Chapter 15

The Wrath of Zwi Zamir

Mossad’s pursuit of Alì Hassan Salameh reflected a return to one of Israel’s earliest preoccupations: revenge. Israel considered Salameh to be a ruthless terrorist. In particular, it held him responsible for the bloody carnage of the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972, when members of a Palestinian movement known as Black September took a group of Israeli athletes hostage. Eleven of the athletes died.

Mossad believed that Salameh was the planning chief of Black September. The movement had been formed in the aftermath of the events of September 1970 when Jordan’s King Hussein unleashed his Bedouin troops on the Palestinian guerrillas operating against Israel from refugee camps within Jordan. In the bitter fighting that followed, the guerrillas were all but crushed. At first the new movement concentrated on avenging this act of Arab treachery. On 28 November 1971, Jordan’s Prime Minister Wasfi Tal, on an official visit to Egypt, was gunned down in the doorway of the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo. Three weeks later in London Black September tried to murder Jordan’s ambassador to Britain. In February 1972 it executed five suspected Jordanian secret service agents in the basement of a house near Bonn.

After this bloody apprenticeship, Black September spread its terror more widely. It blew up oil depots in Hamburg and Rotterdam and bombed a West German factory. The organization also hijacked a Lufthansa airliner whose passengers included Robert Kennedy’s son Robert. The ransom extorted for the passengers’ release was five million dollars.

Three months later Black September made its first direct attack on Israel. On 8 May four of its members arrived at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport on a flight from Vienna and took their fellow passengers hostage. Israeli commandos disguised as mechanics stormed the plane and killed two of the terrorists, but twenty-two days later at the same airport Black September sympathizers exacted a terrible revenge. Three members of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group, who had been trained in Palestinian camps, attacked the crowded arrivals lounge at Lod with submachine guns and han grenades. They killed twenty-six people and injured eighty.

In August 1972 Black September succeeded in smuggling a bomb, hidden in a tape recorder, on to an El Al Boeing 707 flying from Rome to Tel Aviv. Although the bomb exploded in mid-flight the intended disaster was averted thanks largely to the skill of the El Al pilot. By that time, however, Salameh was planning the attack in Munich that would take Black September on to the front page of every newspaper in the world.

At 4 am on 5 September eight members of Black September met outside the fence surrounding the village that had been built to house the competitors in the Munich Olympics. Five of the men had travelled to Munich via a circuitous route from Tripoli, Libya. The other three had been in the city for some time: one was an architect who had helped design the village; two had taken menial jobs there to keep an eye on their intended victims. They were all armed with Russian-made Kalashnikov rapid-fire rifles. They were dressed in sweatsuits, so that as they climbed over the fence they were mistaken for recalcitrant athletes coming home from a night on the town. The three who knew the area guided the others to their destination: Connollystrasse 31, where the Israeli athletes were living.

As the terrorists stormed the apartment block they shot dead two of the Israeli team – the wrestling coach and Israel’s weight-lifting champion – and took nine others hostage. Those who managed to flee raised the alarm and 500 police converged on the Olympic village. So did the world’s press. For the next twenty hours much of the drama was played out on live television.

The terrorists’ major demand turned out to be straightforward and impossible. To save the lives of her nine athletes, Israel had to release 200 selected Arab prisoners and deliver them to Cairo. The hostages would also be taken there for an exchange. Israel’s policy towards terrorism was, and is, uncompromising. It would not release one prisoner, give one inch. In those circumstances the West German authorities chose to stage a rescue attempt. The plan they drew up was deeply flawed.

In order to lure the terrorists into the open, the Germans agreed to provide them and their hostages with transport to a nearby airfield where a Lufthansa Boeing 727 jet was waiting, supposedly to take them to Cairo. Teams of German sharpshooters were placed along the route and at the airfield in the hope of killing the terrorists before they could harm the hostages. In the early evening of 5 September, Zwi Zamir, head of Mossad, arrived in Munich to offer strategic guidance. He expressed grave doubts about the feasibility of the plan, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.

At just after ten o’clock that night the terrorists and their hostages set out for Furstenfeldbruck airfield, fourteen miles west of the village. They travelled first by bus, then in helicopters, and none of the riflemen hidden along the route had a chance to shoot. But when the helicopters landed at the airfield, and the terrorists stepped out onto the tarmac, sharpshooters opened fire. Their first shot missed. For the next six minutes a firefight raged. When it was over all nine Israeli athletes and five of the terrorists were dead.*

*The remaining three were captured. They were freed six weeks later when West Germany gave into the demands of terrorists who hijacked a Lufthansa Boeing 727 shortly after it left Beirut.

