On the night of June 16–17, the Bayonet team planted a bomb under the car. In the morning, when one of the Palestinian men got into the car and started to drive away, he was followed by a Mossad car, with Harari driving and Carlos in the passenger seat, holding a remote control the size of a shoebox. In order for the bomb to be detonated, a minimal distance between the vehicles had to be maintained. After a few minutes, the Palestinian man in the car stopped to pick up his partner, who was staying at another address, and then drove off again. Carlos was about to push the button exactly when the car entered the Piazza Barberini, site of the Triton Fountain, an important work by the famous sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Harari knew Rome well from the days after World War II when he was working to help refugees immigrate to Israel, and he was someone who appreciated art. “No! Stop! The statue…It’s Bernini! Do not detonate!” he yelled at a confused Carlos, then proceeded to explain the importance of the work to him.
A few seconds later, when the car carrying the two Palestinians had moved away from the fountain, the button was pressed. The front part of the car exploded and the two men were very badly injured. One later died in the hospital. Police found weapons in the car and interpreted the explosion as a “work accident,” assuming the two were terrorists who had a bomb in the car and had handled it incorrectly.
“Sadness” also reported on the activities of Mohammed Boudia, the head of PFLP operations in Europe. Boudia was a colorful combination of Algerian revolutionary, bisexual bohemian playboy, adventurer, and arch-terrorist who worked for both Haddad and Black September. The small theater he ran in Paris, Théâtre de l’Ouest, was used as a cover for his plans to attack Israelis and Jews.
Thanks to Sadness’s reports, the Shin Bet managed to thwart some of his plans before they were executed. One was for simultaneous explosions of powerful TNT bombs in Tel Aviv’s seven biggest hotels on the Seder night of Passover 1971.
During June 1973, Sadness reported that Boudia was plotting another big attack. A team of thirty Bayonet and Rainbow operatives followed him the length of Paris before an opportunity arose, when he parked his car in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, in the Latin Quarter. When he came back and started it again, a pressure-sensitive bomb placed under the seat of his car exploded and killed him.
Bayonet’s string of triumphs instilled a sense of euphoria throughout the whole organization. “It seemed as if there was nothing the Mossad couldn’t do,” said a Caesarea veteran, “and that there was no one we couldn’t reach.”
That said, the reckoning with Black September remained open. Nine months after the horrific slaughter in Munich—the attack that had triggered the uptick in targeted killings—senior members of Black September were still at large. The Mossad had killed a lot of people, but not the eleven men it wanted most. These included the three surviving participants of the operation, who had been imprisoned but then sprung after Black September hijacked a Lufthansa plane and forced the Germans to release them. The other eight had been marked by the Mossad as tied to the conception, command, or execution of the attack.
At the top of that list was Ali Hassan Salameh, Black September’s operations officer.
Ali Salameh’s father, Hassan Salameh, had been one of the two commanders of the Palestinian forces in 1947 when war broke out after the UN decision on the establishment of Israel. The Haganah had repeatedly tried and failed to assassinate him, until he was finally killed in combat.
His son carried a heavy burden. “I wanted to be myself, [but]…I was constantly conscious of the fact that I was the son of Hassan Salameh and had to live up to that, even without being told how the son of Hassan Salameh should live,” Ali Salameh said in one of the only two interviews he ever gave. “My upbringing was politicized. I lived the Palestinian cause, at a time when the cause was turning in a vicious circle. They were a people without a leadership. The people were dispersed, and I was part of the dispersion. My mother wanted me to be another Hassan.”
But by the mid-1960s, the pressure from Ali’s family, together with Yasser Arafat, was enough. Ali gave in and presented himself at the Fatah recruitment office. “I became very attached to Fatah,” he recalled. “I had found what I was looking for.”
“He very quickly became Arafat’s favorite,” said Harari.
