The adventures of 'Father of the Night'

In April 1989, Yehuda Dangori arrived at Haemek Hospital in Afula for an x-ray after being wounded in the neck in the course of a military operation in Lebanon. "I was about half a centimeter away from death," he recalls. While waiting for the x-ray, he sat next to a mother and her young daughter. He immediately recognized the two: Tami Arad, the wife of missing air force navigator Ron Arad, and their daughter Yuval.

"I had a lot to say to her," Dangori, 72, says. "I could have told her - and in my heart of hearts I even wanted to - about the days and nights that I and the other members of my unit had spent trying to find out what had happened to Ron, but I didn't open my mouth. I didn't try to make contact with her. I had mixed feelings. I wanted to give her hope, but something grabbed my heart. I recalled that his family had accused the Israel Defense Forces and Military Intelligence of not doing enough for him. If only I could have told her I was injured during an intelligence-gathering operation aimed at helping us find out where her husband was being held, perhaps they would have changed their minds."

Lt. Col. (ret.) Dangori, a member of Kibbutz Hama'apil near Hadera, which is affiliated with the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement, was summoned one day in 1988 to the Kirya Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv. He met with then-MI chief Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, and with the coordinator of government activities in Lebanon, Uri Lubrani. That was shortly after contact had been lost with navigator Ron Arad, who was taken captive by the Shi'ite Amal organization in Lebanon. For about a year and a half there had been direct negotiations for an exchange of captives between Lubrani and Nabih Berri, the head of the Amal movement at the time and current chairman of the Lebanese parliament - the highest government post open to Shi'ites.

During these contacts, Lubrani and Israeli intelligence officials received pictures of Arad and a letter from him. In addition, the captors agreed to give Arad a letter from his family. In the end, the Israeli government, headed by prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and defense minister Yitzhak Rabin, refused to pay the price (the release of dozens of terrorists) demanded by Berri and Amal, and the negotiations continued at a snail's pace. Arad subsequently disappeared without a trace, and it is still not at all clear what happened to him.

During their discussion Lipkin-Shahak asked Dangori, who had left the army, to enlist once again, for the fourth time in his life. Dangori agreed and was sent to Tzach, the code name given to the unit involved in the search operation for Arad. The team included representatives of the Mossad, the Shin Bet security service and the research division of the IDF intelligence branch. Among the members of the team was T. from MI Unit 504.

Dangori and T. moved into the IDF headquarters in Marj 'Uyun in south Lebanon, which was under Israeli control - like all of that country up to the Litani River - following the army's Operation Peace for Galilee in June 1982.

The Tzach team began to gather information and run operatives. One of their successes was the enlistment of a young and educated Lebanese woman who, to make a living, went to work in the home of Mustafa Dirani, who was then in charge of security for Amal and in that capacity was holding Ron Arad. Today Dangori refuses to talk about this agent or even to confirm her existence.

However, according to the book by Ron Edelist and Ilan Kfir, "Hata'aluma" ("The Mystery," 2000), the housekeeper disclosed valuable details to army officials about Dirani. Thanks to that information, the IDF built a model of the Dirani home, in which the special forces trained before embarking on their mission in 1994. But even earlier, before the kidnapping, the young agent played another important role: She was also her employer's mistress - until Dirani discovered that the lady was also the lover of his younger brother. The harsh dispute that erupted was finally resolved with an original solution: The brothers decided to kill her. Dirani's younger brother ambushed and shot the woman as she was leaving her new job at a bank in Beirut.

Years after he was kidnapped by Israel, Dirani claimed through his Israeli attorney that he had undergone severe torture; among other things, that interrogators from Unit 504 had shoved a stick up his anus. Says Dangori, himself a hostage interrogator in Unit 504: "I haven't the faintest idea about this. I didn't participate in Dirani's interrogation ... It's hard for me to believe that could happen."

Along with their successes, Dangori and T. discovered that quite a lot of information they received was false.

Dangori: "One day one of my agents gave me a piece of paper written in Hebrew, claiming it was a letter from Ron Arad. With trembling hands I held the paper. It said: 'Save me, I'm not a traitor.' Someone had pierced those terrible words into the paper with a pin. As a member of Hashomer Hatzair I recalled Uri Ilan, from Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, who served in military intelligence and etched the words 'I'm not a traitor' on the wall of his cell before dying in captivity in Syria, in the 1950s.

"I immediately had a feeling it was a fake. I interrogated the agent and he said he had received the paper from someone in Beirut, who claimed that he had contact with people who were holding Arad, and asked for money in return for the information. Additional investigations clarified that some con man in Beirut who knew we were looking for information about Arad decided to exploit this, in the hope of becoming rich at our expense. Apparently, the same con man grabbed some elderly Jew from Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of Beirut, and forced him to pierce the paper."

