Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  But now Mossad was determined to strike a telling blow to force Britain to sever all diplomatic ties with Damascus by closing down its London embassy, long regarded by Mossad as one of the core missions in Europe for plotting against Israel. Central to the plot would be Abu, the cousin of Nezar Hindawi.

  After his dinner with Tov Levy, Abu sought out Hindawi, apologizing for his previous indifference about Ann-Marie. Of course he would help, but first he needed to have some answers. Was she going to keep the baby? Was she still pressing him to marry her? Did Nezar really love the girl? They came from different cultures and mixed marriages rarely worked.

  Hindawi replied if he had ever loved Ann-Marie, he did not now. She had become shrewish and weepy, asking all the time what was going to happen. He certainly did not want to marry the chambermaid.

  Abu gave his cousin ten thousand dollars—money enough, he said, for Hindawi to be rid of Ann-Marie and continue to live a bachelor’s life in London. The money had been provided by Mossad. In return Hindawi would have to do something for the cause they both believed in: the overthrow of Israel.

  On the evening of April 12, 1986, Hindawi visited Ann-Marie in her rooming house in the Kilburn area of London. He brought flowers and a bottle of champagne, purchased with some of the money Abu had provided. He told Ann-Marie he loved her and wanted to keep the baby. The news brought tears to her eyes. Suddenly her world seemed a far better place.

  Hindawi said there was one final hurdle to clear. Ann-Marie must get the blessing of his parents for them to marry. It was an Arabic tradition no dutiful son could flout. She must fly to the Arab village in Israel where his family lived. He painted a picture of their lifestyle having changed little since Christ had walked the earth. To a girl educated by nuns and for whom Mass had been an important part of her life, the imagery was final confirmation that she was making the right decision in marrying her lover. He and his family might not be Christians, but that did not matter; they came from the land of her Lord. In her eyes that made them God-fearing people. Nevertheless, Ann-Marie hesitated. She couldn’t just walk out of her job. And where would she get the money to pay the airfare? And for such an important meeting, she would need new clothes. Hindawi stilled her concerns by producing from his pocket a bundle of notes. He told her it was more than enough for her to buy a new wardrobe. With another flourish, Hindawi produced an El Al ticket for a flight on April 17, five days away. He had bought it that afternoon.

  Ann-Marie laughed. “You were sure I would go?”

  “As sure as I am of my love for you,” Hindawi replied.

  He promised that once she returned to London they would be married. The next few days passed in a whirl for the pregnant chambermaid. She quit her job and visited the Irish embassy in London to collect a new passport. She shopped for maternity dresses. Every night she made love to Hindawi. Each morning, over a leisurely breakfast, she planned their future together. They would live in Ireland, in a little cottage by the sea. Their baby would be christened Sean if it was a boy. Sinead if a girl.

  On the day of Ann-Marie’s departure, Hindawi told her he had arranged for her to collect a “gift” for his parents from a “friend” who was one of the cleaners on the air side of the airport.

  Ari Ben-Menashe, who subsequently claimed to have detailed knowledge of the plot, insisted that “because Hindawi didn’t want to risk her being stopped for having too much carry-on luggage he had arranged for his friend to pass her the bag when she entered the El Al departure lounge.”

  Her gullibility in not asking any questions about the “gift” was the reaction of a woman head over heels in love and completely trusting her lover. She was the perfect patsy in the accelerating plot.

  In the taxi to the airport, Hindawi was the loving, concerned father-to-be. Would she make sure to do her breathing exercises during the long flight? She must drink plenty of water and sit in an aisle seat to avoid developing the cramps she had started to complain of. Ann-Marie had laughingly shushed him: “Holy be to God, you’d think I was flying to the moon!”

  She had lingered at the door to the flight departure area, not wishing to be separated from him, promising to phone from Tel Aviv, saying she would love his parents like her own. He kissed her one last time, then gently pushed her into the line making its way toward the immigration-control desk.

  Watching her until she was out of sight, Hindawi continued to follow the instructions given to him by Abu and boarded a Syrian Arab Airlines bus for the ride back into London. Meantime, the unsuspecting Ann-Marie had safely passed through passport control and UK security checks. Next she made her way to the high-security area reserved for the El Al flight. Shin Bet–trained agents carefully questioned her and inspected her hand baggage. She was assigned a seat and motioned through to the final departure lounge to join the other 355 passengers.

  According to Ari Ben-Menashe, she was handed the “gift” for Hindawi’s parents by a man dressed in the blue coveralls of an airport cleaner. The man disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. Ben-Menashe would write: “Within seconds, Ann-Marie was asked to submit to a search. The El Al security people found plastic explosives in a false bottom in the bag.”

  The explosives consisted of over three pounds of Semtex. Ann-Marie sobbed out her story to waiting Special Branch and MI5 officers. It was the tale of an ill-starred woman not only crossed in love but double-crossed by her partner. The officers concentrated on establishing Hindawi’s contacts with Syria after they realized Ann-Marie had been an innocent dupe.

