Meir Amit, Isser Harel’s successor, was a special kind of man. He was firm, decisive, sometimes blunt and querulous, but he was also warm, charming, a soldiers’ soldier and a man of many friends. Moshe Dayan told us once: “He was the only friend I ever had.”
Meir Amit’s life story symbolized the change in the Mossad’s leadership. Isser Harel was born in Russia, and belonged to the pioneering generation, while Meir Amit, a Sabra (born in Israel), was the first of a long line of Israeli generals; he had fought in Israel’s wars and joined the Mossad after many years in uniform. Isser’s generation was unobtrusive, closemouthed, shrouded in a shadow of anonymity, conspiracy, and concealment. Meir Amit was an army man, with lots of friends and colleagues who knew what he was doing. Life in the shadows was not for him. And while Little Isser had charisma and mysteriousness on his side, Amit and his successors had the brutal directness and authority that rank and uniform gave them.
Born in Tiberias, raised in Jerusalem, and, finally, a member of kibbutz Alonim, Meir had spent most of his life in uniform. A member of the Haganah since the age of sixteen, a battalion commander when the IDF was created, he had been wounded in Israel’s Independence War, and had later made a brilliant army career. Commander of the elite Golani Brigade, chief of operations during the Sinai campaign, chief of the Southern, then the Central Command, he was certainly on his way to becoming chief of staff, but an ill-fated parachute jump immobilized him for a year in a hospital bed. Partly recovered, after a long convalescence and studies at Columbia University, he was appointed chief of Aman. And there Ben-Gurion found him that dramatic afternoon in April 1963, when he needed a replacement for Little Isser.
Meir’s first steps in the Mossad were not easy. Many of Isser Harel’s colleagues, like Yaacov Caroz, couldn’t stand his abrupt manners and his self-confidence. Some resigned right away, others took their time. Under Amit’s leadership, a change of the guard began. But the internal turmoil against the new ramsad was nothing compared to what Little Isser did to him.
In the late spring of 1963, Ben-Gurion resigned from office and was replaced as prime minister and minister of defense by his close aide, Levi Eshkol. Eshkol launched several initiatives that infuriated his predecessor. One of them was appointing Little Isser as his adviser on matters of intelligence. Little Isser was bitter and disappointed after his departure from the Mossad. And when he heard that Meir Amit had done the Moroccans an unusual favor, he went straight for the jugular.
Meir Amit’s Mossad had established very close relations with the Moroccan kingdom.
The Moroccan rapprochement had started during Isser’s tenure. The first connections with the Moroccans had been made by Yaacov Caroz and Rafi Eitan. In the winter of 1963, Isser told Eitan, in the strictest confidence: “Hassan II, the king of Morocco, fears that Egypt’s president Nasser plots to assassinate him because of his pro-Western policy. Hassan wants the Mossad to take care of his personal security.”
The story seemed improbable. An Arab king turns to the Israeli secret service for help? The always practical Rafi Eitan and another agent, David Shomron, flew right away to Rabat, the Moroccan capital, with false passports; they were whisked through a secret entrance into the king’s palace. There they met the formidable General Oufkir, the king’s minister of interior, whose name alone made people tremble. He was known for his cruelty, used torture against the king’s enemies, and was responsible for the unexplained disappearances of many opponents of the regime. Nevertheless, he was the king’s most valued adviser on intelligence matters, and any agreement between Israel and Morocco needed his approval. He came to Eitan with his deputy, Colonel Dlimi.
Right there, Eitan and Oufkir reached an agreement: the Mossad and the Moroccan secret service would establish close ties and permanent offices in both countries; the Mossad would train the Moroccan secret services and Morocco would give the Mossad agents a foolproof cover throughout the world; a special body would be created for the shared gathering of intelligence; the Mossad would also train the special unit in charge of the king’s security. The agreement was sealed by a visit to the king; Eitan gauchely bowed and kissed his hand—and the Mossad got its first ally in the Arab world.
Two weeks later Oufkir was in Israel. The general, used to sumptuous palaces and posh hotels, spent his long visit in Eitan’s tiny three-room apartment in a modest Tel Aviv neighborhood. Eitan did manage to get Philip, the legendary Mossad chef, to cook for his Moroccan guest. Oufkir left and came again; the relations of the two services kept improving. In 1965 Oufkir asked Meir Amit for a special favor.
