Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  Israel would insist that the prospect of catching terrorists was the only reason for intercepting the aircraft. But within Mossad was a mood that no opportunity should be lost to create fear and panic in Arab minds. The Aman interrogators had some satisfaction in knowing that the passengers would further the image of an all-powerful Israel.

  The head of Aman, Ehud Barak, believed the operation was yet another example of Mossad shooting from the hip, and he made his feeling very clear to Nahum Admoni.

  Never a person to suffer a mistake or a rebuke lightly, the Mossad chief set about devising an operation that would not only put an end to the mocking of Mossad on Arab radio stations for being reduced to forcing down an unarmed civilian plane, but one that would also end the sniping within Israel’s own intelligence community that the service he commanded should next time be very sure before it made a fool of them all.

  So began an operation which, among much else, would ruin the life of a pregnant Irish chambermaid and send her Arab lover to prison to serve one of the longest sentences given by a British court; cause huge embarrassment to German chancellor Helmut Kohl and French prime minister Jacques Chirac; once more reveal Robert Maxwell in full manipulative fury; cause Syria to be exiled from the world’s diplomatic table; and force all those Arab radio stations that had so gleefully ridiculed Mossad to change their tune.

  Like all operations, there were moments of high tensions and periods of patient waiting. It had its quota of human despair, useful anger, and betrayal, but for men like Nahum Admoni, such a plot was the very substance of his life. It went with asking himself the same questions over and over again. Could it work? Would other people actually believe that it had been like that? And, of course, would the real truth remain buried forever?

  More certain, Mossad had enlisted the very different skills of two men for the operation. One was a katsa who had served in Britain under the alias of Tov Levy. The other was a Palestinian informer, code-named Abu. The Palestinian had been recruited after being discovered by Mossad stealing from a PLO fund he had been administering in a village on the Israeli-Jordanian border. Playing on his fear that the crime could be revealed through an anonymous tip to the village head, resulting in Abu’s death, Mossad had dragooned him to leave for London. He had been provided with fake documents stating he was a businessman and given living expenses commensurate with his role as a high-flying big spender. His assigned controller was Tov Levy.

  In every way Abu fit the classic definition by Uzi Mahnaimi, a former member of the Israeli intelligence community, of what an agent should be: “You spend hours with him, days even; you teach him everything he needs to know, you go through his courses with him, help him, socialize with him, look at his family photographs, you know the names and ages of his children. But the agent is not a human being; you must never think of him as one. The agent is just a weapon, a means to an end, like a Kalashnikov—that is all. If you have to send him to the hanging tree, don’t even think about it. The agent is always a cipher, never a person.”

  Abu had played his part to perfection and had become a familiar figure around the gambling tables of Mayfair. Given his success, his sexual appetites and bouts of drinking were tolerated. Moving in the haunts of arms dealers and wealthy PLO supporters, Abu picked up information that enabled Mossad to strike against its enemies. Fifteen PLO men were killed by Mossad over a few weeks as a result of Abu’s information.

  Some of his meetings with Tov Levy had taken place in the bars and restaurants of the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. Working there was an Irish woman from Dublin, Ann-Marie Murphy.

  Like many others, she had been tempted across the Irish Sea by the lure of making good money in London. All she had been able to get was a chambermaid’s job. The pay was low, the hours long. Ann-Marie’s little free time was spent in bars in the Shepherds Bush district, long a refuge for Irish expatriates. She joined in the rebel songs and made a glass of Guinness last. Then it was back to her lonely room, ready for another long day of changing bedsheets, scouring lavatory bowls, and leaving each hotel room sparkling in the prescribed Hilton manner. Her career was going nowhere.

  Shortly before Christmas, 1985, close to tears at the thought of having to spend it alone in a city so different from the carefree Dublin she longed for, Ann-Marie met a dark-skinned Arab who was handsome in her eyes. In his silk suit and flashy tie he also exuded affluence. When he smiled at her, she smiled back. His name was Nezar Hindawi, and he was a distant cousin of Abu. Hindawi was thirty-five years old, though he lied about that to Ann-Marie, lopping three years from his age to make him the same as her, thirty-two. He would go on lying to a trusting, naive woman.

