Copyright 1994 Jerusalem Post
Jerusalem Post
June 10, 1994
HEADLINE: MISSING INTELLIGENCE
BYLINE: Steve Rodan and Hillel Kutler
It was a Tuesday afternoon in June 1982 when Yona and Miriam Baumel heard the doorbell ring at their Jerusalem apartment. The visitor was an IDF representative with news that their son Zachary was missing. It was during the early days of Operation Peace for Galilee - the Lebanon War - and dozens of soldiers were unaccounted for. The Baumels were told to be patient and wait for more information.
On a table was Zach's last postcard: "Everything is OK, it looks like I won't be home for a while ..."
Last month, more than a decade and many defense assessments later, Miriam Baumel sat outside the Prime Minister's Office as yeshiva students held up signs reading "Hoot if you care about our boys missing in action." Most motorists did.
Twelve years after they learned their son was missing in action, the Baumels have come full circle. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the battle that changed their lives, that of Sultan Ya'akoub from which Zachary Baumel, Yehuda Katz and Zvi Feldman never returned, neither dead nor alive. And after the Baumels and the other MiA families have traveled hundreds of thousands of kilometers, interviewed hundreds of people, collected thousands of pieces of information and fasted for days in a hunger strike, they have returned to the point from which they began: without an answer to the fate of their sons.
The missing pieces to that puzzle have never been provided by Israel. Despite appeals to world dignitaries, secret talks with Arab representatives, and daredevil missions by Israeli agents, neither Israeli intelligence nor diplomats have provided conclusive evidence of the soldiers' fate. The most vital lead came from an Israeli agent who disappeared and was believed killed in 1986 soon after he reported that he saw Baumel in Syria.
Repeated reports that the bodies of the soldiers were interred by Abu Jihad's men after the battle were never fully pursued. This week, Freih Abu Medein, the appointed "justice minister" for the Palestinian authority, repeated a PLO claim that the three bodies were buried by Abu Jihad "himself" near the battle site.
As a senior intelligence officer put it, "Despite all our efforts, we failed. We didn't provide the political leadership with either a military option or a negotiating option."
Today, senior officials acknowledge, the search for the MiAs has been one of the most bungled operations in Israeli history. It was plagued by poor intelligence gathering, interservice rivalries within the IDF and the Defense Ministry, inadequate civilian supervision and unclear guidelines of when a soldier should be regarded as dead.
The Israeli failure has not been limited to the MiAs from Sultan Ya'akoub. Much of the same negligence has applied to the search for Air Force navigator Ron Arad, from whom there has been no sign of life since 1987, one year after his capture. The abduction of Mustafa Dirani last month, some military sources say, is another example of a dramatic operation taken years too late.
Senior officials recalling the MiA saga still become visibly upset by their memories. "What do you want me to say? That they {some of those involved in MiA search} were a bunch of degenerates and liars?" asks one source, who did not want to be identified. "Well, that's the way it was."
The intelligence blunders began immediately after the Battle of Sultan Ya'akoub. At the time, at least six soldiers from two tanks had been declared missing. Baumel, Feldman, commander Hezi Shai and Ariel Lieberman had been in one tank; Zohar Lipschitz and Yehuda Katz were in the other.
Their fate could have been determined within hours. The battle was filmed in its entirety by a pilotless reconnaissance plane that hovered over the Bekaa Valley. It seemed that getting the answer to the fate of the missing soldiers would simply take a push of the video button.
For weeks, the IDF manpower division pressed military intelligence for the video cassette. When manpower finally received the tape, the Sultan Ya'akoub battle was not there. "The video had been recorded over by the time we got it," recalls Col. Shlomit Carmi, former head of the missing persons unit, in an interview with Ron Ben-Yishai on the New Channel Two last December. Her account has been confirmed by senior defense officials.
Two weeks after the battle, Israeli intelligence had another opportunity to clarify the fate of at least one MiA. In an interview with the Jordanian daily A-Dustour, Palestinian fighter Mustafa Ahmis, who was freed in a prisoner exchange in 1979, claimed, "Among those {Israelis} who have fallen captive in Beirut was tank commander Tesi Shai ..."
