Tactical Success, Meet Strategic Failure

The January 19, 2010 assassination of Hamas’ military wing commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel has turned into a remarkable PR opportunity for the local police. In just a few days, the investigative authorities of the UAE’s glitziest emirate were able to piece together the 19-hour-long chain of events that led to the killing, resulting in this riveting 30′ video that tells us a few things.

First, it provides a rare glimpse into a professional hit squad’s modus operandi. While we are mostly familiar with the methods demonstrated in spy movies a la Jason Bourne, we are very seldom made privy to the standard operations and procedures of real-life spooks. While one may remember the assassination of Georgi Markov in 1978 by the Bulgarian Darzhavna Sigurnost (secret police) using a ricin-coated umbrella tip, the Mossad’s abduction of nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu in 1986 with the help of a seductive female agent, or the botched sinking of Greenpeace’s trawler the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 by the French foreign intelligence services, most tactics used by these services’ special operations branches remain entirely unknown, or at best poorly documented. The Dubai tape reveals that the modern tactics are still rife with clichés — an operative enters a hotel’s restroom and comes out with a wig and glasses, another dresses up as a tennis player complete with racket and towel to look inconspicuous, etc. It also shows that they remain vulnerable to last-minute snags, such as an unexpected tourist making a stop at the floor where the murder is being committed. To a certain extent, it shows how much the upfront strategic planning of a hit remains sensitive to the inevitable role that luck and circumstances play in the tactical execution to make it a success or a failure.

Second, the footage reveals the added operational complexity brought on by ubiquitous surveillance cameras. The pervasive video monitoring of public spaces -both in the open and within the confines of stores and hotels- is a relatively recent development, and may not have been fully integrated into the planning of this particular operation; also, the quality of the footage reveals how technological development, and the associated commoditization of surveillance devices, have allowed all surveillance spots to be equipped with high-resolution, high-speed color captors that are lightyears away from the jerky, grainy black-and-white frames from previous generation cameras. Combined with the strong investigative capabilities of a state (which the hit squad’s planning team may have underestimated in the case of the Dubai police), this becomes an essential tool for documenting the detailed chain of events post-hoc but also a deterrent for close-quarters hit operations in public areas.

Taking this further, the advent of IPv6 will allow all these cameras -whether public or private- to essentially become standalone webcams and stream their feeds in real time to a police command and control center (as opposed to recording them on a local tape or hard drive, which requires investigators to seize the recording after the event). Of course, the centralization of streams puts a strain on the resources monitoring them; but it is only a matter of time (and computing power) before facial recognition software conducts blanket monitoring of all these streams at once, raising a flag whenever a “person of interest” shows up in the field of view of any of those cameras. Conversely, the police will be able to select a person from a video stream and rely on the software to track that person’s movements throughout the day, seamlessly switching from one stream to another as the person leaves a field of view and enters another (which is virtually impossible to do with human operators). If you fear that this is an Orwellian dream coming true, well, you’d better start getting used to it because every major city is either implementing the scheme or planning to. While the trend in itself looks rather unescapable, privacy issues can and should be mitigated by increasing the role of the judicial branch into the operations of such surveillance command and control centers, e.g. by establishing physical presence of judicial officers in those rooms to physically check and balance the increasing power of police and counter-intelligence officers (this, of course, does not apply in police states where judicial and executive powers usually blend). With regards to the subject at hand, it will be interesting to see how foreign intelligence agencies’ operational procedures adapt to the increased exposure brought on by surveillance cameras in their countries of operations.

The 11 first suspects in the Dubai assassination of Mahmoud Al Mabnouh

Third, the Dubai footage is a testimony to the fact that the assassination was both a tactical success and a strategic failure. Tactically, the hit squad managed to get the job done and escape with no collateral damage; but strategically, the physical identity (pictures) of the 11 members caught on tape has been made very public, which, for all practical purposes, strips them of any further operational value for their agency’s special ops branch. They can no longer be commissioned without running the unacceptable risk of raising a flag wherever they go; Interpol even issued a red notice, which calls for their provisional arrest and possible extradition, forcing them to remain within the safety of their national borders. Their future will most likely involve sitting behind a desk at their agency’s headquarters, processing foreign intelligence through the lens of their operational experience — not the best fit. No foreign intelligence agency in the world can afford to lose that many valuable operatives in a single operation, considering the cost and time it takes to recruit and train them. Furthermore, diplomatic and political repercussions from this strategic fiasco may be far-reaching as the investigation unravels, and evidence against the prime suspect -Mossad- builds beyond the circumstantial.

Was it all worth the value of the target?