The following evening, indeed, the Cosa Nostra found the small truck, its back covered with a canvas roof, parked in a dark street. The agents had previously checked out of their hotels and carried their bags with them. Two of the Cosa Nostra sat in the front of the car, and two others got in the back; under the canvas roof were several girls, between the ages of fifteen and twenty, and a teenage boy. The Cosa Nostra were wearing keffiyehs again, covering their heads and leaving just a narrow slit for their eyes. They knew that on the Syrian highways, the army and police often established barriers and checkpoints. They decided that if they were stopped by the police, they would say that the truck was taking the girls to a high school field trip.
The local auxiliary, who had brought over the truck, was driving. He picked up a couple of girls in prearranged locations and then headed north, toward Tartus. They reached a deserted beach; the young Syrian Jews and the agents hid in an abandoned hut. Far from the beach, an IDF missile boat was waiting. Prosper signaled the boat with his flashlight and called them on his radio. The rubber dinghies, manned with Flotilla 13 commandos, started making their way toward the beach.
All of a sudden, bursts of gunfire echoed very close to Prosper and his friends. They scrambled for cover, but soon found out that the shots were not aimed at them. Who was firing? Had the Syrians detected the flotilla dinghies? “Mess on the beach,” the naval commandos’ chief, Gadi Kroll, radioed to Israel. But he did not give up. He called back the flotilla dinghies and sailed north, to an alternative beach that had been selected beforehand. Simultaneously, Prosper and his men rushed the girls back to the truck, drove north, and again made contact with the navy boat. This time, the beach was quiet. The girls and the Cosa Nostra men, their keffiyehs again masking their faces, waded in the water up to their waists, and jumped into the dinghies that took them to the open sea; after a long and bumpy sail in the stormy waters, they finally boarded the navy boat that turned back to Israel. The agents disappeared in a cabin; the girls were taken to another, and ordered never to say a word to anybody about their escape from Syria. They had left their families in Damascus, and if their flight to Israel became known, their parents could pay for it with their lives.
The local auxiliary drove the truck back to Damascus, to prepare for the next operation.
The missile boat arrived to Haifa without any further incident. But before sending out the boys on their next mission, the Mossad tried to find out who had fired that night on the beach. The intelligence department checked spies’ reports, activated its sleepers in Syria, contacted its sources in the army—but to no avail. They concluded that the incident might have been a badly planned ambush or a nervous response by Syrian soldiers to suspicious movements in the water.
The next time, the Cosa Nostra arrived in Damascus by air. They came from Paris, using the cover of archaeology students, coming to visit Syria’s antiquities. They carried false papers, and their pockets were full of metro (the Parisian subway) tickets, coins, receipts from cafés and restaurants, and other tangible proof of their assumed identities. Their documents were in order, yet they were nervous and edgy; perhaps the Mukhabarat had blown their cover? They went through immigration without any problems, and yet they could not calm down. They crossed the crowded arrival hall of the airport and left for the city in several taxis. The Cosa Nostra settled in different hotels. Claudie checked into the Damascus Hilton.
This time, the first night they spent in Damascus was tense. The four young men knew well that if they were caught, their fate was sealed: torture and horrible death. They asked the auxiliary to take them to the square where a few years ago the Syrians had hanged Israel’s greatest spy, Elie Cohen. Standing at the very place where the body of Cohen had hung from the gallows, while a fanatic crowd cheered and waved its fists, was too much for them. Claudie left his friends and ran back to his hotel; he was deeply shaken by the experience.
Haunted by the sinister image of the square, he tossed and turned on his bed, but could not sleep. Suddenly, at midnight, he heard a noise coming from the door, and immediately knew what it was: a key being inserted in the keyhole. That’s it, he thought. They’ve got me. I’ll be the next to hang in the city square. He rushed to the door and looked through the peephole. What he saw was an elderly American tourist trying in vain to open the door. After several failed attempts, she walked away. It turned out that the lady had got off the elevator on the wrong floor. Claudie felt reborn.
