On September 25, 1997, five Mossad agents entered Jordan disguised as Canadian tourists. Their mission: assassinate Khalid Mishal, a 41-year-old operative of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Their method: a page out of Hamlet, injecting poison in Khalid’s ear.
The result: one of the most spectacular failures in the history of international espionage.
Not only did Khalid survive, he became a hero to the Palestinians. The assassination attempt strained Israel’s relations with Jordan and the United States, and, as Paul McGeough explains in “Kill Khalid,” helped shift the dynamic of the Middle East for the next decade. “By their failure to assassinate Mishal,” he writes, “Israel’s [prime minister] Netanyahu and [Mossad director] Yatom had pulled Hamas back from the grave.”
McGeough, chief correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and author of three books on the Middle East, delivers a gripping account of the failed assassination, interviewing many of the major players, including Khalid himself.
Khalid was a prime target for the Israelis, who believed he had organized the suicide bombings that plagued Jerusalem that summer. While Israel had success with assassinations before, however, the plot against Khalid fell apart almost immediately.
When Khalid left his Amman home just after 10 a.m. that September morning, there were warnings that something was amiss. His wife called the car to say that several non-Arabs were spotted in their neighborhood. And Khalid’s driver noted a rental car that shot out ahead of them.
By the time he arrived at his office, Khalid was uneasy, and paid more attention to a blond man standing on the corner as he got out of the car.
The man thrust forward. Khalid’s bodyguard jumped to his aid, throwing the blond man onto the pavement, but not before the Hamas operative heard a hissing noise near his ear.
The bodyguard, Abu Maher, chased the man and an accomplice on foot and by car and, after a long fight, corralled the pair into a taxi and drove them to a police station.
The pair had Canadian passports, and told police Maher had attacked them. However, they refused to speak with the Canadian consulate.
Meanwhile, Khalid, still feeling fine, had a gut feeling that he had been the victim of a failed Mossad attack. He phoned Randa Habib, the Amman bureau chief for news service Agence France-Presse, whose high-profile connections included King Hussein. By 11:14 a.m., the story was on the wires.
Habib’s report was short on length, detail and confirmation of the attack. But the reporter’s instincts proved correct. By lunchtime, Khalid began slipping out of consciousness. The poison had fallen short of its mark, but it was still lethal.
As Khalid lay in a coma, Mossad director Danny Yatom went to see King Hussein in the royal palace, confirming what the AFP had hinted. “We did it, he’ll die in 24 hours,” Yatom told the shocked king. “We’ve injected him with a chemical, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
King Hussein was furious. The assassination attempt could easily destroy the country’s bilateral security treaty with Israel, and because of the AFP report, everyone knew who was behind it. “You have jeopardized everything,” a royal aid yelled at Yatom.
With neighbors already unhappy over Jordanian relations with Israel and the US, the king’s political future depended on keeping Khalid alive. At the same time, the canny king saw an opportunity, McGeough says, to humiliate the man he detested: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hawkish prime minister, by getting him in trouble with the US.
The king called the White House, asking President Clinton to step in or risk a full-blown crisis in the Middle East. His tactic appeared to work: Clinton was sufficiently annoyed with the Israeli prime minister that he refused to take his calls, opting instead to broker through intermediaries the deal for Israel to hand over the formula for the poison and the antidote. When Israel had agreed to his terms, Clinton told King Hussein personally.
Eight days later, Khalid was out of the hospital, having received the Israeli treatment with his own medical consultants, including a pharmacologist from the Mayo Clinic.
The entire operation backfired. To get its agents back, Israel was forced to release Hamas religious leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and other prisoners. “Hamas was having its worst year,” a top US Official says. “But then Mossad’s balls-up in Amman turned their fortunes.”
The poisoning also cemented the reputation of the little-known Khalid. Today he is the political leader of Hamas.
“Khalid Mishal emerged as a changed man from his brush with death,” McGeough says. “He saw himself in a very different light, and so did the movement’s members. Overnight, he had become a household name – for Palestinians, Israelis and the whole Arab world. In a Mossad flash, Mishal had been hauled into the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. It had a profound effect on him.”
McGeough calls Mishal “a complex individual with a personal charm that belied the caricature and his cutthroat reputation.” Starting in the acknowledgments, he thanks the Hamas leader for setting “no conditions” on the amount of time he spent on interviews for the book. That may be true, but the terrorist has an agenda nonetheless. It can’t hurt that among Hamas, Khalid is seen as the man the Israelis couldn’t kill.
Kill Khalid
The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas
by Paul McGeough
New Press