by Kai Bird
Two weeks after Musa Sadr’s disappearance, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—then still in exile in Iraq—sent a message to Yasir Arafat asking him to help “clarify the mystery.” At the same time, Ames decided to take an interest in the case. He did so for two reasons. First, he understood that Musa Sadr’s disappearance could exacerbate Lebanon’s smoldering civil war. And second, he knew the imam’s fate was of intense interest to millions of Shi’as not only in Lebanon but also in Iran, a country that was beginning to show signs of revolutionary turmoil in the streets of Tehran. Ames sent a message to Ali Hassan Salameh about the case and asked if he had any intelligence on the imam’s whereabouts. Salameh eventually replied with a detailed account.
Arafat had learned that Qaddafi had agreed to host a meeting between Musa Sadr and one of his theological rivals, the imam Mohammed Beheshti. For some years the latter had led in exile a Shi’a mosque in Hamburg, Germany. But Beheshti was also a close political ally of Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Musa Sadr, Beheshti was a scholar of some repute. But unlike Imam Sadr, Beheshti was an intellectual proponent of a theocratic Shi’ite state. Sadr disagreed, arguing that Shi’a theology prohibited clerics from directly exercising political power.
Both Sadr and Beheshti were recipients of Qaddafi’s largesse, and the Libyan dictator wanted the two men to set aside their theological disputes and cooperate on a common, anti-Western political agenda. (The eccentric Qaddafi was himself a Sunni Muslim and had no interest in the arcane merits of what was essentially a Shi’a theological dispute.)
In any case, Musa Sadr and Beheshti were supposed to meet in Tripoli and iron out their political differences under Qaddafi’s auspices. Musa Sadr arrived—but Beheshti and his delegation never came to Tripoli. Musa Sadr was an impatient man, and after several days of waiting in his hotel for a meeting with Qaddafi that never materialized, he announced that he was packing his bags and leaving Libya. Arriving at the Tripoli airport, Musa Sadr was escorted to the VIP departure lounge. In the meantime, Beheshti told Qaddafi over the phone to detain Musa Sadr by all means necessary. Beheshti assured Qaddafi that Imam Sadr was a Western agent. Qaddafi ordered his security force to delay Musa Sadr’s departure. Qaddafi instructed that the imam should just be persuaded to go back to his hotel. But Qaddafi’s security officers accosted Imam Sadr in the VIP lounge and addressed him disrespectfully. An argument ensued, and the imam was roughed up and thrown into a car. Things had gotten so out of hand that the imam was taken to a prison.
Qaddafi was angered when he discovered what had happened, but he felt he couldn’t release Imam Sadr without embarrassing himself politically. So Musa Sadr sat in a Tripoli prison for many months. Finally, Arafat directly asked Qaddafi for his release. By this time, Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to Tehran, where he and Beheshti were writing postrevolutionary Iran’s Islamic constitution. When pressed by Arafat, Qaddafi reportedly said he had to make a phone call. He called Beheshti, who told him Musa Sadr was a threat to Khomeini.
Ames was told by his Palestinian sources that eventually Imam Musa Sadr and his two traveling companions had been summarily executed and buried at an unmarked desert gravesite. Ames was shocked by Qaddafi’s wanton ruthlessness but also by Beheshti’s behavior. It gave him his first insight into the cruel character of the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran.
* * *
*1 Carlos the Jackal wasn’t apprehended until 1994 and is now serving a life sentence in a French prison.
*2 When Angleton was dying of lung cancer in the spring of 1987, he told Mossad’s Efraim Halevy, “I have a confession. I trusted you Israelis, but not fully, so I penetrated you.” The senior Mossad officer who related this story wryly remarked, “He was planting suspicion even from his deathbed.” This officer recalled that the CIA had tried to recruit him on two different occasions.
*3 Sanford Dryden later became a good Arabist and apparently learned to write. He eventually became a principal deputy to the deputy director for plans (DDP), the chief of all covert operations.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Assassination
He [Salameh] was in a clandestine relationship with the Americans. They [the Israelis] thought such a relationship was the first step to seeing Arafat in the White House. So they would have wanted him dead just for that reason alone.
