-Caveat Lector-
It seems that the Israeli and Palestinian Secret Service
have a close relationship.
flw
LA TIMES
Saturday, June 30, 2001
In Israeli Colonel's Death, Lives of Intrigue Emerge
West Bank: The killer, a Palestinian handyman, also dies and is revealed
as a spy--but for whom?
By MARY CURTIUS, Times Staff Writer
BETHLEHEM, West Bank--For years, Hassan abu Sheireh charmed the elderly Jewish
residents of the posh
Jerusalem retirement home where he was a handyman.
He joked with them in Hebrew, told stories about the Bethlehem refugee camp where
he lived and griped
about corruption in the Palestinian Authority. Many invited Abu Sheireh into their
apartments to share meals,
or gave him small gifts to take to his children.
The 32-year-old handyman and the residents of Nofeh Gilo remained close even
after fighting erupted in
September and gunmen in Bethlehem and other nearby West Bank villages began shooting
at the Jewish
neighborhood of Gilo, where the retirement home is situated.
Abu Sheireh told his friends that he was as disgusted as they by the violence
convulsing their two
communities. Even when Israel banned most Palestinians from entering the Jewish state,
he kept coming to work.
But Abu Sheireh didn't show up as usual the morning of June 17. Instead,
according to the Israeli army,
the handyman gunned down Lt. Col. Yehuda Edri, the highest-ranking Israeli officer to
die in nine months of
fighting with the Palestinians, before being killed as he tried to escape.
Residents of Nofeh Gilo were stunned to see their beloved handyman's face flashed
on their television
screens that night, identified in news reports as Edri's killer. But along with the
shock of what Abu Sheireh
had done came a second shock: the revelation that for years, he had been an Israeli
agent.
Edri, Israeli media reported, was the top Israeli military intelligence officer
in the West Bank, veteran
of a secret unit, once called 504, that recruits and runs agents for Israel in the
Arab world. Abu Sheireh had
been reporting to him for months, perhaps years.
"He was a very gentle person," recalled an 85-year-old Nofeh Gilo resident, who
said she wanted her name
withheld because she's so upset and frightened by the turn of events. "I just can't
believe it."
Told that her interviewer would visit Abu Sheireh's family, she asked that they
be given a message. "If
you would just tell his wife that there are people here with tremendous sympathy for
her. Tell them that we
grieve for them and that we loved him."
At least they loved the man they thought Abu Sheireh was. Now they ask themselves
whether they ever
really knew him. Was Abu Sheireh a hero who risked his life for years to supply Israel
with information that
may have thwarted terrorist attacks? Was he a betrayer of their trust, a man who
feigned friendship with them
as he worked as a double agent and plotted to kill a respected intelligence officer?
Or was he a victim forced
to take on a suicide mission because Palestinians discovered that he had betrayed them?
Mostly, residents and their families wonder at how little they understood this
man many counted as a
close friend.
"I'm not sure what I believe anymore," said Sheila Raviv, who spent hours
chatting with Abu Sheireh in
the last two years during visits to her parents-in-law at Nofeh Gilo. The last time
she saw him was the night
before he killed Edri, a night in which he greeted her husband, Zvi, with the usual
round of hugs and back
slaps.
"Everyone is very sad and very shocked," Raviv said. "When suddenly you realize
that everything you
believed was wrong, you wonder about it."
A few miles south of Gilo, Palestinians, too, are wondering what to think of Abu
Sheireh. The Palestinian
Authority has declared him a shahid, or martyr to the Palestinian cause. There is no
higher honor in
Palestinian society. After Israel returned Abu Sheireh's body to his family Wednesday,
he was buried in a
martyrs cemetery.
But in Al Azza refugee camp where Abu Sheireh was born, some mock the effort to
portray him as a hero of
the Palestinian nationalist cause. There, people note bitterly that if what the
Israeli army and Palestinian
security officials say is true, their neighbor informed on them for years before his
death.