  As the airlines bus entered London, Hindawi ordered the driver to divert to the Syrian embassy. When the driver protested, Hindawi said he had the “authority” to do so. At the embassy, he asked consular officials to grant him political asylum. He told them he feared the British police were about to arrest him because he had tried to blow up an El Al plane for the “cause.” The astonished officials handed Hindawi over to two embassy security men. They asked him to remain in an embassy staff apartment after they questioned him. They might well have been suspicious that this was some sort of trap to embarrass Syria. If so, those fears would only have deepened when Hindawi left the apartment shortly after.

  Hindawi had gone in search of Abu. Failing to find him, he checked into the London Visitors’ Hotel in the Notting Hill district, where he was arrested shortly afterward.

  The BBC broadcast news of how the police had foiled the plot. The details were unusually precise: the Czech-made Semtex had been concealed in the false bottom of Ann-Marie’s bag and was primed to explode at thirty-nine thousand feet.

  For Ben-Menashe, the operation had swiftly moved to a satisfying conclusion. “Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian embassy. Hindawi was jailed for forty-five years. Ann-Marie went home to Ireland where she gave birth to a daughter.” Abu returned to Israel, his role over.

  After Hindawi’s trial, Robert Maxwell unleashed the Daily Mirror: “The bastard got what he deserved,” screamed an editorial. “Ambassador of Death,” shrieked a headline on the day of the expulsion of Syria’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. “Get Out, You Syrian Swine,” screamed another. Ari Ben-Menashe would be the first to claim that Mossad had pulled off a “brilliant coup which cast Syria into the political wilderness.”

  But there were intriguing questions behind that clear-cut sentiment. Had Ann-Marie Murphy really been handed a working bomb, or had it been part of an elaborate scam? Was the man in blue coveralls—Hindawi’s supposed “friend”—a security officer? How much foreknowledge of the plot did MI5 have? And would it not have been unthinkable for Mossad and Britain’s security services to actually allow Semtex to be taken on board an airliner when there was even the remotest chance the bomb could have detonated on the ground? Such an explosion would certainly have devastated a sizable area of the world’s busiest airport at a time when thousands of people would have been in the area. Had the real brilliance of the coup been that Mossad had achieved the diplomatic castration of Syria at no
risk at all to El Al and Heathrow by using a harmless substance resembling Semtex? To all such questions, Prime Minister Shimon Peres would only intone: “What happened is usually known to those who should know and whoever does not know should continue not knowing.”

  From Britain’s high-security jail at Whitmoor, Hindawi has continued to protest he was a victim of a classic Mossad sting operation. White-haired and no longer slim, he says he expects to die in prison. He refers to Ann-Marie only as “that woman.” In 1998, she lives in Dublin raising their daughter, who, she is thankful, does not look like her lover. She never speaks of Hindawi.

  There is one puzzling footnote to the story. Two weeks after Hindawi was sentenced to a prison sentence that would see him incarcerated well into the twenty-first century, Arnaud de Borchgrave, the respected editor of the Washington Times, placed his tape recorder on the desk of France’s prime minister, Jacques Chirac, in Paris. De Borchgrave was in Europe to attend the European Community foreign ministers’ meeting in London, and the interview with Chirac was to obtain a briefing on the French position. The interview had moved along predictable lines, with Chirac making it clear that France and Germany had been dragooned into a show of loyalty to the British government, which was proving to be increasingly intransigent over Common Market policies. De Borchgrave raised the question of France’s own relationship in another area. The editor wanted to know what stage Chirac’s negotiations had reached with Syria to end the spate of terrorist bombs in Paris, and of France’s efforts to free the eight foreign hostages held by the Hezbollah in Lebanon. The prime minister paused and looked across his desk, seemingly oblivious of the recorder. He then said that the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, had both told him that the Syrian government was not involved in Hindawi’s plan to blow up the El Al airliner; that the plot “was engineered by Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service.”

  The resulting diplomatic furor nearly ruined Chirac’s career. He found himself being attacked on one side by his own president, François Mitterand, and on the other fending off furious telephone calls from Helmut Kohl demanding he must retract. Chirac did what politicians often do. He said he had been misquoted. In London, Scotland Yard said the matter had been fully dealt with by the courts and there was no need for further comment. In Paris, the office of Jacques Chirac—in 1997 president of France—said he had no recall of the interview with the Washington Times.

  Soon another sting would leave Mossad with a further stain on its reputation.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE EXPENDABLE CARTOONIST

  Nahum Admoni’s demise as director general of Mossad began on a July afternoon in 1986, the result of an incident on one of those Bonn streets built in the post–World War II building boom in Germany. Forty years later the street had become a mature avenue with small but well-kept front gardens and maids’ quarters in the rear. Security systems were discreetly hidden behind wrought-iron gates and the lower windows were mullioned, the result of using bottle glass.

  No one saw the person who left a plastic carrier bag in the telephone booth at the end of the street. A police patrol car spotted it and stopped to investigate. The bag contained eight freshly minted blank British passports. The immediate reaction of the local office of the Bundeskriminal Amt (BKA), the equivalent of the FBI, was that the passports were for one of the terrorist groups who had brought terrorism to the streets of Europe with a series of violent and brutal bombings and kidnappings.

