Chapter 16

A Fatal mistake

On 9 July 1973, Aerbel dutifully followed the instructions of his Mossad control and presented himself at Lod Airport, near Tel Aviv. There he met two men who introduced themselves as Gustav Pistauer and Jean-Luc Sevenier. Pistauer was one of Mossad’s most experienced agents. Originally from Poland, he had spent much of World War Two in German concentration camps, where many of his relatives had perished. As well as Hebrew and polish, he spoke English perfectly, and was accomplished in German, French and Italian. He was in his forties, and close to mossad’s retirement age. Some twenty years younger than Pistauer, he yhad come to Israel from one of France’s former colonies in North Africa.

That afternoon the three men caught a Lufthansa flight to Frankfort, en route to Denmark and then Sweden. Mossad had received reports that Salameh was moving north through Europe towards Scandinavia, and felt that his most likely destination was Stockholm, which at that time had the unenvied reputation of being the European base of several terrorist groups. The three men’s task was to try to find Salameh. If they succeeded, an assassination squad would be brought in to kill him. But Pistauer told Aerbel non of this: only that they were bound for Scandinavia, where Aerbel’s languages would be required. When Aerbel started probing further Pistauer told him bluntly to sop asking questions.

After a night in Frankfurt the three men flew to Denmark, where they were due to change planes. From the transit lounge Aerbel telephoned his sister, a doctor with a practice in Copenhagen, to say hello. He told her he was on his way to an international conference on vegetarianism in the province of Skomo in southern Sweden. The purpose was wrong; the country right: later that day the trio arrived in the Swedish capital, Stockholm.

They were there for a week, and if his two taciturn colleagues were uncovering clues to the whereabouts of Alì Hassan Salameh, Aerbel knew nothing about it. Pistauer instructed him to rent two apartments for six months. Aerbel had no idea why they were needed for so long: ‘I had to equip the apartments with furniture,’ he said later. ‘I also had to get hold of a lot of keys.’ Pistauer made Aerbel read aloud the political news from the papers each morning, and generally treated Aerbel as his amanuensis. Aerbel was surprised that Pistauer seemed so preoccupied with his forthcoming pension, calculating aloud how much money he would receive. He found Pistauer hopelessly impractical. ‘I had to help him with everything,’ Aerbel said.

On 13 July Aerbel called his wife in Tel Aviv to tell her he would be home soon. On 16 July he was still in Stockholm. ‘I said in a very decisive way that I wanted to go back to Israel. “No,” Pistauer answered. “We are going to Norway.”

The reason for the switch in plan was new and better information that had reached Mossad from Switzerland. An Arab named Kemal Benamene had been seen by an Israeli agent at Geneva airport buying a ticket for Oslo. Mossad believed that Benamene was an important courier for black September: if he was going to Norway, then there was a strong chance that Alì Hassan Salameh was already there. The three man advance team of Pistauer, Sevenier and Aerbel was dispatched to Norway to locate Benamene and keep an eye on him. Meanwhile, back in Israel, Mossad assembled an assassination squad.

For Mossad both the abruptness of Salameh’s reappearance and his apparent location were awkward. Previous assassinations had been carried out in countries where the preparations had been thoroughly laid. In Paris, scene of more than half the murders, Mossad had been operating on what was virtually home ground, and the ‘hit teams’ had been able to rely on the well-established resident agents for logistic support. In Norway, Mossad’s network was sketchy, and there the ‘hit team’ would have to fend for itself. In view of that it would have made tactical sense for Mossad to do no more than track Salameh to more suitable territory. Or, at least, delay the operation until the groundwork in Norway had been properly laid. It did not because killing Salameh had become an obsession. Just as though it were back in the old days of brilliant improvisation, Mossad hurriedly formed a ‘hit team’ from the best recruits it could find and packed them off to Norway. One of those recruits was very raw indeed.

Marianne Gladnikoff was a short and slightly plump Swedish girl of twenty-nine, with brown eyes and long black hair. She was a doctor’s daughter from Stockholm who had emigrated to Israel out of feelings of solidarity after the 1967 Six Day War. She had a degree in languages from Stockholm university but found no suitable jobs in Israel and took a course in computer programming. She shared an apartment with a girl friend in the suburb of bat Yam south Tel Aviv, and worked as ELTA. ELTA undertook sensitive work for Israeli government agencies, including the preparation of programmes for Mossad’s computers. Gladnikoff was warned not to tell anyone that she worked on computers and to describe herself as a secretary. Early in 1973 she had applied for Israeli citizenship, and on 2 July she started a top-secret induction course that would eventually qualify her to join Mossad.