Zamir watched the battle from the airfield control tower. The next day he attended an improvised memorial service for the dead athletes, held in the Olympic stadium. In the section of the stand occupied by the Israeli team, eleven seats were left conspicuously vacant. He took the first flight home to Israel. He was depressed and furious at the West Germans, not only for bungling the rescue attempt but for failing to provide adequate security at the Olympic village in the first place. This was not the first time a European government had made it easy for groups like Black September to operate. Time after time since 1968 there had been Palestinian terrorist attacks in Europe. Yet, in Israel’s view, West Germany, France, Italy and Britain, among others, had refused to take the problem seriously. As a result, eleven Israelis were dead. By the time Zamir’s plane reached Tel Aviv he was determined that Mossad would strike out at terrorists wherever they could be found. And it would avenge the dead of Munich.

The concept of revenge was embodied in one of the first laws passed by Israel, the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Act of 1950. It permitted Israel to try war criminals for acts committed against the Jewish race even before Israel was created. That law’s most renowned victim was Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann was the SS officer who administered Hitler’s Final Solution – the extermination of some six million European Jews. In 1945, like many Nazis, Eichmann fled to South America. Twelve years later Mossad received information that Eichmann was in Argentina. Later it learned that he had taken the alias Otto Klement and was living in a scruffy house in a suburb of Buenos Aires. It was not until 1960 that Mossad tracked Eichmann down, and Mossad’s boss Isser Harel flew to Buenos Aires to make certain of the final identification. Then Harel did not hesitate, ordering Mossad agents to bring Eichmann back to Israel for trial ‘come hell or high water.’

They did. They kidnapped Eichmann in the street, drugged him, smuggled him into Buenos Aires airport and put him on a specially diverted El Al flight to Israel.

[NdT: later Mossad would kidnap even Jews, as in the case of the scientist Mordechai Vanunu in Rome. The kidnapping was watered-down by an Italian magistrate – Domenico Sica – that is actually the cheerleader of a Italian judiciary intoxicating & whitewashing team together with judge Misiani and SISDE chief Mario Mori. SISDE is the Italian political-security service.]

There Eichmann stood trial for mass murder. He was hanged on 1 June 1962.

This episode marked an important turning point in Mossad’s evolution. Although most of Israel’s allies sympathized with the motives that lay behind Eichmann’s kidnapping they were at the same time deeply alarmed at Mossad’s methods. The point was not lost on Prime Minister Ben-Gurion who decreed that Mossad should henceforth employ a little more restraint. And for a couple of years the Institute did behave in a more orthodox fashion- until a man named Wolfgang Lotz pulled off a spectacular espionage coup in Cairo.

Lotz had been recruited by Mossad in 1956, largely because of his looks. Half Jew, half Gentile, he had been taken to Palestine from Germany by his mother in 1933 at the age of twelve. His first name maws changed to Zeev but in appearance he remained notably Aryan. He was spotted by Mossad while serving in Military Intelligence and he readily agreed to take on an extraordinary and dangerous mission. Mossad had long been itching to infiltrate an ahent into Cairo and, with Lotz as his candidate, Harel asked the West German secret service, the BND (Bundesnachrichtdienst), for help. The head of the BND, General Reinhard Gehlen [NdT: former head of the Nazi secret service, Gehlen was quietly reinstalled in post-WWII as the head of the new German secret service BND], arranged for Lotz to be provided with training and cover. In due course Wolfgang Lotz arrived in Cairo posing as a fervent anti-semite, a horserider and stud farmer and a wealthy man-about-town. The BND’s own agent in Cairo was told nothing.

Much helped by his exotic cover, Lotz developed a circle of highly-placed Egyptian friends who were most indiscreet about Egypt’s military capability. He also got to know a group of Germans living in Cairo who, Lotz established, were scientists – many of them Nazi exiles – intent on helping Egypt develop ballistic missiles.

When this intelligence reached Tel Aviv it provoked Mossad into taking direct and drastic action. Disregarding the policy of restraint, Harel authorized attacks on the German scientists, their families and their associates. The reprisals began in Switzerland in July 1963 when a light aircraft chartered by a Swiss-Egyptian businessman was sabotaged. The businessman escaped after fortuitously cancelling his flight at the last moment, but his wife and the pilot died in the subsequent crash. In September, a West German who Mossad suspected of supplying Egypt with rocket motors was kidnapped in Munich. Meanwhile, in Egypt itself, the German scientists began receiving letter bombs. One of them exploded and killed five Egyptians.

This campaign of intimidation continued in 1963. In February one of the German scientists, Dr Hans Kleinwachter, left Egypt for a brief visit to Germany. On a lonely road near the Swiss border, Kleinwachter was ambushed by Mossad agents and shot at through the windshield of his car. Fortunately for him, the bullet was deflected and buried itself in his thick winter scarf.

