Chapter 8

Gunboat Diplomacy

The gunboats affair: the phrase itself has an intimately French ring. It was one of those dramas in which France seems to specialize. There were the thunderous pronouncements and accusations of betrayal made by politicians, the contradictions and ambivalences of state policy laid bare; and the obvious enjoyment of the people of Cherbourg, in their role as chorus, at their leaders’ discomfort. For Israel the episode was manna: one more audacious chapter to be written in her breathless and valiant history. Israel naturally played up the elements of personal courage. But what had preceded the events of Christmas Eve 1969 were many months of detailed planning and meticulous preparation. It was almost as if Mossad, after Plumbat, had agreed to an encore.

The Cherbourg affair had its origins in the last days of 1968, barely a week or so after Israel had successfully brought her uranium home. On 26 December an El Al Boeing 707 crammed with passengers on the long journey from Tel Aviv to New York sat on the tarmac at Athens airport, ready to resume flight. Suddenly its fuselage was raked by gunfire, hand grenades were hurled at its engines and fuel tanks. The airliner had been chosen as a target by two young Palestinian terrorists. One passenger died and the others were gripped by fear but miraculously the holocaust the terrorists had hoped for did not ignite. The two men fled to the airport terminal where they were seized by Greek security police. They said they belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and they had flown to Athens from Beirut.

Two days later Israel took her revenge. If Lebanon harboured terrorists, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan decided, then Lebanon must pay. On 28 December Israeli commandos landed in helicopters at Beirut’s international airport. They draped explosives over thirteen empty passenger planes belonging to Middle East Airlines and detonated them. As the helicopters took off again for Israel, the blazing planes lit the sky. The destruction totalled £20 million.

General Charles de Gaulle, President of France, learned of the raid as he watched the television news at his home in the village of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, where he was spending the Christmas holidays. Israel’s attack offended him deeply. He had fond memories of his service as a young army officer in Lebanon in the days of French rule, and he felt that his personal intervention had managed to save Lebanon from being caught up in the Six Day War. Now the Israelis had landed in French-made helicopters to destroy French-made planes belonging to an airline in which Air France was a major shareholder. On New Year’s Day, de Gaulle made a speech at a formal diplomatic reception at which the Israeli ambassador was present. He attacked Israel’s aggression towards ‘a peaceful country and a traditional friend of France.’ And he decreed that from now on France would supply no more arms to Israel.

It was not the first time de Gaulle had issued such orders. He had made the same threat at the time of the Six Day War eighteen months earlier. His main target then had been the fifty Mirage jet fighters Israel had ordered from the French Dassault company. Israel was prevented from taking delivery of the Mirages but otherwise the embargo had been an ambivalent and hypocritical affair, reflecting as much as anything the ambiguities of French policy-making under de Gaulle. But this time the General made it clear that he meant what he said. The most serious casualty of this new, tough attitude were the missile-launching gunboats being built for Israel in the dockyards at the French port of Cherbourg.

Any navy would be proud to own the gunboats. Just under 150 feet long, they were designed to reach a top speed of more than forty knots, yet, under Israel’s specification, pack the punch of a destroyer. They were to be armed with torpedoes and rapid-fire guns, and most formidable of all Gabriel missiles, designed and built by Israel herself. The missiles could deliver a 330 pound warhead with fearsome accuracy to an enemy ship twelve miles away, thanks to a highly sophisticated guidance system which would take it skimming over the waves. The Israeli Navy had first asked a German shipyard to build the gunboats, but when Germany stopped giving Israel arms the order was switched to the Cherbourg company Constructions Mecaniques de Normandie, known as CMN. Israel ordered six gunboats on 26 July 1965, and six more on 14 March 1966. The price was £700,000 each.

