If Yaacov Zhiren had a little more time to think and a little less adrenaline coursing through his veins, he probably wouldn’t have run toward the suicide bomber.
But the head of the intelligence-gathering section of Israel’s police force wasn’t the only one acting counterintuitively that day. He was the sixth man to reach the writhing young Arab man who had been dragged off a crowded bus after the button on his chest he repeatedly pressed failed to yield the expected explosion.
“He looked like a very ordinary young boy. About 18, with a shaved haircut. An ordinary boy. You couldn’t see why young men such as this would like to commit a suicide murder,” recalled Zhiren, a short, powerfully built man in his early 40s with a full-time poker face and calm, soft-spoken demeanor.
“The [bomb’s] trigger wasn’t good enough. Afterward, it exploded with a very loud sound. If he had succeeded, there would have been a lot of bodies over there.”
Unlike Geraldo Rivera drawing troop positions in the sand, Zhiren, an old hand in both intelligence gathering and public relations, isn’t one to give away any trade secrets. On his recent trip up and down the West Coast with representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, however, law enforcement officials from San Diego to San Francisco hung on his every word. The question they asked him most often was very broad, and, perhaps even beyond the scope of an intelligence czar: Can Israeli-style terrorism happen here?
His answer was not exactly what they wanted to hear — why not?
“The most peculiar thing I have felt when I get into the States [is] I have never been checked. I could get into any place without being checked. I think the awareness that something might happen, it is not so clear in the States,” said Zhiren, who goes by the nickname Koby.
“I don’t want to give ideas to anybody, but [in America] you can get a small weapon like a pistol and use it. You can make a lot of damage with this kind of stuff. Imagine if some terrorist got into a mall and started shooting, just with a pistol.”
In Israel, despite the ubiquity of firearms much more menacing-looking than pistols, Zhiren assures that it is not nearly so easy to legally obtain a firearm in his home country as it is here.
Also, Israel’s police are specifically trained to spot and apprehend terror suspects before they reach major population centers — something American cops have seldom had to do.
Zhiren acknowledges that roadblocks are annoying and inconvenient, but states that you can’t argue with their success. Recently, a suicide bomber was halted at a roadblock on the outskirts of Jerusalem and hurriedly detonated his bomb, killing himself and the police officer manning the station. A female suicide bomber also recently killed two Israeli border patrol officers after being stopped on Jerusalem’s French Hill..
“They were killed, but they saved a lot of lives,” said Zhiren of the fallen police officers. “If they wouldn’t have stopped her, she could have gotten on a bus.”
The measures Israeli police take to detain terror suspects sound much like standard, vigilant police work. Keep an eye on men or women who seem out of place. Watch for someone writing down bus numbers or counting civilians. Note an unusually nervous man or woman. Be especially careful of such a person hanging out near a police station or bus depot.
What Zhiren speaks less openly about is how to crack into “the lake of intelligence, the lake of knowledge.” He is a fluent Arabic speaker, and, by hook or by crook, he often receives specific information that a suicide bomber is leaving a certain town with a certain target in mind.
“If we had information about this woman in French Hill, we would have captured her far, far before, in the Arab territories, when she was leaving her village,” he said.
“But we didn’t have the information, though we knew something like this might happen. So those police officers spotted her and she exploded. They reduced the casualties, but paid with their lives.”
When it comes to information gathering, Zhiren bluntly notes that Americans “should start” if they haven’t already. He sees it as a key element in a struggle that won’t end any time soon.
“As long as it takes,” he responded when asked how long Israel can stay on high alert. “We have no other choice. We have no other country.”