Just two weeks later, Aerbel’s control Abraham Gehmer called Gladnikoff and asked if she was prepared to go on a mission for Israel. She said she was and Gehmer told her to go to a Tel Aviv café named the Angel. There she was met by a man she did not know. He told her that ‘nothing illegal’ would be required of her, and took her passport, saying it was needed to make out her air ticket – where to, she had no idea. In less than ten minutes the meeting was over.

Early the next morning, 18 July, a mini-bus picked up Gladnikoff at her apartment and took her to Lod Airport. Some fourteen or fifteen other people were gathered there, including three beautiful women. Gehmer was the only one she knew. They spoke in Hebrew and as she understood only a smattering of the language she could glean little of what was going on. But she was particularly struck by one self-possessed man in his forties who everyone addressed as Mike. Had she known his true identity she might have realized that she was involved in a critical assignment. Although he had adopted the alias of Edouard Lasquier for this job, his real name was Georg Manner. He was the head of Mossad’s operations in Europe.

Manner handed Gladnikoff a large roll of banknotes, including a thousand US dollars – Mossad never stints on expenses – and directed her to a plane. The team had been divided into two groups, both bound for Oslo, one via Zurich, the other via Amsterdam. Gladnikoff was in the Zurich party, and sat next to one of the beautiful women, who happened to be Sylvia Raphael. Raphael said her name was Patricia Roxburgh but said little else during the whole flight. In Zurich, one of the men, who said his name was Jonathan Ingleby, discovered he had lost his baggage. Gladnikoff rode with him into Zurich between flights, and they both spent some of their Mossad dollars on new clothes. The last person in the Zurich group was Gehmer, who had asked both Gladnikoff and Aerbel to join the mission. As the plane touched down in Oslo, Gehmer told Gladnikoff that she was to be used as a translator and interpreter. She could not speak Norwegian but she assumed that, with her Swedish, she was the best that Mossad could find. In Oslo she was pleased to discover someone else she knew. It was Aerbel, who had once come to the ELTA office to seek her help in translating come Scandinavian documents.

With the advance guard of Aerbel, Pistauer and Sevenier, who had been in Oslo for twenty-four hours, a sizeable team had now assembled. A number of them had previously worked for Mossad in Paris, including all three who had flown in with Gladnikoff via Zurich. Sylvia Raphael, of course, had been based there as the photographer ‘Patricia Roxburgh.’ Jonathan Ingleby, formerly Jonathan Isaac Englesberg, the British businessman specializing in East-West trade, was a trained marksman who had been in Paris at the time of several earlier ‘hits’ and now in Norway wore his .22 Beretta in a shoulder holster. Gehmer had been attached to the Israeli Embassy in Paris from 1965 to 1969, appearing in the official diplomatic list. In Norway Gehmer was posing as the Englishman Leslie Orbaum, and carried a British passport in that name, number 604285. It was an example of Mossad’s technique of providing agents with the identity mof real people who were unaware their names were being used. In this case the real Leslie Orbaum was an Englishman who worked as a school teacher in Leeds. The real Gehmer was born in Rehovot, in Palestine, in 1937.

There were several agents with similar cover in the group that had flown in via Amsterdam. There was Gerard Emile Georges Lafond, for example: the real Lafond was born in Bourg, France, on 13 February 1945, lived for a time at 144 Rue Lafayette, Paris, and emigrated to Israel in July 1971, going to live and work on the Kibbutz Ein Hachoresh near Haifa. The Mossad agent now in Oslo had borrowed his name without asking. A second in that category was the agent calloing himself Rolf Baehr, who was a Mossad wheelman, or driver. The real Rolf Baehr was born in Cologne on 11 February 1930, and had fled with his parents to Palestine via Italy to escape Nazi persecution. Another agent with a Paris background was Zwi Steinberg, who, like Gehmer, had been officially attached to the Israeli Embassy, from 1968 to 1971, before setting up in Paris as a gentleman of leisure, and as such received a nice round 3,000 francs (£250) a month in his account at the Credit Commerciale de Paris. Steinberg had the advantage of dual nationality, and in Norway he used his Brazilian passport.

Another agent with a South American background was Raoul Cousin, from Argentina. And completing the team were two women: Nora Heffner, a tall, attractive thirty-year-old; and the strikingly beautiful twenty-five-year-old Tamara, who also sometimes called herself Tamar, sometimes Marie. She was one of Mossad’s professional killers and the mistress of Georg Manner, Mossad’s European boss. Manner was in Norway to lead the operation and Pistauer was his deputy.

