Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Begin equated Yasser Arafat with Adolf Hitler and believed that the Palestinian Covenant, which called for the destruction of the Jewish state, was nothing less than Mein Kampf II. “We Jews and we Zionists, guided by experience, will not take the path taken by leaders in Europe and across the globe in the thirties,” Begin said in a fulminating speech in the Knesset on July 9, 1979, attacking the West German and Austrian chancellors, Willy Brandt and Bruno Kreisky, for their ties to Yasser Arafat.

  “We take Mein Kampf II seriously, and we shall do all we can—and with God’s help we will be able—to prevent the realization of the horror…uttered by that son of Satan [Arafat]…the leader of a despicable organization of murderers, the likes of which has not existed since the Nazis.”

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  SINCE 1974, AS TERROR attacks in Europe tapered off, Arafat had been putting special emphasis on political efforts in the international arena to obtain diplomatic recognition for the PLO and to present himself as someone who was ready to negotiate with Israel. Over Israel’s vociferous objections, official and overt PLO diplomatic missions were opened all over the world, including in Europe. At the height of this campaign, in November 1974, Arafat appeared before the UN General Assembly and delivered a speech that generally was accepted as being relatively moderate.

  Moreover, Arafat’s efforts to appear an advocate for a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began a thaw in relations between the PLO and the United States. Israeli intelligence was deeply concerned about a potential rapprochement between its main ally and its chief enemy. A December 1974 paper prepared by AMAN for then–Prime Minister Rabin warned that “the United States has an interest in acquiring maximal influence inside the PLO so that it will not remain an exclusively Soviet stronghold.” The paper also said, about Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was considered pro-Israel, “We do not find in his words an absolute negation of PLO with regard to the future.”

  Israel’s intelligence community wasn’t persuaded by the PLO’s diplomacy. To AMAN, it was nothing more than “a draft strategy for the liquidation of Israel.” While Arafat wooed American diplomats and was toasted at the United Nations, his people were continuing to attack Israeli citizens. “Arafat was the complete opposite of his ludicrous appearance. He was a kind of genius,” said Major General Amos Gilad, long a prominent figure in military intelligence. “He had two deputies for running terror operations, Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, but, except in one attack, you won’t find any direct connection to Arafat. It’s like a zookeeper letting a hungry lion loose in the streets and it eats someone. Who’s responsible? The lion? Clearly it’s the zookeeper. Abu Jihad got directives in principle, and he did the rest on his own. Arafat didn’t want reports, didn’t take part in planning meetings, didn’t okay operations.”

  Arafat’s increased prominence on the world stage led to a sharp debate between the Mossad and AMAN about whether he was still a suitable target for assassination. Brigadier General Yigal Pressler, then head of the AMAN department that dealt with assassination targets, argued passionately that Arafat should be left at the top of the list: “He is a terrorist. He has Jewish blood on his hands. He orders his people to keep on carrying out terror attacks. Everything must be done to get rid of him.”

  The head of counterterror at the Mossad, Shimshon Yitzhaki, disagreed: “After Arafat’s speech at the UN, he has become a political figure. He’s the head of the snake, but the world has given him legitimacy, and killing him will put Israel into an unnecessary political imbroglio.”

  Ultimately, the latter opinion won the day. That meant that Arafat’s name was removed from the kill list and Wadie Haddad’s name was pushed to the top.

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  FOR EIGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER the Entebbe raid, Wadie Haddad lived securely and very affluently in Baghdad and Beirut.

  The Mossad was apprehensive about using firearms in Arab capitals such as Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut, however, because the risk of capture was simply too great. And so more silent methods of assassination were sought, ones that had a less visible signature and made the death appear natural or accidental, the product of, say, a disease or a car crash. In such cases, even if there were to be a suspicion of foul play, by the time anything could be done, the killers would be long gone, whereas, in a hit using firearms, it is immediately clear that the killers are still in the vicinity.