About a week later, a similar forged "letter" arrived at another information-gathering unit in the intelligence community.

Did you manage to get to the con man and punish him?

Dangori: "Unfortunately we didn't."

Additional false information about Arad came from the families of south Lebanese prisoners, who were being held by Amal at the police station in the town of Baalbek, under suspicion of collaborating with Israel.

"The prisoners' relatives brought us stories from time to time to the effect that Ron Arad was being held there, or told us about someone who had heard from someone else that Arad was in another place. They tried to sell us these tall tales in the hope that in exchange we would help release them from prison," Dangori recalls.

For years Israel's intelligence assessment has been that at a certain point, under unclear circumstances, Ron Arad was transferred from Amal and Dirani, to Hezbollah and to intelligence and operations officers of the Al-Quds Force, affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The latter had representatives both in the Iranian embassy in Beirut and in the Shi'ite district of Baalbek.

Dangori: "I assumed - intuitively - that he was perhaps transferred to Syria for interrogation. Ron was a navigator in the air force in the first Lebanon War. One of the most successful operations then was the destruction of the Syrian missile batteries, manufactured in the Soviet Union. I assumed he had been transferred for interrogation in Syria and interrogated by Soviet investigators, who wanted to understand how, within minutes, their batteries - the pride of Soviet industry - had been destroyed. But I must admit this was only a guess and not solid intelligence information per se."

Is he still alive, in your opinion?

"I don't know. As has already been publicized, Hezbollah and the Iranians received many offers, including oil deals worth tens of millions of dollars. And they should have been interested in holding Arad as a bargaining chip. They knew we were willing to pay them a high price. Of course, the more time passes, the smaller the chances that he's alive."

So it was a failure that his captors didn't exchange him when there were such opportunities?

"Of course it was a failure. There was an opportunity to exchange him, but the political leadership, for its own reasons - which we may be able to understand but not accept - decided to continue conducting negotiations with Amal. The painful affair of Ron Arad brings me back to what is now happening with Gilad Shalit. I don't understand why they aren't bringing him back. He's an IDF soldier, and the army must do everything possible to bring him back from captivity. They have to pay the price demanded for him."

En route to Paradise

Yehuda Dangori was born in Damascus in 1938. His grandfather, the community rabbi and a factory owner, was a wealthy man; his father, Joseph, was a Zionist activist. In 1945, immediately after World War II, his father sent Yehuda to Palestine with his brother Moshe. "I was 6 and a half years old, my brother was 9. We were sent in a group of 24 children to be educated in Palestine. My father in effect 'volunteered' me because of his belief in the Zionist enterprise. My mother Ora was opposed but Father said we were going to Paradise."

At the time the illegal immigration operation was organized by the Mossad. The Dangori brothers and other children, and four escorts from Palestine, were driven in a truck from Damascus to Lebanon. They stopped about two kilometers from the border and walked the rest of the way: The border was open and the children arrived safely at Kibbutz Kfar Giladi in the Upper Galilee. One of their escorts was "Reuven" - the code name of Avraham Arnan, a fighter in the Palmach pre-state militia, who later founded the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit. The children were dispersed to various kibbutzim after a few days; the Dangoris were sent to Kibbutz Ein Shemer.

Only in 1948, at the height of the War of Independence, did their parents and other relatives immigrate. Dangori's father went to work as a longshoreman at the Tel Aviv port, and his mother was a housewife. Dangori went to live with them in Tel Aviv, attended the Max Fein Vocational School and joined the central branch of Hashomer Hatzair.

At 17 Dangori joined the Hashomer Hatzair Nahal garin (core group) that was sent to Kibbutz Hama'apil. He did his military service in Battalion 50 of the Nahal Paratroopers Brigade. During his service he was called to a secret meeting, where he once again met Arnan, who wanted Dangori to join a secret unit of Arabic-speaking, intelligence-gathering fighters to be established as part of Sayeret Matkal.

While participating in a parachuting exercise in the Negev, Dangori was injured and suffered several broken ribs. He was thereafter barred from combat activity, and his dream of serving in Sayeret Matkal was shelved. In any event, Arnan's idea of a unit of Arabic-speaking fighters was never implemented.

After the accident Dangori returned to Hama'apil, where during the next decade he got married, started a family and worked in several branches of the kibbutz.

In late 1968 several IDF officers approached Dangori on the kibbutz and proposed that he return and join a special MI unit, which today is referred to as Unit 504.

