Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  That was exactly what Zamir and Yariv came to propose.

  Zvi Zamir, skinny, balding, and freckled, with sharp features jotting out of a triangular face, was a former Palmach fighter but was not regarded as an outstanding general. The highest position he had reached during his military service was commander of the Southern Front. He later served as military attaché and representative of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in Great Britain. In 1968, he was appointed ramsad to replace Meir Amit, who had completed his term. Many criticized Zamir’s appointment; he was a bland and shy man with no experience in secret operations; lacking charisma, he didn’t consider himself the Mossad chief like Harel and Amit before him. He preferred to act as a sort of chairman of the board, and delegated authority to many of his senior aides. He would achieve his fame only in the Yom Kippur War (see chapter 14), but in 1972 he couldn’t claim any substantial success. And some of the veteran agents of the Mossad, like Rafi Eitan, disliked him and left the service in protest.

  Yariv, like Zamir, was more a man in the background than a man of limelight. He had been an outstanding Aman chief during the Six-Day War, but he was admired mostly because of his learned, analytical mind. Slim, soft-spoken, bespectacled, with a clear forehead, the well-mannered Yariv looked more like an erudite professor than a master spy.

  Yariv and Zamir had a lot in common. They were supposed to be rivals, because of their overlapping functions; yet they worked in harmony and mutual trust. They both were quiet, low-key, reserved, and rather shy. They hated to take center stage and were very cautious in their analyses and planning. But the idea they presented to Golda that October afternoon was surprisingly brutal: the secret services would identify and locate the Black September leaders, and kill them. All of them.

  Since Munich, Yaniv and Zamir had engaged in feverish activity and had gathered top-notch intelligence about Black September. They came to Golda prepared. Black September, they said, intended to launch an all-out war against Israel. This was a group that had sworn to kill as many Jews as possible—military, civilians, women and children. The only way to stop it was to kill all its leaders, one after the other. Crush the snake’s head.

  Golda hesitated. It was not easy for her to make a decision that would mean sending young people to a risky assassination campaign. Israel had never done that before. She sat quiet for a long time. Then she started speaking, in a barely audible voice, as if she were talking to herself; she mentioned the horrid memory of the Holocaust and the tragic march of the Jewish people through the ages, always persecuted, hunted, and massacred.

  Finally, she raised her head and looked at Yariv and Zamir. “Send the boys,” she said.

  Zamir immediately started preparing the operation. He called it Wrath of God.

  But Golda, too, had her say. As a prime minister of a democratic Jewish state, Golda could not rely only on the promise of Yariv and Zamir that “the boys” would hurt no one but the leaders and the major militants of Black September. Promises were not enough. She knew well that such an operation would be outside the law, and that if the civilian supervision of Mossad’s actions was loosened, there was a real danger that innocent people might also be killed. Therefore she decided to establish a tight control over Wrath of God. She created a secret committee that included, besides her, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, a brilliant former general. The three of them became a secret tribunal that had to review and approve every individual case in the operation. They were called the X Committee. Yariv and Zamir had to submit every file and name to the trio, and only after getting their approval could the Mossad hit team enter the scene.

  Massada (Caesarea), the operational department of the Mossad, was assigned to carry out Wrath of God. It was headed by Mike Harari, a black-haired, rugged, and secretive agent. Almost all the hits were to be carried out in Europe, where Black September had deployed its men and where they were protected by sophisticated covers.

  Harari picked his men from Kidon, the Massada operational team. Each unit sent against a Black September operative was composed of several secondary crews. A crew of six men and women would be charged with identifying and following the suspects. They had to make sure that the man they targeted was indeed the right one, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. They would arrive in the city where the suspect terrorist operated, follow him, secretly photograph him, learn his habits, locate his friends, find his exact address, the bars and restaurants he visited, his routine, hour by hour. A smaller unit, in most cases just a man and a woman, was in charge of the logistics—renting apartments, hotel rooms, and cars. Another small crew was in charge of communications with the advanced operational headquarters established in the respective European cities and with the Mossad headquarters in Israel.