Israeli intelligence spotted the article and thought nothing of it. There was no Israeli MiA named Tesi. There was, however, an Israeli soldier missing named Hezi Shai.
It was a costly mistake, senior defense sources now say. Nearly two years later, Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, acknowledged he was holding an Israeli soldier and said he was ready for a prisoner exchange with Israel. Jibril's prisoner was tank commander Shai, one of the four crew members missing from the Battle of Sultan Ya'akoub.
"We had the answer about Hezi Shai in A-Dustour, but we read it wrong," says Maj. -Gen. Yehoshua Saguy, head of IDF military intelligence during the Lebanon War.
Maj. -Gen. Amos Yaron, former head of the IDF manpower division, goes further. "It was a big blow to the organization," he says. "The key lesson is there wasn't enough attention paid by military intelligence to the issue of the MiAs. In the aftermath, the intelligence improved."
Critics say these mistakes were compounded by a conception that the MiAs were killed by enemy fire. On July 4, 1982, Israeli military intelligence learned that four Palestinian fighters and Syrian secret police arrived in a truck at the Damascus Jewish cemetery. The Palestinians told Syria's Chief Rabbi Abraham Hamra that they had four bodies for burial along with name tags, which Israeli intelligence sources reported were provided by the PLO's Fatah faction, headed by Yasser Arafat. Hamra was not allowed to open the coffins.
Still, to Israeli military intelligence, this was a big break. Four Israeli soldiers were missing from the Baumel tank. Four bodies were buried in the Damascus cemetery. The conclusion was that they were the same people.
"We told them {the families} that 80 percent of the answer to the whereabouts of their sons was in the Damascus Jewish cemetery," recalls Saguy, today mayor of Bat Yam.
That percentage quickly dropped. On August 15, Syrian officials confirmed that they were holding three prisoners, including Ariel Lieberman, one of the four members of Baumel's tank crew. On September 26, the International Committee of the Red Cross visited several Israeli PoWs, including Lieberman.
The families of the MiAs were pressing the political leadership for answers. Who indeed was buried in the Damascus Jewish cemetery? Saguy, who met with the families in late 1982, offered to mount an operation to exhume the bodies in Damascus and somehow bring them to Israel. The mission, as Saguy put it, would be dangerous and soldiers might be captured or killed.
"We planned an operation to get the bodies out of cemetery," Saguy recalls. "I told Baumel the operation could end in tragedy. Baumel said, 'Don't do it.' "
In October 1983, Israel learned for certain when the Red Cross was permitted to exhume the four graves in the Damascus Jewish cemetery. Only one body was that of an Israeli. He was identified as Zohar Lifschitz. He had been in the tank of MiA Yehuda Katz.
But by that time, many other leads had gone cold. One concerned reports that the MiAs were paraded - either alive or dead - in Damascus hours after they were taken from Sultan Ya'akoub. Several news accounts asserted that Syrians and Palestinians had paraded an Israeli tank and crew through the streets of the Syrian capital.
Dean Brelis, who reported then for Time magazine, recalls he was tipped by a Palestinian source that "something interesting could be seen" in downtown Damascus. It was a parade of Syrian and Palestinian troops and vehicles. In the middle was an Israeli tank.
"A flatbed truck followed the tank," Brelis says, quoting the notes he wrote at the time. "It contained what I believed were three young Israel Defense Force soldiers. Their hands and ankles were chained. They looked deeply saddened, if not ashamed by their plight. They did not seem scared. The parade moved slowly out of sight, through the massive crowd hysterical with ecstasy.
"I requested an opportunity to interview and photograph the three Israeli PoWs, and was told it was impossible at that time."
The Defense Ministry and the IDF were skeptical of the reports that the MiAs from Sultan Ya'akoub were taken alive. First, Syrian army commanders had maintained that the missing Sultan Ya'akoub soldiers were dead. Intelligence analysts reported that the Israeli tank seen in the Damascus parade was a Centurion. The Baumel tank was a Patton. Years later, a senior IDF officer recalls receiving a statement from a UN officer in Damascus who insisted that neither he nor his men saw an Israeli soldier on display.
