Chapter Twelve
The Quest for the Red Prince

On September 5, 1972, at four thirty A.M., eight armed terrorists wearing ski masks broke into the apartment of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics. They killed Moshe Weinberg, the coach of the wrestling team, who tried to bar their way, and Joe Romano, a weight-lifting champion. A few athletes, awakened by the shouts and the gunfire, escaped by jumping out the windows; nine were taken hostage by the terrorists.

The German police arrived, followed by reporters, photographers, and television crews that covered the drama unfolding in the Olympic Village. For the first time in history, the whole world watched a murderous terrorist attack in live broadcast on its television screens. So, too, did Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, who was awakened by her military adjutant. Golda felt trapped: the attack happened in a friendly country and the responsibility for rescuing the hostages fell on Germany’s shoulders. The authorities of the State of Bavaria, where the attack had occurred, politely rejected Israel’s suggestion to send over Sayeret Matkal, the best Israeli commando unit. You have nothing to worry about, the Germans said to the Israeli representatives, we shall free all the hostages. But Germany lacked the experience, the creativity, and the courage to face a deadly, cunning terrorist organization. After an exhausting negotiation between the terrorists and the German authorities, which lasted a whole day, the terrorists and the hostages were driven to Fürstenfeldbruck Airport, outside Munich. There, the Germans had promised the terrorists, they would board a plane that would take them to the destination of their choice. But the police actually had laid a childish and amateurish trap at the airport. They had hauled an empty and unmanned Lufthansa aircraft to the center of the airport. Incompetent sharpshooters had been placed on the roofs. The terrorists’ leader came to inspect the plane. That plane, with no air crew, its engines cold, was going to take off in a few minutes? The terrorists right away realized they were being deceived; they opened fire and threw hand grenades. During the ensuing shoot-out with the police, they murdered all the hostages. A German police officer was also killed, as well as five of the eight terrorists (the other three would be captured, but released shortly afterward, following the hijacking of a Lufthansa aircraft by the terrorist organization). Israeli general Zvi Zamir, who had recently replaced Meir Amit as ramsad, helplessly watched the bloody drama from the control tower. He had been sent to Munich by Prime Minister Golda Meir, but had no right to interfere with the German operation. His hosts kept assuring him that their plan was excellent, and he just had to watch and see. What the ramsad saw was the massacre of the Israeli athletes. He now realized that Israel had a new enemy: a terrorist organization that called itself “Black September.”

 

Black September. That was how the Palestinian terrorists had renamed September 1970, the month when King Hussein of Jordan had massacred thousands of them in his kingdom. In the years that had passed since the 1967 Six-Day War, the terrorists gradually had gained control over large chunks of Jordanian territory and many neighborhoods in the capital, Amman; towns and villages along the Israeli border became their exclusive bases and they would wander in their streets with their weapons. They rejected King Hussein’s authority and step by step had become the real masters of Jordan. The king knew this—but didn’t do anything. In one of his visits to an army camp, he saw a brassiere flying like a flag from a tank antenna. “What’s this?” he angrily inquired.

“This means that we are women,” the male tank commander replied. “You don’t let us fight.”

Finally, Hussein could take that no more. He could not continue burying his head in the sand like an ostrich while his kingdom was slipping through his fingers. On September 17, 1970, the king unleashed his army against the terrorist bases and camps. It was a terrible massacre. Terrorists were shot in the streets, hunted, captured, and executed without trial. Some of them found shelter in the Palestinian refugee camps, but the Jordanian artillery shelled the camps without a shadow of remorse, killing thousands. Scores of panicked terrorists crossed the Jordan River and surrendered to the Israeli Army. They preferred to rot in Israeli prisons than die by Jordanian guns. During the massacre, most of the surviving terrorists escaped to Syria and Lebanon. Until this very day, the number of dead terrorists in Black September remains unknown; the figures are between two thousand and seven thousand people.

Yasser Arafat, chief of Fatah, the major Palestinian terrorist organization, became obsessed with revenge. He created, inside the Fatah, a secret inner organization, an underground within an underground. The regular Fatah members and commanders didn’t even know of its existence. He called it “Black September.” This organization did not comply with the “respectable” lines of conduct that Arafat now tried to impose on his group in order to achieve international recognition and sympathy. It was to be a cruel, unrestrained group that would attack the “enemies of the Palestinian people” in every possible way, without mercy. Formally, Black September did not exist, and Arafat would deny any connection to it, but secretly he was its creator and leader. He appointed Abu Yussef, one of the senior Fatah commanders, as the head of Black September; as chief of operations, he selected Ali Hassan Salameh, a young man with fanatic views but no less brave or smart. Ali was the son of Hassan Salameh, who had been the last supreme commander of the Palestinian forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Hassan Salameh had been killed in battle, and his son Ali had vowed to continue his father’s struggle.

Black September’s first operations didn’t worry Israel too much, as they were mostly directed against Jordan. The terrorists bombed the Rome offices of the Jordanian national airline; attacked the Jordanian embassy in Paris with Molotov cocktails; hijacked a Jordanian airliner to Libya; sabotaged the Jordanian embassy in Berne, an electronics plant in Germany, and oil reservoirs in Hamburg and Rotterdam; in the cellar of a house in Bonn, they murdered five Jordanian secret agents. In their most appalling operation, they murdered former Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Al-Tal in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton. One of the assassins crouched over the body and lapped his victim’s blood.

With Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the terrorists now took upon themselves to continue the war against the Jewish state. They hijacked aircraft, crossed Israel’s borders, and assassinated civilians, planted bombs and explosive charges in the big cities. The Shabak and the Mossad had to fight a new enemy now, penetrate the terrorist organizations, foil their plans, and arrest their activists. Fatah was the major organization Israel had to confront now; Black September was not.

But Black September soon crossed the limits it had originally set to its activities and started acting against Western nations—first and foremost, against Israel.

The Munich massacre was their first, bloody assault.

And that was how Ali Hassan Salameh earned his nickname. He was the brains behind the Munich operation. The rumors about his obsession with killing and blood spread among the terrorists, and they started calling Hassan Salameh’s son the “Red Prince.”

