by Dan Raviv
Finding Salameh remained a high priority. That would happen under a new Mossad director and a new—and very different—Israeli government.
In 1977, for the first time in the 29-year history of the nation, the Labor Party lost an election. The leader of the right-wing Likud bloc, Menachem Begin, became prime minister.
Begin had been a leader of the Irgun, an underground movement that battled Arabs and the British before statehood in 1948. Irgun attitudes were more unbending and its methods generally more violent than those of Ben-Gurion’s mainstream Jewish fighters. Shifting from opposition leader to prime minister, Begin was now enchanted by the excitement of Israel’s intelligence community. He always believed in Jews being able to fight—and now, in fascinatingly innovative ways, they really could fight!
General Yitzhak Hofi had already taken over the Mossad from Zamir in 1974, and Begin was giving Hofi a free hand in almost everything. The prime minister enthusiastically approved finishing the job that was frustratingly incomplete: finding and eliminating Ali Hassan Salameh.
The Red Prince was known to be spending almost all of his time in Beirut, where his boss, Arafat, ran a mini-state within the nation of Lebanon. Reaching him there was certainly a possibility, as Israeli spies, assassins, and commandos had operated there before. But it was never easy.
This time, the key figure in the operation would be Erika Chambers. She was born in 1948 in London, where her father was a famous racing car driver. Her mother, a Czech Jew who grew up in Vienna, exposed Erika to Jewish culture and history.
She studied hydrology, first in England and then in Canberra, Australia. In 1972, she flew to Israel to do some field work in the Negev desert, continuing her studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Then, one day, she disappeared. She had joined Harari’s special operations department, Caesarea. She underwent training in all the relevant arts, including the use of explosives, and prepared herself to be planted undercover in enemy territory for a Kidon assassination mission.
Chambers first spent a long period in Germany establishing a legend, making sure to leave a trail of home addresses. Then she did some work for a children’s charity in Geneva, where she volunteered to be its representative in Lebanon. Soon Chambers was renting an apartment in Beirut, and she chose a location along the route where Salameh drove to and from his home every day.
She told her neighbors her name was Penelope, and they would see her feeding street cats and painting on an easel she set up on her balcony. That was a wonderful vantage point for looking down to spot approaching cars.
She also visited Palestinian orphanages, and her target—Salameh himself—was among the PLO officials she befriended.
In January 1979, she subtly made contact with at least two more Mossad combatants who had entered Lebanon using British and Canadian passports. These were the committed, seemingly emotionless, trained killers of Kidon. Using material that other Israeli agents had pre-positioned, they were able to fill a vehicle with explosives and a reliable radio-controlled detonator.
On January 22, they parked it along Salameh’s habitual driving route. When the Red Prince came up that road, one of the Mossad operatives pressed a button. The powerful bomb exploded. This particular elusive enemy of Israel was vaporized, his car mangled and charred. His four bodyguards and four bystanders—including a German nun and a British visitor—were also killed.
The Israeli assassination squad quickly fled. Yet for some reason, probably haste and uncharacteristic sloppiness, “Penelope” left behind her authentic British passport—identifying her as Erika Chambers—in her Beirut apartment.
Her return to the Mossad’s bosom came at sea. Harari personally waited for her and the other combatants on a navy missile boat, in the Mediterranean north of Israel’s territorial waters. Israeli naval commandos used motorized rubber craft to pick up the assassination team, after rendezvousing with them on a Lebanese beach.
Chambers received a hero’s welcome at Mossad headquarters. She was assigned to desk work—boring, of course, after her heart-pounding covert experiences. She took part in some lectures and training within the Mossad’s secret educational compound, but quite quickly Chambers retired and practically ceased to exist.
She changed her name and told her British parents and brother nothing, but she did regularly mail them holiday cards with Israeli stamps on the envelope. Here, then, was a woman from England—inspired by a partially Jewish upbringing and a short time in Israel to take daring and drastic action on behalf of the Mossad—then willing to give up her entire genuine life for the cause. Israeli intelligence was lucky to have more than a few other women and men who did much the same.