Mossad’s campaign certainly deterred some of the scientists from continuing their work for the Egyptians, but in March 1963 things went badly wrong. On 2 March, Swiss police eavesdropped on a meeting in Basel between two Israeli agents and the daughter of one of the scientists. The agents were arrested and charged with issuing threats.

The publicity surrounding the case was deeply embarrassing to Israel, and Prime minister Ben-Gurion was furious. Isser Harel argued that the German scientist had, like Eichmann, been a special case and that Mossad’s terror tactics were justified, even through they had been exposed. Ben-Gurion disagreed and after a vigorous debate Harel resigned.

That did not altogether end the matter for even after Harel’s departure there were still those in Mossad who continued to believe in direct action. In Cairo the gentleman horse-breeder-cum-secret agent Wolfgang Lotz decided to take matters into his own hands and mailed more letter bombs to the German scientists. They failed to go off, were traced back to him, and in February 1965 he was arrested. Once in custody Lotz unsportingly incriminated the BND’s Cairo agent Gerhard Bauch even though Bauch knew nothing whatsoever of the affair. Bauch, who had been earnestly building his own relationship with the Egyptian secret service, was promptly arrested and only frantic diplomatic action saved him from standing trial alongside Lotz. He was deported to Germany where he resigned in protest at the BND’s perfidy. (Lotz was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in July 1967 in exchange for Arab prisoners-of-war.)

The entire episode was diplomatically disastrous to all concerned. The West Germany government was already in deep trouble with the Arab world through the revelation that it had been supplying Israel with arms, and it was furious with Mossad’s Major Lotz for making matters worse. It was also furious that Mossad agents had invaded German territory during the intimidation campaign. The Israeli government was at that time negotiating with West Germany over the terms of compensation for lost arms supplies and the affair seriously weakened Israel’s hand. Ben-Gurion issued a stern warning that Mossad had no further business engaging in such foolish and open heroics.

Meir Amit, Harel’s replacement as head of Mossad, drew the same moral. Mossad had spent years carefully building a cover for Lotz, who had wrecked that work and seriously jeopardized Israel’s relationship with one of her most important allies. Lotz had no business out in the open: an agent must live in the shadows. The whole point of a secret service was that it should remain secret. Amit insisted that Mossad should go under cover and stay there, and his eventual replacement Zwi Zamir pursued the same policy.

Plumbat was the perfect example of that concept: a brilliant operation carried out in secret which had remained a secret. Then came Cherbourg – Mossad’s design had hold until the last minute, when the complication of the part played by the Israeli Navy forced Israel out into the open.

But after the Munich massacre Zamir was determined that Mossad must, once again, change the rules.

Even before Munich, Zamir had proposed that in the fight against terrorism Mossad should take the law into its own hands. In the summer of 1972 he had told the inner cabinet that Mossad should set up assassination squads to carry the war wherever Israel’s enemies could be found. Zamir argued that it was a logical extension of Israel’s existing policy of mounting reprisal raids against Palestinian leaders in Lebanon. In retaliation for the massacre at Lod airport, for example, Israeli frogmen went ashore in Beirut and planted a bomb in the car owned by Ghassan Kanafani, spokesman for the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Both Kanafani and his teenage niece were blown to pieces. But before Munich the cabinet had baulked at the idea of direct action in Europe. Killing people on Arab territory was one thing; murdering them in London or Paris, quite another. In Munich’s emotional aftermath such prosaic diplomatic considerations carried less weight. On 6 September, only hours after returning to Israel from Munich, Zamir argued his case again. This time the inner cabinet agreed. Salameh and his ilf should be hunted down and killed wherever they were. Prime Minister Golda Meir gave Zamir the go-ahead to set up the killer squads.

The Palestinians were not to die quietly. Israel wanted them killed in spectacular fashion as a clear warning to others. For Mossad that posed the problem of who should actually pull the trigger or plant the bomb. It had discovered during the Wolfgang Lotz affair that secret agents who engaged in assassination attempts tended to wreck their carefully constructed cover. As Mossad was unwilling to jeopardize its European network of agents the murders would have to be carried out by others.

The solution was to create a self-contained operations squad, under Mossad’s control. The men and women in this squad would be the core of the ‘hit teams’ – the killers.

The job of Mossad’s resident agents was to locate the targets, provide information and logistic help and then largely stay out of the way when the ‘hit team’ came in, killed and got out fast. It was a fine distinction. Some of Mossad’s resident agents in Europe became heavily involved in the murders and the network was put at risk.