  The hit team itself consisted of several Mossad agents, who were the last to arrive on the ground. Their task was to get to a certain address, at a certain time, and kill the man whose photograph and other identifying details had been given to them. While they operated in the targeted city, they were protected by another team—a crew of armed agents and drivers, who were positioned nearby, with vehicles ready to move and escape routes designed and rehearsed. Their task was to protect—with weapons, if necessary—the members of the hit team. Immediately after the operation was over, all hit team members and their security details would leave the country.

  The crew that identified and followed the suspect would have left the country before the operation. The others would stay a few more days to cover up the traces, pack equipment, and return rental cars used for the operation.

  The first city chosen for a Wrath of God operation was Rome.

  In the Eternal City, the advance team identified and followed a man who could never be suspected of terrorism: a low-level clerk in the Libyan embassy, a Nablus-born, thirty-eight-year-old Palestinian, Wael Zwaiter. He was slim, gentle, and soft-spoken, the son of a well-known man of letters and translator into Arabic. Wael himself was known for his excellent translation of fiction and poetry into and from Arabic. He also was a devoted art lover. He worked as an interpreter at the Libyan embassy for the meager salary of 100 Libyan dinars a month, led a very modest life, and lived in a tiny apartment on Piazza Annibaliano. His friends knew him as a moderate man who rejected any form of violence and often expressed his disgust toward terrorism and killing.

  But even Zwaiter’s closest friends were not aware of his secret: their good friend was a cruel fanatic, who commanded the Black September operations in Rome with ruthless determination. Recently, he had devised and carried out a lethal operation: he identified two young Englishwomen who spent the first days of their vacation in Rome before continuing to Israel. Zwaiter instructed two young, handsome, and charming Palestinians to establish contact with the girls and try to seduce them. And indeed, soon the young Casanovas landed in the Englishwomen’s beds. When parting from their lovers, one of the Palestinians asked his girl to take a small record player with her, a gift for his family on the West Bank. The silly girl readily agreed, and the record player was duly checked with the ladies’ other luggage at the El Al counter in Rome’s airport. They did not know that Zwaiter and their charming lovers were sending them to their death. Under Zwaiter’s supervision, the Black September agents had taken the record player apart, stuffed it with explosives, then repacked it in a brand-new box. The booby-trapped device was programmed to explode as soon as the aircraft reached its cruising altitude. The plane and all its passengers were doomed.

  Fortunately, the terrorists did not know that after a Swissair liner headed for Israel had been blown up by a similar device, the storage compartments of El Al’s planes had been covered with thick armor plate, so that no explosion could wreck the aircraft. The record player did explode, but the blast was contained by the armor. The El Al pilot, alerted by a flashing red light, immediately returned to the airport. The stunned English girls were interrogated and revealed their involvement with their Palestinian lovers; but those t
wo had left Italy right after they bid a heartbreaking farewell to the girls they were sending to their deaths.

  The first crews of the hit team arrived in Rome and followed Zwaiter for several days. A young couple strolled in front of the Libyan embassy and the woman clicked a camera concealed in her handbag every time Zwaiter went in or out of the embassy. Some “tourists” arrived in Rome by various flights. One of them, a forty-seven-year-old Canadian by the name of Anthony Hutton, rented an Avis car and told the clerk he was staying at the Excelsior Hotel on Via Veneto. If the clerk had checked the information, he would have found that no such person was staying at the Excelsior, exactly like some other “tourists” who had rented cars that same week and given false addresses to the car rental agencies.

  On the night of October 16, Zwaiter returned home and was about to put a ten-lira coin in the elevator slot. The house entrance was dark and somebody on the third floor was playing a melancholy tune on the piano. Suddenly two men emerged from the shadows and pumped twelve 0.22 Beretta bullets in Zwaiter’s body. Nobody heard the shots; the two agents jumped into a Fiat 125 parked on the Plaza Annibaliano. A few hours later, they were out of the country.

