Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  On December 28, 1972, a Black September unit attacked the Israeli embassy in Bangkok. The PLO flag was hoisted over the building and six Israelis were taken hostage. Soon five hundred Thai police and troops surrounded the building. The terrorists demanded that Israel release thirty-six PLO prisoners, or they would kill the hostages.

  In Tel Aviv, a familiar scenario unfolded. The cabinet met in emergency session. There was the usual talk of standing tough or surrendering. It was left to Zvi Zamir to say that getting to Bangkok would require logistical support that was simply not there along a hostile route. And the Israeli embassy was in the center of busy Bangkok. The Thai government would never allow even the possibility of a shoot-out to occur. Then, after only brief negotiations, the terrorists unexpectedly agreed to a Thai offer of safe conduct out of the country in return for freeing the hostages. Hours later the Black September unit were on a flight to Cairo, where they disappeared.

  In Tel Aviv, Zamir’s relief that no Israelis had died turned to suspicion. Black September were highly trained and motivated and well financed, and had shown they had strategic cunning. They understood the methods and pressure points to bring any government to its knees. So why had they given in so quickly this time? The Bangkok embassy was a perfect target to gain them further publicity and so attract others to their cause. Almost certainly there was nothing random in their choice of target. Everything the group did was part of its concentrated assault on democracy. Within the embassy’s compound the terrorists had followed the advice of their guru, Che Guevara, to keep hatred alive. The helpless hostages had been subjected to a tirade of anti-Semitic abuse—but was it all a diversionary tactic? Was another operation somewhere in the world being planned against Israel? Where and when? Zamir was still pondering these questions when he flew with Golda Meir to the Paris conference. From there he continued to search for answers.

  In the early hours of January 14, 1973, the break came. A sayan working in Rome’s central telephone exchange handled two telephone calls from a pay phone in an apartment block where PLO terrorists sometimes stayed. The first was to Bari, the second to Ostia, the port that served Rome. The calls were made in Arabic, a language the sayan spoke. The caller said that it was time “to deliver the birthday candles for the celebration.”

  The words convinced Zamir this was a coded order connected to a forthcoming terrorist attack. “Birthday candles” could refer to weapons; the most likely one with a candle connotation was a rocket. And a rocket would be the perfect way to destroy Golda Meir’s aircraft.

  To warn her would be pointless. She was a women without fear. To alert the Vatican could well lead to the visit being canceled: the last thing the Holy See would want was to be caught up in a terrorist incident, especially one that would involve it having to condemn its Arab friends.

  Zamir telephoned Hessner and Kauly, the two katsas who originally accompanied him to the Vatican, and moved Kauly from Milan to Rome. Then Zamir, accompanied by the small Mossad team traveling with Golda Meir, took the first flight to the city. Their mood was reflected in Zamir’s gallows humor that it could be the city of eternity for Golda Meir.

  In Rome, Zamir laid out his fears to the head of DIGOS, the Italian antiterrorist squad. Its officers raided the apartment block from where the calls had been made to Bari and Ostia. A search of one of its apartments turned up a Russian instruction manual for launching a missile. Throughout the night, DIGOS teams, each accompanied by a Mossad katsa, carried out a series of raids on other known PLO apartments. But nothing more was found to confirm Zamir’s fears. With dawn breaking and Golda Meir’s plane due in a few hours, he decided he would concentrate his search in and around the airport.

  Shortly after sunrise, Hessner spotted a Fiat van parked in a field close to the flight path. The katsa ordered the van driver to step out of the cab. Instead, the back door of the vehicle opened and there was a burst of gunfire. Hessner was unhurt but two terrorists in the back of the van were seriously wounded when he fired back. Hessner set off in foot pursuit of the driver, catching up with him as he tried to hijack a car—driven by Kauly. The two Mossad katsas bundled the luckless terrorist into the car and drove off at high speed to where Zamir had his mobile command post, a truck.

  The Mossad chief had already received a radio message that the Fiat van contained six rockets. But he still had to know if there were more positioned elsewhere. The van driver was severely beaten before he revealed the whereabouts of the second set of rockets. Zamir suspected he was one of the men who had provided backup for the Munich massacre. Driving at full speed in the truck, Zamir, Hessner, and Kauly, with the now-battered terrorist slumped between them, headed north.

