Spies Against Armageddon (25 page)

The couple became celebrities in Oslo and was invited to social events, where many Norwegians wanted to chat amiably with a Mossad assassin. It was as though Israel had produced yet another champagne spy.

In the 1980s, the Mossad uncovered a PLO plot to assassinate Roxborough/Raphael. The Tevel department, in charge of foreign liaisons, sent a detailed message to the Norwegian secret service—because clandestine relations were back to normal within a few years after the mistaken murder. The Norwegian government, a great supporter of the Palestinian cause, privately warned Arafat that if Raphael were killed, then he would be held responsible.

Five of the Mossad operatives had to spend time in a Norwegian prison, with terms ranging from two to five-and-a-half years. Yet, the sentences were reduced for all of them.

Raphael did not return to the Mossad, at least not in life. She and her husband lived in Norway for a while and then in South Africa, where she died of leukemia in 2005 at age 67. The Mossad arranged to bring her body to Israel for a hero’s funeral at her kibbutz, surrounded by the scent of citrus flowers from nearby groves. Clandestine colleagues attended the moving ceremony, and her own words are carved on her gravestone: “I love my country wholeheartedly.”

In an unprecedented move, the Mossad agreed to open parts of its secret archives to publicize Raphael’s heroic service. One of her trainers in espionage tradecraft, Motti Kfir, was permitted to take part in writing a biography titled
Sylvia
.

The Mossad was lucky that Norway did not press very hard in its investigation of the complicated Lillehammer case, clearly preferring not to add public humiliation to Israel’s embarrassment. Despite incriminating information that emerged at the trials in Norway, the French and Italian security services also displayed a great deal of solidarity with the Mossad. They ignored the PLO’s demands to renew investigations into the violent deaths of Palestinians in those countries.

This was, of course, not simply the result of dumb luck. The seeds sown by the Tevel department were bearing fruit. Western secret services respected the Jewish state’s willingness to show the world an alternative to appeasement and submission in the war against terrorism. Most European governments thus did not look intensively into things they would rather not know.

This was small consolation for Israel. The Mossad could not be satisfied until it finally caught up with Salameh. Yet, there was a six-year halt in counter-terrorism killings. Lillehammer made it seem that the danger of exposure was too great, and assassinations not worthwhile.

Finding Salameh remained a high priority. That would happen under a new Mossad director and a new—and very different—Israeli government.

In 1977, for the first time in the 29-year history of the nation, the Labor Party lost an election. The leader of the right-wing Likud bloc, Menachem Begin, became prime minister.

Begin had been a leader of the Irgun, an underground movement that battled Arabs and the British before statehood in 1948. Irgun attitudes were more unbending and its methods generally more violent than those of Ben-Gurion’s mainstream Jewish fighters. Shifting from opposition leader to prime minister, Begin was now enchanted by the excitement of Israel’s intelligence community. He always believed in Jews being able to fight—and now, in fascinatingly innovative ways, they really could fight!

General Yitzhak Hofi had already taken over the Mossad from Zamir in 1974, and Begin was giving Hofi a free hand in almost everything. The prime minister enthusiastically approved finishing the job that was frustratingly incomplete: finding and eliminating Ali Hassan Salameh.

The Red Prince was known to be spending almost all of his time in Beirut, where his boss, Arafat, ran a mini-state within the nation of Lebanon. Reaching him there was certainly a possibility, as Israeli spies, assassins, and commandos had operated there before. But it was never easy.

This time, the key figure in the operation would be Erika Chambers. She was born in 1948 in London, where her father was a famous racing car driver. Her mother, a Czech Jew who grew up in Vienna, exposed Erika to Jewish culture and history.

She studied hydrology, first in England and then in Canberra, Australia. In 1972, she flew to Israel to do some field work in the Negev desert, continuing her studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Then, one day, she disappeared. She had joined Harari’s special operations department, Caesarea. She underwent training in all the relevant arts, including the use of explosives, and prepared herself to be planted undercover in enemy territory for a Kidon assassination mission.

