The history of manhunts, from Sabbah the Assassin to Yahya the Engineer

Killing Osama bin Laden involved an especially massive manhunt but it’s not the first time such effort has been put into eliminating a single man. Manhunts are as old as man.

The word assassin actually comes from the Arabic word Hashashin, an order of trained Persian killers that operated during the 11th and 12th centuries and is regarded as one of the world’s first terrorist organizations. More recently, two Israeli intelligence agencies, Shin Bet, responsible for targeting terrorist groups within Israel and Mossad, which deals with groups outside of Israel, have carried out some of the world’s most daring and brutal assassinations, sometimes tracking targets for years before finally eliminating them with exploding cell phones or bomb-rigged Volkswagens.

The Hashashin was founded by Hasan-I Sabbah, a popular Persian missionary who may have established the group to reap profits from the unrest brought about by the First Crusades. Sabbah’s headquarters was a fortress called Alamut, in present-day northwest Iran. His organization had a formal hierarchy: Sabbah was the grand headmaster, there were propagandists, rafiqs (companions) and lasiqs (adherents). The lasiqs were the assassins, well-read, calculating men conversant in numerous foreign languages, capable of fitting in anywhere and trained to kill, like Medieval 00 agents. But Marco Polo, who visited the region on his travels, reported back a less glamorous picture, noting that Sabbah drugged followers with hashish and indoctrinated them with religious extremism. Sabbah took contracts from both sides and carried out assassinations in public spaces to intimidate enemies. One famous killing was Nizam al-Mulk, vizier of the Great Seljuq Empire, who was assassinated in Baghdad in 1092.

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One of Mossad’s largest missions, Operation Wrath of God, involved hunting down the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre, in which 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were kidnapped and killed by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. The most elusive target was Ali Hassan Salameh, nicknamed the Red Prince and considered the mastermind of the Munich attacks. In 1973, Mossad located the Red Prince in a Norwegian ski town and sent agents in for the kill. But it was the wrong man, a Moroccan waiter with no connection to the incident. International outrage over the killing forced Israel to suspend Operation Wrath of God but five years later, after the election of a new prime minister, it was resumed. The Red Prince was tracked to Beirut and in the autumn of 1978 Mossad agents rented an apartment on the Rue Verdun, a street he frequented. On the afternoon of January 22, 1979, as the Red Prince and four bodyguards drove down the Rue Verdun in a Chevrolet station wagon, a Volkswagen packed with explosives that had been parked on the street was detonated with a radio device. The Red Prince and his bodyguards were dead, as were four innocent bystanders, including an English student and a German nun.

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The event was bad press for Mossad but Israeli intelligence has proved they can execute cleaner hits, such as the one Shin Bet carried out on mastermind Hamas bomber Yahya Ayyash, an engineering student who killed 90 Israelis with complex homemade bombs in the mid-1990s. Ayyash, known simply as the Engineer, revolutionized terrorist bomb-making and developed a cult following in Palestine. For three years he was the most wanted man in Israel. Shin Bet convinced a relative of one of his friends into giving the Engineer a cell phone they said they’d be using to track him. The phone also contained 15 grams of RDX explosive. At 8 am on January 5th the Engineer’s father called the phone. Overhead, an Israeli plane picked up the conversation and relayed it to a command post which confirmed the voice was indeed that of the Engineer. According to unconfirmed sources, the head of Shin Bet briefly announced who he was and said goodbye, then the phone was remotely detonated, instantly killing the Engineer.

The Engineer was back in the news recently when in April 2010 the Palestinian Authority named a street in Ramallah after him. City officials said the street name had been chosen in the late 1990s, shortly after Ayyash’s death. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office called it an “outrageous glorification of terrorism”. The US State Department weighed in too: “We also strongly condemn the glorification of terrorists who have murdered innocent civilians… honoring terrorists with the dedication of public places hurts peace efforts and must end.”