The major opposition leader and the king’s most dangerous enemy was a Moroccan called Mehdi Ben-Barka. After being accused of plotting against the king, he had been exiled, but kept directing subversive activities from his hideouts. Sentenced to death in absentia, he knew that his life was in danger; he operated with extreme caution and Oufkir’s men had failed to find him. Could the Mossad help?
Amit’s men helped indeed. Under a clever pretext, they established contact with Ben-Barka in Switzerland and convinced him to come to Paris for an important meeting. At the door of the famous Left Bank restaurant Brasserie Lipp, he was arrested by two French police officers, who—it turned out later—were on Oufkir’s payroll. Ben-Barka was delivered to Oufkir and vanished, but a witness testified that he had seen Oufkir stab him to death. Meir Amit himself informed Prime Minister Eshkol: “The man is dead.”
In France, Ben-Barka’s disappearance caused an unprecedented political scandal. President de Gaulle was beside himself with rage, and when he heard of Israel’s role in the abduction, he didn’t spare it in his fury. Isser Harel was stunned. How could the Mossad participate in such an affair? How could Amit play a role in such a criminal, immoral operation—and jeopardize Israel’s close alliance with France? He asked Eshkol to fire Amit immediately. Eshkol hesitated, but then appointed two boards of inquiry, which found no grounds for any measure against Amit. After all, Amit had lured Ben-Barka to Paris, but had not taken part in his abduction and assassination. Little Isser then resigned and demanded the immediate resignation of both Eshkol and Amit. He tried to launch a campaign in the press, but the military censorship strictly forbade any mention of the affair.
Isser kept doggedly fighting Amit, but the ramsad was already engaged in another operation that was utterly crucial to Israel’s defense: a secret alliance with the Kurds in Iraq.
“At the end of 1965,” Amit wrote in his memoirs, “our dream started to become a reality. The unbelievable happened. An official Israeli delegation settled in the camp of the Mullah Mustafa Barzani (the leader of the Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq).”
The arrival of Mossad officers in Kurdistan was considered a tremendous victory for Israeli intelligence. For the first time a contact was established with one of the three components of the Iraqi nation—the Kurds, who were waging a stubborn, endless war against the Baghdad government. (The other two components were the Shiite and Sunni Muslims.) The rebels, led by Barzani, controlled a large area inside Iraq. If the Mossad succeeded in turning the Kurdish rebels into a strong military force, the Iraqi leaders would be compelled to focus their efforts on their internal problems and their capacity for fighting Israel would be diminished. The alliance with the Kurds could become a real boon for Israel.
The first two Mossad agents spent three months in Kurdistan. Barzani welcomed them in his inner circle, took them with him wherever he went, and revealed to them all his secrets. That first encounter laid the foundation for a close cooperation that was to last for many years. Barzani and the Kurdish military chiefs visited Israel; Meir Amit and his aides came to Kurdistan; Israel supplied the Kurds with weapons and defended their interests in international forums.
Beni Ze’evi, the senior Israeli agent who first visited Kurdistan, had left his wife, Galila, in London; she was expecting a child. Beni’s son, Nadav, was born while his father followed Barzani in the jagged mountains of Kurdistan. A coded telegram reached Ze’evi. It was signed by “Rimon”—Meir Amit’s code name—and read: “The mother and child are in excellent health. Mazal tov!”
When Barzani heard of the baby’s birth, he took four stones and marked a lot with them. “This is my gift to your son,” he said to Ze’evi. “When he grows up, he can come to our country and claim his piece of land.”
And while his relations with the Kurds were developing, Meir Amit started planning another great Mossad operation, code-named “Yahalom” (Diamond), the operation he was perhaps most proud of.
During the year preceding Amit’s death, we met him several times in his Ramat-Gan home. “The story started in one of my meetings with General Ezer Weizman, who was then chief of the air force,” he began. “We used to have breakfast together every two or three weeks. In one of these meetings, I asked Ezer what I could do for him as ramsad. He said right away: ‘Meir, I want a MiG-21.’ ”
“I told him: ‘Have you gone mad? There is not even one such plane in the Western world.’ ” The MiG-21 was the most sophisticated Soviet fighter plane at that time; the Russians supplied many of those aircraft to the Arab states.