  The Mossad decided to exploit its deep intelligence penetration of Haddad’s organization and to allocate the job of eliminating him to Junction. The assassination, using poison, was assigned to the agent Sadness, who had a high degree of access to his home and office.

  On January 10, 1978, Sadness switched Haddad’s toothpaste for an identical tube containing a lethal toxin, which had been developed after intense effort at the Israel Institute for Biological Research, in Ness Ziona, southeast of Tel Aviv, one of the most closely guarded locations in Israel. It was founded in 1952 and still serves as the facility where Israel develops its top-secret defensive and offensive biological warfare agents. Each time Haddad brushed his teeth, a minute quantity of the deadly toxin penetrated the mucous membranes in his mouth and entered his bloodstream. The gradual accretion in his body, when it reached a critical mass, would be fatal.

  Haddad began feeling sick and was admitted to an Iraqi government hospital. He told the doctors there that in the middle of January he had begun suffering from severe abdominal spasms after a meal. His appetite faded, and he lost more than twenty-five pounds.

  He was first diagnosed as suffering from hepatitis and, later, a very bad cold. Doctors treated him with aggressive antibiotics, but his condition didn’t improve. His hair began to fall out and his fever spiked. The doctors in Baghdad were at a loss. They suspected that Haddad had been poisoned. Arafat instructed an aide to approach the Stasi, East Germany’s secret service, to ask them for help. In the 1970s, the Stasi had provided Palestinian terror organizations with passports, intelligence, shelter, and weapons. The East German leader, Erich Honecker, and others in that country regarded Arafat as a true revolutionary, like Fidel Castro, and were ready to help him.

  On March 19, 1978, Haddad was flown to the Regierungskrankenhaus, in East Berlin, a prestigious hospital that catered to members of the intelligence and security communities. His aides packed a bag for him with his toiletries, including a tube of the deadly toothpaste.

  Intelligence material reaching the Mossad after he boarded the plane from Baghdad to Berlin gave cause for satisfaction. “Haddad was absolutely finished when he reached Germany,” read a report at a Junction command meeting. “Biological Institute experts say he is a dead man walking.”

  He was admitted under the pseudonym Ahmed Doukli, forty-one years old, five feet six inches tall. He was indeed in bad condition: hemorrhaging in many places, including subcutaneously, from the pericardium around his heart, at the root of his tongue, his tonsils, his pleural membranes, and inside his cranium, with large quantities of blood in his urine. Bone marrow functioning was suppressed, with a resulting drop in the red platelet count in his blood. Despite his being treated as a privileged patient, Haddad’s condition continued to deteriorate. The military physicians, the best doctors in East Germany, put their patient through every conceivable test: blood, urine, bone marrow, X-rays. They believed he had been poisoned, either with rat poison or some heavy metal, perhaps thallium, but they could find no physical evidence. According to information reaching Israel from an agent in East Germany, Haddad’s screams of pain reverberated throughout the hospital, and the doctors gave him increasing doses of tranquilizers and sedatives.

  Wadie Haddad died in great agony in the East Berlin hospital on March 29, ten days after he had arrived. Shortly afterward, Stasi chief Erich Mielke received a full report, including results of an autopsy conducted by Professor Otto Prokop, of East Berlin’s Humboldt University, one of the world’s leading authorities on forensic medicine. He wro
te that the immediate cause of death was “brain bleeding and pneumonia by panmyelopathy” and that, in view of the symptoms and the person under discussion, there was room for suspicion that someone had assassinated him. But in hairsplitting forensic medicalese, he was actually admitting that he had no idea what had killed Haddad.

  At the time of his death, Haddad was effectively in command of an entirely separate organization from that led by George Habash. But Habash grieved his comrade’s demise, and he had no doubt that Israel was behind it.

  The Mossad and the leaders of the Israeli defense establishment were overjoyed at the operation’s outcome. One of Israel’s most potent and effective enemies had been neutralized. No less important, five years after the Lillehammer fiasco, the Mossad had returned to targeted killings, and had done so in an eminently sophisticated manner. This may have been the first time that the phrase “low-signature,” to describe an assassination in which the death appears to be natural or by chance, entered the Mossad’s vocabulary.

