Last update - 00:00 22/04/2005
The debris of the tunnel wars
By Amir Oren
"I find it extremely peculiar," says Amiram Levin, choosing his words carefully. "How is that so much time has passed, and an operational solution hasn't yet been found? We're talking about Zionism here, not money. I'm certain the problem could have been solved through technology, at reasonable cost, and on a much tighter timetable. This isn't the Ron Arad mystery."
Levin, a reserve major general, and a former commander of Sayeret Matkal and deputy director of the Mossad, has over the years come up against many complex challenges in the special operations arena, which have called for rapid and creative solutions. He is amazed that the defense establishment has not been able to deploy these sort of means against the tunnels in Gaza.
Levin is not alone in his failure to understand what has happened.
Eleven Israeli soldiers have been killed in the past four years (according to the Israel Defense Forces spokesman; the Southern Command puts the number at 15) in the war over the Gaza tunnels - the ones that run beneath the Philadelphi route dividing the two halves of Rafah, and the secret tunnels burrowed beneath IDF positions and the Erez roadblock; both smuggling tunnels and demolition tunnels.
These are the direct victims. The indirect victims are the casualties resulting from the arms, ammunition and explosives smuggled from Egypt and from the terrorists who entered and exited through the tunnels.
Palestinian victory in the battle over the tunnels will encourage the below-ground distribution of the war materiel to other fronts. Once the IDF leaves Gaza and redeploys in the area to the east of the border fence, diplomatic limitations will prevent the army from using gunfire to enforce the ban on approaching the fence from the west. The Palestinians will be able to saturate the Gaza Strip near the fence with dense construction, and then use it to dig a safe passage to the fields of adjacent kibbutzim, and beyond.
The questions can be directed at all of the relevant parties - but the most accusatory finger may be pointed at the body that bears main responsibility: the Weapons Systems and Infrastructure Development Authority (WSIDA).
For the past two and a half years, the director of the authority - a general or a civilian of equivalent rank who participates in discussions of both the General Staff and the Defense Ministry directorate - has been Shmuel Keren, a reserve brigadier general and former director general of Israel Military Industries. Directly below him in the pecking order is the head of the R&D unit, Brigadier General Danny Gold. Below him is the department head, Colonel David Ovadia, one of whose branches - directed by Lieutenant Colonel Yaron Meirovich - is engaged in "limited conflict and war on terror." Sources in the authority report that this branch is highly preoccupied with seeking responses to the problems encountered in the war with Palestinians.
Six and a half years ago, three outstanding scientists from Ben-Gurion University, headed by Dr. Vladimir Fried, developed a system ("V-3") for detection of underground spaces - in other words, tunnels. In November 1998, an outside expert, a Technion scholar, carried out a test of the system on behalf of WSIDA. Despite the success of the test, the contacts with the authority broke off. A year later, the scientists reapproached, but the authority still wasn't answering the phone.
In early 2004, signs of life were finally detected from planet WSIDA: "The proposal has been studied, and the proposed methods are familiar to us, and their suitability to the problem of the tunnels was examined in the past under the difficult geological constraints that exist in the area." (Veteran geologists chuckle at the thought of "difficult constraints.")
The idea - "fusion of the data" - "has been examined in the past," WSIDA added, "but at this stage the solutions being explored are focused in other directions."
Fried and his colleagues, backed by geology professor Dov Bahat, did not give up. In late 2004, their proposal was submitted to WSIDA via Amiram Levin, who also happens to represent commercial interests. He spoke to Keren, who sent it to the limited conflict and war on terror branch. Nothing happened.
Spadework had already been done
On December 12, 2004, five Israeli soldiers died when an explosion went off in a tunnel below the JVT position. The blast sent Eli Ronen, the director general of the National Infrastructures Ministry and a colonel in the reserves, into a panic.
The next day, Ronen went to his ministry's Geophysical Institute of Israel, which has since the 1950s specialized in "mapping subterranean structures and attributes" to learn why it was not joining in a national mission - developing a system for detecting tunnels.
To Ronen's astonishment, he found out that all the spadework had already been done. The Geophysical Institute had in the last two years, based on its experience in locating sinkholes in the Dead Sea region, developed a system (called "Ben-Ari") that had been checked at the initiative, and through the funding, of the institute, in part by digging a special tunnel. The institute had also initiated and underwritten a test, carried out in April 2004 in coordination with WSIDA, at a testing ground in the south. An additional test was performed in August, the results of which - precise detection of three out of four tunnels - were presented to WSIDA in October. The response from WSIDA: silence. The Ben-Ari system was presented in November at a seminar for clients of the institute. An IDF officer representing WSIDA was invited, attended and remained silent.
In a further review of the files, Ronen discovered that the bungle continued, and was leading to unexpected directions: His minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, was too weak to induce Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz to move on the idea. But the problem began with Mofaz's predecessor at the Defense Ministry - the very same Ben-Eliezer. If ministry staffers wanted to taunt Ben-Eliezer, they would have answered him in his current capacity with embarrassing exhibits from his previous post. As early as August 2001, the institute appealed to then-defense minister Ben-Eliezer, laying out for him the plodding history of the treatment of the tunnels, "a painful subject."
One body that is interested in delving deep into the tunnels is the state comptroller's office. It will receive numerous documents showing that as early as 1990, WSIDA and the Southern Command asked the Geophysical Institute for ideas for detecting the tunnels along the Philadelphi route. The institute suggested erecting a "seismic fence" for three purposes - detection of empty spaces in existing tunnels, detection of the sounds of digging, and detection of the sounds of people and equipment moving through the tunnel.
