Authors: Matthew Levitt
Told by Obeid that he needed to travel to Europe to finalize a part of this new business deal, Tannenbaum booked a flight to Brussels for October 4. As he prepared to leave, he offered only one sign of possible reservations about the trip. His daughter Keren would later recall his last words before leaving: “I will take care of myself.”
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As a reserve officer who still consulted for major arms industry companies, he had reason to be cautious. An official with one of the companies Tannenbaum worked with conceded the work dealt “with the [Israeli] Defense Ministry’s most sensitive technologies.” The firm had “outsourced [work to Tannenbaum] for a number of contracts,” the company’s security officer conceded.
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Strangely, however, Tannenbaum exhibited little of the caution common among people working on sensitive, classified matters. He reportedly boasted about his high security clearance and, according to police statements, would wear his military uniform to impress people at business meetings.
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Tannenbaum felt he had built a relationship of trust with Obeid, and with accumulating gambling and business debts, he desperately needed the income promised by this new business partnership. He departed Israel for Brussels believing he was meeting with some of Obeid’s business contacts. A few days later he was reported missing.
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Tannenbaum told a friend and sometimes business partner before he left that he was heading to London, not Brussels. “He went to Europe to bring cash to conduct a deal here in Israel,” the partner said, insisting he could not have been mixed up in drugs.
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To other friends he reportedly said he planned to visit an unnamed Arab country and might be gone some time finalizing a major deal.
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Media reports would link Tannenbaum to “a number of drug deals in the six months prior to his abduction,” though the International Crimes Unit of the Israeli National Police would only comment that he was never indicted for narcotics trafficking.
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In the days following his abduction, however, a special team was set up within this police unit and quickly determined Tannenbaum had been planning a major drug deal.
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On October 7, just days after Tannenbaum’s disappearance, Hezbollah operatives disguised as United Nations officials attacked an Israeli military vehicle patrolling the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon and abducted three Israeli soldiers. A week later, at a conference organized to pressure the Arab League to support the continuation of the second intifada and reject peaceful compromise at its upcoming meeting, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah took to the podium. With Israeli leaders still reeling from the recent cross-border abduction, the conference participants expected Nasrallah to gloat over his recent operational success and goad Arab leaders to follow his example of unyielding military pressure on Israel. They did not expect him to announce yet another, still more audacious, abduction.
“I inform you gladly,” Nasrallah told the conference participants, speaking into the cameras carrying his speech live on Hezbollah’s own al-Manar satellite television station and the pan-Arab al-Jazeera network, “in a new qualitative achievement and in a complicated security operation, the Islamic resistance was able to take prisoner an Israeli Army officer with the rank of colonel who works with one of the Israeli security agencies.” The audience rose in applause. “Let us not give any further details, to keep the Israelis in confusion.” Turning to Selim al-Hoss, the Lebanese prime minister, who was sitting next to him, Nasrallah jokingly apologized for the calls the prime minister would likely soon field from the US secretary of state.
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Later, citing its reasoning for proscribing Hezbollah’s IJO (referred to here as the ESO, or External Services Organization), the British government would note that, among other attacks on British or Western interests, the “ESO is believed to have been instrumental in the kidnapping in December 2000 of the Israeli businessman Elhanan Tanenbaum and of Israeli soldiers from the Shaba farms region of Southern Lebanon/Syria.”
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Investigators quickly assumed the seized individual was Tannenbaum, now disappeared for twelve days. But how did Tannenbaum get to Lebanon? According to Nasrallah, Tannenbaum “flew to Beirut from Brussels on a false passport and entered Lebanon legally. We arrested him when he arrived.”
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The truth—which would emerge over a long period marked by rampant media speculation—bore out Nasrallah’s account of the abduction as a “complicated security operation.” Drawn to Brussels on the pretense of meeting “businessmen” central to the success of a $200,000 drug deal, Tannenbaum left Israel of his own free will on a Sabena Airlines flight on the night of October 3.
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He and Obeid had been in regular telephone contact leading up to the trip.
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From Tannenbaum’s perspective, this contact likely underscored their business partnership. In fact, Obeid was the point man for the kidnapping operation, receiving a service fee of $150,000 from Hezbollah for delivering a childhood friend and high-ranking military reservist who still worked on highly classified projects.
