Chapter 17

Confession

It is hard to see how anyone could have mistaken Ahmed Bouchiki for Alì Hassan Salameh. The most cursory inquiries would have revealed that Bouchiki, the man Mossad killed, was a well-known Lillehammer figure who worked as a waiter in a health clinic and was married to a local girl named Torill. Aged twenty-nine, with an Algerian father and a Moroccan mother, he had first come to Norway in 1965. He had taken a Norwegian government course in the hotel trade and had worked as a waiter, with a couple of interludes, ever since. He met Torill, an employee at the Lillehammer hospital, in 1972 and they were married later that year, with Torill two months pregnant. To improve his prospects Bouchiki was training as a lifeguard and swam frequently at the local pool. It was there, on 19 July, that he happened to meet Benamene, whom he had not previously known. This chance encounter with a stranger was to cost Bouchiki his life.

There are indeed few Arabs in Norway, and Bouchiki was delighted at the chance of conversing in his own language. The acquaintanceship was renewed at the Kroline café the following morning, when they talked about clothes and Arab music. At the end of the conversation, so closely observed by Pistauer, Cousin and Gladnikoff, they exchanged names and addresses. It was this casual action on which Pistauer placed so sinister an interpretation and which convinced him that Bouchiki was their target, Salameh, From that moment Bouchiki was marked for death. He was followed remorselessly the next day: as he went swimming again, and afterwards met Torill, by now seven months pregnant; as they returned to their apartment for the afternoon; as he escorted her, in her bright yellow raincoat, to the cinema that evening; and as they took their last journey home together that night.

Of all Mossad’s mistakes in Norway, the botched identification was the most extraordinary. Mossad had spent three years making sure it had the right man before kidnapping Eichmann from Argentina. Pistauer took just fifteen minutes to sentence Bouchiki to death. Marianne Gladnikoff said later that he did so on the basis of the one enlarged and fuzzy colour snapshot which he examined at the Karoline café.

It was true that there was a certain facial resemblance between Bouchiki and Salameh – they were after all both Arabs. But Gladnikoff claimed that both she and Cousin had voiced doubts which Pistauer had overridden. She said she had expressed unease about the matter of the moustache – Bouchiki had one at the time; Mossad’s photograph showed Salameh clean-shaven – as well as ma clear difference in the shape of their eyebrows.

But Mossad should not have relied solely on a photograph. Salameh has several features which could have served as an aid to identification. For example, he bears a distinctive scar or pockmark on his left cheek. And one further characteristic possessed by Salameh is so striking that Mossad’s ignorance on the point is astonishing: his height. By all standards apart from American basketball players Salameh is very tall – at least six feet three inches. Bouchiki was five feet seven.

There were other factors that Mossad should have heeded. Would Israel’s most wanted enemy, who even in Beirut is constantly attended by a bodyguard, really have behaved so casually? Would he not have been alerted by the people tailing him so conspicuously? The mistake was so outrageous that Israel has encouraged several equally outrageous theories which attempt to minimize it. One was advanced by lawyers defending the arrested Mossad agents at their trial in Oslo in January 1974. They suggested that Bouchiki was a ‘sleeper’, a Palestinian agent planted many years before and waiting for the call to duty. It is a theory entirely without proof: if Bouchiki, a Moroccan, was involved with the Palestinian movement, not one scrap of evidence to show it has emerged to this day. Nor does the theory get round the problem that in any case Mossad thought it was killing Salameh.

An even more far-fetched theory has emerged: Mossad was set up. According to this theory, Fatah, the military wing of the Palestine liberation Organization, deliberately led Mossad to the innocent Bouchiki in order to divert attention from the Arabs’ preparation for the October 1973 war. For Israel the theory has the advantage of excusing both the killing in Lillehammer and Israel’s lack of preparedness for the war. If it is true, then Fatah pulled of one of the most spectacular subterfuges in the history of intelligence operations. And both Mossad and Israel stand exposed as among the most spectacular dupes.

