But Meiri had no problem being in Bayonet, and no compunction about what he did while he served in the unit. Over the years, people who knew of his covert life asked if he was ever haunted by images of the people he had killed, or if he had nightmares about them. “I dream at night about my family,” Meiri would reply. “I dream about the valley of slaughter there, next to Demblin in Poland; I dream about the Muselmänner [starving, sick inmates] in the death camps. Those are the things that bother me. I have no problem with anyone that I’ve killed. They deserved a bullet in the chest and two in the head, each one of them.”
Meiri was one of the men who shot Zwaiter to death in Rome. Two weeks later, the next target was marked: Mahmoud Hamshari, allegedly the number-two man in Black September.
The Mossad blamed him for a conspiracy to use international airmail to plant barometrically triggered bombs on planes flying from Europe to Israel. One such bomb exploded in February 1970, shortly after taking off from Frankfurt on a flight to Vienna, but the pilot managed to make an emergency landing. The pilot of Swissair Flight 330, from Zurich to Hong Kong, with a stopover in Tel Aviv, also tried to land after a bomb went off in his cargo compartment but crashed into a forest. All forty-seven passengers and crew members were killed. The Mossad also believed that Hamshari was connected to a failed attempt on Ben-Gurion’s life during his visit to Denmark in May 1969, and that his apartment in Paris served as the arsenal for Black September.
Bayonet operatives watching Hamshari in Paris found that he spent a large part of his time with his wife and baby daughter at home, and the rest meeting various people, mostly in busy public places.
Being surrounded by so many innocents presented a problem, to which Meir was acutely sensitive. She invited Harari to her home and made him a cup of tea. “Mike,” she said, “be sure that not a hair falls from the head of a French citizen. Not even a single hair. Do you understand me?”
Despite her newfound willingness to kill people in Europe, Meir still understood that certain protocols had to be followed. She also remained uncomfortable shouldering sole responsibility for condemning men to death. Whenever Zamir asked her to sign a “Red Page,” as the kill order was called because of the color of the paper it was typed on, she would convene a select group of her cabinet ministers to deliberate with her—including her minister for religious affairs, Zerach Warhaftig, who would anoint each mission with a religious stamp of approval.
Killing Hamshari, then, would have to be done when he was alone inside his apartment. Meiri and Romi made the operational plan, which called for the participation of an additional unit—a departure from the usual protocols of Caesarea, which generally functioned as an independent unit within the Mossad.
On December 3, a team from Rainbow (Keshet in Hebrew, the new name of Colossus, the unit responsible for clandestine penetration) broke into Hamshari’s apartment and took dozens of photographs, focusing especially on his work area. Those pictures were then flown to Israel and studied by Yaakov Rehavi, in the Mossad’s technical department. He noticed that the telephone sat on a marble base. He and his staff crafted an identical base, stuffed with explosives.
On December 7, a man who introduced himself as an Italian journalist named Carl, but was actually Nehemia Meiri, phoned Hamshari and set up an interview at a café near his home the next day. As the interview was taking place, the Rainbow team broke in again and swapped out the phone base. A short time after Hamshari returned home, his phone rang. “Is this Monsieur Dr. Hamshari?” a voice asked. When the affirmative came, a button on a remote detonator was pushed and the marble base blew up. Hamshari was “almost cut in half” by the fragments of marble, according to Kurtz, who took part in the operation. He died several weeks later in a Paris hospital.
—
THE MOSSAD AND AMAN personnel coordinating the targeted killings devoted considerable time and thought to the ethics of each one. It was important that such acts be perceived as moral, at least in the assassins’ own eyes. Even forty years later, Harari and his operatives described the deep conviction they held in both the end and the means. “In Caesarea there were no born killers. They were normal people, like you and me,” Harari told me. “If they hadn’t come to Caesarea, you wouldn’t have found them working as contract killers in the underworld. My warriors in Caesarea were on a mission for the state. They knew that someone had to die because he had killed Jews and if he went on living he’d kill more Jews, and therefore they did it out of conviction. Not one of them had any doubts over whether it had to be done or not; there was not even the slightest hesitation.”