  “I was very happy when I heard Haddad was dead,” said Shimshon Yitzhaki. Because Israel never admitted that it had killed Haddad, he stressed, “Don’t take my words as confirmation of involvement in the case,” but he declared that “anyone who has Jewish blood on their hands is doomed to die. Without Haddad, incidentally, his organization couldn’t exist. It was already functioning separately from George Habash, and it split between Haddad’s deputies and then kept on splitting until it melted away.”

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  WITH HADDAD ELIMINATED, THE Mossad moved on to its next target: Ali Hassan Salameh.

  The reasons Salameh had to die are a matter of some dispute. Israeli intelligence believed he had planned and implemented the slaughter of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, though people who worked with Salameh strongly deny this accusation. In any case, the desire to eliminate him was likely intensified by the fact that the attempt to assassinate him in Lillehammer had turned into the most embarrassing and damaging fiasco in the Mossad’s history. Salameh himself poured oil on the flames by mocking the agency for botching the Norwegian operation. “When they killed Bouchiki, I was in Europe,” Salameh said in an interview with the Lebanese Al-Sayad. “Bouchiki was a swimming pool employee. His face and figure did not match my description.” Salameh said he was saved “not so much because of my skills, but rather because of the weakness of Israeli intelligence.”

  This interview was distributed to the heads of the intelligence community by the AMAN department that deals with open-sources intelligence—Harari had asked the unit to collect every detail it could about Salameh. “Do not fear,” he told his people when the interview was read out at a Caesarea meeting. “His day will come.”

  Salameh was undoubtedly connected to a number of acts of terrorism against both Israeli and Arab targets. He himself admitted involvement in Black September operations in the two interviews he gave. But Black September was not in existence anymore in 1978, and Salameh had taken on a number of internal roles in Fatah, leaving the terror activities to others. Was revenge for what he had done in the past a sufficient reason to take him out?

  “Killing Salameh was first and foremost a matter of closing the Munich account,” said Yair Ravid, who was the commander of Unit 504’s northern region and one of the top experts on PLO attacks originating in Lebanon. “In our view, he was not an initiator of terrorist attacks” in the late 1970s. Other Caesarea operatives of the time, however, insisted that Salameh remained a threat as a commander of the PLO’s Force 17, Arafat’s bodyguard unit. “We’ve got to remember that Force 17 not only was guarding Arafat, but also carried out various terrorist operations,” said one Caesarea veteran.

  But there was also a deeper motive.

  On July 10, 1978, during a high-level meeting at the Mossad, Caesarea chief Mike Harari reported that there had been “significant progress” made toward the goal of eliminating Salameh. But David Kimche, the head of Universe (Tevel), the Mossad branch in charge of relations with the intelligence agencies of other countries, said that his CIA counterparts had hinted that Salameh was an asset of theirs. “They didn’t say explicitly that they wanted to protect him, but this has to be on the table, and we have to ask ourselves whether our relations with ‘Helga’ ”—the Mossad’s nickname for the CIA—“should alter our attitude toward him.”

  Shimshon Yitzhaki responded sharply, “So what? Suppose he’s connected to the Americans. This man has Jewish blood on his hands. He was involved in Munich. He’s still operating against us. I don’t give a damn if he’s an American agent.”

  In fact, Salameh was not just any source for the CIA. MJTRUST/2, as he was labeled by his controllers at Langley, was one of the CIA’s most important contacts in the Middle East. Moreover, he was acting with the full knowledge and approval of Yasser Arafat, serving as the channel for exchanges between the Americans and the PLO.

  “Dominick,” a senior Mossad official involved in the hunt for Salameh, said that throughout the 1970s, the Mossad learned of the depth of the ties between the CIA and Salameh. The Mossad, and Prime Ministers Rabin and Begin, saw these ties as “no less than base treachery on the part of an ally, a stab in the back.”

