Chapter 1

Murder in Norway

On a Saturday evening in July 1973 Dan Aerbel was standing in the main street of Lillehammer, a placid Norwegian resort town 80 miles north of Oslo. On the other side of the street was Lillehammer’s only cinema, showing the World War II adventure epic Where Eagles Dare. Aerbel was not interested in the movie, but in a man he had watched go into the cinema for the last programme of the day. Aerbel and nine companions now in different parts of Lillehammer were waiting for the movie to end and the man to come out. When he did, they would kill him.

They had been tailing their target around Lillehammer all day. They first sighted him that morning as he relaxed over a cup of coffee at a street café in the town centre. They followed him when he went to swim at the Lillehammer pool, and then as he made his way to an apartment block on the edge of town. They staked out the building in four rented cars from which they could cover all the exits. They saw him emerge around 7:30 that evening in the company of a woman wearing a bright yellow raincoat which did not disguise the fact that she was heavily pregnant. They followed the couple as they walked back into town and saw them disappear into the cinema. Aerbel stood watching the cinema’s main entrance from across the street, hoping he was not too conspicuous.

Where Eagles Dare came to its bloody but victorious climax at 10:30 pm. The audience spilled out of the cinema into the warm night air: in the midsummer twilight the man and the woman, wearing a yellow raincoat, were easy to spot. As they turned up Lillehammer’s main street, Storgaten, heading for the bus stop, Aerbel followed them on foot. He watched as the last bus of the night pulled up and the couple climbed on board. The message was passed on by walkie-talkie radio: the target was coming.

There were half a dozen people on the bus. It stopped once to let off a small girl and then a second time close to the apartment building where the couple had spent the afternoon. They were the only ones to get off. The bus drew away.

The woman noticed a car parked in the road facing her, its parking lights on. ‘We thought it was waiting for the bus to pass so that it could turn,’ the woman said later. ‘Then it moved slowly toward us. It passed by very close to us. Then it stopped.’

Inside the car, a white Mazda, were three men and a woman, alerted to expect the bus by the radio message. As the bus disappeared up the street two of them, a man and the woman, got out. Each held a handgun, a .22 caliber Beretta fitted with a silencer.

The man who was their target saw them approach. He shouted one word: ‘No.’

The pair from the car did not reply. They shot the man six times in the stomach. As he slumped to the ground they shot him twice in the head. As he lay prostrate they shot him six more times in the back.

The pregnant woman could not believe what she saw: it was like a scene from a gangster movie. Even the guns seemed unreal. ‘They sounded like cap pistols,’ she said. ‘I saw bright flashes, many of them. It was all over in seconds.’

She fell to the ground beside the dying man. The two killers ignored her, walked back to the white Mazda, got in and drove away. The pregnant woman was still huddled there when a second car, a green Volvo, drew up. The driver looked across briefly at the forlorn tableau. Certain that the man was dying, he picked up his walkie-talkie and said in English: ‘They took him. All cars go home.’

Dan Aerbel was waiting min a white Peugeot in the centre of Lillehammer when the signal came. With him were three of the others who had tracked the target to his death. They drove out of Lillehammer and headed south for Oslo. Five miles down the road the Peugeot stopped at a rendezvous point. The rest of the team were already there. Someone asked one of the killers how things had gone. He replied that a job was a job.

The small convey of cars, all of them rented, continued their journey to Oslo. Despite the apparent ease with which the task had been accomplished, Dan Aerbel, in the back of the Peugeot, was anything but relaxed. He complained of a stomach ache and took swigs from a bottle of whisky, although he professed to be a teetotaller. The young girl sitting beside him seemed just as nervous. Aerbel took her hand. Even he was not sure whether his gesture was intended to comfort or seduce.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Dan Aerbel was back in Lillehammer on Storgaten, the street where he had tracked the target to the bus stop. This time he was the quarry. He had been arrested in Oslo on suspicion of murder and driven to Lillehammer police station, In a first floor office overlooking Storgaten, Aerbel was facing one of Norway’s most persuasive police interrogators, Inspector Steinar Ravlo, a member of Norway’s serious crimes squad, the E-Gruppa. Ravlo, a man of classic Nordic looks – blond hair and unrelenting blue eyes – was convinced that Dan Aerbel had helped carry out this bizarre execution, the first murder within Lillehammer town limits in forty years. But Ravlo had no idea why.

