But the team commander, who was present, calmed his disappointed warriors. Wait and see, he said knowingly, she’ll bring him back here shortly. They didn’t ask how he knew, but the man was right. Barely twenty minutes later, the car was back. Al-Kubaissi parted from the prostitute and started walking toward his hotel. He had only taken a few steps when two men emerged from the shadows, blocking his way. One of them was David Molad.
Al-Kubaissi immediately understood. “No!” he shouted in French. “No! Don’t do that!”
Nine bullets pierced his body and he collapsed by the Madeleine church. The Mossad agents jumped in the getaway car and left the square.
The following day, as in the Zwaiter case, the spokesmen of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine revealed the real role of the law professor.
In the following months, Molad and the members of Kidon killed several Black September envoys who had come to Greece to buy ships, load them with explosives, and sail them to Israel’s ports.
But one question remained unanswered: Where was the mastermind behind Munich? Where was Salameh?
Salameh was in his Beirut headquarters, planning his next moves. The first was the takeover of the Israeli embassy in Thailand by a Black September team. But the operation had failed. Threatened by the tough Thai generals and pressured by the Egyptian ambassador in Bangkok, the terrorists released their hostages and left Thailand utterly humiliated.
Salameh’s next operation was more reckless: his men, armed to the teeth, broke into the Saudi embassy in Khartoum during a farewell party for a European envoy, and captured almost the entire diplomatic corps in the Sudanese capital. By Arafat’s order, they released most of the hostages, and kept only the U.S. ambassador, Cleo A. Noel; the deputy chief of the U.S. mission, George C. Moore; and the Belgian acting ambassador, Guy Eid. Following Salameh’s instructions, they murdered them with horrific cruelty, firing first at the feet and legs of their victims, then slowly raising the barrels of their Kalashnikov assault rifles till they ripped open their chests.
The terrorists were arrested after the massacre but released a few weeks later by the Sudanese government.
The world reacted with fury and disgust to the appalling assassination of the diplomats. Israel felt that it was time to deal Black September a mortal blow.
In Jerusalem, Golda Meir gave the go-ahead to Operation Spring of Youth—a new phase in the ongoing Operation Wrath of God.
On April 1, 1973, a thirty-five-year-old Belgian tourist named Gilbert Rimbaud checked into the Sands Hotel in Beirut. The same day another tourist, Dieter Altnuder, also checked into the hotel. The two men apparently didn’t know each other; both were given rooms with ocean view.
On April 6, three more tourists arrived in the hotel. The dapper, impeccably dressed Andrew Whichelaw was British; David Molad, who arrived two hours later on the Rome flight, produced a Belgian passport in the name of Charles Boussard; George Elder, who arrived in the evening was British, too, but quite the opposite of his fellow countryman. Another British tourist, Charles Macy, checked into the Atlantic Hotel on El-Baida beach. And, like a real Englishman, he inquired twice a day about the weather forecast.
Each on his own, the six men toured Beirut, walked the streets, and got familiar with the main traffic arteries. At the Avis and Lenacar agencies, they rented three Buick Skylarks, a Plymouth station wagon, a Valiant, and a Renault-16.
On April 9, a flotilla of nine missile boats and patrol vessels of the Israeli Navy took to the high seas and blended into the international traffic lanes. The MB Mivtah carried a paratrooper unit under the command of Colonel Amnon Lipkin, which was to attack the headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two other units had embarked on the MB Gaash: another paratrooper platoon and the Sayeret Matkal unit, under Colonel Ehud Barak. They had a different mission. Before embarking, each of them had received the photos of four people. Three of them were Abu Yussef, the supreme commander of Black September; Kamal Adwan, the Fatah top operations commander, who was also in charge of Black September’s operations in the Israeli occupied territories; and Kamal Nasser, Fatah’s main spokesman. All three, the soldiers were told, lived in the same apartment building on Rue Verdun.
The fourth photo was of Ali Hassan Salameh. Nobody knew where he was.
