Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  The CIA escort, Charles Waverly, recalled the visit: “All he [Salameh] really wanted to do was eat oysters. He thought they were an aphrodisiac. I was in the adjoining hotel room—so in the evenings I heard the results.”

  Because of the relationship between the Israeli and American intelligence communities and Israel’s overall dependence on the United States, the Mossad refrained from operating on American soil. Salameh knew he wasn’t threatened there. This meant that the couple could have a real holiday, without bodyguards getting in the way.

  Normally, however, Salameh hardly ever left Beirut, and he surrounded himself with very heavy security. He would move around in a convoy of vehicles loaded with armed bodyguards, with a Dushka 22-millimeter heavy machine gun mounted on a Toyota pickup truck bringing up the rear.

  Ames and his CIA colleague were not impressed. In his book, Bird mentions that Sam Wyman, one of the CIA liaison officers with Salameh in Beirut, once asked Salameh, “How is that damn cannon going to protect you? It just announces to everyone where you are.” Salameh just laughed and said, “Oh, it is good.”

  Bird notes that Salameh was given dozens of CIA alerts, some in a very firm tone, that the Mossad was out to get him.

  “I warned him,” said Wyman. “I told him, ‘You idiot, they’re going to get you, the way you drive around Beirut. It is only a matter of time….You are violating every principle of good intelligence practice. The Israelis know who you are, and they know what you did, and so you should be careful.’ ”

  The CIA even supplied Salameh with encrypted communications equipment to enhance his security, and it considered sending Salameh an armor-plated car to protect him from the Israelis as well.

  To Dominick, there was only one way this relationship could be interpreted: “Imagine that we, the Mossad, set up a secret relationship with Osama bin Laden, not because we recruited him as a spy working for cash but a friendly relationship, almost like allies, swapping info and mutual favors. Imagine that we invited him on a visit to our Tel Aviv HQ, kowtowed to him, expressed understanding and sympathy for the Twin Towers attack, told him that it was okay for him to go on blasting American embassies as long as he didn’t blast ours, gave him and his wife royal hospitality, and did everything to protect him from the Navy SEALs coming to kill him. How would that be seen by America?”

  The Mossad eventually reached the conclusion that “cutting this channel was very important, to show that no one was immune—and also to give the Americans a hint that this was no way to behave toward friends.” Prime Minister Begin was informed by Mossad director Hofi about the relationship between Salameh and the Americans, but even with this knowledge, he accepted the Mossad’s recommendation to assassinate him.

  —

  IN JUNE 1978, THREE months after Wadie Haddad was killed, Operation Maveer (Burner), the hunt for Salameh, went into high gear. For the first time since Operation Spring of Youth, Caesarea would kill someone in a target country: “a blue-and-white job to ensure that the job will be done,” in Harari’s words. A top agent for AMAN’s Unit 504, code-named Rummenigge, after a German soccer star of the time, was asked to supply information about the quarry’s habits.

  Rummenigge was Amin al-Hajj, a member of one of Lebanon’s prominent Shiite families and a well-connected merchant. His recruitment was facilitated by his hatred of the Palestinians and his desire to obtain permission to move his goods (which some say included a lot of illicit drugs) freely around the Middle East, sometimes via Israel, without hindrance by the Israeli Navy. Meetings between Rummenigge and his controller were usually held on an Israeli missile boat off the coast of Lebanon.

  Al-Hajj used his network of sources to come up with a plethora of details on Salameh’s daily routines, discovering that he spent a lot of time at the gym and spa of the Continental Hotel in Beirut and that he shared an apartment with Rizk in the upscale Snoubra neighborhood of the city.

  Harari was pleased. “Salameh was by nature a playboy, a prominent figure in Beirut’s glitzy social class,” he said. “It’s easy to get close up in such circles. I sent my warriors in to rub shoulders with him.”

  A Caesarea operative went to Beirut, booked a room in the Continental Hotel under a false European identity, and signed up at the gym. He went there every day, and now and again he ran into Salameh. He knew Salameh took a keen interest in luxury watches and fashionable clothes, and he dressed himself accordingly in the locker room, always standing as close as he could get to the Palestinian.