 

In early October 1972, two retired generals asked to meet with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who had replaced Levi Eshkol after his sudden death in 1969. They were the new ramsad, Zvi Zamir, and the prime minister’s adviser on counterterrorism, former Aman chief Aharon Yariv.

Golda Meir had been utterly traumatized by “Munich night,” when the Israeli athletes had been murdered. “Once again, bound and tied Jews are being murdered on German soil,” she had said. Golda was a strong, tough woman; it was clear that she wouldn’t let the Munich massacre go without punishment.

That was exactly what Zamir and Yariv came to propose.

Zvi Zamir, skinny, balding, and freckled, with sharp features jotting out of a triangular face, was a former Palmach fighter but was not regarded as an outstanding general. The highest position he had reached during his military service was commander of the Southern Front. He later served as military attaché and representative of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in Great Britain. In 1968, he was appointed ramsad to replace Meir Amit, who had completed his term. Many criticized Zamir’s appointment; he was a bland and shy man with no experience in secret operations; lacking charisma, he didn’t consider himself the Mossad chief like Harel and Amit before him. He preferred to act as a sort of chairman of the board, and delegated authority to many of his senior aides. He would achieve his fame only in the Yom Kippur War (see chapter 14), but in 1972 he couldn’t claim any substantial success. And some of the veteran agents of the Mossad, like Rafi Eitan, disliked him and left the service in protest.

Yariv, like Zamir, was more a man in the background than a man of limelight. He had been an outstanding Aman chief during the Six-Day War, but he was admired mostly because of his learned, analytical mind. Slim, soft-spoken, bespectacled, with a clear forehead, the well-mannered Yariv looked more like an erudite professor than a master spy.

Yariv and Zamir had a lot in common. They were supposed to be rivals, because of their overlapping functions; yet they worked in harmony and mutual trust. They both were quiet, low-key, reserved, and rather shy. They hated to take center stage and were very cautious in their analyses and planning. But the idea they presented to Golda that October afternoon was surprisingly brutal: the secret services would identify and locate the Black September leaders, and kill them. All of them.

Since Munich, Yaniv and Zamir had engaged in feverish activity and had gathered top-notch intelligence about Black September. They came to Golda prepared. Black September, they said, intended to launch an all-out war against Israel. This was a group that had sworn to kill as many Jews as possible—military, civilians, women and children. The only way to stop it was to kill all its leaders, one after the other. Crush the snake’s head.

Golda hesitated. It was not easy for her to make a decision that would mean sending young people to a risky assassination campaign. Israel had never done that before. She sat quiet for a long time. Then she started speaking, in a barely audible voice, as if she were talking to herself; she mentioned the horrid memory of the Holocaust and the tragic march of the Jewish people through the ages, always persecuted, hunted, and massacred.

Finally, she raised her head and looked at Yariv and Zamir. “Send the boys,” she said.

 

Zamir immediately started preparing the operation. He called it Wrath of God.

But Golda, too, had her say. As a prime minister of a democratic Jewish state, Golda could not rely only on the promise of Yariv and Zamir that “the boys” would hurt no one but the leaders and the major militants of Black September. Promises were not enough. She knew well that such an operation would be outside the law, and that if the civilian supervision of Mossad’s actions was loosened, there was a real danger that innocent people might also be killed. Therefore she decided to establish a tight control over Wrath of God. She created a secret committee that included, besides her, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, a brilliant former general. The three of them became a secret tribunal that had to review and approve every individual case in the operation. They were called the X Committee. Yariv and Zamir had to submit every file and name to the trio, and only after getting their approval could the Mossad hit team enter the scene.

Massada (Caesarea), the operational department of the Mossad, was assigned to carry out Wrath of God. It was headed by Mike Harari, a black-haired, rugged, and secretive agent. Almost all the hits were to be carried out in Europe, where Black September had deployed its men and where they were protected by sophisticated covers.

Harari picked his men from Kidon, the Massada operational team. Each unit sent against a Black September operative was composed of several secondary crews. A crew of six men and women would be charged with identifying and following the suspects. They had to make sure that the man they targeted was indeed the right one, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. They would arrive in the city where the suspect terrorist operated, follow him, secretly photograph him, learn his habits, locate his friends, find his exact address, the bars and restaurants he visited, his routine, hour by hour. A smaller unit, in most cases just a man and a woman, was in charge of the logistics—renting apartments, hotel rooms, and cars. Another small crew was in charge of communications with the advanced operational headquarters established in the respective European cities and with the Mossad headquarters in Israel.

The hit team itself consisted of several Mossad agents, who were the last to arrive on the ground. Their task was to get to a certain address, at a certain time, and kill the man whose photograph and other identifying details had been given to them. While they operated in the targeted city, they were protected by another team—a crew of armed agents and drivers, who were positioned nearby, with vehicles ready to move and escape routes designed and rehearsed. Their task was to protect—with weapons, if necessary—the members of the hit team. Immediately after the operation was over, all hit team members and their security details would leave the country.

The crew that identified and followed the suspect would have left the country before the operation. The others would stay a few more days to cover up the traces, pack equipment, and return rental cars used for the operation.

The first city chosen for a Wrath of God operation was Rome.

In the Eternal City, the advance team identified and followed a man who could never be suspected of terrorism: a low-level clerk in the Libyan embassy, a Nablus-born, thirty-eight-year-old Palestinian, Wael Zwaiter. He was slim, gentle, and soft-spoken, the son of a well-known man of letters and translator into Arabic. Wael himself was known for his excellent translation of fiction and poetry into and from Arabic. He also was a devoted art lover. He worked as an interpreter at the Libyan embassy for the meager salary of 100 Libyan dinars a month, led a very modest life, and lived in a tiny apartment on Piazza Annibaliano. His friends knew him as a moderate man who rejected any form of violence and often expressed his disgust toward terrorism and killing.