The commandos were wearing civilian clothes. At nine thirty P.M., as the boats approached Beirut, they donned wigs and hippie clothes. Ehud Barak put on women’s clothes, assuming the appearance of a voluptuous brunette; in his brassiere, he concealed several explosive charges.
Out of the dark, several rubber dinghies emerged on the deserted Beirut beach, bringing over the paratroopers from the mother ships. In front of them, they saw the six cars, with one of the “tourists” behind each wheel. Each soldier knew to which car he was assigned. In a matter of minutes, the cars darted in different directions. A few of them turned to the headquarters of the Popular Front. Other vehicles, one of them driven by Molad, headed for the apartment building where the leaders of Black September lived.
The military commando unit that headed for the Popular Front headquarters had rehearsed the attack before, using an unfinished building in a Tel Aviv suburb. One night, when Chief of Staff David (Dado) El’azar had come to watch the training, he had been approached by a young, handsome lieutenant, Avida Shor. “We are going to use a hundred twenty kilograms of explosives to bring down the building in Beirut,” Avida said. “But this is unnecessary and dangerous. The explosion would affect the neighboring buildings, and there are lots of civilians there.” He took a notebook from his pocket. “I made some calculations. We should use only eighty kilograms of explosives. That will bring the building down without harming innocent people in other houses.” El’azar had the figures checked, and agreed to Shor’s suggestion. He instructed the operation commander to use a charge of no more than eighty kilograms.
Now, the paratroopers reached the Popular Front headquarters. After a short shoot-out, in which two Israeli commandos lost their lives, the paratroopers took over the entrance lobby of the building and planted the eighty kilograms of explosives. The explosion turned the building into a heap of ruins, killing scores of terrorists; but not one of the neighboring houses was damaged.
One of the commandos killed was Lieutenant Avida Shor.
At the same time, other units of paratroopers and naval commandos attacked several terrorist camps south of Beirut, in a diversionary move intended to draw the response of the terrorists and the Lebanese Army. But there was no such response.
At that very moment, the Sayeret Matkal commandos reached the building on Rue Verdun. They were about to enter, when two Lebanese police officers passed by. But all they saw was a pair of lovers tenderly embracing on the sidewalk. The Romeo was none other than Muki Betzer, one of the best Sayeret fighters, and his curvaceous Juliet was Ehud Barak. As soon as the policemen had turned the corner, the Israelis stormed the building. They simultaneously broke into the apartments of Kamal Adwan, on the second floor; Kamal Nasser, on the third floor; and Abu Yussef, on the sixth.
The terrorist leaders had no chance whatsoever. When the paratroopers broke into their flats, they reached for their weapons, but the soldiers were faster. In minutes, the three terrorists were killed. Abu Yussef’s wife tried to shield him with her body and was hit as well. Another casualty was an old Italian woman who lived across the landing from Adwan’s apartment. She heard the shots, opened the door—and was slain with a burst of gunfire.
During the operation, the commandos collected documents that they found in the cupboards and drawers of the Black September leaders. Then they collected their wounded and dead and rushed to the cars headed for the beach, where the rubber dinghies were waiting.
On the beach, the six Mossad “tourists” parked their rented cars in a neat row, leaving the keys in the ignitions. A few days later, the rental companies received the payment via American Express.
The task force was reunited on the mo
ther ship and sailed to Israel. The operation was a total success. The PFLP headquarters was no more, the Black September leaders had been killed; among them, Abu Yussef, the organization commander.
But the commandos didn’t know that barely fifty yards away from the house on Rue Verdun, Ali Hassan Salameh was sleeping peacefully in an inconspicuous apartment. He had not been disturbed. The next day, when Abu Yussef’s death was announced, he became Black September’s leader.
Spring of Youth heralded the end of Black September. The organization would never recover, after all its leaders had been killed.
All but one.
In Tel Aviv, the documents seized during Spring of Youth helped solve a mystery that had preoccupied the Mossad for the previous two years. That was the Passover Affair.