The Kidon unit’s achievement in 1979, erasing Ali Hassan Salameh, felt like good news in Israel. But the publicly exposed failure in Norway in 1973 continued to haunt Israeli intelligence. Many in the community referred to Lillehammer, in an unhappy pun, as Leyl-ha-Mar, Hebrew for “the Night of Bitterness.” Every time it was mentioned, Israeli secret operatives cringed. They all agreed that killing the wrong man—and then getting caught—added up to their greatest operational failure.
It could be argued that a post-Munich obsession with escalating the shadow war of assassinations prompted the intelligence agencies to misplace their keen judgment. Some senior officials complained that it was a mistake to be drawn into becoming a branch of Murder Incorporated. They claimed that Mossad resources, even after the massacre at the Olympics, should have been devoted far more heavily to tracking the military capabilities of Israel’s Arab neighbors.
The internal dissenters claimed that Israel was exaggerating the importance of Palestinian terrorism, for in the final analysis it was not this that would imperil the country’s existence. At worst, it was like a pesky insect annoying Israel without posing a huge threat. Others stressed that there was no use in wiping out the heads of Palestinian guerrilla groups, because there was no guarantee that their replacements would be more moderate or less able.
Some of the dissidents within Israeli intelligence further charged that the Lillehammer debacle did not lead to sufficiently harsh consequences. Mike Harari offered his resignation, but it was rejected by Zamir and Meir. The tenor of the times did not require individuals to bear responsibility for their failures. The Israeli public and the media still fully trusted the government.
Harari resumed his operations job in Tel Aviv for a few more years.
Zamir, as Mossad chief, was comfortable with the post-Munich focus on bringing the fight to the Palestinian enemy. His analysts concluded that PLO activists, rather than devoting their energies to terrorist planning, were now spending a lot of time and trouble looking over their shoulders—fearing that they themselves were about to be attacked.
Zamir broke his silence only three decades later, because of outrage over a movie. In an interview, his version of events was more complex than the oft-told tale of Prime Minister Meir demanding revenge against the individual Palestinians who organized the Olympics massacre.
The occasion that provoked Zamir to talk was the release of Munich, Steven Spielberg’s film based on a book, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, by Canadian journalist George Jonas. Jonas’s information came mainly from Juval Aviv, a New York-based private detective who claimed that he had led the Mossad’s post-Munich hit team.
Spielberg said he, too, had a chance to meet with “Avner,” the name used by Aviv. The famous filmmaker felt that he gained an understanding of the deep doubts supposedly felt by hit-team members—and, in the end, the uselessness of waging a war on terrorism.
Zamir was furious at the way the movie depicted the post-Olympics massacre events. “The film is a kind of Western, but with no connection to reality,” he said, then making a point of adding: “Aviv was never in the Mossad. He is an imposter.”
Explaining the true motivations of the Mossad and Meir, Zamir insisted that myth is not truth. “We didn’t go on a vengeance mission,”
he said. “The Mossad was not and is not a Mafia organization. Golda did not instruct me to take revenge.”
He did agree that the 1972 massacre led to a huge change in Israel’s response to attacks. Zamir said: “Until Munich, our policy was guided by the assumption that European nations would not allow Palestinian terror to operate on their soil or to stage a wave of hijackings. That meant that there was no need for us, the Mossad, to operate against the terrorists on European soil. Indeed, we avoided doing so.”
The PLO kept attacking Israelis in Europe, and in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem a faction arose that wanted a stronger, lethal reaction. “We—the intelligence and military chiefs—tried to persuade Golda that the European governments were soft on terrorists,” Zamir recalled. “And when they did arrest them, after a while they were released.” The Mossad chief concluded that Israel would have to mete out justice.