But even Zwaiter’s closest friends were not aware of his secret: their good friend was a cruel fanatic, who commanded the Black September operations in Rome with ruthless determination. Recently, he had devised and carried out a lethal operation: he identified two young Englishwomen who spent the first days of their vacation in Rome before continuing to Israel. Zwaiter instructed two young, handsome, and charming Palestinians to establish contact with the girls and try to seduce them. And indeed, soon the young Casanovas landed in the Englishwomen’s beds. When parting from their lovers, one of the Palestinians asked his girl to take a small record player with her, a gift for his family on the West Bank. The silly girl readily agreed, and the record player was duly checked with the ladies’ other luggage at the El Al counter in Rome’s airport. They did not know that Zwaiter and their charming lovers were sending them to their death. Under Zwaiter’s supervision, the Black September agents had taken the record player apart, stuffed it with explosives, then repacked it in a brand-new box. The booby-trapped device was programmed to explode as soon as the aircraft reached its cruising altitude. The plane and all its passengers were doomed.

Fortunately, the terrorists did not know that after a Swissair liner headed for Israel had been blown up by a similar device, the storage compartments of El Al’s planes had been covered with thick armor plate, so that no explosion could wreck the aircraft. The record player did explode, but the blast was contained by the armor. The El Al pilot, alerted by a flashing red light, immediately returned to the airport. The stunned English girls were interrogated and revealed their involvement with their Palestinian lovers; but those two had left Italy right after they bid a heartbreaking farewell to the girls they were sending to their deaths.

The first crews of the hit team arrived in Rome and followed Zwaiter for several days. A young couple strolled in front of the Libyan embassy and the woman clicked a camera concealed in her handbag every time Zwaiter went in or out of the embassy. Some “tourists” arrived in Rome by various flights. One of them, a forty-seven-year-old Canadian by the name of Anthony Hutton, rented an Avis car and told the clerk he was staying at the Excelsior Hotel on Via Veneto. If the clerk had checked the information, he would have found that no such person was staying at the Excelsior, exactly like some other “tourists” who had rented cars that same week and given false addresses to the car rental agencies.

On the night of October 16, Zwaiter returned home and was about to put a ten-lira coin in the elevator slot. The house entrance was dark and somebody on the third floor was playing a melancholy tune on the piano. Suddenly two men emerged from the shadows and pumped twelve 0.22 Beretta bullets in Zwaiter’s body. Nobody heard the shots; the two agents jumped into a Fiat 125 parked on the Plaza Annibaliano. A few hours later, they were out of the country.

Now that Zwaiter had been killed, his deep cover was no longer necessary. A Beirut paper published his obituary, signed by several terrorist organizations that mourned Zwaiter as “one of our best combatants.”

 

The leader of the small team that killed Zwaiter was an Israeli in his mid-twenties, David Molad (not his real name). He was born in Tunisia and emigrated to Israel as a child. From his parents, both teachers and Zionists, he had inherited a perfect mastery of the French language, a profound, deeply emotional love for the State of Israel, and a burning patriotism. Since a young age, he had dreamed of serving Israel, even at the risk of his life. In the army, he had volunteered for an elite commando unit in the IDF and amazed his commanders with his daring and creativity. After his discharge, he had joined the Mossad and had quickly become one of its best agents, participating in the most hazardous operations. Because of his fluent French, he could easily assume the identity of a Frenchman, Belgian, Canadian, or Swiss. He married young, and soon became the father of a little boy; but this did not cool his urge to serve on the front lines of the Mossad fighters.

After Zwaiter’s death, Molad spent a few days in Israel, then flew to Paris.

A few days later, the phone rang in an apartment on 175 Rue Alesia, in Paris. Dr. Mahmoud Hamshari answered the call. “Is this Dr. Hamshari? The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) representative in France?” The caller had a strong Italian accent. He introduced himself as an Italian journalist who sympathized with the Palestinian cause, and asked to interview Hamshari. They agreed to meet in a café, far from Hamshari’s home. Hamshari, a respected historian who lived in Paris with his French wife, Marie-Claude, and their little daughter, had been taking very strict precautions lately. When walking the streets, he kept watching for people who might be shadowing him; he left cafés and restaurants before his order was filled; he often checked with his neighbors if any strangers had asked about him.

On the face of it, he had nothing to worry about. He was an academic, a moderate man, well integrated in the Parisian intellectual circles. “He does not need any precautions,” wrote Annie Francos in the Jeune Afrique weekly, “because he is not dangerous. The Israeli secret services know that well.”

But the Israeli secret services knew a few more things: Hamshari’s participation in the foiled attempt to assassinate Ben-Gurion in Denmark in 1969; his involvement in the midair explosion of a Swissair liner in 1970 that took the lives of forty-seven people; his connections with mysterious young Arabs, who would sneak into his apartment at night, carrying heavy suitcases.

The Israeli secret services also knew that Hamshari was now the second in command of Black September in Europe.

So, on the day Hamshari left for his interview with the Italian reporter, a couple of men broke into his apartment and left fifteen minutes later.

The following day, the strangers waited until Hamshari’s wife and daughter left the apartment and he remained there by himself. The telephone rang and he picked up the receiver.

“Dr. Hamshari?” The Italian journalist again.

“Yes, speaking.”

At that moment, Hamshari heard a shrill whistle—and, after it, a thunderous explosion. An explosive charge that had been concealed under his desk blew up and Hamshari collapsed, gravely wounded. A few days later he died in the hospital, not before blaming the Mossad for his death.

 

A few weeks after Hamshari’s death, Mike Harari and a man named Jonathan Ingleby arrived on the island of Cyprus. They checked into the Olympia Hotel in Nicosia. Lately, because of its location, close to Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, Cyprus had become a battlefield between Israeli and Arab agents. This time, the two Israeli agents shadowed a Palestinian by the name of Hussein Abd el Hir. A few months before, Abd el Hir had been appointed the Black September resident in Cyprus; he was also in charge of relations with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations that had become a paradise and a safe haven for the terrorists. In Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Palestinian terrorists trained in army installations and special forces’ units. Those countries sent shipments of weapons and equipment for the terrorist organizations; quite a few Palestinian leaders, enthusiastic believers in the Soviet ideology, studied at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.