Mossad chief Zamir also knew that having Meir’s backing was important to his warriors. He knew how the prime minister’s mind worked, too, so he always brought one or two Bayonet operatives with him when he met with her. One of them told her how important it was to know that their commander, Meir, was “a person with a world of moral values, with good judgment.” Because of that, he continued, the assassins “feel much more comfortable with everything they’ve done, even if sometimes, once, there were question marks.”
Meir beamed with happiness. “I sit facing them,” she said after another meeting with Caesarea warriors, “full of wonder at their courage, composure, ability to execute, knowledge. They sit right in the jaws of the enemy….I cannot explain to myself how we were blessed with a group like this.”
Despite such mutual admiration, and the shared conviction in the morality of their actions, there were in fact a number of questions about the motives behind many of the post-Munich targeted killings, and whether the appropriate targets were chosen.
“Some of the Arabs we killed in that period, we didn’t know why we were killing them, and they also don’t know to this day why they died,” a Caesarea officer said. “Zwaiter had nothing to do with the killing of the athletes, except, perhaps, that their plane flew over Rome on the way to Munich.”
A top Mossad official who looked at the Zwaiter file years too late admitted that “it was a terrible mistake.” Indeed, Palestinians have long insisted that Zwaiter was a peaceable intellectual who abhorred violence. (Granted, similar claims have been made about nearly every other Bayonet target from that period.)
But for some, that didn’t matter. “Let’s say that he [Zwaiter] was just the PLO representative in Rome, about which there’s no disagreement,” said an AMAN officer who dealt with identifying targets for Mossad hits. “We looked at the organization as one entity, and we never accepted the distinction between the people who dealt with politics and those who dealt with terror. Fatah was a terrorist organization that was murdering Jews. Anyone who was a member of such an organization had to know that he was a legitimate target.”
Indeed, it is difficult to determine retrospectively whether the Zwaiter slaying was an error or part of an approach that had, and still today has, many disciples in Israeli intelligence: Every member of a terrorist organization, even if his function is not directly connected to acts of terrorism, is a legitimate target.
The problem inherent in this approach was that it allowed the Mossad to kill the people it could, not necessarily those the agency believed it should. Though the Mossad considered the targeted killing campaign a success, by early 1973 it was clear that it had not damaged the top echelons of the PLO. Those targets were sheltered in Beirut. That was where Israel would have to strike. And that would be a much more difficult mission.
—
ON OCTOBER 9, 1972, a coded message arrived at the AMAN base responsible for communications with Israel’s agents in the Middle East. The base, which is situated on a ridge facing the sea and is surrounded by sand dunes, lies in one of Israel’s prettiest landscapes. Hundreds of soldiers were employed there to receive, decipher, encode, and transmit top-secret material.
The message that night read, “Model requests urgent meeting.”
Model was the code name for Clovis Francis, one of the most va
luable agents AMAN and the Mossad had ever run in Lebanon. He was a well-groomed Lebanese man from a rich, connected Christian family, and he served Israel faithfully for decades. He’d been sending encrypted messages since the 1940s, when he relied on homing pigeons. Using a camera installed in the door of his car, he supplied Israeli intelligence with some 100,000 photographs over the years, documenting every corner of the country. He visited Israel periodically, traveling by submarine or naval vessel, to brief top intelligence officials. But he never asked for payment. He spied, he said, because “I believed in an alliance between Lebanon and Israel and, later, because I saw the Palestinians’ activities in Lebanon as a great danger to my country.”
Three days after his message requesting a meeting, a rubber dinghy slid up in the dark of night to a beach near Tyre, in southern Lebanon. Model climbed in and was ferried to a missile boat, which steamed to Haifa. The top officers of Unit 504 were waiting there to hear what he had to say. Model did not disappoint. He brought with him the home addresses of four top PLO officials in Beirut: Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, the head of the PLO’s intelligence apparatus, who had been involved in the planning and approval processes for the Munich operation; Kamal Adwan, responsible for Fatah’s clandestine operations inside Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip; Kamal Nasser, the PLO spokesman; and Abu Jihad, Arafat’s second in command. The first three lived near one another in a pair of high-rise buildings on Verdun Street.