—Bruce Riedel, analyst, Directorate of Intelligence
Soon after Ames’s return from his TDY in Beirut in the summer of 1978, an Israeli officer approached Alan Wolfe at a conference in London and asked him quite directly if Ali Hassan Salameh was a CIA asset. Wolfe brushed aside the question and walked away. But he understood the full import of the Mossad man’s question. Back in Langley a meeting was convened of senior Directorate of Operations officers familiar with the case. Ames was not invited because he was by then technically no longer in the Directorate of Operations but working as a national intelligence officer in the National Intelligence Council. Wolfe was told that this was not the first time Mossad had recently asked about Salameh. There had been at least two other recent approaches. Mossad wanted to know if Salameh was out of bounds. Could they assassinate him? Or was he working for the Americans?
The questions posed a dilemma for the Agency. Salameh—or MJTRUST/2, as he was known inside Langley headquarters—was a source, but he was not an asset. “The Israelis knew full well that Salameh was our source,” said Clair George, the late veteran clandestine officer. “He was a critical source. But if we had claimed him as an asset, a man under our protection, well, the Israelis would have asked us to share the intelligence we got from him. We couldn’t do that. It was a dilemma.” George was not at the meeting that decided Salameh’s fate, but he said he was told all about it. “There was a vigorous debate. And in the end it was decided that we just shouldn’t reply to the Israelis. No answer was better than a yes or no.”
More than one Agency officer thought this was an egregious mistake. “No answer was an answer,” said Charles Waverly. “He wasn’t our guy, but he was an important relationship.” The Agency’s handling of the problem was bureaucratically predictable. “ ‘We won’t answer the question’—well, this is a favored CIA answer to any tough question,” said Bruce Riedel, a high-ranking analyst who’d once reviewed the Salameh-Ames files. “They just thought answering the question would have made matters worse. Maybe they hoped that by ignoring the problem it would go away. But I dealt with the Israelis and I believe they viewed Salameh as a threat in two ways. First, he was a terrorist. But second, he was in a clandestine relationship with the Americans. They thought such a relationship was the first step to seeing Arafat in the White House. So they would have wanted him dead just for that reason alone.”
Dewey Clarridge—one of those clandestine officers who were critical of Ames for not having made a full recruitment—nevertheless thought it was a huge mistake. “I am sure there was a debate,” Clarridge said. “And obviously, they decided to fudge it. Just stupid! They should have protected him.”
George and two other clandestine officers believed that Ames had been told of both the Israeli approach and the Agency’s decision not to reply. So Ames knew that Salameh was in danger, and he sent him an explicit warning. According to Frank Anderson, the chief of station in Beirut, Ames also urged Alan Wolfe to pass an explicit statement to the Israelis not to touch Salameh. Wolfe reportedly refused to do so. “There was some talk of shipping him an armored car,” recalled Sam Wyman, a clandestine officer in Beirut. “But I think we did give him some encrypted gear so he could communicate with us and upgrade his security. I warned him. I told him, ‘You idiot, they’re going to get you, the way you drive around Beirut. It is only a matter of time.’ ”
According to Mustafa Zein, Mossad’s deputy director David Kimche approached Ames. Several retired Mossad officers confirm this. Kimche was then head of Mossad’s Tevel Unit, responsible for relations with foreign intelligence services. The well-known Israeli spymaster, a veteran of Mossad since the early 1950s, flew into Washingt
on specifically to ask Ames if Salameh was on the CIA’s payroll. Kimche made it clear that Salameh was being targeted. He said his life would be spared only if Mossad was given an explicit assurance that he was working for the CIA. Ames couldn’t give him an answer. But sometime in November 1978 Ames contacted Salameh in Beirut and, according to Zein, he tried very hard “to get permission from Yasir Arafat—through Ali—to tell the Israelis that Ali was working for the CIA.” The two men argued. Ames bluntly warned Ali that his life was in danger—and that he was irreplaceable. Ali said that he would never change his mind. He reminded Ames that he’d rebuffed a similar effort to recruit him in Rome eight years earlier. He insisted that he couldn’t be identified as a CIA asset. And probably for good reason. “If Ali Hassan had agreed to be named as an asset,” said Yoram Hessel, a senior Mossad officer, “well, that would be putting a gun to his head. He knew that once he gave his consent to be called an asset, we could have launched a black psychological operation, letting it be known in Beirut circles that he was an agent.” Salameh understood the dilemma, and so did Ames.
