44 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
circumstances. They’ve become almost
an ordinary U.S. response.”
By the end of Obama’s second term,
after fifteen years of drone attacks,
Americans no longer paid much atten-
tion to them. In polls, a large majority
of Americans say they support targeted
killings; in most other countries, the
majority is firmly against them. Accord-
ing to the New America Foundation, in
the past three years Trump has launched
at least two hundred and sixty-two at-
tacks: an increase, on an annual basis, of
twenty per cent.
I
n the operations center at the Mos-
sad headquarters, each officer in the
Mughniyeh mission had a specific role.
One kept track of Mughniyeh’s move-
ments; another monitored the video
feed, in order to confirm, in a split sec-
ond, that the man in the kill zone was,
in fact, Mughniyeh. Olmert visited the
operations center to remind them that
the relationship with the United States,
Israel’s most valued ally, was on the
line. They had to follow the agreement:
kill Mughniyeh and no one else.
On the evening of February 12, 2008,
as Mossad officers tracked the pings
from Mughniyeh’s cell phone, they
learned that he was heading toward
the apartment in Kfar Sousa. They
sent word to Damascus, where agents
maneuvered the S.U.V. into position,
parking in a spot that the target was
guaranteed to pass on the way to his
front door.
Images of the street appeared on a
large television screen in the operations
center. The officers watched Mughni-
yeh’s car pull up in his usual space. The
plan called for detonating the bomb
the instant that he walked into the kill
zone. But Mughniyeh was not alone.
He was accompanied by two other men,
whom the spies recognized: Brigadier
General Muhammad Suleiman, the
Syrian military commander who had
led that country’s construction of a nu-
clear reactor (until Israel destroyed it
in air strikes), and Qassem Suleimani.
It was an unusually formidable gath-
ering. The three leaders, from Leba-
non, Syria, and Iran, were united by a
shared conflict with Israel and the
United States. Each had a different
area of expertise: Mughniyeh was a
technical specialist who had advanced
the use of synchronized bombings to
maximize casualties; Suleiman, the nu-
clear adviser, had also built Syria’s ar-
senal of chemical weapons, including
sarin gas; and Suleimani was an aspir-
ing warrior-statesman, at ease among
politicians and at work on building
the Quds Force into an Iranian For-
eign Legion.
“We just had to push a button and
all three of them would disappear,” the
former Israeli official recalled. “That
was an opportunity given to us on a
silver platter.” Olmert was on a flight
home from a state visit to Berlin, and
though Mossad operatives could have
tried to contact him via satellite phone
for permission to kill the other two
men, they didn’t have much time. They
also knew that the C.I.A., whose sta-
tion chief was in the operations cen-
ter, was authorized to help kill only
Mughniyeh. In an instant, the three
men slipped into the building, and the
operatives settled in to wait for them
to reëmerge. “They prayed that they
would come back separately,” the for-
mer official said.
After nearly an hour, the Mossad
officers watching the video feed saw
Suleimani and Suleiman leave the
apartment building and drive away.
Ten minutes later, Mughniyeh emerged
alone. The commander of the opera-
tion detonated the explosive. On the
screen, the figure of Mughniyeh disinte-
grated mid-stride—“cut into pieces,”
an official who watched the feed re-
called. “His body was thrown in the
air—he was killed on the spot.” No-
body else was harmed.
Word reached the Israeli Prime Min-
ister’s plane in the middle of the night.
The cabin was crammed with journal-
ists, so Olmert’s military assistant, Gen-
eral Meir Klifi-Amir, padded softly to
Olmert’s seat and leaned in to whis-
per. “The world has lost one terrorist
just now,” he said. Olmert responded,
“God bless you.” When the plane
landed, Olmert took the microphone
of the plane’s public-address system,
and said, cryptically, “I want to wish all
of you a great day. This is a great day.”
By the next morning, Mughniyeh’s
death had made the headlines across
the Middle East. At eight o’clock,
Dagan, the Mossad chief, walked into
the Prime Minister’s office with the
commander of the operation, carrying
a disk with a video recording of the as-
sassination. After watching it, Dagan
also played a clip of Suleimani and Su-
leiman walking away. Olmert was de-
flated. Had they reached him, he told
Dagan, “I would have ordered you to
kill them all.”
In the days after Mughniyeh’s assas-
sination, the U.S. and Israel made a
point of avoiding any claim of respon-
sibility. Silence after a killing prevents
“unnecessary complications,” the for-
mer Israeli official said. “You can always
send a plane, bomb a place. You want
to do it in a way that will reduce the
option of retaliation, or the eruption of
large-scale hostilities.” A few days after
the bombing, Mike McConnell, the di-
rector of National Intelligence, appeared
on Fox News. The host, Chris Wallace,
asked him whether America had been
involved in the Mughniyeh killing. “No,”
McConnell said. “It may have been
Syria. We don’t know yet, and we’re try-
ing to sort that out.”
In the intelligence business, funer-
als can provide a feast of information
on the internal politics of an enemy.
Analysts keep track of who sends the
most extravagant flower arrangements,
which up-and-comers get prime seats,
and what top leaders say, and don’t say,
about the need for escalation. At
Mughniyeh’s funeral, in the suburbs
of Beirut, Hassan Nasrallah, the Hez-
bollah chief, delivered a eulogy by
video, full of the usual threats—“Zi-
onists, if you want this kind of open
war, let the whole world listen: Let
this war be open”—but the details of
the event were reassuring. Thousands
of citizens turned out, but Syrian offi-
cials stayed away. They suspected that
Israel was behind the killing, but Pres-
ident Bashar al-Assad didn’t want to
face political pressure to retaliate. In
intercepted communications, Syrian
leaders were overheard stoking rumors
that Mughniyeh died in an internal
feud. “Assad knew exactly who did it,”
the former Israeli official said. “But,
since he didn’t want to get involved in
any major confrontation, he had to
give an excuse.” The agent who had
given Mossad access to Mughniyeh’s
phone was smuggled out of Lebanon
and resettled in another country. Ol-
mert told Mossad officers that, in a