Aerbel was still funding the work Pistauer was assigning him less than enthralling. He had made all the travel arrangements to get the advance team to Oslo – ‘Pistauer couldn’t even arrange his own air ticket,’ he said later – and now in the name of Dan Erst he rented two cars and an apartment in Otto Ruges vei (Vei is Norwegian for way or street; Otto Ruges was a Norwegian general of World War II) in the residential suburb of Baerum. But he did begin to divine something of the nature of the mission when Pistauer told him to call all Oslo’s hotels in search of an Arab named Benamene. Aerbel felt very pleased when he found him at the Panorama Summer Hotel, one of the student hotels in Oslo which doubles as a hotel during the long summer vacation. Bit the ‘hit team’ delayed going there for several hours, by which time Benamene had moved on. That evening, while Pistauer and one of the new arrivals from Tel Aviv enjoyed a meal at the Oslo Tivoli grill. Aerbel made some twenty more calls from a nearby pay phone in a vain effort to find Benamene again.

On 19 July the character of the mission, and the parts played by Aerbel and Gladnikoff, changed decisively. It became an uninhibited manhunt. One of the team managed to trace Benamene to the small town of Lillehammer, an inland resort 120 miles north of Oslo. Manner reasoned that Black September’s courier could only have gone there to meet Ali Hassan Salameh, and no fewer than ten members of the ‘hit team’ sped north in four rented cars. Among them were Aerbel and Gladnikoff, who now must have realized that they were involved in something very serious.

The team arrived in Lillehammer to find that Benamene was staying quite openly at the Skotte, a small tourist hotel in the town centre. Gladnikoff and Cousin were assigned to stay there in order to watch him, while the eight other agents checked in at a variety of hotels. For someone on so important a mission Benamene was certainly relaxed. That afternoon he went for a swim, then returned to the Skotte for a sleep. Unsure where he was, Cousin and Gladnikoff took up a position in the Skotte’s television lounge so they could see if he went in or out. After three hours Benamene came downstairs, and, to their considerable alarm, sat down beside them. Cousin and Gladnikoff did not dare move until half an hour later when Benamene stood up, stretched and went back to bed. Cousin and Gladnikoff hurried out to report to Manner.

In the morning, things hotted up. Benamene went for a walk. Cousin sent Gladnikoff after him; she lost him. The ‘hit team’ split up, found Benamene sitting alone at an outdoor café, and then lost him once more. He was not spotted again until midday when he sat at the Karoline café on Lillehammer’s main street, Storgaten. This time he was talking to two men – and one of them was an Arab!

The vital task of identifying Alì Hassan Salameh was entrusted to Pistauer, Cousin and Gladnikoff. They went boldly up to the Karoline street café and occupied a table barely five yards from their quarry. Pistauer was equipped with a photograph of Salameh, an enlargement from an outdoor colour snapshot in which Salameh was pictured from waist up. The enlargement had rendered the image somewhat indistinct, and care was obviously needed. Pistauer looked at the picture, then stared directly at the Arab sharing Benamene’s table. Gladnikoff wondered why Benamene remained so composed: didn’t he recognize her and Cousin from the night before?

Apparently not. Benamene and his companions went on with their conversation, even though it was fifteen minutes before Pistauer made up his mind that the second Arab was indeed Salameh. The identification took that long because the photograph, besides being indistinct, showed a man who was clean-shaven, whereas the Arab with Benamene wore a moustache. But if Pistauer needed confirmation that he was observing a meeting between Salameh and his courier it came when he saw the two men exchange handwritten messages.

Having found Salameh the ‘hit team’ let him go. When the two Arabs eventually got up from their table, they shook hands and parted: Benamene walked off in one direction while Salameh rode away on a bicycle in another. As the team did not have bicycles they followed Benamene. They lost him. Fortunately, Manner anticipated that Benamene would return to Oslo and he dispatched Aerbel, Pistauer, Gehmer and Raphael to the capital in the hope of picking up his trail. The four agents arrived in Oslo in time to see Benamene arrive by train and they followed him around the city for several hours. In the process, however, Pistauer managed to pull a leg muscle and retired from the hunt to a bed in the Ritz Hotel.

Late that night Manner sent a message to Oslo: Salameh had been located again. Aerbel, Gehmer and Raphael left Pistauer to his own devices and headed back to Lillehammer. Mossad was closing for the kill.

