Eshkol had to bat down many enticing offers. An example, made public in this book for the first time, came in 1968, when Meir Amit, the head of the Mossad, requested an urgent meeting with the prime minister. A plan to kill Yasser Arafat, the head of Fatah, was in its final stage. There was something unusual in Arafat’s fervor, his determination, and his steadfast terrorist ideology that indicated to the Mossad he would plague Israel for years to come. All that was needed to send him down the path to martyrdom was a nod from Eshkol.
The top secret plan called for an undercover Caesarea combatant to bring a booby-trapped car into Syria—a country officially at war with Israel—and blow it up outside Arafat’s Damascus offices, where he both slept and conducted business. Yossi Yariv, the head of Caesarea at the time, had been working on the plan for six months. Only a handful of people knew the particulars. Under Yariv’s directives a Caesarea combatant transferred a 1959 Chevy to Damascus. The car had made its way from Israel to Syria, via Europe and Lebanon, with one hundred pounds of top-quality explosives hidden beneath the backseat, molded in a hollow-pointed shape for optimal destruction. Once all the components of the plan were in place, Amit approached Eshkol for authorization.
“Kinderlach, why should I approve this?” Eshkol asked in Yiddish-peppered Hebrew. “It’s a double-edged sword. Today we kill their leaders and tomorrow they kill ours. It goes on forever. I won’t authorize it.”
Officers at Mossad headquarters were devastated. All the preparations, planning, and risks were in vain. For neither the first nor the last time, an opportunity to neutralize Arafat was missed.
Before Munich, Arafat had been high on the Mossad’s hit list, and although neither the Mossad nor Military Intelligence had the type of evidence admissible in court, both believed he knew of, and signed off on, the Olympic attack. By 1972, however, Arafat was becoming well known on the international circuit. Politics, more than state security, determined his fate. Over the years many secret meetings would be held at Mossad and Military Intelligence headquarters, weighing the pros and cons of keeping him alive. This time, Israel decided to leave him among the living.
As the Munich Massacre continued to echo across the globe, everyone in the Arab world spoke about its “success,” despite the price paid by the shuhada, who had sacrificed themselves for the cause. The Europe-based Palestinian saya’ans made the most noise, eager to prove their undying allegiance to the homeland they had left. Keen to cash in on Black September’s new popularity, these saya’ans spoke freely among friends about their involvement in the planning, execution, and logistical operations tied to the massacre. The buzz, some of it baseless bravado, reached the ears of Tzomet case officers, who were under immense pressure to deliver intelligence about the perpetrators of the attack. In the weeks after the massacre, dozens of Palestinian names, implicated by thin shards of intelligence at best, were passed back to Tel Aviv. There, they were almost automatically put on a secret database of possible targets.
The Mossad and the intelligence community, with the backing of the public consensus and the parliament, were stretching the meaning of the term “terrorist involvement” to the limit. Anyone vaguely connected to a terrorist organization or act was immediately placed on the top of a slippery slope; assassination waited below. Senior intelligence officials believed that “a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist.” They felt that the times demanded that the gray area between guilt and innocence disappear. The head of the Mossad needed no encouragement from the prime minister. Everyone in the defense establishment was determined to avenge the murders at Munich.
18 SHADOW WARS
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, CAFÉ PRINCE, PLACE DE BROKER SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1972, 2000H
Five days after the massacre at the Olympics, the public was given a rare glimpse at the covert and dangerous world of a Mossad case officer—a katsa. On the eve of the Jewish New Year, September 10, 1972, katsa Tzadok Ofir received a phone call at his Brussels home. He was told that a young Moroccan man with information about Black September’s operations in Europe wanted to meet him ASAP. Ofir knew his bosses at the Mossad Tzomet headquarters would want the meeting to happen immediately—despite the holiday and the history of the man requesting the get-together. Rabah, the young Moroccan exile, had offered his services to the Mossad in the past and been denied, but, days after the Olympic massacre, none of the Mossad’s katsas had the luxury of filtering intelligence information: anything that came in had to be turned over and examined. Black September knew the Mossad would be hungry for information, which is why they sent Rabah—a former revolutionary and current thief—to kill Ofir.
