Sensational headlines sprouted all over the world’s newspapers. The captured agents stood trial and some of them were sentenced to long prison terms. One of them, Sylvia Raphael, made a strong impression on the Norwegians by her proud and noble appearance. Her trial brought her an unexpected prize: she fell in love with her Norwegian attorney, and after her release from jail she married him and lived happily with him till she died of cancer in 2005.
After the Lillehammer fiasco, the heads of the Mossad had to clean house—change conspiracy rules, abandon safe houses, establish new contacts . . . They had to admit their responsibility for Ahmed Bushiki’s death and pay $400,000 to his family. But the worst was that the legend of the glorious, invincible Mossad had been shattered.
Golda Meir ordered Zvi Zamir to end Wrath of God immediately. But soon the failure was obscured by more dramatic events. On October 6, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. The Yom Kippur War had begun. (See chapter 14.)
Two years passed.
On a balmy spring evening in 1975, a Beirut family hosted the most beautiful woman in the world. Georgina Rizk certainly deserved that title, as four years before she had been elected Miss Universe in the flashy beauty contest at Miami Beach, Florida. The gorgeous Lebanese beauty had won fame, awards, trips, meetings with world leaders. Back in Lebanon, she had developed a brilliant career as a supermodel and owner of fashion boutiques.
That evening, in her friends’ home, she met a handsome, charismatic young man. They fell in love. Two years later, on June 8, 1977, they got married. The happy groom was Ali Hassan Salameh.
His career, too, had soared in the previous few years. At the end of 1973, Black September ceased to exist. Despite the collapse of his organization, Salameh had become Arafat’s right hand and his “adopted son”; rumor had it that he would be appointed Arafat’s successor at the helm of the PLO.
After the fall of Black September, Salameh was made head of Force Seventeen, which was in charge of personal security of the Fatah leaders and of all unorthodox coups de main. Salameh accompanied Arafat on a trip to New York. Arafat entered the United Nations General Assembly holding an olive branch in his hand but carrying his gun on his belt. Salameh was at Arafat’s side when the latter traveled to Moscow and met with powerful world leaders. To Israel’s amazement, he was also courted by the CIA.
In another of its great oversights, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to ignore the bloody past of the “Red Prince,” his role in the Munich Massacre, the savage assassination of American diplomats in Khartum that he masterminded, the simple fact that Salameh was one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, and recruited Salameh as its informant. The CIA hoped that Salameh would become a loyal servant of American interests. The CIA offered Salameh hundreds of thousands of dollars, but he refused. On the other hand, he agreed to spend a long vacation with Georgina in Hawaii, all expenses covered by the agency.
Salameh’s lifestyle had changed, and his friends had started to believe that his life was no longer in danger. But he felt that his days were numbered. He did not stop speaking about his death. “I know,” he said to a reporter, “that when my fate is sealed the end will come. Nobody will be able to save me.”
Israel decided to seal his fate.
Many changes had taken place in Israel since the downfall of Black September. Golda Meir had gone; her successor, Yitzhak Rabin, had resigned; and a new prime minister, Menachem Begin, was now in power. Zvi Zamir had been replaced as ramsad by General Yitzhak (Haka) Hofi, a former commander of the Northern region. The Palestinian terror against Israel continued, in sporadic outbursts. In 1976, the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe, in Uganda, had resulted in a daring rescue raid by Israeli paratroopers and Sayeret Matkal. In 1978, Fatah terrorists landed in Israel, hijacked a civilian bus, and proceeded to Tel Aviv. They were stopped by a roadblock in the city outskirts, and were finally overpowered, but not before murdering thirty-five civilian passengers. Civilian men, women, and children were regularly brutally murdered in terrorist incursions into Israeli territory.
Menachem Begin felt that no terrorist with blood on his hands could be left in peace. In the late seventies, Salameh’s name was on the avengers’ list once again.
An undercover Mossad agent was sent to Beirut, and managed to join the health club where Salameh exercised. One day, as he walked into the sauna, he found himself face-to-face with the naked Salameh.