"They wanted to give me the rank of officer without undergoing the usual training," Dangori says, "but I refused: I demanded to take the obligatory officers' training course and a course for intelligence officers, like everyone else. I also took lessons to improve the Arabic I still remembered from the past."

The mission of Unit 504 has always been threefold: gathering information, which in the professional jargon is called human intelligence (HUMINT), via agents near Israel's borders; interrogating persons taken captive; and participating in special operations, a particularly sensitive area. An officer in the unit is called a katam, the Hebrew acronym for "special tasks officer." Katamim take part in cross-border operations and raids of IDF special units such as Sayeret Matkal, the Shayetet naval commandos and Shaldag, the air force commandos.

Over the years, the media in Israel and abroad have published unpleasant details about the activity of Unit 504's members, such as, for example, their involvement in assassinations of Arab agents who betrayed Israel.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the unit operated bases in three areas: the eastern sector, which includes the West Bank and the Jordan Valley; the northern sector in the Golan Heights opposite Syria and Lebanon; and the southern sector in Sinai. Dangori served in all three. During and following the Yom Kippur War, Dangori was an interrogator of captives in the northern Golan Heights. Thereafter, he was transferred to serve in various capacities in Sinai, which he won't discuss, was discharged from the IDF and returned to his kibbutz.

Shortly afterward, a friend from Unit 504, Lt. Col. Yehoshua Bar-Tikva, arrived at Hama'apil and urged Dangori to return to service once again; he convinced the kibbutz members to allow him to do so, and in 1978 he found himself in uniform again - this time in Lebanon.

SLA's special force

During the next five years Dangori served in various positions in Unit 504, among them as deputy commander of the southern Lebanon district, whose name was later changed to the Lebanese Liaison Unit. He managed to serve under three commanders: Yoram Hamizrachi, a journalist who eventually made his way to snowy Canada; Meir Dagan, the current head of the Mossad; and former deputy defense minister Dr. Ephraim Sneh.

Those were days of adventurism and illusions in Israel - as, for example, in the dream of then-prime minister Menachem Begin, defense minister Ariel Sharon and chief of staff Rafael Eitan to bring Lebanon under pro-Israel and pro-Western rule, under the leadership of the Gemayel family. Israel helped to establish a local militia, the Free Lebanon Army, commanded by Maj. Saad Haddad; later, under Gen. Antoine Lahad, it became known as the South Lebanon Army.

The SLA was established in the image of the IDF, but of course adapted to Lebanese reality. It included platoons, brigades and divisions, an intelligence unit, a security service, an interrogation unit, a prison and so on; Israel armed, trained and paid the salaries of SLA soldiers. Although SLA soldiers, and certainly their commanders, thought they were good Lebanese patriots fighting for their freedom, they could have been considered to be an army of mercenaries.

The SLA's purpose was, with the help of the IDF, to defend the security zone that Israel established in south Lebanon, up to the Litani River, to prevent infiltration of Palestinian militants into Israeli territory. After the Lebanon War, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was expelled from Beirut and Lebanon, Hezbollah gradually became Israel's new, bitter enemy in Lebanon.

For his part, Dangori created a special unit in the SLA. "In those years," he recounts, "IDF units carried out raids against terrorist organizations. Soldiers were killed and sometimes there were diplomatic incidents involving the United Nations when our units went on raids north of the Litani.

"I had the idea of establishing a special force of south Lebanon residents familiar with the territory, who would wage guerrilla warfare against the terrorists, with our instructions and supervision. When the IDF embarked on a mission it deployed a brigade. A force of that size risks complications, casualties. I believed that instead of a brigade, two or three men from my [Lebanese] commando unit could carry out the same mission better. My commanders were enthusiastic about the idea and gave me the go-ahead. Even Maj. Haddad agreed. Raful [Eitan], who always preferred doers to talkers, considered me a field person and supported my idea. I chose several Shi'ite residents and some terrorists who had turned themselves in."

At its peak, Dangori's commando unit numbered 16 fighters. They followed an ordinary routine and were considered SLA members to all extents and purposes, and were occasionally summoned for missions, he explains: "We conducted tests to ensure they wouldn't betray us. We gave them false missions involving patrols and reporting. We held a series of training sessions with them and prepared them well."

One mission of which Dangori is particularly proud was blowing up the headquarters of Nayef Hawatmeh's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the village of Barachit in 1980.

"A force from the IDF's [Nahal] brigade 50 failed to carry out the mission and returned with several wounded and one dead. I proposed sending my own fighters. The idea was accepted, albeit not without opposition. I sent two of my guys, residents of the region who were very familiar with the access roads to the village; one was a former terrorist and sapper, whom the IDF had taught and trained. On the basis of an aerial photo the two were instructed where to place the explosive device.