In April 1971, two young, pretty Frenchwomen landed at Lod Airport and tried to go through immigration with fake French passports. The airport security had received an early warning about their arrival. The girls were taken to a side room where they were searched by policewomen and Shabak female officers. The search revealed something strange: the women’s clothing, including their underwear, weighed twice what would feel like its normal weight. The policewomen found that the Frenchwomen’s clothes were saturated by some white powder. Apparently, the clothes had been immersed in a thick solution that contained the white powder. When the garments were shaken and rubbed, large quantities of the powder dropped off. More white powder was found in the heels of the ladies’ exquisite sandals. The two girls were carrying about twelve pounds of white powder that turned out to be a powerful plastic explosive. In a box of tampons, in one of the girls’ suitcase, the police found scores of detonators.
The girls broke down under interrogation and admitted that they were sisters, daughters of a rich Moroccan businessman; their names were Nadia and Madeleine Bardeli. They had been contacted by a man in Paris, and being adventurous by nature, had agreed to smuggle the powder.
“And who else is in this with you?” the police detectives asked.
That afternoon, several police officers raided the small hotel Commodore in Tel Aviv and arrested an old French couple, Pierre and Edith Bourghalter. When they disassembled the transistor radio of the couple, they found it had been stuffed with delayed action fuses for the manufacture of explosive charges. Pierre Bourghalter burst into tears.
The next day, the unsuspecting commander of the operation landed in Israel as well: an attractive twenty-six-year-old Frenchwoman, carrying a passport in the name of Francine Adeleine Maria. Her true name was Evelyne Barges and she was well known to the Mossad as a professional terrorist, a fanatic Marxist who already had participated in several terrorist attacks in Europe.
When interrogated by police, the members of the so-called Passover Team confessed that they had intended to blow up their plastic charges in nine major Tel Aviv hotels, at the peak of the tourist season, and kill as many tourists and Israelis as possible, dealing Israel a heavy blow.
This nice bunch went to jail, but the man who pulled the strings behind the scenes had not been caught. He was Mohammad Boudia, a charming Algerian, a director of a Paris theater and an actor himself. Again, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: a man of culture, an intellectual and an artist, whose life on stage was but a cover for his criminal activities. He was Evelyne Barges’s lover, and involved in so many love affairs that the Mossad agents called him Bluebeard.
Boudia was originally under the orders of George Habash and the PFLP. A year after the Passover Team had been captured, he had joined Black September and was appointed head of the organization in France. He was involved in the murder of Khader Kanou, a Syrian reporter in Paris who was suspected of being a Mossad informant. Boudia was also in charge of Black September’s operations in Europe, and planned an attack on a transit camp for Jewish immigrants from Russia. After Hamshari’s assassination, Boudia became extremely cautious and following him became incredibly difficult.
In May 1973, a hit team of the Massada group arrived in Paris and tried to find Boudia. They had the name and address of Boudia’s new lover. The agents waited patiently around the corner of the building where she lived. Finally, Boudia emerged out of nowhere and snuck inside. But the next day, when most of the residents left the building for work—he was not among them! Only after a frustrating month, when the agents had compared notes, did they notice something strange: every morning, after the torrid nights Boudia spent with his lover, a tall, big woman would be among the people coming out of the house. At times, she would be a blond, at other times, brunette . . . At last the agents solved the riddle: using his actor’s talents, Boudia disguised himself as a woman before leaving the building.
But now, for some reason, he stopped visiting his mistress, and the Mossad lost track of him. The only lead they still had was that every morning he traveled by subway to his meetings, and took a connecting train at the Étoile station, under the Arc de Triomphe. That metro station was a major hub—scores of trains passed through it, millions of people ran through the underground passages, switching lines. How could they find Boudia, “the man with a thousand faces”?