The defense establishment rejected the proposals and opted for other means - dense drilling along the route and the introduction of a camera to detect tunnels, and subterranean mapping by radar, between the drillings.
In August 2001, almost one year after the start of the current conflict with the Palestinians, the institute approached Ben-Eliezer and requested that within the defense establishment there be "a single body that would coordinate the subject in a continuous and consistent manner."
Proposals made some waves
The institute again proposed that a seismic fence be erected, and also proposed looking into an idea raised in the defense establishment to operate radar along the length of a buried underground pipeline.
The proposals made some waves, and WSIDA issued a call for proposals in September 2001. Two years later, WSIDA carried out a comparison test of three detection systems - of the Geophysical Institute, and two companies, Hadas Detection and Decoding, and Electro-Optic Research and Development (EORD).
The criteria used to explain the results of the test and to rank the three competitors - only the top two advanced to the next stage - are controversial. WSIDA will have to convince - apparently the state comptroller, as well - that moving EORD into second place (there was no argument about Hadas having placed first) and the elimination of the Geophysical Institute did not stem from alien considerations. According to a table that compares the main points of the systems' performance, the Geophysical Institute surpassed EORD in the percentage of events detected, precision of the detection at great depth, and in another index, statistical error in one of the readings.
The conclusion of the WSIDA report assesses the practical chances of demolishing a tunnel that would be detected by each one of the systems, through the detonation of an explosive charge. Hadas: The errors are "likely to enable" precise location leading to "a moderate chance of destruction." Geophysical Institute: The errors "enable" precise locating and a "low chance" of destruction. EORD: The errors "do not enable" locating at the required level of accuracy.
Despite this comparison, which would seemingly rule out EORD, in December 2004, the head of WSIDA circulated a document that stated: "Results of this test showed that the performance of the systems presented by the Geophysical Institute were inadequate, in comparison to the other two companies, and it was therefore decided to carry on activity with these companies."
Another document, drafted by Colonel Ovadia in January 2005, stated that "Proving the feasibility of the systems of the Hadas and EORD companies ended in success."
Two weeks after the deadly explosion at the JVT position, Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Moshe Ya'alon appointed a "special assistant to the chief of staff for the matter of the threat of the tunnels."
Ya'alon did not choose a career officer identified with WSIDA, the Southern Command or any other internal body. As a former commander of Sayeret Matkal and chief of Military Intelligence, who, like Amiram Levin, had experience with nonroutine actions, Ya'alon preferred to call up reserve Colonel Yossi Langotsky, a geologist and former head of MI's department of intelligence collection, commander of the Intelligence Corps' technological unit and also someone who happened to have learned about tunnels. Langotsky is a student of another era, another school of thought, in which the term "emergency" was interpreted in a straightforward manner: the need to concentrate effort and address urgent needs within days or weeks, not years or decades. After holding consultations, Langotsky submitted practical recommendations for resolution of the tunnel problem.
Tunnel threat is rated number one
While Langotsky was still researching the subject, the Geophysical Institute again proposed to WSIDA that it could prove, at its own expense, the effectiveness of the Ben-Ari system. The deputy chief of staff, Major General Dan Halutz, ordered that an "immediate trial" be conducted: Relative calm had settled over the Philadelphi route, after the election of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as chairman of the Palestinian Authority, and an opportune time came about for testing the ideas in the field, and not only on the test site.
When the outcome of the January 11 test was presented to Ovadia, it turned out that an argument broke out among the officers over the location of the tunnel, near one of the army positions, and no review of the test was issued. Now, three months later, it is still unclear whether the test was successful. The route is no longer as calm as it was then, and thus an opportunity to examine all of the possible ideas in the field has been missed (in the past year, WSIDA has received 15 suggestions, not all of them eccentric).
The Defense Ministry describes the sharp criticism of WSIDA as a gross injustice to its devoted employees, who are doing all they can, and that they have to take into account not only the wisdom of the proposal, but also the simplicity of its execution, operation and maintenance of the systems. The tunnel threat is rated number one on the list of priorities for execution, right up with suicide bombers. More than NIS 16 million has been invested in it, and WSIDA assesses that the defense establishment in along the way to a solution. There has been slight progress in certain fields, and more in others.
"The issue of the tunnels is complicated," said a Defense Ministry spokeswoman this week, on behalf of WSIDA. She wished to emphasize that WSIDA was responsible only until the stage of proof of feasibility, and that "the decisions are reached by a joint team of WSIDA, the Ground Forces Command, and the techno-logistics division.
The IDF spokesman added that if there was a certain degree of calm along the Philadelphi route, it was exploited to set up an engineering obstacle and deploy "technologies that were at a level of development that permitted operational application." No one in the world has yet found a solution to the problem of tunnels, due to its "physical complexity."
Meanwhile, in a country looked to as an example by Israel, Congress voted to give special authority to the Defense Department to rapidly equip its forces with technological measures without the need for a tender, and within two weeks of a report by the commander of the operational theater of a clash with an urgent need.
The local version sounds like an admission of defeat: Israel is saying that the Palestinians won, and will continue to win, when it comes to underground warfare. And if they can do it, then why not Hezbollah and other groups?
Professor Bahat, of Ben-Gurion University, wonders if they are waiting for an apple to drop on the head of a Newton. Perhaps in order for there to be a sharp sense of emergency in the offices of the minister of defense and chief of staff on the 14th floor of the tower in the Kirya in Tel Aviv, or two stories above them, in WSIDA, there will be a sharper sense of emergency. What is needed is a Shin Bet warning about a Palestinian intention to dig a tunnel from the nearby street to a point below the building that houses their offices.