The truth is much more simple. Mossad’s behaviour in Norway was that of an organization that had grown complacent, even arrogant, in its prowess. Mossad maws careless of the hazards inherent in operating on unknown territory, instead of the comforting surroundings of a city like Paris where the backup was strong and the ground well-prepared. To arrive team-handed in the small town of Lillehammer was reckless. Local people soon noticed the squad of cars with Oslo licence plates, and several jotted down their numbers. The cars’ movements on 20 and 21 July were well observed, as were the radio antennas protruding from their windows. The Lillehammer police did see the stakeout of the Buochikis’ apartment on the fatal afternoon. A neighbour was even watching from close by when Bouchiki was gunned down, and noted the type of a car the killers had used. By the time the ‘hit team’ left Lillehammer for Oslo the police of Norway were already for them.

A murder anywhere in Norway is a rare event – there are only about thirty a year. The Lillehammer police had dealt with one back country killing in the 1960’s, but there had not been a murder within the town limits for forty years. They were on the scene within moments of receiving calls from the Bouchikis’ neighbours. Bouchiki may just have been alive when an ambulance picked him up, but at the Lillehammer hospital doctors certified him ‘dead on arrival.’ News of the killing was quickly flashed to Norwegian police headquarters in Oslo.

Meanwhile, the four Mossad cars, having received their ‘go home’ instructions from Manner, stopped at the roadside rendezvous five miles south of Lillehammer. According to Gladnikoff, it was Jonathan Ingleby, when asked how the killing had gone, who uttered the laconic ‘a job is a job.’ Despite Ingleby’s studied nonchalance, the atmosphere in the white Peugeot containing Gladnikoff and Aerbel as it continued on the way to Oslo was anything but relaxed. Gehmer, who was driving, said nothing. Beside him Raphael smoked incessantly and gulped whisky from a bottle of Chivas Regal. Aerbel was clearly feeling under pressure, for he swigged whisky, too, despite his claims to be teetotal. He also complained of stomach ache. Next to him Gladnikoff, finally aware, if she was not before, just what the mission was about, was moaning softly and Aerbel took her hand. (Later, he told the police that this was to comfort her. But when he went on trial Aerbel, in a show of bravado, said he was making a pass at her.)

As the Peugeot sped south along the eastern shore of Mjosa Fiord, several cars bearing detectives from Norway’s serious crimes squad, the E-Gruppa (Etterforsknersgruppa – the equivalent of a homicide department or the British murder squad), were racing to Lillehammer by the shorter, western route. Local police along both routes had also been alerted, and they set up roadblocks. The first in the Peugeot’s path was at Hamar, forty miles south of Lillehammer. It was not a very intimidating affair; a patrolman stood on the roadside signalling cars to stop. The first drivers to approach simply ignored him and drove past. Gehmer was betrayed by his own anxiety. When he saw the policeman he slowed, then changed his mind, accelerated and drove on. His hesitation was enough to alert the patrolman who noted the Peugeot’s license number, DA 97943. it was relayed to Oslo police headquarters.

The Peugeot drew up outside the apartment Aerbel had rented in Otto Ruges vei, oslo, in the early hours of Sunday morning 22 July. The four agents went inside. They were hungry and wanted to eat, but the apartment contained no food so they went to bed.

Later that morning another of the Lillehammer team arrived at the apartment in the green Volvo that Manner had used during the operation. The Volvo, which had been rented from Oslo’s Fornebu Airport, was no longer needed, and Aerbel volunteered to take it back, offering to buy some food at the same time. The combination of parsimony and hunger was the ‘hit team’s’ undoing.

As Aerbel drove the Volvo to the airport, Gladnikoff followed in the white Peugeot in order to bring him and the food back. Aerbel parked at the airport terminal and went inside to hand in the keys and to buy food at the terminal’s self-service cafeteria. Gladnikoff waited in a no waiting zone. The Peugeot’s number, picked up at the Hamar roadblock the previous night, had already been circulated to the police and airline staff at Fornebu. An SAS airline ticket clerk spotted the Peugeot and called a police officer, who took Gladnikoff to the airport police post. As Aerbel walked back towards the Peugeot, his arms laden with food, he was met by more police.