  They spotted a van parked on the side of the road. Protruding from its roof were three unmistakable nose caps of missiles. In the distance, descending by the second, was the equally unmissable shape of Golda Meir’s 747, the sun illuminating its markings. Without slowing, Zamir used the truck as a battering ram, hitting the van side-on and toppling it onto its side. The two terrorists inside were half-crushed as the missiles fell on them.

  Stopping only to toss the senseless driver out onto the road beside the van, Zamir drove off, alerting DIGOS that there had been “an interesting accident they should look into.” Zamir had briefly considered killing the terrorists, but he felt their deaths would serve as a serious embarrassment to Golda Meir’s audience with the pope.

  Meir had the feeling that the weight of the world bore down on the pope’s narrow shoulders, threatening to crush his diminutive white-clad figure. At the end of the audience, in reply to her question, Paul said he would visit the Holy Land, and spoke of his pontificate being a pilgrimage. When she asked him about the possibility of Israel establishing formal ties with the Holy See he sighed and said the “time is not yet appropriate.” Golda Meir gave him a leather-bound book depicting the Holy Land; he handed her an inscribed copy of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical in which he had spelled out the consecration of his pontificate.

  On her way out of the Vatican, Golda Meir told Zamir that the Holy See seemed to have a clock different from the rest of the world’s.

  The Black September terrorists—who had taken part in the Munich massacre of Israel’s Olympic athletes—were taken to a hospital and, after they recovered, were allowed to fly to Libya. But within months they would all be dead—killed by Mossad’s kidon.

  The biblical eye-for-an-eye retribution Golda Meir had authorized met with distaste from Pope Paul, whose entire pontificate was rooted in the power of forgiveness. It also strengthened the Vatican’s ties to the PLO, which John Paul II continued following his own election in 1978.

  Since then the pope had received Yasser Arafat and senior aides in several lengthy private audiences, during which John Paul had each time reiterated his commitment to actively pursue a search for a Palestinian homeland. The PLO, now based in Tunisia, had a permanent liaison officer attached to the Secretariat of State, and the Holy See had its own envoy, Father Idi Ayad, assigned to the organization.

  With his frayed cassock trailing in the desert dust, padre’s hat planted squarely above his pinched face, Ayad served with equal devotion pontiff and the PLO, even to having his bedroom wall decorated with framed and signed photographs of John Paul and Yasser Arafat. Ayad had helped Arafat draft a letter in 1980 to the pope that had delighted him: “Please permit me to dream. I am seeing you going to Jerusalem, surrounded by returning Palestinian refugees, carrying olive branches and spreading them at your feet.”

  Ayad had suggested Arafat and the pontiff should exchange courtesies on their respective holy days: Arafat began to send John Paul a Christmas card, while the pope sent Arafat greetings on the prophet Muhammad’s birthday. The tireless priest had also brokered the meeting between the PLO foreign minister and Cardinal Casaroli, the Holy See’s secretary of state. Afterward the Middle East desk had been expanded and the papal nuncios, the Holy See’s ambassadors, were instructed to persuade governments to which they wer
e accredited to support the PLO’s aspirations to nationhood. All these moves had dismayed Israel. Its official contacts were still limited to infrequent visits by a government official who would be granted only a few minutes in the papal presence.

  The chilly relationship on both sides stemmed partly from a bizarre incident following the creation of Israel in 1948. The then secretary of state had sent an emissary to Israel’s attorney general, Haim Cohn, carrying a request that Israel should restage the trial of Christ and, of course, reverse the original verdict. Once that was done, the Vatican would formally recognize Israel. The importance of such a diplomatic tie was not lost on Cohn. But to achieve it in such a way he had found “capricious almost beyond belief. Such a trial would be pointless and anyway we had more pressing matters to settle—surviving against the onslaughts of our Arab neighbours. Rattling the bones of Christ’s biography was very low down on my list of priorities.”

