Chapter 18

Friends at Court

Zwi Zamir, head of Mossad, had been in Norway to oversee the murder of Salameh. Mossad’s leaders have a traditional liking for being on the scene as an important operation nears its consummation, and Zamir travelled to Norway several days before the killing, spending that Saturday in an unpretentious motel on the road forty miles south of Lillehammer. As soon as he heard from the team leader Georg Manner that the ‘hit’ had been performed, he checked out of the motel and went to Oslo. Manner joined him there. It was not until the first newspaper reports of the murder were published on Monday – there are no Sunday newspaper in Norway – that Mossad knew it had killed the wrong man. Worse, Zamir learned that four of his agents had been arrested.

Ahmed Bouchiki’s actual killers, Ingleby and Tamara, had already escaped. The remaining members of the team were still hiding in Oslo, intending to depart in ones and twos. They were now clearly in jeopardy and Zamir instructed them to keep their heads down while he attempted to sort out the mess.

Neither Zamir nor any other Israeli official could openly approach the Norwegians, for to do so would acknowledge that those in custody were Israeli agents. But Israel had always enjoyed friendly relations with Norway, and Zamir thought that a discreet approach might work. A Copenhagen lawyer named Isi Foighel, a prominent member of Denmark’s Jewish community, was commissioned to go to Lillehammer. He went by seaplane which landed at the north end of Mjosa Fiord. He went directly to Lillehammer police station and asked to see the prosecuting authorities. He was rather quickly sent away.

If Zamir needed further proof that Norway was not going to overlook the murder it came the following day, when acting on Aerbel’s information the E-Gruppa raided the Israeli diplomat’s apartment, ignored claims of diplomatic immunity, and arrested Zwi Steinberg and Michael Dorf. When the Israeli Ambassador went to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry to protest this outrage, he was sent away. Israel’s chief legal adviser flew in from Tel Aviv to add weight to the protest. The Foreign Ministry remained unmoved.

There could be no doubt that Norway was going to prosecute anyone it could hold culpable for Bouchiki’s murder. Zamir and Manner decided the time had come to leave town. They slipped away, as did the remaining members of the ‘hit team’ who had managed to escape arrest. But Mossad could not let the matter rest here. Events were taking place elsewhere in Europe which made it very clear that at least one of the arrested agents was talking his – or her – head off. Mossad’s European network was in danger of being blown wide open.

The revelations in the Lillehammer file were being passed, in a flow of telex messages, from norway’s secret service to its European counterparts. Nowhere were those telexes more eagerly read than at the Paris headquarters of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the French counterintelligence service.

The French were heartily sick of the succession of shootings and bombings that the Arab-Israeli conflict had imported to Paris. But the DST had been unable to stop the mayhem or catch those responsible for it. The information that Aerbel was supplying about Mossad’s network in France therefore made consummate reading. When Magnhild Aanestad asked for permission to go to Paris to follow up the Lillehammer case she was made most welcome.

The information provided by Aerbel, and gleaned from the possessions of his less talkative companions, led Aanestad, accompanied by two DST men, to a series of Mossad apartments. Aanestad discovered that Mossad referred to the apartments not by their addresses but by the Paris cinemas they were nearest to: Eiffel, Tours and Madeleine, for example. In all she found eight apartments which Mossad had used as accommodation for resident agents or as ‘safe houses.’ In one of these, she found Mossad’s store of sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment.

More significantly, Aanestad discovered ballistic evidence that linked the killing of Ahmed Bouchiki with the shootings of Basil Kubaissi in Paris on 6 April 1973, and of Wadal Zwaiter in Rome on 16 October 1972. All three had been shot with .22 calibre pistols with bored barrels whose boring went to the right. In each case the bullets used had been ‘long rifle’ cartridges made by the German weapons company Reinisch-Westfaelische Sprengstoff. In each case they were marked with the capital letter R and striated on the bullet end. If Mossad had killed Bouchiki, then here was clear proof that Mossad had been involved in these earlier murders. (So convincing did this evidence appear that the Italian magistrate investigating the Zwaiter killing later issued arrest warrants against all the named members of the Lillehammer team.)