While they waited for the next group of girls to be prepared, they walked Damascus’s streets and visited cafés and restaurants. The waiters gaped in amazement at the quartet of Fransaouees (Frenchmen) who split their sides laughing during the meals. It was all Claudie’s fault: he repeatedly succeeded in dispelling his buddies’ tremendous tension—and his own—by improvising bombastic speeches in French, inserting words and jokes in Hebrew slang.
This and future operations were flawlessly executed, until the day when Prosper and his friends noticed unusual traffic and large concentrations of troops along the beach. They could not risk an operation on the heavily patrolled coast. Prosper decided to change the itinerary.
“Go to Beirut!” he told his helper and they raced to Lebanon’s capital, a hundred kilometers away. After crossing the border into Lebanon, Prosper headed for Jounieh, a port north of Beirut, inhabited mainly by Christians. In no time he rented a boat, a midsize yacht, after explaining to its owner that he wanted to take about fifteen guests on a pleasure cruise, a “surprise party” for one of his friends’ birthday. Once the boat was secured and ready for departure, he cabled in code his superiors in Paris and informed them of the change in plans. Shortly after, he received confirmation by the same channel.
That night, the truck came from Damascus, carrying its usual load of young Jewish women. Claudie was at the wheel. The truck stopped a few kilometers from the Lebanese border and unloaded its human cargo. Claudie continued, alone in the truck, presented his papers at the border checkpoint, and crossed into Lebanon. There he stopped the truck on the roadside and waited. The young women, carrying their heavy suitcases, escorted by the Mossad agents, walked in the darkness for hours, stumbling on the rock-strewn ground and bypassing the border control barrier. After an exhausting march, they reached the road on the other side of the border, and met with Claudie, who drove them to Jounieh. They boarded the yacht, one by one, and finally the yacht sailed on its “birthday voyage.” In the open sea, the girls were transferred to a navy boat.
The Cosa Nostra spent the following day in Beirut, strolling and shopping. At night, they headed back to Damascus by the same way they had come; a few kilometers before the border, three of the agents got off and made their way in the dark fields around the checkpoint. Claudie crossed legally with his vehicle, met his friends down the road, and took them back to Damascus.
The day after, they were on their way back to Paris, and to Tel Aviv.
The operation ended in April 1973, when Golda Meir came to Haifa naval base to personally thank Prosper, Claudie, and their friends for what they had done. Between September 1970 and April 1973, the Mossad and the navy had carried out about twenty operations for bringing young Jews and Jewesses from Syria via the Tartus beaches and the Lebanese coast. All the operations were successful, and about 120 young people were brought to Israel. The operation was kept secret for more than thirty years.
That was the end of the Cosa Nostra. Its members turned to more peaceful activities, like business, tourism, and civil service, even though they were still called back for special Mossad operations once in a while.
Time passed, and Emanuel Allon (Claudie) was invited to the wedding of a relative. He was introduced to the bride and recognized her immediately: she was one of the virgins he had helped bring over from Syria. He asked her: “Where do you come from?”
The girl paled. She felt she was still bound by the secret of her past. Allon smiled at her: “Didn’t you come from Syria? By sea?”
The stunned woman al
most fainted, and then all of a sudden grabbed his arms, hugged and kissed him warmly. “It was you,” she mumbled. “You took me out of there!”
“This moment,” Allon said later, “was worth all the risks we took.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Today We’ll Be at War!”
On October 5, 1973, at one A.M., Mossad agent code-named “Dubi” got a phone call from Cairo. Dubi, a senior case officer, operated from a safe house in London. The phone call was a tremendous shock. On the line was the most important and most secret agent of the Mossad, whose very existence was known only to a select few. He was known as the Angel (in some reports, he was code-named “Rashash” or “Hot’el”). The Angel uttered a few words, but one of them made Dubi shudder. It was “chemicals.” Dubi immediately called the Mossad headquarters in Israel and conveyed the code word. As soon as it reached the ramsad, Zvi Zamir, he told his chief of staff, Freddie Eini: “I am going to London.”
He knew he had no time to lose. The code word “chemicals” carried an ominous message: “Expect an immediate attack on Israel.”
