Professor Eugen Sänger with Otto Joklik.
The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his rescuer Otto Skorzeny.
Elie Cohen and his family in a rare moment of happiness.
Elie Cohen on trial in Damascus.
“Kamal Amin Tabet” in the company of Syrian officers on the Golan Heights. (Yedioth Ahronoth archives)
Front page of Yedioth Ahronoth on March 7, 1965, announcing the killing of Cukurs.
The crate where Cukurs’s body was found in Montevideo.
Anton Kunzle as he was photographed by Herbert Cukurs. “If I’ll be murdered, my murderer is in these pictures.”
MiG-21. Ezer Weizman wanted one. (Zvika Tishler)
Heads of the Mossad (ramsads) Meir Amit and Efraim Halevi. (Michael Kremer)
Golda Meir: “Send the boys.” (David Rubinger)
The “Red Prince” and the most beautiful woman in the world.
The funeral of the Red Prince—Yasser Arafat and Ali Hassan Salameh’s son.
Zvi Zamir: “Today we’ll be at war!” (Israel Government Press Office)
Ashraf Marwan, our man in the Egyptian president’s office. (Wikipedia)
Yitzhak (Haka) Hofi. Haka’s forces in Sudan. (David Rubinger)
Gerald Bull, the man who sold his soul to the devil. (Wikipedia)
Nahum Admoni, in the footsteps of Vanunu. (Yedioth Ahronoth archives)
The eternal Rafi Eitan, receiving a certificate of merit for the capture of Eichmann. (Israel Government Press Office)
“John Crossman” (Mordechai Vanunu) leaving jail. (Israel Government Press Office)
Heads of the Mossad: Danny Yatom and Shabtai Shavit. (Meir Partush)
A honey trap named “Cindy.” (Yedioth Ahronoth archives)
Imad Mughniyeh, Number 1 on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. (Hezbollah)
Khaled Mash’al. The foul-up that saved his life. (Israel Government Press Office)
The Syrian nuclear reactor, before and after the visit of the Israeli Air Force. (U.S. government)
Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh. The cameras were rolling. (Wikipedia)
The Mossad agents in action. (Courtesy of the Dubai police)
“The dream will be fulfilled; soon we will arrive in the Land of Israel.” (Elad Gershgoren)
Tamir Pardo, ramsad. (Tomeriko)
Chapter Sixteen
Saddam’s Supergun
On March 23, 1918, at the height of World War I, a huge artillery shell exploded in the center of Place de la Republique in Paris. An hour later, another shell hit the center of Paris, killing eight people. The explosions terrified the Parisians, since the city, far away from the front lines, was supposed to be safe. The commander of the Paris district immediately sent several squads to scan the forests around the capital, where a German artillery unit must have been hiding. But the search turned up nothing. The French surmised that the shells had been fired from an airship, even though no Zeppelin had been sighted. Six days later, on Good Friday, another shell exploded in Paris; this time it was a direct hit at the Saint Gervais church in the Fourth arrondisement. The explosion killed ninety-one people and wounded a hundred.
Panic spread throughout the city. Army patrols fanned out from the capital and didn’t find anything. No one had ever heard of a cannon that could hit Paris from such a fantastic distance anyway. The newspapers compared the monster that bombarded them from afar to the huge cannon that writer Jules Verne had described in his book From the Earth to the Moon. Jules Verne’s fictional cannon could fire a whole spaceship to the moon.
The French were in luck. The war ended that same year with the victory of the Allies over imperial Germany. Slowly, information started trickling about the horrible cannon that had spread death and panic in the French capital. Some called it the “Paris gun,” others named it the “Wilhelm gun,” after Wilhelm II, Germany’s emperor. It turned out that it had been developed by the Krupp heavy weapons industry, which had produced three of the mysterious cannons. The cannon had an unheard-of range of 128 kilometers; its shells were three feet long, with a charge of gunpowder that was twelve feet long. The shells soared to a height of 42 kilometers, a record that was broken only by the German V-2 rockets in World War II. Krupp assembled the three superguns in utmost secrecy. The guns were pulled by special trains that moved from one position to the other almost daily. Each was manned by eighty artillery soldiers, who were forbidden to speak to anybody. It was imperative to shroud the monstrous weapons in complete secrecy.