In 1968, he was sent to Egypt by Arafat, for training in intelligence and the operation of explosives. He became an assistant to Abu Iyad, who assigned him to oversee the identification and liquidation of Arabs who collaborated with Israelis.
Salameh was young, charismatic, wealthy, and handsome, and enjoyed the high life that went hand in hand with membership in Rasd, the secret intelligence arm of Fatah. He combined his love of women and parties with his terrorist activities in a manner that “raised eyebrows in Fatah,” according to an Israeli military intelligence report on him.
The Mossad believed that Salameh had been involved in a long list of terror attacks, some against Jordan and some against Israel, including the hijacking of the Sabena airliner. Documents seized in al-Najjar’s apartment in Beirut indicated that Salameh’s responsibilities included liaising with European terrorist organizations, and that he had invited Andreas Baader, co-founder of the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, to a Palestinian training camp in Lebanon. “We showed the documents to the Germans,” said Shimshon Yitzhaki, head of the Mossad’s counterterror unit, “to make it clear to them that the danger of Palestinian terror was their concern as well.”
There is no disagreement about these charges, but the Mossad was also convinced that Salameh was implicated in the planning and execution of the Munich massacre, and that he had even been present not far from the scene when the terror squad was dispatched to Connollystrasse 31 in the Olympic Village. However, Mohammed Oudeh (Abu Daoud) maintained that Salameh wasn’t involved at all and that he, Oudeh, planned and commanded the operation. Doubts about Salameh’s role were also raised in two books on the subject, Kai Bird’s The Good Spy and Aaron Klein’s Striking Back.
But to this day, Yitzhaki remains confident: “The fact that Abu Daoud, years after the event, when Salameh was no longer alive, wanted to take all the credit for himself makes no difference. Ali Salameh was not present when the attack went down in Munich, but he was involved in the deepest manner possible in the planning, recruitment of personnel, and perpetration of that shocking murder.”
In any case, Salameh was a marked man. “Ali Hassan Salameh was the number-one target,” Harari said. “We hunted him for a long time.” The Mossad had only one recent photograph of him, though, which they used, without success, to try to locate him. Information about him took Bayonet operatives to Hamburg, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Stockholm, and other European cities. Each time, they seemed to have missed him by moments.
The breakthrough came in mid-July 1973, after an Algerian named Kemal Benamene, who was working for Fatah and had links with Black September, left his apartment in Geneva for a flight to Copenhagen and waited for him there. The Mossad had reason to believe he was planning an attack with Salameh, and he was followed. If they could stick close to Benamene, the Israelis reasoned, they would reach Salameh and be able to kill him.
The Caesarea men trailing Benamene saw that he didn’t leave Copenhagen airport, but instead went to the area for passengers in transit and then immediately boarded a flight to Oslo. From there he took a train to Lillehammer. The whole time, he was followed by Mossad operatives. Harari and Romi concluded that he was going to meet their target in the sleepy Norwegian town.
Commandeering personnel from two Bayonet teams engaged in missions elsewhere in Europe, Harari rapidly formed a task force. The team of twelve was headed by Nehemia Meiri and comprised a mixture of trained assassins and other operatives and Caesarea staffers who knew Norwegian and were available for the job. One of these team members was Sylvia Rafael, the operative who traveled the Arab world posing as an anti-Israeli Canad
ian photojournalist named Patricia Roxburgh and gathered much valuable information on the armies in the region.
Other members of the squad included Avraham Gehmer, who had been Rafael’s training officer; Dan Arbel, a Danish-Israeli businessman who occasionally took part in Mossad operations in Arab countries, helping with logistics and renting cars and apartments; and Marianne Gladnikoff, an immigrant from Sweden and former Shin Bet employee who had just recently joined the Mossad but who spoke Scandinavian languages fluently.