But Ezer stood his ground: “We need a MiG-21, and you should not spare any effort in getting us one.”
Amit decided to entrust the operation to Rehavia Vardi, a veteran operations officer who had already tried in the past to get a MiG-21 in Egypt or Syria. “We spent many months working on this operation,” Vardi said years later. “Our main problem was how to transform the idea into an operation.”
Vardi sent out the feelers throughout the Arab world. After long weeks, he got a report from Yaacov Nimrodi, Israel’s military attaché in Iran. Nimrodi wrote about an Iraqi Jew, Yossef Shemesh, who claimed he knew a pilot that could bring a MiG-21 to Israel. Shemesh, single, smart, a womanizer and a bon vivant, had an uncanny ability to befriend people and make them trust him. “He was a smooth operator and could be very persuasive,” Nimrodi said. “He recruited the pilot in the most professional fashion. He worked on him for a year. Only he could do that, nobody else.” Nimrodi decided to test Shemesh. He sent him to perform a few secondary espionage operations. Shemesh passed the test with flying colors, obtaining excellent intelligence. Then Nimrodi gave him the green light to launch his operation.
In Baghdad, Shemesh had a Christian mistress. Her sister, Camille, was married to the Iraqi Air Force pilot Munir Redfa, also a Christian. Shemesh knew that Redfa was frustrated and bitter; even though he was an excellent MiG-21 pilot, he was not promoted in rank. Moreover, he was ordered to fly an antiquated MiG-17 to fulfill a disgusting mission—to bomb the Kurd villages. He regarded this as a humiliation and a demotion. He complained to his superiors and was made to understand that as a Christian, he would never be promoted and never become a squadron leader. Redfa, a very ambitious man, concluded that there was no sense in living in Iraq anymore.
For almost a year, Shemesh held long conversations with the young pilot, and finally succeeded in convincing him to make a short trip to Athens. Using all his eloquence and powers of persuasion, Shemesh explained to the Iraqi authorities that Redfa’s wife suffered from a serious illness, and the only way to save her was to have her examined by Western doctors. She must fly to Greece right away, he said, and asked on her behalf that her husband be allowed to join her, as he was the only one in the family who spoke English.
The authorities capitulated, and Munir Redfa was allowed to travel with his wife to Athens. There they met another pilot—Colonel Ze’ev Liron (Londner), an Israeli Air Force officer. Liron, born in Poland and a Holocaust survivor, was the chief of Air Force Intelligence. He had been asked by the Mossad to help in the Redfa case. Liron and Redfa had several tête-à-tête discussions. Liron pretended to be a Polish pilot working for an anti-Communist organization. Munir told him about his family, his life in Iraq, and his deep disappointment with his superiors who sent him to bomb Kurd villages. All the able Kurdish men had gone to fight, he said, and those who had stayed in the villages were women, children, and old people. These were the people he had to kill? For him it was the last straw that made his decision final: he would leave Iraq for good.
Following the Mossad’s orders, Liron invited Munir to join him on a small Greek island. The Mossad gave Redfa a code name: “Yahalom” (Diamond). In the serene, tranquil atmosphere of the island, the two men continued their conversations and became good friends. Late one evening, Liron asked Redfa what would happen if he left Iraq with his plane.
“They would kill me,” Redfa said. “Besides, there is no country that would agree to give me asylum.”
“There is one country that will welcome you with open arms,” Liron said, and revealed the truth to his astounded friend:
“I am an Israeli pilot, not a Pole.”
There was a long silence.
“Let’s talk about this tomorrow,” Liron said and they parted for the night. The following morning, Redfa told Liron he had decided to accept his offer. The two of them started discussing the conditions for Redfa’s defection and the sum of money he would get.
Redfa was very modest. “Meir Amit told me to offer Redfa a certain amount of money,” Liron said later, “and to double it if needed. But Redfa immediately accepted my initial offer. We agreed that his family would join him in Israel.”
From the Greek island they flew to Rome. Shemesh and his mistress arrived from Baghdad. A few days later, they were joined by Yehuda Porat, a research officer at Air Force Intelligence, who started debriefing Redfa.