As the war approached its end, the maneuvering capacities of the superguns quickly deteriorated. British aircraft discovered the huge guns, hounded them along the rails, and kept bombing them. The French, too, fired at them from positions close to the front lines. Yet none of the attacks were successful. The only gun that was neutralized was one that exploded while firing; five soldiers were killed. The other two vanished without a trace at the war’s end. What happened to them remains a mystery. They may have been dismantled, or concealed in some deep cave or an abandoned mine.
The superguns turned into a legend, and many thought their secret would never be solved. But in 1965, an elderly German woman arrived in Canada and met a thirty-seven-year-old scientist, Dr. Gerald Bull, who was in charge of the High Altitude Research Program (HARP) at McGill University in Montreal. The woman was a relative of Fritz Rausenberger, the deceased director of design at Krupp Industries. She brought Bull a lost manuscript that she had discovered in the family archives, which described in detail the big gun and the way it was operated.
The manuscript fired up Bull’s imagination. He was reputed to be a genius who had received his Ph.D. at the age of twenty-three, the youngest Ph.D. to graduate from a Canadian university. Bull dreamed of building superguns that would fire shells at targets hundreds of miles away, and even launch satellites to outer space. Using the manuscript, he wrote a book about the Wilhelm guns and the possibilities they offered to the scientists of the future.
But the book was not enough. Bull obtained funding from the U.S. and Canadian governments, as well as from his university. On a testing ground in Barbados, he tested his own huge gun—the longest gun ever built in the world. It was 36 meters long, with a caliber of 424 millimeters. Hundreds of workers, technicians and engineers, many of them local, participated in the building and testing of the formidable firearm.
Bull’s cannon excelled in the test-firing and dispatched heavy loads to record altitudes. He claimed that if, instead of shells, he armed his gun with missiles propelled by solid fuel, he could fire a 200-pound missile to a distance of 4,000 kilometers or to an altitude of 250 kilometers.
Bull’s gun was a great achievement, but the U.S. and Canadian governments decided, for various reasons, to stop funding the project. In 1968, Bull was forced to leave Barbados. His frustration knew no limits. With spite and hatred, he attacked the “bureaucrats” who had aborted his project.
For a while he produced artillery shells, and even exported fifty thousand shells to Israel for use with American-made guns. He was even rewarded with honorary American citizenship. But he had a very short fuse, was not always able to control his mouth, and clashed with most senior officers and officials he met. The humiliation he had felt at the closure of the test range in Barbados kept burning in him, and he was ready to do anything in order to continue building his big guns. It became his obsession, and nothing could stop him.
First he built the GC-45 gun, the most advanced gun of his time that had a range of forty kilometers. Bull sold the gun to anybody who wanted to buy it. In spite of the United Nations embargo on weapons sales to South Africa, Bull sold his guns to its army, which needed them for the war against neighboring Angola. Bull also sold South Africa a license to build the guns on its territory.
Some say the CIA secretly supported Bull’s illegal activity. But as soon as the matter became public, Bull’s CIA friends vanished into thin air, and he remained alone, exposed to the UN’s accusations of having become a cynical, heartle
ss arms trafficker. He was forced to return to the United States, where an unpleasant surprise awaited him: an American court found him guilty of illegal weapons trade, and sentenced him to six months in jail. When he was released and returned to Canada, he was fined $55,000. Angry and bitter, he moved to Belgium, where he founded a new company, in association with the United Gunpowder Works (Poudreries Réunies de Belgique).
But his obsession did not subside. He kept dreaming of building a huge supergun, worthy of Jules Verne’s imagination. Like Goethe’s Faust, he was ready to sell his soul to the devil for realizing his dream. And indeed, he found the devil: Iraq’s megalomaniac dictator, Saddam Hussein.