At the first interrogation Ravlo got only vigorous denials of Aerbel’s involvement. But one night in the station cells was enough to weaken Aerbel’s resolve. When Ravlo began his second interrogation on 23 July, two days after the killing, he sensed what was about to happen. Aerbel began by repeating his denials. Then came a long silence. ‘My palms were sweating,’ says Ravlo. ‘I was really excited. I knew he was going to crack.’

Aerbel stared through the window, looking down on the desultory Monday morning traffic in Storgaten. The silence persisted: five minutes, ten, fifteen. Finally Aerbel spoke.

‘Okay,0 he told Ravlo. ‘You don’t believe anything I say. I will tell you how it is.’

Day after day for the next three weeks Aerbel talked, and the story he told was astonishing. Aerbel said that he was an agent for Mossad, Israel’s secret service, and had been since 1963. Under the cover of being a salesman, and using half a dozen different names, he had carried out missions for Mossad in France, Italy, Scandinavia – even Libya. Aerbel’s latest mission had been the murder of an official Israeli assassination squad, originally set up under direct orders from Prime Minister Golda Meir.

It was a confession which Inspector Ravlo regarded with the greatest caution. By most western standards Norway’s serious crime rate is very low; also, Norwegian policemen rarely have to cope with the international terrorism that has developed from the ruthless politics of the Middle East. But even when Ravlo knew from the wealth of detail Aerbel was providing that his story must be true, he maintained his air of scepticism. It was a ploy to extract more and more information from Aerbel and it met with remarkable success. The more Ravlo appeared unimpressed by the series of confessions, the more Aerbel sought to convince him they were true. The relationship became a near perfect example of the dependency the interrogator seeks to create in his victim. Aerbel came to view Ravlo as a friend he wanted to please. Ravlo encouraged the friendship by granting Aerbel small favours. In his gratitude, Aerbel arranged for the inspector to receive a small present, sent from Israel.

And so the confessions continued. Aerbel talked about his previous missions; he gave away Mossad’s top-secret emergency telephone number in Tel Aviv; he named his Mossad controller and his contact man in Oslo; and he gave away his co-conspirators in the assassination plot.

By the middle of August, when Aerbel had been transferred from Lillehammer to a prison at Trondheim close to the Arctic Circle, and Ravlo had to fly 350 miles in each direction to visit him, Aerbel had only one secret left to give. It was the biggest secret of them all. As soon as Aerbel had blurted it out, he himself realized that. He fell into an uncharacteristic silence and refused to tell Ravlo anything more.

Ironically, what Aerbel had said meant nothing to Ravlo. He wrote a brief report of the conversation which he gave to his boss, the head of E-Gruppa, when they met next day in Oslo. He, too, was mystified and slipped Ravlo’s note into the bulging Lillehammer file.

But there were others who did know what it meant – to whom Aerbel’s fragment of information was the vital missing part in a puzzle that the intelligence services of Europe and America had been poring over for almost five years. They were agents of Norway’s secret service, the Politiets Overvaakningstjeneste, who every day checked through the Lillehammer file at Oslo police headquarters to keep abreast of the latest revelations about Mossad, and to pass the choicest parts on to the intelligence services of Norway’s allies in NATO. Some time around 15 August 1973, the Norwegian agents read Inspector Ravlo’s report of his most recent conversation with Aerbel. What Aerbel had told Ravlo was that once, in Mossad’s cause, he had owned a ship called the Scheersberg A. The Norwegian secret agents made the connection and a mystery of enormous international implications had at last been resolved.

In November 1968 the Scheersberg A, a small and shabby cargo boat laden with 560 metal drums, had set sail from the Belgian port of Antwerp, bound for Genoa, Italy. She never arrived. Two weeks after she was due at Genoa she put in instead at the eastern Turkish port of Iskenderum. Her captain, who said his name was Peter Barrow, told the port authorities that the Scheersberg A was empty, which was self-evidently true, and that she had come from Naples, which was a lie. A few days later Barrow and his crew had abandoned the Scheersberg A – and disappeared.

The voyage of the Scheersberg A had greatly preoccupied the security services of Belgium, Italy and West Germany, together with their partners in the European Common Market, and their allies in NATO. They had all investigated what had happened to the Scheersberg A’s cargo, and who could have organized the operation which had resulted in the cargo apparently being spirited away. All of them, including the American CIA, drew a blank.

Now, in August 1973 in Oslo central police station, the Norwegian security men found themselves staring at the answers. Dan Aerbel’s temporary ownership of the Scheersberg A could only mean that the true destination of her cargo on that mysterious voyage had been a place called Dimona. And that meant that there could now be no doubt that Israel had acquired the means to develop nuclear weapons.

Chapter 2

A Secret Place, A Secret Service