| When I heard that it was him, I was in shock. Like a punch to the stomach. It was clear to me that the information would not remain with him in captivity.” Cohen said there could be no doubt that Tannenbaum gave Israel’s enemies information that caused grave damage the security of the state. He was very emphatic in his reply when asked what he would have done if it were he who had been abducted: “Understanding that I would not be able to keep the information inside me, I would probably have killed myself, if I could have done so.” Among the secrets that Tannenbaum knew was one called simply “the project.” It has to do with Israel’s most advanced weapons system, one that was supposed to have decided the next battlefield confrontation. The system has many top-secret American components and parts of it are manufactured in the United States. When the IDF attaché in Washington reported to the Pentagon on the Tannenbaum affair, therefore, there was considerable consternation. That consternation only increased after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. There were those who feared that some of the information on the technologies used in “the project” would be transferred by Hizballah to the forces fighting against the Americans there. Investigators assume that whatever information Tannenbaum might have divulged, it was given under interrogation, and he did not set out to sell it to Israel’s enemies. If, however, he had been a professional spy, he was |
dawn light began to rise, a cat appeared suddenly on the windowsill. After creeping out of a pile of junk, it was looking for a ray of sun to rid it of the night’s chill. An alley cat, shabby and filthy, it had once been white but now was wearing the same gray shade as the alley itself. It was 4:30 a. m. on April 15, 2004, at the corner of Salah al-Din Street and Cinderblock Alley, in the heart of the casbah of Nablus, the largest city in the West Bank. Early peddlers were dragging their carts piled with vegetables and fruit, and the smell of baking pita bread was in the air. The cat, with all of its feline instincts, did not notice that less than an arm’s length away, on the other side of the closed iron shutter, someone was watching it through the sights of a sniper’s rifle. The awakening street shared the cat’s ignorance. Inside the apartment overlooking the street was a team of elite Israeli soldiers, men of Viper Company of Paratroop Battalion 202, heavily armed and daubed with warpaint, waiting for the start of “Operation Swamp King.” The objective: to kill wanted, armed terrorists of Hamas and the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad based in the casbah. The method: creation of an artificial provocation that will irresistibly tempt them out of their hiding places to attack Israeli troops operating in the streets, thus exposing themselves to the waiting ambush, of a kind code-named “Grass |