The information was passed to Romi, Caesarea’s intelligence officer, and he convened a series of meetings at the Caesarea HQ at Tel Aviv’s 2 Kaplan Street. In addition to the information about the residences of the PLO men, large amounts of high-grade intel had been amassed on additional PLO targets in Lebanon—weapons workshops, command posts, offices. Harari said that he believed “there’s a [targeted killing] operation here,” but there were still too many gaps in the info for him to move forward. “It was a rule with me,” Harari said, “that if there was no intelligence there would be no operation. Period.”
In order to fill in those gaps in information, Caesarea decided to send a female operative into Beirut.
Yael (only her first name can be made public) was born in Canada in 1936 and grew up in New Jersey in a Jewish family without any link to Israel. Later on, she developed an emotional relationship toward the young country, and decided that “true Zionism entails making aliyah (immigrating) to Israel and forgoing the comforts of life in America.” At that time, before the Six-Day War, “Israel aroused in me a sympathy for the underdog. Since childhood, I was attracted to people who were vulnerable, discriminated against.” After immigrating and first finding work as a computer programmer, she was eventually recruited by the Mossad personnel division into the long and demanding Caesarea training course. In time, she became known as an exceptionally talented and coolheaded operative, who used her quiet charisma and her attractive appearance as a powerful weapon. When Harari sent Yael to Beirut, he told her, “With your femininity, delicateness, and beauty, who would suspect you?”
Yael—code-named Nielsen in the Mossad—and her handlers crafted a cover story of someone who’d come to Lebanon to write a TV series on the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, an aristocratic British woman who defied the conservative restrictions of the nineteenth century and became a groundbreaking political and social activist. Stanhope traveled extensively and spent her last years in Lebanon and Syria.
Yael arrived in Lebanon on January 14, 1973. She checked in at Le Bristol Hotel and, after a few days, rented an apartment in a luxury building exactly opposite the two buildings where the three targets lived. She quickly made friends with both locals and foreigners in Beirut, who agreed to help her in her research for the TV series about Lady Stanhope. Her cover story enabled her to move around freely and provided a legitimate pretext for traveling almost anywhere in the country.
She began walking around the potential landing areas and the target buildings, carrying a handbag with a camera inside it, which she operated by pushing a button on the outside. “Every detail was important,” Yael later wrote in a journal. “Describing the day and nighttime routines in the three apartments, when the lights went on and off, who could be seen through the windows at what times, details about their cars, who came to call on them, whether the place was guarded.”
With Yael’s extensive reconnaissance work in hand, the Mossad now knew whom to hit and where to hit them, but enormous obstacles still remained. The homes of the top PLO men were in densely populated blocks in Beirut, so explosives couldn’t be used—the likelihood of killing innocent civilians was unacceptably high. These would have to be close-contact hits. The problem, though, was that Lebanon was a target country, hostile to Israel, where a captured assassin would surely face torture and death. That meant that the Caesarea warriors already planted in Beirut were trained not in combat but rather in long-term, deep-cover surveillance. And the Bayonet warriors, who could execute a clean kill, lacked convincing cover stories for getting into a target country and remaining there long enough to do the job. Even if they did, getting out of the country quickly after hitting as many as seven PLO targets—three men and four installations—would be well-nigh impossible.
Romi and Harari came to an unavoidable conclusion: Caesarea couldn’t carry out such a mission on its own. Only the IDF had the necessary forces and resources for a successful raiding party. This was a new proposition—until that point, the Mossad and the IDF had never cooperated in assault operations on the ground. It carried a special risk as well. Israel routinely denied responsibility for Mossad hits, but the moment a large military force started killing people, even if soldiers weren’t in uniform, it would be impossible for Israel to claim it wasn’t involved.