Abd el Hir also was in charge of infiltrating terrorists into Israel, and eliminating Arab spies who came to Cyprus to meet their Israeli handlers. The X Committee sentenced him to death.

That night, Abd el Hir returned to his hotel room, turned off the lights, and went to bed. Jonathan Ingleby made sure that the man was asleep, then pressed a button on a remote-control monitor. A shattering explosion shook the hotel. In a third-floor hotel room, a couple of Israeli honeymooners dived under their bed for protection. The reception clerk rushed to Abd el Hir’s room. When the smoke cleared, he saw a terrifying scene that made him faint: Abd el Hir’s bloodied head was facing him, stuck in the lavatory pan.

 

Black September’s revenge was instantaneous.

On January 26, 1973, an Israeli by the name of Moshe Hanan Ishai met with a Palestinian friend at the Morrison Pub on Jose Antonio Street in Madrid. After they left the pub, two men appeared in front of them and blocked their way. The Palestinian escaped, while the two men drew their weapons, sprayed Ishai with bullets, and vanished.

Only a few days later, it was established that Ishai’s real name was Baruch Cohen, a veteran Mossad agent who had established a network of Palestinian students in Madrid. The young man he had met at the pub was one of his informants, who actually had been planted in the network by Black September. His comrades avenged Abd el Hir’s death by taking out Baruch Cohen.

Black September was also suspected of shooting and wounding another Israeli agent, Zadok Ophir, in a Brussels café, and of assassinating Dr. Ami Shechori, an attaché at the Israeli embassy in London, by a letter bomb.

Two weeks after Abd el Hir’s death, Black September appointed a new agent in Cyprus. Barely twenty-four hours after arriving in Nicosia, the Palestinian met with his KGB contact, returned to his hotel, turned off the light—and died in the same way as his predecessor.

Arafat and Ali Hassan Salameh decided, therefore, to carry out a massive act of revenge. They planned to hijack a plane, load it with explosives, and have it flown to Israel by a suicide commando. The aircraft would then be crashed in the midst of Tel Aviv, killing hundreds. It was an early version of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

The Mossad informants got wind of the preparations, and several agents started following a group of Palestinians in Paris, who were apparently in charge of the project. One night, the agents noticed an older man who had joined the group. They dispatched the man’s photos to Mossad headquarters and the stranger was identified as Basil Al-Kubaissi, a senior leader of Black September. Kubaissi was a well-known jurist, a law professor at the American University in Beirut, and a respected scholar. But he, too—like Zwaiter and Hamshari and quite a few others—secretly was a dangerous man. In 1956, he had tried to assassinate Iraq’s king Faisal by placing a car bomb on the path of the royal convoy; the bomb exploded prematurely, and Al-Kubaissi escaped to Lebanon, and then to the United States. A few years later, he tried to assassinate Golda Meir, who was visiting the United States. When this attempt failed, he tried to murder Meir at the Socialist International summit in Paris. It was another failure. Al-Kubaissi didn’t give up; he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and became the deputy of George Habash, the group’s leader. He participated in the planning of the May 30, 1972, massacre, in which innocent passengers in the Lod Airport were attacked by Arab and Japanese terrorists. Twenty-six people died in the attack, most of them Puerto Rican pilgrims to the Holy Land. Later, Al-Kubaissi joined Black September, and now he was in Paris, probably to direct the suicide-plane operation. He checked into a small hotel on Rue des Arcades, off the Place de la Madeleine.

On April 6, after having dinner at Café de la Paix, Al-Kubaissi was on his way back to his hotel. At the Place de la Madeleine, the Mossad’s hit team was waiting. Two people had been placed on the street, two more in a car. One of them was wearing a blond wig. As Al-Kubaissi came closer, the two agents approached him, cocking their guns. But something unexpected happened. A flashy car stopped next to Al-Kubaissi, and a pretty young woman leaned out of the window. They exchanged a few phrases, and Al-Kubaissi got into the car, which left immediately. The frustrated agents realized that the woman was a prostitute, and had just propositioned Al-Kubaissi.

The entire operation was going to fail because of a hooker!

But the team commander, who was present, calmed his disappointed warriors. Wait and see, he said knowingly, she’ll bring him back here shortly. They didn’t ask how he knew, but the man was right. Barely twenty minutes later, the car was back. Al-Kubaissi parted from the prostitute and started walking toward his hotel. He had only taken a few steps when two men emerged from the shadows, blocking his way. One of them was David Molad.

Al-Kubaissi immediately understood. “No!” he shouted in French. “No! Don’t do that!”

Nine bullets pierced his body and he collapsed by the Madeleine church. The Mossad agents jumped in the getaway car and left the square.

The following day, as in the Zwaiter case, the spokesmen of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine revealed the real role of the law professor.

In the following months, Molad and the members of Kidon killed several Black September envoys who had come to Greece to buy ships, load them with explosives, and sail them to Israel’s ports.

But one question remained unanswered: Where was the mastermind behind Munich? Where was Salameh?

 

Salameh was in his Beirut headquarters, planning his next moves. The first was the takeover of the Israeli embassy in Thailand by a Black September team. But the operation had failed. Threatened by the tough Thai generals and pressured by the Egyptian ambassador in Bangkok, the terrorists released their hostages and left Thailand utterly humiliated.

Salameh’s next operation was more reckless: his men, armed to the teeth, broke into the Saudi embassy in Khartoum during a farewell party for a European envoy, and captured almost the entire diplomatic corps in the Sudanese capital. By Arafat’s order, they released most of the hostages, and kept only the U.S. ambassador, Cleo A. Noel; the deputy chief of the U.S. mission, George C. Moore; and the Belgian acting ambassador, Guy Eid. Following Salameh’s instructions, they murdered them with horrific cruelty, firing first at the feet and legs of their victims, then slowly raising the barrels of their Kalashnikov assault rifles till they ripped open their chests.

The terrorists were arrested after the massacre but released a few weeks later by the Sudanese government.

The world reacted with fury and disgust to the appalling assassination of the diplomats. Israel felt that it was time to deal Black September a mortal blow.