A dramatic dilemma developed in the highly eventful year, 1973. On February 21, a Libyan airliner on a routine flight from Benghazi to Cairo made a navigational error, overshooting the Egyptian capital and flying into Israeli-controlled airspace over the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli fighter planes were scrambled, but a political or senior military decision would be needed on how to respond to what appeared to be a civilian plane that was simply off course.
Unfortunately, only a few weeks before that, Israel’s intelligence community received a tip that an Arab terrorist group planned to hijack a passenger plane and crash it into either the Dimona nuclear reactor or the Shalom Tower in Tel Aviv, the country’s tallest building.
The Libyan pilot did not respond to radio calls from the Israelis or to such internationally recognized signals as flapping wings attempted by the fighter pilots. With only a few minutes remaining until a target building might be hit, the military chief of staff—General David (Dado) Elazar—issued an order that the Libyan airliner be shot down. Out of 112 passengers and crew, 105 were killed. News coverage of the wreckage and of the bodies of victims, scattered over the sands of the Sinai, made Israel look awful.
Libya’s dictator, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, was livid. To take revenge against the Jewish state, he insisted on immediate and extreme use of a Libyan-Egyptian political-military alliance then in effect. He had heard that the British ocean liner, the Queen Elizabeth 2, would be visiting the Israeli port of Ashdod in May to mark the 25th anniversary of Israel’s independence. Qaddafi insisted that an Egyptian navy submarine sink the QE2.
Luckily, cooler heads prevailed in Cairo. President Anwar Sadat blocked any such order to his navy, regardless of the shared authority that Qaddafi supposedly wielded. The dictator was to be told that the submarine could not locate the cruise ship.
One of Sadat’s motivations was that he had already started planning a surprise attack, for October 1973, in the hope that it would force the Israelis out of the Sinai Peninsula. Torpedoing Britain’s gem of the ocean could well torpedo Sadat’s more significant plan.
Qaddafi—who had seized power in a military coup four years earlier and was only beginning to earn his eventual nickname of “Mad Dog of the Middle East”—insisted on revenge for the downing of the Libyan airliner. According to Israeli officials, Sadat gave in and agreed to a more modest operation that might seem fitting: downing an El Al airliner as it approached Rome’s Fiumicino Airport for a landing.
Egypt’s intelligence agency agreed to provide Soviet-made SAM-7 Strela missiles to a team of PLO guerrillas, who would fire them. The coordinator of the plot was Ashraf Marwan, a young and ambitious chemist who was a significant character in Cairo for three reasons: His father was a senior Egyptian officer; he himself was the husband of Mona, daughter of the late President Nasser; and he was a close aide to President Sadat.
Two Strela missiles, with their launchers, were packed into boxes bearing Mona’s name, and they were sent from Cairo to Rome as legally unsearchable diplomatic mail. The addressee was an Egyptian arts center in Italy.
Marwan picked up the parcels, wrapped the missiles and launchers in a large carpet, and personally delivered them to the Palestinian terrorists at an elegant shoe store on Via Veneto, near the United States embassy. Marwan then flew to London to await the results.
The plot failed. Italy’s security services and police arrested some of the terrorists and seized their missiles. What the Libyan, Egyptian, and Palestinian conspirators never knew was the secret about Marwan: He was a paid agent for the Mossad, one of the best Israel ever had.
Zamir knew what was happening, every step of the way. He knew about Qaddafi’s drive for revenge, his pressure on Egypt, and Sadat’s approval of a plan to shoot down innocents on an Israeli airliner.
Zamir had flown to Rome, to supervise Mossad operatives who kept the Palestinian plotters under surveillance. Zamir, waiting until he knew that they had the missiles with them, personally informed his Italian counterpart.
Frustration for the Mossad came, however, when the five Palestinians who were arrested—despite being sentenced to long terms by a judge at their trial—were released by Italy after only a few months.
The release was forced upon Italy by a PLO method that became increasingly routine. Palestinians hijacked an Italian civilian airliner, and they refused to release the plane and a large number of hostages until the five prisoners in Rome were set free.