  One day, some of the other gym members were congratulating Salameh on an award Rizk had received at a ball the previous night. The Caesarea operative joined in and struck up a conversation with Salameh. “There was some male bonding there,” said Harari.

  The two became friendly and chatted every now and again. “The idea in encounters like these is to let the target initiate contact,” said a source involved in the operation. “Otherwise it would seem suspicious, especially for a hunted person like Salameh.”

  When the Caesarea operative returned to Israel, a “low-signature” hit on Salameh was discussed, including the possibility of “slipping some ‘medicine’ into his toothpaste or soap or aftershave lotion,” Harari said. But the risk for the operative, were he to be discovered, looked too great.

  Another alternative, placing an explosive device in Salameh’s locker at the gym, was rejected out of fear that an innocent bystander might also be hurt. Eventually, Harari decided to drop altogether the idea of taking him out at the gym or his office or home, because of the heavy security at those sites.

  The solution Harari adopted was new to the Mossad: a bomb on a public street, hitting a moving target. Salameh would be dispatched while driving through Beirut, escorted by the Toyota truck with the heavy machine gun and a third vehicle occupied by bodyguards. Somewhere along the route, as the three cars passed by, a large explosive device would be triggered by a Mossad operative positioned unobtrusively a safe distance away.

  Yaakov Rehavi, a former NASA scientist recruited by the Mossad to head the technology department, created a special device for the agents to practice executing the operation. In the drill, the operator had to push a button at the exact moment a car chassis on metal wheels, towed at speed by another vehicle, passed a certain point. There was no explosion, just an electronic signal showing whether the button had been precisely synchronized with the passing of the vehicle.

  Agents who took part in the drills recalled that Rehavi and two other male operatives couldn’t get the timing right. “Maybe you’ll let me try,” asked a female desk hand in the counterterror department, who was present at the drills. Rehavi smiled patronizingly and handed her the remote. She timed it perfectly, several drills in a row. Finally they tried it with explosives, with store-window mannequins in the car, and once again the woman’s timing was perfect.

  “As long as men were pushing the button, there was an atmosphere of despair,” said Harari, “but after she aced it again and again, in differing light conditions, I realized that women apparently were better at it than men, and I made a decision accordingly.” A female operative, code-named Rinah, would push the button in Beirut. “This wasn’t an easy decision,” said Harari. “We had to change all the cover stories and to construct something that would suit a woman who would possibly have to remain for long hours at a site with a view of the street. It wasn’t enough for her just to know how to push the button. Salameh didn’t leave his home at the same times every day. Sometimes it was necessary to be on the alert for as much as eighteen hours, and sometimes she’d have to close her eyes or go and do pee-pee. It’s no simple matter.”

  —

  RINAH’S REAL NAME WAS Erika Chambers, and she was born in England in 1948, the daughter of Marcus Chambers, an engineer who designed race cars and spent most of his life at the tracks, and his wife, Lona, a singer and actress from a wealthy Czechoslovakian Jewish family, m
ost of whom were killed in the Holocaust. Erika studied at the University of Southampton in the 1960s, where she was remembered most vividly for her wild driving. She traveled to Australia and then to Israel, where she enrolled in a master’s program in hydrology at the Hebrew University. In early 1973, she was contacted by a recruiter for the Mossad. She liked the idea of combining adventure with what she described as “making a significant contribution to the security of the state.” She passed all of the screening tests, was inducted into Caesarea, and then underwent the grueling training program. In mid-1975, she left Israel, assumed a false British identity, and began carrying out missions abroad.

  Rinah and two men were selected for the assassination of Salameh.

  The complex plan once again called for close cooperation with the IDF’s special-ops units, who were to execute those aspects of the operation that the Mossad couldn’t carry out itself.