The first boat was launched on 11 April 1967. Six months later Israel’s urgent need for the boats was confirmed when her destroyer the Eilat was sunk off Port Said by a Styx missile launched from a Soviet-built Komar missile boat of the Egyptian Navy. That disaster left the Israeli Navy with one old destroyer, six submarines, a few patrol boats and landing craft. Egypt would rule the waves until the French gunboats were delivered. De Gaulle’s first embargo, imposed after the Six Day War, did not affect the gunboats and the first five reached Israel safely. Then came Beirut, and the General’s rage. He did not even pay Israel the courtesy of notifying her formally of the new policy, merely instructing the French customs to prevent any more gunboats from leaving Cherbourg.

Israel did, however, receive advance warning of the ban from a sympathizer in the French Ministry of Defence. As a result she was able to get boats six and seven out of Cherbourg just in time. The sixth boat had conveniently left Cherbourg for sea trials on 31 December, and the following evening her commander radioed that everything was in order and he would sail directly to Haifa. He went only as far as Gibraltar. The seventh boat left Cherbourg harbour on 4 January, just as the new embargo instructions were clattering in on the telex machine in the local customs post. Boat number seven met boat number six at Gibraltar and the two sailed home together.

They were the last escape. When gunboats eight and nine were launched early in 1969 they remained securely in Cherbourg. Previous boats had been guarded in the naval section of the harbour but after the new embargo was imposed Cherbourg’s prefet maritime refused to take delivery of any more. The two new ones suffered the indignity of being moored to the pier used by the ferries bringing tourists and their cars from England.

In April 1969 General de Gaulle was approaching the end of his eleventh year as President of France. He had consolidated his power through referendums, and having survived the dramas of May 1968, when students fought riot police nightly in the streets of Paris and France was swept by strikes, he now decided to use a referendum for the fifth time. The question he posed was somewhat abstruse, concerning a reform of the constitution in order to alter the system of regional government. It is said that governments offer referendums only when they are certain what the answer will be. If that is so, de Gaulle miscalculated. He lost. He resigned immediately and returned in pique to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. On 15 June France elected Georges Pompidou her new President.

The question of the Israeli arms embargo arose at President Pompidou’s first press conference. He was cautious. He spoke of the embargo possibly becoming ‘more selective’ at some future date, but for the moment it would remain in force. In private Israeli diplomats pleaded with their counterparts at the French Foreign Ministry to relax the ban and release the gunboats, but they received only the same irritating half promises that the situation might perhaps be reviewed one day – but not yet. While the manoeuvring continued, gunboat number ten was launched on June 30 to join her two sisters in idleness at the car-ferry terminal.

Admiral Mordecai Limon had no time for the nuances and posturing of diplomatic life. Once a Navy man and now Israel’s chief arms buyer in France, he was in no doubt what should be done: Israel should seize the gunboats. It was not surprising that he should hold so forthright a view, given his career as an Israeli patriot and man of action. Born in Poland in 1921, he had been taken to Palestine as a young child in the second great wave of Jewish immigration. In 1940 Limon had captained small boats that, with Mossad’s help, landed illegal Jewish immigrants on the beaches of Palestine. In 1948 he was made an admiral in the new Israeli Navy and in 1950, at the age of thirty-one, he became its Commander-in-Chief.

In 1954 Limon was chosen for a less public role. He was sent to new York, then brought back to Tel Aviv where he took up a series of posts in Israel’s Ministry of Defence. Even their formal titles convey their sensitivity: deputy director-general in the department of ‘emergency economic planning’; assistant director-general in charge of ‘special duties’. In 1962 he was transferred to Paris, which Mossad had chosen as the European headquarters for its intelligence gathering and undercover operations. Limon was made a ‘special envoy’ at the Israeli Embassy, where his assignment included supervising Israel’s military purchases. He had been engaged on the Navy’s gunboat order since 1965 and had become increasingly frustrated by France’s prevarication. Finally Limon flew to Tel Aviv. He met Defence Minister Moshe Dayan and argued that Israel must take the boats. Dayan agreed.

The decision had been quickly made; putting it into effect was quite another matter. As it pondered the best way of taking the gunboats, the Israeli Cabinet called in Mossad.