During those first moments in custody, the naivete of Aerbel and Gladnikoff was pitifully exposed. When Aerbel was asked why he was carrying so much food, he explained that some was for his friends. At nearby Sandvika police station, Aerbel said those friends were staying with him in Baerum. Gladnikoff even gave the address of the ‘safe house’ – 77c Otto Ruges vei. The police went there and arrested Raphael and Gehmer. By 6:30 that evening all four of the Peugeot’s passengers were back in Lillehammer, this time in the police station on Storgaten, the same street where the fatal identification of Ahmed Bouchiki had been made.

Some very puzzled members of Norway’s E-Gruppa were waiting for them. They were led by Magnhild Aanestad, a detective with slender wrists, greying hair and a taste for simple summer dresses. Aanestad was the E-Gruppa’s second-in-command, and the highest-ranking woman on the Norwegian police force. She joined the police in 1954 and even though women were not accorded equal promotion until 1960, rose steadily to politiforstebetjent, parallel to a US captain of detectives or a British chief inspector. Despite her frail, almost innocent look, she had tackled and solved her fair share of the E-Gruppa’s toughest cases, including a particularly intractable murder involving a Pakistani whose body was found six months after it had been thrown into a fiord. She occupied a large, drab office in the E-Gruppa’s headquarters in Oslo’s Victoria Terrasse, relieving its institutional greyness by bringing in flowers – she liked Michaelmas daisies – which she displayed in a slender vase on the windowsill. She had no illusions about the requirements of her chosen profession. She remained unmarried, accepting that no husband would easily tolerate the abrupt departures and the long absences. She had been asleep in her Oslo apartment when the news from Lillehammer came through. She was up and dressed in moments, and on the road to Lillehammer within an hour.

The few details Aanestad had learned simply did not add up. The police had heard from a distraught Torill Bouchiki how a man and a woman she had never seen before had burst from a car to shoot her husband down. Aanestad wondered why strangers should come to Lillehammer to kill an Arab. Her first thought was that it must be something to do with narcotics. As she considered the four suspects, two men and two women, who had been brought from Oslo, she felt even more baffled. Two seemed fairly composed. The other two, Marianne Gladnikoff and the man who said his name was Dan Ert, were clearly very nervous.

It fell to Aanestad to assign a detective to each suspect. She had an experienced and eager team available, including a young detective inspector named Steinar Ravlo. Only twenty-nine, Ravlo had already helped investigate some thirty murder cases – quite a tally for Norway. His reputation lay not only in his skill as an investigator, but in his ability as a thoughtful and determined interrogative. In that role Ravlo was undoubtedly aided by his handsome Nordic looks and his deceptively friendly smile. Aanestad decided that Ravlo was the obvious choice for the uneasy Dan Ert. To Marianne Gladnikoff she assigned a short, young, strongly built detective named Leif Lier.

Ravlo escorted Aerbel to an office on the third floor of the Lillehammer station with windows overlooking Storgaten. The room was well-appointed by the standards of Victoria Terrasse with a splendid working table made of polished mahogany, and a comfortable visitor’s chair. Ravlo invited Aerbel to sit down.

When it came to composing a cover story, Aerbel, despite his lack of preparation, had much in his favour. He had travelled widely and he still owned the Viking company in Copenhagen, even if it was little more than a nameplate outside a scruffy office. He also had his fertile imagination.

Aerbel repeated that his name was Ert and said that he lived in Rome. He owned a Danish company named Viking, and he had come to Norway to sell his products. That was why he had rented the apartment in Baerum. He had first met his three companions at an Oslo hotel, and Patricia Roxburgh (the alias of Sylvia Raphael) had moved into the Baerum apartment with him soon afterwards. On Saturday they had decided to go for a drive, and they could possibly have been in Lillehammer. ‘But really I’m not sure at all where we went. We were only looking at the beautiful countryside and we did not have any definite travel plans or schedule.’ The four had spent the night in the apartment and in the morning, as the police well knew, he and Gladnikoff had gone to Fornebu Airport to return one of their rented cars. He knew little about his companions’ background, but he had noticed nothing strange about them. He definitely knew nothing about a killing in Lillehammer.

