Tit for tat, the reciprocal killing continued. An eye for an eye—and there was no shortage of eyes.
For several years now, I had worked hard to gather every scrap of information I could to help the Shin Bet stop the bloodbath. We continued to keep an eye on Muhammad Jamal al-Natsheh, Saleh Talahme, and the other three guys I had stashed away after their release from the PA prison compound. They changed locations several times, and only Saleh kept in touch with me. But we tracked the others through their families and by monitoring calls on public telephones.
Saleh trusted me, always told me where he was living, and frequently invited me to visit. As I got to know him, I found that I really liked Saleh. He was an amazing man—a brilliant scholar, graduating at the top of his electrical engineering class and one of the best students in the history of Birzeit University. To him, I was the son of Hassan Yousef, a good friend and a good listener.
I spent a lot of time with Saleh; his wife, Majeda; and their five children (two boys and three girls). Their older son was named Mosab, like me. Majeda and the kids had come to Ramallah from Hebron to spend a little time with Saleh in his apartment hideout. I was still working on my degree at the time, and one evening, Saleh asked me how school was going.
“Any problems with anything?”
“Yeah, Economical Statistics.”
“Okay, tomorrow you bring the book and we’ll sit down together and study. It will be our own little class.”
When I told Loai and others in the Shin Bet about it, they were pleased. They thought that these tutoring sessions would make a good cover for intelligence gathering.
But it wasn’t entirely a cover. Saleh and I were becoming friends. He taught me, and I actually did very well on the exam a couple of weeks later. I loved him, and I loved his children. I often ate with the family, and over time, a strong bond began to form among all of us. It was a strange relationship because I knew that by now Saleh had become a very dangerous guy. But then again, so had I.
One night in March 2002, I was sitting at home when two men came to the door.
Suspicious, I asked, “How can I help you?”
“We’re looking for Sheikh Hassan Yousef. It’s important.”
“Tell me why it’s important.”
They explained that they were two of the five suicide bombers who had just arrived from Jordan. Their contact had been arrested, and they needed a safe place to stay.
“Okay,” I said. “You came to the right place.”
I asked what they needed.
“We have a car full of explosives and bombs, and we need someplace safe to leave it.”
Great, I thought, what am I going to do with a car stuffed with explosives? I had to think quickly. I decided to keep their car in the garage beside our house. It was obviously not one of my brighter ideas, but I was forced to think on my feet.
“Okay, here’s some money,” I said, emptying my wallet. “Go find a place to stay, get back to me here tonight, and we’ll figure out what to do.”
After they left, I called Loai, and to my relief, the Shin Bet came and took the car away.
All five suicide bombers returned a short time later. “Okay,” I told them, “from now on, I am your connection to Hamas. I will provide your targets, locations, transportation, everything you need. Do not talk to anyone else, or you might be dead before you have a chance to kill any Israelis.”
This situation constituted an extraordinary windfall in terms of intelligence. Up to now, no one ever knew about suicide bombers before they detonated their explosives. Suddenly, five of them had shown up at my door with a carload of bombs. Thirty minutes after I told the Shin Bet their location, Prime Minister Sharon authorized their assassinations.
“You can’t do that,” I told Loai.
“What!”
“I know they are terrorists, and they are about to blow themselves up. But those five men are ignorant. They don’t know what they’re doing. You can’t kill them. If you kill them, this is my last operation.”
“Are you threatening us?”
“No, but you know how I work. I made an exception once with Halawa, and you remember how that ended. I will not be part of killing people.”
“What option is there?”
“Arrest them,” I said, though even as I spoke the words, I knew it was a crazy idea. We had the car and the bombs, but these guys still had their belts. If a soldier got within a hundred yards of their one-room flat, they would detonate the belts and take everybody with them.
Even if we managed to get them out alive without anybody else getting killed, they would be sure to mention my name to their interrogators, and I would be burned for sure. Self-preservation told me the safest thing for all concerned was just to let a helicopter fire a couple of missiles into their apartment and be done with it.
But my conscience was being rewired. Though not yet a Christian, I was really trying to follow the ethical teachings of Jesus. Allah had no problem with murder; in fact, he insisted on it. But Jesus held me to a much higher standard. Now I found I couldn’t kill even a terrorist.
At the same time, I had become far too valuable to the Shin Bet for them to risk losing me. They weren’t happy about it, but they finally agreed to call off the assassination.
“We have to know what is going on inside that room,” they told me. I headed over to the apartment under the pretext of taking the bombers a few pieces of simple furniture. What they didn’t know was that we had placed bugs inside the furniture that allowed us to hear every word they said. Together, we listened in as they discussed who would go first, second, third, etc. Everyone wanted to be first, so they didn’t have to watch their friends die. It was eerie. We were listening to dead men talking.
On March 16, security forces troops moved into position. The bombers were in the center of Ramallah, so the IDF couldn’t bring in tanks. Because the troops had to go in on foot, the operation was very dangerous. I followed the events from my place, as Loai talked to me on the phone and kept me informed of everything that was going on.
“They are going to sleep.”
We all waited until sounds of snoring came across the monitors.
The greatest risk was waking them too soon. The troops had to get through the door and reach the beds before any bomber could move a muscle.
A soldier fixed an explosive charge to the door as we listened to the monitors for the slightest noise, the slightest interruption in the snoring. Then they gave the signal.
The door exploded. Special forces troops rushed into the small apartment, catching all but one of the men. He grabbed a gun and jumped through the window—he was dead before he hit the ground.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone except me. As soon as they got the guys into the jeep, one of them mentioned my name, exposing me as a collaborator.
My worst fears had been realized. I was burned. Now what?
Loai had the solution. The Shin Bet simply deported the guy back to Jordan, sending his friends to prison. So while he was home free, having fun with his family, the other three would assume that he had been the traitor, not me. It was brilliant.
I had gotten away with it one more time, though just barely. But it was clear I was pushing my luck a little too hard.
One day, I received a message from Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, thanking me for the work I was doing for them. He said he had opened all the files in Israel’s war on terrorism and found the Green Prince in every one. While this was flattering, it was also a warning. I recognized it, and Loai recognized it. If I continued the way I was going, I would end up dead. The trail out there was too long. Somebody was sure to stumble across it. Somehow I needed to be sanitized.