Killing Terror Leaders: Israel's Experience
The elimination of an organization's leader tends to paralyze the group in the short term, but it sometimes results in the rise of an even more dangerous successor.
Before most Americans had heard the name Osama bin Laden, Israel's Mossad was on to him. In 1995, when unknown assailants tried to kill then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia, the CIA and the Egyptian intelligence service requested the Mossad's assistance in investigating the incident. The Mossad discovered that Iran and a hitherto unknown mujahedeen group were jointly responsible for carrying out the attempted assassination. Notable among these mujahedeen—veterans of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan who had found refuge in Sudan—was a certain wealthy Saudi by the name of bin Laden.
The Mossad was sufficiently concerned by this development that it set up a Global Jihad desk—the first Western intelligence organization to do so—in a bid to gather information on the new phenomenon of scattered terrorist cells lacking a hierarchical structure and regular state assistance. The Mossad was also the first to attempt, unsuccessfully, to assassinate bin Laden: In 1995, it recruited his secretary to poison him.
It has long been evident that killings of this kind are an invaluable component of the military arsenal in the fight against terrorism. The country that has carried out more targeted killings than any other since the end of World War II is Israel. Though it officially denies responsibility for most of the killings it has carried out, the Jewish state has repeatedly eliminated field operatives and military, political and ideological leaders of organizations it has deemed dangerous.
While formally opposed to Israel's actions, U.S. administrations have turned a blind eye. And since the mid-1990s, Israel has shared a great deal of technology that it developed in its use of drones with the U.S. Today, drones are America's primary weapon in its own targeted killings. Israel also trained U.S. special forces in penetration and ambush techniques in urban environments—techniques that were later put into practice in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
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