Israel's spy in Hamas (Part II)

Deep embarrassment

It became increasingly clear to the Shin Bet, Yousef explains, that he was in great danger of being exposed. "We had two options: either send me back to jail or 'play the game,' as Loai put it, by staging a real attempt to arrest me, big and impressive, that would fool not only Hamas but also the Israeli army. The Shin Bet gave an undercover IDF unit intelligence information that I was armed and dangerous, and would be going to visit my mother. In the meantime, I was told to go home and wait outside in the car for instructions from the Shin Bet. When I got Loai's call I drove quickly to my new secret location somewhere else. Within a minute, the undercover unit, dressed as Arabs, arrived on the scene in 10 cars with Palestinian license plates. They surrounded the house and ordered everyone to come out. My brother and my sisters went out.

"In the meantime, to ensure that the raid would get a lot of publicity, I had tipped off Al Jazeera and said an attempt would be made to assassinate my father, and they sent a TV crew to the house. But the soldiers called for 'Mosab Hassan Yousef' to come out and not 'Hassan Yousef.' In the meantime, dozens of armed Palestinians, who realized that an operation was under way at the sheikh's house, started to approach, and air force helicopters fired at them to stop them. By now, I was watching the drama live on TV in my new hiding place. The army even fired a missile at the second floor of our house, which blew up half the building. Overnight I had advanced to the most-wanted list and the whole Arab world knew about it."

During Operation Defensive Shield, which the IDF carried out in the West Bank in the spring of 2002, Yousef says he was scurrying all over, even though his handlers wanted him to stay in the hotel where he was "hiding." His father was also in a safe house at the time: When the army carried out house searches, the soldiers - amazingly - skipped the one in which the sheikh was hiding.

Yousef: "'It's a miracle,' my father told me. They looked in all the houses around us and ours was the only one they skipped. And I thought to myself, 'You're welcome.'"

Another story revealed by Yousef concerns the relations between Jibril Rajoub, while he was head of Palestinian Preventive Security, and the Shin Bet. One of the first places raided by the army after troops entered Ramallah was Preventive Security headquarters in Bituniya in April 2002. Fighting broke out at the site until those in the building were ordered by their commander to surrender. The soldiers told them to come out naked; both the Preventive Security personnel and Hamas prisoners who were incarcerated in the facility did so, received sweatsuits and were sent by bus to the Ofer army base. It was only then, Mosab Yousef says, that the Shin Bet realized its mistake: How could they differentiate between those on the wanted list and the security personnel, when the ID cards remained behind in the totally destroyed headquarters?

Ofer Dekel, now head of the Shin Bet and at the time chief of the Jerusalem district in the Shin Bet, "was in charge of the operation," Yousef recalls. In his book, he describes what happened next.

"[Dekel] called Jibril Rajoub, who had been away from the compound at the time of the attack. Dekel gave Rajoub a special permit so he could pass safely through hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers at the army base. When he arrived, Dekel asked Rajoub if he would mind pointing out which men worked for him and which were fugitives. Rajoub said he would be happy to do so. He identified police as fugitives and fugitives as police, and the Shin Bet released all the wanted men [apart from Bilal Barghouti, whom they identified].

"'Why did you do that to me?' Dekel asked, after he figured out what had happened. 'You just blew up my offices and my compound,' Rajoub calmly explained ... The Shin Bet was deeply embarrassed. The only thing they could do in retaliation was release an official account that branded Rajoub a traitor for turning over the wanted men to Israel in a deal brokered by the CIA."

Rajoub lost much of his political clout in the wake of that fiasco, Yousef notes. Hamas and Fatah accused him of betraying them, even though he had actually saved Hamas' wanted men.

In a recent conversation with Haaretz, Rajoub denies having been involved in the incident at the Ofer base. His deputy at the time, Jibrin al-Bakri, now the governor of Nablus, says he was also not in the vicinity and doesn't know any details: "I think Abed Alun was the person involved," al-Bakri says. (Alun, a senior figure in Preventive Security, was killed in an Al-Qaida attack in an Amman hotel.)

Mosab Yousef's handlers in the Shin Bet declined to comment on the event.