The head of Mossad, General Zwi Zamir, had two broad possibilities before him. The gunboats could be hijacked through surprise and the force of arms. Or they could be spirited away in a clandestine operation. The first rather dramatic approach accorded more with the traditions of the Israeli Navy and the preferences of the impatient Admiral Limon, and Zamir agreed to evaluate its chances of success.

A senior Navy man, rear Admiral Benny Telem, had already been to France to look at the potential scene of action. He went ostensibly to take a member of his family for an eye operation. While there he travelled to Cherbourg and examined the harbour. It was certainly tempting, Telem reported. It was a great advantage that the gunboats were moored in the civil harbour, for it was lightly guarded, access to the quays was straightforward, and the open sea beckoned invitingly beyond two gaps in Cherbourg’s long outer sea wall.

Now an occasional agent for Mossad made other soundings. In the German port of Cuxhaven he contacted the Danish sea captain Knud Pedersen – who was later to tell his story to the Danish journalist Ole Schierbeck. As Pedersen’s experience included service on patrol boats for the British navy during World War Two, and later the rather less honourable trade of smuggling Asian immigrants into Britain in a former German torpedo boat, there was some truth in his claim to be skilled in piloting small vessels in difficult conditions. What was more he claimed to have made a special study of Cherbourg harbour. He too argued in favour of snatching the Israeli gunboats under cover of bad weather or darkness.

It was ironic, given Mossad’s past, that in Tel Aviv Zamir found himself arguing against these views and in favour of a stealthy approach. It was true that snatching the boats fitted well with Israel’s traditions of valour and daring. But there were clear risks involved in such an operation. Pompidou was no de Gaulle. But would even Pompidou allow so flagrant an insult to go unanswered? From Cherbourg to Haifa was more than 3,000 nautical miles. It would take the gunboats the best part of three days to reach the Mediterranean, and the French would have ample time to dispatch an intercepting force from her giant naval base at Toulon, near Marseille.

There was one striking case history to illustrate an argument for an operation based on cunning. That was Plumbat. Zamir had been in charge then too, and knew that Mossad could use ‘friends’ and front companies in conveniently far away places to get the boats, just as it had used ‘friends’ and front companies to get the uranium. And if that modus operandi were used for Cherbourg, there could be one exquisite bonus.

Mossad had just learned that France was secretly trying to sell Mirage jet fighters to israel’s enemy, Libya. They were the very same Mirage fighters that France had withheld from Israel under de Gaulle’s first embargo. If Mossad could make it look as through France had been her accomplice in releasing the boats, then the negotiations with Libya could be badly damaged – perhaps wrecked. To Mossad, such piquancies have special appeal, and if this nploy came off it would more than compensate for the failure to make it appear that the PLUMBAT uranium had been bound for the Arab world when it disappeared. The Israeli cabinet duly gave permission for Mossad to lift the gunboats by stealth.

The Navy accepted the decision. But there was one practical problem that no amount of cunning could guarantee to solve. How would the gunboats obtain enough diesel fuel for the voyage from Cherbourg to Haifa? The precise distance was 3,000 nautical miles. The range of the gunboats depended on their speed. At fifteen knots they could travel 2,500 miles; at twenty knots, 1,600 miles; at thirty knots, only 1,000 miles. On the one hand there would be a need to save fuel; on the other, a desire to move fast enough to deter would-be pursuers. The gunboats’ customary cruising speed of twenty-two or twenty-three knots seemed about right, which would give them a range of some 1,500 miles; although the possibility of bad weather also had to be weighed, as that would mean higher fuel consumption. All in all, it seemed clear that two refuelling stops would be necessary.

The earlier gunboats had taken on fuel in the port of Gibraltar and Palermo, but it was unlikely that the escaping gunboats would be able to do the same. Refuelling at sea was the only alternative. Here the Navy was in difficulty. The Israeli fleet consisted of submarines, gunboats and landing craft – certainly nothing the Navy could send the length of the Mediterranean to meet the five boats on their way from Cherbourg.

Mossad had the answer. It told the Ministry of Defence it had one most suitable vessel available which had already proved satisfactory for the transfer of cargoes at sea.

Chapter 9

The Good Ship Sofa…