The four E-Gruppa interrogators were sequestered with their suspects in different parts of the borrowed Lillehammer police station. Magnhild Aanestad ha set up a ‘murder room’, and from time to time the interrogation would come out to relate to her what they were being told. Despite some inconsistencies, Aerbel’s story was broadly similar to those being told by Raphael and Gehmer. Aanestad felt they were all probably lying, but just how they were connected with the murder, or with each other, remained a mystery. When one official arrived at the police station and asked what was going on Aanestad replied: ‘A man is dead, that is reality. What the motives are, we don’t know.’

But the E-Gruppa detectives were about to get their first intimation that they were caught up in an international intrigue with sensational implications.

Gladnikoff had been closeted with Leif Lier for a long time. She was both bewildered and a little angry. She had been kept ignorant, even misled, over the purpose of the mission to Norway. Now she found herself caught up in a murder. Under gentle, almost sympathetic pressure from Lier, she began to talk. She said she had come from Israel, and that she had been recruited for a secret operation by Mossad. She talked of following the mysterious Benamene to Lillehammer, and of sitting next to him in the Skotte’s television lounge. She described the identification session in the Karoline. ‘I had no idea that a man was going to be killed,’ she said.

Lier had emerged once during Gladnikoff’s recitation to give the first gist of it to Aanestad. She was dubious and warned Lier to be cautious. But when Lier brought the interrogation to a close after midnight and related the detail of Gladnikoff’s account, it was no longer possible to believe that she had made it all up. Aanestad reflected that Norway was a small country several thousand miles from Israel. She asked herself: ‘Could this really happen here?’

After breakfast the next morning Lier met Gladnikoff again. This time he was disappointed. A night’s sleep had helped restore her composure and she was deeply regretting her talkativeness. She refused point blank to throw further light on her extraordinary story. Raphael and Gehmer were equally tight-lipped. The main hope rested with the man who called himself Ert. At 2:40 that afternoon Inspector Ravlo led Aerbed back to the room on the third floor. Ravlo did not know it yet, but Aerbel was in a very vulnerable state.

A stay in the cells may have been therapeutic for Gladnikoff, for Aerbel, it was agony. It brought back all the terrible memories of the two months he had spent bricked into a cellar in Denmark as a child, hiding from Jew-hunting Nazis. That was why he had asked for his house in Herzliyya to be designed with so few interior doors. That was why, after listening to tales of life in Hamburg jail from Torben Hviid, he once had said: ‘I couldn’t stand a single night like that.’

When the second interrogation began, Aerbel falteringly repeated his businessman story. Ravlo was sceptical, though not hostile. Then came the long silence, as Aerbel stared out of the window, and Ravlo could feel the sweat on his palms. Finally Aerbel cracked; the subsequent interview lasted eight hours. To occasional prompting by a bemused Inspector Ravlo, Aerbel told everything he knew about the Lillehammer operation, confirming all that Gladnikoff had said, and providing much more, including the emergency telephone number Mossad had given him at the start of the operation. He even gave Ravlo information which later led E-Gruppa detectives to an Israeli diplomat’s apartment in Oslo. There they found ‘hit team’ member Zwi Steimberg and arrested him despite strenuous official protests. For good measure they took from the apartment a communications expert named Michael Dorf, who worked at the Israeli Embassy.

Aerbel also attempted to justify the ‘hit team’s’ mission. He told Ravlo that Israel was at war with terrorists who sought her destruction, and that the Lillehammer operation had been sanctioned at the highest level. Aerbel mentioned that when he saw the cruising police patrol car near the apartment building on the Saturday afternoon he felt sure that the Norwegian authorities were co-operating in the mission. It dawned on Ravlo that Aerbel believed the governments of Norway and Israel had drawn up the Lillehammer plan together, and that he had only to convince Ravlo of this to go free.