On July 31, 2002, a suicide bomber blew himself up on the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Following the attack, in which seven people were killed, Mosab Yousef lost touch with Saleh Talahmeh, from the Hamas military wing, with whom he had formed close ties over the years. "We had become true friends," he relates. "He even helped me with private lessons in economics."

The members of Talahmeh's close circle - Mohammed Jamal a-Natsheh, Ibrahim Hamed, Sayed Sheikh Qassem and Hasnein Rumaneh - also disappeared. Information gleaned about the Mount Scopus attack led to five residents of the neighboring village of Silwan and from them to Mohammed Arman, who under torture in interrogation related that "the sheikh" was responsible for sending him on missions, but he did not know his full name. Shown a photo of Ibrahim Hamed, he identified him immediately.

It was not until 16 months later that Israeli security forces located Talahmeh and his group, in a residential building in Ramallah. In the course of an all-night battle, Talahmeh, Kasem and Rumaneh were killed. Captain Loai informed Mosab Yousef that his good friend Talahmeh had been killed and told him to go to the hospital in Ramallah to identify the bodies.

Yousef: "I identified Saleh [Talahmeh] immediately. Kasem was in pieces and I could not identify Rumaneh. In the absence of other central activists in Hamas, I was compelled to organize the funeral of my friend Saleh and the others." Ibrahim Hamed had not been in the building. "The Shin Bet planted many bugs in his house, in the hope that someone from the family would say something, but they were very careful." Hamed simply vanished.

'Most important mission'

Sheikh Hassan Yousef was released from prison in November 2004. In the days that followed, hundreds of people flocked to his office to ask for help with various matters. In their eyes, the sheikh was the leader of Hamas in the West Bank. However, according to Mosab Yousef, his father had no money and no access to the organization's financial assets. His conclusion: The fact that the organization continued to operate even after most of its recognized leaders had been killed or imprisoned, meant that there was a secret leadership, which was in direct contact with Hamas' senior figures in Damascus and with the military wing.

A few months earlier, Loai had asked Yousef to visit an Internet cafe in Ramallah, to find out who in the cafe was in e-mail correspondence with the Hamas leadership in Damascus. There were about 20 people in the cafe when he got there. He looked for a bearded man, but everyone was clean-shaven.

A few weeks later, Yousef put a house in Ramallah up for sale. Someone called and came over to look at the property, and Yousef identified him as one of the 20 people from the cafe. The man introduced himself as Aziz Kayed and said he was the director of a center for Islamic studies called Al-Buraq.

After Sheikh Yousef was released from prison, Mosab accompanied him to Nablus to meet with senior Hamas figures. One of them remarked that the sheikh should be in contact with "Aziz Kayed from the Al-Buraq Center." Mosab asked the Shin Bet to check Kayed's background. It turned out that during his student days he had been a key activist in the Hamas cell at the university, but had ceased all political activity a decade earlier, was now conducting a normal life and had even gone abroad without interference. Mosab Yousef recalled a few other young men he had known in the past from Hamas who, as he writes in the book, "have advanced university degrees and were at one time very active in Hamas. But for whatever reason, they simply dropped out of sight 10 years ago."

A check revealed that all of them had remained in touch with one another and worked at Al-Buraq. The Shin Bet began to monitor the men's activity - with dramatic results: "We learned that these deadly 30-somethings had gained total control of the money and were running the entire Hamas movement in the West Bank," Yousef writes.

One day, they followed one of them, Nahdi Mahadi, from his apartment in north Ramallah to a garage in the commercial zone. "Suddenly we saw him pull up at the garage door, enter, and close the door behind him. We watched the place for two weeks until one day the garage door opened from the inside and before us stood Ibrahim Hamed. The Shin Bet waited until he went back in and then surrounded the building." Hamed did not try to resist. At the soldiers' orders, he came out naked and was arrested.

"The exposure and arrest of Hamed and of the Hamas secret leadership was the most important mission I carried out in all my years of work with the Shin Bet," Yousef says. "Hamed was responsible for the death of 80 Israelis. That was also my last mission in the Shin Bet."