At ten o’clock the next morning, 21 July, the team gathered in the parking lot of Lillehammer’s railway station. Manner was determined not to let Salameh slip away and he ordered all of the agents to join in tracking the target. They used the four rented cars and depended for communication on walkie-talkie radios: to improve reception it was sometimes necessary to operate them with their aerials sticking out the car windows.

The team picked up Salameh’s trail at an outdoor café just off Storgaten. When he left the café Gladnikoff and Cousin were assigned to follow on foot. In the busy Saturday morning throng on Storgaten they temporarily lost sight of him, but Lillehammer is hardly overcrowded with Arabs and it was not long before the rest of the team relocated him. Salameh led them to a swimming pool.

Manner ordered cars into positions overlooking all the pool exits and instructed Gladnikoff to follow Salameh inside. One agent bought her a bikini which proved much too small, so she rented a one-piece suit at the ticket office. In the pool she saw Salameh speaking to a European. Cautiously she swam closer, only to discover that they were talking in French, which she could not understand.

When Salameh left the pool he and the European walked to another café on Storgaten, followed by Cousin, Raphael and Aerbel. Salameh stayed there until 12:30 when he was joined by a woman with blond hair who was obviously pregnant. They got onto a bus, rode to a residential area on the edge of Lillehammer and disappeared into an apartment building. All four of Mossad’s rented cars followed the bus and then took up positions around the building.

The ‘hit team’ waited over six hours for their quarry to reappear. To relieve the monotony, the watching agents sometimes switched cars, or parked close to each other so that they could chat. Occasionally, they took spins around the neighbourhood. Once a police car passed by when two of the cars were parked close together, but appeared to notice nothing untoward. Around seven o’clock most of the watchers drove back into Lillehammer to have dinner, leaving Gladnikoff and Cousin watching the main entrance. That was unfortunate for soon afterwards Salameh and the pregnant woman, now wearing a bright yellow raincoat, walked out of the apartment block and started downhill towards the centre of town. There was a moment of understandable panic. Cousin ordered Gladnikoff to drive into Lillehammer to find Manner, while he followed Salameh on foot. She refused because she did not know how to drive the car. Salameh and the woman walked past as Gladnikoff and Cousin were at the height of their quarrel. Cousin got out, leaving his fellow agent to cope as best she could. Fortunately for her, she came across Manner, now accompanied by Tamara, almost immediately. And fortunately for the whole team, Cousin managed to stay with Salameh and the pregnant woman. He followed them to the cinema, watched them go inside and then reported to the station parking lot which had been selected as the emergency rendezvous.

Aerbel, Gladnikoff and Gehmer were instructed to keep watch on the cinema’s entrance. Raphael and Cousin sat in two cars close by. Meanwhile, the assassination squad prepared to go into action. The two killers were to be Jonathan Ingleby and the young woman Tamara. Their driver was Rolf Baehr and the fourth in the squad was Gerard Lafond. They drove in a white Mazda to a point a quarter mile or so from the apartment building where Salameh had spent the afternoon and waited.

When the movie, Where Eagles Dare, ended shortly after 10:30 Salameh and his companion left the cinema and walked up Storgaten. Aerbel, who spotted them first, went after them, followed by Gladnikoff and Gehmer. Raphael and Cousin went ahead in their cars and waited further up the street. When Salameh boarded a bus Cousin used his walkie-talkie to warn the assassination squad.

Baehr drove the Mazda to a point close to the apartment building and waited for the bus to arrive. When Salameh and the woman climbed down from the bus Baehr eased the car downhill towards them. He passed so close that the car almost touched Salameh. Then he jammed on the brakes. Ingleby and Tamara got out and raised their Berettas. Alì Hassan Salameh only had time to say ‘No.’

It was the style of the Israeli ‘hit teams’ to leave nothing to chance. When Wadal Zwaiter was assassinated in Rome he was shot twelve times at point blank range. In Paris, Basil Kubaissi was shot nine times. In Lillehammer, Salameh took fourteen bullets. The first six tore into his stomach. The next two struck hi head, one ricocheting into a nearby house, the other penetrating below his ear and hitting the base of his brain. Shots nine through fourteen ripped into his back as he lay on the ground. Two of these struck his left forearm, one a buttock and others hit his kidney and liver. Even so, Salameh did not die immediately. But when Manner arrived on the scene in a green Volvo a few minutes later he was satisfied that his victim could not possibly survive long enough to reach a hospital.

It was an utterly ruthless killing – exactly the fate Mossad had decreed for Alì Hassan Salameh. The trouble was, the ‘hit team’ had just killed the wrong man.

Chapter 17

Confession.