Israel’s Top Secret Agent In Lebanon Comes Out of the Shadows After 30 Years

Joseph Fitsanakis

November 17, 2014

Mossad’s top agent in Lebanon speaks publicly for first time

A spy for Israel, who is described as one of the Jewish state’s most valuable intelligence assets in the Middle East, has broken his 30-year silence and has accused his Israeli handlers of having “thrown him to the dogs”. Amin al-Hajj was born in 1955 into one of the Lebanese Shia community’s wealthiest and most powerful clans. In the early 1970s, al-Hajj entered the inner circle of former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, an outspoken leader of the country’s Christian community, who subsequently played an instrumental role in Lebanon’s civil war. 

Al-Hajj shared Chamoun’s detestation of Lebanon’s Palestinian community, which he held as responsible for sparking the civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990 and destroyed the country. He helped direct and train Chamoun’s bodyguards and regularly represented the Christian politician in secret meetings with officials from Israel. The latter supported Chamoun’s pro-Phalangist Tigers Militia during the civil war. It was during those meetings that the Israelis sensed al-Hajj’s hatred for the Palestinians and gradually recruited him as an asset. He went on to serve the Mossad as one of its most effective agents in the Middle East. 

Soon after his recruitment, al-Hajj assumed the operational codename RUMMENIGGE, after German soccer superstar Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who was at the peak of his career in the late 1970s. Al-Hajj’s Israeli handlers claim that he consistently refused to accept money from the Israeli government, saying he wanted to help Israel because he “thought it would be the only force that could fight the Palestinians” in Lebanon.

Eventually, RUMMENIGGE built an entire network of agents in Lebanon, Cyprus and elsewhere, which numbered over a dozen and included at least two senior officials in Palestinian group Fatah, who provided him with information in exchange for financial compensation. In 1987, however, the PLO began to suspect that al-Hajj was collaborating with Israel and tried to kill him. 

He managed to escape with his wife to Israel, where he remains today. He is currently facing no fewer than nine separate death sentences in Lebanon. However, soon after he received protection in Israel, al-Hajj’s relations with the Israeli intelligence community turned sour. He was accused of trying to forge his Lebanese passport. Soon afterwards, a ship belonging to his import-export company was found by Israeli authorities to be carrying nearly 4 tons of hashish. Last week, Al-Hajj spoke to veteran Israeli intelligence correspondent Ronen Bergman, saying that the Israeli intelligence community had “thrown [him] to the dogs”. He complained that, after the Israelis had “extracted all they could” from him, they had “tossed [him] aside like some kind of rug”. 

He said he was living in Israeli without permit, without rights and without any form of medical insurance. Bergman sought clarification about al-Hajj’s case from the Israeli government, but was simply told that the former spy’s current state of living was “due to the actions of the individual in question” and “the fact that he had cut ties with Administration officials”.