“He was polite, very considerate, a man of honor,” Porat recalled. “He was brave, not talkative; he had none of the inhibitions that you would expect of a man in his situation.”
In Rome, Liron and Redfa discussed communication methods. It was agreed that when Redfa heard at Radio Kol Israel in Arabic the popular Arab song “Marhabtein Marhabtein,” that would be the signal for him to be on his way. But he did not know that while he was meeting his handlers in various cafés in Rome, he was being watched by the heads of the Mossad.
“I decided,” Meir Amit told us, “to have a personal look at the pilot before the operation got into its final stage. I flew to Rome and went to the café where the Iraqi pilot and my men were supposed to go. I sat at a neighboring table and waited. Then quite a few people walked into the café. The guy made a good impression; I signaled to our officer who was sitting with him that everything was all right; and I left.”
During our meeting with Amit, he insisted on reading to us a passage from his book Head On, which described the group that had walked into the Rome café: “The Jewish lover (Shemesh), wearing slippers because of a wound in his foot; his mistress, a fat and almost ugly lady (I didn’t understand what he saw in her); and Diamond (Munir’s code name), a short, sturdy, and broad-shouldered man with a serious face. They didn’t know they were being tested.”
Only when he was convinced that he could trust Diamond did Amit give Rehavia Vardi the order to proceed with the next stage—briefing the Iraqi pilot in Israel. Liron and Redfa returned to Athens to catch a flight to Tel Aviv. But a snag at Athens Airport almost ruined the operation. By mistake, Redfa boarded a flight to Cairo instead of Tel Aviv. Only when he boarded the El Al flight, did Liron realize that Redfa had vanished.
“I was desperate,” Liron reported later. “I was certain that everything was lost. But a few minutes later, Munir appeared beside me. It turned out that the flight attendants in the Cairo plane counted the passengers, found out that there was an extra passenger, checked the tickets, and sent Munir to the Tel Aviv flight.”
Redfa spent only twenty-four hours in Israel. He was briefed, and even rehearsed the flight itinerary into Israel. In a Mossad compound, he was taught a secret code; his new friends then took him on a stroll down Allenby Street, one of Tel Aviv’s main arteries, and in the evening hosted him in a fine restaurant in Jaffa, “to make him feel at home.”
Redfa flew back to Athens, changed planes, and landed in Baghdad, in preparation for the last stage.
But . . . “at that moment, I almost got a heart attack,” Amit recalled. “A few days before his desertion, the Iraqi pilot decided to sell his home furniture. Now try to imagine the implications of a sudden garage sale by a fighter pilot. I was scared to death that the Iraqi Mukhabarat (security service) would find out about the sale, would interrogate Redfa, arrest him, and the entire operation would collapse. Thank God, the Mukhabarat didn’t hear about that, and the stupid sale of this miser’s belongings didn’t lead to his arrest . . .”
Then, another problem: how to get the pilot’s family out of Iraq, first to England and later to the United States? He had quite a few sisters and brothers-in-law that had to be taken out of Iraq before he flew. His immediate family, it had been agreed, would be flown to Israel. Redfa’s wife didn’t know a thing about this, and he was afraid to tell her the truth. He had only told her that they were going to Europe, for a long stay. She flew with her two children to Amsterdam. Mossad people waiting there took them on to Paris, where Liron met them. She still had no idea who these people were.
“They were settled in a small apartment with one double bed,” Liron recalled. “We sat on this bed, and there, on the night before the flight to Israel, I revealed to her that I was an Israeli officer, that her husband would land in Israel the next day, and that we are going there as well.”
Her reaction was dramatic. “She wept and yelled all night,” Liron reported to his superiors. “She said that her husband was a traitor; that this was treason against Iraq; and her brothers would kill Munir when they found out what he had done.
“She wanted to go right away to the Iraqi embassy and tell them what her husband intended to do. She didn’t stop screaming and crying all night long. I tried to calm her down; I told her that if she wanted to see him, she had to come to Israel with me. She realized she had no other choice. With swollen eyes and a sick child, she got on the plane and we flew to Israel.”