  They had met in a bar close to the BBC Theatre in Shepherds Bush Green. She had never been to this pub before and was surprised to find Hindawi among the ruddy-faced building-site navvies whose accents echoed every county in Ireland. But Hindawi seemed to know many of the drinkers, joining in their rough humor and standing a round when it was his turn.

  For weeks, Hindawi had been coming to the bar hoping to make contact with the IRA. Abu had asked him to do so, though typically his cousin had not explained why. Hindawi’s few attempts to discuss the political situation in Ireland had been brushed aside by men more interested in sinking pints. Whatever scheme Abu was concocting would remain a secret as far as Hindawi was concerned. The arrival of Ann-Marie had also given him something else to think about.

  Captivated by his good manners and charm, Ann-Marie soon found herself laughing at Hindawi’s stories about his life in the Middle East. To a woman who had never traveled farther than London, he made it sound like an Arabian Nights fantasy. Hindawi drove her home that night, kissed her on both cheeks, and left. Ann-Marie wondered if the giddy feeling she experienced was the first stage of falling in love. The following day he took her to lunch at a Syrian restaurant and introduced her to the delights of Arabic cooking. Tipsy from a fine Lebanese wine, she put up only token resistance when he took her back to his apartment. That afternoon they made love. Until then Ann-Marie had been a virgin. Raised in the strong Irish Catholic tradition opposed to contraception, she had taken no precautions.

  In February 1986, she found she was pregnant. She told Hindawi. He smiled reassurance; he would take care of everything. Alarmed, Ann-Marie said she would never agree to an abortion. He told her the idea had never crossed his mind. In truth he was panic-stricken at the prospect of having to marry a woman he regarded as beneath his social class. He also feared she would go to the authorities and complain. With little understanding of how indifferently officialdom would view such matters, he thought his permission to stay in Britain would be revoked, resulting in his being deported as an undesirable alien. Hindawi turned to the only source of help he knew, his cousin Abu.

  Abu had his own problems, having lost a good deal of money gambling. He bluntly told Hindawi he couldn’t loan him the money Hindawi had decided he would offer Ann-Marie to return to Dublin, have the baby, and place it out for adoption. She had told him that was common in Ireland.

  Next day Abu met Tov Levy. Over dinner the katsa told Abu he needed to do something to cause the British government to close down the Syrian embassy in London and order out its staff, long suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. Levy said he needed a “hook” that would achieve that. Could Abu tell him about anyone, anything, that might be useful? Abu mentioned he had a cousin with an Irish girlfriend who was pregnant in London.

  The plot began to coalesce after the aftershocks rocking the Israeli intelligence community from the disclosures tumbling out of Washington about the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. Israel’s tough image for dealing with terrorism had taken a pounding. There was anger within Mossad that the Reagan administration had allowed matters to go so badly wrong as to allow Israel’s role in Irangate to surface.

  The revelations had made it that much more difficult to maintain even the minimum support of cautiously friendly neighbors like Egypt and Jordan at a time
when they were both finally growing tired of the PLO and the histrionics of Yasser Arafat. Increasingly the PLO leader had become a political captive of his own extremists. No Marxist himself, he found himself cornered into spouting its rhetoric, calling for “the liquidation of the Zionist entity politically, culturally, and militarily.”

  The vituperation did nothing to improve his position among the various breakaway factions of the PLO. To them, Arafat was the man who had been forced to make a humiliating withdrawal from Beirut under cover of UN protection from the watchful eye of the Israelis. Some fifteen thousand Palestinian fighters had boarded boats for Tunis. Others had deserted Arafat on the promise of support from Syria and had become even more militant against both him and Israel from their new bases outside Damascus.

  Yet for Mossad, Arafat remained the key obstacle to peace. Killing him was still a priority; at the Mossad target range the silhouettes were all of Arafat. Until he was dead, he would continue to be held ultimately responsible for all the acts of savagery committed by the disparate Palestinian groups in Syria.