This stunning discovery triggered a fiery debate at Mossad headquarters. A naked Salameh in his health club was an easy prey. On the other hand, any attempt to kill him there could result in the death of civilians; therefore, the plan was abandoned.
Enter Erika Mary Chambers.
She was a single Englishwoman, eccentric and strange, who had lived in Germany for the last four years. She arrived in Beirut and rented an apartment on the eighth floor of a building at the corner of Rue Verdun and Rue Madame Curie. Her neighbors nicknamed her Penelope. She told them she did volunteer work for an international organization taking care of poor children. She was seen, indeed, in hospitals and relief agencies; some even said she had met with Ali Hassan Salameh. She seemed to be a very lonely woman. Always disheveled, shabbily dressed, Penelope would emerge on the street with plates full of food for stray cats; her apartment was also said to be full of her beloved felines. She was also a passionate painter, but those who saw her canvases quickly realized that her talents were rather limited.
But besides painting Lebanon’s landscapes, what really interested Miss Chambers was the busy traffic in the street below and, more specifically, the daily passage of two cars under her windows: a tan Chevrolet station wagon, always followed by a Land Rover jeep. Using a code, Erika scrupulously noted the times and directions of the vehicles’ movements. Every morning they came from the Snoubra neighborhood, down Verdun and Curie streets, heading south toward the Fatah headquarters; they came back at lunch time, and reappeared in the early afternoon, heading to headquarters again.
Watching the cars with a pair of binoculars, Erika identified Salameh sitting in the backseat of the Chevrolet between two armed bodyguards; several other armed terrorists rode in the Land Rover that followed.
Salameh’s guards perhaps could protect him, but they could not save him from the worst enemy of a secret agent: routine. Since his marriage to beautiful Georgina, Salameh’s life had fallen into a steady pattern: he had settled with his wife in the Snoubra neighborhood, and would go to work, like a clerk, every morning at the same time, come home for lunch and rest, return to work after the siesta. He was ignoring the basic rules of secret activity: never develop regular habits, never stay at the same address for too long, never use the same itinerary twice, never travel at the same time of day.
On January 18, 1979, a British tourist, Peter Scriver, arrived in Beirut, checked into the Mediterranee Hotel, and rented a blue Volkswagen Golf at the Lenacar agency. The same day he met with a Canadian tourist, Ronald Kolberg, who stayed at the Royal Garden Hotel and rented a Simca Chrysler, also at Lenacar. Kolberg was none other than David Molad. The third client of the popular rental agency walked into its office the following day. That was Erika Chambers, who asked to rent a car “for a trip in the mountains.” She signed out a Datsun, which she parked close to her home.
That night, three Israeli missile boats approached a deserted beach between Beirut and the port of Jounieh, and left a large load of explosives on the wet sand. Kolberg and Scriver were there; they loaded the explosives in the Volkswagen.
On January 21, Peter Scriver checked out of his hotel, drove the blue Volkswagen to Rue Verdun, and parked it in full view of Erika Chambers’s windows. He then took a cab to the airport and boarded a flight to Cyprus. Ronald Kolberg checked out of his hotel, too, and moved to the Montmartre Hotel, in Jounieh.
At three forty-five P.M., as usual, Ali Hassan Salameh entered his Chevrolet. His bodyguards took the Land Rover, and the small motorcade headed for the Fata
h headquarters. The cars moved down Rue Madame Curie and turned into Rue Verdun.
From the eighth floor of the corner building, Erika Chambers watched them approach. Molad stood beside her, holding a remote control device.
The Chevrolet sailed smoothly past the blue Volkswagen. At that moment, Molad pressed the switch on the remote control.
The Volkswagen exploded, turning into a huge ball of fire. The Chevrolet, engulfed by the flames, blew up in turn. Chunks of metal and splinters of glass were projected violently upward. Windows in the neighboring houses were shattered and pieces of glass rained down on the sidewalk. Horrified passersby stared at the bodies of the Chevrolet’s passengers, strewn about the smoldering debris.
Police cars and ambulances rushed toward the scene and the medics pulled out of the Chevrolet’s twisted chassis the bodies of the driver, the two bodyguards, and Ali Hassan Salameh.