Israel was expecting an attack by its Arab neighbors since the 1967 Six-Day War, in which it gained large chunks of territory: the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and Jerusalem from Jordan. The IDF was now deployed on the Golan Heights, on the eastern shore of the Suez Canal, and along the Jordan River. The Arab countries were rattling their sabers, promising revenge, but in the war of attrition that had followed the Six-Day battles, Israel had the upper hand. All its efforts to trade the newly conquered territories for peace had been angrily rejected by the Arab states. In the meantime, Egypt’s fiery President Nasser had died and been replaced by Anwar Sadat, a man lacking charisma, regarded by the Israeli experts as weak, irresolute, and unable to lead his people to a new war. After the death of Prime Minister Eshkol, Israel’s leadership had been entrusted to the strong hands of charismatic Golda Meir, a tough and powerful stateswoman, assisted by the world-famous minister of defense Moshe Dayan. Israel’s security, it seemed, couldn’t be in better hands.
A few weeks before the phone call, in utmost secrecy, King Hussein of Jordan had flown to Israel and warned Golda that the Egyptians and Syrians were planning an attack on Israel. Hussein had become Israel’s secret ally and was engaged in intensive negotiations with Golda’s envoys. But, at the time, Golda was not focused on Hussein’s warnings. She was much more interested in the forthcoming elections, and Golda’s Labor Party campaigned under the slogan “All Is Quiet on the Suez Canal.”
Barely eighteen hours before Yom Kippur, it appeared that nothing was quiet on the Suez Canal. Zvi Zamir took the Angel’s warning very seriously. According to the prearranged procedures, triggered by the code word, the ramsad was to meet his agent in London, as soon as he got the signal.
Zamir boarded the first flight to London. On the sixth floor of an apartment building in the British capital, not far from the Dorchester Hotel, the Mossad kept a discreet safe house. The apartment was bugged, serviced, and secured by Mossad agents. It had been acquired and equipped for only one purpose: meetings with the Angel. As soon as Zvi Zamir arrived, a detachment of ten Mossad agents took positions around the building, to protect their chief in case the signal from Cairo was part of a plot to capture or injure him. The head of the unit was veteran Zvi Malkin, the legendary agent that had helped catch Eichmann in Argentina.
Zamir, tense and agitated, waited for the Angel all day long. His agent apparently had made a stopover in Rome, on its way from Cairo, and reached London only in the late evening. The two men met at the safe house at eleven P.M.
In the meantime, Yom Kippur—the holiday of prayer, fasting, and atonement—had settled upon Israel. All work had ceased, the television and radio had stopped their broadcasts, no cars moved on the roads. Skeleton army units manned the borders of the Jewish state.
The meeting between Zamir and the Angel lasted two hours. Dubi noted every word.
It was close to one A.M., when the meeting ended. Dubi invited the Angel into another room, where he paid him his customary fee of $100,000. Zamir, frantic, hurriedly composed an urgent telegram to Israel. But the Mossad agents couldn’t find the embassy encoder to transmit the vital message. Finally, Zamir lost his cool and placed a call to Freddie Eini’s home. The calls were not answered and the harried operator told him: “There is no answer, sir. I think today is an important holiday in Israel.”
“Try again!” Zamir growled. Finally, the ringing woke up his chief of staff and he picked up the phone. He sounded half-asleep. “Take a basin of cold water,” Zamir said to him. “Put your feet in it and pick up pen and paper.” When Freddie did as he was told, Zamir dictated the code phrase: “The company will sign the contract by the end of the day.”
Then Zamir added: “Now get dressed, go to headquarters, and wake everybody up.”
Freddie followed Zamir’s orders to the letter. He started calling the political and military leaders of Israel. His message to them could be summed up in one sentence: “War will break out today.”