On July 17, 1966, one of the Mossad stations in Europe got a coded letter from Munir, informing them that his flight was approaching. On August 14, he took off, but a malfunction in the aircraft’s electric system made him turn back and land at Rashid Air Base. “Later,” Amit said, “he found out that it was not a serious hitch. The cockpit suddenly filled with smoke because of a burned fuse; if he stayed the course, he would have arrived without any problem. But he didn’t want to take risks and returned to base, and I got some more white hairs . . .”
Two days later, Munir Redfa took off again. He stuck to the planned route, and on the Israeli radar screens a dot appeared, indicating the approach of a foreign aircraft to Israel’s airspace. The new air force commander, General Mordechai (Motti) Hod, had let only a couple of pilots in on the mission. They would escort the Iraqi plane to their base. All the other units, pilots, squadrons, and bases of the air force were given an order by Hod: “Today you don’t do anything, but absolutely anything, without a verbal order from me. And you know my voice.” Hod didn’t want some overzealous pilot to shoot down “the enemy aircraft” breaching Israel’s perimeter.
The MiG-21 penetrated into Israel’s air space. Ran Pecker, one of the aces of the air force, had been chosen to escort Redfa. “Our guest is slowing down,” Ran reported to air force control, “and signals me with his thumb that he wants to land; he also tilts his wings, which is the international code indicating that he comes in peace.” At eight A.M., sixty-five minutes after taking off from Baghdad, Redfa landed in the Hatzor Air Base in Israel.
A year after the operation started, and ten months before the 1967 Six-Day War, the air force got its MiG-21. The two Mirage fighters that had escorted it from the border landed with it. Meir Amit and his men had accomplished the impossible. The MiG-21, which at that time was considered the crown jewel of the Soviet arsenal and was regarded as the main threat to Western air forces, was now in Israel’s hands.
After he landed, still stunned and confused, Munir was taken to the home of the Hatzor base commander. Several senior officers threw him a party, with inexcusable disregard for the man’s feelings.
“Munir was surprised by the party and at first felt as if he had strayed into another man’s wedding,” Meir Amit recalled. “He sat down in a corner and kept quiet.”
After a short rest, when he was assured that his wife and children were already on an El Al plane on the way to Israel, Munir Redfa was taken to a press conference. In his statement, he spoke about the persecution of Christians in Iraq, the bombing of the Kurds, and his own reasons for defection.
After the press conference, Munir was driven to Herzliya, an ocean-front city north of Tel Aviv, to meet his family. “We did our best to calm him down, encourage him, and compliment him for the operation,” Meir Amit wrote. “I promised him to do all in my power to help him and his family to recover, but I feared the next stage, as we had learned that Munir’s family was very problematic.”
A few days after Munir had landed his MiG in Hatzor, his wife’s brother—an officer in the Iraqi Army—arrived in Israel. He was accompanied by Shemesh and his lover, Camille. The officer was mad with rage. He had been told that he had to urgently visit his sister, who was very sick, in Europe, and to his amazement, he was taken to Israel. When he met with Munir, he blew his top, called him a traitor, jumped him, and tried to beat him up. He also accused his sister, Munir’s wife, of being aware of her husband’s plans all along, which made her an accomplice to an unspeakable crime. She denied his accusations, but in vain. A few days later, the brother left Israel.
The first to fly the MiG was Danny Shapira, a famous air force pilot and the best test pilot in Israel. Motti Hod called him the day after the plane’s landing and told him: “You’re going to be the first Western pilot to fly a MiG-21. Start studying this aircraft, fly it as much as you can, and learn its strengths and its flaws.”
Shapira met with Redfa. “We met in Herzliya a few days after his arrival,” Danny Shapira said. “When they introduced us, he almost jumped to attention. Later we met in Hatzor, by the plane. He showed me the switches, we went over the labels that were in Russian and Arabic, and after an hour I told him that I was going to fly the plane. He was amazed. He said: ‘But you haven’t completed a course!’ I explained that I was a test pilot. He seemed very worried and asked to be beside the plane when I took off. I promised.”
All the senior officers of the air force came to Hatzor to watch the maiden flight. Ezer Weizman, until recently the air force commander, was also there. “Ezer came to me,” Shapira remembered, “patted my shoulder, and said: ‘Danny, no tricks, bring the aircraft back, okay?’