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WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS a matter of some dispute. In one version, likely the most accurate, the Caesarea surveillance team lost Benamene’s trail in Lillehammer. They then began using the “combing method,” a technique Meiri helped devise in the 1950s when he was looking for KGB agents in Israel, which enabled the search team to cover large urban areas and quickly locate their target’s position. After a day’s search, they zeroed in on a man sitting with a group of Arabs in a café in the center of the town. He looked, they thought, exactly like the man in the photograph of Salameh they were carrying, “like two brothers look like each other,” General Aharon Yariv, the former head of AMAN who was now Prime Minister Meir’s adviser on counterterrorism, later said.
In another version, the man identified as Salameh was not just sitting with some unknown Arabs in a café, but was actually spotted in a meeting with known Fatah activists. In this version, then, the Israelis saw that the suspect was associating with other known terrorists, and thus they had an additional indication, apart from the photograph, that this was most likely the man they were looking for.
Either way, a report that Salameh had been positively identified was transmitted to the Mossad HQ, on Shaul Hamelech Street in Tel Aviv. But Harari was told that it was not possible for him to speak to the director, Zvi Zamir, because he had decided to travel to Lillehammer himself in order to be there when the hit was carried out. Harari instructed his team to continue with the surveillance.
They soon discovered that the man they thought was Salameh lived a quiet life in Lillehammer. He had a blond Norwegian girlfriend who was heavily pregnant. He went to the movies and to an indoor pool in town. He didn’t betray any of the skittishness or caution of a man concerned that the Mossad might be looking for him. Marianne Gladnikoff purchased a swimsuit and went to the pool to watch and observe him. What she saw only made her question whether this man really was the most wanted Palestinian terrorist after all.
She was not the only one. But when Gladnikoff and others expressed their doubts to Harari—who in turn discussed them with Zamir, already in Oslo, en route to Lillehammer—they were dismissed. “We told them that we thought this wasn’t our man,” an operative nicknamed Shaul said. “But Mike and Zvika [Zamir] said it made no difference. They said, ‘Even if it isn’t Salameh, it’s clear that he’s some other Arab with connections to terrorists. So even if we don’t hit Salameh, the worst we’d do is kill a less important terrorist, but still a terrorist.”
Harari had his own opinion: “Seven operatives make a positive identification between the photograph and the man we’d seen in the street, and only a minority think it wasn’t him. You have to decide, and you go with the majority. The easiest thing is to say ‘Don’t pull the trigger,’ but that way you’ll end up doing nothing.”
The target was kept under observation. In a phone call on Saturday, July 21, Zamir, who had not managed to get the train to Lillehammer, ordered Harari to proceed with the hit. That night, the man and his girlfriend left their apartment and took a bus to a movie theater. The Bayonet team, in vehicles and on foot, did not let them out of their sight. At about 10:30, the couple left the theater and took the bus home. When they got off the bus, a gray Volvo stopped nearby, and Shaul and Y., another operative, got out. The two drew silenced Beretta pistols and shot the man eight times before running back to the car and making off. They left the woman, who was not hit, kneeling over their victim, screaming as she cradled his bloody head.
The hit men drove to a prearranged meeting place, where some of the other team members and Mike Harari were waiting. Shaul reported that the job was a success, but added that they had seen a woman who had witnessed the killing write down the Volvo’s license number as they drove away.
Harari told the logistics man, Arbel, to park the car on a side street and toss the keys into a storm drain. Then Arbel and Gladnikoff were to take a train to Oslo and fly to London and then Israel. The other operatives were to wait in rented apartments for a few hours and then fly out as well. Meanwhile, Harari and the two assassins would drive south to Oslo, where they would take a ferry to Copenhagen.
Shaul and Y. took separate flights out of Denmark. Harari boarded a plane for Amsterdam, confident, flush with success. Salameh’s elimination was the final rung on the ladder of Harari’s climb to the directorship of the Mossad once Zamir’s term ended. Only in Amsterdam, while watching the news on TV, did he finally understand that a catastrophe had just occurred.