In Jerusalem, Golda Meir gave the go-ahead to Operation Spring of Youth—a new phase in the ongoing Operation Wrath of God.

 

On April 1, 1973, a thirty-five-year-old Belgian tourist named Gilbert Rimbaud checked into the Sands Hotel in Beirut. The same day another tourist, Dieter Altnuder, also checked into the hotel. The two men apparently didn’t know each other; both were given rooms with ocean view.

On April 6, three more tourists arrived in the hotel. The dapper, impeccably dressed Andrew Whichelaw was British; David Molad, who arrived two hours later on the Rome flight, produced a Belgian passport in the name of Charles Boussard; George Elder, who arrived in the evening was British, too, but quite the opposite of his fellow countryman. Another British tourist, Charles Macy, checked into the Atlantic Hotel on El-Baida beach. And, like a real Englishman, he inquired twice a day about the weather forecast.

Each on his own, the six men toured Beirut, walked the streets, and got familiar with the main traffic arteries. At the Avis and Lenacar agencies, they rented three Buick Skylarks, a Plymouth station wagon, a Valiant, and a Renault-16.

On April 9, a flotilla of nine missile boats and patrol vessels of the Israeli Navy took to the high seas and blended into the international traffic lanes. The MB Mivtah carried a paratrooper unit under the command of Colonel Amnon Lipkin, which was to attack the headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two other units had embarked on the MB Gaash: another paratrooper platoon and the Sayeret Matkal unit, under Colonel Ehud Barak. They had a different mission. Before embarking, each of them had received the photos of four people. Three of them were Abu Yussef, the supreme commander of Black September; Kamal Adwan, the Fatah top operations commander, who was also in charge of Black September’s operations in the Israeli occupied territories; and Kamal Nasser, Fatah’s main spokesman. All three, the soldiers were told, lived in the same apartment building on Rue Verdun.

The fourth photo was of Ali Hassan Salameh. Nobody knew where he was.

The commandos were wearing civilian clothes. At nine thirty P.M., as the boats approached Beirut, they donned wigs and hippie clothes. Ehud Barak put on women’s clothes, assuming the appearance of a voluptuous brunette; in his brassiere, he concealed several explosive charges.

Out of the dark, several rubber dinghies emerged on the deserted Beirut beach, bringing over the paratroopers from the mother ships. In front of them, they saw the six cars, with one of the “tourists” behind each wheel. Each soldier knew to which car he was assigned. In a matter of minutes, the cars darted in different directions. A few of them turned to the headquarters of the Popular Front. Other vehicles, one of them driven by Molad, headed for the apartment building where the leaders of Black September lived.

The military commando unit that headed for the Popular Front headquarters had rehearsed the attack before, using an unfinished building in a Tel Aviv suburb. One night, when Chief of Staff David (Dado) El’azar had come to watch the training, he had been approached by a young, handsome lieutenant, Avida Shor. “We are going to use a hundred twenty kilograms of explosives to bring down the building in Beirut,” Avida said. “But this is unnecessary and dangerous. The explosion would affect the neighboring buildings, and there are lots of civilians there.” He took a notebook from his pocket. “I made some calculations. We should use only eighty kilograms of explosives. That will bring the building down without harming innocent people in other houses.” El’azar had the figures checked, and agreed to Shor’s suggestion. He instructed the operation commander to use a charge of no more than eighty kilograms.

Now, the paratroopers reached the Popular Front headquarters. After a short shoot-out, in which two Israeli commandos lost their lives, the paratroopers took over the entrance lobby of the building and planted the eighty kilograms of explosives. The explosion turned the building into a heap of ruins, killing scores of terrorists; but not one of the neighboring houses was damaged.

One of the commandos killed was Lieutenant Avida Shor.

 

At the same time, other units of paratroopers and naval commandos attacked several terrorist camps south of Beirut, in a diversionary move intended to draw the response of the terrorists and the Lebanese Army. But there was no such response.

At that very moment, the Sayeret Matkal commandos reached the building on Rue Verdun. They were about to enter, when two Lebanese police officers passed by. But all they saw was a pair of lovers tenderly embracing on the sidewalk. The Romeo was none other than Muki Betzer, one of the best Sayeret fighters, and his curvaceous Juliet was Ehud Barak. As soon as the policemen had turned the corner, the Israelis stormed the building. They simultaneously broke into the apartments of Kamal Adwan, on the second floor; Kamal Nasser, on the third floor; and Abu Yussef, on the sixth.

The terrorist leaders had no chance whatsoever. When the paratroopers broke into their flats, they reached for their weapons, but the soldiers were faster. In minutes, the three terrorists were killed. Abu Yussef’s wife tried to shield him with her body and was hit as well. Another casualty was an old Italian woman who lived across the landing from Adwan’s apartment. She heard the shots, opened the door—and was slain with a burst of gunfire.

During the operation, the commandos collected documents that they found in the cupboards and drawers of the Black September leaders. Then they collected their wounded and dead and rushed to the cars headed for the beach, where the rubber dinghies were waiting.

On the beach, the six Mossad “tourists” parked their rented cars in a neat row, leaving the keys in the ignitions. A few days later, the rental companies received the payment via American Express.

The task force was reunited on the mother ship and sailed to Israel. The operation was a total success. The PFLP headquarters was no more, the Black September leaders had been killed; among them, Abu Yussef, the organization commander.

But the commandos didn’t know that barely fifty yards away from the house on Rue Verdun, Ali Hassan Salameh was sleeping peacefully in an inconspicuous apartment. He had not been disturbed. The next day, when Abu Yussef’s death was announced, he became Black September’s leader.

Spring of Youth heralded the end of Black September. The organization would never recover, after all its leaders had been killed.

All but one.

 

In Tel Aviv, the documents seized during Spring of Youth helped solve a mystery that had preoccupied the Mossad for the previous two years. That was the Passover Affair.