  Rinah arrived in Beirut in October 1978, presenting herself as an NGO staffer interested in assisting Palestinian orphans at a shelter in the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp. She lived in the city for some two months and, together with another operative, clandestinely gathered information about Salameh’s movements. Early in the new year, she rented a flat on the eighth floor of a high-rise building on Beka Street, overlooking Salameh’s apartment. On January 16, the other two operatives arrived in Beirut separately, one with a British passport and the other with a Canadian one.

  On January 18, a team from Sayeret Matkal crossed the border into Jordan, in the Arabah region, south of the Dead Sea, carrying a hundred kilograms of plastic explosive and a detonation device. On the other side of the border, a 504 agent was waiting. He put the explosives in his car and drove to Beirut. On January 19, in an underground parking garage, he met the two male operatives. He said the password—two words in English—and they gave the prearranged two-word reply. The agent then handed over the explosives and the detonation device, said goodbye, and left. His part in the operation was done.

  The operatives loaded the bomb into the trunk of a Volkswagen they had rented two days before, set the detonation device, and parked the car down the street from Salameh’s apartment block.

  Harari himself traveled to Beirut to oversee the culmination of Operation Maveer. He could not allow himself another failure like Lillehammer. Leaving the Volkswagen containing the bomb parked on a busy street for what might be a long time was a problem. A parking inspector’s suspicion could be aroused. The solution: “To switch cars, at a time when we were sure that Salameh would not be passing. Just making sure we kept the right parking spot was an operation in itself.” On January 21, 1979, Harari took leave of Rinah and the two men and flew out, to ensure that there would be as few operatives as possible in the field.

  The next day, shortly after 3 P.M., Salameh finished eating lunch with his wife, kissed her goodbye, and left. He got into his Chevrolet and drove off at 3:23 toward the Force 17 offices, his bodyguards traveling in the Land Rover in front of him and the Toyota behind him. He had gone only about sixty feet when his Chevy drew level with the Volkswagen. Rinah pressed the button. A huge explosion shook Beirut, and the Chevrolet became a ball of fire. One of the two male operatives, who was watching from a distance, would later recount to his friends that Salameh had managed to get out of the car, his clothes in flames, and fall to the ground. The operative muttered through his teeth, “Die, motherfucker! Die!”

  Abu Daoud (Mohammed Oudeh), the commander of Black September’s Munich operation, who by chance was passing by, ran up and tried to help. He saw a huge metal fragment lodged in Salameh’s skull. Salameh was rushed to the American University Hospital, where he died on the operating table.

  Eight others were also killed in the blast: Salameh’s driver and two bodyguards, three Lebanese citizens, a German, and a Briton. Harari acknowledged that an operation such as this, with the explosion of a large device in an area teeming with passersby, would never have been approved in a non-Arab country.

  Rinah and the two other operatives waited on a beach near Jounieh, north of Beirut, for a rubber dinghy manned by Flotilla 13 men to pick them up at around midnight. A young naval commando lifted Rinah into the boat. The man, on one of his first missions, was Holiday, who would one day become head of Caesarea. The dinghy met up with a navy missile boat waiting out at sea, and within hours the hit team was in Haifa.

  The killing of Salameh was a terrible blow to the PLO. “I warned them!” Arafat exclaimed, with heavy pathos, in a television interview shortly afterward. “I warned my brothers, ‘Be careful! The Mossad will hunt us, one by one, commander by commander.’ ” At Salameh’s huge funeral, Arafat took Hassan, the dead man’s son, who was named after his grandfather, the Palestinian commander in the 1948 war, on his knee, holding an AK-47—just as he had held Ali himself at a memorial for his father twenty-five years before.

  Frank Anderson, head of the CIA station in Beirut, wrote Hassan an emotional condolence letter: “At your age, I lost my father. Today, I lost a friend whom I respected more than other men. I promise to honor your father’s memory—and to stand ready to be your friend.”