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THE MAN THE ISRAELIS killed in Lillehammer was not Ali Hassan Salameh, but Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan working as a waiter and cleaning man at the swimming pool. He was married to a woman named Torill, who was seven months pregnant. She described what happened:
All of a sudden, my husband fell. I did not understand what had happened, and then I saw those two men. They were three, four meters away from us. One of them was the driver of the car, and the second was his passenger. They stood outside the car, on both sides, firing pistols. I fell flat on the ground, sure they wanted to kill me, too, and that I would die in a moment. But then I heard the car doors slam and it drove away. My husband didn’t shout….I got up and ran as fast as I could to the nearest house and told them to call the police and an ambulance. When I got back, there were already people around my husband trying to help him. An ambulance came and I drove with my husband to the hospital, and there they told me he was dead.
Mossad chief Zamir tried to dismiss the disaster: “Not one of us has the means of making only correct decisions. Wrong identification of a target is not a failure. It’s a mistake.” Zamir placed some of the blame on the victim’s conduct: “He behaved in a manner that seemed suspicious to our people who were following him. He made a lot of journeys, the aim of which it is difficult to know. He may have been dealing in drugs.”
Meiri was not at the scene because he’d torn a ligament the day before and had been sent back to Israel by Harari. In his version of events, Bouchiki was seen meeting with known Fatah operative Kemal Benamene. He insisted the operation was therefore still a success. “It angers me that it is seen as a failure,” he said. “What difference does it make if I kill the arch-murderer or his deputy?”
But there’s no substantive evidence that Bouchiki was anyone’s deputy. In truth, he had no connection at all to terrorism, and the Lillehammer affair was nothing but the cold-blooded murder of an innocent pool attendant.
And Bayonet’s problems were just beginning. According to Shaul, while waiting for the hit to go down, Dan Arbel had bought a faucet and a few other items for a house he was building in Israel. He put them in the trunk of the gray Volvo—the car Harari later told him to dump because a witness had gotten the plate number. But Arbel didn’t want to carry his rather heavy purchases, so instead of getting rid of the Volvo, he drove it to the airport in Oslo with Gladnikoff.
The police were waiting at the rental car return at the airport. Arbel broke down fairly quickly under interrogation because of his claustrophobia. “Only after the operation,” Shaul said, “did we read in Arbel’s file [about] his fear of closed places and how apprehensive he was about getting caught and interrogated. It was very unprofessional behavior on Caesarea’s part. A man writes an honest report and no one reads it. If they had read it, he would have been suspended immediately from operational duties.”
Arbel told the police where to find Avraham Gehmer and Sylv
ia Rafael, and a search of their hideout led to the capture of two more operatives. It was already clear to the Norwegians that this was a targeted killing and the Mossad was behind it. Documents found on the detainees (which the operatives were supposed to have destroyed after reading them) led to the discovery all across Europe of safe houses, collaborators, communications channels, and operational methods. The information also helped the Italian and French security authorities with their investigations into targeted killings that had been carried out in their countries.
The six detainees were put on trial, making headlines all across the globe and causing extreme discomfort in Israel. Particularly embarrassing was that Arbel had given up everything, even the phone number of Mossad HQ in Tel Aviv. Israel did not admit that it was responsible for killing Bouchiki, but the state provided legal defense and other assistance for the prisoners. The court found that the Mossad was behind the murder. Five of the six were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five and a half years, but they were all released after serving only short periods because a secret agreement was reached between the governments of Israel and Norway. Upon their release from prison, they were greeted as returning heroes in Israel.
Harari and Zamir kept their jobs, although the snafu probably cost Harari his dream of becoming head of the Mossad. “Lillehammer was a real failure all down the line, from those who tailed the target to the shooters, from the Mossad to the State of Israel,” said Caesarea veteran Moti Kfir. “By a miracle, precisely those who were truly responsible for what happened came out of it without any harm.”
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