"The camp is boiling like a pot of food on the flame," said one elderly camp
resident, who spoke on
condition that his name not be used because he feared retaliation from Abu Sheireh's
family. "Everyone is
wondering what damage this man caused, and who he has left behind him to continue his
work."
Palestinians estimate that there are tens of thousands of collaborators living
among them, some providing
Israel with a steady stream of information about the whereabouts, habits and
vulnerabilities of key militants.
During the current uprising, the Jewish state has used that information to kill field
operatives in what the
Israelis call "targeted operations" and the Palestinians call assassinations.
The Palestinian Authority considers the act of informing a capital crime,
punishable by death.
According to one Palestinian version of what happened to Abu Sheireh, Palestinian
security officials
uncovered his work for Israel and offered him a choice: be killed for his betrayal, or
redeem himself by
killing his handler. There have been a handful of such killings before, during the
first Palestinian uprising
that began in the 1980s. In some of those attacks, the killers managed to escape. Abu
Sheireh may have
believed that he, too, would survive.
Militants who are lionizing Abu Sheireh offer another version. They say that Abu
Sheireh's conscience was
plagued by his betrayal of the Palestinian cause. He came to them and confessed his
crimes, and volunteered to
kill Edri to redeem himself. Palestinian newspapers published a final will and
testament, dated June 5, that
tends to back this version of events.
"I will execute a heroic operation as soon as possible, and I hope it will bring
honor to you and to
every Palestinian," the will says. "Please do not forget my children or my family
after me so that I may rest
in my grave."
Few Palestinians believe that Abu Sheireh actually wrote the will.
According to Israeli news reports, Israel's intelligence services still aren't
certain whether Abu
Sheireh was sent by Palestinian security or acted on his own in killing Edri. The army
spokesman declined to
let any intelligence officer be interviewed for this story.
"When you are manipulating sources who are effectively betraying their own nation
or their own
organization, you are dealing with a very complex emotional issue," said Yaacov Perry,
former head of Israel's
General Security Services, which handles internal intelligence. "There comes a time
when every source feels
that there is no way back."
What is known is that Abu Sheireh persuaded the 45-year-old Edri to meet him on a
road inside
Israeli-controlled territory but close to Palestinian-controlled territory.
Edri took two bodyguards with him that morning. In apparent violation of
operating procedures that call
for the bodyguards to intercept an informer and frisk him before allowing him to
approach his handler, all
three Israelis were in their yellow van when Abu Sheireh pulled up. He got out of his
car, walked to the van,
pulled a pistol from his waistband and shot Edri in the face. He then shot one of the
bodyguards in the jaw
before running. The second bodyguard chased Abu Sheireh into an olive orchard before
gunning him down.
Edri, the father of six, died within minutes of the attack. He received a hero's
burial that night on
Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem's military cemetery. According to news reports, his family
didn't know that Edri had
been an intelligence officer until members of his unit arrived at their home in a West
Bank settlement near
Jerusalem to inform them of his death.
"Since the intifada started last September, Yehuda worked day and night," the
unit's commander, who
didn't identify himself, said at Edri's funeral. "He brought intelligence that saved
the lives of many
civilians. We take a vow to continue his work and to do this sacred work to the best
of our abilities."
At Al Azza refugee camp, Abu Sheireh's family struggles to understand how the man
they knew as a devout
Muslim and quiet family man died in a blaze of gunfire.
His cousin Zeid denies that the handyman was a collaborator.
"All the people here, they loved Hassan," Zeid Abu Sheireh said, sitting in the
mourner's tent and
sipping bitter coffee with a visitor. "He was very religious, he prayed at the mosque,
he never did anything
bad. We were shocked when we were told that Hassan had killed an Israeli officer.
Nobody knew that he would be
a martyr."
By dying a martyr, Abu Sheireh secured for his family a $200-a-month pension from
the Palestinian
Authority and the chance to be seen not as the relatives of a traitor but the family
of a hero.
He will miss the cousin he grew up with, Zeid abu Sheireh said. Still, he
insisted: "I am happy. The man
Hassan killed was responsible for killing many, many people. He was like a disease: If
you don't kill him, he
will kill you."
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