"In the pre-operation briefing I told them not to harm civilians under any circumstances, and that if they saw children playing in the yard of the PFLP headquarters, they were forbidden to carry out the operation. We transported the men and their equipment in a van belonging to a poultry seller, to within about 200 meters of the target. They placed the device and fled. The headquarters exploded without any casualties. It was a great success."

In his headquarters in Marj 'Uyun, Saad Haddad waited for a report on the operation. When Dangori arrived, the major embraced him and dubbed him "Abu Lail": "Father of the Night." Dangori remembers Haddad saying to him: "You are to Free Lebanon what Orde Wingate [the British general in charge of Mandatory Palestine, who sided with the Jews], who was the 'father' of special night squads, was to you." From then on Dangori's unit was called the "Abu Lail force."

In another operation, which required meticulous information-gathering and planning, the force was dispatched to kidnap a Shi'ite butcher, who worked at UN headquarters in the coastal town of Naqoura in south Lebanon. The butcher, who "moonlighted" as a guide for terror squads, was among other things, the one who in 1980 led the terror cell that infiltrated Kibbutz Misgav-Am on the Lebanese border, and murdered the kibbutz secretary and a baby.

According to the intelligence Israel had, the butcher was due to lead another squad in a similar attack on another community; chief of staff Raful instructed Dangori to thwart it. Five fighters from the Abu Lail force were deployed and the butcher was kidnapped in the dead of night. After intensive interrogation in Israel, the butcher was tried and sentenced to a long imprisonment. A few years later, in 1985, he was released in the hostage-exchange deal with Ahmed Jibril's organization.

Fatah mission

Meanwhile, Yehuda Dangori became notorious among senior Fatah officials in Beirut, who had already in 1981 ordered their staff at regional headquarters in Nabatieh to eliminate Abu Lail. A short time before that, Dangori had enlisted a young man of 20 from the village of Itaron to his unit. His mission: to penetrate the Fatah headquarters in Nabatieh, acquire the trust of the local commanders and provide information to Israel.

"At the time the headquarters had established terrorist cells in various villages, which were supposed to embark on terror attacks in Israel," recalls Dangori. "We were very eager to get our hands on the names of the squad members."

But Fatah exposed the intelligence agent and threatened to execute him if he didn't work for them, as a double agent. His handlers equipped him with a cardboard box that supposedly contained the secret documents, but also contained 300 grams of plastic explosives and a watch.

Dangori: "The agent came to the meeting with me as arranged, in a field near the village. There were two bodyguards with me. The agent gave me the package and I noticed there was something different about him. He looked nervous, his hands were trembling, he perspired. I understood something was wrong. My suspicion increased when the agent told me he was in a big hurry to go take care of his sick mother. Because I was familiar with his entire life story and that of his family, that sounded even more surprising.

"'You have sisters,' I said. 'They can take care of your mother.' He stuttered something and I decided to act. I pulled out a pistol and ordered him to get into the car with me and the bodyguards. I placed the package he had brought me between his legs and began driving. Before we had gone 100 meters he turned to me anxiously and said in Arabic: 'It's a bomb.' Sappers were summoned and neutralized the device, and the double agent was brought in for interrogation in an SLA prison.

"Major Haddad wanted to execute him. I was opposed and told him: We don't kill so easily. We'll put him on trial. And that's what happened. The terrorist was sentenced to a prolonged period of imprisonment, but was also released in the Jibril deal."

About a year later, in November 1982, Dangori's life was saved again. At the time, after the first Lebanon War, he was military governor of the city of Tyre. He left his offices shortly before terrorists blew them up, but dozens of IDF soldiers and Shin Bet members were killed.

You served under Meir Dagan, as his deputy in the special liaison brigade in Lebanon. Did you have information to the effect that he ordered assassinations of terrorists or traitorous agents, with the help of the Lebanese agents that you were handling?

"Ask him. He was my commander and I have nothing to say on the subject."

A decade ago Dangori published a memoir called "Arba'ah Alei Tiltan" ("Four-leafed Clover: The Road from Damascus to Secret Activity in Southern Lebanon"). In one of the pictures there, he is seen in the company of the head of the command, Avigdor "Yanush" Ben-Gal. But if one gets a hold of the original photo, it reveals a third figure who was cut out of the book: Meir Dagan.

Dangori ends our conversation on an optimistic note. A few months ago, he says, he was invited to give a lecture at a pilots' training course, in which his grandson was participating. "I left," he says, "with a sense of elation about our youth."