The IDF’s initial plan was an unwieldy and time-consuming mess, requiring a contingent of a hundred men to storm both high-rise buildings and drive the residents into the street. A sort of police lineup would be held in order to identify the targets, who would then be killed.
Lieutenant General David Elazar, the IDF’s chief of staff, had serious doubts about the plan. He asked Ehud Barak, the commander of Sayeret Matkal, the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit of the IDF, for some fresh ideas.
Sayeret Matkal was set up in the late 1950s with the aim of creating an elite force capable of clandestine penetration of enemy territory, which “would be trained to carry out combat operations, sabotage, and [intelligence] gathering,” in the words of its establishment order. Until the 1970s, the unit specialized mainly in deep penetrations behind enemy lines in order to install highly sophisticated listening and observation devices. It was and still is considered the best unit in the IDF, always receiving the cream of the new recruits, who then undergo a twenty-month training course, said by some to be the hardest in the world.
Ehud Barak, who was the first officer to grow up in the Sayeret, became its commander in 1971. Kibbutz-born, short of stature, but athletic and determined, Barak embodied all the special qualities the unit required. He was also a skilled politician who knew how to handle his superiors, and he was boundlessly ambitious while always maintaining his composure. From the moment he took over command, Barak pushed for Sayeret Matkal to be a bigger part of IDF operations, beyond gathering intelligence behind enemy lines.
So when Elazar requested his assistance in planning the Beirut hits, “a look of satisfaction spread across Barak’s face, like the look on the face of a chef starting to cook an extraordinary dish,” one of his officers said. Barak examined the raw intelligence, the plot points on a map of Beirut, the previous hundred-man plan. “Chief, this is no good,” Barak told Elazar. “A force of this size that enters Beirut and that may have to spend a long time there, until the ‘police lineup’ is done, will get involved in exchanges of fire. There could be many fatal casualties, on our side and on theirs. Civilians, too.”
Elazar asked him, “How would you do it?’ ”
Barak repli
ed, “Once we are sure the three targets are at home, we’ll enter the city with a very small force, no more than fifteen men, get to the apartments, break in, shoot them, and pull out. All in a few minutes. With the right planning and means, and appropriate training, we can get in and out before additional enemy forces arrive on the scene. By the time they grasp what’s happened, we’ll be gone. Most important: to maintain the element of surprise.”
Elazar smiled and gave Barak the green light to begin planning.
—
THE PLAN FOR OPERATION Spring of Youth—the Beirut raid—was outlined a few days later. The naval commando unit, Flotilla 13, would land the raiding party on the beach, where Caesarea operatives would be waiting with rented vehicles.
The Mossad team would then drive the troops to Verdun Street, where they would take the Fatah leaders by surprise in their apartments, kill them, then slip back to the beach and escape to Israel. At the same time, other commando squads would attack four different targets in Lebanon.
It was clear that after the operation it would be very difficult to carry out another one, and therefore the Israelis wanted to hit as many targets as possible. Barak has said that his sense was that Elazar was not confident that the Sayeret would succeed in hitting the three senior PLO men, and that he wanted to “spread the risk [of failing] out with additional objectives.”
This was a complex exercise, involving the coordination and integration of different units, so Elazar oversaw some of the training sessions himself. He raised the concern that a group of men moving in the middle of the night through downtown Beirut might arouse suspicion. He suggested that some of the men wear women’s clothing. “This way you’ll also be able to conceal more weapons,” Elazar said with a smile.
Some members of the Sayeret did not like their commander involving the unit in an operation that went beyond intelligence gathering. Before the raid, an internal argument broke out. Two of Barak’s officers, Amitai Nahmani and Amit Ben Horin, both kibbutz members of the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement, argued that the unit had not been established as a death squad and that they had no intention of becoming assassins. Barak tried to persuade them, but they asked to see a higher authority. Barak set up a meeting with chief of staff Elazar, who spoke to them about the importance of the war on terror and the fact that Jewish blood had been spilled by Fatah in Israel and abroad. He said it was their duty to respond “with force and elegance.” The two accepted the explanation and were assigned to the lead squad.
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