  According to Kai Bird’s The Good Spy, an authoritative biography of Robert C. Ames, one of the CIA’s savviest field operatives in the Middle East, Salameh and Ames met for the first time in 1969, at the Strand café, in Beirut, and continued to meet later on in CIA safe houses in the same city. Ames reported to the CIA that Arafat valued Salameh highly.

  The PLO was officially considered a terrorist organization by the United States, but the CIA wanted to preserve a back channel. In 1973, with Kissinger’s approval, this channel became a secret but formal link between the United States and Arafat. Over the years, the two met in Europe and Beirut many times. The connection continued even after Salameh took a leading role in Black September. The Americans persisted not because they disagreed with the Mossad’s evaluation of Salameh’s role and responsibility in terrorist activities, but in spite of that.

  Salameh even admitted to Ames that he had recruited Mohammed Boudia, the Paris theater owner who had sent agents to blow up a hotel in Israel, to Black September. Ames considered this to be “interesting intelligence,” and he even expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause: “I am fully aware of the activities of our friend,” he wrote in a letter to the intermediary who passed messages between him and Salameh, “and although I do not agree with all of them, I can sympathize with his organization’s feeling that they must carry them out.”

  Ames did all he could to persuade Salameh that “we are not out to ‘get’ his organization. Contrary to his beliefs, we are not an action group like his group is.” He also kept on reassuring him in order to keep the connection with him alive: “Our friend should know that he still has friends in high places, and so does his cause.”

  The only point over which Ames saw fit to admonish Salameh was the possibility that Black September would act in the United States: “His activities in Europe, which are fully documented, and his plans in our territory, which we know of completely and will hit hard and expose to his organization’s embarrassment, are the only points on which we disagree.”

  In other words, as long as Salameh would be careful not to harm Americans or act on American soil, he could continue attacking other targets without fear of reprisal from the United States. Ames even went so far as to offer, “I could arrange safe travel to…[a] European point, if he so desires.”

  Through the Ames-Salameh middleman, a meeting between CIA deputy director Vernon Walters and top Fatah officials was arranged and held in Rabat, Morocco, on November 3, 1973. The understanding that existed between Ames and Salameh became an official position—Fatah would not harm Americans, and the secret channel of communication would remain open.

  Ames wasn’t present when Salameh traveled with Arafat to the General Assembly in New Yor
k in 1974, but he organized the visit and arranged meetings at the Waldorf Astoria. “We watched him escorting Arafat around New York,” said Dominick. This was insulting, wounding, “as if they had poked a finger in our eye.”

  Salameh, as Arafat’s emissary, tried to obtain official American recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians. It didn’t happen, but the very existence of the channel was a significant achievement from Arafat’s point of view. In exchange, Salameh helped Ames with various kinds of information about developments in Lebanon and in the PLO, and on attempts by the PLO’s rivals to harm the United States.

  A deep friendship had formed between Ames and Salameh, which, due to Ames’s rising standing in the agency, was gradually affecting the U.S. administration’s attitude toward the PLO as well. After the Lebanese Civil War broke out, in 1975, turning Beirut into a war zone, Salameh posted his own men to guard the American embassy. The Israelis looked on and ground their teeth.

  The link with Salameh was not Ames’s private initiative or a rogue operation, although the American did have sharply critical positions toward Israel. It in fact was a high-priority project of the entire CIA. In late 1976, the agency’s director, George H. W. Bush, sent an official invitation to Salameh, via Ames, to come to Langley. The visit, which took place in January 1977, combined business and pleasure. Salameh told Ames that he “really needed a vacation”—he had just married a former Miss Universe, the Lebanese beauty queen Georgina Rizk, and wanted to make her dream come true of having their honeymoon in Hawaii and Disneyland. Ames promised to take care of it.

  The CIA organized the trip, and a senior official escorted the couple wherever they went, including on all the rides in the California theme park. Rizk greatly enjoyed herself. Salameh hated Disneyland but was very happy with the gift he received from CIA operations officer Alan Wolfe—a splendid leather shoulder holster for his handgun.