  After the monsignor was brusquely seen off by Cohn, the Vatican all but turned its back on Israel.

  Since then there had been a glimmer of hope only when John Paul’s immediate predecessor, the frail Albino Luciano, hinted during his thirty-three days on the Throne of Saint Peter that he would consider establishing diplomatic ties with Israel. His death from a heart attack, allegedly brought about by the responsibility of his high office, had led to the election of Karol Wojtyla. Under his pontificate the Bronze Door of the Apostolic Palace remained all but closed to Israel as the papacy moved even further into international politics, encouraged to do so by its reestablished links with the CIA.

  In 1981, William Casey, a devout Catholic, was the CIA director. He had been among the first men the pope received in private audience after being elected. Casey had knelt before the charismatic Polish pope and kissed the Fisherman’s Ring on his finger. In every word and gesture, the CIA director was a humble supplicant, not like the bombastic, hard-bitten men his predecessors had been. But Casey shared their and the pope’s deep distrust and fear of Communism.

  For over an hour the two men discussed issues dear to them. Where should Ostpolitik go now? How would the Polish regime, indeed the whole of the Soviet Bloc, respond to the change in direction the Church must now take? Casey left the audience chamber sure of one thing: John Paul was not a man to seek easy accommodations. That was what made him so charismatic. His clean-cut beliefs were the best possible answer to that tired old question, the one Stalin was supposed to have posed about how many divisions a pope had. John Paul, Casey believed, was a pontiff who single-handedly would prove that faith could be more effective than any force.

  Casey returned to Washington to brief President Reagan, who told the CIA director to return to Rome and tell the pope, under a secret arrangement the president approved, that from now on he would be kept fully informed on all aspects of U.S. policy—military, political, and economic.

  Every Friday evening the CIA station chief in Rome brought to the Apostolic Palace the latest secrets obtained from satellite surveillance and electronic eavesdropping by CIA field agents. No other foreign leader had access to the intelligence the pope received. It enabled the most political of all modern pontiffs to stamp his distinctive style and authority on both the Church and the secular world. Papal diplomacy, the political core of a highly centralized Vatican bureaucracy, had, more than at any time in its five hundred years of very active history, become deeply involved with international events. As a world leader, this involvement had nearly cost the pope his life when he was almost assassinated in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.

  Two years later, on November 15, 1983, a cold winter’s night in Rome, John Paul was about to learn the answer to a question that still consumed him: Who had ordered the assassination? Every moment of what had happened had been seared forever into his memory and remained as vivid as the scar tissue from his bullet wounds.

  There had been about one hundred thousand people in St. Peter’s Square on that Wednesday afternoon, May 13, 1981. They were packed within the three-quarter circle encompassing Bernini’s colonnades—284 columns and 88 pilasters, themselves supporting 162 statues of the saints. A fenced-off route indicated the path the popemobile would travel to the platform from which John Paul delivered his weekly address. There was a festive air and some of the onlookers speculated what the pontiff would be doing in the Papal Apartments while they waited.

  What went on in the mind of a swarthy young Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, would not be known. He had arrived in the square in midafternoon and worked his way close to the path along which the popemobile would trundle. Agca had been a member of a terrorist group based in Turkey that called itself the Gray Wolves. But he had left their ranks and traveled through the Middle Eastern training camps of even more extreme Islamic fundamentalist groups. Now he was almost at the end of his journey. Agca was in St. Peter’s Square not to praise but to kill the pope.

  At four o’clock John Paul had changed into a freshly pressed pristine white silk cassock. On the advice of the CIA, the garment had been cleverly modified to enable a flak jacket to be worn undetected beneath the garment. On his last visit to the Apostolic Palace, Casey had warned John Paul that “in these crazy times, even the pope was not above attack. I told him we had no hard evidence he was in danger. But John Paul was a very controversial figure and a fanatic could try to kill him.”

  John Paul had refused to wear the protection. The very idea, he had told his English-language secretary, Monsignor John Magee, went against all his papacy represented.