So Salameh worked for the Old Man and the revolution—and no one else. Ames did not get the answer he wanted—but he did persuade Ali to come to Washington the following month for an officially sanctioned exchange of intelligence. Perhaps Ames was hoping that the Israelis would notice such a trip—and that this would somehow protect Salameh. In the meantime, Ames arranged for the encrypted communications gear to be shipped to Beirut. It was a present for Ali Hassan that wouldn’t arrive in time.
Zein was unhappy with Salameh’s refusal to take more security precautions. “I knew he was dead,” Zein said. He warned Salameh’s wife Nashrawan that an attack was coming. “We wanted him to move out of the Hamra area of Beirut, where it was common to see foreigners walking the streets. He really should have moved into one of the refugee camps. He would have been safe in Sabra and Shatila—but of course, you couldn’t expect Georgina to live in the camps. Okay, Ali could still have moved to an upscale Palestinian neighborhood outside of Hamra. I told him it would not be forever—the Israeli hit team wouldn’t wait around for long. But Ali refused to move from the Verdun apartment.”
Some months earlier, Ali had been given a two-door Mercedes, a generous gift from a benefactor. Ali loved the classy sports car, but there was no room for his bodyguards. So he reluctantly gave it to Mustafa, who drove it himself, using Ali’s license plate and registration. But after Ames came to Beirut and warned Salameh about the impending attack, Mustafa decided it would be foolish to drive around the city in Ali’s car. “I gave it back to Ali,” Mustafa said. “I also decided to no longer ride with him in his convoy.”
After the botched attempt to kill Salameh in Lillehammer in July 1973, Prime Minister Golda Meir had ordered an end to the post-Munich “war of the agents.” But this decision was reversed in June 1977 when Menachem Begin, the leader of the right-wing Likud Party, was elected prime minister. Sometime in the spring or summer of 1978, Begin reauthorized the Mossad’s Caesarea hit team to resume its hunt for Salameh. Perhaps Begin had never been disabused of the legend that the Red Prince was a primary architect of the Munich operation. Perhaps he thought Salameh was still running “wet” operations. But this wasn’t the case. By 1979, Mossad had no evidence that Salameh was a “ticking bomb.” In any case, Begin was told that Salameh was the CIA’s conduit to the PLO. It’s also possible that Mossad had picked up intelligence that Ames had invited Salameh to visit America for a third time, in December 1978.
In the wake of the September 1978 Camp David Accords, there were many details to iron out between the two parties. Besides paving the way for an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Accords also included a plan to give Palestinians “full autonomy” in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Ames had convinced Carter administration officials that it would be advantageous to bring Salameh to Washington, where he could meet various officials. Such talks with the PLO’s intelligence chief would be highly secret. Washington wasn’t ready to negotiate openly with the PLO. For his part, Salameh was certainly critical of the Camp David Accords. Mere “autonomy” was not a PLO goal; it wanted full sovereignty. But Ames hoped to massage Salameh into viewing the Accords as a first step, a window of opportunity for the PLO to achieve some of its aims by peaceful means. If the Israelis had indeed heard rumors of such a secret summit in Washington, this would certainly have accelerated their plans for Salameh’s assassination. As it turned out, Salameh decided to postpone his Washington visit from December 1978 to April 1979.
In early 1978 officers from Caesarea, Mossad’s elite operational unit, began once again to collect intelligence on Salameh’s daily itinerary in Beirut. They did so with an eagerness that bordered on obsession. Aaron J. Klein, the author of Striking Back, reported that in his interviews with retired Caesarea officers, they described killing Salameh as a form of closure—“We want to ‘close the circle.’ ” They knew Black September no longer existed. They knew there were other Palestinian terrorists with more blood on their hands than Salameh. But Salameh was always at the top of their hit list. Initially, they contemplated dropping a large bomb on Salameh’s apartment. But architects studied the building and concluded that too many innocent lives would be lost. “We followed Ali Hassan extensively,” said a former Mossad director general, “using all intelligence means. We knew his bodyguards never left him for a second.”