  Representing causes and minorities from all corners of the world, they were determined to force their way to a role in setting the agenda for international policy. They had found ready support from the radical student politics that had swept Britain and the Continent. Since 1968, when Leila Khaled, a young Palestinian woman revolutionary, hijacked a jet plane to London and was promptly released because the British government feared further attacks, naive students had chanted the agitprop slogans of the PLO. Those middle-class young radicals had a romanticized view of the PLO as “freedom fighters” who, instead of taking drugs, took the lives of the bourgeoisie, and instead of holding sit-ins, held hostages.

  The BKA assumed that the passports had been left by a student acting as a courier for a terrorist group. The list of groups was dauntingly long, ranging from the IRA or Germany’s own Red Army Faction to foreign groups like the INFS, Islamic National Front of Sudan; the ELN, the National Liberation Army of Colombia; the MDRA, the Angola Liberation Movement; or the LTTE, the Tamil Tigers. These and many more had cells or cadres through the Federal Republic. Any one of them could be planning to use the passports to attack one of the British military bases in Germany or travel to Britain and stage an outrage there.

  Despite being Western Europe’s leading former imperial power, initially Britain had only encountered continued terrorism at the hands of the IRA. But its intelligence services had warned it was only a matter of time before other foreign groups, allowed to operate against their own countries from London, would drag Britain into their machinations. A foretaste of what could happen came when a group opposed to the Tehran regime took over the Iranian embassy in 1980. When negotiations failed, the Thatcher government sent in the SAS, who killed the terrorists. That well-publicized action had led to a sudden decline in Middle Eastern plots hatched in London. Instead, Paris had become the battleground for bloody internal conflicts between various foreign organizations, most notably Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Abu Nidal and his gunmen. Mossad had also done its share of killing Arab enemies on the streets of the French capital.

  The BKA believed the passports found in the Frankfurt telephone kiosk were the precursor of more slaughter. The agency called in the BundesNachrichten Dienst (BND), the republic’s equivalent of the CIA, who informed the MI6 liaison officer attached to BND headquarters in Pullach, in southern Germany. In London, MI6 established that the passports were expert forgeries. That ruled out the IRA and most other terrorist groups. They did not have the capability to produce such high-quality documents. Suspicion switched to the KGB; their forgers were among the best in the business. But the Russians were known to have a stockpile of passports and certainly it was not their style to use a phone booth as a pickup point. The South African security service, BOSS, was also ruled out. It had virtually stopped operating in Europe, and false British passports were hardly needed in the unsophisticated African countries where BOSS now concentrated its activities. MI6 turned to the only other intelligence service who could make good use of the passports—Mossad.

  Arie Regev, an attaché at the Israeli embassy in London who was also the resident katsa, was invited to meet a senior MI6 officer to discuss the matter. Regev said he knew nothing about the passports but agreed to raise the matter with Tel Aviv. Back came the swift response from Nahum Admoni: the passports had nothing to do with Mossad. He suggested that they could be the work of the East Germans; Mossad had recently discovered that the Stasi, the East German security service, was not above selling fake passports to Jews desperate to travel to Israel, in return for hard currency. Admoni knew the passports had been created by Mossad forgers—and were intended to be used by katsas working under cover in Europe and to enable them to more easily enter and leave Britain.

  Despite an “understanding” with MI5 that Rafi Eitan had originally helped hammer out, in which Mossad agreed it would keep MI5 informed of all operations inside Britain, the agency was secretly running an agent in England in the hope it would lead to a double triumph for Mossad: killing the commander of the PLO’s elite Special Forces unit—Force 17—and ending Yasser Arafat’s increasing success in establishing a relationship with the Thatcher government.

  In London, no longer was Arafat’s name synonymous with terrorism. Mrs. Thatcher had slowly become convinced that he could bring about a just and lasting peace in the Middle East that would both recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and assure the security of Israel. Jewish leaders were more skeptical. They argued it was only terrorism
that had brought the PLO to the stage at which it was now, and that the organization would continue to use the threat of more terrorist actions unless all its demands were met. Not for the first time, London was unmoved by Tel Aviv’s protestations. Mossad continued to regard Britain as a country which, despite the outcome of the Iranian embassy siege, was becoming too ready to support the Palestinian cause. There was already concern within Mossad over the way the PLO had managed to cozy up to the CIA.

  Contacts between the United States and the PLO would later be precisely dated by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. He would reveal in his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, that six weeks after the U.S. ambassador to Sudan was shot dead in Khartoum by Black September gunmen, a secret meeting took place, on November 3, 1973, between CIA deputy director, Vernon Walters, and Yasser Arafat. The outcome was a “nonaggression pact” between the United States and the PLO. Kissinger subsequently wrote: “Attacks on Americans, at least by Arafat’s faction of the PLO, ceased.”

  When he learned of the pact, Yitzhak Hofi fumed that in the long history of expediency, there had never been a worse example. Using his back channel to the CIA, Hofi tried to have Walters cancel the agreement. The CIA deputy director said that was not possible and warned Hofi that Washington would regard it as an “unfriendly act” if news of the pact became public. It was a shot across the bow not to let loose Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare on friendly journalists.