  John Paul descended to the San Damaso Courtyard inside the Apostolic Palace at 4:50 P.M. The Vatican’s security chief, Camillo Cibin, ticked off the pontiff’s approach on his copy of the minute-by-minute schedule that governed the pope’s working day. In the jacket of Cibin’s custom-made steel gray suit was a small but powerful cellular phone linking him to Rome police headquarters. But the immediate protection of the pontiff was in the hands of blue-suited Vigili. The Vatican’s small but highly trained security force were the sharp eyes behind the ceremonial Swiss Guards already positioned in St. Peter’s Square.

  Parked in the courtyard was the popemobile, or campagnola, with its white-leather padded seat and handrail for the pope to grip during his progress through the vast piazza. Gathered around the vehicle were senior members of his staff. Magee would remember that John Paul was in “unusually good form.”

  At five o’clock precisely, the popemobile drove out of the courtyard. Ahead, from St. Peter’s Square, the cheering began. As the campagnola approached the Arch of the Bells, the Vigili were joined by Rome city policemen, who walked ahead and immediately behind the vehicle. As the popemobile emerged into the piazza, the crowd noise rose to a roar. John Paul waved and smiled; his time as an actor in his youth had given him a powerful stage presence.

  At two miles an hour, the pope turning from one side to the other, the vehicle moved toward the Egyptian obelisk in the center of the piazza. At exactly 5:15 P.M. the campagnola began a second circuit of the square under the watchful eyes of Cibin; the security chief was trotting behind the popemobile. The crowd’s cheering was even wilder. Impetuously, John Paul did something that always made Cibin nervous. The pope reached into the crowd and plucked out a child. He hugged and kissed the little girl and then handed her back to her ecstatic mother. It was part of the pontiff’s routine. Cibin’s concern was that a child would wriggle free of the pope’s grasp and fall, creating a nasty accident. But John Paul had dismissed all such concerns.

  At 5:17 P.M. he once more reached out to touch the head of another little girl, dressed in communion white. Then he straightened and looked about him, as if wondering who else he might greet. It was his way of personalizing the papacy in even the largest of crowds.

  Furthest from his mind at that moment were the dangers he had faced in other crowds. Only three months before—in Pakistan, on February 16, 1983—a bomb had exploded in Karachi’s municipal stadium shortly before he began his journey among the faithful. In January 1980 t
he French secret service had warned of a Communist plot to kill him. It was just one of scores of threats the Vatican had received against the pope’s life. All had been investigated as far as was possible. Later Magee said: “In reality we could only sit and wait. Short of enclosing the Holy Father in a bulletproof cage whenever he appeared in public, something he would never agree to, there was not much else we could do.”

  At 5:18 P.M. the first shot rang out in St. Peter’s Square.

  John Paul remained upright, his hands still gripping the handrail. Then he started to sway. Mehmet Ali Agca’s first bullet had penetrated his stomach, creating multiple wounds in the small intestine, the lower part of the colon, the large intestine, and the mesentery, the tissue that holds the intestine to the abdominal wall. Instinctively, John Paul placed his hand over the entry wound to try to stop the spurting blood. His face increasingly filled with pain and he slowly began to collapse. Only seconds had passed since he had been hit.

  Agca’s second bullet struck the pontiff in his right hand, which fell uselessly to his side. Bright red blood spurted over his white cassock. A third 9-mm bullet hit John Paul higher up on the right arm.

  The campagnola driver twisted in his seat, his mouth open, too stunned to speak. Cibin was screaming at him to move. A papal aide shielded the pope with his own body. The vehicle began to lurch forward. The crowd itself was swaying as if buffeted by a giant wind. One shocking sentence rippled outward from the scene of carnage. In a score of different languages came the same disbelieving words, “The pope has been shot.”

  Cibin and his Vatican security men and city of Rome policemen were waving their guns, shouting orders and counterorders, looking for the gunman. Agca had burst through the crowd, running very fast, holding his gun in his right hand. The crowd continued to open before his waving pistol. Suddenly he tossed the gun away. At the same moment, his legs were cut from beneath him. A Rome police officer had made the arrest. In a moment both men were buried beneath other policemen in a scene that resembled a rugby scrum. Several policemen kicked and punched Agca before he was dragged away to a police van.