Killing the Red Prince would not be easy. For one thing, his security was not light. Ali Hassan had stashed Kalashnikovs in every room of his apartment and office. He had a small platoon of armed men guard his apartment building off Rue Verdun in Ras Beirut. Heavy steel shutters had been installed on the Verdun apartment’s windows. He always traveled in a convoy of cars with a squad of bodyguards. He rarely left Beirut.
But for all his precautions, Ali Hassan was indeed fatalistic, morbidly so at times. “I know that I’ll die,” he told Shafik al-Hout, the PLO’s media chief. “I shall be murdered, I shall fall in battle.” When Time magazine correspondent Dean Brelis asked him if he was worried about an Israeli assassination attempt, Salameh replied, “They’re the ones who should be worried after all their mistakes. But I know that when my number is up, it will be up. No one can stop it.” He told Brelis that he really needed a vacation: “Maybe a beach in Brazil or the Caribbean. But I can’t just go out and get on an airplane. I don’t know if I can ever fly from one country to another again.”
Mossad’s Caesarea chief, Mike Harari, kept looking for a gateway, a window that would allow his operatives to get close enough to Salameh to carry out the hit. Harari was the same officer who’d led the bungled Lillehammer assassination attempt against Salameh in 1973. A driven, charismatic clandestine officer, his subordinates nicknamed him “Caesar.” At one point, a Mossad officer pointed out to his colleagues that Salameh had told Monday Morning in a 1976 interview that he loved karate. He looked fit. So did this mean he worked out in a gym? They scoured the Beirut Yellow Pages to make a list of likely gymnasiums, and then they sent agents into the various gyms in an attempt to spot Salameh. It reportedly took months, but eventually a Mossad agent found himself sitting naked next to Salameh in the Continental Hotel’s sauna. Salameh, it turned out, was a member of the Continental’s sports club, and he worked out nearly every afternoon. Mossad tentatively prepared a bomb that could be hidden under the sauna bench—but the plan was vetoed as likely to kill innocent civilians.
Eventually, Mossad came up with an alternative. Surveillance teams in Beirut identified the location of Salameh’s apartment in the upscale neighborhood of Snoubra in Ras Beirut. This was the apartment he shared with his second wife, Georgina Rizk. And they noted the route he regularly took from his apartment to that of his mother and sister, who lived nearby in Ras Beirut. This pedestrian information—acquired at considerable cost with human agents on the ground—gave the Israelis the opportunity to mount an attack. The operation began in early November 1978. It required the depl
oyment of some fifteen Caesarea operatives into Beirut and a considerable budget.
The first Mossad agent to arrive was Erika Mary Chambers, a thirty-year-old British passport holder. Previously, Chambers had spent four years living in Germany. But before that, she had studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where Mossad had recruited her. Upon her arrival in Beirut, Chambers offered to work as a volunteer at the House of Steadfastness of the Children of Tel al-Zatar, a charity dedicated to helping survivors and orphans from the siege of the Tel al-Zatar Palestinian refugee camp. By some accounts, Chambers was introduced to Ali Hassan Salameh in Tel al-Zatar and they became friendly. (This seems somewhat improbable.) According to Peter Taylor, whose States of Terror contains the most authoritative account of the operation, Chambers rented an eighth-floor apartment on Beka Street; her neighbors knew her as “Penelope,” an eccentric young Englishwoman who loved cats and could often be seen sitting on her balcony, painting street scenes. From her balcony, Chambers could observe Salameh’s battered Chevrolet station wagon driving nearly every afternoon on Beka Street, followed by a Land Rover filled with armed guards. Salameh usually sat in the backseat of the Chevrolet, with a bodyguard on either side.
In mid-January 1979, several other Mossad officers arrived in Beirut, traveling on forged Canadian and British passports.*1 They checked in to different hotels and rented a Volkswagen Beetle. Two frogmen from an Israeli missile boat several miles offshore delivered eleven pounds of hexagene explosives to a deserted beach, where they were picked up by other agents and packed into the Volkswagen. They parked the Volkswagen on Beka Street below Chambers’s apartment. And then they waited.