  Then two incidents happened which, momentarily at least, moved the focus from Arafat, and ultimately settled the plot in which Abu was to become a key figure.

  A growing problem Syria had with the PLO factions under its wing was the need to satisfy their constant demands for action. As one of the world’s prime exponents of state-sponsored terrorism, Syria was more than prepared to finance any operation that did not further blight its own already seriously tarnished image. Many of the schemes the PLO factions placed before Syrian intelligence were too risky for the Syrians to endorse. One had been to poison Israel’s water supply. Another was to send an Arab suicide bomber, posing as an Orthodox Jew, to blow himself up at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Either was guaranteed to draw draconian retaliation from Israel.

  Then came an audacious plot that Syrian intelligence recognized could not only work, but would strike a telling blow at the very heart of Israel’s military supremacy. The first step had been to buy a ship. After several weeks of searching ports around the Mediterranean, a Panama-registered merchantman, Atavarius, was purchased and sailed to the port of Algiers.

  A week after it arrived, a detachment of Palestinian commandos arrived from Damascus on a Syrian air force transport plane. With them they brought a small arsenal of weapons: machine guns, antitank weapons, and boxes of Kalashnikov rifles so beloved of terrorists. That night, under cover of darkness, the commandos and arms were placed on board the Atavarius.

  At daybreak the ship set sail, its captain having told the port authorities he was bound for Greece to undergo an engine overhaul. The commandos were belowdecks. But their arrival had not gone unnoticed. A Mossad informer employed in the harbormaster’s office had become sufficiently suspicious to inform the katsa stationed in the city. He sent a message to Tel Aviv.

  Its arrival triggered a “condition yellow” alert that was sent to the entire Mossad network stationed around the Mediterranean. Memories were still fresh of the unsuccessful attempt to blow up the seafront at Elat, and it was assumed this could be a similar attack, only this time against Haifa. The busy port on the Mediterranean seaboard was an obvious target. Two naval gunboats were stationed offshore ready to deal with any attempt by the Atavarius to enter the harbor that was Israel’s main trading sea link with the world.

  The Atavarius’s destination was the beaches north of Tel Aviv. In a plan that could have been plucked from a Hollywood movie, the Atavarius would lower the commandos into rubber boats, which they would row ashore. Then they would fight their way into Tel Aviv to their target, the Kirya, the fortresslike headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces, whose tower dominated the skyline and would serve as a beacon for the commandos. The plan depended on total surprise and the ruthless courage the Israelis had themselves made a byword.

  The attack had been set for Israel’s Independence Day celebrations, when a carnival mood would prevail, and the Kirya, according to Syrian intelligence, would have fewer men than usual guarding it. The commandos did not expect to escape with their lives, but they had been chosen for the mission because they had all shown the same mentality as the Beirut suicide bombers.

  Meantime, they could relax and enjoy the short cruise that took them past Tunisia to their next landfall, the island of Sicily. No one on board probably paid any attention to the fishing trawler wallowing in the swell as the Atavarius passed. The boat contained sophisticated electronic equipment capable of monitoring radio conversations on board the merchantman. A short transmission in Arabic announced that the ship was on schedule. One of the trawler’s two-man crew, both Mossad sayanim, radioed the news to Tel Aviv. For the next twenty-four hours, the Atavarius was shadowed by other Mossad-operated vessels as it passed Crete and then the island of Cyprus.

  A fast motor yacht crossed its path. It, too, was equipped with detection gear, including a powerful camera concealed in the side of the wheelhouse. On deck were two young women, sunbathing. They were cousins of the Cypriot sayan who owned the yacht and were being used as bait to attract interest from those on board the Atavarius. As the yacht cruised alongside, several of the commandos appeared at the deck rail, shouting and smiling at the women. In the wheelhouse, the sayan activated the camera to photograph the gesticulating men. His part in the surveillance over, he raced back to Cyprus. In his home the film was developed, and the prints were wired to Tel Aviv. Mossad’s computers identified three of the faces as known Arab terrorists. Condition yellow moved to red.

