August 4, 2001, I waited outside the office of Marwan Barghouti until I saw Abu Halaweh go inside. A few hours later he came out and got into his gold VW Golf. I informed the Shin Bet that he was in the car, alone; it was important for them not to hurt Barghouti. The Israelis waited a little, until the car was in an open area, and then fired a missile at it. Apparently he saw the missile coming and tried to jump out, but it hit the car and he was thrown out. A second missile hit the sidewalk. I felt the blast in a car 100 meters away. Muhanad's car went up in flames, and so did he, but he was not killed. "That evening I went with my father to visit Muhanad in the hospital. His face was burned and I could hardly bring myself to look at him. But he recovered and continued his killing campaign. It was not until a few months later that he was assassinated, when two Apache helicopters fired at him as he came out of a restaurant in Bituniya." Thanks to his father's name, the Green Prince was able to weave a network of connections within the organization. After the assassination of Sheikh Jamal Salim and Jamal Mansour in Nablus, both of them friends of his father, in July 2001, he decided to isolate and hide his father, to save him from death; he put him up at a hotel and fired his bodyguards. He told the Shin Bet what he had done, but reached an agreement with his handlers to ensure that no Israeli would come near his father. "In that period I started to behave like a leader in Hamas," he recalls. "I walked around with an M-16 [rifle], emphasized my blood ties to the sheikh and hung out with members of the Hamas military arm, who were certain that I was plugged in to everything that was going on in the organization's leadership. They told me about their problems and I extracted more and more information." Yousef also managed to forge a direct connection with the Damascus-based head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Meshal. The two spoke by phone at least once a week. In his book, he describes how the Mossad espionage agency asked for the Shin Bet's help in discovering the identity of the "dangerous person" in Ramallah who was speaking with Meshal on a regular basis. But the Shin Bet, Yousef writes, chose to keep his identity a secret from the Mossad. He was distanced from Arafat, he says, because of an inadvertent act: "I met Arafat a few times when I accompanied my father to meetings with him. I didn't like him, but I could not show my feelings. One time he kissed me and I instinctively wiped my cheek. He was offended, and my father was embarrassed and did not take me to meetings with him after that." He does not have a high regard for Marwan Barghouti, either. "He is a terrorist with the blood of many Israelis on his hands," Yousef says. "Even though the Shin Bet hated him, they did not want to liquidate him and turn him into a martyr. I knew Marwan through my father. I accompanied him to meetings with Marwan at the start of the intifada, but also later, when the representatives of the organizations met. For Hamas, I became a sort of mediator between them and the other organizations, particularly after my father went underground, and the other organizations asked me many times for explosives and weapons. Everyone thought I had 'merchandise' to offer and believed in me, in part because I was the sheikh's son. "So it was that Ahmed (the Frenchman) Barghouti, Marwan's faithful assistant, told me he needed a large quantity of explosives for seven suicide bombers arriving from Jenin. I told him I would try to organize something, but already that night he sent one of them to perpetrate the attack at the Seafood Market [restaurant] in Tel Aviv. The next day, we arrested the other six." 'To my beloved father' "To my beloved father and my wounded family / To the victims of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict / To every human life my Lord has saved. My family, I am very proud of you; only my god can understand what you have been through. I realize that what I have done has caused another deep wound that might not heal in this life and that you may have to live with its shame forever - With love, Your son." 'Son of Hamas' In this interview, as in earlier ones, the Green Prince makes a point of saying how much he loves his father. Captain Loai also says he heard much from Yousef about how his father raised him to love humanity. Nevertheless, the son is responsible for his father's arrest and provided the information leading up to it. Moreover, in order to camouflage the source of the information, Mosab told his mother where his father was hiding, so that she would meet with him. The arrest was made minutes after Yousef's mother arrived. "As usual, my father surrendered peacefully," Mosab Yousef writes. "And he and the other Hamas leaders assumed the Shin Bet had followed my mother to his hideout." "The kid saved his dad," Captain Loai says in his defense. "If not for him, his father would be dead 10 times over. He effectively became a kind of protective umbrella for his father, and he understood that. One time, after the terrorist attack in the Beit Yisrael [neighborhood] in Jerusalem, Ariel Sharon issued an order to shoot, more or less, at everything that moved and breathed Hamas. His father's name came up for discussion as a candidate for liquidation. Mosab emphasized that his father was important to him and human life is precious to him, and this prevented his liquidation." Some time after his father's arrest, which was in the summer of 2002, Mosab Yousef and Loai initiated Mosab's own arrest. He was held for a few months in administrative detention (arrest without trial) and met with his father in prison. Mosab was released in April 2003, his father the following year. Yousef recalls that one evening in March 2002, someone knocked on the door of his family's home. Two people were standing there, he says: "'We are looking for Sheikh Hassan Yousef,' they said. I asked them what they wanted. They said they were representatives of five suicide bombers who had been sent from Jordan to carry out attacks. Their contact man had been arrested and they needed a safe place to stay. I told them they had come to the right place. They said they also had a car packed with explosives. I told them to leave the car, gave them money and explained where they could hide. I passed on the information to Loai, and within half an hour Sharon had already authorized their liquidation. "I said that if they were hurt, I would stop working for the Shin Bet. 'Are you threatening us?' Loai asked, and I replied that I could not agree to killing. These were five ignorant young people who did not know the difference between good and bad. I knew that an attempt to kill them would constitute a tremendous danger for the soldiers and for me, because they knew about me and would suspect that I had brought about their capture. Nevertheless, I continued to insist, so that no one would be killed. "In the end, the Shin Bet, which didn't want to lose me, agreed, but wanted to know what was going on in the room where they were sleeping. I drove over on the pretext of taking them some furniture, but what they didn't know was that highly sensitive bugs had been inserted into it. On March 16, Israeli special forces encircled the building where they were staying in the center of Ramallah. The forces waited until we knew they were asleep and then blew open the door with explosives. One of the men jumped out of the window with a weapon and was shot to death by the Israeli forces. When the other four were in the Jeep and about to be taken to the detention facility, one of them mentioned my name. I was sure my cover was blown and I didn't know what to do. But Loai had an idea: He released the one who had mentioned my name and returned him to Jordan, so the others thought he was the informer. In the interrogation of the three who remained, it turned out that one had been given a mission to assassinate Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. |
In a new book on his life as Israeli agent, son of Hamas founder says he had the trust of Arafat, Barghouti and even Khaled Meshal.
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