In April 1971, two young, pretty Frenchwomen landed at Lod Airport and tried to go through immigration with fake French passports. The airport security had received an early warning about their arrival. The girls were taken to a side room where they were searched by policewomen and Shabak female officers. The search revealed something strange: the women’s clothing, including their underwear, weighed twice what would feel like its normal weight. The policewomen found that the Frenchwomen’s clothes were saturated by some white powder. Apparently, the clothes had been immersed in a thick solution that contained the white powder. When the garments were shaken and rubbed, large quantities of the powder dropped off. More white powder was found in the heels of the ladies’ exquisite sandals. The two girls were carrying about twelve pounds of white powder that turned out to be a powerful plastic explosive. In a box of tampons, in one of the girls’ suitcase, the police found scores of detonators.

The girls broke down under interrogation and admitted that they were sisters, daughters of a rich Moroccan businessman; their names were Nadia and Madeleine Bardeli. They had been contacted by a man in Paris, and being adventurous by nature, had agreed to smuggle the powder.

“And who else is in this with you?” the police detectives asked.

That afternoon, several police officers raided the small hotel Commodore in Tel Aviv and arrested an old French couple, Pierre and Edith Bourghalter. When they disassembled the transistor radio of the couple, they found it had been stuffed with delayed action fuses for the manufacture of explosive charges. Pierre Bourghalter burst into tears.

The next day, the unsuspecting commander of the operation landed in Israel as well: an attractive twenty-six-year-old Frenchwoman, carrying a passport in the name of Francine Adeleine Maria. Her true name was Evelyne Barges and she was well known to the Mossad as a professional terrorist, a fanatic Marxist who already had participated in several terrorist attacks in Europe.

When interrogated by police, the members of the so-called Passover Team confessed that they had intended to blow up their plastic charges in nine major Tel Aviv hotels, at the peak of the tourist season, and kill as many tourists and Israelis as possible, dealing Israel a heavy blow.

This nice bunch went to jail, but the man who pulled the strings behind the scenes had not been caught. He was Mohammad Boudia, a charming Algerian, a director of a Paris theater and an actor himself. Again, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: a man of culture, an intellectual and an artist, whose life on stage was but a cover for his criminal activities. He was Evelyne Barges’s lover, and involved in so many love affairs that the Mossad agents called him Bluebeard.

Boudia was originally under the orders of George Habash and the PFLP. A year after the Passover Team had been captured, he had joined Black September and was appointed head of the organization in France. He was involved in the murder of Khader Kanou, a Syrian reporter in Paris who was suspected of being a Mossad informant. Boudia was also in charge of Black September’s operations in Europe, and planned an attack on a transit camp for Jewish immigrants from Russia. After Hamshari’s assassination, Boudia became extremely cautious and following him became incredibly difficult.

In May 1973, a hit team of the Massada group arrived in Paris and tried to find Boudia. They had the name and address of Boudia’s new lover. The agents waited patiently around the corner of the building where she lived. Finally, Boudia emerged out of nowhere and snuck inside. But the next day, when most of the residents left the building for work—he was not among them! Only after a frustrating month, when the agents had compared notes, did they notice something strange: every morning, after the torrid nights Boudia spent with his lover, a tall, big woman would be among the people coming out of the house. At times, she would be a blond, at other times, brunette . . . At last the agents solved the riddle: using his actor’s talents, Boudia disguised himself as a woman before leaving the building.

But now, for some reason, he stopped visiting his mistress, and the Mossad lost track of him. The only lead they still had was that every morning he traveled by subway to his meetings, and took a connecting train at the Étoile station, under the Arc de Triomphe. That metro station was a major hub—scores of trains passed through it, millions of people ran through the underground passages, switching lines. How could they find Boudia, “the man with a thousand faces”?

But there was no other choice. Mossad agents were alerted from all over Europe. Scores of Israelis received Boudia’s photos and were positioned in the corridors, passages, hallways, and platforms of the giant Étoile station. One day passed, then two and three, and nothing happened. But on the fourth day, one of the agents spotted Boudia—disguised, made-up, but still the man they were looking for. This time they stuck to him like shadows till he got into his car that was parked near the metro exit. They followed the car and watched it through the night, while Boudia stayed in a house on the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, probably his new lover’s abode. The next morning, June 29, 1973, Boudia approached his car, inspected it thoroughly from the outside, peeked under the chassis, and, apparently satisfied, unlocked it and took the driver’s seat. A deafening explosion turned the car into a heap of twisted, blackened metal and killed Boudia. According to European reporters, the ramsad, Zvi Zamir, watched the explosion from a street corner.

But the heads of Mossad had no time to celebrate their success. An urgent message reached headquarters: a special Black September messenger, the Algerian Ben Amana, had been sent to meet with Ali Hassan Salameh; Ben Amana had crossed Europe in an odd, tortuous route, and had reached Lillehammer, a resort town in Norway.

 

A few days later, the Kidon hit team, under Mike Harari’s command, was positioned in Lillehammer. Nobody had any idea what Salameh was doing in the quiet mountain town. The first crew followed Ben Amana to the town’s swimming pool and saw him establishing contact with a Middle Eastern–looking man. Three members of the crew looked at the photographs they carried and concluded that the man undoubtedly was Salameh. They overruled their fourth colleague, who had overheard the man speaking with other people and pointed out that it was impossible that Salameh could speak Norwegian.

The agents were cocksure in the identification; they followed Salameh in Lillehammer’s streets and saw him in the company of a young, pregnant Norwegian woman.

The operation entered its final stage. More agents arrived from Israel; Zvi Zamir was among them. Salameh’s elimination was to be the last step in the total destruction of Black September, and Zvi Zamir wanted to be there for the finale. The killers were to be the ubiquitous Jonathan Ingleby, along with Rolf Baehr and Gerard Emile Lafond. David Molad did not participate in that operation. The support crew rented cars and hotel rooms. Some maintain that the town residents immediately noticed the unusual activity; the presence in Lillehammer of many “tourists,” whose cars whooshed in all directions, was not a common sight in Lillehammer during the summer.

On July 21, 1973, Salameh and his pregnant friend came out of a cinema where they had seen Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare. The couple took the bus and got off on a quiet, deserted street. Suddenly a white car braked beside them; a couple of men jumped out on the sidewalk, Beretta guns in their hands, and sprayed Salameh’s body with fourteen bullets.