In the eighties, Iraq was fighting a ruthless war against Iran. Bull sold the Iraqis two hundred GC-45 guns, made in Austria and smuggled via the port of Akaba, in neighboring Jordan. But that was only the beginning.
Saddam Hussein, like Bull, was deeply frustrated after Israel had bombed the Tamuz nuclear reactor and shattered his dream to make Iraq a nuclear power. He was also utterly jealous that Israel was on the verge of launching satellites into space.
Bull offered to build Saddam the biggest and the longest supergun in the world. With this gun, Bull promised, Saddam would be able to launch satellites into space and fire shells to a distance of more than a thousand kilometers. Saddam realized that he would be able to hit the population centers of Israel and gladly accepted Bull’s offier. Bull called his enterprise “Project Babylon.”
Bull drew up the plans for Babylon: a gun 150 meters long, weighing 2,100 tons, with a caliber of 1 meter! But before building his mammoth gun, Bull decided to assemble a smaller prototype, for testing purposes. He called the smaller gun “Baby Babylon,” even though this baby was bigger than all its ancestors. The gun was 45 meters long, and Saddam’s artillery commander was awed by its performance. But this was nothing compared to the real thing that was emerging from the Iraqi desert.
Bull chose to place his giant gun on a bare hill, positioning the components of the longest and the fattest gun in the world on the rising slope. After choosing the location, he ordered the parts of his cannon from various European steel plants. The main component, of course, was the barrel that Bull intended to assemble, using scores of huge steel tubes. He ordered the tubes in England, Spain, Holland, and Switzerland. The orders were camouflaged as “parts of a large oil pipeline.” Because Iraq was subject to draconian international restrictions on importation of strategic materials, once again the orders were filed in the name of neighboring Jordan.
The pipes began arriving. The amazing aspect of the entire operation was that most of the states and the companies involved in the production of the pipes understood perfectly well that the pipes were nothing but parts of a giant lethal weapon; but their cynicism and greed, as well as their indifference to the wars in the Middle East, meant that they had no problem cooperating. The huge pipes were given export licenses, loaded on freighters, and sent on their way. Many of them reached Iraq without any trouble.
Bull’s private army of technicians and engineers started assembling the gun pieces, pointing them west, toward Israel. But Bull was still not satisfied. He built the Iraqis two self-propelled guns, Al-Majnoon and Al-Fao. Al-Majnoon (The Crazy One) was immediately integrated into Iraq’s artillery.
Bull also agreed to improve the Scud missiles in Saddam’s arsenal, and modify their warheads. He extended the Scud’s range and their performances; these missiles would be used against Israel during the first Gulf War.
Here, though, Bull crossed a line. According to Bull’s son’s testimony, Israeli agents warned Bull to stop his dangerous activities. Bull refused to listen. Israel was not alone in its desire to stop the scientist. The CIA and MI6 were also worried; the Iranians, too, had unfinished business with Bull. During the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqis had used the guns built by Gerald Bull against them. Apparently, Bull did not suffer from a lack of enemies; and they were determined to put an end to his projects.
As he ignored the warnings, the foreign agents stepped up their activities. Several times during the winter of 1990, unknown persons broke into Bull’s apartment at the Uccle neighborhood in Brussels. They took nothing, just overturned the furniture and emptied cupboards and chest drawers, leaving clear indications of their visit. That was another warning for Bull: We are here. We can get into your home as we please, and may go even further than that.
Once again, Bull ignored the warnings. The gun parts kept arriving, and were placed, one after the other, on the barren hill in Iraq. It seemed that no action could stop Project Babylon. Except one.
On March 22, 1990, Bull returned to his Brussels apartment. While he was fumbling in his pocket for the apartment keys, a man emerged from the dark corridor, a silenced gun in his hand, and fired five bullets in the back of Bull’s head. The father of the great gun collapsed, and died on the spot.
The world press plunged in speculations about the identity of the killers. Some said the assassins had been sent by the CIA, others pointed at MI6, Angola, Iran . . . but most of the observers agreed on Israel. The Belgian police started an investigation but did not find a thing. The murderers of Gerald Bull have yet to be found.