Nonetheless, defense officials helped the families conduct independent searches, which included trips to Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. Newton Froelich - a former Washington, DC, lawyer who helped the Baumels - recalls that in 1984 he was offered an office in the Defense Ministry to phone journalists who were in Damascus in the early days of the Lebanon War.
Froelich presented the civilian head of the Defense Ministry MiA team, Shmuel Tamir, with a list of 30 eyewitnesses to the Damascus parade who the attorney said had not been approached by Israeli representatives. Tamir, Froelich recalls, appeared impressed.
"He {Tamir} said, 'You're filling this hole in the investigation that's a mile wide. Thank you,' " Froelich says.
But Froelich believes that Tamir, who died in 1987, and his aides were not taking the families' investigation seriously. "They were intelligent, sweet and kind," Froelich says, recalling the MiA team. "But they humored me. Tamir had done no investigation at all. He relied totally on the army conclusion that the tank crew was dead."
Maj. -Gen. Moshe Nativ, head of manpower until 1983, says Tamir and his predecessor and law partner Arye Marinski, were the wrong people to oversee the search for the MiAs. Tamir and Marinski, both of whom had been seriously ill, might have been brilliant attorneys. "But they were at the end of their days and strength," says Nativ, today director-general of the Jewish Agency. "These people also didn't know the army or how to deal with it."
As Froelich and Baumel searched for leads, the first physical trace of the MiAs was obtained by Israel. It was a wax impression of Baumel's IDF tag. In 1984, Jordan's Princess Dina, whose husband was a high-ranking PLO official being held prisoner in Israel, presented the wax impression of Baumel's IDF tag to Israeli journalist Aharon Barnea. Barnea reported the information and gave the wax impression to a senior intelligence officer, Gadi Zohar.
The wax impression was just one indication that the PLO, despite its denials, knew plenty about the MiAs. In late 1985, eastern Jerusalem editors Hanna Siniora and Ziad Abu Zayyad visited Arafat's second-in-command, Khalil Wazir, and saw the actual tag - only half of which was given to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin last year - in his personal safe.
Siniora recalls that Wazir, codenamed Abu Jihad, also reported the fate of the Sultan Ya'akoub MiAs, an assessment Arafat repeated to Rabin this year and Abu Medein repeated this week. "He said all three {Israeli soldiers} were killed in battle and are buried near the site," Siniora recalls.
Abu Medein says only Abu Jihad, assassinated by Israel purportedly in 1988, and "two or three people" know where the burial ground is. He says he could not identify those people. "Abu Jihad didn't leave a map of the area," he says. "Unfortunately, Abu Jihad was killed by the Israelis and they killed the secret with him."
The IDF filed the wax impression of Baumel's tag, and officers never found it again. Military sources today acknowledge that they don't know where the impression is. They have not provided an explanation of what happened.
For nearly two years, perhaps out of embarrassment or simply feeling that the Baumels didn't need to know, the IDF failed to tell the family about the wax impression of Zachary's dog tag. But a senior IDF officer did tell a member of another MiA family. Until today, not one Israeli security source has provided a reason.
"There was no formal decision not to tell the Baumels of the wax impression," a senior IDF officer recalls. "We thought the wax impression was significant. Why didn't we tell them? I don't know. Maybe we didn't want them to know the source {of the tag}."
The Baumels were furious. They called for a court-martial of Carmi, then head of the missing persons unit, a demand that was not met. "This was really criminal," Yona Baumel recalls. "If this was a military secret, then why was it told to a member of some other family? She {Carmi} then should have been prosecuted for passing on a military secret."
Carmi refuses to comment.
Yona Baumel learned of the wax impression after he returned from Amman, one of several trips he took to follow up leads that senior defense officials today assert they had known were false. In June 1986, US diplomats helped arrange a meeting between Baumel and a Jordan television host, Haroun Mechamid, who two years earlier had claimed that Palestinians were holding the Sultan Ya'akoub MiAs.
Mechamid told Baumel and Froelich that he saw Zachary in December 1982, six months after the battle in the Bekaa Valley. Baumel's captors allowed Mechamid to peep into his cell and they showed him the Israeli's identification papers, the TV host told the elder Baumel, adding that the soldier looked healthy. The captors did not allow Mechamid to speak to Baumel.