Shortly afterward, the telegram that Zamir had written finally arrived in Tel Aviv: “According to the plan, the Egyptians and the Syrians are going to attack in the early evening. They know that today is a holiday and they believe that they can land [on our side of the Suez Canal] before dark. The attack would be carried out according to the plan which is known to us. He (the Angel) believes that Sadat cannot delay the attack because of his promise to other Arab heads of state, and he wants to keep his commitment to the last detail. The source estimates that in spite of Sadat’s hesitation, the chances that the attack will be carried out are 99.9 percent. They believe they’ll win, that’s why they fear an early disclosure that may cause an outside intervention; this may deter some of the partners who then will reconsider. The Russians will not take part in the operation.”
The ramsad’s dramatic report was not accepted by everybody at face value. General Eli Zeira, the handsome, confident chief of Aman, was convinced that there was no danger of war, in spite of the worrying reports by intelligence sources. He believed that the huge concentrations of Egyptian soldiers and armor on the African shore of the Suez Canal were nothing but a part of a large army maneuver. Zeira also admitted, in a conversation with Zamir, that he had “no explanation” as to why a report by Unit 848 (later renamed Unit 8200, 848 was the listening and monitoring installation of the IDF) stated that the families of the Russian military advisers in Syria and Egypt were urgently leaving those countries—a surefire indication of imminent war.
The chief of Aman and most of the defense community leaders were firm believers in “conception”—a theory that Egypt would attack Israel only under two conditions: first, that it would receive from the Soviet Union fighter jets able to face the Israeli fighter aircraft, as well as bombers and missiles that would reach Israel’s population centers; and second, that it would assure the participation of the other Arab countries in the onslaught. As long as these two conditions had not been met, the conception said, there was no chance that Egypt would attack. Egypt would make threats, would tease and provoke, would carry out mammoth maneuvers—but wouldn’t go to war.
But the theory had already failed before, in 1967. That year, a large part of the Egyptian Army was in Yemen, where it waged a prolonged war against the royal army. Israel was convinced that Egypt wouldn’t initiate any provocative or aggressive action as long as part of its army was tied up in the Yemenite quagmire. But on May 15, 1967, the elite units of the Egyptian Army suddenly crossed the Sinai and reached the Israeli border while President Nasser expelled the United Nations’ observers and closed the Straits of the Red Sea to Israeli shipping. Israeli experts should have realized the failure of their logic, but in the afterglow of the astonishing victory of the Six-Day War, it was forgotten.
The “conception” theory hovered over the extraordinary cabinet meeting called in the early hours of October 6, 1973.
Not only Zeira, but several cabinet ministers as well doubted the report about an imminent Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack. Twice in the past, in November 1972 and May 1973, the Angel had flashed Israel a warning about a forthcoming attack. True, he had retracted at the last moment, but in May 1973, huge numbers of reserve soldiers had been urgently mobilized, and the operation had cost Israel the staggering sum of $34.5 million.
At this morning’s cabinet meeting, everybody was conscious of the gravity of the situation. Nevertheless, they only decided on a partial mobilization of reservists. The ministers also decided not to launch a preventive strike on the huge Egyptian concentrations of troops along the canal.
Zamir returned to Israel and stuck to his guns: war is imminent! He quoted the Angel’s warning of a joint offensive by the Egyptian and Syrian armies, shortly before sunset.
At two P.M., Zeira summoned the military correspondents to his office and stated that there was only a low probability of war breaking out. He was still speaking, when an aide walked into his office and handed him a short note. Zeira read it, and without another word grabbed his beret and hurried out of the room.
A few moments later, the wail of the air-raid sirens shattered the silence of Yom Kippur. The war had begun.
After the war, senior Aman officers angrily accused the Angel of having misled Zamir by mentioning the end of the day as the H-hour for the attack, while the real offensive had started at midday. Only later it was established that the H-hour had been modified at the last moment, in a phone conversation between the presidents of Syria and Egypt. The Angel was already in the air, on his way to London.
It seems strange that the Aman chiefs were disturbed by the Angel’s mistake, or by his former mistaken warnings. Apparently, Aman’s chiefs regarded the Angel not as an intelligence source but as the Mossad’s representative in the office of Egypt’s president, who was supposed to report, in full detail, everything that happened there. They ignored the fact that, in spite of his senior position, the Angel was only a spy; he produced excellent reports, but did not always know everything, as is the case with any other spy.
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