In Damascus, a harried messenger brought an urgent telegram to Yasser Arafat, who was presiding over a meeting at the Meridien Hotel. Stunned, Arafat perused the telegram and burst into tears.
That same night, a rubber dinghy, launched from an Israeli missile boat, landed at Jounieh beach. Ronald Kolberg and Erika Chambers jumped onto the dinghy that took them to its mother ship. A few hours later, they were in Israel. The Lebanese police found their rented cars parked on the beach, keys in the ignition.
Erika Mary Chambers was the real name of a Mossad agent, a British Jewess, who had lived in England and Australia before immigrating to Israel, and was recruited by the Mossad during her studies at Hebrew University. She returned to Israel and was never heard of again.
That was the end of the Quest and the end of Operation Wrath of God.
Black September was eliminated.
Many years later, some of the operation’s details came to light. General Aharon Yariv admitted in a television interview that he had advised Prime Minister Golda Meir “to kill as many of the Black September leaders as possible.” He admitted that he was surprised by the fact that “a military operation by our forces in Beirut and a few killings in Europe were enough to make the Fatah leaders stop the terrorism abroad. That proves that we were right by using this method for a certain time.”
But that dark affair had a surprising and promising epilogue. In 1996, the Israeli journalist Daniel Ben-Simon was invited by friends to a merry party in Jerusalem. He met a young, pleasant Palestinian there, impeccably dressed and speaking fluent English. He introduced himself as Ali Hassan Salameh.
“That’s the name of the man who masterminded the massacre of the Israeli athletes in Munich,” Ben-Simon said.
“He was my father,” the young man said. “He was murdered by the Mossad.” He told the amazed Ben-Simon that he had lived for years with his mother in Europe, and finally had come to Jerusalem as Yasser Arafat’s guest. “I would never have believed,” he added, “that the day would come when I’d be dancing together with young Israelis at a party in Jerusalem.” He described his voyage throughout Israel, the warm hospitality of the Israelis he had met, and expressed his desire to help conciliate Israelis and Palestinians.
“I am a man of peace, a hundred percent,” young Salameh said. “My father lived in times of war and paid for that with his life. Now a new era has begun. I hope that peace between Israelis and Palestinians will be the most important event in the life of those two peoples.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Syrian Virgins
On a stormy night in November 1971, an Israeli Navy missile boat was struggling against the raging Mediterranean waves as it plowed its way toward the Syrian coast. It had left the big naval base in Haifa in the early evening, sailed along the Lebanese coast, and entered the Syrian territorial waters. The darkened boat passed by the illuminated Latakiyeh port, and kept its northbound course. It finally moored at a safe distance from a deserted beach, close to the Turkish border. Naval commandos of Flotilla 13 emerged on board of the wildly swaying boat and launched a few rubber dinghies into the water.
When they were ready to depart, the door of a locked side cabin opened, and three men in civilian clothes came out. Their faces were concealed by checkered keffiyehs and in their watertight bags they carried small transceivers, forged passports, personal belongings, and loaded revolvers. Without uttering a word, they jumped into the dinghies and headed toward the beach. The commandos were not told their identities or the reason they were bringing these men to Syria. As they approached the coast, shortly before daybreak, the three civilians dove into the icy waters and swam toward the beach. They crouched in the surf till they saw the silhouette of a man waiting in the sand. They swam the last few yards and joined him. This was Yonatan, code-named “Prosper,” their leader. He had brought dry clothes for his shivering friends and they changed right away. He took them to his concealed car close by. A stranger, apparently Mossad’s local auxiliary, was waiting at the wheel; he started the car and deftly merged into the traffic on one of Syria’s main highways. A few hours later, they entered Damascus.
They checked into two hotels. After a long sleep, they got together and set out to reconnoiter the Syrian capital. They all were former Flotilla 13 commandos, now Mossad agents, and were on the most unusual mission of their lives. Among them was David Molad.