Baumel began to celebrate on the plane back to Cairo. "He was in the plane with a martini on the flight back to Cairo, saying 'My son is alive,' " Froelich recalls.
Both men returned to Tel Aviv and reported to the Defense Ministry team. The Israelis were skeptical. IDF intelligence had already concluded that Mechamid was a liar. Some officers concluded from the testimony Shai and Lieberman gave after they were returned from Syria in prisoner exchanges that the remaining two tank crew members were dead.
"If I could choose between whom I should believe, the Jordanian broadcaster or our own people, then I would believe our soldiers," says Yaron, former head of the manpower division.
As it turned out, Jordanian officials belatedly agreed with the Israeli intelligence community and never gave Mechamid permission to help the Baumels. A US Embassy cable from Amman reported that Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid Rifai had "serious doubts about how much Mechamid knew and feared that the family would put too much weight or hope on Mechamid. Rifai was concerned that Israel not blame Jordan if Mechamid disappoints or uses his good offices for his own aggrandizement."
Years later, Froelich, still convinced the broadcaster was sincere, shakes his head at the memory. "It was another lead that went cold," he says.
The same year, Baumel was off again - this time to Berlin, accompanied by Tel Aviv attorney Ory Slonim. They met with an Israeli drug dealer. He had an Arab partner who was said to have been in Tadmor prison in Syria, near the Iraqi border, where Israelis had been secretly detained in the 1950s. The Arab dealer said he saw Israeli soldiers in Tadmor after the Lebanon War.
Finally, the Israeli agreed to be accompanied by an Israeli intelligence agent to meet the Arab drug dealer in Denmark and hear his story. Slonim immediately made the phone calls for an agent to meet him in Berlin.
It took two weeks for the agent to arrive. By that time, the Israeli drug dealer feigned illness and refused to cooperate.
Today, the episode still sparks debate among some of the IDF officers involved in the affair. Some believe the Berlin dealer had hard information but backed out. Others, particularly intelligence sources, say the story was hogwash. For his part, Slonim refuses to comment.
| But even the leads provided by the IDF itself were often ignored by senior officers. The reason stemmed from the rivalries within the military, particularly between the manpower division and the Intelligence Corps. Of the two, military intelligence was clearly the more powerful. The manpower division had to deal with the families, their complaints and their worries. But it was completely dependent on intelligence for any information concerning the MiAs. The result was that most of the manpower division's efforts were wasted. In the early 1980s, the division entrusted a reserve colonel with long experience in South Lebanon with finding the MiAs from Sultan Ya'akoub. Lt. -Col. Yud, as he wants to be known, searched the countryside for clues and spoke to numerous residents and guerrillas. One lead was an imam in the southern Lebanese village of Ita el-Fouchar, near Sultan Ya'akoub. He was said to have participated in a rite in which the bodies of MiAs were displayed. The imam was said to have known their burial place. The Islamic clergyman refused to meet Yud and the officer urged his superiors - in an operation that echoes last month's capture of Dirani - to kidnap the imam and force him to cooperate. "I didn't get the tools I needed," said Yud, during an interview with Ron Ben-Yishai on Channel Two last year. "During the entire time, there was no feedback on the information I provided." A senior officer who worked with Yud agrees. "They put all sorts of obstacles in his way," the officer recalls. "He had a problem getting even the basics, like gasoline and a car." Col. Menahem Digly, a reserve intelligence officer who commanded Yud, says eventually the team stopped operating. "The whole effort faded away," he recalls. "They stopped dealing with this." Privately, the IDF acknowledged that it wasn't getting anywhere with the search for the Sultan Ya'akoub MiAs. Two IDF reports from 1986 agreed that the intelligence-gathering effort was "terrible." In January 1987, the IDF, led by Lt. -Col. Yona Tilman, then in charge of the missing soldiers unit, recommended a reassessment. Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister, eventually approved it. He asked Maj. -Gen. Aharon Yariv, a former military intelligence chief who was then head of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, to head a review committee. In the end, the intelligence community rejected the committee's proposals. The debate over the fate of the MiAs raged even within the IDF manpower division, with different units giving the families opposing assessments. The casualty unit, which dealt with the MiA families, tried to reassure them that the IDF was doing everything it could to find their sons. The missing soldiers unit, responsible for finding the MiAs, told the families that their children were dead. |
(BOX 1) MiA Chronology |
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The refusal to resolve the MiA affair angered Carmi and her colleagues. They asserted that the main reason that the MiAs were still regarded as alive was the pressure of the political leadership, particularly that of Rabin. They maintained that the IDF was setting a dangerous precedent by actively investigating every single soldier sent to the front whose body could not be found.