  Prime Minister Shimon Peres ordered that the Atavarius be attacked. A plan to bomb it was considered and rejected. An air attack might be mistaken by Egypt as part of a preemptive strike; though diplomatic relations between Israel and its neighbor had survived a number of incidents, there was considerable tension and suspicion in Cairo about Tel Aviv’s activities. Peres agreed that the attack should be seaborne.

  Six Israeli navy gunboats were fueled and armed with rockets. On board were units of the IDF Special Forces and Mossad operatives who were to interrogate any of the commandos taken alive. The gunboats set off in the early hours for Haifa, heading west out into the Mediterranean. They raced through the waters in stern-to-prow formation, so as to reduce the possibility of detection by radar on board the Atavarius. The Israelis had timed their attack to be launched with the rising sun immediately behind them.

  At a little after 6:30 A.M., the Atavarius was sighted. In a textbook maneuver, the gunboats fanned out, attacking the merchantman from both sides, raking the hull and decks with rockets. On deck the commandos fired back. But their heavy armaments were still crated below, and their automatic rifles were no match for the superior firepower of the Israelis. In minutes the Atavarius was on fire and its crew and commandos began to abandon ship. Some were shot as they plunged into the sea.

  In all, twenty crew and commandos were killed. Their bodies were all recovered. Eight survivors were taken prisoner. Before the gunboats raced back to Israel, they sank the Atavarius with rockets whose nose cones were filled with extra-powerful explosives.

  The bodies of the dead were unceremoniously buried in the Negev Desert. The prisoners were tried in secret and sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment. During their interrogation, they had totally implicated Syria as the guiding force behind the incident. But, rather than launch an attack on its neighbor, the Israeli government, acting on the advice of Mossad, kept the incident secret. Mossad’s psychologists had predicted that the disappearance of the ship and its crew and passengers would become the subject of intense and increasingly fearful speculation among the Syrian-based PLO groups. Mossad also warned Prime Minister Peres that the one thing he could be certain of was that the terrorists, knowing their operation had failed, would be eager to regain face with their Syrian benefactors.

  Meanwhile, the Palestinians continued to fulminate against Arafat and applaud the deadly war being waged against him by his onetime associate, Abu Nidal. Long deemed terrorism’s “grand master
of the unexpected,” Nidal had fallen out with Arafat over tactics.

  Arafat was slowly coming around to the idea that a movement that had nothing at its disposal but terrorism would ultimately fail; it needed a political program and a sense of diplomacy. Arafat had been trying to demonstrate that in his recent public statements, earning encouragement from Washington to continue on this new path. In Israel, Arafat’s words were seen as a sham. For Abu Nidal they were nothing but a betrayal of all he personally stood for—naked, unadulterated terrorism.

  For months, Nidal had been biding his time. When he heard about the failure of the Atavarius mission and the way the ship had subsequently disappeared from the face of the earth, he decided the time had come to remind Israel he was still around. With the full connivance of his protectors in Syrian intelligence, Abu Nidal struck with horrific effect. At the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, his gunmen opened fire on helpless Christmas travelers. In as many seconds nineteen passengers, among them five Americans, were slaughtered at the El Al check-in counters at both airports. How had those terrorists been able to move unhampered around Italian police to reach their targets? Where were El Al’s own security men?

  While answers to these urgent questions were being sought, Mossad’s strategists were also looking at other areas. Though Britain had joined in the total condemnation of the attacks, the country still maintained full diplomatic ties with Syria—despite Mossad having furnished MI5 with ample evidence of Damascus’s role in state-sponsored terrorism. It was not enough for the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to deliver forceful denunciations in Parliament of terrorism. There was a need for more direct action. However, in the past MI5 had reminded Mossad that even Israel had from time to time shown expedient self-interest, and accepted the need to trade with its sworn enemies. There had been its decision to free over a thousand Palestinian detainees—many convicted terrorists—only months before the Rome and Vienna airport bombings, in exchange for three Israeli soldiers held in Lebanon.