The operation had been planned a few weeks earlier, at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. The ramsad, Zvi Zamir; the head of Caesarea, Mike Harari; and a few other department heads met with the four young men, who were between twenty-three and twenty-seven years old. The four of them were close friends, had participated in several operations together, mixing their naval commando skills with their Mossad training. All of them were born in North Africa and spoke excellent French and Arabic. They called themselves the “Cosa Nostra,” like the Sicilian Mafia. Zamir began to brief them.
Two years ago, a message had come from Syria. It had been sent by the leaders of the dwindling Jewish community. The autocratic regime of President Hafez Al-Assad, who had seized power in 1970, oppressed and persecuted the local Jews. Many of them had trickled out of the country, leaving behind a tiny, aging community. The young and able men had escaped from Syria, leaving behind Jewish girls who had no hope of finding husbands. Their best option was to escape to Israel.
Some of the girls, Zamir told the Cosa Nostra, had tried to escape via Lebanon, with the help of smugglers they had bribed. Some of them had been captured, beaten, tortured, even shot. A few had still managed to get to Beirut. All of them had the address of a safe house in the Lebanese capital. Local Mossad helpers had taken care of them until they could be brought to Israel.
One night, in the winter of 1970, an Israeli missile boat approached the port of Jounieh, north of Beirut, and local fishermen brought over the twelve Jewish girls who had fled Syria.
The captain of the Israeli boat was a veteran sea wolf and a submariner, Colonel Avraham (Zabu) Ben-Ze’ev. Before the operation, he and his men had undergone very rigorous training on a model they had built at a navy base. The training had been excellent, and the transfer of the girls on board had been smooth and efficient. Zabu had his men throw blankets on the badly frightened, shivering girls, served them sandwiches and coffee, and then sailed full-throttle to Haifa. He docked at four A.M. and, to his great surprise, saw the unmistakable figure of Prime Minister Golda Meir waiting on the wharf, along with the chief of the IDF staff, General Haim Bar-Lev, and his deputy, General David (Dado) El’azar. Golda threw a modest party for the Syrian girls and was deeply shaken by their stories. During the following year, Ben-Ze’ev and his successor on the job, Amnon Gonen, carried out a few more operations, bringing a few more young Syrian girls from the Lebanese coast to Israel. But crossing the Syrian-Lebanese border had become a very risky business, and the Arab smugglers and fishermen could not be trusted. Golda decided then that she must bring the remaining girls directly from Syria to Israel.
She called Zamir and instructed him to rescue the Syrian girls.
At the meeting with the C
osa Nostra, Zamir addressed the four young men. “You have to rescue those girls. That’s your assignment.”
A heated debate broke out in the conference room. Is this a job for Mossad agents? one of the men asked. This task should be given to the Jewish Agency. Another angrily added that the Mossad was not a matchmaking agency, and its officers should not have to risk their lives in one of the most dangerous and cruel Arab countries just to ensure that a few Jewish virgins would find grooms.
The ramsad did not budge. He reminded his men that rescuing the Jewish communities in enemy countries was one of the Mossad’s missions from its very inception.
The operation was code-named “Smicha”—Hebrew for “blanket.”
The day after the Cosa Nostra landed on Syrian territory, their self-confidence improved. They walked the streets of Damascus, chatting in French. They checked their surroundings and made sure they were not followed by the Mukhabarat, the dreaded Syrian Intelligence service. Later that day, they strolled in the illuminated markets of the city, and entered a jewelry store. “Prosper” and “Claudie” (Emanuel Allon) were examining the jewelry, conversing in French, when the merchant bent toward them and whispered: “You are from Bnai Amenu (Hebrew for ‘our people’), aren’t you?”
The agents were stunned. If they were so easy to identify, they were in mortal danger. They ignored the merchant’s remark and quickly slipped out of the store and disappeared in the crowd.
The news about the chance to escape Syria and reach Israel had spread among the young girls of the Jewish community. “Our situation in Syria was very bad,” Sara Gafni, one of the young women, said later. “We were under pressure to marry—but whom? There was nobody. We heard a lot of stories and rumors, and we became obsessed with the idea: to get to Israel, to the land of the Jews.”
A message was secretly delivered to Prosper: tomorrow evening, the girls will be waiting in a small truck not far from your hotels.
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