Ofir walked into the Café Prince on Place de Broker fifteen minutes early. He looked over the old, wood-paneled Victorian establishment in downtown Brussels and found what he was looking for: a darkened table in the corner, where he could keep his back to the wall and watch patrons come and go. He was alone and unarmed. Every few minutes he got up to see if Rabah was waiting outside. His gut was issuing dull pangs of warning.
Rabah arrived at 2000 hours sharp. His first contact with the Mossad had been from the Netherlands’ Aranheim Prison, Cell 81. From there, as Prisoner 3382, a petty thief, he sent multiple letters to the Israeli embassy. Tzomet never wrote back. Rabah provided ample information about his past, but most of it made him appear untrustworthy. He either was or was not an officer in the Moroccan armed forces; he had been exiled from that country; he had affiliated himself with the Palestinian cause; and he had taken a number of combat courses with Palestinian terror organizations in the Middle East. During his years of exile in Europe, he crossed the law many times. The Mossad found him strange and unstable.
The barman watched as Ofir led Rabah to his table. The two were an odd couple. Rabah, in his olive-green jacket, baggy jeans, and five o’clock shadow, looked shabby; Ofir, in a leather jacket and turtleneck, was in his holiday clothes. As they made their way to the corner table, Ofir felt suddenly alone. He looked over his shoulder—Rabah was gone. On the floor was a faded brown knapsack. “A bomb!” Ofir thought. He moved to the sturdy bar, putting some distance between himself and the bag, seeking shelter from the imminent blast. As he had been trained to do, he tamped the turbulence out of his voice and asked the barman in fluent French whether, perhaps, he had seen his buddy. The barman pointed to the bathroom door just as Rabah was emerging.
“Where’d you go?” Ofir asked, approaching Rabah.
“I really had to piss. I couldn’t wait.”
Ofir’s suspicions only intensified. Something is off, he thought to himself.
They went back to the table. Ofir sat down first. Rabah, lingering behind him, circled toward his seat, pulled out a Smith & Wesson .38, and unleashed a quick burst of fire. The first bullet hit Ofir in the ear; the second went in through his neck and out through his shoulder; the third caught him square in the chest; and the fourth went in through his shoulder and lodged itself in his stomach cavity. Ofir got out of his chair, took a few steps, and asked for an ambulance before collapsing. Rabah fled the café in a dead run as pandemonium broke out. Ofir’s life was saved at St. Pierre Hospital in Brussels. The scenes from that day still haunt him.
In Beirut, Black September claimed responsibility for the hit in Brussels. The story generated enormous publicity. Papers all over the world carried accounts of the Israeli Mossad katsa shot by an Arab agent just five days after the Munich Massacre.
In less than a week, Black September had gone from near anonymity to public enemy number one in Israelis’ perception. No one knew their next target. The defense establishment and the Mossad were asked for answers; they had nothing definitive. The files on Black September contained slivers of intelligence, bits of unchecked information that could not be cross-referenced, about operatives who may or may not have been affiliated with the mercurial organization.
On Tuesday, September 19, the mailroom in the Israeli embassy in London was bustling. Letters had piled up over the long Yom Kippur weekend, the
Jewish Day of Atonement. No one in the mailroom noticed the four slim, identical envelopes sent from Amsterdam with handwritten addresses. Three of them remained sealed, but the fourth was delivered to Dr. Ami Shchori, forty-four, an agricultural attaché set to return to Israel in the coming weeks. He was chatting with a colleague when the envelope was delivered. “This is important,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for it.” He was expecting flower seeds from Holland. When Dr. Shchori opened the envelope he released a tiny spring, which hit a detonator smaller than an aspirin tablet, and set off the two five-inch strips of plastic explosive. Although they weighed only fifty grams, the explosives triggered a powerful blast, hitting Shchori in the abdomen and chest. He died of his wounds.