But there was no other choice. Mossad agents were alerted from all over Europe. Scores of Israelis received Boudia’s photos and were positioned in the corridors, passages, hallways, and platforms of the giant Étoile station. One day passed, then two and three, and nothing happened. But on the fourth day, one of the agents spotted Boudia—disguised, made-up, but still the man they were looking for. This time they stuck to him like shadows till he got into his car that was parked near the metro exit. They followed the car and watched it through the night, while Boudia stayed in a house on the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, probably his new lover’s abode. The next morning, June 29, 1973, Boudia approached his car, inspected it thoroughly from the outside, peeked under the chassis, and, apparently satisfied, unlocked it and took the driver’s seat. A deafening explosion turned the car into a heap of twisted, blackened metal and killed Boudia. According to European reporters, the ramsad, Zvi Zamir, watched the explosion from a street corner.
But the heads of Mossad had no time to celebrate their success. An urgent message reached headquarters: a special Black September messenger, the Algerian Ben Amana, had been sent to meet with Ali Hassan Salameh; Ben Amana had crossed Europe in an odd, tortuous route, and had reached Lillehammer, a resort town in Norway.
A few days later, the Kidon hit team, under Mike Harari’s command, was positioned in Lillehammer. Nobody had any idea what Salameh was doing in the quiet mountain town. The first crew followed Ben Amana to the town’s swimming pool and saw him establishing contact with a Middle Eastern–looking man. Three members of the crew looked at the photographs they carried and concluded that the man undoubtedly was Salameh. They overruled their fourth colleague, who had overheard the man speaking with other people and pointed out that it was impossible that Salameh could speak Norwegian.
The agents were cocksure in the identification; they followed Salameh in Lillehammer’s streets and saw him in the company of a young, pregnant Norwegian woman.
The operation entered its final stage. More agents arrived from Israel; Zvi Zamir was among them. Salameh’s elimination was to be the last step in the total destruction of Black September, and Zvi Zamir wanted to be there for the finale. The killers were to be the ubiquitous Jonathan Ingleby, along with Rolf Baehr and Gerard Emile Lafond. David Molad did not participate in that operation. The support crew rented cars and hotel rooms. Some maintain that the town residents immediately noticed the unusual activity; the presence in Lillehammer of many “tourists,” whose cars whooshed in all directions, was not a common sight in Lillehammer during the summer.
On July 21, 1973, Salameh and his pregnant friend came out of a cinema where they had seen Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare. The couple took the bus and got off on a quiet, deserted street. Suddenly a white car braked beside them; a couple of men jumped out on the sidewalk, Beretta guns in their hands, and sprayed Salam
eh’s body with fourteen bullets.
The Red Prince was dead.
The operation over, Mike Harari ordered his men to leave Norway right away. The pullout was done according to the rules: the killers left first, abandoning their white car in Lillehammer’s center, and took the first flights out of Oslo, the capital. Most of the agents and Mike Harari were the next to depart, leaving behind the crew that was to evacuate the safe houses and return the rental cars. But an unexpected coincidence turned everything upside down. A woman who lived near where the shooting took place noticed the color—white—and the make—Peugeot—of the killers’ car; a police officer, manning a roadblock between Lillehammer and Oslo, saw a white Peugeot driven by a striking-looking woman and noted the car’s license plate. The following day, when the car was returned at the airport car-rental desk, the police arrested its occupants, Dan Aerbel and Marianne Gladnikoff. Their interrogation brought about the arrest of two more agents, Sylvia Raphael and Avraham Gemer. Another two agents were arrested the same day. Aerbel and Gladnikoff broke down under the intensive interrogation. They revealed top-secret information about the operation, addresses of safe houses in Norway and throughout Europe, conspiracy rules, phone numbers, and modus operandi of the Mossad. The police raided an apartment in Oslo and found a trove of documents there; they also discovered that Ig’al Eyal, the Israeli embassy security officer, had a connection with the Mossad. It was a disaster.
The next day, Norway’s media published the news about the Israeli agents’ arrests. It was a terrible blow to the Mossad’s prestige and credibility. But the media published another piece of news, even more devastating: the Mossad had killed the wrong man.
The man killed in Lillehammer was not Ali Hassan Salameh. He was Ahmed Bushiki, a Moroccan waiter who had come to Norway looking for a job. He had also married a Norwegian woman, the blond Torril, who was seven months pregnant.
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