In September 2005, the Shin Bet informed Yousef that following the escalation in Gaza, it had been decided to arrest his father again. Having no other choice and realizing that this was the only way he could save him, Yousef agreed to his arrest. As mentioned, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, who is undoubtedly one of the most moderate figures in Hamas, is still in prison.

God of truth and lies

"I was not surprised when I heard he had converted to Christianity," Captain Loai says. "But I was surprised to read in your article [in 2008] that he is abroad. Personally, I am happy for him. We had a very strong personal relationship."

Another of Yousef's handlers also recalls having many intimate talks with the Green Prince about matters of religion. It is clear that the religion Mosab adopted some five years ago constitutes a significant element in his worldview today. In a conversation with him, and while reading his book, one sometimes gets the feeling that he is engaged in a fierce crusade against Islam, the religion into which he was born and raised.

"I tell you again, I did everything out of a sense of mission, in order to save human lives," Mosab Yousef says. "Take, for example, Jamal Taweel, a senior figure in Hamas. If I had not worked for the Shin Bet, Taweel would now be dead. He was due to be assassinated, but because I was the one who provided the information about his location, he was arrested. He spent a few years in prison and maybe will hate me now, but he is now free, lives with his family and is the mayor of El-Bireh. I am not exaggerating or showing off," he says in the phone call from California. "I supplied priceless information. No one but me was capable of obtaining it."

Aren't you afraid now after exposing all this?

"I will not lie by saying I am not afraid. But I am motivated by the fact that I saved hundreds of people - Israelis, Palestinians, Americans. That gives me the strength to go on. I am not a Zionist and I did not work for the Zionists. I am not pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. I worked for my God, who is the father of all human beings wherever they are. I do not want to go back to that work. I chose to leave, because after 10 years of fighting terrorism, I understood that it is not the problem. Of course, it is important to fight terrorism, but if I think about the long term, the only way is not to do battle against suicide bombers but against their motivation: namely, their God.

"Many people think the terrorists' motivation is the Israeli occupation, the corruption, but all that is just the backdrop. It is not the root of the problem. The occupation is like the rain that falls on the soil in which the seed has been planted, but it is not the seed itself. The root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not lie in security or politics: It is a war between two gods, two religions. Between the God of the Torah and the God of the Koran. The Koran teaches that this is Waqf land - a sacred endowment which must not be given up. The Torah taught the Jews that this is their land and must not be given up.

"It follows that there will be no peace in the Middle East. Israel's problem is not with Hamas or with any other organization, nor with the interpretation Hamas reads into the Koran. It is with the god of the Koran. After all, even a moderate Muslim who reads the Koran must read that the Jews are the sons of apes and that the infidels must be killed. The Palestinians must stop blaming Israel, or the West, for all their problems. If they want true freedom, they must free themselves from their God."

You sound completely pessimistic. What about a Palestinian state?

"That is not a solution. Today we do not have a leadership worthy of ruling, not Hamas and not Fatah. The Palestinians move between the corrupt leadership of Fatah, and the Hamas leadership, which sends them all to die. Besides, Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis. That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels, only a cease-fire, and no one knows that better than I.

"The Hamas leadership is responsible for the killing of Palestinians, not Israelis. Palestinians! They do not hesitate to massacre people in a mosque or to throw people from the 15th or 17th floor of a building, as they did during the coup in Gaza. The Israelis would never do such things. I tell you with certainty that the Israelis care about the Palestinians far more than the Hamas or Fatah leadership does. Israel withdrew from Gaza, and instead of the place being built up and cultivated, look what happened there. We need to take a break from these leaders. And I call on the government of Israel: Never accede to Hamas demands, not even about Gilad Shalit. They will not hurt him - he is too important to them. Even if it goes on for 10 years, Israel must not give in and release all those people from prison."

What about you? Where do you live? What do you do for a living?

"I rent. I don't have a place of my own. After I left, the Shin Bet tried to pressure me to return and even told the FBI that I am the son of a dangerous terrorist, in the hope that I would have no choice but to come back. What kind of behavior is that? Aren't they ashamed? I risked my life for them; they should be ashamed. I am still processing the experiences I underwent and sometimes I don't believe I survived. I am only writing about my experience and hope the book will help me earn a decent living."