Black September was staying on the offensive. A week after the attempted assassination in Brussels they sent out sixty-four identical letter bombs from Amsterdam to Israeli diplomats in New York, Ottawa, Montreal, Paris, Vienna, Geneva, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Kinshasa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. All of the standard-sized envelopes were detected and neutralized except for one—in London. The Israeli embassy in Kensington had been briefed about terror attacks, including the possibility of letter bombs. This was not a new tactic. The PFLP had employed the same approach to terrorism earlier in the year, sending fifteen letters from Austria and Yugoslavia to Israeli businessmen in Israel. All of them were detected and no harm was done. But the Black September campaign was far more professional: their letters bore fewer telltale signs and the explosive devices were more complex and harder to detect.
With no publicity or fanfare the Mossad refreshed its own campaign of mail-borne death. Mossad explosives experts created the letter bombs—a quick and easy way to hit senior Palestinian activists, without the time-consuming and dangerous effort required of face-to-face assassinations. On October 24, the Mossad’s own campaign of terror began: Mustafa Awad Abu-Zeid suffered severe facial injuries when he opened a letter in Tripoli; Abu-Khalil, a PLO representative in Algeria, was badly wounded by a letter several days later; Farouk Kadumi and Ha’il Abed el-Hamid were left unscathed by a faulty bomb in Cairo; Omar Tzufan, a PLO activist and the director of the Red Crescent, lost all of his fingers from a letter bomb delivered to Stockholm; Adnan Hammad, a member of the Palestinian Students’ Organization, was critically wounded in Bonn; Ahmed Awdullah, a Palestinian student in Stockholm accused of aiding and abetting terrorism, lost an arm.
Not one of the recipients had any direct ties to Black September. Most of the injured and the dead were PLO ambassadors and affiliates, unofficial diplomats. According to the defense establishment, though, they were field agents—Black September operatives who moved freely under the cloak of respectability while gathering operational intelligence for their masters in Beirut. The maiming of these people was meant to sow fear and confusion among activists in the PLO and Fatah’s Black September. The Mossad’s aim was to create a sense of permanent threat in the minds of Palestinian operatives and potential inductees, a violent persuasion to cease, or shy away from, all activity on the behalf of terrorists.
19 FIRST MAN DOWN
ROME, PIAZZA ANNIBALIANO MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1972, 2130H
Mike Harari felt the familiar drumbeat of adrenaline in his neck. “The target has left the girlfriend’s house. He’s on his way to the bus stop,” the commander of the surveillance team reported. Harari, forty-five, a chain-smoking Humphrey Bogart look-alike, checked his watch. He estimated that in just under an hour the two-week undercover operation would come to a close. He and about fifteen Caesarea combatants and staff officers under his command were on the verge of assassinating Wael Zu’aytir, the first individual to be brought by the Mossad before the prime minister and defense cabinet since the Munich Massacre.
A tall, thin man from a family of intellectuals and teachers, Zu’aytir, thirty-six, was a single Palestinian who had been living in Rome for the past sixteen years. He was presented to the prime minister and the defense cabinet as a man inextricably linked to Black September’s terror operations in Italy. They were told that he was head of Fatah’s Black September in Rome and that he had aided and abetted the attack in Munich. He was unceremoniously sentenced to death.
Harari didn’t care to examine Zu’aytir’s terrorist credentials. He saw himself as a contractor who, less than three weeks prior, had been given an assignment. His job was to fulfill the task, not analyze it. His team had been working undercover for over two weeks, on foot and in cars, from close and afar, watching Zu’aytir’s every move. Now they followed him as he walked toward his apartment building in northern Rome on the Piazza Annibaliano. Just before 2230, he stopped at the Trieste bar near his house, made a phone call, and came back out to the chilly autumn air.
Two weeks of monitoring Zu’aytir led to a simple assassination plan. Zu’aytir, who worked as a translator at the Libyan embassy, was a soft target. He walked around in the open, unarmed. He allowed his habits to slip into routine. Harari and R., his chief intelligence officer, drew up a plan built on Zu’aytir’s predictable schedule: two assassins would wait and then kill him at the entrance to his home.