What filmmaker Spielberg and countless publications did not comprehend fully was the logic behind the Mossad’s post-Munich assassinations. European governments were repeatedly giving in to blackmail and releasing Arabs who clearly were guilty of terrorism. Israel wanted its enemies to be neutralized. It would have settled for seeing them jailed for long terms. But because Europe was releasing them, Israel decided that it would have to remove them from the scene.
Finding it impractical to take the extra risks to kidnap and imprison known terrorists in distant lands, the Mossad would kill them.
In addition, there was a desire for psychological impact. Despite the fact that there were barely 10 killings in this campaign, a deterrent effect was surely achieved. Israel was perceived as a country with a very long arm and the memory of an elephant.
More than 30 years later, in light of Hollywood’s distorted take on the post-Munich killings, Zamir felt compelled to clarify the nuanced reasons for the Mossad sending out assassins—even to friendly countries where police and politicians were unhappy about playing host to bloodshed. He insisted that the killings were tactical, part of a war.
Zamir said: “Munich was a shock to all of us, a turning point. Yet, Golda didn’t order us to avenge the slaughter of our athletes, as the world has assumed. Our decision was to disrupt the PLO’s operational infrastructure in Europe: their offices, couriers, representatives, and routes.
“Golda left the decision whom to kill, and where, to us. Our attitude was that in order to defend ourselves, we have to go on the attack. And I believe we succeeded in our campaign. Those who accuse us of being motivated simply by revenge are talking nonsense. We didn’t wage a vendetta campaign against individuals. It was a war against an organization, aiming to halt and prevent concrete terrorist plans.
“Yes, those who were involved in Munich deserved death. But we didn’t deal with the past. We concentrated on what was expected to happen.”
Zamir also refuted the myth of Committee X. “There was no such committee,” he said. “The system worked differently. At headquarters, the heads of the operational and research units collected data on the most active PLO representatives and agents in Europe. Based on that information, a list was compiled, and that was shown to a small group of senior Mossad managers.
“That was the forum that decided whom to kill, and where and when, if operational circumstances allowed that to be carried out.”
The process was far more informal, in a sense more Israeli, than having a stodgy committee labeled X. Zamir did, indeed, go to Prime Minister Meir with the list of recommended targets, and she consulted with a small group of cabinet members: Moshe Dayan, Foreign Minister
Abba Eban, Yigal Allon, and Yisrael Galili. Her counterterrorism advisor, Aharon Yariv, was also part of the consultation process—focused on the danger that the intended target might pose if he continued to be alive and active. They also considered what the damage might be to Israel’s relations with the country where the assassination would take place.
Last, but surely not least, the prime minister and her advisors—in a pattern that became a fixture of Israeli behavior—wanted to know about collateral damage. The Israelis believe they are different from, and, indeed, morally superior to, their Middle East counterparts. The Mossad targeted only the suspects and tried to avoid killing innocent people, though occasionally some deaths and injuries did occur.
In the end, it was Golda Meir herself who gave Zamir the final green light for any “elimination mission.” A planned assassination, by the foreign intelligence agency of a modern democratic country, was considered something for which the highest elected authority in the land should take responsibility.
Murdering individuals was and remains a rarely used weapon for Israeli intelligence, but it would continue to be a very important tool: to eliminate the person or persons gunned down or blown up, and to send a message to others who might think of joining or replacing those killed.
Israeli leaders kept their focus on terrorism, probably to an exaggerated degree. They almost ignored the fact that military build-ups by Arab armies would pose much more of a danger than the ambitions of a “Red Prince” Salameh or Arafat.
Chapter Eleven
Forbidden Arms
In the first half of the 1960s, Israel managed to repel pressure from the United States and France to slow down or fully reveal its embryonic nuclear program. Side-stepping pressure from powerful foreigners gave the Israelis who were privy to the secret an energizing sense of confidence. They realized that producing nuclear bombs would be doable. No one would stop Israel.