"Sometimes there are mysteries that cannot be resolved," says an officer who served with Carmi. "The families have to accept that. Do you think we will be able to look for what could be hundreds or thousands of soldiers missing in the next war, heaven forbid?" Carmi, in a brief telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post, said: "I gave a promise to the head of the manpower division that I wouldn't respond to any questions by reporters and that I would not meet with reporters. I have to keep this promise." Defense Ministry sources say Rabin's attitude toward the MiAs was typical of that of many political leaders. They agreed to repeatedly raise the issue publicly and privately. They spent much time speaking to the families. But they failed to adopt recommendations that could have resolved the affair. The best example occurred in 1987. Shamir's military secretary, Azriel Nevo, had pushed for and won a cabinet discussion of the search for the MiAs. He proposed that the government adopt the chief recommendation of the Yariv committee: that an overall authority, accountable only to the prime minister and the defense minister, be appointed. But at the cabinet meeting, the military brass objected. The manpower division chief, Maj. -Gen. Matan Vilna'i, urged that the status quo be maintained. Rabin agreed. Shamir dropped the issue. Shamir, who could not recall the specific meeting, said many proposals were considered during his years as prime minister. Rabin refused to be interviewed for this article. Today, the families say, Rabin has little time for the MiA issue. Instead, they say, he has become preoccupied with negotiations with Syria and the PLO. Last fall, after the signing of the Declaration of Principles, the MiA families were called in by the head of IDF manpower, Maj. -Gen. Yoram Yair, who urged them not to speak to reporters or interfere with the peace process. Miriam Baumel quickly learned what the new Israeli policy meant. In February, she traveled to the US on a trip paid by the government to recruit support for the MiAs. She told American audiences that Arafat has the answer to the whereabouts of the MiAs. In response, American student activists decided to establish a booth in front of the PLO mission at the UN. The Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations, which has a task force on the Israeli MiAs, called the Israel Consulate-General in New York for advice. The consulate, on orders from the Foreign Ministry, objected. "We wanted the booth to be outside either the PLO mission or the Syrian Embassy," recalls David Felsenthal, the organizer of the students. "The Israeli Consulate-General told us to go to the Iranian Embassy. To us, that meant that they wanted us to do nothing." Foreign Ministry officials confirm the account. They say a vigil in front of the PLO office during the negotiations on Gaza-Jericho First would have been counterproductive. "We raise the issue with the PLO at all levels," one official says. "Our impression is that as long as the Gaza-Jericho process is not complete, Arafat will not deal with this {MiA} issue." In the process, the families say, Israel is giving away its last bargaining chip. In April, the families urged the prime minister not to release the thousands of Palestinian prisoners until the fate of their sons was resolved. Rabin said he would consider the request. In the following weeks, his government released more than 1,000 prisoners. To the families, it was another victory for realpolitik. "We're tired of being orphans," Miriam Baumel says. "We're asking that every soldier and every parent of a soldier realize that this could happen to them soon." Some of the IDF officers involved in the case quietly agree. They say sometimes they are kept awake wondering how Israel could pour so much effort into the search for the MiAs and see virtually no result. Nativ, the former head of manpower, has one explanation. "What happened really was that some people {involved in the MiA search} got tired," he says. "They say, 'OK, we tried.' I say we have to be convinced that we have the facts. Here, we cannot say that we have the facts that they are dead." For Digly, the colonel who was part of the IDF search for the MiAs, the affair is unsettling. His words reflect a crisis of confidence by some senior IDF officers in the intelligence community. "If we don't know this {the fate of the MiAs}, then this scares me," says Digly. "Because then I wonder what else they don't know." |
(BOX 2) A Costly Ambush |