Within a month of the inner cabinet’s decision, the revenge teams (some observers dubbed them Wrath of God – WOG – squads) were ready to go. Alì Hassan Salameh was the most wanted man on Mossad’s list but he was proving elusive. He was believed to have followed the events in Munich from East Germany and then crossed to the west where he dropped out of sight. As the hunt for Salameh went on Mossad turned to easier targets.

The first to die was Wadal Adel Zwaiter, suspected by Mossad of being the leader of Black September’s Italian cell. At about 10:30 pm on 16 October 1972, he returned to his apartment on Piazza Annibalino in Rome. As he entered the building he was shot twelve times at point blank range by two Mossad killers armed with handguns.

The same month, in Paris, Mossad killed a Syrian journalist named Khodr Kannou who was suspected of being a member of the PFLP. He, too, was shot down outside his apartment.

Mahmoud Hamshari was next to go. He was the Paris spokesman of the Palestine Liberation Organization but Mossad regarded him as a terrorist. In particular he was reckoned to have inspired the planting of a bomb on a Swissair flight to Tel Aviv which had cost the lives of forty-seven people. On 7 December he was lured away from his apartment at 175 Rue Alesia while a bomb was planted in his bedroom. The next day he answered his telephone and heard a high-pitched noise. It was an electronic signal and it triggered an explosion that shattered the lower half of his body. He died a month later.

Six weeks after the attack on Hamshari, Mossad struck in Nicosia, Cyprus. The victim this time was Bashir Abu Khair who Mossad believed had gone to collect a regular donation to the Palestinian cause from the Russian Embassy in Nicosia. Khair returned to his room at the Olympic hotel, got undressed and went to bed. A bomb, hidden under the mattress was triggered electronically and blew him to pieces.

In April two more alleged terrorists died. Professor Basil Al Kubaissi of the American University in Beirut was believed by Mossad to be in charge of terrorist arsenals in Europe. A killer squad caught up with him in Paris on 6 April: as he walked to his hotel, two young men overtook him and shot him nine times. On 9 April, Zaiai Muchasi, believed to be a replacement courier for basher Abu Khair, was dispatched in his Nicosia hotel, again with the aid of a bedroom bomb.

In June Mossad claimed its most important victim so far. Mohammed Boudia was an Algerian who lived in Paris where he had gained a considerable reputation as an actor and theatrical director. He was also a dedicated terrorist and head of the European cell of the PFLP. He had masterminded several attacks against Israel and had liaised with the Japanese Red Army before its bloody assault on Lod Airport. On 28 June Mossad took its revenge. After spending the night with a girlfriend, Boudia drove his car to the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Bernard and parked. While he was away, a Mossad assassin planted a powerful explosive charge behind the driver’s seat. It was fitted with a short fuse that was triggered when Boudia opened the car door. He just had times to get into the driver’s seat before the bomb exploded.

This murderous campaign had not gone unanswered. In Washington DC, Colonel Yosef Alon, air attaché at the Israeli Embassy, was shot dead in the garage of his house. Israeli diplomats around the world received a flurry of letter bombs. And Israelis in Rome and Nicosia who were believed – probably wrongly – to be Mossad agents were gunned down. Mossad did lose a man in Madrid, early in 1973. Moise Yshai was an agent who thought he had successfully infiltrated Black September’s Madrid cell but his real identity had been discovered. At about 10:30 am on January, Yshai was struck by five bullets as he walked along one of Madrid’s main streets, intending to keep an appointment at the Morrison cafeteria. His killer, a medical student in his mid-twenties from Jordan who had arrived in Madrid a week earlier, was never caught.

But Mossad was winning. Leading terrorists went into hiding and the number of their attacks in Europe dropped dramatically. In nine months the ’hit teams’ had carried out seven assassinations without getting caught. The police, particularly in Paris, had little doubt who was behind the killings, but it was impossible to prove any link with Israel. Mossad’s network in Europe remained intact. [NdT: at that time in Italy – 1967 to 1977 - the carabinieri’s general Arnaldo Ferrara was in charge of covering-up the Mossad involvement in many crimes and terrorist attacks.]

And in June 1973 Mossad was winning. Leading terrorists went into hiding and the number of their attacks in Europe dropped dramatically. In nine months the ‘hit teams’ had carried out seven assassinations without getting caught. The police, particularly in Paris, had little doubt who was behind the killings, but it was impossible to prove any link with Israel. Mossad’s network in Europe remained intact.

And in June 1973 Mossad picked up the trail of the man who had always been the prime target: Alì Hassan Salameh. He was spotted in northern Europe, heading for Scandinavia. In Israel a team was assembled from available agents to take up the chase. One of those agents was Dan Aerbel.

Chapter 16

A Fatal mistake