The Red Prince was dead.

The operation over, Mike Harari ordered his men to leave Norway right away. The pullout was done according to the rules: the killers left first, abandoning their white car in Lillehammer’s center, and took the first flights out of Oslo, the capital. Most of the agents and Mike Harari were the next to depart, leaving behind the crew that was to evacuate the safe houses and return the rental cars. But an unexpected coincidence turned everything upside down. A woman who lived near where the shooting took place noticed the color—white—and the make—Peugeot—of the killers’ car; a police officer, manning a roadblock between Lillehammer and Oslo, saw a white Peugeot driven by a striking-looking woman and noted the car’s license plate. The following day, when the car was returned at the airport car-rental desk, the police arrested its occupants, Dan Aerbel and Marianne Gladnikoff. Their interrogation brought about the arrest of two more agents, Sylvia Raphael and Avraham Gemer. Another two agents were arrested the same day. Aerbel and Gladnikoff broke down under the intensive interrogation. They revealed top-secret information about the operation, addresses of safe houses in Norway and throughout Europe, conspiracy rules, phone numbers, and modus operandi of the Mossad. The police raided an apartment in Oslo and found a trove of documents there; they also discovered that Ig’al Eyal, the Israeli embassy security officer, had a connection with the Mossad. It was a disaster.

The next day, Norway’s media published the news about the Israeli agents’ arrests. It was a terrible blow to the Mossad’s prestige and credibility. But the media published another piece of news, even more devastating: the Mossad had killed the wrong man.

 

The man killed in Lillehammer was not Ali Hassan Salameh. He was Ahmed Bushiki, a Moroccan waiter who had come to Norway looking for a job. He had also married a Norwegian woman, the blond Torril, who was seven months pregnant.

Sensational headlines sprouted all over the world’s newspapers. The captured agents stood trial and some of them were sentenced to long prison terms. One of them, Sylvia Raphael, made a strong impression on the Norwegians by her proud and noble appearance. Her trial brought her an unexpected prize: she fell in love with her Norwegian attorney, and after her release from jail she married him and lived happily with him till she died of cancer in 2005.

After the Lillehammer fiasco, the heads of the Mossad had to clean house—change conspiracy rules, abandon safe houses, establish new contacts . . . They had to admit their responsibility for Ahmed Bushiki’s death and pay $400,000 to his family. But the worst was that the legend of the glorious, invincible Mossad had been shattered.

Golda Meir ordered Zvi Zamir to end Wrath of God immediately. But soon the failure was obscured by more dramatic events. On October 6, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. The Yom Kippur War had begun. (See chapter 14.)

 

Two years passed.

On a balmy spring evening in 1975, a Beirut family hosted the most beautiful woman in the world. Georgina Rizk certainly deserved that title, as four years before she had been elected Miss Universe in the flashy beauty contest at Miami Beach, Florida. The gorgeous Lebanese beauty had won fame, awards, trips, meetings with world leaders. Back in Lebanon, she had developed a brilliant career as a supermodel and owner of fashion boutiques.

That evening, in her friends’ home, she met a handsome, charismatic young man. They fell in love. Two years later, on June 8, 1977, they got married. The happy groom was Ali Hassan Salameh.

His career, too, had soared in the previous few years. At the end of 1973, Black September ceased to exist. Despite the collapse of his organization, Salameh had become Arafat’s right hand and his “adopted son”; rumor had it that he would be appointed Arafat’s successor at the helm of the PLO.

After the fall of Black September, Salameh was made head of Force Seventeen, which was in charge of personal security of the Fatah leaders and of all unorthodox coups de main. Salameh accompanied Arafat on a trip to New York. Arafat entered the United Nations General Assembly holding an olive branch in his hand but carrying his gun on his belt. Salameh was at Arafat’s side when the latter traveled to Moscow and met with powerful world leaders. To Israel’s amazement, he was also courted by the CIA.

In another of its great oversights, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to ignore the bloody past of the “Red Prince,” his role in the Munich Massacre, the savage assassination of American diplomats in Khartum that he masterminded, the simple fact that Salameh was one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, and recruited Salameh as its informant. The CIA hoped that Salameh would become a loyal servant of American interests. The CIA offered Salameh hundreds of thousands of dollars, but he refused. On the other hand, he agreed to spend a long vacation with Georgina in Hawaii, all expenses covered by the agency.

Salameh’s lifestyle had changed, and his friends had started to believe that his life was no longer in danger. But he felt that his days were numbered. He did not stop speaking about his death. “I know,” he said to a reporter, “that when my fate is sealed the end will come. Nobody will be able to save me.”

Israel decided to seal his fate.

 

Many changes had taken place in Israel since the downfall of Black September. Golda Meir had gone; her successor, Yitzhak Rabin, had resigned; and a new prime minister, Menachem Begin, was now in power. Zvi Zamir had been replaced as ramsad by General Yitzhak (Haka) Hofi, a former commander of the Northern region. The Palestinian terror against Israel continued, in sporadic outbursts. In 1976, the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe, in Uganda, had resulted in a daring rescue raid by Israeli paratroopers and Sayeret Matkal. In 1978, Fatah terrorists landed in Israel, hijacked a civilian bus, and proceeded to Tel Aviv. They were stopped by a roadblock in the city outskirts, and were finally overpowered, but not before murdering thirty-five civilian passengers. Civilian men, women, and children were regularly brutally murdered in terrorist incursions into Israeli territory.

Menachem Begin felt that no terrorist with blood on his hands could be left in peace. In the late seventies, Salameh’s name was on the avengers’ list once again.

An undercover Mossad agent was sent to Beirut, and managed to join the health club where Salameh exercised. One day, as he walked into the sauna, he found himself face-to-face with the naked Salameh.

This stunning discovery triggered a fiery debate at Mossad headquarters. A naked Salameh in his health club was an easy prey. On the other hand, any attempt to kill him there could result in the death of civilians; therefore, the plan was abandoned.

Enter Erika Mary Chambers.

