The Dubai Job

[wyclif]

Al-Mabhouh's number was clearly up. The article sensationalises the diplomatic damage between Israel and the US/UK-- it's called blowback and the Mossad was willing to pay the price if mistakes were made. Operations this complex rarely come off flawlessly, but it was very well done, "good enough" you might say. With their objective accomplished and their agents disappeared before Hamas knew what was going on, the mission was a success.

[kylelibra]

Wired has some additional follow up information on the subject. It definitely reinforces your point that his number was up.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/dubai-assassination...

[yuvadam]

This is a very interesting article.

Ronen Bergman is a very well known journalist here in Israel, but this article sheds new light on details which haven't been made public up until now.

The fact that head of the Caesarea unit offered to resign following the Dubai operation has not been known up until now.

[eliben]

Bergman may be well known but he's a sensationalist, making a living off "exposing unpublic information". Don't be surprised if he gets into UFOs at some point. I would take everything he writes with a grain of salt.

[tome]

It seems like the operation was tactically a great success, but strategically a failure.

The agents seem to have been very well trained and carried out their task very effectively.

There has been serious negative fall-out, though, including the unmasking of a number of important agents, and worsening ties with Dubai and the countries whose passports were forged.

[wyclif]

I'd say you have it backward. Tactically, mistakes were made. But strategically this mission was a huge success: they eliminated their target-- the goal of the whole operation.

[praptak]

This is interesting: "Any operative trying to reach a colleague—whether in the hotel down the street or at the command post in Israel—dialed one of a handful of numbers in Austria, from which the call was then rerouted to its destination. But since dozens of calls were made to and from this short list of Austrian numbers over a period of less than two days, the moment that the cover of a single operative was blown and his cell phone records became available to the authorities, all others who called or received calls from the same numbers were at risk of being identified."

Given that the agents have had enough time to leave Dubai, I wonder how did the authorities identify the initial phone number whose billings were checked. Have the agents called an easily identifiable hotel landline?

[sjs]

If they had some footage of the spys making phone calls and had precise times for that footage they would have been able to match up calls with the cell towers in the area.

[WestCoastJustin]

Links to the 30 minute CCTV videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JghQ0ZcRfQs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8XDhnEJ-N0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWxjxTaWytE

[raheemm]

"Take yourselves and your bank accounts and your weapons and your forged fucking passports and get out of my country," - Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, chief of the Dubai Police

[patrickgzill]

Why did they not at the least, confiscate the weapons, bank accounts, and forged passports?

[koudelka]

The late 70's British spy show, "The Sandbaggers" might also be of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandbaggers

[vitorbal]

This was a really interesting article. I like this subject, does anyone know of any books, websites or articles that might have more of the same?

[nikcub]

Same author (a very good, well known writer on the topic):

* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/opinion/10bergman.html?_r=...

* http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124243059842325581.html

Same topic:

* http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/0319/Dubai-a...

* http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/al-mabhouh_ass...

[lallysingh]

The Stratfor rundown:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100303_using_intelligence_a... (free article)

Stratfor's good for this in general, but also not cheap.

[kevinskii]

...they somehow managed to chain the door from the inside.

This to me has always been the more curious detail of the operation.

[daten]

There are tricks for unlocking it with something as simple as rubber bands. ( http://blackbag.nl/?p=1315 )

There are also tools for sale that go under the door for manipulating such locks. I imagine those could be used to replace the chain. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAkJRpKeyYg )

It should be even easier than unlocking it since you have access from the inside to set something up that you could pull from the outside after closing the door.

[veb]

Awesome article. No bullshit, no advertising... just plain win.

[tuxychandru]

There is no advertising because it is the print version. The normal page is a 7 page article with enough ads.

[ilitirit]

It is a bit sensational, but I suppose that is to be expected.

>... the trafficking of huge amounts of rockets and sophisticated weaponry into Gaza, which have been used to devastating effect since the start of the second intifada in 2000.

I don't think the weapons smuggled into were particularly sophisticated and I don't think they were used to devastating effect at all.

Still a very informative piece though.

[johnyzee]

If anyone is interested in further reading I can recommend "The Other Side of Deception" by former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky. (Note that this is the sequel to "By Way of Deception" by the same author, it is more informational and matter-of-fact than the first book.)

[chanux]

This article was really inspiring to me. I realized that "I don't do enough of what I do", reading it.

...the lock picker practiced disabling every type of lock in use in all the major hotels in Dubai.

[vinodlive]

How did the assassins exit room 230, chained from the inside?!!

[badmash69]

Downvote me if you will, but I do not think this article belong on the front page of Hacker news. It is a interesting illuminating article but it belongs on Reddit or even Slashdot.

[sophacles]

Read the guidlines -- "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is the short and sweet rule. I find well written pieces about things I normally don't know much about intellectually gratifying. More so, actually, than yet another "awesome vim tricks (that any reasonably experienced user already knows)" or "look at this awesome revolutionary thing in node.js (that turns out to be a standard async pattern)".

[johnyzee]

Don't forget to flag it.

[kiddo]

I knew the basic outline of this story beforehand and yet I read the article anyway.

A few new things that stood out:

- the description of Dagan's mgmt style and how it negatively affected the mission

- the way the author (a presumably non-techie) described the lock picking and practicing of lock picking (did the picker actually test the picking of the locks as the author suggests or did the team assume the locks would be electronic and simply bring a device that could pick any known lock?). the author glosses over this and makes a short inference, but it made me wonder.

- the Austrian private switchboard. i didn't know this kind of thing existed. can i get access to one?

So I agree with comments from many other people about it just being an interesting story, but those are 3 bits that made me think and made it worth my time.