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Tannenbaum spent several days in Brussels. At the meeting itself, someone tied to Hezbollah told Tannenbaum he would need to visit the United Arab Emirates
(UAE) to close the deal. Tannenbaum’s previous mentioning to friends of an Arab destination suggests he knew in advance that the meeting in Brussels was just a prelude to another meeting in an Arab country. Whether he knew where that meeting was to be held is unknown. In Belgium, Tannenbaum’s Hezbollah contacts provided him with a false passport bearing his photograph and a name similar to his own. The time it took to finalize the forged passport, with Tannenbaum’s true photograph and signature, likely explains the lag before his departure to the UAE on a flight connecting in Germany.
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After his eventual release, Tannenbaum would testify that he flew to Brussels and then on to the Emirates on his true passport, only assuming his cover identity when he arrived in Lebanon. By some accounts, Tannenbaum used his new false passport to travel to Dubai, with the document switch making sense given Israeli regulations precluding a senior reserve IDF officer from visiting an Arab country. Whether he used the forged passport or not, the sophistication of Hezbollah’s network in Europe was made apparent by its quick procurement of such a document.
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Most press reports indicate that Tannenbaum flew to Abu Dhabi, but by his own account, he went to Dubai, the glitzy Emirate city just across the Gulf from Iran.
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How he got from there to Lebanon is a matter of some debate, and a story that Tannenbaum has never fully told. Nasrallah insisted that Tannenbaum came to Beirut of his own accord. By one account he was “lured to Beirut by a female Hezbollah agent masquerading as a businesswoman.”
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In the media frenzy that accompanied the Tannenbaum affair, Israeli reporters revealed that Tannenbaum maintained at least two mistresses and fathered a child with one of them, lending some credence to the possibility that he might have been vulnerable to a “honey trap” operation.
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But as Israeli counterintelligence officials pieced together how Tannenbaum ended up in Beirut, a very different picture emerged.
Tannenbaum, investigators determined, was lured to Dubai, where the ruse of a lucrative drug deal quickly degenerated into what Israeli officials described as a Mafia-style abduction.
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In Dubai, Hezbollah operatives, believed to be aided by agents of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), brought Tannenbaum to a safe house where he was drugged. The IRGC is known to operate front companies and employ agents in Dubai, a critical trans-shipment point for goods—both legitimate and illicit—from around the world to Iran.
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Several anonymous Israeli security sources confirmed to prominent Israeli intelligence correspondents that Iran supplied Hezbollah operatives with both a safe house and the plane on which they bundled their sedated Israeli captive, locked in a large crate. Tannenbaum was considered such a valuable commodity, according to this account, that the flight stopped first in Iran, where he was interrogated by IRGC agents, and then, after an undetermined period, flew on to Lebanon.
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While the details remain unconfirmed, senior Israeli officials involved in the affair at the time unanimously insist Tannenbaum was drugged and did not travel to Beirut of his own accord. In the words of then–foreign minister Silvan Shalom, “He did not reach Beirut under his own power—this must be made clear.”
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That was not always clear, however. Only after extensive investigation did Israeli officials rule out
the claim that the drug deal was an elaborate ruse used to cover Hezbollah’s actual recruitment of Tannenbaum as a willing agent. In time, investigators determined the kidnapping was not faked, but this outcome was not assumed from the start.
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Without confirming or denying Iran’s role in this particular abduction, one retired senior Israeli official noted that many in the Israeli government were wary of publicly pointing fingers at Iran, even when the evidence of Iranian involvement was overwhelming, for fear of forcing the government into having to take some kind of retaliatory action against the Islamic Republic.
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While Tannenbaum remained in Hezbollah’s custody for more than three years, Mughniyeh and his lieutenants ran multiple infiltration operations by sending undercover operatives into Israel via third countries. Qais Obeid’s special abduction unit, for its part, developed a list of some twenty Israelis targeted for Tannenbaum-like entrapment and abduction. One target was Gonen Segev, a former Israeli minister of energy who had tried to work out a private business deal to import natural gas from Qatar after he left government service in 1995. In 2001, the Shin Bet warned Segev of intelligence indicating a plot to kidnap him.