She was a single Englishwoman, eccentric and strange, who had lived in Germany for the last four years. She arrived in Beirut and rented an apartment on the eighth floor of a building at the corner of Rue Verdun and Rue Madame Curie. Her neighbors nicknamed her Penelope. She told them she did volunteer work for an international organization taking care of poor children. She was seen, indeed, in hospitals and relief agencies; some even said she had met with Ali Hassan Salameh. She seemed to be a very lonely woman. Always disheveled, shabbily dressed, Penelope would emerge on the street with plates full of food for stray cats; her apartment was also said to be full of her beloved felines. She was also a passionate painter, but those who saw her canvases quickly realized that her talents were rather limited.

But besides painting Lebanon’s landscapes, what really interested Miss Chambers was the busy traffic in the street below and, more specifically, the daily passage of two cars under her windows: a tan Chevrolet station wagon, always followed by a Land Rover jeep. Using a code, Erika scrupulously noted the times and directions of the vehicles’ movements. Every morning they came from the Snoubra neighborhood, down Verdun and Curie streets, heading south toward the Fatah headquarters; they came back at lunch time, and reappeared in the early afternoon, heading to headquarters again.

Watching the cars with a pair of binoculars, Erika identified Salameh sitting in the backseat of the Chevrolet between two armed bodyguards; several other armed terrorists rode in the Land Rover that followed.

Salameh’s guards perhaps could protect him, but they could not save him from the worst enemy of a secret agent: routine. Since his marriage to beautiful Georgina, Salameh’s life had fallen into a steady pattern: he had settled with his wife in the Snoubra neighborhood, and would go to work, like a clerk, every morning at the same time, come home for lunch and rest, return to work after the siesta. He was ignoring the basic rules of secret activity: never develop regular habits, never stay at the same address for too long, never use the same itinerary twice, never travel at the same time of day.

On January 18, 1979, a British tourist, Peter Scriver, arrived in Beirut, checked into the Mediterranee Hotel, and rented a blue Volkswagen Golf at the Lenacar agency. The same day he met with a Canadian tourist, Ronald Kolberg, who stayed at the Royal Garden Hotel and rented a Simca Chrysler, also at Lenacar. Kolberg was none other than David Molad. The third client of the popular rental agency walked into its office the following day. That was Erika Chambers, who asked to rent a car “for a trip in the mountains.” She signed out a Datsun, which she parked close to her home.

That night, three Israeli missile boats approached a deserted beach between Beirut and the port of Jounieh, and left a large load of explosives on the wet sand. Kolberg and Scriver were there; they loaded the explosives in the Volkswagen.

On January 21, Peter Scriver checked out of his hotel, drove the blue Volkswagen to Rue Verdun, and parked it in full view of Erika Chambers’s windows. He then took a cab to the airport and boarded a flight to Cyprus. Ronald Kolberg checked out of his hotel, too, and moved to the Montmartre Hotel, in Jounieh.

At three forty-five P.M., as usual, Ali Hassan Salameh entered his Chevrolet. His bodyguards took the Land Rover, and the small motorcade headed for the Fatah headquarters. The cars moved down Rue Madame Curie and turned into Rue Verdun.

From the eighth floor of the corner building, Erika Chambers watched them approach. Molad stood beside her, holding a remote control device.

The Chevrolet sailed smoothly past the blue Volkswagen. At that moment, Molad pressed the switch on the remote control.

The Volkswagen exploded, turning into a huge ball of fire. The Chevrolet, engulfed by the flames, blew up in turn. Chunks of metal and splinters of glass were projected violently upward. Windows in the neighboring houses were shattered and pieces of glass rained down on the sidewalk. Horrified passersby stared at the bodies of the Chevrolet’s passengers, strewn about the smoldering debris.

Police cars and ambulances rushed toward the scene and the medics pulled out of the Chevrolet’s twisted chassis the bodies of the driver, the two bodyguards, and Ali Hassan Salameh.

In Damascus, a harried messenger brought an urgent telegram to Yasser Arafat, who was presiding over a meeting at the Meridien Hotel. Stunned, Arafat perused the telegram and burst into tears.

That same night, a rubber dinghy, launched from an Israeli missile boat, landed at Jounieh beach. Ronald Kolberg and Erika Chambers jumped onto the dinghy that took them to its mother ship. A few hours later, they were in Israel. The Lebanese police found their rented cars parked on the beach, keys in the ignition.

Erika Mary Chambers was the real name of a Mossad agent, a British Jewess, who had lived in England and Australia before immigrating to Israel, and was recruited by the Mossad during her studies at Hebrew University. She returned to Israel and was never heard of again.

 

That was the end of the Quest and the end of Operation Wrath of God.

Black September was eliminated.

Many years later, some of the operation’s details came to light. General Aharon Yariv admitted in a television interview that he had advised Prime Minister Golda Meir “to kill as many of the Black September leaders as possible.” He admitted that he was surprised by the fact that “a military operation by our forces in Beirut and a few killings in Europe were enough to make the Fatah leaders stop the terrorism abroad. That proves that we were right by using this method for a certain time.”

But that dark affair had a surprising and promising epilogue. In 1996, the Israeli journalist Daniel Ben-Simon was invited by friends to a merry party in Jerusalem. He met a young, pleasant Palestinian there, impeccably dressed and speaking fluent English. He introduced himself as Ali Hassan Salameh.

“That’s the name of the man who masterminded the massacre of the Israeli athletes in Munich,” Ben-Simon said.

“He was my father,” the young man said. “He was murdered by the Mossad.” He told the amazed Ben-Simon that he had lived for years with his mother in Europe, and finally had come to Jerusalem as Yasser Arafat’s guest. “I would never have believed,” he added, “that the day would come when I’d be dancing together with young Israelis at a party in Jerusalem.” He described his voyage throughout Israel, the warm hospitality of the Israelis he had met, and expressed his desire to help conciliate Israelis and Palestinians.

“I am a man of peace, a hundred percent,” young Salameh said. “My father lived in times of war and paid for that with his life. Now a new era has begun. I hope that peace between Israelis and Palestinians will be the most important event in the life of those two peoples.”