INTELLIGENCE : Israelis Question if Shin Bet Can Handle the Hamas Threat

As Haim Nahmani, a 26-year-old Israeli intelligence officer, waited for one of his Palestinian informants in an apartment in Jerusalem’s exclusive Rehavia neighborhood two weeks ago, he ran through his urgent questions:

Who in Hamas, the militant Islamic Resistance Movement, had launched the current campaign against Israeli security forces? Who was carrying out the attacks? Where were they hiding?

The pressure on Nahmani and other agents of Israel’s General Security Service--informally known as Shin Bet--is intense, because Hamas has killed six Israeli soldiers and police in the previous two months.

But in preparing for his meeting with Maher abu Sarur, 22, a Hamas activist from the occupied West Bank, Nahmani failed to take along a backup officer. And according to senior Shin Bet officials, Abu Sarur had come not with crucial information he had promised but with a plan to kill Nahmani.

Nahmani was stabbed and beaten to death, according to police reports. The three killers fled to the West Bank.

For Abu Sarur, Nahmani’s murder may have been a matter of his own survival: His Hamas superior was among more than 400 Palestinians deported to southern Lebanon in mid-December, and suspicion had apparently grown that Abu Sarur was responsible. He is still at large, police say; the two others sought in the slaying have been arrested.

“When the pressure is on, you can make mistakes,” one of Nahmani’s Shin Bet colleagues said later, “and the pressure was on--and is still on.”

With Nahmani’s killing, however, the pressure on Shin Bet broadened from the crackdown on Hamas to a reassessment of the elite intelligence and security service itself. Was Shin Bet, Israelis asked, up to the new threats posed by members of the militant Muslim organizations? Unlike the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has reluctantly come to accept Israel’s existence, those groups, most notably Hamas, seek the annihilation of Israel and the establishment of a pan-Arab Islamic state.

Like other Israeli security services, Shin Bet was caught by surprise when Hamas began attacking soldiers and policemen. “This is clearly a turning point in dealing with terror,” military commentator Zeev Schiff wrote. “Israel is facing an ideological entity that stands by its principles. Security forces have managed to arrest a number of Hamas activists, but Hamas has always managed to recuperate and come back.”

Although Shin Bet had informants in Hamas, the group proved hard to penetrate. It had been decentralized after previous crackdowns, it was based in local mosques where everyone knew one another and it was intensely ideological.

“This is not easy work,” said Nahmani’s superior, who under Israeli censorship regulations may not be identified. “A person who has ideals, who has strong convictions, is more difficult for us to recruit (as an informant). . . .”

When a border policeman was abducted in Lod--later to be killed on the West Bank--security forces arrested more than 1,200 Palestinians in the first day in trying to find him. Two days after the officer was killed, “they were still searching around Lod,” a Western diplomat said. “In short, they didn’t have a clue.”

But the mass roundup turned up more frightening information: Hamas had planned to assassinate Palestinian leaders taking part in negotiations with Israel. And much of its leadership was now based abroad, notably in the United States.

Asked by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for the names of Hamas supporters to deport in retaliation for its attacks, Shin Bet provided just seven names, Israeli political correspondents said. Rabin then turned to military intelligence for more names, and 415 Palestinians were deported.

Rabin’s annoyance with Shin Bet became clear when neither he nor his military secretary attended Nahmani’s funeral--and when he used his condolence call at the agency to tell it to improve its operations.