With Bull’s death, work on the big gun immediately stopped. His assistants, engineers, researchers, buyers scattered throughout the world. They were familiar with parts of the project but the master plan was locked in Bull’s head, and only he knew how to proceed. Bull’s death was also the death of Babylon.
Two weeks after Bull’s death, the British authorities emerged from their long slumber. They finally dispatched a customs unit to the port of Teesport, where they seized eight huge Sheffield steel pipes, listed in the export manifest as “oil pipes.” It was a nice try, but too late: the British had missed forty-four other “oil pipes” that were already in service in Iraq. In the following weeks, more components of the giant gun were seized in five other European countries. An official investigation in England tried to establish how respectable companies like Sheffield Forge Masters could ignore Saddam Hussein’s devious goals and supply steel pipes for the big gun.
When the U.S. army conquered Iraq in 2003, they found piles of the huge pipes, slowly gathering rust in Al-Iskanderiya junkyard, about thirty miles south of Baghdad. The rusty pipes were all that was left of the grandiose plans of Dr. Gerald Bull.
Gerald Bull’s assassination came at a time of profound change in the Mossad character. The new ramsad, veteran Mossad agent Shabtai Shavit, found a very different service from what the Mossad used to be when he assumed his duties in 1989. A former Sayeret Matkal fighter and head of Caesarea, he seemed the right man for the job. But starting in the early seventies, with the systematic elimination of the leaders of Black September, and much more so in the eighties and nineties, the emphasis in the Mossad activity shifted from intelligence to special operations. The Mossad gradually had to assume most of the operations against the nonmilitary and nonconventional dangers threatening the State of Israel. The formal state organs were unable to efficiently defeat terrorism. The terrorist leaders lived abroad in relative safety, planned their attacks, and dispatched their men against Israeli bodies or citizens throughout the world. Even when Israel knew who they were and what they were doing, they could not arrest them and bring them to justice. The only way left to the Mossad was to find them and kill them. These were brutal, utterly trying actions for those like David Molad, who carried them out; but they achieved their goals when the killing of the terrorist leaders wiped out or immobilized their organizations for many years. The hunt for the Black September leaders was the best example. The Gerald Bull case had similar results. Even though his assassins were never officially identified, his death was also the death of his evil projects. It was the same with Wadie Haddad.
It all started with a box of chocolates.
Dr. Wadie Haddad, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was one of the most dangerous enemies of Israel. His most notorious operation had
been the hijacking of an Air France plane on its way from Tel Aviv to Paris on June 27, 1976. Several terrorists, Arabs, Germans, and South Americans, forced the pilot to land in Entebbe, the capital of Uganda, and demanded the exchange of the Jewish and Israeli hostages for the world’s most dangerous terrorists. In a heroic rescue operation, Israeli commandos flew thousands of miles, landed in Entebbe, killed the terrorists, and liberated the hostages. After Entebbe, Haddad realized that his life was in danger and moved his headquarters to Baghdad, where he felt safe. From Iraq, he continued to launch terrorist operations against Israel.
The Mossad was determined to kill the arch-terrorist. But how? A painstaking operation was launched, with the goal of discovering everything about Haddad, mostly his weaknesses and vices.
A year after the Entebbe rescue, the Mossad agents found out that Haddad adored chocolate, especially fine, Belgian chocolate. The information on Haddad’s secret vice came from a reliable Palestinian, who had infiltrated Haddad’s Popular Front.
The ramsad, Yitzhak Hofi, presented the information to Israel’s new prime minister, Menachem Begin, who immediately approved the operation. Mossad agents then recruited one of Haddad’s trusted aides, who was on a mission in Europe; on his return, he brought his boss a big box of mouthwatering Godiva chocolates. Mossad experts injected a deadly biological poison into the chocolates filled with sweet cream. They assumed that Haddad, who craved Godiva, would gobble all the chocolates himself and would not even think of sharing them with anybody.
Mossad Page 29