  Now that Zwaiter had been killed, his deep cover was no longer necessary. A Beirut paper published his obituary, signed by several terrorist organizations that mourned Zwaiter as “one of our best combatants.”

  The leader of the small team that killed Zwaiter was an Israeli in his mid-twenties, David Molad (not his real name). He was born in Tunisia and emigrated to Israel as a child. From his parents, both teachers and Zionists, he had inherited a perfect mastery of the French language, a profound, deeply emotional love for the State of Israel, and a burning patriotism. Since a young age, he had dreamed of serving Israel, even at the risk of his life. In the army, he had volunteered for an elite commando unit in the IDF and amazed his commanders with his daring and creativity. After his discharge, he had joined the Mossad and had quickly become one of its best agents, participating in the most hazardous operations. Because of his fluent French, he could easily assume the identity of a Frenchman, Belgian, Canadian, or Swiss. He married young, and soon became the father of a little boy; but this did not cool his urge to serve on the front lines of the Mossad fighters.

  After Zwaiter’s death, Molad spent a few days in Israel, then flew to Paris.

  A few days later, the phone rang in an apartment on 175 Rue Alesia, in Paris. Dr. Mahmoud Hamshari answered the call. “Is this Dr. Hamshari? The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) representative in France?” The caller had a strong Italian accent. He introduced himself as an Italian journalist who sympathized with the Palestinian cause, and asked to interview Hamshari. They agreed to meet in a café, far from Hamshari’s home. Hamshari, a respected historian who lived in Paris with his French wife, Marie-Claude, and their little daughter, had been taking very strict precautions lately. When walking the streets, he kept watching for people who might be shadowing him; he left cafés and restaurants before his order was filled; he often checked with his neighbors if any strangers had asked about him.

  On the face of it, he had nothing to worry about. He was an academic, a moderate man, well integrated in the Parisian intellectual circles. “He does not need any precautions,” wrote Annie Francos in the Jeune Afrique weekly, “because he is not dangerous. The Israeli secret services know that well.”

  But the Israeli secret services knew a few more things: Hamshari’s participation in the foiled attempt to assassinate Ben-Gurion in Denmark in 1969; his involvement in the midair explosion of a Swissair liner in 1970 that took the lives of forty-seven people; his connections with mysterious young Arabs, who would sneak into his apartment at night, carrying heavy suitcases.

  The Israeli secret services also knew that Hamshari was now the second in command of Black September in Europe.

  So, on the day Hamshari left for his interview with the Italian reporter, a couple of men broke into his apartment and left fifteen minutes later.

  The following day, the strangers waited until Hamshari’s wife and daughter left the apartment and he remained there by himself. The telephone rang and he picked up the receiver.

  “Dr. Hamshari?” The Italian journalist again.

  “Yes, speaking.”

  At that moment, Hamshari heard a shrill whistle—and, after it, a thunderous explosion. An explosive charge that had been concealed under his desk blew up and Hamshari collapsed, gravely wounded. A few days later he died in the hospital, not before blaming the Mossad for his death.

  A few weeks after Hamshari’s death, Mike Harari and a man named Jonathan Ingleby arrived on the island of Cyprus. They checked into the Olympia Hotel in Nicosia. Lately, because of its location, close to Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, Cyprus had become a battlefield between Israeli and Arab agents. This time, the two Israeli agents shadowed a Palestinian by the name of Hussein Abd el Hir. A few months before, Abd el Hir had been appointed the Black September resident in Cyprus; he was also in charge of relations with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations that had become a paradise and a safe haven for the terrorists. In Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Palestinian terrorists trained in army installations and special forces’ units. Those countries sent shipments of weapons and equipment for the terrorist organizations; quite a few Palestinian leaders, enthusiastic believers in the Soviet ideology, studied at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.

  Abd el Hir also was in charge of infiltrating terrorists into Israel, and eliminating Arab spies who came to Cyprus to meet their Israeli handlers. The X Committee sentenced him to death.