Chambers first spent a long period in Germany establishing a legend, making sure to leave a trail of home addresses. Then she did some work for a children’s charity in Geneva, where she volunteered to be its representative in Lebanon. Soon Chambers was renting an apartment in Beirut, and she chose a location along the route where Salameh drove to and from his home every day.

She told her neighbors her name was Penelope, and they would see her feeding street cats and painting on an easel she set up on her balcony. That was a wonderful vantage point for looking down to spot approaching cars.

She also visited Palestinian orphanages, and her target—Salameh himself—was among the PLO officials she befriended.

In January 1979, she subtly made contact with at least two more Mossad combatants who had entered Lebanon using British and Canadian passports. These were the committed, seemingly emotionless, trained killers of Kidon. Using material that other Israeli agents had pre-positioned, they were able to fill a vehicle with explosives and a reliable radio-controlled detonator.

On January 22, they parked it along Salameh’s habitual driving route. When the Red Prince came up that road, one of the Mossad operatives pressed a button. The powerful bomb exploded. This particular elusive enemy of Israel was vaporized, his car mangled and charred. His four bodyguards and four bystanders—including a German nun and a British visitor—were also killed.

The Israeli assassination squad quickly fled. Yet for some reason, probably haste and uncharacteristic sloppiness, “Penelope” left behind her authentic British passport—identifying her as Erika Chambers—in her Beirut apartment.

Her return to the Mossad’s bosom came at sea. Harari personally waited for her and the other combatants on a navy missile boat, in the Mediterranean north of Israel’s territorial waters. Israeli naval commandos used motorized rubber craft to pick up the assassination team, after rendezvousing with them on a Lebanese beach.

Chambers received a hero’s welcome at Mossad headquarters. She was assigned to desk work—boring, of course, after her heart-pounding covert experiences. She took part in some lectures and training within the Mossad’s secret educational compound, but quite quickly Chambers retired and practically ceased to exist.

She changed her name and told her British parents and brother nothing, but she did regularly mail them holiday cards with Israeli stamps on the envelope. Here, then, was a woman from England—inspired by a partially Jewish upbringing and a short time in Israel to take daring and drastic action on behalf of the Mossad—then willing to give up her entire genuine life for the cause. Israeli intelligence was lucky to have more than a few other women and men who did much the same.

The Kidon unit’s achievement in 1979, erasing Ali Hassan Salameh, felt like good news in Israel. But the publicly exposed failure in Norway in 1973 continued to haunt Israeli intelligence. Many in the community referred to Lillehammer, in an unhappy pun, as
Leyl-ha-Mar
, Hebrew for “the Night of Bitterness.” Every time it was mentioned, Israeli secret operatives cringed. They all agreed that killing the wrong man—and then getting caught—added up to their greatest operational failure.

It could be argued that a post-Munich obsession with escalating the shadow war of assassinations prompted the intelligence agencies to misplace their keen judgment. Some senior officials complained that it was a mistake to be drawn into becoming a branch of Murder Incorporated. They claimed that Mossad resources, even after the massacre at the Olympics, should have been devoted far more heavily to tracking the military capabilities of Israel’s Arab neighbors.

The internal dissenters claimed that Israel was exaggerating the importance of Palestinian terrorism, for in the final analysis it was not this that would imperil the country’s existence. At worst, it was like a pesky insect annoying Israel without posing a huge threat. Others stressed that there was no use in wiping out the heads of Palestinian guerrilla groups, because there was no guarantee that their replacements would be more moderate or less able.

Some of the dissidents within Israeli intelligence further charged that the Lillehammer debacle did not lead to sufficiently harsh consequences. Mike Harari offered his resignation, but it was rejected by Zamir and Meir. The tenor of the times did not require individuals to bear responsibility for their failures. The Israeli public and the media still fully trusted the government.

Harari resumed his operations job in Tel Aviv for a few more years.

Zamir, as Mossad chief, was comfortable with the post-Munich focus on bringing the fight to the Palestinian enemy. His analysts concluded that PLO activists, rather than devoting their energies to terrorist planning, were now spending a lot of time and trouble looking over their shoulders—fearing that they themselves were about to be attacked.