“Redfa was also there. I took off, did what I did, and after I landed, Redfa came to me and hugged me. He had tears in his eyes. ‘With pilots like you,’ he said, ‘the Arabs will never beat you.’ ”
After a few test flights, the air force experts understood why the West held the MiG-21 in such esteem. It flew very high and very fast and weighed a ton less than the French and Israeli Mirage III.
The MiG-21 operation made the headlines of the world press. The Americans were amazed. Soon after, they sent a delegation of technicians and asked to study and fly the aircraft. Israel, however, refused to let them near the plane before the United States shared with it its files on the SAM-2, the new Soviet antiaircraft missile. The Americans finally agreed; American pilots came to Israel, examined the MiG-21, and flew it.
Learning the secrets of the MiG-21 was a tremendous help to the Israeli Air Force and was essential in preparing for the confrontations with the MiGs that finally occurred ten months later, in the Six-Day War of June 1967. “That MiG had an important part in the victory of the Israeli Air Force over the Arab air forces, and in particular in the destruction of the Egyptian Air Force in a few hours,” Amit proudly said.
The Mossad and the Israeli Air Force had indeed achieved a tremendous victory, but Munir Redfa and his family paid dearly for it. “After his arrival, Munir had a very hard, miserable, and sad life,” a senior Mossad officer said. “Building a new life for an agent [out of his country] is almost a mission impossible. Munir felt frustrated, but his family suffered, too. A whole family was broken.”
For three years, Munir tried to make Israel his home, and even flew Dakota aircrafts for the Israeli oil companies to the Sinai and back. His family lived in Tel Aviv; they were given a cover, as Iranian refugees. But Munir’s wife, a devout Catholic, was unable to make friends, felt isolated, and couldn’t adapt to life in Israel. They finally left and moved to a Western country under false identities. Even there, far from home and relatives, surrounded by local security agents, they felt lonely and feared the long arm of the Iraqi Mukhabarat.
In August 1988, twenty-two years after his desertion, Munir Redfa died at his home of a sudden heart attack. His wife, in tears, called Meir Amit (who had long ago left the Mossad) and told him that earlier that morning, her husband had come down from the second floor of their house and, while standing next to their son, suddenly collapsed in the entrance hall and died instantly.
The Mossad held a memorial service for Munir Redfa. Veteran officers couldn’t hold back their tears. “It was a surreal sight,” Liron said. “The Israeli Mossad mourns an Iraqi pilot . . .”
Following the success of Operation Diamond and the subsequent astounding victory in the Six-Day War, Meir Amit saw an opportunity to launch a new operation. He requested that his superiors demand the release of the Lavon Affair prisoners as part of a POW exchange. The young captives had been rotting in prison for thirteen years, with no chance of pardon or early release. Israel, Amit felt, seemed to have forgotten them. Now that the Six-Day War was over, Israel was in negotiations with Egypt. Israel had captured 4,338 Egyptian soldiers and 830 civilians—while Egypt only captured 11 Israelis. Yet the Egyptians firmly refused to include the Lavon Affair prisoners in the deal.
Meir Amit wouldn’t let go. “Forget about it, Meir,” Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan told his friend. “The Egyptians will never release them.” Prime Minister Eshkol agreed. But Amit refused to give up. He finally sent a personal note to President Nasser, “as a soldier to a soldier,” and demanded the prisoners’ release, as well as that of Wolfgang Lutz, the “Champagne Spy,” who had been arrested during the German scientists affair.
Amit negotiated for a prisoner exchange with the Syrians as well. He had a personal stake in this negotiation. He asked the Syrians to help release Mrs. Shula Cohen from her Lebanese jail. Shula Cohen (code-named “the Pearl”) was one of the legendary Mossad spies. A simple housewife, she had established relations with high-placed leaders in Lebanon and Syria, organized the clandestine emigration of thousands of Syrian and Lebanese Jews, and directed a highly successful spy ring.
To his amazement, his plea to Nasser worked, and the Syrians followed suit soon after. Meir Amit won. In a covert transaction, the Lavon Affair prisoners, Lutz, and Shula Cohen were returned to Israel.
Sometimes the missions to bring home a nation’s own are the most meaningful.