"The Dubai job" (by 'Caesarea', aka. Pumpous & Clumsy)

"At 6:45 a.m., the first members of an Israeli hit squad land at Dubai International Airport and fan out through the city to await further instructions... Most of the operatives here are members of a secretive unit within the Mossad known as Caesarea, .... "If the Mossad is the temple of Israel's intelligence community, then Caesarea is its holy of holies."

In the course of reporting this story, GQ has learned that this is Caesarea's second attempt to kill Al-Mabhouh. On a previous trip to Dubai two months earlier, in November 2009, the same team tried to poison him. It is not known precisely how the team administered the toxin in their first attempt, though the suspicion is that they either slipped it into a drink or smeared it on one of the fixtures in his hotel room. Al-Mabhouh fell mysteriously ill but eventually recovered ...

Al-Mabhouh has been on the Mossad's list of assassination targets since 1989, after he and an accomplice named Muhammad Nasser abducted and murdered two Israeli soldiers...... The need to eliminate Al-Mabhouh, however, has only intensified over time,.... In the mind of Mossad chief Meir Dagan, liquidating Al-Mabhouh is worth the risk of sending such a large team on a mission into a hostile country, though the wisdom of this choice will be severely questioned in the aftermath of the job....

In 1997 the Mossad tried to assassinate Khaled Mashal, the political leader of Hamas, by spraying a chemical agent on his ear as he walked down a street in Amman, Jordan. The mission failed..... In a humiliating blow to the agency, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to admit that the Mossad plot had been a terrible failure. For the next several years, morale within the agency plummeted, and its reputation for daring and success was tarnished.

Then, in 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tapped Dagan, a former military commander with a reputation for ruthless, brutal efficiency, to restore the spy agency to its former glory and preside over, as he put it, "a Mossad with a knife between its teeth." "Dagan's unique expertise," Sharon said in closed meetings, "is the separation of an Arab from his head." Dagan immediately announced that the Mossad would devote most of its resources to what he considered the two key threats to Israel's survival: the Iranian nuclear program and terrorism from the Iranian-supported groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The number and frequency of covert operations increased dramatically. There were several acts of sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program: two mysterious crashes of Iranian aircraft associated with the program, fires breaking out at two important laboratories, damage inflicted upon Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and the disappearance of two Iranian scientists and the killing of a third. There was also a mysterious explosion at a Syrian plant where Scud missiles were being fitted with chemical warheads, and the Mossad is credited with the discovery of a nuclear reactor in Syria, built with North Korean assistance, whose existence the Syrian authorities had managed to conceal for over five years. (The Syrian nuclear facility was subsequently destroyed by the Israeli Air Force in September 2007 after the United States proved reluctant to do so.)

The number of complex targeted assassinations carried out by the Mossad also increased under Dagan. The most high-profile of these was the elimination in Damascus of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's military chief..... Dagan's Mossad is also believed to be responsible for the death of General Mohammed Suleiman, a close aide of Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad, who headed that country's nuclear program and handled military cooperation with Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah....

Because of these successes, Dagan's tenure as director of the Mossad was repeatedly extended, ...Dagan is also reported to have stated on several occasions that he does not believe there is anyone within the Mossad today who is worthy to replace him.

Several Mossad operatives who have attended meetings in Dagan's office describe a ritual that he goes through when preparing a team for a dangerous mission. During the meeting, Dagan points to a large photograph hanging on his office wall of a bearded Jew wrapped in a prayer shawl, kneeling on the ground with his arms in the air. The man's fists are clenched, and his piercing eyes look straight ahead. Next to him stand two German SS officers, one holding a club and the other a pistol. "This man," Dagan says, "was my grandfather, Dov Ehrlich. ......I can to ensure that something like this will never happen again."

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