Zamir broke his silence only three decades later, because of outrage over a movie. In an interview, his version of events was more complex than the oft-told tale of Prime Minister Meir demanding revenge against the individual Palestinians who organized the Olympics massacre.

The occasion that provoked Zamir to talk was the release of
Munich
, Steven Spielberg’s film based on a book,
Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team
, by Canadian journalist George Jonas. Jonas’s information came mainly from Juval Aviv, a New York-based private detective who claimed that he had led the Mossad’s post-Munich hit team.

Spielberg said he, too, had a chance to meet with “Avner,” the name used by Aviv. The famous filmmaker felt that he gained an understanding of the deep doubts supposedly felt by hit-team members—and, in the end, the uselessness of waging a war on terrorism.

Zamir was furious at the way the movie depicted the post-Olympics massacre events. “The film is a kind of Western, but with no connection to reality,” he said, then making a point of adding: “Aviv was never in the Mossad. He is an imposter.”

Explaining the true motivations of the Mossad and Meir, Zamir insisted that myth is not truth. “We didn’t go on a vengeance mission,” he said. “The Mossad was not and is not a Mafia organization. Golda did not instruct me to take revenge.”

He did agree that the 1972 massacre led to a huge change in Israel’s response to attacks. Zamir said: “Until Munich, our policy was guided by the assumption that European nations would not allow Palestinian terror to operate on their soil or to stage a wave of hijackings. That meant that there was no need for us, the Mossad, to operate against the terrorists on European soil. Indeed, we avoided doing so.”

The PLO kept attacking Israelis in Europe, and in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem a faction arose that wanted a stronger, lethal reaction. “We—the intelligence and military chiefs—tried to persuade Golda that the European governments were soft on terrorists,” Zamir recalled. “And when they did arrest them, after a while they were released.” The Mossad chief concluded that Israel would have to mete out justice.

A dramatic dilemma developed in the highly eventful year, 1973. On February 21, a Libyan airliner on a routine flight from Benghazi to Cairo made a navigational error, overshooting the Egyptian capital and flying into Israeli-controlled airspace over the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli fighter planes were scrambled, but a political or senior military decision would be needed on how to respond to what appeared to be a civilian plane that was simply off course.

Unfortunately, only a few weeks before that, Israel’s intelligence community received a tip that an Arab terrorist group planned to hijack a passenger plane and crash it into either the Dimona nuclear reactor or the Shalom Tower in Tel Aviv, the country’s tallest building.

The Libyan pilot did not respond to radio calls from the Israelis or to such internationally recognized signals as flapping wings attempted by the fighter pilots. With only a few minutes remaining until a target building might be hit, the military chief of staff—General David (Dado) Elazar—issued an order that the Libyan airliner be shot down. Out of 112 passengers and crew, 105 were killed. News coverage of the wreckage and of the bodies of victims, scattered over the sands of the Sinai, made Israel look awful.

Libya’s dictator, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, was livid. To take revenge against the Jewish state, he insisted on immediate and extreme use of a Libyan-Egyptian political-military alliance then in effect. He had heard that the British ocean liner, the
Queen Elizabeth 2
, would be visiting the Israeli port of Ashdod in May to mark the 25th anniversary of Israel’s independence. Qaddafi insisted that an Egyptian navy submarine sink the
QE2
.

Luckily, cooler heads prevailed in Cairo. President Anwar Sadat blocked any such order to his navy, regardless of the shared authority that Qaddafi supposedly wielded. The dictator was to be told that the submarine could not locate the cruise ship.

One of Sadat’s motivations was that he had already started planning a surprise attack, for October 1973, in the hope that it would force the Israelis out of the Sinai Peninsula. Torpedoing Britain’s gem of the ocean could well torpedo Sadat’s more significant plan.

Qaddafi—who had seized power in a military coup four years earlier and was only beginning to earn his eventual nickname of “Mad Dog of the Middle East”—insisted on revenge for the downing of the Libyan airliner. According to Israeli officials, Sadat gave in and agreed to a more modest operation that might seem fitting: downing an El Al airliner as it approached Rome’s Fiumicino Airport for a landing.