Targeted Killing in Dubai: A Mossad Operation Gone Awry?

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No cameras recorded what happened in the next 19 minutes. According to the investigations conducted to date, an electroshock device was apparently used to stun Mabhouh when he entered his room. It is not known whether the four assassins were already waiting for him in the room or attacked from room 237, across the hallway.

It appears that the Hamas leader was then suffocated with a hotel pillow. The killing was supposed to look like a natural death.

By 8:46 p.m., two of the four agents were already standing at the elevator, waiting to take it back downstairs.

The adrenalin-fueled tension in the men is recognizable in the video images. Like boxers, they keep shifting their weight from one foot to the other. One of the two has even forgotten to remove his rubber glove.

The hit squad left the Bustan in teams of two and took taxis to the airport. On the videos, Folliard is shown walking arm-in-arm with another agent, carrying a plastic bag in her left hand.

Daveron secured the retreat. He was the last to leave room 237, talking on his phone and pulling his trolley bag behind him.

Dubai Police Come Out Looking Good

Everything went according to plan. A short time later, Daveron and Folliard were sitting on a flight to Paris and two others were on a plane bound for South Africa, while Mabhouh was still lying undiscovered in room 230.

The commando operation took less than 24 hours. But after it ended, nothing went according to plan.

The agents knew that they had been filmed on surveillance cameras at the airport, at taxi stands, in hotel lobbies and in front of elevators. But they were apparently confident that no one in Dubai would be capable of analyzing, or would even take the trouble to analyze, countless hours of video footage. That was a mistake.

"The big surprise lies in the ability of the Dubai police," says Israeli intelligence expert Ronen Bergman, "to have put together all of this material to assemble a single picture. That's an extremely complicated undertaking." The Dubai police, says Bergmann's colleague Ben Kaspit of the Israeli daily newspaper Maariv, "emerges from this entire situation looking the best."

Those police efforts ended up being detrimental to the Israelis, despite being an initial source of amusement. "Do you recognize them?" Maariv asked its readers on the day after the Dubai police published the photos of the suspected assassins. Israel is a small country, with 7.5 million people living in an area smaller than the US state of West Virginia. In a spirit of amusement rather than concern, Israelis across the country began scrutinizing one another, checking out café patrons in Tel Aviv, neighbors in kibbutzim and parents in kindergartens.

Legal Identity Theft

When Or Kashti saw the photos, he could hardly believe his eyes. Kashti is the education editor at the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, and he is a dead ringer for the man with the cover name "Kevin Daveron." Kashti received the first call early in the morning. It was his mother, and she asked him carefully whether he had been abroad recently. Later, while he was standing in a supermarket between the tomato and eggplant shelves, an older woman slapped him on the back and said: "Congratulations, you guys really stuck it to that Arab."

But not everyone was so pleased -- particularly the six Israelis whose names and identities were actually used by the hit squad. "This is horrifying," says Stephen Daniel Hodes, who immigrated to Israel from Britain years ago. "I haven't left Israel in two years, and I've never been to Dubai." Paul John Keeley, who lives on the Nahsholim kibbutz south of Haifa, is also shocked. "Who do you call when someone has stolen your identity?"

It's a good question, one which has no answer. Even if the six Israelis could prove that the Mossad used their identities, a lawsuit would hardly succeed. Under Israeli law, document forgery is not illegal if it is authorized by the government.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, this is already the second time a Mossad intelligence operation has gotten him into diplomatic hot water. During his first term, in 1997, he ordered the liquidation of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in the Jordanian capital Amman. When the agents sprayed a nerve toxin into Mashaal's ear as they walked past him in broad daylight, they were taken into custody by the Jordanians. To secure their release, Netanyahu had to hand over the antidote and release the co-founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin.

Looking for New Recruits

In the al-Mabhouh case, the assassination was successful, but keeping it a secret wasn't. Jerusalem has remained officially silent on the Dubai police claims. This "policy of ambiguity," as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman calls it, is meant to protect Israel's own agents, while simultaneously deterring terrorists and sending them the message that they will never be safe anywhere in the world.

But whether this policy of deterrence is working is doubtful. Even if Hamas's supply of weapons in the Gaza Strip is interrupted for some time as a result of the al-Mabhouh killing, others will sooner or later take his place. "It isn't clear that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was worth the trouble," fears journalist Ben Kaspit.

Few Israelis question the idea that targeted killings are morally justified. "We forgot long ago that a state based on the rule of law doesn't use death squads," says left-leaning journalist Gideon Levy.

The Mossad, which is presumably no longer able to use 11 of its agents, is already searching for new recruits. There is a job application form on the agency's Web site (www.mossad.gov.il), under the keyword "career." The areas where potential intelligence agents are needed, according to the site, include computer technology, logistics and "special projects."

DIETER BEDNARZ, ERICH FOLLATH, CHRISTOPH SCHULT, ALEXANDER SMOLTCZYK, HOLGER STARK, BERNHARD ZAND

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• Part 1: A Mossad Operation Gone Awry?
• Part 2: Is Mossad Taking Greater Risks?
• Part 3: A Serious Strain on German-Israeli Relations?
• Part 4: On the Israeli's Hit List
• Part 5: Intended to Look Like a Natural Death