During her visit Aanestad also found interesting background on two of the suspects in custody in Norway. Since his arrest Gehmer had refused to change his story that he was Leslie Orbaum, a schoolteacher from Leeds, England; he had merely been visiting Norway on vacation, and he had nothing to do with Israel. The DST was immediately able to identify ‘Orbaum’ as the Israeli diplomat who had been based at the Paris Embassy until 1969.

The DST was also able to reveal the true identity of Steinberg, the Mossad agent whose arrest had aroused furious diplomatic protests. A DST agent took one look at a photograph Aanestad had brought and said: ‘My God – that’s Zipstein.’ The French had good reason to remember Victor Zipstein: he had been Admiral Limon’s ‘chauffeur’ on the momentous visit to Cherbourg on Christmas Eve, 1969.

With this quality of information, coupled with Aerbel’s detailed confession, Norway had a formidable case against the ‘hit team.’ It could demonstrate both that the Lillehammer murder had been sanctioned by the Israeli government, and that it was only the latest in a series of official political assassinations. Mossad also knew, from the Paris raids, that the information Norway was acquiring was dynamite. If it emerged in the formal setting of a trial such evidence could wreck Israel’s relations with half of Europe and cast Mossad once again in the role of international outlaw. Israel had to do all she could to prevent the information from becoming public. To a very large extent she succeeded.

The man in the hot seat was Hakon Wiker. As Norwegian State Prosecutor for East and South Norway, as well as the city of Oslo, he had arrived in Lillehammer soon after the E-Gruppa, and had followed the investigation closely from that moment. A tall, handsome and sometimes anxious man, he was a former policeman on the Oslo force who had studied law in order to join the police legal department, and had graduated to his post as state prosecutor in 1968. It was now his task to prepare the prosecution case against the six suspects.

Wiker soon found himself under considerable and conflicting pressure. Norway’s Prime Minister Trygve Bratteli was asking for daily reports on the progress of the investigation. In addition, Wiker met frequently with Rolf Jahrmann, the head of the E-Gruppa, and with Gunnar Haarstad, boss of Norway’s security service. On the one hand Wiker understood the natural police desire to include all evidence about the motives of the accused. On the other, Wiker was aware that the security service would want nothing to harm its cordial relations with Mossad: Haarstad and Zamir knew and liked each other, and the two intelligence outfits had long exchanged information about terrorist organizations and activities.

In the end Wiker adopted a rule of thumb that he said was fair to both side: ‘I put in just the evidence concerning the murder.’ In preparing the case, Wiker excluded large amounts of information about Mossad’s operations, ‘in the interests of international security.’

Even then, some of the evidence ‘just concerning the murder’ did threaten Mossad. It did not have to worry. When Aerbel and his five co-defendants went on trial in Oslo on 7 January 1974, the prosecution and defence soon reached an extraordinary understanding. Whenever sensitive matter were raised, such as Aanestad’s discoveries in Paris, the packed court was cleared. Aerbel remained as voluble in the witness box as he had been during his interrogations. And after he had once again revealed Mossad’s emergency telephone number in Tel Aviv the court was closed, and it remained closed until the end of the trial.

Aerbel’s admission that the Scheersberg A had taken uranium to Israel was simply not mentioned. Wiker had read Ravlo’s brief report on the subject but did not know what it meant. The Norwegian secret service men who also read the file did understand its significance. But they never told Wiker. To Mossad’s enormous relief Plumbat was one of the secrets that remained buried in the Lillehammer file.

Norwegian justice was merciful.

Dan Aerbel, Abraham Gehmer, and Sylvia Raphael were found guilty of murder and espionage. Gehmer and Raphael were sentenced to five and a half years; Aerbel, to five. The sentences were less than Norway’s usual minimum.

Marianne Gladnikoff received two and a half years, Victor Zipstein one year, and Michael Dorf was acquitted. The sentences were academic since all five convicted were given generous parole.

Aerbel was released after nineteen months, proper allowance having been made for his ‘medical condition.’ He returned to Israel, to his old job at Osem, and to his house with few doors.

Chapter 19

Closing the Stable Door