  That night, Abd el Hir returned to his hotel room, turned off the lights, and went to bed. Jonathan Ingleby made sure that the man was asleep, then pressed a button on a remote-control monitor. A shattering explosion shook the hotel. In a third-floor hotel room, a couple of Israeli honeymooners dived under their bed for protection. The reception clerk rushed to Abd el Hir’s room. When the smoke cleared, he saw a terrifying scene that made him faint: Abd el Hir’s bloodied head was facing him, stuck in the lavatory pan.

  Black September’s revenge was instantaneous.

  On January 26, 1973, an Israeli by the name of Moshe Hanan Ishai met with a Palestinian friend at the Morrison Pub on Jose Antonio Street in Madrid. After they left the pub, two men appeared in front of them and blocked their way. The Palestinian escaped, while the two men drew their weapons, sprayed Ishai with bullets, and vanished.

  Only a few days later, it was established that Ishai’s real name was Baruch Cohen, a veteran Mossad agent who had established a network of Palestinian students in Madrid. The young man he had met at the pub was one of his informants, who actually had been planted in the network by Black September. His comrades avenged Abd el Hir’s death by taking out Baruch Cohen.

  Black September was also suspected of shooting and wounding another Israeli agent, Zadok Ophir, in a Brussels café, and of assassinating Dr. Ami Shechori, an attaché at the Israeli embassy in London, by a letter bomb.

  Two weeks after Abd el Hir’s death, Black September appointed a new agent in Cyprus. Barely twenty-four hours after arriving in Nicosia, the Palestinian met with his KGB contact, returned to his hotel, turned off the light—and died in the same way as his predecessor.

  Arafat and Ali Hassan Salameh decided, therefore, to carry out a massive act of revenge. They planned to hijack a plane, load it with explosives, and have it flown to Israel by a suicide commando. The aircraft would then be crashed in the midst of Tel Aviv, killing hundreds. It was an early version of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

  The Mossad informants got wind of the preparations, and several agents started following a group of Palestinians in Paris, who were apparently in charge of the project. One night, the agents noticed an older man who had joined the group. They dispatched the man’s photos to Mossad headquarters and the stranger was identified as Basil Al-Kubaissi, a senior leader of Black September. Kubaissi
was a well-known jurist, a law professor at the American University in Beirut, and a respected scholar. But he, too—like Zwaiter and Hamshari and quite a few others—secretly was a dangerous man. In 1956, he had tried to assassinate Iraq’s king Faisal by placing a car bomb on the path of the royal convoy; the bomb exploded prematurely, and Al-Kubaissi escaped to Lebanon, and then to the United States. A few years later, he tried to assassinate Golda Meir, who was visiting the United States. When this attempt failed, he tried to murder Meir at the Socialist International summit in Paris. It was another failure. Al-Kubaissi didn’t give up; he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and became the deputy of George Habash, the group’s leader. He participated in the planning of the May 30, 1972, massacre, in which innocent passengers in the Lod Airport were attacked by Arab and Japanese terrorists. Twenty-six people died in the attack, most of them Puerto Rican pilgrims to the Holy Land. Later, Al-Kubaissi joined Black September, and now he was in Paris, probably to direct the suicide-plane operation. He checked into a small hotel on Rue des Arcades, off the Place de la Madeleine.

  On April 6, after having dinner at Café de la Paix, Al-Kubaissi was on his way back to his hotel. At the Place de la Madeleine, the Mossad’s hit team was waiting. Two people had been placed on the street, two more in a car. One of them was wearing a blond wig. As Al-Kubaissi came closer, the two agents approached him, cocking their guns. But something unexpected happened. A flashy car stopped next to Al-Kubaissi, and a pretty young woman leaned out of the window. They exchanged a few phrases, and Al-Kubaissi got into the car, which left immediately. The frustrated agents realized that the woman was a prostitute, and had just propositioned Al-Kubaissi.

  The entire operation was going to fail because of a hooker!