Caesarea’s surveillance team never questioned Zu’aytir’s humble lifestyle, despite intelligence reports that he was a master terrorist. Unlike many PLO employees, he led a modest life. His bills were never paid on time; the telephone in his rather bare apartment had been disconnected. His circle of friends included members of the Italian Communist Party, poets, and writers, including the author Alberto Moravia. His girlfriend, Janet Venn Brown, was Australian. She was the last person he met that night. They enjoyed a pleasant dinner together.
Zu’aytir loved music and books. Before moving to Rome he’d studied classical Arabic literature and philosophy at the University of Baghdad. After studying in Iraq, he moved to Libya and from there to Rome, his permanent home. He was a gifted linguist who spoke impeccable French, Italian, and English. In his free time he read voraciously. He translated political articles and prose into Arabic and from Arabic to Italian. His greatest achievement was an Italian translation of the Arabic classic One Thousand and One Nights.
The Palestinian cause was undoubtedly dear to Zu’aytir, a native of the Palestinian city of Nablus, and he was in close contact with other Palestinian activists in Italy, going to rallies and parlor discussions together. But unlike many of those around him, he denounced terrorism and violence.
The Mossad did not buy into Zu’aytir’s public persona. They maintained that he was a senior operative working undercover, a Jeykll and Hyde character who posed as a moderate Arab intellectual but was in fact a bloodthirsty terrorist, responsible for numerous attacks. They alleged that on August 16, 1972, he masterminded an attack on an El Al flight out of Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome. A tape recorder packed with powerful explosives blew up in the cargo hold as soon as the flight reached cruising altitude, but the blast was absorbed by the newly installed armored walls in the underbelly of the aircraft. The pilot, faced with a panel of screaming red and yellow lights, was able to put the plane down in an emergency landing six terrifying minutes later in Rome.
In early August, Zu’aytir was rounded up by Italian police, perhaps heightening Israeli suspicions. The police questioned him about an oil refinery bombing that had been claimed by Black September. He was released along with dozens of other Palestinians. In September, his brother, an illegal alien and a student, was thrown out of West Germany along with thousands of other Palestinians after the attack.
At 2230 hours, he walked into Entrance C of his apartment complex. He was wearing a lightweight gray blazer, a black trench coat, and a checkered shirt. He carried a basket of groceries—some rolls, a bottle of cheap wine, and a newspaper—that he had bought after leaving Venn Brown’s house. Harari’s combatants were spread out in their positions, alert and electric with tension. Surveillance gave the all-clear and reported that Zu’aytir was on his way to the house, alone. The escape car, a Fiat 125 that had been rented earlier by an undercover Caesarea comba
tant posing as a Canadian tourist, idled two 90-degree turns away.
The two assassins waited in the darkened anteroom. They watched Zu’aytir enter the building and make his way toward the elevator before they stepped out of the shadows and shot him twelve times with a silenced Beretta 0.22. He was hit in the chest and head, and dropped to the ground in a lifeless heap. The two assassins walked out of the building quickly, their guns inconspicuously by their side. The squad commander watched their backs as they made their way to the getaway car.
Minutes later, Mike Harari, his staff officers, and Zvi Zamir, who had come to Italy to personally oversee the mission, received word from the commander of the hit squad in the field. The signal released the tension in the air. Officers went from pensive waiting to quick action, gathering papers and packing bags. Within four hours, all the Mossad officers and combatants, from Zamir to the most junior member of the surveillance team, had left Italy by plane, train, and automobile.
Earlier that day, at four in the afternoon, the fourth plenum of the Knesset convened. As is customary, the prime minister delivered an address from the podium. Golda was well aware that the first act of retribution after Munich was under way. She kept her comments general. “This war, by definition, cannot be defensive; we must actively seek out the murderers, their bases, their missions and their plans . . . .” Golda refused to open the subject to debate, declaring, “I speak for the entire government of Israel when I say again that we have no choice but to strike at terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace. We shall fulfill that obligation undauntedly.”
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response Page 10