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In 2002, Obeid reached out to several Israeli entrepreneurs and offered them partnerships in especially lucrative businesses. As in the Tannenbaum case, the entrepreneurs were told they would have to travel to Europe to close the deal. Another operational template Obeid employed involved recruiting Israeli Arabs like himself to lure Israelis to areas near the Lebanese border where they could be grabbed and taken to the other side, similar to the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers just before Tannenbaum traveled to Europe.
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Supporting, or perhaps complementing, Obeid’s abduction efforts, in 2003 Hezbollah assigned Ahmad Ma’aniya, a veteran IJO operative, to kidnap Israelis abroad. Ma’aniya was said to have “past experience in abduction plots and hostage mediation, including the seizure of Westerners in Lebanon. Outside Lebanon, Ma’aniya operates cells that carry passports from South American countries and Iran.”
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The involvement of someone of Ma’aniya’s caliber in Hezbollah’s kidnapping operations signaled to Israelis the group’s serious commitment to this strategy. Moreover, it led Israeli security officials to issue warnings that Israelis and even non-Israeli Jews should be wary of business offers that sounded too good to be true and could not be fully verified in advance. Reports that Ma’aniya was working on these plots with the financial and technical support of IRGC agents spooked Israeli officials even more, especially in light of reports that top IRGC figures were known to have funded and provided support to Ma’aniya and his operations in the past. The involvement of the IRGC prompted officials to leak a warning to the press suggesting that Iranian participation in such kidnapping operations would have “very serious repercussions.” Under such circumstances “Israel would have no alternative but to respond forcefully.”
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Recognizing that the Tannenbaum abduction provided not just an intelligence coup in Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel but also a political boost at home, Hezbollah invested in efforts to seize still more Israelis. More captives, Hezbollah reasoned, would provide the group still greater leverage in the prisoner exchange negotiations then being mediated by Germany.
Against the backdrop of these security threats, German-mediated prisoner swap negotiations continued. Throughout 2002–3, periodic press reports detailed progress in the talks, but no concrete agreement emerged until January 2004. The parties agreed to a deal under which Israel would release some 435 prisoners, including senior Amal and Hezbollah officials Mustafa Dirani and Abdel Karim Obeid, as well as the bodies of sixty Lebanese killed in clashes with Israeli forces, in return for Tannenbaum and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed during the Hezbollah operation when the kidnappings occurred. The prisoner exchange was carried out on January 29, 2004, the same day a suicide bomber struck a downtown Jerusalem bus killing at least eleven people and wounding fifty.
In an interview with Hezbollah’s al-Manar television taped just hours before his release, Tannenbaum claimed he was treated well, “almost without exception.” Compelled to do the interview while still a captive, Tannenbaum told his Hezbollah interviewer, “They treated me well. They brought me food on time. They took care of my medical problems. I have no complaints.” He also claimed that he went to Lebanon in part to “make some money for my family” and in part to find information on Ron Arad, a missing Israeli aviator shot down over Lebanon and believed to have been held captive in Iran and later Lebanon. This, anyway, is what Tannenbaum told his Hezbollah captors in a videotaped interview before his release. Piecing together the details of the Tannenbaum affair, however, would prove frustratingly difficult, even after his release.
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Once released, Tannenbaum was detained at the Neurim police facility for interrogation on suspicion of drug trafficking, use of a forged passport, and revealing classified intelligence to Iran and/or Hezbollah. The most pressing questions, however, revolved around what Tannenbaum told his captors. If he had revealed information, was it done only under interrogation, or was he selling secrets to Israel’s enemies as part of his business deal? Further, what damage was done to Israeli security as a result of these revelations? As soon as military officials were aware he was kidnapped, they did what they could to contain the potential damage from Tannenbaum’s security breach, but they could not know whether they had done enough without Tannenbaum’s full cooperation. This they did not receive. Tannenbaum passed a polygraph exam that refuted the suspicion that he was willingly involved in espionage or treason, but he continued to maintain the whole episode grew out of a small-time drug deal. “For that he would not have had to travel on to Abu Dhabi,” one official stated, exposing a chief flaw in Tannenbaum’s stance.
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The counterintelligence operation aimed at cleaning up what the press widely described as the Tannenbaum affair was code-named Genius, but from the start, the efforts did not live up to the moniker.
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