It was nearly midnight when Ravlo ended the interview. Aerbel was depressed to learn he would have to spend another night in the cells. Ravlo noticed his dismay and tried to comfort him by saying he was not the only one to have talked. For that solace Aerbel was grateful. It marked the beginning of the dependency Aerbel came to feel for Ravlo, a feeling which Ravlo did his best to encourage and exploit.

Over the next two weeks Ravlo interviewed Aerbel almost every day. The meetings were informal. They ate sandwiches, Ravlo drank coffee, and he saw that Aerbel was provided with the rose-hip tea he favoured. As Ravlo catered to Aerbel’s predilections, Aerbel spilled more and more details of Mossad’s operations and the agents who had undertaken them.

On 5 August Aerbel and the five other prisoners were split up. The Norwegians wanted to ensure there could be no mass breakout, or even a break-in by an avenging force of Arabs. Aerbel was moved north to Trondheim, an ancient university city 350 miles from Oslo. Ravlo secured for Aerbel a spacious cell in Trondheim prison’s modern hospital wing. The cell had hot and cold water, a writing table, walls painted in restful pastel colours, and a fresh vase of flowers each day. The two large windows had no bars and Ravlo even persuaded the prison authorities to leave the cell door open, to ease Aerbel’s claustrophobia.

Because of the distance to Trondheim, Ravlo’s visits became less frequent. To compensate, Ravlo obtained special permission for Aerbel to keep a typewriter which his sister had delivered. In Ravlo’s absence Aerbel wrote him letters, sometimes two or three a day, containing fresh information. By now Aerbel regarded Ravlo as a true friend. Once Ravlo munched an almond from a food parcel Aerbel had received and remarked how tasty it was. Soon a package of almonds arrived for Ravlo from Israel. It was exactly the kind of relationship Ravlo desired. As he rather clinically put it: ‘It is a fundamental basis of an enquiry to create an atmosphere of confidence.’

Aerbel continued to provide fascinating details of his work for Mossad. He told Ravlo it began in 1963. He listed the many names he had used, and said that on Mossad’s instructions he had reported his Danish passport lost several times in order to obtain new ones. He had given the surplus passports to Mossad.

Aerbel told Ravlo of sailing into ports in the eastern Mediterranean to spy on Arab ships. He made a point of mentioning the presence on the yacht of the lovely, long-legged Sylvia Raphael. Ravlo told Aerbel he was not sure how much he could believe. Such scepticism only encouraged Aerbel to brag more. ‘He was always eager to make me believe that he was an important member of Mossad,’ says Ravlo. He judged Aerbel ‘very naïve’.

On 13 August Aerbel asked to see Ravlo again. By then Ravlo was increasingly occupied on other aspects of the inquiry. Although Gladnikoff had given a more or less full account of her part in the operation, her accomplices were proving far less helpful and there were many mysteries for E-Gruppa to resolve. Nevertheless, Ravlo flew up from Oslo on 14 August and went into Aerbel’s hospital cell. Aerbel seemed pleased that he had been able to help Ravlo once more, but the inspector was far from satisfied: was that all Aerbel had brought him to Trondheim to hear?

Aerbel genuinely did not have a lot more to say. He had given away most of his secrets. Almost all he had left was the little he knew about Operation Plumbat.

He asked Ravlo if he had told him about the ship. What ship, Ravlo asked?

‘I owned the Scheersberg A.’

Ravlo asked, so what?

‘It carried the uranium to Israel.’

Aerbel immediately realized he had gone too far. When Ravlo probed further, Aerbel would add only that he had not known about the uranium shipment at the time he owned the Scheersberg A. Puzzled, Ravlo withdrew. He had made some notes during the conversation, including the words ‘Scheersberg A’ and ‘uranium’ and he typed an account of what Aerbel had said, amounting to 120 words on a single sheet of paper. It was, of course, that brief report which the Norwegian secret service found in the Lillehammer file, and which provided the vital missing piece of the Plumbat puzzle.

Chapter 18

Friends at Court