  Israel had closed its account with Ali Salameh, but it had not managed to cut the ties between the United States and the PLO. Robert Ames was very saddened by the death of his friend, and he tried hard to forge ties with the man the PLO appointed to replace him, Hani al-Hassan. After the slaying, Ames espoused positions that were considered pro-Palestinian, and he was a key figure in the formulation of the Reagan Plan, which was in effect the first official American recognition of the right of the Palestinians to establish a state of their own.

  ABOUT A WEEK BEFORE Wadie Haddad, writhing in agony from Mossad poison, was admitted to an East German hospital, the Shin Bet learned from one of its sources, code-named Housemaid, about a PLO squad training for a raid into Israel. Amos Gilad, from the AMAN unit that dealt with Palestinian terrorism, met Housemaid in a Shin Bet safe house in Jerusalem and left the meeting feeling very worried: “I understood they were planning something terrible, and they wanted to cause as many casualties as possible.”

  The information, confirmed by wiretaps at the PLO offices in Cyprus, was very specific. The Shin Bet knew the names of the terrorists and the exact location of their base on the beach of Damour, in Lebanon. They knew that the terrorists were planning an attack from the sea, and that the assault was intended to disrupt peace talks Begin had initiated with Egypt. Arafat and Abu Jihad had ordered it because they feared, correctly, that a truce between Egypt and Israel would leave the Palestinians in the lurch, as Egypt had thus far been their chief advocate. The raid was so important to the PLO that Abu Jihad himself had briefed the guerrillas, together with his operations commander in Lebanon, Azmi Zrair.

  Gilad wanted to strike first, to eliminate the threat with a preemptive attack on the terrorist base. On March 5, 1978, the naval commandos, Flotilla 13, carried out Operation Lucky Man (Bar-Mazal). The aim was to eliminate all the terrorists at the Damour base, but they actually killed only those who were in one building, while those who were in a nearby structure and didn’t come out or open fire were unharmed. Housemaid was able to report this as well.

  Gilad demanded that the commandos go in again to finish the job, but Defense Minister Ezer Weizman said, “Forget about all these commando raids. I’m going to Washington tomorrow and it’ll only ruin my visit.”

  Gilad protested vehemently: “By now Abu Jihad knows that we know that he’s preparing something. That will only spur him on to get them on the move as soon as possible. There is going to be a murderous attack.”

  Weizman may have been correct that headlines about an Israeli military action in the sovereign territory of another country would cast a dark shadow over his first visit to the Pentagon as defense minister, but it turned out to be a costly decision.

  On March 11, 1978, at 2:30 P.M., eleven Fatah men landed on the beach near Kibbutz Maagan
Michael, south of Haifa, in a nature preserve bounded by fish-breeding ponds where flocks of migrant birds stop on their way to and from Africa. An American nature photographer named Gail Rubin was taking pictures of the birds when the raiding party stumbled upon her. The Palestinians were close to despair after three exhausting and hazardous days at sea, during which two of their number had drowned. Because the waters were so stormy and they had been washed miles out to sea, they had lost their bearings and thought they’d landed in Cyprus. They were relieved when Rubin told them they were in Israel, halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. They thanked her and shot her dead.

  Then the attackers made for the Coastal Highway, the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv. At gunpoint, they hijacked a taxi and then a bus, and took the drivers and passengers hostage. They ordered the driver of the bus to head south, toward Tel Aviv. Abu Jihad had instructed them to seize a hotel, but the raiders, now in bold high spirits because of the dozens of hostages in their hands, decided to change the nature of the operation. The IDF’s classified report on what followed noted, “The terrorists’ improvisation led to a new method of assault—an attack on the move (along a route of over 50 kilometers), which was a surprise and against which there was no deployment at all on the part of the security forces.”

  The terrorists fired from the bus windows at vehicles on the road and stopped another bus, taking its passengers hostage as well. Because of the novel nature of the attack, “security forces found it difficult to read the situation, to maintain an updated evaluation and to take the initiative, which affected the course of the incident and its results.”

  Although the police managed to stop the bus at the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv, the confusion led to utter chaos: “The predominant factor was the lack of central control, both among the terrorists, who were trying to defend themselves by firing in all possible directions, and among the security forces.”